Power Down

by Ben Coes

  So they spoke of America’s government. How it grew out of bloodshed and recklessly cast its shadow wherever it chose, in Vietnam, in Iran. Of Israel, their most hated enemy, and how America protected her with guns and money.

  That fateful Sunday evening, Aswan poured wine into each of the teacups. It was a special occasion.

  “It will work this way,” Aswan explained. “It can only work this way. . . .”

  That next autumn, as planned, Mohammed accepted the teaching post at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Palan went to America too, taking a job in the maintenance department of a small nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania called Three Mile Island.

  And exactly one year after that, young Alexander was ripped from his bedsheets at age six in the middle of the night. He wasn’t harmed, but it was sudden and deliberate, like a kidnapping. Unlike a kidnapping, however, it was a plan designed by his own father and carried out by Binda. He took him at three thirty in the morning. Binda muffled his screams with a handkerchief stuffed into his small mouth. When the struggling and screaming stopped hours later, as the dawn approached, he drugged Alexander. It was only Valium, but it stopped the crying.

  “It has to be this way,” Aswan had said that night with the wine. “It must be this way. Sudden and violent, not gradual.” Mohammed and his wife Calla had to become Alex’s parents, and not just his guardians. He must be ripped from the womb. “He must be loved like a son by you, Mohammed. Can you love my son? Can you and Calla raise him as Rhianne and I would have?”

  “We can. We will.”

  “I love him the most of all of my children, you see. But I can’t tear him from his own home. That must be you. In this way I sacrifice all for our cause, but I’ll never recover.”

  To hide in plain sight, thought Aswan that terrible morning after Alexander vanished, as he shivered in his bedroom, tears flowing down his cheeks, holding Nebuchar, also sobbing, and Mattie, confused and hysterical.

  So it began.

  In Bethesda, they lived in a sprawling shingle-style home, with Navy blue shutters and a low, white picket fence. In the big backyard, Alexander learned to play football and baseball with the neighborhood children.

  He strongly resembled Calla. For whatever reason, despite the fact they weren’t related, he possessed her sharp, beautiful nose. His coloring was light, but Mediterranean. By ten he was already six feet tall, and startlingly handsome. At twelve, one of the neighborhood girls, the daughter of a French diplomat stationed in Washington, kissed him on the lips. Also that year, at school, he got into a fight with a child named Kevin, who thought Alexander had shoved him in the hallway. Kevin broke Alexander’s nose with his first punch, but it was Alexander who, upon seeing and tasting his own blood, went into a frenzied rage and beat the bully with his fists, not only breaking the boy’s nose but also knocking out two front teeth.

  Alexander grew quickly to like strawberry ice cream, coffee, girls, and reading, especially Ernest Hemingway. They raised him as an Episcopalian because it was part of the plan that he assimilate. He had many friends, and a best friend, George, the youngest son of a brood of four boys who lived next door. They strung Dixie cups together with a long string between the two big houses so that they could talk to one another, a set of low-tech walkie-talkies. On Sundays, he and George, sometimes with George’s older brothers, would walk to the movie theater on Connecticut Avenue and catch a matinee. It was with George that Alex drank his first beer. When George’s family moved back to Kansas after his father was transferred by General Electric, it was the most devastating event of Alex’s young life.

  He couldn’t remember the night they’d torn him from his home in Lebanon. Aswan was like a dream father whom, when Alex was alone, he would recall in foggy images, warming him in a way that was just below his ability to articulate in words even to himself. His true mother’s face he never forgot, but everything else seemed hazy. Had he had another father? Had he even been to that place, or was it a dream? That beautiful city that smelled of ocean and pine and dust?

  For Mohammed and Calla, he was a blessing. Who would’ve known Calla would prove barren? All of her love that she had in her heart, the love she always planned on giving to her own children, went to him. Mohammed was awed by the young boy. In everything he did, Alexander excelled. Like his real father, Alex had a talent for languages. By sixteen he exhausted the Episcopal Academy languages department, and was fluent in French, Spanish, and Italian. His junior year at Episcopal, he scored a perfect 1,600 on his SAT. It was obvious Alexander would go wherever he wanted for college. On the Episcopal lacrosse team, Alex played midfield and was captain of the team his senior year. He loved lacrosse more than anything and was named all-American at the end of the season. When Alex applied to college, it was only to schools that had strong lacrosse programs—Princeton, University of Virginia, Yale, and Harvard. He was accepted by all of the schools and chose Princeton.

  All the while, like a cancer, Mohammed slowly, patiently, methodically developed the beast within.

  It began innocently enough, in the basement of his house, in a small homemade boxing ring. At nine years of age, he and Alex would go down after dinner and spar, and laugh, and spar some more. By ten, when Alex was already as tall as Mohammed, the sparring became more real. One night, Alex gave Mohammed a bloody nose; the next night, Mohammed returned the favor, then watched as Alexander lost control of his temper and went into a mad and violent frenzy directed at him. Mohammed knew he’d have to harness that anger.

  He could never tell Calla what it was all about, though he wanted to. They rarely spoke. Mohammed left for his office at George Washington University by 5:00 A.M. and usually didn’t return until after dinner. When he did, he looked at her blankly and would usually go to the basement and read or work on the computer. When Alex returned home from school, he’d join Mohammed there as well.

  Calla assumed Mohammed was having an affair. But it wasn’t a woman that removed him from the marriage. In truth, he was transformed. The original hatred that had propelled him to the shores of the United States had been forged into the steel framework of Aswan’s plan.

  Into that scheme he carefully, deliberately, slowly, gradually, but ultimately completely drew Alexander.

  As in Beirut, Mohammed formed a small network of like-minded jihadists. There were three in all. Dahim was an academic, an assistant professor at American University. The other, Karim, worked as a sous-chef in the restaurant at the Four Seasons. Mohammed didn’t want to risk socializing with any Middle Easterners posted in Washington at one of the embassies. He knew they’d be under surveillance. Both Dahim and Karim were known by Aswan.

  In the basement, on Alex’s thirteenth birthday, as he opened up the present that Mohammed had given to him, he spoke for the first time about what had to be done.

  “Are you old enough to be a man?”

  “I’m thirteen, Dad. I’m taller than you.”

  “I’m not talking physically,” Mohammed said. “Are you ready to talk of difficult things?”

  Alex was silent. Eventually he nodded. It was then Mohammed told Alex of jihad.

  His birthday present consisted of two small volumes, underground books, one a book of poetry by D. W. Myatt entitled One Exquisite Silence, the other a novel by Myatt about a future world where America has taken over the world and a young Muslim hero named Basal-el saves civilization.

  It was an odd day for Alexander. He didn’t like the presents. For the first time, he felt alienated from Mohammed and confused. Mohammed knew that would be the case. It had to begin somewhere.

  What began as conversations and confusion between Mohammed and Alex on his thirteenth birthday grew into comprehension and acceptance.

  Sometime during that fourteenth year of Alexander’s life, Mohammed explained to him that he and Calla were not his parents. Alexander cried. He wouldn’t speak to either parent for a week. But it worked. After that week, Alex never cried again.

  He live
d a schizophrenic life. In the day, he was the president of his senior class at Episcopal Academy. He was captain of the lacrosse team. He was popular. He had a succession of girlfriends.

  At night, after his studies, Mohammed would teach him of Allah, and jihad. At night, Alex became a freedom fighter, at least in his mind. At night, Mohammed carefully planted the seeds of a hatred that became the lifeblood of his soul.

  On the night before he was to leave for Princeton, Mohammed brought a small television set and VCR out of a closet in the basement.

  “What’s that for?” Alex asked.

  Mohammed was silent. He turned the television set on and pushed a tape in.

  “Do you remember Three Mile Island?”

  “Yes. The accident at the nuclear power plant.”

  “You had just arrived.”

  The black-and-white picture on the small TV became clear. Walter Cronkite came on the set. Mohammed and Alexander watched the tape together, a recording of the CBS Evening News the night of Three Mile Island. Mohammed poured two small glasses of red wine from a bottle that was tucked away in a trunk, cabarnet from a small vineyard near Broumana called Chateau Ksara.

  “This is being called the worst industrial accident in American history,” the voice on the television said. “It’s still not known if the cooling mechanism within the containment vessel will be enough to prevent a catastrophic event known as a nuclear meltdown. . . .”

  “Why are we watching this?” asked Alexander.

  “His name was Palan,” said Mohammed. “He was a friend. He and I arrived in America on the same plane from Lebanon. He worked at the plant. This was our first project. He was our first martyr.”

  Alexander was silent as he stared at Mohammed, then back at the television.

  “One man,” said Mohammed. “One man maimed America this day in 1979. This was why you were brought to America.”

  Mohammed reached his arm out then and placed it on Alexander’s shoulder.

  Alexander shut his eyes for nearly a minute as he realized the implications. Finally, he looked back at Mohammed.

  “Thank you, Father,” he whispered.

  “We’ll never triumph if we try and launch missiles from the sky or take hostages like the students in Tehran, or commit suicide on buses,” said Mohammed. “Those things only make us feel good. They only make the challenge harder.”

  “We have to attack anonymously,” whispered Alexander.

  “Patiently,” said Mohammed. “That most of all.”

  Alexander took a big gulp and finished the wine in his glass. “May I have another glass of wine, Father?”

  Mohammed smiled. He picked up the green bottle of cabarnet.

  “Yes, you may.”

  22

  U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Antonia Stebbens walked into the main entrance of the Department of Energy, then took an elevator to the fifth floor. She walked down a long hallway, turned the corner, and walked to the end of another long, windowless corridor. There, she took out a metal pass card and slid it into a small sensor. When she heard a click, she walked through the unmarked door. In front of her was a small elevator. Once inside, Stebbens inserted a different card into the scanner inside the elevator. The door closed and the elevator went down, to a heavily fortified floor eleven stories below her, six stories below ground level.

  Entry here began with Stebbens staring into a blue light and trying hard not to blink. She’d stared into the blue light nearly every morning for more than a decade and knew the biometric’s foibles and flaws. If you blinked, the machine occasionally registered a false negative, alerting two security guards with weapons drawn. This, of course, was sure to send your coffee flying all over the fingerprint scanner, which came next. She understood why it had to be this way, but if you asked her, it was overkill.

  Once the machine determined that the person in front of it was, in fact, Antonia Stebbens, the door on the other side of the metal passage opened. She now stepped inside what was the main U.S. government intelligence-gathering and security control point for all energy-related facilities in the United States: Strategic Operations Center, or SOC.

  SOC’s primary purpose was oversight of the security of all seven U.S. nuclear weapons manufacturing installations.

  While it falls to the president to decide if and when to fire a nuclear weapon, and the Department of Defense does the actual firing, it’s DOE’s job to build America’s nukes, and SOC’s to ensure that this process remains secure.

  Stebbens’s official title was undersecretary of Energy and director of the Strategic Operations Center. She was the boss of a directorate little known even within the U.S. government. It was staffed with two hundred and fifty-eight individuals, all of whom passed rigorous background checks and agreed to allow the government to monitor all of their activities both inside and outside SOC: cellular and wireline phone conversations, e-mail and regular mail, and any other communications inside or outside of work.

  Of the two hundred and fifty-eight nonsupport staff professionals within SOC, all had previous government experience. The CIA was SOC’s main feeder agency, with the FBI a close second, and NSA just behind. In fact, SOC had more than a hundred and fifty ex-CIA employees, including Stebbens.

  Of the two hundred and fifty-eight agents and analysts within SOC, two hundred and ten were detailed to the security of America’s nuclear bomb manufacturing infrastructure. The other forty-eight dealt with nonnuclear issues, mainly oil- and gas-related security issues. Refinery security was a main priority, and its subgroup was called SOCOG.

  Because the attacks on Capitana and Savage Island occurred during the Christmas holidays, few people were around. But that didn’t matter to Stebbens.

  Stebbens started today’s work by convening her six senior staffers.

  “I know you’ve all been here through the night,” said Stebbens. “I appreciate your work. I want to make sure you also express that sentiment to your own people.”

  There were nods around the table.

  “What do we have?” asked Stebbens. She took a sip from her coffee cup. “I have to be back at the FBI in two hours and I need some content.” Stebbens nodded to a gray-haired man seated across the table. “Bob?”

  “Here’s a summary of where we are,” said Bob Griffin, who was in charge of the team of analysts looking at petroleum-related activities. He smiled and cleared his throat, pulling a stack of papers from his notebook and passing it around the table. “It’s still early. First priority is protecting the remaining sources of petro that impact consumption within the United States. We’ve set up a protocol within SOC, then live-wired this information across the intelligence protocol. That’s now live. It’ll be updated hourly. We’re actively tracking a month’s worth of petro supply, down through individual well hole, tanker, storage depot, et cetera. Our goal is to get that tracking protocol extended out one year, so we have assurance on a secure year’s supply of oil.”

  “Good,” said Stebbens.

  “Second issue is replacement dynamics,” said Griffin. “Are OPEC, Venezuela, et al., prepared to increase production and, more important, give that increase to the United States? This is a more challenging situation. Capitana supplied more than nine percent of America’s raw petroleum supply and that number was increasing. We’ll need to manage not only the analysis, but will have to participate behind the scenes with State Department and the White House on any implementation. If, for example, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or others are unwilling to help, that needs to impact us in real time, again across the intelligence protocol.”

  “What do we have there?”

  “This is really about Saudi Arabia and Venezuela,” said Griffin. “Let’s start with Venezuela. They could, if they chose, increase deliveries by a million to a million and a half barrels a day by mid-January,” said Griffin. “They’re stockpiling and the primary barrier there is political. They wouldn’t have to increase production, just
delivery.”

  “Got it,” said Stebbens, taking notes.

  “OPEC, however, doesn’t have stockpiles,” said Griffin. “China is sucking them dry. In the past six months, Sinopec has been willing to consistently outbid U.S. suppliers by up to ten dollars a barrel. They’ve taken what was a decent stockpile and monetized it for OPEC, particularly Iran. That said, they could easily increase production. Saudi Arabia alone could fill most of the existing shortfall created by Capitana’s destruction.”

  “Okay,” said Stebbens. “Now what about retroactive activity?”

  “We’re looking at petro supply and demand activity over the past three years,” said Griffin. “If you look at the second sheet, you’ll see some interesting preliminary data.”

  “Go on,” said Stebbens.

  “The first key finding is that Capitana is harming BP here in the United States. Anson’s U.S. market share has quadrupled every year while BP’s is falling in almost exact proportion.”

  “So BP’s been the victim of Capitana’s growth?” asked Stebbens.

  “BP’s more than made up for loss in U.S. share by gains in Europe. They’ve increased their dominance in the European theater. Surprisingly, the decline in U.S. demand hasn’t hurt them.”

  “The plot thickens,” said Stebbens, looking at the paper.

  “Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has been hurt on two fronts,” said Griffin. “Aramco has been pummeled by BP in Europe. This was their best growth play market and that growth, starting four years ago, halted and has been in steady decline ever since. On one dimension, Aramco’s shift to China appears smart. It’s their way to recoup losses in Europe. But if you look at chart four, you’ll see they’ve been heavily subsidizing transport costs to China. They’re effectively lowering the profit they make per barrel by nearly forty percent. That is dramatic movement by any measure.”