Protected

WILLOW

"Thumper One, Thumper Three. I have a low-pressure light on the vibration hydraulics." I looked up from my computer to listen to the radio chatter. "Hang on, I'm going to take a look," Thumper Three said.

"Uh-oh, that's not good," Hank said softly. There was a long pause as Hank, myself, and Reed Dickson, one of Colt's men, watched the radio.

"Hank? You copy?" the radio squawked.

Hank pulled the mic off its hook. "Go ahead."

"We've blown a hydraulic line to the vibration plate on Thumper Three. You'll need to call it in."

"Roger that," he said as I picked up my phone, looked up a number on my computer, and then started dialing. Steve Colby was the Larke mechanic that maintained the generators and such in the area and was my closest support. "We're calling it in now."

"Tell him we'll send the crew van to get them. No point in them sitting out there," I instructed as the sat phone purred in my ear.

"Willow said to send the crew van so you don't cook. She's such a good boss," Hank repeated into the mic. I grinned.

Todd chuckled over the radio. "Yes she is, but don't tell her I said that."

"Colby."

"Steve! Willow. I've got a blown vibrator plate hose on a thumper. How soon can you get here and get it replaced?"

He was quiet for a moment. "I'm just finishing up servicing well twenty-nine." He paused again. "You're over in that new section we're opening up, right?"

"Yeah, off Eagle Pass Road."

"Yeah, that's what I thought." He paused again. "You're in luck. I'm not far away. Say, ten minutes to finish buttoning everything up here, then what, an hour drive? Call it ninety-minutes... probably less."

"Really? Great! Thanks! Ready for the coordinates?"

"Hang on. Let me get something to write on." When he was ready, I read Steve the coordinates for the thumpers from my computer screen and he repeated them back to me. "Got it. Give me a few minutes then I'll be on the road."

"I owe you a beer!"

"I'll take you up on that."

"Next time you're in Houston."

"You got it. See you an hour or so."

"Thanks again." I punched the button to end the call and then turned my attention to Hank. "Scratch the crew van. Steve can be here there in a little over an hour."

Hank keyed the mic. "Scratch the crew van. Steve's on his way."

"Dammit. I take back what I said about her being nice, and you can tell her I said that."

There was no way I was going to let that pass. I rose from my desk, walked the three steps to Hank's station and took the mic from his hand with a grin. "He doesn't have to. I heard it myself."

"Willow! What are you doing there?" Todd cried in mock distress.

"Somebody has to keep an eye on you jacklegs."

"Now you've done it. You done gone and hurt Phil's feelings. There, there...she didn't mean it."

Phil's voice came over the radio, faint and far away. "Momma..."

I snickered as I handed the mic back to Hank. "Those guys are crazy."

"It comes from driving a truck at one mile an hour, stopping every six feet, for eight hours a day. I'd be crazy, too."

Big Dick nodded in apparent sympathy. I assumed that his nickname came not from a certain part of his anatomy but from his last name, Dickson, and the fact he was what we called in Texas, 'a big ol' boy.' He was the biggest of Colt's men that I'd seen so far. He was taller than Colt, pushing two meters in his boots, and weighed 130 kilos if he weighed a gram, but he had a friendly round face and quick smile. He wasn't what I'd call fat, nor hugely muscled, but was just

big.

Despite his size, what was most surprising to me was how he moved. He moved with amazing grace and verve for such a big man, paced like a caged tiger, and spent more time outside the truck than in it. Though he never complained, I could tell he was one of those guys that didn't like to be cooped up inside and was never still.

I decided to take pity on him. "Want to go see a thumper?"

The obvious relief on his face made me smile. "Sure. We'll need to pick up Goose."

"Let Todd know we're coming," I said as I picked up my sunglasses and stuck them on the top of my head. "Hold the fort."

"Holding."

Big Dick and I trotted down the steps and then stepped into my Jeep. "You'll have to direct me. I can never find your hideout."

"Down the road about a mile, then left at the little tree that's bent way over. You should be able to follow the tracks after that."

"It's amazing how the net just disappears," I said as we bounced along. "I watch through the binoculars as you drive out there. I can see the truck, and I watch you walk away from it, then

boop

,

you crouch down and are gone and somebody else pops up. I

know

I'm looking right at the hide, but dammed if I can see it."

He chuckled. "That's what it does. Turn here," he said, pointing left.

I turned and slowed way down. As rough as the road was, no road was worse, and I had to weave through the scrub brush. I was nearly on the hide before I saw it.

Amazing

,

I thought as I pulled to a stop.

Big Dick opened the passenger door. "Goose! Road trip!" he bellowed as he stepped out of the Jeep.

Kenny Gosling's head appeared from out of the hide. "I was wondering why you were here again so soon, and in Willow's Jeep," he said as he crawled out from under the net and stood up.

"A thumper truck broke down and we're going to go see. I told Willow you could fix anything."

Goose chuckled. "Yeah, right. Just hand me a pipe wrench," he said as he squeezed into the backseat. Goose was of average height and slim build, so he fit in the back better than Big Dick.

"I sense a story here," I said as Big Dick got back into the Wrangler.

"No, not really," Big Dick said with a grin. "Goose is a hell of a plumber, but he doesn't even change his own oil."

"Just doing my part to help you put food on your table," Goose said from the back seat. "Why don't you fix it? You're the mechanic."

"If it's just a blown hose I probably could, if I had a hose... and some tools... and you know, some hydraulic fluid."

I grinned as the men ribbed each other. I was frankly amazed by the Buitre del Demonio. Their members were all normal people I wouldn't have guessed were part of an outlaw club. Colt had his well drilling service and Fish owned one of the three grocery stores in Rio Lago. Goose was a plumber and Big Dick was a mechanic. Grace was a welder, Limpkin a heavy diesel engine mechanic, and Packard did sheetrock and painting. Over the past several days, I'd learned the club also contained at least one other mechanic, a truck driver, an electrician, a carpenter, and a landscaper. Men from all walks of life, and not one of them I would have pegged to be a drug runner in an outlaw club.

But, then, none of these men were actually drug runners and the Buitre del Demonio is no longer an outlaw club according to Colt, is it?

We jounced along the road for a while as I kept an eye on the GPS stuck to the windshield. My Jeep had built in navigation, but it was useless out here in the bush where everything we did worked off longitude and latitude. The road was starting to take us away from the thumpers, so I turned off the road and started across country. The dry, hard-baked soil posed no problem for the Jeep, but I had to weave my way among the scrub and stunted trees.

"Jesus," Big Dick grunted as we banged and bounced. "How much farther?"

"About a mile."

"Christ. Talk about Nowheresville, Texas," Goose growled from the back.

"Is that them?" Big Dick asked a moment later as we crested a low hill and the three hulking vehicles appeared.

"That's them," I confirmed as I adjusted my path.

"Ugly sum-bitches," Goose muttered.

"Are you kidding?" I exclaimed. "They're beautiful and elegant pieces of engineering. When they stop and vibrate, all three trucks are vibrating in sync, making those three trucks operate like one big unit."

Big Dick grunted. "They may be elegant pieces of engineering, but they're still ugly as shit."

I snickered as we pulled to a stop beside the first in the line of the large pieces of machinery so my Jeep wouldn't be in the way when Steve arrived. "Don't tell Phil that. You'll hurt his feelings," I teased.

We stepped out of the Jeep and began walking toward the third unit where the three drivers were standing around. The hydraulic vibrator truck, or thumper truck as I referred to it, was a truck in name only. Nearly four meters tall, three wide, and six long, the machine rolled on four heavily lugged tires that looked like tractor tires, except they were 180 centimeters tall and nearly as wide. The trucks looked like they could go anywhere, and their near-straight path as they muscled aside or flattened the brush proved it. The trucks had a cab in the front for a driver, a 20.4 liter diesel engine mounted on the back, and a complicated series of hoses and hydraulic rams running to a huge plate hung under the center of the truck between the tires.

"What a mess," I murmured as we ambled to a stop beside the ailing machine. There was hydraulic fluid all over the underside of the truck, the top of the plate, and a sizable dark stain on the ground below it. "Guys... this is Reed and Goose," I said, too embarrassed to use Reed's nickname in front of the crew. Everyone knew I had shadows now, so the men's presence wasn't a surprise. "Goose, Reed, Todd Bowden, my site foreman, Phil, and Doug."

The men shook hands and muttered greetings all around before Big Dick stepped in close to the truck. He didn't touch anything, but I could tell he was looking it over carefully. "How does this beast work, anyway?"

"You want to show him?" I asked Todd.

"Sure," Todd said before he turned and walked away.

We followed him to the first truck and waited as he climbed into the cab. The big machine turned over and then roared to life. "That plate weighs about twenty-seven thousand kilos!" I noticed Goose and Big Dick glance at each other and I realized I'd forgotten to covert from metric for them. I was so used to working in the metric system for my job I sometimes forgot that not everyone else did. "That's about sixty thousand pounds!" I shouted to be heard over the bellowing machine.

I signaled Todd with a thumbs up. The plate lowered until it reached the ground, and then it lifted the entire machines so that its tires were off the ground before there was a deep rumble, not unlike distant thunder, and the ground vibrated beneath our feet for a moment. When the vibration stopped, the truck settle back to its tires and the plate returned its stored position. The entire cycle took less than sixty seconds. A moment later the engine fell silent again.

"That's it?" Goose asked. "I hardly felt anything."

"That's it. We inject a vibration into the ground, the waves bounce off the strata, the geophones pick them up, and from that we can build a three-dimensional map of what's underground. It's kind of like sonar, but for the earth."

"And that shows you where the oil and gas are located?" Big Dick asked.

"It shows us where oil and gas

might

be located."

"Willow here is working on something that's going to change the way the oil and gas industry explores, though. Isn't that right

Doctor

Larke?" Todd teased as he climbed out of the thumper.

"How's that?" Big Dick asked as I blushed. Todd had been with the company forever, and I kind of thought of him as an honorary uncle.

"Just a little something I'm working on. It takes the soundings, the same soundings the oil industry has been using for years, and extrapolates out the densities to a much finer level. That gives us a better picture of what's down there. The geophones have finally gotten good enough that we can capture the data at a granularity where we can detect the densities of the voids to determine their contents."

Big Dick rubbed his forehead as he grimaced. "I'll take your word for it, Doc." I snickered. I'd noticed he got that pained expression when Hank and I discussed the data coming in.

"Right now, the drillers get all the glory, but when Willow's software comes online, it'll be the sounding crews who actually finds the stuff. Then we'll be the heroes for a change," Todd continued.

"What do you mean?" Goose asked.

"Imagine this," I began. "The way it works now is there is a giant warehouse, and somewhere in there is a brick of gold. I tell you it's somewhere in the back left third of the warehouse, and I send you to go find it. You go in and search, and eventually come out with the brick. Who gets the credit for finding it?"

"I guess we both do," he said after a pause. "You knew it was in the back left third, but I had to go in there and dig around until I found it."

"Fair enough," I said. "But who would you say

found

it?"

"I guess I'd say I found it."

"Okay. Now imagine the same thing, except I tell you which aisle, row, and bin it's in. Now who gets the credit?"

Goose smiled. "I see. That makes sense I guess."

"Yeah. Right now, the roughnecks give us boomers a train load of shit about how even with all this fancy equipment, they're

still

the ones who have to find the oil," Todd explained. "Well, that's about to change. Willow here, she can practically smell oil. When was the last time you sunk a dry hole?"

"I don't know," I murmured, slightly embarrassed by Todd's unstinting praise.

"I do. Not since your first year, when you were still working on your PhD. You sunk one

dry hole.

One

.

Hell, even your dad isn't that good, and he's

damn

good. When you get the bugs worked out of your software..." Todd shook his head. "I've been doing this for more than forty years. I was one of the first people Harris hired when he founded the company, and I can tell you, this will be the biggest thing to come along since the Roller Cone bit."

Goose and Big Dick looked at each other. "That's big?" Goose asked.

Todd chuckled. "Considering they've been using that design for more than a hundred years, yeah, that's big."

-oOo-

We were standing around as the guys regaled Goose and Big Dick with tall tales about oil extraction, when I heard a loud

tink

of something hitting metal, then an instant later, the crack of a rifle. Big Dick shoved me to the ground and fell at my side with one arm over my back before the echo of the shot had faded, or I had time to realize what was going on. There was a puff of dust about six feet in front of us followed moments later by another crack of gunfire.

"Under here!" Big Dick cried, dragging me sideways by my belt until I got my wits about me. "Stay down!" he barked as I began helping him and scrambled under the thumper. He shoved me between the massive front tires and then crowded in beside me. Goose joined us a moment later, crawling quickly to a stop on the other side to sandwich me between them as the rest of the thumper crew scrambled for cover.

"See anybody?" Goose asked as they peered around the tires, their weapons out.

"No, but I didn't see anyone before either. Wherever they are, they're way the hell off because I didn't even see a truck."

"Yeah, and the sound of the shot is way behind."

We stayed down a long moment. "Stay here," Big Dick said, motioning to me with a hand before he crept out from behind the tire.

"Where are you going?" I hissed.

"Going to take a look around," he said as he stood, stared into the distance a moment, and then climbed onto the steps to the cab before twisting around to look in the direction of the shot.

"See anything?" Goose called from under the truck beside me.

"Just a dust cloud from someone leaving in a hell of a hurry."

When Goose started crawling out from under the truck, I followed, the rest of the thumper crew also crawling out from under and behind the trucks.

"What the hell..." Todd growled.

Goose started walking toward my Jeep. "Don't know, but I'm going to go take a look. Willow, I'm going to use your Jeep."

I nodded but didn't say anything, my heart still hammering in my chest.

"Willow, stay behind the tire," Big Dick ordered. I knew the rubber wouldn't stop a bullet, but I complied anyway, peeking around the edge to watch what was going on.

"You think it's that crazy old bastard again?" Todd asked, as Goose drove in the general direction of the shot.

"Why would it be? You're not on his land anymore, right?" Big Dick rumbled. He turned to look at the thumper. "Where'd the bullet hit?"

Todd and the rest of the crew looked the truck over. "This is probably it," Phil said.

I stepped from behind the tire to see him running his finger over a dent in the front wheel where the paint was missing. Big Dick looked at the dent, ran his sausage like finger over it, and then turned to eyeball the direction the sound of the shot came from as I returned to my spot behind the tire.

"It looks like they were shooting at you, Willow. Weren't you standing about here?" he asked as he pointed at a spot on the ground.

"Yeah, I guess," I nodded, watching around the tire as my Jeep bumbled around out in the brush. It was so far away, if it'd been any color other than bright yellow, I'd never been able to see it through the haze and heat waves.

"As soon as Goose gets back, we need to get you out of here."

"Why? You said yourself you saw the dust cloud as they left."

"That may have not been them."

"They're not shooting anymore and, if they're out there, Goose will probably flush them out, right? Since I'm here, I want to stay and see what Steve has to say about replacing the hose."

Big Dick looked at me for a long moment before he nodded. "Okay, so long as Goose doesn't find anything, but you stay behind that tire until we know for sure."

"You got it. I'm not too keen on being shot at again, so anything you want me to do, Big Dick, I'm all in."

Big Dick seemed satisfied and turned away from me and shielded his eyes as he watched my Jeep. After ten or fifteen minutes, the vehicle was so far away I couldn't see it anymore, and after another thirty minutes or so, I saw my Jeep bouncing its way back toward us.

"What'd you find?" Big Dick asked as Goose stepped out of the Jeep.

"Just some tire tracks... and these." He held up two shell casings.

Todd took one as I stepped out from behind the tire. "30.06?"

"That's what it looks like to me," Big Dick said, taking the other. "How the hell did they get in so close?"

"They weren't close. They were at least two thousand yards away. I could sort of see the thumpers, but I couldn't see you at all. It's probably why they missed. Even with a scope, hitting something as small as a person from that distance would be a hell of a shot."

"Why didn't we see their dust?" Big Dick asked, handing Goose the shell casing. Todd did the same.

"Moving slow, I guess. I don't know. I guess they didn't think they could get in any closer without being spotted."

"This makes no sense," Big Dick growled, then nudged Goose and nodded at a dust cloud in the distance. "Willow, get on the other side of the truck," he said as he pulled his weapon again and moved to crouch behind the rear wheel of the first truck.

"Everyone, get on the other side of the trucks!" Goose ordered as he pulled his own weapon and crouched behind the front tire.

We scrambled to comply. With Todd at my back, clearly intending to protect me as much as he could, I crouched and watched under the machine as the cloud came closer. Goose and Big Dick held their position, weapons at the ready, as the snorting and growling service truck fought its way toward the thumpers then stopped. A man stepped out then froze when he saw Goose and Big Dick, their weapons out and pointed at him.