Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

  Jack laughed. “I’m a Dunkin’ Donuts kind of guy.”

  “That’s good, too. You’re careful, right?”

  “With the coffee. Yeah-”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

  “Yeah, I’m careful.”

  “So what’s he got you working on?”

  Another smile from Jack. “Sorry, Dad, your need to know expired a while ago. If you win the election, we’ll talk again.”

  Ryan Senior shook his head. “Fuckin’ spooks.”

  Frank Weaver had spent four years in the Army, so he was well familiar with the maddening ways in which the government often went about its business, but he’d thought he’d left that all behind when he got his honorable discharge and went to truck-driving school. He’d spent ten years doing that, doing long hauls from coast to coast, sometimes taking his wife along, but mostly eating up the miles while listening to classic rock. God love XM satellite radio, he thought, and thank God the government was going to let him keep it for this new job. He hadn’t relished the idea of working for the government again, but the pay had been too good to pass up, what with the hazardous-duty bonuses and all. They didn’t call it that, exactly, but that’s what it amounted to. He’d gone through a special training program and background checks by the FBI, but he had nothing to hide and he was a damned good driver. In truth, there was nothing extraordinary about what they had him doing-except for the cargo, that was, but he never had to touch the stuff. Just show up, let someone else load it, then get it safely to its destination and let someone else unload it. Mostly they drilled him on emergency procedures: what to do if someone tried to hijack the load; what to do if he got into an accident; what to do if a UFO came down and beamed him out of the cab… The Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission trainers had “what-if” drills for everything you could think of, then a hundred more you’d never imagine. Besides, he’d never be driving the route alone. They hadn’t told him yet whether his escorts would be in marked or unmarked cars, but you could bet they’d be armed to the teeth.

  There’d be no guards this time, though, which surprised Weaver a bit. Yeah, it was only a trial run and his load would be empty, but given the way the DOE played everything as if it was real, he’d expected an escort. Then again, maybe they were lying; maybe he’d have an escort he wasn’t supposed to see. Still didn’t change his job.

  Weaver downshifted and braked, swinging the rig into the entrance drive of the Callaway Nuclear Power Plant. A hundred yards ahead he could see the guard shack. He braked to a stop and handed his ID card down to the guard. The entrance was blocked by five steel-core concrete pillars.

  “Engine off, please.”

  Weaver complied.

  The guard looked over his ID, then slipped it into his front shirt pocket and had him sign in on the clipboard. Weaver’s flatbed was empty, but the guard did his job, first walking a complete circle around the rig, then checking the undercarriage with one of those rolling mirror-cart things.

  The guard reappeared below the window.

  “Please step out of the truck.” Weaver climbed down. The guard again examined Weaver’s ID, taking a good ten seconds to check to make sure the faces matched. “Please stand beside the guard shack.”

  Weaver did so, and the guard climbed into the truck’s cab and spent two minutes searching the interior before climbing down. He handed Weaver his ID card.

  “Dock number four. You’ll be directed along the way. Speed limit is ten miles an hour.”

  “Got it.”

  Weaver climbed back into the cab and started the engine. The guard lifted his portable radio to his lips and said something. A moment later, the concrete pillars retracted into the ground. The guard waved Weaver through.

  Dock four was only a hundred yards away, on the back side of the plant. At the halfway point a hard-hatted man in coveralls waved him on. Weaver did a Y-turn, backed up to the dock, and shut off the engine.

  The dock foreman walked up to Weaver’s door. “You can wait in the lounge, if you want. Take us about an hour.”

  It took almost ninety minutes. Though Weaver had seen pictures of the thing during training, he’d never seen one in person. He and the other drivers had nicknamed it “King Kong’s Dumbbell,” but the DOE people had gone to a lot of trouble drumming the particulars into their brains. Officially known as the GA-4 Legal Weight Truck (LWT) Spent Fuel Cask, the container was an impressive piece of engineering. How they’d settled on the dumbbell shape Weaver didn’t know, but he assumed it had something to do with durability. According to the trainers, the GA-4’s designers had torture-tested the thing, subjecting it to dead-fall drops, incineration, puncture hazards, and submersion. For every ton of nuclear waste-fuel assemblies from either pressure water reactors or boiling water reactors-four tons of shielding went into the GA-4’s shell.

  Hell, Weaver thought, you could no more get into the damned thing than you could steal it with anything short of a truck, a crane, and perhaps a heavy-lift chopper. It would be like those idiots you occasionally see on television who hook a chain to an ATM, drag it off, then dump it somewhere because they can’t break it open.

  “Never seen one up close,” Weaver told the dock foreman.

  “Looks like something from a sci-fi movie, doesn’t it?”

  “Sort of is, in a way.”

  Per protocol, the two of them walked around the flatbed, checking “preflight” items off their forms as they went. Each tie-down chain was new, and had been stress-tested at the plant, as had the ratchets, each of those secured by dual padlocks. Satisfied the cask wasn’t going anywhere before it reached its destination, Weaver and the foreman signed and countersigned the forms, each taking his own copy.

  Weaver waved good-bye and climbed into his cab. Once the engine was going, he powered up the GPS nav system affixed to his dash, then scrolled through the touch-screen menu and selected his route; the unit had been preprogrammed with dozens of them by the DOE. Another safeguard, he’d been told. No driver would be given his until leaving a pickup facility.

  The route popped up on the screen as a purple line overlaid on a map of the United States. Not bad, Weaver thought. Major highways for most of the trip, 1,632 miles total. Four days.

  72

  TEXT MESSAGE from our Russian girl,” Tariq said, striding into the living room. The Emir stood at the window, staring out at the desert. He turned.

  “Good news, I trust.”

  “We will know in sixty seconds.”

  Tariq powered up his laptop, opened his Web browser, and went to a website called storespot.com, one of dozens of free online file-storage sites available on the Internet. All that was required to open an account was a user name, a password, and an e-mail address, and for that there were sites that offered throw-away “self-destructing” e-mail addresses.

  Tariq logged in to the account, clicked on three links, and found himself in the upload/download area of the site. There was one item waiting, a plain text file. According to the annotation, the file had been uploaded twelve minutes ago. Tariq opened the file, copied the contents to his clipboard, then deleted the file from the account. Next he opened the laptop’s built-in text program and pasted the contents into a new file. He took two minutes to scan the contents.

  “It’s all here. Everything we need.”

  “Which entrance?”

  “The south.”

  The Emir smiled. Allah was with them. Of the two, the facility’s southern entrance saw less activity than the northern main entrance. This meant fewer security personnel. “Where exactly?”

  “The third drift layer, five hundred meters in and three hundred meters below the surface. According to Jenkins, that’s the area the engineering department is most concerned about. Next week they’re having a meeting with the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission to discuss backfilling and capping the entire drift before they start accepting shipments.”

  There was, however, a drawback to us
ing the south entrance, the Emir knew. Within minutes of the truck turning onto the service road from Highway 95, sensors and cameras would likely record its passage and alert the monitoring center at the facility’s main entrance. Once the staff realized the truck was headed toward the south entrance, how would they react? It seemed unlikely an alarm would be immediately raised; this was, after all, only a trial shipment, and the first of its kind. More likely, the staff would assume the driver had taken a wrong turn. Calls would be made, perhaps a vehicle sent to the south entrance to collect the wayward truck. Musa and his men would take care of it.

  Of all the feasibility studies the URC had done in the early stages of Lotus, the most troubling and nebulous question had involved the facility’s on-site security, an issue that neither the DOE nor NRC had publicly addressed, either because of security concerns or because of internal indecision. As planning for Lotus progressed, it became clear to the Emir that they had to assume the worst-case scenario, which, in the case of nuclear facilities, involved the presence of NNSA protective forces, a well-trained and well-equipped paramilitary force under the control of the DOE.

  As it had many facets of American government and society, 9/11 had brought into sharp focus the need for more robust material control programs, and to its credit the DOE had spared no expense in pursuit of that goal. NNSA Protective Forces were trained in small-unit antiterrorist tactics and equipped with armored vehicles and heavy-caliber weapons, including grenade launchers, armor-piercing rounds, and at select sites, mobile and fixed Dillon M134D Gatling Gun systems.

  None of the URC’s intelligence suggested the NNSA was manning the facility this far in advance, but the Emir had been clear with Musa: Assume you will meet with heavy resistance. Assume you have only minutes to complete your mission.

  “Where are we with the other elements?” the Emir asked Tariq. “The truck.”

  “It left the plant this afternoon. Transit time is four days. Ibrahim and his team are on the ground. Unless we send him the abort, they should be moving in”-Tariq checked his watch-“three hours. The ship is two days out; our people in Norfolk are ready. As it stands, the ship will probably have to overnight at anchor before being assigned a berth.”

  “Good. And Mr. Nayoan’s men?”

  “In place and ready. They will not move until you give the order. They’ll need twenty-four hours’ notice.” The Emir nodded, and Tariq asked, “What do you want to do with the girl?”

  “Let her go. She knows nothing about us, and Beketov is dead. The link between us and her people is gone. Even if she’s picked up, the only leads she can offer will either go nowhere or go where we want them to go. She’s earned her money.”

  “She knows about the facility.”

  “What of it? She was hired by some fringe environmental group to dig up damaging information about the facility. That’s all. She’s a mercenary, Tariq. She’ll take her money and move on.”

  Tariq considered this, then nodded. “Very well.”

  “One last detail: I’ll be joining Musa on his mission.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’ll record a message before I leave. Once we’ve succeeded, you will make sure it reaches the right hands.” Tariq opened his mouth to speak, but the Emir waved him off. “Old friend, you know this is necessary. My death, and what we do here, will fuel our war for generations to come.”

  “When did you decide this?”

  “It’s been the plan from the start. Why else would we have come here-to this forsaken place?”

  “Let me join you.”

  The Emir shook his head. “It’s not your time. You must trust me on this. Promise me you’ll do as I ask.”

  Tariq nodded.

  73

  PULLING INTO the town of Paulinia just after sunset, Shasif Hadi could see the lights of the refinery, still some four miles away, long before he could see the complex itself. Seventeen hundred acres of distillation columns, fractionation towers, and high-voltage wires, all festooned with blinking red lights designed to warn off low-flying aircraft, and all unnecessary, as far as Hadi was concerned. If any pilot managed to miss seeing the dozens of pole-mounted stadium lights illuminating the complex’s work areas, he deserved to crash.

  The main highway from Campinas, the SP-332, wound along the northern outskirts of Paulinia before swinging back first to the west, then to the north, before finally passing the refinery complex on the left. Hadi drove past it and continued north for another mile before reaching his turnoff, a two-lane asphalt road heading due east. This he followed exactly one and a half miles to where the road curved yet again and the blacktop gave way to gravel. A hundred yards ahead, his headlights picked out what looked like a bridge spanning the road. Hadi felt his pulse quicken. This was not a bridge, he knew, but rather an ethanol pipeline. As he passed under the line, he glanced out his passenger window and could see a grass-covered clearing barricaded by a cattle gate. Sitting in front of the gate, hood facing out, was a white pickup truck. Hadi kept going, making one more turn, this time south, onto a dirt road. After fifty yards he slowed, scanning the tree line to his left. He spotted the gap between the trees and pulled in and shut off his headlights as he coasted to a stop. He checked his watch: on schedule.

  He got out, locked the door, then walked out of the trees to the edge of the road. He looked right. A half-mile down the road a pair of headlights appeared around a corner. Ibrahim’s blue Volkswagen Fox slowed beside Hadi, its brakes squealing slightly.

  “No trouble?” Ibrahim asked.

  “None.”

  Hadi climbed into the backseat. Fa’ad sat beside him, Ahmed in the front passenger seat. As part of their exfiltration plan, Fa’ad and Ahmed had parked their cars on back roads to the southeast and northeast of the refinery, where they were picked up by Ibrahim. If for some reason the group became separated, they would rendezvous at one of these cars and make their way back to the coast.

  Ahmed handed Hadi a pistol, a 9-millimeter Glock 17 equipped with a noise suppressor. “The truck is there,” Hadi said. “I couldn’t be sure, but I think I saw two figures sitting in it.”

  “Good. Ahmed, you will do it.”

  Headlights off, Ibrahim put the car in gear and drove on, retracing Hadi’s inbound route. Fifty yards from the pipeline, he stopped the car. Ahmed climbed out, crossed behind the car, and walked into the trees. They sat in silence, Ibrahim keeping track of the time on his watch. After two minutes, he turned on the headlights and started out again. “Down in the back,” he told them. Hadi and Fa’ad hunched down below the windows. As the car drew even with the pickup truck, Ibrahim slowed the car and got out. He had a map in his right hand.

  “Excuse me,” he called in Portuguese, as he walked toward the truck. “I’m lost. Can you give me directions back to Paulinia?”

  No one responded.

  “Excuse me, I need help. Can you-”

  A hand appeared out of the driver’s-side window and waved him forward. Ibrahim walked up to the window. The decal on the door said PETROBRAS SECURITY. “I think I missed a turn somewhere. How far away is Paulinia?”

  “Not far,” said the guard. “Follow this road west until it runs into the highway, then turn left.”

  Through the truck’s open passenger window, Ibrahim could see Ahmed’s outline emerge from the trees and start toward the truck.

  Ibrahim asked, “How far is it?”

  Before the driver could answer, Ibrahim took a step back. The first muffled shot went into the temple of the passenger-side guard; the second went into the neck of the driver, who slumped sideways. The noise suppressor, made from steel soup cans and fiberglass insulation, had worked well. The shots had been no louder than a muted hand-clap.

  “One more each,” Ibrahim ordered.

  Ahmed fired another round into the first guard. He then extended the gun into the cab, took aim, and fired a round into the driver’s ear. Ibrahim turned and signaled to the Volkswagen. Hadi climbed into the driver’s s
eat and pulled the car into the clearing. Ibrahim and Ahmed already had the guards’ bodies out of the truck.

  “Key ring,” Ahmed said, and tossed it to Ibrahim.

  They started dragging the bodies toward the tree line. Hadi pulled out a pair of white towels he’d taken from his hotel, tossed one to Fa’ad, and together they wiped down the cab. The Glock’s soft-nosed hollow-points had disintegrated inside the guards’ skulls, leaving no exit wounds, so there was more blood than brain matter. Once done, Hadi tossed his towel to Fa’ad, who jogged into the trees and tossed them away.

  Ibrahim returned to the clearing, unlocked the cattle gate, then tossed the key ring to Hadi. He and Fa’ad got in and backed the truck through the gate, followed by Ibrahim and Ahmed in the Volkswagen. Hadi shut and locked the gate as Ibrahim pulled the Volkswagen into the trees and out of sight.

  The service road ran alongside the pipeline, which sat atop five-foot support pylons, spaced every fifty feet or so. Bracketed on both sides by trees and heavily rutted, the road had been built to accommodate construction equipment during the pipeline’s construction and now served as an access road for the refinery’s maintenance and security staff.

  After a mile, the road veered, going right as the pipeline went left. In the median stood a grove of trees, over the top of which the lights of the refinery were visible. Ibrahim stopped the truck, and they got out. “Change clothes,” he ordered.

  The navy blue coveralls had been chosen not so much for stealth but for anonymity. Most of the refinery workers wore similar coveralls. If spotted, from a distance Ibrahim and his team would, they hoped, be mistaken for maintenance personnel. They were now less than a half-mile from the refinery’s perimeter road and fence.

  Once in their coveralls, they walked through the grove to a clearing. Here the pipeline zigzagged before straightening again, crossing over the road, and then, after another five hundred yards, passing through the security fence and into the refinery itself.