by Marc Elsberg
Not even an hour and a half from here to Brussels with the regular connection, he thought. Over two days on foot. He rocked Shannon gently, whispered in her ear again until she opened her eyes.
She looked at him, blinking.
‘Nightmare,’ she groaned.
‘You had one?’
‘No, I woke up and landed back in one.’
She sat there a moment longer, then rose, sluggish, and stretched dramatically. Manzano did the same. He could feel his injured leg.
‘What do we do now?’ said Manzano.
‘I’ve got to … You know.’
‘Oh …’ An awkward pause. ‘Me too.’
After they had done their business in separate corners, they wandered across the platform looking for a map or some other clue as to how they could get to Brussels.
They asked some of the people who were also starting their day.
‘Do trains come through here?’
‘Very rarely. Freight trains,’ answered one.
‘Where are they heading?’
‘No idea.’
‘Is there anywhere nearby where you can get something to eat?’
‘In the street in front of the train station there’s a soup kitchen. It’s not always open, though.’
An hour later Shannon and Manzano were sitting in a room heated by a coal oven. No one had questioned them in the food line. Each of them had received two large ladlefuls of vegetable soup, which they sipped gratefully direct from the bowl, seated at long crowded tables. Those who had empty bowls were requested to give up their seat for the next consumer. Which meant most of them lingered a long time before finishing. Shannon and Manzano were in no hurry either, but after repeated demands, were finally forced back outside in the cold. ‘We’ve got more important things to do,’ Manzano said. ‘Come on, back to the train station.’
Manzano paced up and down the track, before finally deciding on a direction, and pulled Shannon with him. After about two hundred metres they went under a bridge. Beyond them, the tracks branched out in several directions. Two of them disappeared into buildings, others merged again after another few hundred metres. In between, dozens of railway vehicles were parked, from simple locomotives, regional train cars and freight cars, to strange machines that were probably used to lay rails or make repairs. One of them looked like a short, yellow truck that could drive on rails.
Manzano climbed up next to the driver’s door, tried to open it. A second later he was sitting at the wheel inspecting the controls.
Shannon watched him doubtfully from the ladder beside the door.
‘Doesn’t this thing need electricity?’
‘Nope. Runs on diesel.’
‘If the tank’s not empty.’
Manzano removed a panel under the dashboard, behind which a tangle of wires appeared. He looked over the cables, pulled out a few, reconnected others. Suddenly, with a loud rattle, the engine sprang to life.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked. ‘See if there’s anything like a route map in here.’
‘Hasn’t it got a navigation system?’ she asked. She climbed in, sat down on the passenger seat and looked through the giant glove compartment until she found a thick book filled with diagrams and maps.
‘Got it!’
Manzano tested whether he could put the vehicle in motion. It gave a lurch and started.
Shannon studied the thick tome, found Aachen and Brussels on a full-page spread.
‘Now all we have to do is figure out what this means.’
‘You’re the navigator, I’m the driver!’ cried Manzano, and sped up to walking speed.
‘Since when does a man trust his female passenger to read the map?’
‘Since the thing he’s driving isn’t a car but a … Oh, just bloody well tell me where to go!’
Berlin, Germany
‘Rosinenbomber ’ – raisin bombers – that was what her mother and all the other Berliners had called the American aircraft that had supplied the West Sector of Berlin with food after the Second World War. Michelsen wondered if any of today’s youth still knew the word. And now, decades on, military planes were once again landing at Tegel airport – only this time they were Russian.
The passenger planes grounded since the beginning of the power outage had been cleared away. In their place a staggering number of dark-green, large-bellied colossuses were lined up beside each other, the symbols of the Russian Federation emblazoned on their tail fins. In the night sky, Michelsen saw the chain of lights from incoming planes and the formations of those flying out again.
Berlin wasn’t their only destination. At that very moment, similar scenarios were playing out in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Paris, London and other large airports across north and central Europe, while in the south hundreds of planes, chiefly from Turkey and Egypt, delivered their loads. At the same time, truck convoys and mile-long trains brought more life-saving provisions from Russia, the nations of the Caucasus, Turkey and North Africa.
‘Looks like an invasion,’ muttered the foreign minister.
NATO had still not made a decision about Chinese offers of aid. The view gained increasing acceptance among hardliners that China was responsible for the catastrophe. So long as this suspicion could not be refuted, they would not, under any circumstances, tolerate Chinese soldiers or even civilian aid personnel setting foot on Western soil.
‘Let’s go welcome the general,’ said Michelsen.
Between Liège and Brussels, Belgium
Up until then, they had travelled no faster than seventy kilometres per hour so as not to miss any switches or obstacles.
‘What’s that light back there?’
Behind them, Shannon and Manzano saw a tiny, flickering light.
‘No idea. Getting bigger and brighter, though,’ said Shannon. ‘A lot bigger and brighter – and fast,’ she realized. ‘It’s on the tracks. That’s a train.’
‘On our track?’
‘I can’t tell, but it’s a train all right,’ Shannon repeated, getting anxious. She could already make out the locomotive. ‘If it is driving on our track, it’s going to ram us. Go, now – we need to go!’
Their car-on-rails shuddered forward. The train behind them was only a hundred metres away now.
‘Faster!’ screamed Shannon. She felt the car accelerating, but nowhere near fast enough. Then to her relief it became apparent that the train was travelling on the other track. As it drew closer, she saw dozens of freight wagons behind the locomotive, hundreds of people sitting on top of them.
‘Like in India,’ remarked Manzano. ‘Only those people must be frozen stiff!’
Slowly the train caught up to them, until they were driving right alongside the locomotive. Shannon saw the engineer and waved at him until he snapped open his window. Shannon did the same. Over the noise of the two engines she shouted in French, ‘Where are you going?’
‘Brussels!’ he replied.
Berlin, Germany
‘Oh my God,’ Michelsen stammered.
‘How could this happen?’ asked the chancellor. His face was as white as chalk.
‘From the way things look, there’s been an accident,’ said the state secretary for Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety. On the screen appeared photos of burned-out truck skeletons that lay scattered over the highway and neighbouring fields. Faces grimaced in horror.
‘We don’t know how it happened,’ said the state secretary. ‘The investigations are still ongoing. The fuel trucks were pulling trailers and were accompanied by two troop vehicles, front and behind, each with a ten-man crew.’
He pointed at two of the blackened wrecks in the fields.
‘There are no survivors.’
‘Was it an accident or an attack?’ asked the chancellor.
‘We can’t say at present. All we know is that from the time of the inquiry made by the Philippsburg nuclear power plant until the discovery of the accident site, ten hours had e
lapsed.’
‘Lord, why so long?’
‘Because everyone out there is at their limit!’ growled the state secretary. ‘Because fewer and fewer are even available. Because the radios aren’t working in many regions. Because …’ Words failed him, his lips began to tremble, he fought back tears.
Please don’t have a nervous breakdown, Michelsen prayed. They had already lost two people.
‘The next diesel transport could not be sent out till this morning and will reach Philippsburg in six hours at the earliest.’
On the screen there appeared a large basin like a swimming pool.
‘This is the pool for spent fuel rods in the Philippsburg 1 nuclear power plant. In some power plants there are more used fuel rods sitting in the spent fuel pool than are active in the reactor itself. Since they are still very hot, they have to be cooled year-round. The pool in Philippsburg 1 was always a safety risk, as it lies outside the containment structure for the reactor. The spent fuel pool didn’t even have a backup system prior to the plant’s early decommissioning in 2011, at which time it was provisionally equipped. According to the operators, diesel for cooling the spent fuel pool ran out sometime last night. The power plant management chose not to risk diverting diesel from the emergency cooling systems for the reactors.
‘The water in the pool is evaporating due to the heat of the fuel rods. By the time the replacement diesel reaches the plant, the pool will be dry. It’s likely that the fuel elements have already begun to melt. I don’t need to explain to anyone here what that means. Or maybe I do. Since the spent fuel pool is not located within the containment structure, this meltdown would take place in the middle of the building. As a result, the inside of the building will be so severely irradiated that it truly can no longer be entered. In the event of an explosion, even the cities of Mannheim and Karlsruhe could be endangered.’
‘For God’s sake!’ shouted the chancellor and pounded his fist on the heavy table so hard that it shook. ‘You close the damn reactors down and still things go wrong!’
‘The residual risk people always like to cite,’ murmured Michelsen.
‘Do we need to evacuate the area?’ asked the chancellor.
‘Even if we want to, there’s no way we can do it quickly,’ answered the state secretary. ‘Contact with local emergency crews has long been patchy. Even if we’re only talking about a radius of a few kilometres, we’ll need hundreds of vehicles, drivers, fuel. In the present situation …’ he looked down at the table in front of him, shaking his head, ‘all we can do is pray.’
Brussels, Belgium
There had been enough fuel in the tank to make it to the next switch. Shannon and Manzano had then simply hooked the railway vehicle to the train. The engineer way up front hadn’t noticed a thing.
Forty-five minutes later, they stopped in what seemed to be a major train station.
Soldiers with rifles across their chests stood on both sides of the train.
‘Hopefully, they’re not waiting for us,’ said Manzano.
‘Don’t be so full of yourself,’ Shannon replied. ‘I’m sure they’re here because of looters.’
A soldier without a gun but with a megaphone walked up and down the train and ordered the people in French to get off and calmly disperse. They climbed down from the containers and freight cars and carried their possessions past the line of soldiers. Manzano and Shannon blended in with the crowd. The station signage confirmed they had reached Brussels. Here, too, hundreds of people had set up makeshift sleeping rigs in the main hall of the train station. The booths were closed, but Manzano spotted a man in a yellow security jacket who was watching from the sidelines.
‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked, after Shannon and Manzano had tried out their English on him.
‘To the Monitoring and Information Centre of the EU,’ said Manzano.
The man shrugged.
‘How do we get there?’
Command Headquarters
At first they were worried. Since the previous day, more computers used to communicate with crisis centres and important organizations like Europol had been shut down. Email traffic had markedly decreased. Had their surveillance been discovered? They waited, conducted no active manipulations. Really, it had almost been too easy. They had procured thousands of email addresses belonging to employees at various power companies and government institutions via social media. Then, using personalized emails, they had lured them to a website with ‘special discount travel deals for select employees’.One visit and the deal seeker’s computer was infected with a malicious code.
Within a few months they had infiltrated practically every target – several corporations and the systems of the largest European nations as well as the US. In the same way they identified laptops that had Skype or other Internet telephone programs installed. They had activated their built-in cameras and microphones, without the users being notified.
But now more staff were turning off their computers. And in doing so they took away their eyes and ears inside the enemies’ operations centres.
In a mail from the French crisis centre their automated keyword search had finally seized upon a message. It came directly from the office of the president. In it he ordered all members of staff at government authorities to turn computers and other technological devices on only when absolutely necessary, in order to conserve backup power. Within a few hours they dug up similar emails in several other government networks.
That was a welcome surprise. If after just over a week even the most important institutions were having to conserve backup power, it couldn’t be long till the final collapse. The day when the people would finally take back their lives was growing ever closer.
Brussels, Belgium
It was getting dark by the time they stood in front of the massive building. Big letters beside the entrance proclaimed: Europese Commissie – Commission européenne.
Lights were on inside. A few men dressed in navy blue stood in the window and looked out on to the street.
Shannon took a close look at Manzano, from his stitched-up forehead to his filthy shoes. His fever had abated, but he still looked like a vagrant. A glance at herself reminded her that she didn’t look much better.
‘Yeah,’ said Manzano, ‘we look like welcome visitors. I’m sure we smell like it too.’
They hadn’t even pushed the door open before a security guard came to greet them.
‘Entry is for staff only,’ he said in French.
‘I am staff,’ Manzano answered confidently in English. He tried to push past him but ran into an outstretched arm.
‘Your ID,’ the man demanded, also in English now.
‘Escort me to reception,’ Manzano told him. ‘I’m an independent contractor with the Monitoring and Information Centre,’ he lied. ‘Ask Sophia Angström – she’s an employee here. If you don’t let me through there’s going to be trouble, I can promise you that.’
The security man hesitated, but quickly came to a decision.
Sophia stepped out of the lift and scanned the lobby. Only at second glance did she recognize Piero Manzano. Sitting next to him was a young woman with matted hair. Coming closer, Sophia recognized her face.
‘Piero! My God, just look at you!’ She took a step back. ‘And the smell …’
‘I know. A long story. By the way, this is Lauren Shannon, American journalist.’
‘Oh, I know her,’ said Sophia. ‘She was the first to report on the attack on the power grid. And now I know where you got the story,’ she said to Shannon. ‘Piero here …’
‘We met in The Hague,’ Manzano explained, ‘through François Bollard, do you remember him? Another long story.’
Sophia couldn’t help but wonder if Manzano and the young American had been through more than just ‘long stories’ together.
‘What are you doing in Brussels? Another scoop? Or are you here for Europol?’
‘I might have a clue that could lead to the attackers,’ ans
wered Manzano.
‘The whole world is in the dark about who’s responsible for this disaster and you’re telling me you know who it is?’
‘I didn’t say that. But I might have a clue. My hunch turned out right once before.’
Sophia nodded.
‘What I need right now though is power and an Internet connection. I thought I could maybe get them from you here.’
Sophia laughed wearily. ‘Oh sure, it’s not like it matters. Everything’s gone nuts here anyway.’ With a motion of her head she signalled for them to follow her. ‘This could cost me my job. But first you two have to check in and shower.’
‘We’d like nothing better.’
‘We have sanitary facilities, so we’ll go there first. Do you have something to change into?’
‘I do,’ said Shannon.
‘I don’t,’ Manzano admitted.
‘Maybe I can rustle something up,’ said Sophia.
She stood at the desk.
‘Two visitor passes, please,’ she said to the receptionist, whose nose was upturned in a sneer.
Ratingen, Germany
‘We’ve got them,’ announced the caller from Berlin on the radio telephone. ‘A team carrying out surveillance on a transmission substation spotted them after they’d started a fire.’
‘Where?’
‘Near Schweinfurt.’
Schweinfurt. Hartlandt didn’t bother to guess how far that was. On his computer he brought up a map of Germany. Around three hundred kilometres southeast of Ratingen.
‘Did they catch them?’
‘They called in a helicopter. It’s under way and will continue surveillance from a safe altitude. The counter-terrorist unit has already been notified.’