This particular Yemeni asked if we might reverse the board for a moment in the middle of a game, when I’d unexpectedly put his king into check. When I asked why he said, “You must always think of the board from the position of your opponent.” After he’d had a chance to peer from behind my pawns, he laughed as he tipped over his king. “The best players can see both sides of the board in their minds. Not I.”
As I played through events from Paul’s perspective, I saw a break—a flaw in the pattern. I opened my eyes to see Quigley and Nichols staring down at me.
“Let’s say Paul did kill himself and that the FBI never caught on. The National Front would still have known that he was running his own game. They’d obviously know that they didn’t kill him, either. And they’ve got the kind of men who could track him down wherever he went. So why take the risk? Paul could have just holed up on the National Front compound for the time being. If the scheme gets blown, he could always make a run for it later.”
“But we were already coming to arrest him,” Nichols pointed out.
“Good point. But that’s only because Paul screwed up when he blackmailed the Reclaim leader, Roxanne. Now you guys have her in custody and she’s going to testify that he was complicit in the sabotage against his own mine.”
“Which would be a good reason for the National Front to want to kill him before he flipped and pointed it back to them.”
“But what if his disappearance was part of the plan from the beginning? He was always going to be the weak link. If the Bureau brought him in, you’d eventually uncover his connection to the National Front.”
“Unless we weren’t looking for it,” Nichols said.
“Right. If what looks like a hit job at first glance quickly starts to look like a disappearing act by Jason Paul, that changes the story, doesn’t it? Imagine that you find a bunch of financial bets that Paul made against his own company and his own industry. He makes a quick score, converts his offshore accounts to bearer bonds or something and disappears while the FBI is still trying to figure out whether he’s dead or not.”
“Then it would look like this whole business was a get-rich scheme Paul cooked up on his own. The tapes and everything else would prove that he was trying to implicate Reclaim. And Roxanne could testify that Paul had blackmailed her.”
“That makes sense. But what does the National Front get out of this?”
Nichols answered quickly. “They’re much more sophisticated in their financial dealings. They have the ability to get thousands of individuals to place bets for them. They might not even need to. If you buy the shares of a company right before it takes off and make a windfall, there will be an investigation. But natural gas futures are widely held. If the price spiked, so many people would make a killing that the National Front could get lost in the shuffle.”
“But this leaves some open questions, doesn’t it?”
“Right. For instance, why has the National Front been trying to kill you? Why is the girl important? Were they afraid she’d warn someone about the Gilroy mine?”
“Harmon certainly would have known the plan, so it’s possible,” I suggested. “But in the note she wrote to her mother last week, Heather said she was going to run out of insulin tomorrow, not today. She was specific about the day. Gilroy was clearly timed for today. So what if she was trying to warn us about something else?”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but it might still involve energy. We don’t know why the National Front would want to sabotage power stations in South Africa. How does that help them blow up a coal mine? They already know how mines work.”
“Yeah, I agree. We’re still missing something.”
“So you folks think the whole business today was some scheme to blow up energy prices?” Quigley asked.
“Not oil but maybe natural gas or coal.”
“Shutting down a coupl’a mines in West Virginia wouldn’t do that. Production out west’s way bigger than here these days.”
“Right, that’s what the analyst told us,” I agreed. “At first we thought they might try to sabotage Wyoming surface mines where Paul worked previously, but that seems unlikely.”
“And your analysts think a terrorist strike on Gilroy would have a big effect on prices?”
“They don’t know. Maybe, because it’s hard to tell with terrorism. But it’s not certain. Commodities analysts know that it’s not too difficult to mess with an underground mine. But surface mines use blasting to get at the ore, and they’re enormous. They’re not so vulnerable to terrorism. We can’t see how you’d threaten them.”
“Oh that’s easy,” Walters said. All three of us swiveled toward him.
“Easy?” I asked.
“A dirty bomb.” Walters crossed his arms when he said it. I looked around, suddenly concerned we were being overhead. But the cops manning the tape were swarmed with reporters.
“How would these guys possibly get hold of the materials to make a nuke?” Nichols asked.
“I didn’t say a nuclear weapon, I said a dirty bomb. For a dirty bomb, you don’t need weapons grade uranium or plutonium, just highly radioactive material. The bomb itself is conventional, but it spreads out the radiation pretty widely.”
“I thought the whole idea was discredited,” I said, trying to recall what I’d heard from the WMD briefings during the Iraq war.
“As a way to kill people, it sucks. You never get high enough radiation levels to do much damage. Conventional weapons like a fuel-air bomb work much better. But if you’re trying to turn a working mine into a superfund site, you couldn’t do much better. If you took the kind of charges we saw yesterday and upsized them for the kind of demolition work they do at surface mines, then packed a bunch of radioactive material around it, you’d create about a century’s worth of EPA litigation in a heartbeat. Nobody would be able to touch that coal in our lifetime.”
“Is there any chance that one of the power plants the National Front targeted in South Africa was nuclear?” Nichols asked, straightening up.
“I’d better find out.”
39
Alpha reached me on the tarmac of Chuck Yeager airport, which had temporarily re-opened to allow a single government plane to land. “I just spoke with the South Africans. You may find this interesting. The reactor that experienced the incursion last month does not create weapons grade plutonium as a byproduct. The spent fuel rods from that facility primarily contain thorium and reactor grade plutonium. Shortly after the security breach, the database that tracks inventory at the nuclear waste facility co-located with the reactor became corrupted.
“A manual count was ordered, and it appears from the existing paper records that two fuel rods might be missing. But there was a gap of some weeks in the physical paperwork, so that was thought to be the source of the discrepancy. Because the rods in question did not contain weapons grade plutonium, this was not reported to international agencies.”
It was a few hours to midnight and the West Virginia governor had declared a state of emergency. An exhausted flight controller told me that Charleston was expecting a foot or more of snow and blizzard conditions overnight. The rain had picked up and the wind was gusting heavily.
“Could they have gotten radioactive material out of the country and into the U.S. undetected?”
“It would have been difficult, but not impossible. The control rods are not as large as you might think. Breaking them down would be hazardous but not complex. Major airports and ports in both South Africa and the United States have radiologic detection equipment. But there are thousands of private airports in both countries. We’ve observed jets taking off from South Africa under visual flight rules, flying to Namibia and then diverting to international routes from there. It could have been done.”
“I thought the South African incidents were intended to cripple the power industry?”
“It appears so. A technician who performed an inspection ahead of schedule because she was about to go on va
cation found a device that would have exploded and triggered a containment leak and a major nuclear crisis. Stealing some commercial-grade spent fuel is a minor crime by comparison.”
“Do we have enough evidence to make this scenario plausible?”
“We have another new piece of information,” Alpha responded. “We sent over Mr. Harmon’s photo to the South Africans and asked them to check it against their plant records. There was a visual match—he had been issued a contractor pass for that day. We’re cross-matching photos of all the other visitors at the facility on that day with National Front members. We’ll send photos and profiles to your device in the next twenty minutes.”
“One of Heather’s friends—her roommate at the commune—mentioned Harmon had taken a trip while the two of them were together.”
“Given his familiarity with the Hobart mine, it’s a cause for concern. But if a radiologic device is anywhere near that mine, they’ll find it.”
I heard the squeak of rubber as a jet touched down and then the whine of engines reversing before a Gulfstream appeared. The cold, driving rain beat against the fuselage of the executive jet. We were just a few degrees away from snow. I jumped back into the Suburban with Nichols and we drove onto the runway, followed by two other black Chevys with flashing lights. As the doorway to the plane opened and the staircase dropped down, I had my first glimpse of one of the specialists who had made it to Charleston less than two hours from the moment I first called Alpha.
There’s just one agency that deals with radiologic threats in the U.S.: NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Support Team. I didn’t see how we could call them in with unsupported speculation. But when I spoke with Alpha and laid out our suppositions, he had no qualms. He notified NEST immediately, then contacted the South Africans.
The NEST team mobilized from Andrews Air Force Base so quickly that we had to leave the crime scene at Jason Paul’s house abruptly to prepare for their arrival. Nichols liberated two extra Suburbans from the FBI carpool and Quigley called in the State Police SWAT unit to meet us at the mine entrance. A team of eight rumpled looking men and women filed from the jet. I greeted the man at the front of the line, a thin, graying scientist with rain-splattered, steel-rimmed glasses and a firm handshake.
“I’m Michael Herne. It’s my fault that you’re getting wet. This could be a false alarm.”
“Dr. William Harris. Call me Bill,” he said as he shook my hand. His voice rose as the Gulfstream’s engine powered back up and the plane glided off toward a hangar. “Don’t worry, Mr. Herne—most of what we do is chase down false alarms. But the last time we found a functioning radiologic device, the woman who called us in said the exact same thing.”
“We found explosives set in an underground mine today a few hundred miles north of here. We’ve tied them to the guy running a surface mine about twenty miles from here,” I said as I looked at the rest of his team. They were male and female, young and old. They all carried various backpacks and pieces of luggage that I’d been told contained testing equipment rather than personal essentials. They looked a little like an American tour group preparing for a safari.
“And you think he’s concocted a radiologic device?”
“We think he—or a group he’s been associated with—plans to scare the markets by disrupting the country’s coal supply.”
“How?”
“He’s affiliated with a group that may have stolen spent fuel rods from a reactor. If he did set a device, there’s a good chance it’s at his own mine—the largest surface mine in the state and the second largest mine overall. The biggest one is the underground site where we found the conventional explosives.”
“That seems a little self-destructive. Blowing up his own mine, I mean.”
“He wasn’t going to keep the job for long. We think he faked his own death this morning.”
“You’ve had quite a day,” Harris said. I exchanged a glance with Nichols.
“This group has been very aggressive in trying to keep us out of their business. Is your team armed?”
“Heavens no! We’re scientists. We like to be attached at the hip to law enforcement. We’ll rely on you for security,” Harris said, glancing at Special Agent Nichols.
“There’s a state SWAT team meeting us on site. How do you need to conduct your search?”
“We can do it from vehicles if we drive slowly. The trick is separating the signature of a radiologic device from background radiation, which may be especially difficult in a mine. But we have lots of experience with doing our job in difficult conditions and this isn’t the worst we’ve seen.”
“I’m sorry to bring you out here in this weather. I’m afraid it’s about to get a lot worse.”
“I work in a lab without windows all day. I love getting out in bracing weather like this.”
I smiled. “I think we’re going to get along just fine, Dr. Harris. Did you bring something for me?”
“Ah, yes, the courier almost missed our departure, in fact. We have several bags for you. Heavy ones.”
“They always are.”
40
A shot rang out, shattering the silence of wind and rapidly falling snow. I didn’t see the muzzle flash; I’d been looking too far north as I scanned the ridgeline. Nichols tapped my shoulder. “Eleven o’clock at 1600 yards,” she said. I pivoted slowly and adjusted the infrared scope. I found what I was looking for: the glowing white silhouette of a prone man with a sniper rifle, the barrel still hot. As I adjusted the scope again for the range and calculated the effect of the wind, another shot rang out. Sirens wailed and the Hobart mine exploded into activity.
We’d met the State Police a quarter mile from the main mine entrance. The command staff rode in a purple and blue recreational vehicle functioning as a mobile command communications center. A dozen cruisers and two armored trucks accompanied them. Nichols had wrangled a warrant to search the mine and its offices, but Colonel Smith—the gray-haired, green-clad head of the State Police—didn’t ask to see it. After five years in which not a life had been lost, the West Virginia State Police had two troopers killed in August, when a detained suspect produced a hidden weapon in the back of the car.
Now four of his men had perished at Jason Paul’s mansion, and a dozen more had been wounded. The troopers were hungry for blood. Surrounded by tragedy in the face of a rapidly building blizzard, they had lost interest in the niceties of criminal procedure. If we had asked them to level the mine offices with bulldozers, they would have done it.
The task of searching the mine for an explosive device in a snowstorm was compounded by the mine’s size. The Hobart mine sprawled over an area ten miles wide by five miles long. The entire site was sunken below the surrounding topography and shielded by ridgelines. Five roads entered the mine, not counting the main entrance, but in practice four of them ended at cliffs several hundred feet above the mine site. The roads had disappeared as surely as the mountains they’d once scaled.
We spread topographic maps on a planning table inside the purple RV and pored over them with Nichols, Dr. Harris, Colonel Smith and Sergeant Ogletree from the West Virginia Special Response team—as the state SWAT team was called—along with Quigley and Walters.
Dr. Harris confirmed that the most likely place to plant a device would be near the active mining activity, where the conventional explosive would stir up enough dust to allow the thorium, plutonium and depleted uranium from the control rods to disperse as widely as possible. That put our primary search area under a sheer wall shaped like a horseshoe that ran up some 300 feet above the mine. I’d seen the site twice in the daylight—once from the inside and once from above—and I was worried.
I ran the math in my head again, to make sure I’d lined the shot up right. I relaxed, slowed my heart rate, held my breath and then gently, smoothly squeezed the trigger of the rifle. The big Barrett—an M107A1 if it matters—punched against my shoulder. It was a lighter punch and less of a bang than I remembered because this was a new mod
el, and suppressed at that. But it still made a big noise when it fired and I held myself absolutely still under the thermal blanket that Nichols had pulled over us. The blaring sirens of the cruisers helped to cover the sound of my counter-fire, but anyone near enough to the bullet would still hear the supersonic whine.
“Got him! I mean, hit,” Nichols corrected herself. “Next target one o’clock, 1900 yards.”
When we looked at the mine site, Colonel Smith, Sergeant Ogletree and I saw the same thing: a shooting gallery. We hoped Harmon had planted the device and left—or better yet, that we were really on a wild goose chase and there was nothing to find. But if it had been me and I really wanted the thing to go off, I would have put snipers up on top of the ridge overlooking the mine. They could bring any search to a dead standstill for hours, and remotely trigger the device when they were forced to retreat.
And that’s exactly what they’d done.
It took me longer to find the second target. He was better dug in and I couldn’t see his entire body with the thermal scope—just his head and the silhouette of the gun barrel. I wouldn’t even have spotted the gun barrel if it hadn’t been warm because he’d just fired it. I switched between monochrome and color display on the FLIR scope. Nineteen hundred yards is over a mile, and the wind was gusty and unpredictable. Several inches of snow had already drifted onto the heat-reflective blanket we were under and without the thermal scope I couldn’t see much past ten feet.
“Miss! Say eighteen inches to the right,” Nichols hissed. My second shot went wide. But it was close enough so that the shooter felt the round impact the ground next to him and realized he was in my sights. He rolled, jumped to his feet and started to run. “Hammer, we have a target on the move in sector three.” Nichols spoke over the State Police radio, about the only communications device that functioned reliably in the hills.
Binder - 02 Page 21