The wind blew in our direction (making it harder for the dogs to pick up our scents if we messed up the timing), and, as an added bonus, it cut down on the distance to the turbine building. The perimeter fence ran down to the water just to our left; it was anchored there by a sentry station about thirty yards from the water. The post hadn’t appeared occupied earlier in the day but now proved to have not one but two guards in it.
One was female and not entirely in uniform. I wish I could say I’d thought of setting that up myself, but t’ain’t so.
We tiptoed across the shadows, taking advantage of some trailers parked in the lot for cover. We reached the corner of the building and went up, one at a time, to the roof. We hadn’t brought a ladder, but the climb couldn’t have been easier if we had; the bricks had been set in a decorative pattern at the corner, providing handy footholds. The second roof was harder to reach. There was no decorative pattern, and it had to be scaled quickly, since it was in the sightline of one of the guards patrolling the dock area. Trace went to work on it, making her way up with a special set of climbing gloves and footgear. She found a spot to anchor a rope at the top, and after the guard passed out of sight, Sean and I climbed up and joined her, aided by a rope she’d tossed down.
At this point, the facility was basically ours. We were not in a position to do maximum damage yet—the reactor building was several hundred yards away—but from a public relations point of view, an explosion of ten pounds of C-4 here, or even a few grenades tossed around the nearby area, would have been a disaster nearly as devastating as an unplanned release of radioactive water vapor.
Trace and I scooted to the edges of the roof to get a look at the rest of the plant, Sean began placing IEDs at various points around the roof. I had a digicam with me, recording the plant from a new angle. After I finished taking my pictures, I went back and saw that Sean was ready to go.
Trace, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found.
“Where’s Ms. Apache?” I asked him.
“I thought she was with you.”
A quick scan of the rooftop failed to turn her up. Halfway between being angry and concerned, I went to the east side of the building, where I’d last seen her. There was a large vent stack about ten yards away, part of a large cooling complex. Thinking she had gone down the side in her climbing moccasins to look at the buildings there, which we had little information on, I crawled to the edge and looked over. I didn’t see her. As I raised my head, though, I spotted a dark shadow near the top of the cooling pipe.
Trace Dahlgren, human fly.
We had radios with us, but we wanted to keep their use to a minimum. Our scan of press stories about the plant showed that the company had recently won a grant from the state for advanced radio equipment, which might have been code—which should have been code—for high-tech frequency detectors. It probably wasn’t, but I didn’t want to take a chance and blow the operation just because I was pissed at Trace.
Kicking Trace’s butt a mile—well, that was a different story. Lucky for her there were other things for us to do.
We’d made it down to the lower roof when Sean caught my attention. One of the security vehicles was coming down the perimeter road a few yards away. We slipped to our bellies and watched as it proceeded up the road, then stopped right near the bend in the fence that had been our next destination.
There’s one thing about this exercise that I haven’t had a chance to mention until now. And that is that, because we didn’t want the plant to be unarmed if my shadow made an appearance, the guards at the site had not been told that a security operation was underway. Furness knew, his chief of security knew (actually, he was Furness’s deputy, but the title substituted for a raise), and the watch commanders knew, but they were under strict instructions not to tell their men.
Which meant that the guards were carrying live ammo. Granted, most of them hadn’t chambered a round in the Glocks they were wearing, nor were there shells in the few shotguns that the guards were assigned. That may not have made much of a difference, since for the most part the men only used the weapons once a year, firing at paper in well-lit, air-conditioned rooms. But bullets are bullets, and just because someone aims at your chest doesn’t mean he won’t hit your head.
So that’s why when one of the guards flicked on the search beam on the side of his SUV and swung it toward the stack, I felt a jolt of concern. I was worried about Trace.
“Skipper, we moving?” asked Sean.
I held my hand up a second longer. The guard played the beam in the direction of the tower, then swung it around. Sean and I ducked as it played over the edge of the building. The guard swung it around a few times, then got back in the truck and resumed his patrol.
“If she gets her ass caught, I’m going to kick it into next week,” I told Sean as we headed for the perimeter fence. “And then I’m going to kick it into next month.”
“Me, too,” he said.
There were sensors along the fence line, a whole suite of high-tech infrared and motion detectors. The thing was, they were designed to deal with the likely threat—which meant they were all located on the other side of the fence. We planted a series of IEDs along the fence area, then worked our way up through the complex. The fence itself was a standard chain-link job topped by four-strand barbed wire. There were runs on either side of an asphalt road.
Hard to climb? No. Hard to cut through? No. A psychological barrier that will lull the security force into thinking they have a secure situation when in reality it’s a sieve? You got it.
With the devices planted, I took a look at the containment vessel of Reactor Four, which sat beyond a large water holding tank to my right.* Air pressure inside the vessel is kept lower than the external pressure, so that in the case of a leak, any radioactive vapors will remain inside.
Theoretically. And only if it’s a small leak. But we’ll leave the quibbles to the engineers.
The vessels themselves are thick concrete. They were originally engineered to protect against earthquakes, and if you do any sort of research at all you’ll find that they can withstand a good amount of shaking before failing. That same research will show you where the weakest point of the containment containers tends to be. I’m not going to do your homework for you, but I will give you a hint: it’s not where you think it is, and it’s vulnerable to a surprisingly low amount of explosives, if you use a very targeted weapon.
If you’re a diligent terrorist and you do your homework, you’ll also find any number of reassuring points about how the containment vessels will withstand crashes by private airplanes and even fully loaded jetliners. There’s a reason for that. The front of an airplane is not a particularly hard point, and even in a 747, it’s as much the momentum of the object rather than its mass at rest that does most of the damage.
We should also remember that we’re speaking theoretically here. To my knowledge, there has only been one real-world test that even attempted to simulate severe trauma on the concrete shell of a containment vessel, and that was on a scale model in Japan a few years back. In real life—who knows?
I digress. Sean and I went to the fence line and planted the rest of our IEDs. They were a mix of timer and radio controlled smoke bombs, with a few flash-bangs thrown in. Then we retreated to the rendezvous point.
Where Trace stood waiting for us.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“I ought to put you over my knee and spank you,” I told her. “What the hell was the idea deviating from the game plan?”
“If you hit me, you better slug Sean, too, or I’ll file for sex discrimination,” she said.
“Cut the shit, Trace. Why’d you go off like that?”
“You tell us if we see an opportunity, take it,” she said. “I planted my camera up there with the wireless transmitter. We’ll be able to see everything that happens. Valuable intelligence.”
“It wasn’t worth the risk. Next time you do that, I’ll kick your ass, little
girl.”
“Why wait?”
She reminds me of the daughter I never had. We slipped out into the water, stroking toward one of the speedboats, which had anchored itself upstream after we made land.
Not that the night’s work was done, not by any means. While Trace, Sean, and I were rummaging around the northwestern side of the plant, a team led by Hulk had scouted the perimeter fence on the southwest. Their primary mission was peeking. That part of the campus lay outside of reactor perimeter and was heavily forested. The pictures we had were taken in the summer, and we weren’t entirely sure what lay beneath the foliage.
To the north of the security fence—outside of the nuclear zone but still on the campus grounds—sat a large administrative area that was as easy to get through as Central Park in New York forty miles away. The buildings themselves were lightly guarded and the large parking lots were unlit, as were the nearby holding areas for trailers and supplies. I thought the area might be useful for the actual assault, and it was up to Hulk to find out.
As they were proceeding, he spotted an area we hadn’t mapped. It was a set of trailers where, at least according to the signs, low-level waste was stored. These were barrels with various items, no more radioactive than the medical chest at your local hospital, but still necessitating special handling. The area was covered by video cameras, but there was a gaping hole in the defenses at one end. Hulk took the opportunity to plant some IEDs there. Then he and the team worked their way to the perimeter fence and called me on the sailboat.
“The bird is primed for plucking,” Hulk said, handling the tongue twister better than I thought he would. It was perfect timing. An old-fashioned seaplane was just skimming down on the glassy water a hundred yards away.
“Vulture is on its way,” I told him. “Ten minutes.”
The aircraft heading toward us was a genuine old-timer, a PBY Catalina borrowed from one of Dan Capel’s clients. Most of the airplane’s flight time was spent at air shows, where its gooselike hull and fuselage blisters filled some of the crowd with nostalgia and the others with curiosity. I’m not a nostalgic type and I really don’t give a hoot for airplanes, except as tools to get the job done. In this case, the job was to provide a real-time thermal scan of the facility, showing us how the security force reacted to the probes Hulk was about to launch.
It was also helping us watch our backs. If Shadow was watching me, he’d see me go aboard the PBY and presumably take an interest in it or some other element of the operation, like the sailboat.
While the showy seaplane did its thing, a much more mundane two-engined Fokker borrowed from the DEA was flying farther above watching us. One of Capel’s partners, Jeff Storey, supervised the sensor reads and had at his disposal three two-man rapid response teams made up of my new shooters. If Shadow started following me or one of the boats, we’d follow him.
Trace and I left Sean to kick back with a brewski and paddled out to the flying boat. The plane’s owner welcomed us aboard. One of the conditions of allowing us to use the aircraft was that he be with it at all times. Since Capel vouched for him, I had no trouble with that.
Originally intended as crew member observation posts back in the days when the flying boat was used for long-range patrols, with slight modifications the blisters in the rear fuselage were excellent posts for infrared and radar pods. The Coast Guard has similar gear in its HU-25 Guardians that allow it to watch ground objects from a good distance away. The DEA has slightly different gear but with the same basic capabilities.
Capel’s client had upgraded the PBY’s engines to improve their efficiency and range. The mods, coincidentally, made the engines much quieter than the originals, and the aircraft could fly relatively low without being heard from the ground.
The nuclear power plant was in a special restricted flight zone, with two F-16 fighters from an air base in nearby New Jersey assigned to enforce it. But Capel had flown around the area yesterday and discovered that he wouldn’t be challenged as long as he stayed just outside the bubble. He’d also taken the precaution of alerting the area controllers that he would be practicing night flights and water landings in preparation for an air show planned at Atlantic City later that month. The air show was being heavily promoted, and the PBY was well-known in the air community, which made the cover a natural—so much so that one of the tower people at Westchester called over to see why Capel was flying instead of the owner, whose voice he would have recognized. That was easily handled: the owner chimed in from the copilot’s seat, assuring the controller that he wasn’t going to let his friend dent his million-dollar toy.
The infrared gear was so good and Capel timed his first cut over land so perfectly that I could see Hulk set up the small wind sock devices on the security perimeter to start the next phase of the operation. The idea was to set off the sensors and test the security force’s response. We already knew how big the force was and roughly how they were deployed, but “roughly” is a sure way of guaranteeing that an operation will hit FUBAR—Fucked Up Beyond All Repair—well ahead of schedule. The devices set off the detectors on the fence. This meant the response team had to come and check them out, giving us the plant’s MO for handling problems. It also got them used to being annoyed, subtly lowering their attention level.
One truck, two guys. That was the entire response “team.” They left their shotgun—assuming they had one—in the vehicle. That might be a moot point. The fence was easily monitored from the cover of the woods, and anyone with a decent rifle and nightscope—hell, anyone with a bow and arrow—could have taken out both men before they found the sock.
Actually, they seem not to have spotted it at all. The guards stared for a while, then called back on their radios to HQ that there was nothing there. We got the whole communication on the scanner, recording it for further analysis and possible use.
Hulk’s team continued the probing operation several more times, varying their approach. In one case, a team member went to the fence, pried the bottom up and then rolled a warm soda can across the sensor track. This set off all sorts of alarms, but the response was pretty pathetic. One of the guards found the soda can resting against the fence and kicked it. Hulk told me later that the guard laughed as the warm soda exploded against a fence post. I wonder what he would have done if the can had been filled with something other than agitated carbon dioxide and sugar.
Rather than thinking they were being screwed with—and perhaps initiating a lockdown and calling in reinforcements, or at least contacting their boss—the guards wrote it all off to a series of flakeouts and, maybe, ghosts. I’m sure if there had been a full moon they would have blamed that.
Earlier I mentioned that security isn’t just a matter of money, it’s a mindset, and this was the perfect example of that. There was a perfectly logical explanation for everything that they saw, everything that happened. Forgetting their other errors for a second, if one guard had taken a step back and said, “Gee, there have been a lot of weird things going on tonight, I wonder why,” the outcome of the exercise might have been much different.
Or at least we would have been forced to be more creative.
Capel practiced a pair of touch and go’s on the river—part of the cover story. Then we did two more circuits and prepared to call it a night. Hulk’s team was already rendezvousing with their transport, a nondescript Dodge Caravan about a mile south of the plant entrance.
To keep our tail operation secure from Shadow, I didn’t communicate directly with Storey in the DEA plane. But I was monitoring the frequency he would have used to send the coded transmission to the backup teams. The line had been quiet all night. Below, the river was empty except for our sailboat and the two speedboats we’d borrowed for the operation.
I picked up the radio and broadcast a message on the frequency we’d been using from the sailboat. “Let’s pack it in and get some rest,” I said. “We dance at high noon.”
A decoy, yes. If Shadow didn’t fall for the subtle, maybe he�
�d go for the obvious. But he didn’t show the next day, and I was starting to think maybe he had been the mad motorcyclist after all.
The car that pulled up to the gate of the Wappingers Falls Volunteer Ambulance Company around five A.M. Saturday morning looked like your typical soccer-mom mobile. A Dodge Caravan with a dented fender and plenty of sticky fingerprints on the windows, it might easily have taken a wrong turn while looking for the town soccer field, which happened to be just down the hill. A ditzy-looking soccer-mom type got out of the van, pulled the zipper up all the way on the jacket of her matching sweatsuit outfit, adjusted her kitten-face head band, and checked her RedveryRed lipstick in the van window. After a few moments of dazed introspection, she went to the door and began ringing the bell at the side of the ambulance company building. This woke the person upstairs. (Though traditionally staffed by volunteers, the company had faced the realities of an era where civic responsibility was no longer a given and hired full-time paramedic drivers to stay with the ambulance, ensuring quick response no matter what the day or hour.) The paramedic on duty, a thirty-year-old chain smoker whose gut and unshaven mug made him look about fifty, plodded down the steps somewhat haphazardly.
“You’re an hour early,” he said, pulling open the door.
“It’s never too early to have fun,” said the ditzy soccer mom, who had reached beneath her sweats and produced a Kimber Compact .45. You don’t see that weapon very often around town, especially in the hand of someone who favors RedveryRed lipstick, so I don’t blame the ambulance attendant for being surprised. The Kimber looks a bit like a Colt .45 that’s gone through a serious aerobics program. As pretty as it is, the serious work is on the inside, where the craftsmen have worked hard to make the weapon durable and dependable.
The paramedic was no doubt thinking of all of this when he saw the gun. Overwhelmed, he did the only rational thing possible—he fainted.
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