Читать книгу Toxic Terrain - Don Pendleton - Страница 7

Grassy Butte, North Dakota

Pam Bowman stared down at the dead Hereford calf at her feet and said, “This is not good.”

“It most certainly is not,” the man standing next to her confirmed.

He would know, Bowman thought. Though he was just the McKenzie County extension agent, Roger Grevoy had earned both an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, and had at one time been considered among the world’s top researchers studying the pathology of communicable diseases. Grevoy had never discussed how he’d gone from holding a high-powered research job with the Pentagon to being a lowly county extension agent, but Bowman suspected it had something to do with the meetings he went to in the basement of the local Catholic church every Wednesday night. Whatever the reason, she was damned glad to have his help.

“Is it what I think it is?” Bowman asked.

“I won’t have the test results until tomorrow,” Grevoy said, “but it looks like it might be. I’ve seen it before. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Mad cow disease.”

“How’s that possible?” Bowman asked. “This calf can’t be but four months old. It takes years for an animal to die from BSE.”

“I know. I think we’re dealing with something we’ve never seen before. And it’s extremely bad.”

“We’d better start riding back to the truck if we’re going to get out of here before sunset,” Bowman said.

Grevoy packed his tissue samples in the dry-ice packs in his saddlebag and the pair mounted their horses. They had ridden nearly an hour to get to the infected herd and had about fifty minutes before the sun set. They had good horses, but even a healthy, strong horse would have a difficult time negotiating the North Dakota Badlands in the dark.

They hadn’t ridden fifteen minutes before they heard the “whoop-whoop-whoop” of helicopter blades breaking the near silence that usually blanketed the rough country. On rare occasions one of the oil companies with wells in the Badlands would fly a helicopter out to a drill site, but not often because the bizarre rugged terrain of the area, with its deep crevasses and gullies carved out of the soft bentonite clay soil, offered few places to land a helicopter. Bowman’s grandfather had once described the Badlands as “mountains that go down into the earth instead of up out of it.”

The helicopter skimmed over the top of a butte and hovered about twenty feet above the trail. The horses Grevoy and Bowman rode were strong and sure of foot—they weren’t easily spooked and wouldn’t get upset over anything as mundane as a rattlesnake or a mountain lion. But they were not used to helicopters, and Grevoy’s horse reared up, tossing him to the ground. Ropes fell from the helicopter, and armed men clad in black combat gear slid down to the ground. Bowman reached for the .338 Marlin Express in her saddle scabbard, but before she could pull the lever-action carbine free of its leather, the armed men had combat rifles pointed at both her and Grevoy.

Several pairs of hands pulled Bowman off her horse and threw her face-first to the ground. She looked over and saw Grevoy trying to fight back. One of the men smashed the butt of his collapsible rifle stock into Grevoy’s head, knocking him unconscious. A couple of men tied Bowman’s hands behind her back and bound her feet together. The last thing she saw before they put the hood over her head was a group of men removing the saddles and bridles from their horses and setting the animals free. Anyone who saw them would assume they were wild horses that had strayed outside the confines of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, at least until they got close enough to see the brands. Then she felt a thud on the back of her head and the lights went out.