Savage Road

by Chris Hauty

  Shadows deepen. The running path plunges into dark woods. Traffic on Beach Drive, through the park, is sporadic. Hayley registers none of it, her feet “seeing” for her. Memories of the derailment continue to cascade. The smell of electrical fire. Her helper’s cowardly eyes. EMT trucks at the Rosslyn station entrance. The throng of onlookers. Shocked expressions. Sirens rending the morning air.

  Then she sees him.

  He is a young guy, in his twenties. Dark complexion. Black hair poking out of black ball cap and wearing a soccer jersey. Why is he smirking? His grin reminds her of the booking photo of the young man who shot the US congresswoman in Arizona, deranged and ecstatic. Why is he enjoying the spectacle of injured and stunned Metro passengers emerging from the Rosslyn station? Of all the onlookers, only the soccer jersey guy is smiling. Only him.

  Hayley stops running and studies the image from her memory as if it is a three-dimensional object in the palm of her hand. Red soccer jersey with a gold Chevrolet logo splashed across the chest. What’s the writing on his cap? Iron Pony Tap Room? She’s heard of the place. The guy stands out, independent of the crowd. No reason for that smile. Unless he has something to do with the derailment? No one else could enjoy the terror and suffering the crash caused. No one.

  Hayley has found what she wanted. She can turn around now and run home, about six miles, at a slower pace on her return. Immersed again in the world.

  * * *

  TUESDAY, 7:54 P.M. Empire Apartments at 2000 F Street, in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, is an eight-story brick building with vague art deco pretensions. Comprising 150 studio apartments, none more than five hundred square feet in size, the Empire is the housing choice of the budget-minded renter who most likely has grander ambitions. It is a beachhead, from which the young and driven will launch their conquest of the nation’s capital, within easy walking distance of more fashionable Georgetown.

  Rafi’s studio apartment, on the eighth floor, is furnished in total from Ikea and with complete disregard for visual pleasure. Utility is the underlying motif. There is no memorabilia or decoration. Pizza boxes and the detritus of other takeout meals litter a woefully unequipped kitchen. When not playing with dog toys strewn throughout the apartment or sleeping, Yazat is in the habit of grazing on the congealed leftovers in week-old food containers.

  Rafi’s laptop is open on a sixty-nine-dollar “Melltorp” table. He waits to hear from the Boss. A particularly enticing network exploit, discovered months earlier, remains viable. Rafi accessed it only an hour ago. The malware inserted in the natural gas pipeline’s control system is a version of the Stuxnet computer worm. Rafi found the bug in the utility’s network purely by chance. Malware like it infests networks across the country and around the globe, left by unnamed bad actors and then just as often forgotten. The revised Stuxnet worm, in this case, a one-shot weapon, is just waiting for someone like Rafi to stumble on, pick it up, and pull the trigger.

  Rafi passes the time playing with Yazat. He especially enjoys hearing the dog’s toenails clicking across the wood floor, in hot pursuit of a ball. Earlier, he watched some porn and masturbated. And before that, he danced around the room while listening to electronic music on his earbuds. He imagines how weird all of this would seem to the casual observer. But since no one is watching, who cares? With a few keystrokes on his laptop, he denied the United States its precious newspapers for a day. With only fractional more effort, he derailed a Metro train under the Potomac River. And now he is on the cusp of his most audacious hack yet. Rafi experiences a rush of adrenaline just thinking about it.

  The warm, spring weather, while perfect for motorcycle riding, will undoubtedly undercut the impact of the attack. Still, taking out the control system that delivers natural gas to one-third of the US is pretty rad. Standing at the window and staring down at the street, he imagines the people walking past his building without hot water and gas for their cookstoves. The fools have no idea how anything in their world works. Do they appreciate the technical marvel in moving cubic tons of natural gas pulled from the earth in Texas thousands of miles across the country? Imagining their dumb, disappointed faces when they turn the knob on their stoves to make dinner makes Rafi hard. Even though it couldn’t be more than an hour since he jerked off, he masturbates again.

  Afterward, he retrieves the phone in his pocket and opens the Signal app. There is no message from the Boss. Impatient, he decides to break protocol and send a message himself.

  I’m ready

  Rafi sits at the Ikea table and taps a key on his laptop to bring it out of sleep mode. Keeping the secure messaging app on his phone open, he waits for a texted response.

  Minutes pass. Finally receives a response.

  Stand down. Assessing the situation.

  Rafi shakes his head, frowning. What the fuck is this? Who knows if Transco system engineers won’t stumble on the trapdoor themselves and close off the exploit?

  He angrily responds to the Boss’s text. Before it goes away!!!!

  The Boss responds immediately. Negative. Repeat, stand down.

  Rafi slams the phone on the table so hard that his laptop bounces. He can’t stand it when people fail to follow through with a promise. He hates any display of weakness or failure of nerve. Full commitment is the only way to get anything done. Rafi stands and starts to pace back and forth across the small room, in high agitation.

  Fuck it! The Boss instructed him earlier in the day to tee up the pipeline exploit. He only did as he was told. Time to finish the job.

  He pulls the laptop toward him.

  * * *

  THE STAFFORD COMPRESSOR Station #2 in Stafford County, Virginia, southwest of Washington DC, is one of three stations for the Mid-Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Natural gas, extracted from deposits deep underground the Gulf Coast states and then pressurized, is moved to consumers on the East Coast through transmission pipes. Those pipelines are anywhere from six to forty-eight inches in diameter. Every hundred miles or so along its journey east, the natural gas must be repressurized with turbine-operated centrifugal compressors, then pumped forward again through the pipeline. For obvious reasons, compressor stations are located in semirural areas. Explosions of natural gas pipelines occur every year, but accidents that involve an entire compressor station are mercifully rare.

  Five employees—one facility operator, an assistant engineer, and three pipeline technicians—are responsible for the operation of the station at any given time. From the Stafford location, two unmanned compressor stations downline are operated remotely. The job isn’t exciting, but it does require meticulous attention to detail. Mistakes can have severe consequences. Bob Katz, on the job for more than three decades, initially wasn’t too fired up with the idea of women in the control room. But, the truth is, Annie Hopkins has been a great addition to the team. The young college grad never needs to be told twice when given an order—unlike most guys on staff—and she’s more interesting, too. Though he’d never admit it to anyone, the Stafford Compression Station nightshift facility operator manipulates the schedule so that his and Annie’s shifts overlap.

  The blue light of the control system computer screens casts Annie in an alien glow. Bob would swoon if he wasn’t pushing sixty and recuperating from a mild heart attack four months earlier. Maybe he swoons just a little bit anyway.

  “Tell me again about this knucklehead.”

  Annie says, “He’s not a knucklehead, Bob. Ted is a shaman.”

  He likes to think of himself as a surrogate father to the young woman, who lost her dad to cancer while she was in college. “Uh-huh. And how do shamans make a buck again?”

  “Ted helps people organize their living space so that the energies are beneficial.”

  The nightshift operator scoffs. “The only energy that matters is the stuff flowing through these pipes, Annie. That’s energy!”

  She smiles, ever tolerant of her supervisor’s old-school crotchetiness. “Oh, don’t be such a Bob, Bob.”

&nb
sp; He frowns comically, secretly loving this dynamic between them. He wonders, from time to time, if he shouldn’t write down some of their banter and send it to a nephew he has in LA. Bob thinks this relationship with Annie would be a great TV show. He would call it Compressor Station. Judd Hirsch could play him. Is Judd Hirsch still alive? To be honest, he hasn’t written more than a postcard since college, and his nephew is a tennis instructor with zero connection to the television business. Maybe in another life.

  “Hey,” Annie says, looking at one of her monitors. She points for Bob’s benefit. “Look at these spin rate numbers.”

  Bob leans over and sees what Annie sees, elevated readings on every turbine in the joint, and rising. “1750 psi and rising!”

  Annie starts tapping on her keyboard and reacts with alarm. “I’m locked out!”

  Hunching over his keyboard, Bob squints at his monitor. “Got nothing here, too!”

  He grabs a phone on his console. While he’s waiting for headquarters to pick up, Annie keeps her eyes glued on the array of system monitors. Loud enough for the guys out in the truck bay to hear, she says, “2100 psi! Bob, we gotta get the hell out of here!”

  “Wait…” Bob listens as the phone at the other end rings and rings.

  “No, Bob, we’ve got to go now!”

  Annie is out the door first but holds it open for Bob to exit. Red warning lights flash up and down the station and a loud siren wails, Annie having hit the alarm before fleeing the control room. One of the pipeline technicians jumps in his truck and tears ass for the gate while another dashes for the perimeter fence and woods beyond. There’s no sign of the third technician. Stafford Compression Station emits an otherworldly whirring sound that rises in pitch and then deepens into a low, brutish growl.

  Annie hightails it across the long grass, with a head start on the conflagration that is sure to follow. Looking over her shoulder, she expects to see the facility operator on her heels, but he’s not there. Slowing her gait, Annie twists all the way around and observes her supervisor running back toward the control building.

  “Bob!” Her scream cuts through the pipeline’s guttural roar. The facility operator stops, turns, and faces Annie, a look of disbelief and confusion on his face. She runs back and firmly takes him by the arm. “C’mon, friend. We gotta go.”

  “Maybe I can fix it.”

  “Nobody can fix it, Bob. Not even you.”

  Annie pulls him along, the old man going willingly now. They arrive at the fence. She waits for him to clamber over first before she works her way up and drops down to the ground. Behind them, the turbine wail builds to a freakish intensity. Hand in hand, Bob and Annie run for the woods, where the others have taken refuge. They don’t have to wait long. As they gawk in stupefied disbelief, Stafford Compression Station erupts in a crackling, thunderous fireball that expands and expands, enveloping everything in its path with smoke and powdery flame.

  County fire officials the next day discover the body of the third pipeline technician in a flattened equipment shed. He represents Cyber Jihad’s first kill. A fire engine racing to the incident fifteen minutes after the explosion hit an SUV that had failed to yield to the emergency vehicle. The driver, adult passenger, and three children inside the Toyota bring the total dead to six.

  * * *

  TUESDAY, 8:45 P.M. Due to pick up April at her place in fifteen minutes, Hayley is grabbing a quick shower when the hot water goes out. Not many years removed from army life, she guts out a rinse with cold water. Her television is tuned to cable news. Before she has finished dressing, Hayley sees the first reports of a tremendous explosion at a natural gas compression station thirty miles away in Virginia. The loss of hot water in her shower begins to make some sense. Turning the knobs on her gas stove to no effect, Hayley experiences the disconcerting buzz of being part of an evolving news event. She moves to turn off the television just as the cable news anchor reports a natural gas outage from Norfolk to New York City, the largest disruption of service in US history.

  Hayley finds April waiting at the curb outside her place. The disgruntled expression on April’s face is hard to miss as she settles into the passenger seat.

  “What?”

  “A Volkswagen?”

  “I love my Golf,” Hayley says defensively. “What kind of car do you have?”

  Ignoring the question, April gestures forward. “Next time, I’ll drive.”

  The Iron Pony Tap Room is a nine-minute drive away. Hungry for honest friendship, Hayley wants to connect with April in a more emotional and meaningful way than the clandestine work that binds them together. She wonders if the army lieutenant is lonely, too. Despite her many talents, Hayley cannot muster the necessary audacity to broach the topic. Instead, she drives in silence while April checks her phone for late-breaking news.

  “Compressor station just south of here, in Stafford County. Turbines started to spin out of control, operators on-site couldn’t do shit about it.”

  “Hacked.”

  April nods. “Sounds like a variant of Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm that alters the programmable logic controllers of industrial machinery like centrifuges and turbines. The malware was developed by US and Israeli intelligence agencies, in partnership to destroy Iranian uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz.”

  “Thanks for the seminar, April, but I know what Stuxnet is. I also know it took a dozen of your closest friends at the NSA two years to develop. That suggests the Cyber Jihad is no lone wolf.”

  “Not necessarily. After Iran, some moron inadvertently released the malware into the wild. Bad actors at every level of the cyberterrorism game have repurposed countless versions of it.”

  Parking down the block from the tavern, they exit the car and walk toward the entrance.

  “You really think you’ll be able to recognize this guy from memory?” April asks.

  “Has Cyber Command or the NSA cracked the case?”

  “Can’t speak for the NSA, but we’re getting nowhere close to full attribution.”

  They stop outside the entrance into the Iron Pony Tap Room. Hayley says, “Then I guess we should work with what I can remember.”

  Shaking her head, April follows Hayley through the doors. The motorcycle theme is self-evident, with vintage bikes and accessories in the display window, lined up along a balcony, and tucked into elevated nooks and crannies throughout the room. Music thunders from a stadium-grade sound system. The vibe is roadhouse casual and so is the young, boisterous crowd.

  Hayley stands on the second step of stairs leading up to a mezzanine and scans the throng, looking for the smirking, dark-complexioned man from her memory. The bright red Manchester United jersey would be a helpful beacon, but Hayley finds no one in the crowd who matches the image in her head.

  “Anything?” April asks from one step below, shouting over the music.

  Hayley ignores the question and pushes her way through the crowd toward the bar. She gestures to one of the bartenders. Making herself heard over the din isn’t easy.

  “I’m looking for someone. Dark complexion. Maybe Persian?”

  “You got a name?”

  Hayley shakes her head. “Wears a red Manchester United jersey.”

  The female bartender, thin as a stick and festooned with tattoos everywhere but on her face, shakes her head. “Sorry. You want something to drink?”

  Hayley waves off the offer. “Maybe someone else behind the bar might know?”

  “Believe me, I know every regular in the joint.”

  Hayley gestures her thanks and turns away from the bar. She rejoins April closer at the stairs.

  “Waste of time,” April says loudly over the music. Hayley doesn’t argue.

  * * *

  RAFI EMERGES FROM the men’s room where management, reluctant to close their doors due to the lack of hot water, has deposited industrial-size containers of hand sanitizer. Checking his phone, he sees he has received a third angry text from the Boss. He ignores it, the same as
he disregarded the others. The messages express extreme displeasure with the premature attack on the compressor station. In Rafi’s estimation, however, the action was a huge success. With only a few keystrokes on his laptop, he impacted the lives of almost sixty million people, ruining dinner plans, depriving everyone of hot water, and idling dozens of manufacturing plants. Though he has heard early reports of casualties, the big numbers are what excite Rafi the most. Sixty fucking million people impacted by him! How cool is that?!

  Leading with the arrogant thrust of his chin, the computer hacker threads his way across the crowded floor to the bar and flags down the same tattooed bartender. “Burkey’s,” says Rafi, ordering his favorite house lager.

  He’s pretty sure the bartender is a lesbian and, therefore, another in the vast army of women who wouldn’t fuck him if their last, dying breath depended on it. As she turns to fill his order, Rafi imagines shooting her in the back of the head with a Sig Sauer he keeps under his bed mattress. With his mind’s eye, he imagines the exit wound in her forehead the size of a fried egg. Just thinking about it brings a smile to his face.

  The bartender pulls him a pint. Placing it on the bar, she debates whether to say anything. Rafi is frequent topic of conversation among the tavern’s staff members. She remembers too well the night he accused a female patron of riding the “cock carousel” and got a drink tossed in his face. Several staff members lobbied management to permanently ban Rafi from the premises. But the freak is a riding buddy of Aaron, the manager, and so has staved off banishment for now. It doesn’t hurt his cause that Rafi tips decently, for this crowd. Despite her hesitation, the bartender leans over to shout into his ear. “Some chick was just asking after you. Straight, like a cop.”