“So, let me get this right. You had a perimeter breach last night and found some people at the gate entrance. But you did not write down the vehicle’s license plate numbers, didn’t ask for the occupants’ IDs, or even bother to ask for their full names. Then you didn’t secure the facility before going home, or even bother to tell anyone about the breach except in very vague terms in your daily report. Is that about it?”
Bob was thinking that this wasn’t going very well and started grasping for straws.
“Well, when you put it that way it sounds bad, but I did discover the air pump and I know where and when it was purchased. I even think the hardware store has a security camera. That’s good, right?”
Agent Andrews’ face was a nice color for repainting a barn, but not so good for a human’s head. But he decided there was nothing left Bob had to offer, so he left him in the office and asked a fellow agent to go over the hardware store and follow up on the air pump. Hopefully, he could get some answers there.
At only two crooked miles long and approximately one mile wide, the Tolt Reservoir Basin is not a particularly big body of water, but trying to search even that size of an area is no walk in the park. Aerial surveillance was ordered of the water and the surrounding area and agents set out on foot to look over every inch of the east gate location. The air and ground search turned up nothing of interest. By the time the underwater search team got ready and made a few sweeps, the sun was getting low in the sky. The rest of the water-based search with the sonar gear would have to wait for morning.
The forensics teams were still taking samples from the tire tracks and some dripping oil patches in the sand on the shore, in hopes of identifying the Mustang and the truck, when a call came on the radio saying that the two suspect vehicles had been found abandoned in Fall City, twenty miles south of the reservoir. The forensics teams packed up their gear and headed south in search of clues.
Finding the cars abandoned did prove one thing to Andrews even before the forensics teams got to them. This was not going to be a random break-in. Something much bigger was going on. He ordered a security alert about the Tolt Hill investigation to be sent out to every public utility watershed in the country. It was a long wait for the morning’s light.
June 29, 2015
5:30 AM PST
At first light, two sonar teams were already on the water by the east gate. The teams in the search boats started from the point where they left off the night before, about 50 meters from where the truck first touched the water, and then each went in opposite directions. Agent Andrews, back in the now designated operations center, was on his second cup of coffee when the first report from the sonar teams came in. Nothing unusual had been found. The sonar teams were running a typical overlapping search grid pattern and working their way out from the starting point. Even though they had decided to not search the outside two hundred meters from each shoreline, testing the entire reservoir was going to take an excruciatingly long time.
It was nearly 3:00 p.m. and not a single interesting thing had been found in the water. It was then that a frustrated Agent Andrews noticed the first security alert pop up on his laptop. The Sacramento Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant (SRWTP), located in Elk Grove, California, was reporting that water testing was showing an unexplained high concentration of biological particulates. Soon after the first alert, the headwork’s treatment plant on the Bull Run Watershed, which supplies water to Portland, started reporting similar anomalies in the water.
Agent Andrews told everyone within earshot that he wanted the Tolt Hill water manager by his side as fast as he could be found. None of the junior officers made a peep, they just started looking for the King County water manager, whoever that was.
James Clover was working on-site that day and overheard the commotion. As a water engineer for the county, and probably more familiar with the plant workings than anyone else, including the water manager, he offered his services to Agent Andrews. Agent Andrews asked Mr. Clover for an engineering map of the reservoir, studied it briefly, and then asked him what seemed at first to be an odd question.
“Mr. Clover, if you were going to drop some nasty chemical in this reservoir and you wanted to get it downstream as fast as possible, where would you do it?”
James didn’t hesitate for a second.
“Well, if your goal was to get a contaminate downstream as fast as possible, you would want to put it as close to the outlet draft pipes as possible. Those are located at the very west end of the reservoir and about five hundred feet north of where we are now.”
That answer didn’t make any sense to Agent Andrews. If the water exit was on the west end of the lake, why did the breach happen at the eastern most point? If these were the same bad guys they had been trying to find for some time now, they would certainly have studied the reservoir and known where the downstream outlet pipes were located. Then Agent Andrews started to remember the misdirection game that he had been playing out all along with these guys. He decided to start thinking like the deer again. What better way to make us search the wrong end of the reservoir than to enter the water at the east end. The air pump that was found suddenly started to make sense.
Agent Andrews looked at the map and drew a 100 meter circle around where James said the outlet pipes were. Then he got on his radio and told the sonar teams to “get their asses to the west end of the reservoir as fast as possible.” He gave his marked-up map to a junior agent who just happened to wander by, and directed him to get the map to the sonar teams when they got to this end of the reservoir.
When the search team’s operation’s officer got on the radio and asked Agent Andrews why he had ordered his men to the opposite end of the lake from where the breach was, Agent Andrews was uncharacteristically reserved. He simply answered:
“Because that’s where what we are looking for is!”
The operations officer was caught off guard. He expected Agent Andrews to rant and rave, pull rank, and maybe even throw out some threats. When he heard the calm voice with a clear answer, he was deflated from the fight he had expected. So he just answered:
“Okay then, they will be on the way immediately.”
When Agent Andrews got off the radio, Mr. Clover had a question of his own to ask.
“Sir, if you guys know the entry point is two miles upstream, how could whatever you are looking for end up on this end?”
Agent Andrews looked around the room for the evidence bag. He then showed Jim Clover the plastic air pump inside it that Bob had found in the water. He didn’t even have to say a word. James was a smart cookie, and just nodded.
Before the search team had time to get to the west end, reports were starting to be broadcast back to Agent Andrews that the Tolt Hill treatment plant, which receives the water from the reservoir, was starting to see high concentrations of some kind of bacteria.
Agent Andrews ordered all of the dive teams to stay out of the water, only surface exploration from the sonar teams was allowed. Next, he ordered the North Bend Hazmat team to head out to their location, ASAP. Whatever was lurking in the cold, deep water at the west end of the Tolt Hill reservoir was bound to be some kind of nasty business. After the container ship explosions, Andrews was not about to let anyone too close to whatever was there.
After the publication of what was quickly being labeled the “Manifesto,” every journalist in the country was on the lookout for any news story. Of course, these days every knucklehead with an iPhone and twitter account thinks they are one. Despite no statements by the authorities of the search going on at Tolt Hill, South Tolt Hill Road was already starting to get a steady stream of “reporters” with their iPhones all looking for the big story. When the hazmat team from the North Bend fire department was seen on its way up to the reservoir, the twitter universe lit up. According to the tweets by the so-called reporters, Seattle’s water was already killing baby puppies.
In the more down-to-earth world out on the water, Sonar Team 2 reported that th
ey had discovered an odd signature on the bottom, approximately thirty feet from the larger of the two exit pipes. Underwater cameras were sent down to investigate. The video images of what was found at the sonar site had even the veteran search and rescue divers looking away from the screen. The underwater cameras were returning very disturbing images with their dispassionate non-blinking eyes.
When Agent Andrews first saw the pictures from the underwater cameras, he had an interesting response to the horror. The thought that came to his mind was: I am glad I cannot smell them.
What the images on the monitors were showing were two adult bodies in severely advanced decay. Most of the flesh was gone, and roughly half of the soft tissues from the two bodies were missing. Their uninflated and weighted down raft could be seen laying under them. Despite the gruesomeness of the images, the investigator in Agent Andrews was still full on. The picture before him just didn’t add up. Based on the decay, the two bodies must have been killed weeks ago. But if that were the case, how did they get two miles away from where they were launched into the water, and where did the person or persons go that got them there? A check of the system showed no other trespassing sensors had gone off, and they sure didn’t swim two miles back upstream.
While this mystery was circling Agent Andrews’ brain, his laptop started registering new alert messages. Biological anomalies had now been found in Tacoma, Washington; Salem and Eugene, Oregon; Redding and Modesto, California.
Agent Andrews knew he had to get those bodies examined quickly so that whatever they were spreading could be understood and counteracted. But that presented many problems. He couldn’t send a diver to retrieve them without exposing the diver to whatever nasty business was down there. And he couldn’t just drop a rope with a hook. With the bodies in this advanced state of decomposition they would just pull apart. Andrews placed a call to Dr. Curt Robbins, a medical examiner he had worked with before, and deeply trusted. Better yet, Andrews remembered that Dr. Robbins lived and worked in North Bend, only twenty minutes away. Despite Andrews’ minimal description of the situation, the urgency in his voice convinced Dr. Robbins to quickly agree to examine the remains.
Then Agent Andrews decided it was time for a watery exhumation.
Agent Andrews ordered all three boats from the Search and Rescue team to surround the area where the bodies were laying on the bottom and to bring some of their most lightweight climbing ropes and some grappling hooks. When the boats were in position, he had the sonar group drop down their cameras in order to maneuver each of the ropes into position on each corner of the raft. Once each hook had a grip on the corners of the submerged raft, each rope was pulled taut. Then slowly the submerged raft was gently maneuvered by the teams to be raised in such a way that the bodies would be trapped in it. The idea was a partial success. As the raft was raised, the escaping water sloshed some of the decaying body parts out of the raft. Still, much of the remains did make it to the surface where the hazmat team was waiting.
The remains in the raft were then quickly taken to a makeshift morgue (one of the pump station’s empty rooms) by the hazmat team. The dive and sonar team members just wanted to get as far away from the area as soon as possible. Eating for the next few days would not be easy for the teams.
When Dr. Robbins first tried to maneuver around the table where the dismembered body parts were displayed, he was less then comfortable. Ensconced in his level 4 hazmat suit, and inside a room more appropriately sized for playing a game of cards than for dissecting disembodied humans, his task was formidable. However, what he saw on the table before him, captured his imagination like no other examination he had previously performed, and his inhibitions about his environment quickly dissipated. While everyone else was losing their lunch at the sight on the table, Dr. Robbins was fascinated.
It was quickly apparent to his trained eye that these two bodies were not decaying from any normal causes, nor were they doing so in a normal time frame. Body decay progression, even in water, has been very well studied for years. Today’s forensics teams can very accurately predict crime timelines based on tissue decomposition. Discrete timetables exist that show what the normal progression of decay should be for each physical system of the body. In the absence of animal or insect predation, everything decays in a specific order and with a predetermined time table. Yet, these bodies had no order. It was as if they were being dissolved like an antacid pill in water.
Even more bizarre was that the decay rate of the bodies was increasing. Literally before his eyes, tissues he had excised to examine would rapidly effuse into bubbles that would soon pop. The result would be some waste material that he could not identify without tests. Numerous specimens were taken from as many body systems he could excise, skin, soft tissue, hard tissue, bone, organs. All were collected and duly sealed for transport to a facility where other specialists could examine them. The good doctor was being relegated to scoop and pack.
While there were many questions to answer, such as how the bodies got in the water or what process was causing them to virtually dissolve before everyone’s eyes, at least one of the mysteries was quickly revealed to all. Samples from the water at the treatment plants in every affected city showed that a massive amount of some unusual bacteria was being dumped into it from the reservoir water. That bacteria was very similar in molecular structure to E. coli O157:H7.
Long before the officials had a speech ready for the public, and even before many of the city, state, and national officials were even aware of what was going on, the cat was out of the bag to the general public. Several workers at the treatment plants had already sent text messages to loved ones telling them not to drink any city water because of a terrorist attack on the water system. It’s not clear who forwarded the first message to the government watchdog blog, but once the word hit social media, there was no going back.
Doomsday news accounts about the deadly water in the US spread globally in minutes. Despite the fact that the only attacks so far were being discovered in just a few West Coast cities, and that none of the bacteria had yet been detected downstream of the treatment facilities, bottled water on store shelves across the country was gone in hours, and the doomsday preppers were locked tight in their shelters by nightfall.
By evening, Agent Andrews was back in his Seattle office looking for more rational answers.
July 1, 2015
Despite continuous government assurances that the source of the bacteria in the reservoirs had been found and eradicated, and that the small amount of bacteria which had made it downstream into the treatment facilities would be killed there, the general population wasn’t reassured. That view was not helped by the continual reports from the doomsayers in the press. The population was on edge like never before. Every crackpot was now selling water purifiers on craigslist. Even the more educated, rational types, were routinely boiling their water, just in case.
When a cell phone video was posted on YouTube that purported to show decaying terrorist bodies being submerged in the Sacramento Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant, the video had 12.2 million hits in one hour before it was pulled from the You Tube server. Copies of the grisly scene were reposted as fast as they could be removed.
The bodies in the Sacramento video had not yet decayed as much as the ones in Tolt Hill, but the scene certainly was not any more family friendly. The voice-over on the video explained how genetically modified bacteria in the bodies was able to rapidly procreate in the “Host” tissues and that the bacteria would then consume the host tissue until it could no longer contain the rapidly growing bacteria. At that point, the cells would break apart and the bacteria would be released into the water and transported downstream.
The government’s rebuttal claims now were hard to believe, even by those few staunch supporters that still wanted to believe. The FBI’s rebuttal on the evening news to the video was botched beyond belief. The FBI adamantly claimed that the video had been made somewhere in Egypt several weeks ago and not in Sacra
mento. But when questioned by a distrusting press, they could not rebut the claims that the process described in the video was the one used in the actual attacks. Worse, they also could not deny that the bacteria described in the video did not exist, or even that it was 100% fully contained in the reservoirs as first reported. The public was on the tipping point of hysteria.
Then the unthinkable happened. At Harborview Hospital in Seattle, a patient was diagnosed with hemolytic-uremic syndrome resulting from ingestion of E. coli O157:H7. Then a second, then a third. Providence Portland Medical Center and Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento both started reporting to the CDC that they also had new cases of the same pathogen. When the news broke of the hospital reports of E. coli O157:H7 being found in the same cities where the water reservoirs had been compromised, all claims of water safety were no longer believed, even by the government’s staunchest supporters.
Late that afternoon, and in an attempt to counter the reports, every television channel ran an updated FBI press conference. Both the director of the CDC and the director of the FBI stood in front of the cameras and adamantly claimed that the bacterial source for the hospitalized people had been traced back to vegetable bins in all three cities and to a restaurant vegetable crisper in a Sacramento restaurant. Both claimed that no traces of the bacteria had been found in any water downstream of the treatment facilities.
Before the passionate speech for calm from the CDC and FBI had concluded, Fox News broke a report claiming the first death by E. coli O157:H7 was being acknowledged by Harborview Hospital in Seattle. All the logic that the authorities could muster was well and truly now trumped by public panic.
Perception had indeed become reality in America.
THE SLEEPING GIANT AWAKES
Name: Mohamed al-Assadi
Age: 23
Nationality: Yemeni
Education: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, England. Specialized in computer security.
Elevated Threat Page 18