Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  Blood was splashed on one of the control panels along the back wall, and Townsend glanced at the observation window as if he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing on the monitor was actually the control room.

  “What is it?” Gail asked, sensing the reactions behind her.

  “It’s blood on the secondary cycle systems board for number two,” Strasser said.

  “I don’t see any damage,” Townsend said.

  Leaving the camera cable in position, Gail came around to the monitor. “That’s a lot of blood.”

  “Pan farther down,” McGarvey told Wager.

  The image on the screen slid down the panel to the edge of one of the horseshoe-shaped desks.

  “Left.”

  Wager moved the camera head to the left until he stopped it on the image of the two technicians obviously shot to death, one of them slumped over his position, the other sprawled on the floor.

  “Jesus,” Wager said softly.

  McGarvey looked closer. Both men had been taken out by a professional, a single shot to the head, but the backs of their white coveralls were splattered with blood. Someone else’s.

  “Any damage to the equipment at that position?” he asked.

  “Not that I can see,” Strasser said, his voice shaky.

  “Left.”

  Wager panned left, and stopped a few feet away at the body of a man in a blue blazer. He’d been shot in the neck, the bullet probably severing a carotid artery that had pumped out a lot of blood. But he’d also been shot in the head. Two shooters, McGarvey figured. First the neck wound by an amateur then the head shot by the pro.

  “Mother of God, it’s Stan,” Strasser said.

  “Left,” McGarvey said.

  Kubansky’s body crumpled on the tile floor in front of his desk, his right hand outstretched as if he were signaling for help or trying to reach for something, slid to the right of the screen, the image shifting now to the two technicians at the reactor one control position. Like the others, they’d been shot in the head and died before they could sound the alarm.

  “They’re all dead,” Townsend said.

  The shooter had to have been first class, McGarvey figured, but he also had to be well under Homeland Security’s radar, otherwise he would not have been able to get inside, even with a false ID. Most hit men that good were on a lot of international watch lists, usually with fairly accurate descriptions, and in many cases fingerprints and even DNA on file, so the kinds of jobs they took required stealth, not openly walking into a secured facility somewhere.

  But there was more. He was sure of it. If it was the guy who’d gotten sick in the middle of a tour, the one Gail had spotted driving away, but in the wrong direction, he would have done more than just somehow get into the control room, gun down the supervisor and four technicians, and leave. He had a plan and help. Inside help.

  “Any damage to that control position?” he asked Strasser.

  But the engineer shook his head. “Move the camera up,” he said and Wager panned up, the image of the control panels along the back wall coming into view.

  “Shit,” Gail said, and everyone saw it.

  A lump of plastic explosives, probably one kilo, was molded to one of the panels. Wires coming from a detonator were connected to a small device, about the size of a cell phone, with a LED counter.

  “Is that an explosive device?” Townsend asked.

  “Plastic, probably Semtex,” McGarvey said.

  “Well, if it explodes we can kiss all of this goodbye,” Strasser said. “That’s the primary control unit for all the reactor coolant systems. It monitors everything from the steam generator to the reactor coolant pumps and even the control rod indicators.”

  “Tighten the focus,” McGarvey said, and Wager adjusted a control so the LED counter filled half the screen. It had just passed the sixty-minute mark, the numbers decreasing from 59:59.

  “We have one hour to figure out how to get in and stop this from happening,” Townsend said, when a blurred image passed on the monitor, momentarily blocking the LED counter.

  Everybody had seen it.

  “Someone’s still alive down there,” Wager said.

  “Pull back,” McGarvey told him.

  The image broadened to include the entire control panel, but no one was in the frame.

  “Left,” McGarvey said.

  The image of the LED slid to the right to another panel with another LED device. Wager tightened the focus. This counter was at 59:42.

  “That’s the scram panel for reactor two,” Strasser told them. “With the coolant controls gone, and our ability to scram destroyed we’ll go into a massive meltdown.”

  “How soon?” McGarvey asked.

  “It’ll start to happen within minutes once the coolant pumps stop functioning.”

  “Pull back again and go left,” McGarvey said.

  Almost immediately a man’s image in profile filled the screen, and Wager pulled back a little farther.

  “That’s Thomas Forcier,” Strasser said in wonder. “He’s one of our engineers. Worked for Stan when he first got here.”

  But his words were choked off when the man they knew as Forcier turned directly toward the camera, and they could see that he was just finishing strapping two blocks of Semtex to his chest. He inserted detonators into both blocks and calmly began to wire them together, an almost saintly expression on his face, in his eyes, in the set of his mouth. He was a young man bent on making preparations for doing something good, even heroic.

  “For Christ’s sake, talk to him, Chris,” Gail said.

  The kid was connecting the wires to a simple switch, like the handle and trigger of a pistol.

  “Does St. Lucie County have an evacuation plan in place?” McGarvey asked, watching the screen. He’d seen the same sort of look on the faces of terrorists he’d dealt with in Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s acolytes, their religious zeal.

  “Yes,” Gail said. “But an hour won’t do much for us. We’re talking a hundred and forty thousand people in a ten-mile radius. The plan was designed to get away from a slow-moving hurricane.”

  “Nevertheless, get them started,” McGarvey said.

  Gail nodded tightly. “Right,” she said, and she took out her cell phone and walked a few paces down the corridor.

  “Gail,” McGarvey called after her.

  She turned around.

  “Call the local weather bureau and find out the wind direction.”

  FIFTEEN

  On the day the two pickup trucks filled with armed mujahideen warriors came into the ramshackle town of Sadda, one hundred kilometers southwest of Peshawar on the border with Afghanistan, Achmed bin Helbawi, known now as Thomas Forcier, was fourteen years old. Everyone was aware of Uncle Osama and the holy struggle against the West, but down here the war had passed them by. Mostly.

  It was a school day and the children, all of them boys, ran out into the dusty street to see what the commotion was about, but when the teacher saw the guns he quickly herded the children inside. All except for Achmed, whose mother worried about him since he’d learned how to read at the age of six. “Your curiosity will be your undoing,” she harped at him.

  He was curious now, but not afraid. He was just a boy: and what could mujahideen with guns want with a boy?

  A battered Gazik, which was one of the jeeps that the Russians had left in Afghanistan when they’d crossed the bridge, followed close behind the pickup trucks that, to Achmed’s complete amazement, stopped in front of his parents’ house. And suddenly he was afraid.

  His father was gone, tending the sheep, and when his mother came to the front door of their hovel to greet the mullah who’d gotten out of the Gazik, Achmed ran home as fast as he could. His young brother Sayid was up in the fields with their father, leaving only their mother and three sisters alone — to face a man and two truckloads of armed warriors.

  But by the time he reached them, his mother had begun to cry with a very large smile on her face.<
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  Closing his eyes for just a moment in the control room, his right hand on the switch, he recalled that morning in exact detail. He’d been truly frightened, perhaps his mother was going crazy, crying and laughing at the same time, but then after the mullah had explained why they had come to Sadda, he was confused, deeply saddened, and overjoyed all at the same time.

  “Achmed, we have heard very good things about you,” the mullah, a very tall, stern-looking man with the traditional head covering said through his thick, gray beard, and the mujahideen followed his every word with rapt attention, as if they were listening to an important sermon. “Even in Peshawar.”

  Sayid had been removed from school when he was ten, because he was needed to help tend the sheep. But Achmed had been given special attention, even been taught from special books on algebra, the premier invention of Islam, geometry, physics, chemistry and languages — mostly English and French. And he was very good at his studies. He wasn’t a genius, but he was bright, something unusual for a boy in this town, and after that day fearless.

  The New al-Quaeda had gone searching for bright boys like Achmed, to take them from their homes and to educate them. He’d been sent first to Saudi Arabia where he lived with a devout family while he finished his secondary schooling, again with the emphasis on math and physics, then to the King Abdul Aziz University.

  Once a year he was visited by someone from the Peshawar region who brought him news of his family. “They are well, Achmed. And if you continue to excel in your studies we will continue to provide for them.”

  Achmed agreed, of course. Really he had no other choice, and by the time he’d finished his second year at the university he was as fully radicalized as any other student — including Uncle Osama himself — had ever become there.

  “You are now the hero of Sadda. Your people expect great things of you, as do we.”

  But very often there’d been long stretches of no laughter. He remembered that clearly now, holding the trigger. No fun, no games; there’d never seemed to be time even to play soccer in the street like he’d done as a boy at home. Nor did he much care for the limited television they were allowed to watch, though from time to time he did listen to music on the stereo tape player one of the other students had managed to smuggle into the dorm. It was Western and forbidden by the religious police, but not every student was there under al-Quaeda’s direction, and the rich kids whose fathers were Saudi royalty were the most irreverent. Nothing would happen to them.

  He opened his eyes and turned to look at Stan Kubansky’s body lying in a pool of blood, his hatred and contempt rising so hard and fast that he could taste the bitterness of bile at back of his throat. The supervising engineer had been among the worst of the Americans Achmed had met, so profane and so proud of his atheism that sometimes he would talk and laugh at the stupidity of war — of religious war.

  “And for what?” he would practically shout. “Ragheads killing Jews. Ragheads killing Hindis. Ragheads killing Brits, and French, and Germans, and Danes, and crashing airplanes here. Why?”

  The first time Achmed had heard Kubansky’s tirade he’d been struck dumb, his jaw dropping, and he’d almost stepped back, afraid that Allah would strike the infidel and anyone near him dead on the spot. But he had maintained his composure as he’d been told he must — his life and the mission would depend on it — but the deepest hatred he’d ever imagined possible had begun to smolder inside of him.

  Each training shift he’d pulled with Kubansky hardened his heart further and he’d begun to pray in the evenings for the chance to kill the heathen, even as he was making subtle changes to the computer programs that ran both reactors, locking out any possibility of remotely scramming them, and smuggling in the Semtex, detonators, controllers, and the weapons and ammunition.

  It was different after Saudi Arabia, when he went to France — first Paris where he studied French literature to perfect his language, and then to Saclay and Montigny for his nuclear training. And by then he had become fully integrated into French society, and there were even times, especially in Paris, where he’d had fun. He’d learned to appreciate jazz and smoking and drinking alcohol and dancing with girls who wore no head scarves, all activities his handler from Peshawar, who continued to visit him once a year in the spring, insisted on.

  “Outwardly you are no longer a son of Islam,” he was told. “In France you have your Saudi passport, but in the U.S. you will become a French nuclear engineer, and that is where your work for Allah will begin.”

  Finally, before he was to assume his new identity and travel to New York, he was sent to the Syrian training camp in the desert, well away from Damascus. The nearest settlement was the town of Sab Abar twenty-five kilometers to the southwest, and the camp was remote and desolate, another planet from France, but one he understood from growing up in Sadda.

  He turned again and looked at the LED counters running down. If he truly wanted to survive he could try to leave here now. There wasn’t enough time to disconnect the explosives or rewire the panels, or even to reprogram the computer. The main alarm indicator was flashing, indicating that the facility was being evacuated. It meant that the engineers, probably Strasser, had figured out something was going wrong, and when they couldn’t reach the control room they may have tried a remote scram. All of that was inevitable, and the reason why he’d stayed behind.

  And when his mortal body was destroyed, his soul rising to Paradise, al-Quaeda would help his parents, brother, and sisters to a far better situation; enough money to move into Islamabad where Sayid could get a real education, and life would become easy.

  It was a way out for them, a real future, and a way to his salvation for the sins he’d committed since leaving Jidda.

  At the camp his eyes had been completely opened for the first time; he’d finally been told the reason he’d been nurtured since boyhood. He was to become an al-Quaeda operative, a tool in the jihad against the West. He had a purpose.

  And it was at the camp one evening, when a helicopter bearing the Syrian army markings brought General Mohamed Asif Tur, the Pakistani ISI officer who’d been behind his training, and Brian DeCamp with whom he would go on a mission.

  Where General Tur was a dark, completely intense man who seemed to be in constant motion even when he was seated at a table, DeCamp was fair-skinned and calm. Achmed remembered his first impression of the former South African as a man who might have known all the secrets of the world, and had accepted everything, including his place in it. DeCamp was timeless, and that impression had not changed for Achmed during the thirty days in the desert, or at their last meeting in Damascus before he’d flown to London under the Forcier identity and from there to New York.

  General Tur had taken Achmed aside that first night at the sprawling training camp, which appeared from the air to look like a Syrian army basic training center, and assured him that although Brian DeCamp was not a believer, neither was he an infidel in the ordinary sense of the word.

  “This man is our friend,” the general had said. “He is an expert at what he does, so pay special attention to him.”

  “An expert at what, sir?” Achmed had asked, but the general had smiled, not offended by the question.

  “He will explain that to you, along with everything you will do together. Trust him, as I trust you. And may you go with Allah.”

  “And you,” Achmed had replied.

  All through his days at the training base, learning about weapons and explosives from DeCamp, who in turn learned about nuclear power stations from him, Achmed had asked himself the same question each night before sleep: I’m not angry. Why?

  A deep anger seemed to lie just under DeCamp’s calm exterior, General Tur was a man at war, and his handler from Peshawar was angry with the West, as were all of the al-Quaeda — financed kids at the university. Achmed thought it was the way he should feel. He’d accepted al-Quaeda’s message about the evils of the infidels, but that had simply been at an intellectual leve
l.

  But it wasn’t until he’d arrived here that he truly understood the nature of what Kubansky had branded as radical Islam. He was a soldier now, finally ready and willing to give his life for the cause. Not only that he thought that he understood the necessity, even the urgency of the jihad. The continued existence of Islam depended on winning a war in which the infidel West had vowed would stamp out all Muslims everywhere on the planet, would make the belief in a merciful and just Allah illegal, and would brand all of the Holy Land with the stigma of the Jews.

  And ironically he’d learned almost all of that from Kubansky.

  He closed his eyes again and he could see the hills and mountains behind his town; he could hear his mother’s gentle voice instructing his sisters on their duties and responsibilities; he could hear his father and brother talking as they came down the street from the fields where the hired boy would remain with the flock for the night, and they sounded happy; and he could see the schoolroom so well that he could count the cracks in the walls, in the ceiling, and the swirls of dirt on the floor, and hear his teacher’s voice calling his name.

  But something was wrong, and Achmed’s heart missed a beat, and he opened his eyes.

  “Tom, Mr. Strasser wants to talk to you.”

  He didn’t know who was speaking, and the voice was loud but distorted and it came from above, behind the observation window.

  “Will you listen?”

  And then Achmed saw the tiny camera head poking out from behind the blinds and he knew immediately what it was because similar remote video cameras were used to inspect the inside of reactor chambers.

  It was time.

  He smiled and took a deep breath and leaned backward.

  SIXTEEN

  Gail had finished her telephone call and came back as Wager, holding a bullhorn against the glass, was trying to talk Forcier down. McGarvey, watching the image on the computer monitor saw the sudden look of religious ecstasy on the young engineer’s face and he knew what was about to happen.