A Clear and Present Danger

by Buck Sanders

  She smiled for the first time. He had been waiting for this contact for a month. Now he was sure he had made it.

  “You have strong principles,” she said. Her voice had gone lower. She almost cooed the words. “I like people who are strong. They are survivors. They are the people who should rule.”

  “They should be together.”

  Sigrid accepted the gambit.

  “Where do you stay?” she asked.

  Slayton told her about the rooming house. Then he asked her about her quarters.

  “In the mountains,” she answered, mystery dripping from her every pore as she looked out into the street. It was nearly dusk now. She turned to him.

  “You’re an interesting man. Would you like to see where I live?”

  He rose from the booth, taking her hand as he stood. Slayton paid the barman, who winked lecherously, and guided Sigrid out the door toward her Maserati.

  “I am not just any woman,” she said, seated behind the wheel. She turned the key in the ignition. The engine responded at once. “You may be surprised.”

  “I am not just any man.”

  Sigrid smiled at him for the second time.

  Then the Maserati rumbled down the narrow slum street to the highway for the long climb into the Pyrenees foothills.

  Twelve

  WHITE PLAINS, New York, 15 March 1981

  He sat at the north end of a long ersatz wooden table in the well-lighted library, close to the government documents section. He looked only slightly older than the high school students on term paper assignments, not out of place at all.

  He looked up from the thick paper-bound tomes in front of him. Across the room there were perhaps twenty retirees browsing through the stacks of gothic novels.

  From the briefcase on the floor, he produced a yellow legal pad. He pulled a pen out of his pocket after slipping off his trenchcoat.

  There was no reason for him to be the least bit nervous, but he looked about the room anyway, his eyes darting from the desk where three flat-chested women did their librarian tasks, to the water fountains where suburban mothers held thirsty snowsuited toddlers, to the steel shelves where he had moments ago found his material, a conveniently canyoned arrangement for amorous teenagers.

  No one paid the slightest attention to him.

  He wrote the title of the first of two bound documents before him on the top of the first page of his legal pad: Barrier Penetration Database. Then as he flipped through the pages of the government book, he noted:

  First barrier after I make it through the woods, toward perimeter, will be “barbed tape obstacle.” NRC says this will take minimum 15 maximum 21 seconds to clear.

  If I choose to ram through main security gate with light pick-up, NRC says it would take max 3 seconds, with no damage to truck.

  Once at plant itself, approx 300 yards from gate, light explosives necessary to clear 12″ reinforced walls; NRC specifies: “Wall is 500 psi concrete with 5/16-inch expanded metal on 2.5” centers. One needs 150 lbs of cutting torch and a 10 lb sledge hammer together with six lbs of bulk explosives to get through in 23 ± 5 minutes.”

  Roof of nuclear reactor itself is equally vulnerable, according to NRC, to wit: “With 4 lbs of bulk explosive and 20 lb bolt cutters, penetration takes 2.2 ± 0.5 minutes.”

  Reactor ceiling next. Will need 10 lb bolt cutter, 10 lb sledge hammer and JA-IV Jet-Axe explosive. Entry time, says NRC, 1.6 to 2.4 minutes.

  He spent the next hour making notes, from both the U.S. Government’s Barrier Penetration Database and a companion study, the three-hundred page Barrier Technology Handbook. In addition to careful instructions in the art of surmounting security fences, walls, floors, doors, and windows—skills he already knew as a master—the government books thoughtfully included appendices showing the reader precisely how to slip through corridors undetected and how to scale ladders while carrying the necessary valise full of burglar tools to enter a security installation.

  A few weeks earlier, he had been in Washington, where he had dropped into the public reading room of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He looked like any other lobbyist, or perhaps like an earnest young man from Ralph Nader’s office.

  There he read the words of Frank Bevilacqua, vice president of the Combustion Engineering Corporation and a contributor to a 1976 NRC-sponsored workshop at Sandia Laboratories of New Mexico:

  “… A small team and possibly even one or two people with sufficient knowledge and access to the plant equipment can sabotage a sufficient amount of components to cause a release of radioactive material.”

  A photostat of Bevilacqua’s remarks were in his briefcase, along with the industrialist’s urgent recommendation:

  “Details of plant layout, vital systems, instrumentation and control circuitry and details of vital equipment and plant security systems should not be placed in the public domain.”

  The young man who had compiled the NRC material also had a satchel full of newspaper clips. Among them was an Associated Press dispatch he had clipped from the October 21, 1979, edition of the Miami Herald:

  GUARDS CLAIM SECURITY IS LAX

  AT NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

  BUCHANAN, N.Y. (AP)—The men who guard the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant here in upstate New York warn that it is “here for the taking” by skillful terrorists.

  Interviewed were several guards, all of whom requested anonymity. They revealed:

  • Alarms around the plant were often turned off, and because of heavy traffic the ones turned on sounded so often that “no one pays much attention.”

  • Fencing around some sections of the installation was so inferior that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) made Gleason Security Service, which held the contract for protecting Indian Point, put guards on the spot 24 hours a day.

  • Plastic entry cards, used to gain access to the plant’s most critical areas, were frequently lost by employees and replaced without question.

  A student at nearby Yonkers Community College who last summer held a part-time job as a private guard at Indian Point told the AP, “I still have my ID card.”

  The student also said training for him and other part-timers like him was “a joke.” He said, “Most guards wouldn’t know what to do with a gun if they had to use one. Some would blow their foot off first.”

  The young man’s satchel was further full of spiral-bound notebooks containing data he had not bothered to clip in full from newspapers. He would simply come across the information during his normal course of reading newspapers in whatever city he was living at the time.

  In this way, he noted that five nuclear power plants across the United States had been shut down in March of ’79 due to plumbing inadequacies. “Bad plumbing,” he wrote in his notebook, “combined with earthquake activity of even the gentlest measure can cause lethal spillage.”

  The idea of earthquakes in proximity to nuclear power plants occurred to him because of another jotting dated January 4, 1979:

  “Today a gentle quake rolled across Westchester County south of Indian Point. My, my could this be a Biblical foreboding? What a delicious thought.

  “Something like 20 million people, or roughly 10% of the American population, live within 50 miles of Indian Point.”

  One of the young man’s notebooks was entirely filled with details of more than two hundred “security incidents,” as the NRC called them, most of them recorded by the NRC’s predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission. All the incidents occurred between 1967 and 1975, according to the NRC and the AEC, and none mounted had been connected with terrorism.

  “However,” the young man had noted, “the federal government has either completely ignored or chosen for some reason not to reveal what the press has reported as several hundred pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium that is totally unaccounted for in plant by plant inventories matched against centralized supply records.”

  Two “security incidents” were boxed with red-ink borders in the young
man’s notebook. In one case, an incident concerned the matter of a religious fanatic in the Reverend Moon cult who was arrested for selling Moonie “gifts” art the Hanford Atomic Reservation in Washington State and who eluded police and guards for several hours by hiding in a restricted laboratory. That was in June of 1977.

  In another case, two antinuclear activists in Virginia had sneaked into a power plant in their state, damaged the fuel rods, and then announced how they had set the stage for dangerous waste leakage, to demonstrate the potential for catastrophic disaster by sabotage. The young activists were convicted of trespassing and jailed.

  Further jottings and notations included the words from a 1976 NRC press release:

  “No plant has been determined to be out of compliance with existing regulations. All are operating under safeguard plans. Based on our ongoing studies, we perceive no reasonable cause for taking actions beyond the prompt and thoroughgoing ones that have already been initiated.”

  The young man closed the covers of the two government documents from which he had taken copious notes. He picked up his briefcase and slipped his notebook inside.

  As he pulled on his trenchcoat, he thought to himself how overly easy it had been to plot his next course of action.

  There had been no special skills involved. No midnight break-ins of the Department of Energy Building in Washington, as he had thought he might have to accomplish when he first arrived in America; no stolen combinations for underground vaults; no hurried snaps of a laser microfilm camera.

  He had done these things before, having been trained in his craft since puberty. But nothing in his training had prepared him psychologically for the baffling openness of the American culture, the almost complete lack of concern for the spies swarming all over the country. He wrote it off to the overconfidence of a still young and continentalnation, a nation of secure borders unmatched anywhere in the world.

  Besides, what had America to fear from the likes of Canada and Mexico?

  He shook his head, grinning conspiratorially. What a foolish country, he thought. All his training—training by a man the world would soon bow to—and he had only to drop into a public library, flash a card, and spend all the time he needed with the shelves containing America’s secrets.

  The young man walked out of the library. It was raining. He stuffed his briefcase into the folds of his trench-coat to protect it against the weather.

  He headed to his car, a ten-year-old Chevrolet, and realized that he now had just about everything he needed to hold the world hostage. Yet he had broken no law.

  As he drove off the lot of the White Plains Public Library, he hummed the melody to an advertising air he remembered from his indoctrination period, a full year of being steeped in films and television and books depicting the American popular culture. The tune, he recalled, was sung at the beginning and end of a 1950s television variety show starring Dinah Shore.

  “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet—America’s the greatest land of all!”

  And the most naive.

  Thirteen

  ANDORRA, the Pyrenees, 16 March 1981

  They had made love twice before falling asleep. The first time quietly, almost unimaginatively. It was an exploration. The second time was a noisy, sweating affair, wild and abandoned.

  As he slept, his half-consciousness reflected on the ride in Sigrid’s Maserati up into the hills. Never had he seen such beautiful country, such mysterious hills.

  Exposed, heavily eroded granite arched in broken, odd-shaped peaks, moist clouds ringing each formation. Some mad giant, it seemed in his dreams, had flung about great hunks of rock. Some of the rocks landed gracefully, others were heaped haphazardly one atop the other. Inside these formations, soil blown by heavy winds found collection points. Trees rooted themselves precariously from these hidden holes, curling up over the precipices to reach the life-giving rain and sunlight, their haggard limbs resembling at times the legs and arms of human beings.

  Mountain peaks clad in these forlorn ranges of trees, half-rooted in granite, disappeared into moonlit fog and heavy clouds. As they drove up the face of the mountain, Ben saw the remains of shacks, once the homes of goat-herders and shepherds, later outlaws who roamed the hills during the some seven hundred years Andorra was fought over by various invasions of French, Spanish, and Moroccans.

  Waterfalls, mostly small ones dropping ledge to ledge, connected swiftly moving rivers of ice-cold water. The terrain was hauntingly like that of Dante’s inferno.

  As they rounded a bend on a heavily rutted, narrow road, near the top of a middle peak, Sigrid had pointed to a massive block of piled stones, huge and black, silhouetted against the backlight of the moon.

  “That is where I live,” she said. “It is the remains of a castle. The bare remains, I should say.”

  And so it was.

  The castle was little more than a huge round tower, with entrances into underground corridors—or what Slayton assumed were corridors dug into the mountain face—closed by ancient rock slides, probably the result of fierce battle and cannon fire.

  There were several floors. Slayton would explore the place in the daylight. His need for the beautiful German woman was sufficiently urgent to keep him in on this clear night. He had followed her across a rotting board that spanned the remains of a moat, then up the narrow steps from the ground floor to Sigrid’s loft.

  Slits of windows overlooked a wide plain, dropping off more than a thousand feet, Sigrid had told him, to a field of boulders. In the pale yellow illumination of the moon, she had slipped off her clothing, revealing her perfect form.

  As he slept now, his mind a jumble of impressions, he shifted in her bed. Momentarily he was confused by the feel of a woman next to him, by the feel of the thin mountain air.

  But Slayton’s head cleared and he woke fully to her touch. A dull red light was forming in the sky. Soon it would be dawn. Sigrid had already risen and now she was kneeling over his body, her high, soft breasts moving gently to the rhythm of her hands as they massaged his naked chest and stomach.

  His eyes were half open as he watched her take hold of his penis. She stroked it softly, a deep gutteral sound cooing in her throat. She leaned downward and covered the head of his penis with her lips.

  Slayton heard himself rumble, felt himself pulse with desire as he swelled inside her warm mouth. He listened to her sibilant sounds. He felt her long hair, held her to him, thrust into her. He could hold back no longer.

  When she had finished, she lay back in the bed. He moved to her, covering her chest with his own. As he kissed her, he could taste himself on her lips and tongue.

  The two of them twisted into each other, their bodies warm and wet. He was on his back. She slid on top of him, covering the length of his body with her own, her long arms and legs draped over him.

  She spread her thighs and sat upright in one quick, smooth motion. Her narrow, taut hips were poised over his erection. She plunged down onto him, filling herself, shouting as she did so.

  He watched, transfixed by the sight of his own hard member disappearing into her soft darkness over and over as she moved up and down on him. The sounds of her German words were muffled by the wet sounds of their sex.

  Slayton closed his eyes again, weary from the long night and from Sigrid’s insatiable passions. He drifted off. He couldn’t remember it ending… .

  … When he awakened, it was to the sharp sound of gunfire.

  TOKYO, Japan

  The apartment house on Ginza Street was quiet. A bell from the nearby square at Tokyo Station signaled the midnight hour. Tomorrow was a work day. The Meijiza and Kabuki Theatres, to the north and south of the apartment house, had long ago dispensed their early evening audiences.

  Tokyo is a city of early risers, even in the Ginza, the most fashionable and the most colorful street. Residents of the apartment house were highly paid professionals, for the most part, with a smattering of foreign businessmen and assorted diplomats who found it especia
lly convenient because of its proximity to the Imperial Palace and the Diet Building.

  Outside, the only sound was that of strolling police officers, dressed in navy blue tunics and red sashes, armed only with nightsticks and whistles. Two blocks away, a mechanized street sweeper could be heard wetting down the pavement, its giant circular brushes rubbing the surface of the street.

  The newest tenant in the apartment house glanced out her window to the street. The Ginza was empty, save for the reassuring sight of the police foot patrols. She walked from the window and stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray full of butts.

  Her guests lay quietly sleeping, their bodies strewn about the studio in sleeping bags and beneath blankets spread out on two small sofas and a chair.

  She was Italian—of medium size, but much larger than the Japanese women asleep with their men in her apartment. Her companion, a small but powerfully built Japanese man, was still awake. He was making them a small pot of tea.

  She joined him at the kitchen end of her apartment, draping an arm around his muscular shoulders as he removed a kettle from the range and poured it over green tea leaves in a ceramic pot. They sat down together at a little table. She lit a cigarette and smoked as they waited for the tea to steep.

  “When will he come?” she asked. They spoke in English.

  “Not for three more days.”

  “You are sure?”

  “It is what the Wolf has said.”

  The woman raised her hand to silence him from speaking further.

  “What was that?” she whispered.

  He had heard nothing, and told her so.

  She walked to the window again, nonetheless. All was still quiet in the Ginza. The policemen had passed the building. They would return a few more times this way before the night was over.