Gray Mountain: A Novel(38)

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Annette said.

Randy was handcuffed and led away, Hump following along whispering that things were going to be okay. Judge Battle tapped his gavel and called for a recess. Samantha, Annette, and Phoebe left the courtroom and stepped outside, half expecting more trouble.

Tony Fanning and a friend were waiting behind a pickup truck parked on Main Street. They saw the ladies and began walking toward them, both smoking and looking tough. “Oh boy,” Annette said under her breath. “He doesn’t scare me,” Phoebe said. The two men blocked the sidewalk, but just as Tony was about to speak, Donovan Gray appeared from nowhere and said loudly, “Well, ladies, how did it go?”

Tony and his buddy lost every ounce of badness they’d had only seconds earlier. They backed away, avoiding eye contact, and wanting no part of Donovan. “Excuse us, fellas,” Donovan said in an effort to provoke them. As he walked by, his eyes flashed at Tony, who held the glare for only a second before looking away.


After three straight dinners with Annette and her kids, Samantha begged off, saying she needed to study and retire early. She fixed a bowl of soup on a hot plate, spent another hour on the seminar materials, and put them aside. It was hard to imagine running a general practice on Main Street and trying to survive on no-fault divorces and real estate closings. Annette had said more than once that most of the lawyers in Brady were just scratching out livelihoods and trying to net $30,000 a year. Her salary was $40,000, same as Mattie’s. Annette had laughed when she said, “It’s probably the only place in the country where the legal aid lawyers make more than the average private practitioner.” She said Donovan made far more than anyone else, but then he took greater risks.

He was also the biggest contributor to the clinic, where all funding was private. There was some foundation money, and a few big law firms from “up north” kicked in generously, but Mattie still struggled to raise the $200,000 annual goal. Annette said, “We’d love to pay you something, but the money’s just not here.” Samantha assured her she was content with the arrangement.

Her Internet connection was through Annette’s satellite system, perhaps the slowest in North America. “It takes patience,” she had said. Luckily, patience was plentiful these days as Samantha found herself happily settling into a routine that included quiet nights and plenty of sleep. She went online to check the local newspapers, the Times out of Roanoke and the Gazette out of Charleston, West Virginia. In the Gazette she found an interesting story under the headline “Ecoterrorists Suspected in Latest Spree.”

For the past two years, a gang had been attacking heavy equipment in several strip mines in southern West Virginia. A spokesman for a coal company referred to them as “ecoterrorists” and threatened all manner of reprisals if and when they were caught. Their favorite method of destruction was to wait until predawn hours and fire away from the safety of surrounding hills. They were excellent snipers, used the latest military rifles, and were proving quite efficient in disabling the hundred-ton off-road coal-mining trucks built by Caterpillar. Their rubber tires were fifteen feet in circumference, weighed a thousand pounds, and sold for $18,000 apiece. Each mining truck had six tires, and evidently these were easy targets for the snipers. There was a photo of a dozen yellow trucks, all idle and lined up neatly in an impressive show of muscle. A foreman was pointing to the flat tires—twenty-eight of them. He said a night watchman was startled at 3:40 a.m. when the assault began. In a perfectly coordinated attack, the bullets began hitting the tires, which exploded like small bombs. He wisely took cover in a ditch while calling the sheriff. By the time law enforcement arrived, the snipers had had their fun and were long gone. The sheriff said he was hard at work on the case but conceded it would be difficult to track down the “thugs.” The site, known as the Bull Forge Mine, was next to Winnow Mountain and Helley’s Bluff, both over three thousand feet in height and thick with untouched hardwoods. From deep in those forests, it was easy to hide and easy to fire at trucks, day or night. However, the sheriff said that in his opinion these were not just a bunch of guys with deer rifles having some fun. From wherever they were hiding, they were hitting targets a thousand yards away. The bullets found in some of the tires were 51-millimeter military-style slugs, obviously fired from sophisticated sniper rifles.

The story recapped recent attacks. The ecoterrorists picked their targets carefully, and since there was no shortage of strip mines on the map, they seemed to wait patiently until the mining trucks were parked in just the right places. It was noted that the snipers seemed to be concerned with avoiding injury to others. They had yet to fire upon a vehicle that wasn’t parked, and many of the mines worked twenty-four hours a day. Six weeks earlier, at the Red Valley site in Martin County, twenty-two tires had been ruined in a barrage that seemed to last only seconds, according to another night watchman. As of now, four coal companies were offering rewards totaling $200,000.

There was no link to the Bullington Mine attack two years earlier, where, in the most brazen act of sabotage in decades, explosives from the company’s own warehouse were used to damage six dump trucks, two draglines, two track loaders, a temporary office building, and the warehouse itself. Damages exceeded $5 million. No suspects had been arrested; none existed.

Samantha dug through the newspaper’s archives, and found herself cheering for the ecoterrorists. Later, as she began to doze off, she reluctantly pulled up the New York Times. Except for a rare Sunday morning, back in her New York days, she seldom did more than scan it. Now, avoiding the Business section, she zipped through it but stopped cold in the Dining section. The food critic was trashing a new restaurant in Tribeca, a hot spot she had been to a month earlier. There was a photo of the bar scene, with young professionals stacked two deep, sipping and smiling and waiting for their tables. She remembered the food as excellent and soon lost interest in the reviewer’s complaints. Instead, she stared at the photo. She could hear the din of the crowd; she could feel the frenetic energy. How good would a martini taste right now? And a two-hour dinner with friends, all the while keeping an eye out for cute guys?