Power Down

by Ben Coes

  “Long Beach?” she asked.

  “Affirmative,” said Fowler, the agent in charge of FBI Counterterrorism Central Command. “The port’s been wiped out.”

  “Chiles?”

  “Already en route to the White House. You’re to meet him there. A car should be out front as we speak.”

  “Stay on the line,” she said.

  Jessica ran through the exercise room to the woman’s locker room and grabbed her clothing from the locker then ran from the club. She walked quickly down M Street toward a black sedan that was parked in front, steam coming from the exhaust pipe.

  “What have we got?” she said into her phone as she climbed in the backseat.

  “It’s a fucking mess, Jess. We have a massive explosion of indeterminate cause that occurred less than ten minutes ago at the Port of Long Beach. The detonation happened on shore, based on what the satellite images are telling.”

  “So it wasn’t shipborne.”

  “No. There are forty or so piers at Long Beach. Most were destroyed, along with several ships, one of which was an Exxon supertanker. According to someone at the company, they had not begun off-loading product yet, which means almost two million barrels of petrol is helping fuel the fire.”

  “How many dead?”

  “No estimates yet. There are thousands of port employees. It was the four to noon shift, which is the busiest time. Rough estimate: a thousand to two thousand.”

  Jessica finished changing her clothing in the back of the sedan as it sped toward the White House.

  “Let’s prepare an elevation memo for the president. We need to move to severe, clamp down at the ports immediately, airports, the usual. I want that on my BlackBerry in three minutes.”

  “It’s already there.”

  “You’re good, Bo.”

  “I had a good teacher.”

  She closed the phone as the sedan entered the White House grounds through the back gate, between the Old Executive Office Building and the West Wing of the White House. Her phone rang—again CENCOM.

  “Tanzer.”

  “CENCOM, hold please for Terry Savoy.”

  Two clicks on the phone, then Savoy came on the line.

  “Hi, Jessica, it’s Terry.”

  “Hi, Terry.” She hesitated, thinking what to say, wondering whether Savoy knew yet. “How’s Teddy Marks?”

  “I’d call him ‘spry,’ but he’d probably kick my ass for it.”

  “Good. Look, I can’t talk for long. I’m heading into the White House. Long Beach has been struck by a bomb.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “I’m going into the Situation Room. I need to call you back.”

  “Wait, Jess.”

  “What is it?”

  “Remember what we talked about? Have you started looking at interagency?”

  “Yes. I spoke with Chiles. I have a team in place. We’re looking at everyone who was in the meeting where Dewey’s exfiltration was discussed.”

  “Are you walking into interagency?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is just my opinion, but I don’t think you can tip your hand. That means not letting interagency know Dewey called after Madradora. You can’t even let on that you know about Madradora.”

  “You’re saying lie to the president of the—”

  “You have a spy inside interagency. They’re working with the terrorists. They could be the terrorist. If he or she is in the room, you mention the attempt on Dewey and the mole will cease all activities. We can’t let them shut down. Right now he, or she, is the only link we have to this terrorist network. Long Beach shows where this is going. It’s unpredictable—and it’s escalating. If they think you’re looking for them, they will run. If they have the capability to get two killers to Cali in less than two hours, trust me, they’ll be able to disappear. We don’t want that. They could lead us to the terrorist.”

  “I have resources on it,” said Jessica. “But I have to tell you, I’m still not convinced. You’re guessing there’s a mole based on one phone call from Dewey Andreas.”

  “No, I’m basing it on the fact someone sent in a team to kill him before we could exfiltrate him. There was a very limited number of individuals who knew of the exfiltration and where it would take place. All of them were in that room. Dewey knows something and they’re trying to take him out.”

  “DOD is going to know they have two dead Deltas.”

  “Of course. But let DOD announce it. And let them, and everyone else, assume the terrorists in-country followed Dewey. You need to sell that to whoever the mole is. But while you do that, remember what Dewey said: They were operatives. Not a band of Al-Qaeda thugs. Hired professionals.”

  “I know. Look, I’ll do the best I can.”

  “Good. And good luck. We’ll call you in a few hours.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?’ ”

  “Ted and I. We’re leaving Denver this morning. We’re going to Manhattan. We’re going to do a little research, make some calls.”

  Jessica stopped in her tracks. “You’re serious.”

  “Dead serious. Think about it. Ted and I can do some work without interagency oversight.”

  Jessica smiled despite herself. “I thought Marks was barely conscious in ICU.”

  “Oh, he’s conscious all right. Don’t forget, Jess, he’s an ex-SEAL. Frankly, he’s the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. Someone just leveled the company he spent half his life building. Let’s just say he’s motivated.”

  One story below the ground floor of the White House, the Situation Room was filled with military officers and top national security and law enforcement aides. The Situation Room was bright with lights, all surrounding a large conference table. On the walls, screens displayed various live feeds from the disaster at the Port of Long Beach. To the right, an odd-looking contraption on the wall above a desk was a two-way air chute, similar to a drive-through bank deposit system, a relic from the White House’s past built by FDR, that enabled notes to be sent securely from other parts of the White House and Old Executive Office Building.

  The mood was electric—with anxiety, a certain quietness that comes with shock, and fear.

  Jessica entered the room and took a seat next to Louis Chiles. She quickly counted fourteen people, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, national security advisor, the secretaries of Defense, State, Energy, and Homeland Security, and many others, including most of the interagency group, including John Scalia, Vic Buck, Jane Epstein, and others.

  “Jess.”

  “Hi, Lou.”

  “Tough morning.”

  “I’ve got an elevation memo ready to go. Obviously we’re recommending that we elevate to ‘severe’—code red—clamp down on infrastructure—ports, airports, et cetera.”

  On one wall, a large screen showed the same live shot from Long Beach, a CNN feed from a helicopter a long distance away from the fires. Because the chopper had to stay at a distance to avoid the intense heat, the view was a wide panorama of the coastal area of Southern California surrounding the port, the dark of the night interrupted by the lights of Long Beach and its buildings and roads, surrounding neighborhoods leading down to the water. In the middle of the screen, four large fiery clouds of smoke and flames reached into the sky: the inferno that was now the port.

  The president entered the room, followed by his chief of staff, Jane London. The president was dressed in a blue checked button-down without a tie, and he carried a cup of coffee.

  “Morning, everybody,” the president said as he sat down. The president looked pointedly at Secretary of State Putnam. “I think we can now assume Saudi fucking Arabia wasn’t behind the attacks.”

  Putnam nodded. “Yes, sir. No question. Long Beach changes everything.”

  “Before we get a briefing on what just happened, what are we recommending so we can get some direction out to law enforcement?” asked the president.

  He looked to his left at
Myron Kratovil, the national security advisor.

  “I haven’t had time to poll, Mr. President,” Kratovil said. “However, I think we’re all going to be of the same mind here. Let me ask it this way: is there anyone who does not think we should elevate to red?”

  Around the room, silence. The government’s top echelon of law enforcement, military leadership, and national security all agreed to recommend to the president that he formally raise America’s terror alert to its highest level, code red, indicating to the public a severe and imminent risk of terrorist attacks on the country.

  “There’s your recommendation, Mr. President.”

  “Accepted,” said the president.

  A young military attaché placed a document in front of the president, which he signed. The officer walked quickly from the room and began a process which would result in the modern equivalent of a telephone tree; from the White House, the order would quickly be disseminated first to branches of the military, then to states’ governors and attorney generals, who would then inform county and municipal law enforcement, that the nation’s terror alert had been elevated. Practically speaking, however, most people who would need to know would have already assumed this to be the case. Already this morning, several commentators on TV had asked the question as to when the president would raise the alert level. At the same time law enforcement was notified, so too were various parts of the country’s economic and manufacturing infrastructure: ports, nuclear power plants, and other generators of electricity, refineries.

  “All right, Jess,” said the president, “let’s hear it.”

  “At four fifteen A.M. Pacific, a bomb detonated at the Port of Long Beach,” said Jessica. “Casualty estimates between one and two thousand. Fires are nowhere near being under control. That should take at least another twenty-four hours. From the nature of the blast, our munitions experts say it’s likely that it contained octanitrocubane.”

  “I’m guessing that’ll only be the first of many other connections linking this to the prior attacks,” said the president.

  “I believe there’s a larger implication,” said Jessica.

  “Go on.”

  “We’re looking at a new terror network here,” said Jessica. “Anonymous, unpredictable, embedded. Different from what we’ve ever seen before. As with Capitana and Savage Island, no one’s taking credit.”

  “That’s what worries me most,” said the president. “It’s arbitrary.”

  “We can infer that they’re focused on infrastructure,” continued Jessica. “With this explosive in hand, if they wanted to, they could easily be killing many more people. But they’re not. Which only adds to the unpredictability. I don’t see how we can begin to anticipate where they’re going next.”

  “That’s not very encouraging, coming from the head of counterterrorism,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “One of the more illuminating aspects of octanitrocubane, we’ve learned, is the high cost of synthesizing and producing it,” said Jane Epstein from DOD. “Our own munitions labs have been unable to produce it in any scalable quantities. The group behind this has a lot of money and is highly, highly sophisticated. This is not meth lab sort of stuff and you can’t make it in the back of a cave. This is like manufacturing a three-stage pharmaceutical.”

  “We’re working with CIA and Interpol to run the POI database against chemical, weapons, and pharma manufacturers,” said Jessica. “It’s a wide net, but it’s all we have at this point. We’ll develop a list of possible places this compound is being made and go one-by-one with local law enforcement to do inspections.”

  “That’s it?” asked Kratovil.

  “FBI munitions is en route to Long Beach,” said Jessica. “We’ll try to develop a signature from the debris at Long Beach. An identifying odor, hopefully, that we can train dogs on. If we can do that, we could, in theory develop protocols at U.S. Postal, FedEx, UPS; try and get lucky if they’re still sending this stuff around.”

  “Sounds like we’re grasping at straws,” said the president. “What are we doing beyond playing defense here?” He looked around the table at his top law enforcement and national security advisors.

  “The answer, Mr. President, is running hard at the few leads we have,” said Jessica. “We have survivors at Long Beach and teams debriefing to see if we can piece together any links or information. We now know the individuals who spearheaded both Capitana and Savage Island—we have CIA, NSA, and CT teams running hard at their pasts, trying to assemble connections.”

  “What about Ted Marks?” asked the president.

  “Marks survived and we’ve already done a sketch of his assailant and have it out on the wires, down through law enforcement,” Jessica said, handing out copies of the artist’s rendition created by the FBI just a few hours before at Marks’s hospital bedside. “It should be in the world’s newspapers and on television starting this morning.”

  Jane Epstein from DOD raised her hand to say something, but the president waved her off and picked up the black-and-white sketch. He stared at it, then stood up from his chair. “This narrows it down to Arab males between the ages of eighteen and forty,” he said, shaking his head. He looked around the room, then stood up. “So basically, we don’t have shit. Call me when we do.”

  The president turned and walked out of the Situation Room.

  Back at FBI headquarters, Jessica went directly to Chiles’s office, along with Jane Epstein from DOD, John Scalia from the White House, Rick Ennis from NSA, and Vic Buck from the CIA.

  Chiles turned on the television on the wall of his office, displaying the same scene of the port, still burning in the distance. Firefighting helicopters could be seen spraying the flames from above with orange chemicals.

  “You were going to say,” said Chiles, looking at Epstein, “before the president left the room?”

  “Thanks for extending the meeting, everyone,” said Epstein. She looked around the group. “Madradora went badly. The two Deltas we sent in to exfiltrate Dewey Andreas were murdered. Terminated in broad daylight.”

  “What?” said Jessica. “Killed by who?”

  “We don’t know. We had no one else on the ground, and the Cali police don’t have much of a clue, to be frank.”

  “Has anyone spoken with Andreas?” Buck asked.

  Everyone shook their heads, including Jessica.

  Chiles looked at Jessica, then turned to the group and said nothing.

  “All right, then,” said Buck. “Do we have his cell number?”

  “No,” she said. “When he called in earlier, it was through the Anson switchboard.”

  “Do we even know if he’s alive?” asked Ennis.

  Epstein shrugged.

  “Could Andreas have misidentified our men?” Buck asked.

  “You mean misidentified, as in killed American soldiers?” said Jessica sharply. “He was a Delta himself. I can’t imagine him making that kind of mistake. Can you?”

  “All we know is two Deltas were sent to exfiltrate him and now they’re dead,” said Buck.

  “That’s not all we know,” said Epstein. “There was a gun battle, according to witnesses. There’s one dead gunman in addition to our Deltas. He doesn’t appear to be of Arabic descent. He looks Latino. The Cali police are doing their best, but I’m out of resources in the immediate area.”

  “I’ll get a team in there ASAP,” said Buck. “But it seems pretty obvious they followed him. He’s been out of active duty now for over a decade. Add to that the fact that he’s hurt, tired, rattled. He made a mistake and they found him.”

  “I agree,” said Jessica, lying. She stared at Chiles, trying not to look too obvious. “I need to get back to Long Beach.”

  Jessica shut the door to her office and sat on the leather couch next to the window. She shut her eyes for a few moments and tried to clear her head. Opening her eyes again, she looked out the window to Pennsylvania Avenue. It was Sunday morning and the street was largely deserted
. In front of the FBI building, she saw a dozen soldiers with weapons out. Threat level red. Citizens would already be feeling the impact of the heightened security advisory. Not only at federal and state buildings, train stations, ports. Major airports already looked like armed camps, and the levels of scrutiny given passengers had risen exponentially. In the coming days, random searches would be replaced by searches of all passengers. No more carry-on baggage. Profiling was becoming a thing of the past because all citizens were being put under the microscope. They had to.

  Jessica, whose job it was to stop terrorism on America’s shores, tried to imagine the face of the person behind it all. Was he Arab? In a cave on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan? In a sweaty, crowded apartment in Islamabad or Karachi? Or maybe Munich or Paris? This wasn’t like searching for a needle in a haystack. It was searching for a grain of sand on a beach. If only she knew which beach.

  One person might have the answer to that question, whether he knew it or not. Unfortunately, he was either running for his life in South America, or already dead.

  She walked back to her desk and dialed her phone.

  “Yes,” answered Savoy.

  “It’s Jessica. Has Dewey contacted you again?”

  “No,” said Savoy. “How’d interagency go? Did Defense break the news?”

  “Yes. Thanks for the call earlier, you were right. Let me know if Dewey calls.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Where are you?”

  “We just landed. Ted has a TV interview to do.”

  That night, 60 Minutes did a special two-hour episode, featuring coverage of what they dramatically titled “America’s Hiroshima.” Live on-scene reports from Long Beach and a special aerial camera dropped from the sky close into the wreckage showed the incredible destruction wrought by the bomb.