Free Soon by Jerry B. Jenkins Page B

technology enough to sabotage it, thinkin’ that’ll help their sorry little oil business. Or maybe the Arabs put ’em up to it. Those boys would just love to see us go back to the Middle East for oil.”
    “Paul’s here as our religious expert,” Tick said. “The rumors about miracles suggest there’s a Christian threat—that this may be a Christian terrorist act.”
    “Christians, Mexicans, Arabs—I don’t care. Somebody’s got to pay.”

    The oil field lay about ten miles off the freeway. When the driver rolled down his window to check in at the gate, a smoky chemical smell invaded.
    “Whoa!” Paul coughed. “You could get high just breathing out here.”
    “No joke,” Donny said. “It’ll make you sick if you breathe it too long.”
    “Downwind you get the real pollution,” Tick said. “The draft, or superplume, from a fire this big goes up thousands of feet into the atmosphere. The winds up there disperse the smoke hundreds of miles away—out over the Gulf, if we’re lucky.”
    The limo wheeled close to the fiery well, which was surrounded by a fence and guarded by two men wearing hazmat suits and carrying laser Bayous.
    “We won’t be stayin’ long enough to need the suits,” Donny said. “They’re too doggone hot. But we’ve got goggles and masks and coats.”
    He tapped on the interior window. The driver lowered it and passed back a bag of equipment, three long canvas dusters, and a Stetson hat.
    Donny distributed the masks and goggles and coats, then handed the hat to Paul. “Keeps off the sun and the worst of the soot.”
    Even through Paul’s hazmat mask, the air was acrid, and it felt gritty. His shirt soaked through in minutes under the heavy canvas coat. The fire sounded unearthly—not the familiar snap and crackle of a wood fire but rather an uprush of wind whirling to a keening wail high overhead—what Paul imagined a tornado would sound like up close.
    The fire itself impressed him most. About eighteen inches in diameter, it was a column of pure white, its leaping and ebbing flames stretching high into the sky. Through the scrim of heat waves, the white fire looked pearlescent, hypnotic, beautiful.
    “Is this a typical well fire?” Paul shouted.
    “No way,” Donny Johnson said. “Usually all you see is heavy smoke. Nothin’ like this.”
    “What do your techies say about it?”
    “They took samples and they’ll be back today, but they got nothin’ to say yet. No one’s ever seen anything like this before. First there was lots of smoke. Then it just shot right out of the ground like a white gusher. We’ve got witnesses who can tell you all about it.”
    Paul could almost understand how the weak-minded or impressionable might regard something this mysterious and haunting as a miracle.
    Got to be sabotage.
    Johnson pointed back to the car. “Let’s get these fool masks off.”
    Back in the car, the men wiped their faces. “How far from this well do we have to be to risk breathing outside without a mask?” Paul said.
    “About a quarter mile, and even then you can smell it. Base camp should be okay.”
    Johnson had the driver take them through a nearby field where more wells dotted the landscape.
    “You’ve tightened security to protect these?” Paul said.
    “We’ve added a couple of armed sentries at each entrance, on top of our regular guards. We also have electrified razor wire atop the fences. And alarms, of course.”

    From the comfort of the airconditioned car, they surveyed the wells for nearly an hour, eating box lunches of spicy gazpacho soup and thick slabs of roast beef and ham on sourdough bread.
    “Meat’s from my ranch,” Donny said. “Better grub than we’d get at the camp.”
    Finally the limo pulled up to the gate of a fenced-in compound on a stretch of land without a tree or so much as a blade of grass. Inside were three low, oblong cinder-block buildings flanking a larger square one. A fourth oblong building had apparently been