“Er . . . eight days with strict conservation and a public information blitz,” the city engineer said.
“Correction, four to eight days of potable water before the taps run dry. If they detonate, it would take two weeks to repair the tunnels?”
“Yes, with round-the-clock construction.”
“Hey, what if we just fix one? Then how long?” Kronos could see the engineer’s eyebrows rise. He doodled some figures on the pad in front of him.
“Good idea. With one tunnel repaired we could get fifty percent of the water supply back to the five boroughs in five days.”
“We can survive that. We’re friggin’ New Yorkers here,” Kronos said as he left to tell Brooke the good news.
.G.
“I don’t buy it,” Brooke said.
“Brooke, these guys know their shit and they say five days . . .”
“No, I don’t mean your conclusion. I mean I don’t buy that they are going through all this for something that won’t amount to little more than inconvenience for not even a week.”
“A moment ago I was happy; what a buzz kill,” Kronos said.
“Peter, what else do you do with water?”
“Bathe, shower . . . holy shit! Fight fires!”
“That’s it, interrupting the supply isn’t about drinking water.” Brooke ran out of the room.
They followed her back into the IT room.
“Gentlemen, are the fire hydrants of New York on your water system?”
“Yes!”
“Certainly.”
“From 1917 when they laid the pipes.”
“Okay, listen carefully. We are now back to the one-two punch scenario. They are shutting off the firefighting capability of this city, which means they expect to start a fire, a big one. And we have ruled out nuclear, so I want all of you to come up with scenarios for how to burn down this city. Kronos, get me estimates on how long before the water in the system runs out. That should tell us how big the fire they are contemplating will be.”
“I can answer that,” one of the engineers on the videoconference said. “I ran these numbers a few years back after the San Francisco FD ran out of water fighting a five-beller at Mission Bay—ninety pumper trucks ran the system dry. They had to use the backup reservoir.”
“Then we’re toast, mister, because they aren’t doing this for just one five-alarm fire,” Brooke said.
“San Francisco is a totally different supply matrix than us. We’ve got a thousand times the capacity under normal conditions.”
“But if they detonate?” Brooke pressed.
“The residual water in the pipes will be 300 million gallons. If you are fighting one five-alarm fire you are going to go through ten million gallons on average.”
“So we can fight thirty five-alarm fires?” Kronos said.
“No, because at some point the pressure drops. So I would say twenty—twenty-five tops. And then it depends on where they are; more pressure for a longer time as you go south, less pressure, sooner to the north.”
“Okay, water aside, now I need to know how you make a fire or fires all over the city.”
“Back on Christmas Eve, 1994, they planned on hijacking and crashing Air France 8969 into the Eifel Tower to shower flaming jet fuel all over downtown Paris,” Remo said.
“Wait, seven years before 9-11 they tried to use a plane as a weapon?” the engineer asked from the videoconference screen.
“Don’t dwell on it. It is infuriating,” Brooke said as she got up to leave then stopped and addressed the man on the screen. “By the way, what caused the fire in SF?”
“Welding torch.”
“Who’s here from FDNY?”
A man in a blue suit with crossed trumpets on his lapel spoke up. “O’Malley, Chief’s office.”
“What’s the biggest cause of major fires in this city, sir?”
“That would be electrical, ma’am.”
“Crap, six of our students have electrical distribution backgrounds,” Kronos said.
“Kronos, hit it and tell me how I short circuit the city into a blazing inferno, and I need to know that five minutes ago.” Brooke left and realized she’d just used one of her husband’s favorite command toppers, and I need it five minutes ago . . . Mush. She hadn’t had the time to think of him since this morning. When he got back to Pearl from patrol, she’d need a month just to fill him in on all that had gone down in the last week. She hoped she’d be there, and not dead, when he piloted the USS Nebraska into Pearl.
.G.
Jim Aponte was just coming home for lunch, a definite perk of being the head of technology at the casino attached to Yonkers’ Raceway, right across the Thruway from his house. He noticed the Con Ed van at the Bomb House down the street.
.G.
Bridge was screaming into the headset. “Target one, the Hillview reservoir. Due south of the Racetrack in Yonkers. Possible bombs in trailers. Interdict and eliminate, weapons free; repeat, weapons free on my authority. Shoot straight, minimize collateral damage. RDF 3, you’re the closest. Go. Go. Go.”
He then switched the interphone to crew. “Billy, get me there as fast as you can.”
The pilot of the helicopter executed an immediate one-hundred-eighty-degree turn as they were currently over Brooklyn’s Coney Island on the southern tip of the racetrack pattern.
“Nine minutes out,” the pilot said in return.
Bridge switched to Tac 2. “Bird Dog to RDF 3 leader. What’s your ETA on site . . . over.”
“RDF 3 leader to Bird Dog, six minutes out . . . over.”
“Shit,” Bridge said after he switched off his mic.
.G.
The combined security team at Hillview was in a jurisdictional dispute over who was in charge. The newly appointed military liaison officer, a lieutenant from the New York National Guard, wanted all the security personnel out on the roadway armed and ready to interdict whoever tried to get to the water tunnels beneath. But the captain of the security guards had his orders, which were to protect the reservoir at all costs. He had no guidance as to the access roadway and was waiting for a decision from his superiors.
The military man had had enough and ran to get two DPW dump trucks to block the drive at the Central Avenue northern end.
.G.
The two black busses made a hairpin turn off the Central Avenue service road and started up the access way to the main gate of the Hillview reservoir. The guardhouse was on the other side of high, brown security fences, with dark windows. As they approached, the lead bus’s front windshield exploded from inside out as a SAW automatic weapon opened up on the small guardhouse. In ten seconds its barrel was red hot and hundreds of rounds had imploded the bullet-resistant glass. Everyone and everything inside was torn to shreds.
Four security guards who were outside the small structure returned fire. Two men from inside the bus put a steel plate in front of the driver. Bullets pinged off it as he slowly moved the bus forward. He opened the door to the bus and looked to his right where a piece of frosted glass was held in place by an aluminum arm coming off the dashboard. He slowed the bus to a crawl until a small red dot from Fareed’s laser at the house appeared at the edge of the four inch square glass. With gunfire all around and bullets pounding into his shield, he gingerly moved the bus into position so that the dot was dead center of the glass, just as he had trained to do a hundred times over the past two weeks, in the early morning hours in the deserted parking fields of New Jersey shopping malls. He stopped the bus with a hiss of the airbrakes and applied the parking brake. Having completed the task he had specially trained for, he was now expendable, so he grabbed a machine gun, stood, and returned fire while using the plate for cover.
.G.
The second bus had an ultrasonic measuring tape, the kind you get from Home Depot for forty-eight buc
ks, on the dash. The driver of that bus pointed it at the back of the trailer attached to the bus in front of him and watched it, as he inched his bus forward. He was trying to get to nineteen feet, four inches. At that distance, the trailer behind his forty-five-foot bus would be dead center on top of the second water tunnel forty-three feet below. As the readout displayed twenty-two feet, an explosion rocked his bus.
.G.
A Cobra gunship had fired two rockets at the second bus. The hits were low and rocked the bus, kicking up asphalt and dirt. Then the copilot, using his heads-up display, zeroed in on the trailer behind, which they were told was the business end of the attack. He purposefully aimed just under the small trailer. “Foxtrot One!” he said as he flicked the safety cap off the red button on his collective and pressed it. The missile hit just under the trailer and the eight-pound Semtex warhead exploded with enough force to flip the thing up in the air and back twenty feet from the bus. The pilot then heard the sound of large caliber bullets ricocheting off the Plexiglas windshield of the Cobra. He turned his head as the gimbal-mounted Gatling gun right under the cockpit moved, as if part of his central nervous system, towards the door of the bus where the shooter was working an AK-47 and firing away. The pilot walked the line of fire right through the door of the bus, almost cutting the front end off. As it sagged away from the rest of the vehicle’s body from being perforated by thousands of .50 calber slugs, the shooting stopped.
.G.
In the first bus, Amad ran to the red button. He hit it just as his world went bright orange for a nanosecond before going black as the fireball from the missile of the second Cobra gunship to arrive on station made a direct hit on the lead bus. The explosion was simultaneous with the detonation of the trailer, although the jolting of the bus angled the trailer so its fearsome destructive power, which was originally focused down, was now askew and the crater it made was more elliptical and shallower than the deep, perfectly round “ice cream scoop” they’d intended to make in the roadway. The exploding trailer took out the whole body of the already burning bus.
.G.
The National Guard lieutenant pulled up in one of the two dump trucks that he’d gone to get and immediately jumped down from the driver’s side with his sidearm cocked, taking out a terrorist who was aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at one of the choppers as it was landing. Before it touched down, a squad of marines emptied out and started securing the area. Sporadic gunshots were heard as they tracked down a few of the terrorists who’d decided to choose death over life.
The gunfire had subsided when suddenly the ground rumbled. An extremely loud hissing sound built up to ear-shatteringly shrill as the ground under the carcass of the first bus exploded. A gush of water rose fifty feet in the air! The mangled bus was thrown thirty feet by the surging pressure. The roadway around the geyser began to crumble as huge chunks of asphalt went airborne and pelted the ground and the troops. One chunk hit the rotors of the just-landed copter, and the broken-off rotor spun and ripped up two hundred feet of grass to the right, slicing a running terrorist in half along the way, before coming to a rest, jutting out of the ground like a javelin. The pilot did a superior job of wrestling the now-unbalanced damaged bird to safety as it wobbled all over the ground like a bucking bronco at a rodeo.
Then another spout of water as big around as a storage tank rose up sixty feet or more from the ruptured water tunnel. Everyone and everything was deluged. Men found it hard to stand under the relentless downward force of thousands of gallons per second.
.G.
As his helicopter arrived, Bridge saw the huge geyser almost as high as he was flying. He hit the transmit switch. “Bird Dog to Home Plate, Bird dog to Home Plate . . . come in . . . over”
In the conference room, Brooke heard the call sign; she turned to the officer on her right and nodded. “Bird Dog this is Home Plate . . . over,” he said.
“We had one breach. It looks like one of the bombs went off. I see one geyser in the south position. The northern tunnel isn’t affected yet. But someone should shut it down. It’s only a matter of time.”
“On it,” the DPW guy said as he barked orders into his cell phone.
Brooke leaned into the mic in front of the comm officer. “Bridge, this may not be over . . . er . . . over.”
“What happened? . . . over.”
Annoyed, Brooke blurted out, “Can you just call in from your cell? . . . over.”
In ten seconds, the phone rang. Brooke hit the speaker button.
“Bridge. Okay, we think there is a second prong. In all likelihood it’s going to be some kind of attack on the electrical power system.”
“I thought we ruled that out?”
“It’s back on the threat board because we believe they were looking to stop our ability to fight fires with the bombing of the water tunnels. The thinking is they are going to start a huge fire by some electrical means. Kronos and Remo are working on that angle now in the conference room. Bridge, can you dispatch all your teams to hover near major electrical installations? We’ll send coordinates up as soon as we have them.”
“Are you sure you want to pre-commit to this,” Bridge asked over the speaker.
“What’s your option?” Brooke said.
“Let me keep RDF 2 in Queens. I’ll reroute RDF3 and put RDF 1 in the air. That way we’ll have one group ready if something else comes at us that we’re not expecting.”
“Okay, good plan. Approved. Execute. We’ll get back to you when we know more.” Brooke turned to the communications officer. “Patch me into the FBI.”
“New York Bureau dispatch, Agent Sanders,” came over the speaker in the room.
“Sanders, this is Director Burrell-Morton. I have director one status and my authorization code is Transistor. I want a team of agents to interrogate survivors and prisoners at the Hillview reservoir in Yonkers. I want the team airborne in three minutes. We need to know if they can tell us where the rest of the attack will fall.”
Brooke left the room.
.G.
The Yeshiva bus crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge behind the red Con Ed gas service truck. The two sedans were right behind. Dequa’s phone rang.
.G.
“Dequa, it is Fareed. The Americans have attacked the northern team but the bombs have miraculously done their job. There is a very large amount of water coming out of the ground way up into the air. May I leave this place now and join you?”
.G.
“Yes, Fareed, we will need everyone.” Dequa hung up. He had no way of knowing that Fareed couldn’t see that only one tunnel had been breached so he reported to his team over their walkie-talkies, “The northern team has had a great success. It is up to us now to make sure their sacrifice was not in vain. Be alert and don’t let the godless bastards gain an inch of ground.”
.G.
Fareed exited the front door and, after taking two steps, he fell forward from the impact of the aluminum softball bat to the back of his head.
Jim Aponte stood over him. “So you guys thought you could blow up the reservoir and get away with it . . . bullshit!” Jim then went inside to find the cop from the cruiser parked outside.
.G.
Brooke entered the conference room as they were in the middle of a common debate. “Power distribution computers can’t be hacked to make fires. They can be hacked for denial of service at some level. But the entire system is designed to disconnect, like a fuse or circuit breaker in your house.”
“Okay, but that would be because of over-draw of power like in a short?”
“Essentially yes, although in high tensions lines it could be due to inductive losses from the counter EMF. That kind of induction surge could trigger a circuit breaker as well.”
“That’s it,” Remo said.
“What’s it?” the Con Ed chief engineer said.
“Induction
! What if they are planning something that won’t trip the breakers?”
“What are we talking about? Like the breakers in my house?” Brooke said.
“Yes, but these main power breakers would be as big as your house.”
“Yes. Brooke, they look like giant mouse traps, only they slam ‘open’ if there is an instantaneous power drain caused by a short circuit,” Remo said.
“So then, Peter, what did you mean they could do something that won’t trip the breakers?”
“It’s in the back of my head. Geez, what was it?”
“You have to defeat the device mechanically. That’s the only way I can imagine it being bypassed,” the engineer said.
“No, that’s not it . . . What was it?” Peter said, tapping his finger on the table.
Kronos was enjoying this.
Brooke noticed. “What could possibly be so funny that you are smiling at a time like this, Kronos?”
“Are you friggin’ kidding me? Look at this. Finally he can’t think of something. Brain boy here is having a brain fart. It’s friggin’ hysterical.”
“You are such an odd duck, Kro . . .” Brooke was interrupted.
“That’s it! Hysterical!”
“Huh?” Brooke said.
“Um, Hysteresis . . . Hysteresis losses,” Peter corrected himself.
“Okay, but those are already accounted for in the inductive load calculations of the grid. So I don’t think that’s it,” the Con Ed Engineer said.
“Wait. What are we talking about?” Brooke demanded, not to be left out of the conversation.
“In anything with a coil of wire, the presence of electricity produces an opposing force that reacts against the initial voltage. In fact, it’s called inductive reactance.”
“So that’s a bad thing?”
“Not good or bad, it just is. We build the coils and transformers, motors and what have you, to keep the reactance where we need it to be.”
“But reactance is not only a function of the coil, it’s also the applied frequency!”
“Okay, now you are getting way out there,” Brooke said raising her hands.
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