Luke was disgusted. “They didn’t find the sub?”
“The Navy isn’t saying much, but based on what I’ve heard, I think the nearest U.S. submarine was about two hundred miles away from where the F-16 went in. They sent out helicopters and P-3s, but nobody has found anything that I’ve heard about.”
“They’re long gone. It was a diesel. They’re too quiet. If they got even a couple hours’ head start, there’ll be no catching them.” Luke cradled his head in his hands. “I’m really sorry about this, Katherine. You think this was their plan all along?”
“Sure looks like it. Down to the last detail. I’ll bet the original plan was to go to TOPGUN. We just walked into it.”
Luke was speechless. He didn’t know what to do next. “Are we getting hammered in the news?”
“They finally know about the school, the four Pakistani students, the whole thing, but they’re not quite sure what to make of us. There’s a lot of amazement that a school was allowed to operate in Nevada with Russian fighters and that Pakistanis were allowed to come and operate supersonic fighters in the U.S. Oh, and Pakistan claims to know nothing about the attack. They claim to be equally outraged—”
“Right.”
“I’m just telling you what they’ve been saying. They know the pilots, but say they had no prior history of terrorist or radical activity. They think they might have affiliated with some other group, like the Taliban from Afghanistan, or the Iranians—a lot of possibilities. But nobody knows.”
“Can you see the cloud?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “It must be ten miles across now and really high, maybe fifty thousand feet. You can see it from here.”
Luke leaned back in his wooden chair and closed his eyes. He was unable to clear his head of the shame and anger. He looked at Katherine. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. You did everything you could to to stop him.”
“I didn’t listen to Brian as much as I should have. He had the scent of these guys. I didn’t listen. I looked right by. ‘But their security clearances were guaranteed by the United States government. The Undersecretary will look out for—‘ “
“Yeah, except the Undersecretary disappeared. I heard it on the news.”
“Disappeared?”
“Yeah. Vanished. No trace of him.”
“We’re dead.”
“Well, we’ll see where all this leads. My first job is to get you out of here. I’ll have to hire a lawyer.”
“Tell the other guys at the squadron to keep flying. Finish the class.”
Katherine braced herself for getting up out of her chair. “They can’t.”
“Why not?”
She’d hoped not to have to tell him. “The FBI padlocked the gate. The school’s been shut down.”
* * *
“Kevin,” Brian said breathlessly, sick from the developments of the last twenty-four hours and blaming himself, “you’ve got to help—”
“Where the hell are you?”
“The Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah.”
“Brian, I can’t even talk to you! Everybody involved in that school is a leper!”
“You’ve got to help,” Brian repeated, trying not to sound desperate.
“People a lot bigger than me are looking hard, Brian. You can be sure of that. People are looking under every rock. FBI, everybody. Trust me. This is way out of my hands. I can’t do anything.”
“Yes you can. Call Renee.”
Kevin was furious. “Don’t ever mention her name again! Ever.”
“You’ve got to get back to her. Find out what she knows!”
“Do you really think that with four Pakistani pilots attacking the United States we’re not going to be exercising our intelligence assets in Pakistan? How friggin’ stupid do you think we are?”
“And the Undersecretary. Find out who his contact was.”
“We already know!”
“What? Who? I haven’t heard anything on the news.”
“We don’t typically do news releases here.”
“So who was the contact?”
“Guy in the Pakistani embassy. His name was Yushaf.”
“Is somebody having a chat with him?”
“Seems he anticipated there might be a reaction to his pilots bombing our nuclear power plant. He was on an airplane when the attack was still under way.”
“He left before it was in the news?” Brian said, thinking.
“What?”
“He must have been in on it. How else could he have known to get on an airplane?”
“I’m not sure,” Kevin replied.
“That shows it was Pakistan’s plan all along. They pulled their guy from Washington before the shit hit the fan!”
Kevin pondered the implications. “Maybe. Maybe he’s just like this pilot. Maybe they’re all working against their country’s interests. Plus, Yushaf didn’t go back to Pakistan. He vanished.”
“Meaning what? He was working for somebody else?”
“We don’t know.”
“Where’d they get the bombs? Those have to have come from Pakistan.”
“They did. An armory near Islamabad was broken into a couple of months ago. That’s probably when they took the bombs.”
“You’ve got to work this, Kevin. There’s a radioactive cloud hovering off Southern California, the school has been shut down, and Luke is in jail. Can’t you do anything?”
Kevin said, “I’ll be in touch.”
21
Luke and Katherine were ushered into a conference room at the end of the hallway. It was poorly lit but well ventilated, with the thick wire screens over the windows. Luke was still in his khaki flight suit with the Russian wings on his nametag. He felt silly wearing the insignia of a Russian Colonel sitting in a jail on a Marine air station.
They waited patiently; they’d been told that they were to be interviewed immediately. Luke refused to sit. He wanted to fix everything, to make it all disappear. But he knew that the chance to do so was well behind him. The big wooden door opened, and four men and one woman walked in briskly. She was carrying a small black wallet, which she flipped opened and held in front of her. “FBI. Special Agent Helen Li. Please sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit.”
“Sit down,” she insisted. He did. She put her identification back into a small shoulder bag, then placed it on the floor next to the chair. She remained standing and leaned against the chair, holding the top of it with both her small hands and looking down at Luke. She was of medium height and very thin. Her straight hair didn’t quite reach her shoulders. “Are you Luke Henry?”
“Of course I am.”
“I’m here to question you about what happened. There are many things I need to ask you—”
“Aren’t you going to give him his rights?” Katherine interrupted.
Helen looked at her. “No.”
“He’s under arrest, you’re here to question him, and you’re not going to give him his rights?”
“That’s right.”
“Then I’m going to instruct him not to answer any questions.”
“You may instruct him to do whatever you wish,” Helen replied quietly.
Luke looked at Katherine and shook his head subtly. “What do you want?”
“There’s a radioactive cloud drifting toward Los Angeles. The entire West Coast is at risk.” She let that sink in. “I know that the pilots who conducted the attack were being trained by you in a secret desert airfield for the last three weeks.”
“It wasn’t secret.”
“That’s not really important right now,” a man said as he stepped forward.
“Right,” Luke replied. “Who are you?”
“This is Keith Berger,” Li said. “He’s with the Department of Energy.”
Luke looked at the short, round man, and saw deep pain in his face, like the pain of someone who’s just lost a child. “Do you know what happened at the plant? There are onl
y two active plants there. Right? I mean, there are two operating reactors,” Luke said. “And they missed them completely. How the hell can there be a radioactive cloud?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “They hit another building. Almost certainly by intent.”
“What building? What was in there?”
“Nuclear waste.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“A lot of it?”
“Yes. High-level radioactive waste. A lot. The waste from Units Two and Three that has been produced in the last ten years. Even more.”
“Wasn’t it safe?”
“It didn’t have the protection of the two generating plants. And the waste is stored in an open pool of water. I’m afraid the Pakistani pilots knew that.”
“An open pool?” Luke asked, his eyes growing larger. “How did they know?”
“They hit the plant at its Achilles’ heel. The concentrated radiation in the waste was worse than if they’d penetrated one of the reactors. The bombs were able to penetrate the non-reinforced building. The spent waste was blown up with the water in which it was stored.”
“What was it doing there? Why was it stored like that?”
He was obviously distressed. “There’s been an argument ongoing for more than ten years within the federal government on where to store high-level nuclear waste. We built a place in Nevada, but then . . . there was concern about earthquakes. Look, we just couldn’t get agreement. So the waste has been sitting there—pretty much like it was at San Onofre—at most of the nuclear plants around the country.”
Luke stared straight ahead. “This is a disaster,” he said to no one in particular. He looked at Berger. “How could the Pakistanis know that?”
“All you have to do is follow the debates on nuclear waste, and you can find where virtually all the radioactive waste in the country is. There are maps all over the Internet. This waste is as bad as it gets, and it’s right on the coast.”
“But if the wind changes, it won’t get to L.A.”
“Then it would go to San Diego or Palm Springs.”
“So pray for still winds.”
“Then it will settle into the Pacific and ruin the coast of California for a couple of centuries.”
“Ruin?”
“Kill every living thing in the ocean for miles and pollute the bottom and food sources.”
Luke was despondent. “It doesn’t dissipate?”
Berger sighed. “Unlike love, radiation is forever. Or at least close enough to forever to count as forever.”
Helen leaned toward Luke and put her hands on the table. “We must try to control the impact of what has happened. We must try to prevent this from ever happening again. That’s what Mr. Berger is trying to do. But I’m here to find out who did this and why. I need your help. I want you to answer some questions.”
“I don’t think you should say anything,” Katherine interrupted. “We need to get you an attorney.”
“I don’t want a damned attorney!” Luke exploded.
“Do you agree to talk to us?”
“What are you guys doing to try to catch this guy?”
“Who is it that we should be trying to catch?”
“The guy who did this. Major Riaz Khan of the Pakistani Air Force. Do you not know what happened?” Luke asked, looking at Helen, then Katherine.
“I’d like to hear it from you.”
Luke was bone tired. Being awakened from a dead sleep to race to his squadron, only to find a catastrophe under way, had begun to catch up with him. The fact that he had just been in the biggest air battle an American had participated in since Vietnam seemed unreal. Instead of throwing back drinks and telling his friends all about it, he was sitting in a brig, explaining why he should be allowed to breathe. He’d done all he could. He’d fought as hard as he could, but it hadn’t been enough. Five minutes’ more notice, and everything would have been different. Maybe if he’d listened to Brian a little more closely, he wouldn’t be having the self-doubt he felt flooding him. Now he had to try to explain it to people who had no chance of figuring it out. “You know the story . . .”
Helen didn’t respond.
Luke debated with himself, then began. “Khan and three other Pakistanis were students of my Nevada Fighter Weapons School. Last night—this morning, actually—a bunch of men in trucks broke into the base. They killed the security guards and brought in bombs. I have no idea where they got them. They loaded their airplanes and took off. I got a call from Raymond—one of my employees who happened to be outside the base—and he told me what they were doing.” He sat forward and leaned on the table. “I raced down to the airfield, and four of us climbed into our MiGs. We were under a contract to do some missile testing, and it was scheduled for later that morning. Instead we went after the Pakistanis. We got to the nuclear power plant just as they were—”
“How did you know to go to San Onofre?”
“We didn’t. We just took off and chased them down. About halfway through, the FAA guy and I—Catfish was his call sign—concluded that’s where they were headed. It should all be on the tape. You can listen to it.”
“Go on.”
“Like I said, we were too late, but we got all of them but one. Vlad got shot down.”
“Is he okay?”
“Yes. He’s fine. He landed a couple miles north on the beach.”
“Vlad, you said?” Helen asked, acutely interested in this piece of information she hadn’t previously heard. “How well did you know this Vlad? He’s Russian?”
“Yes. He’s with MAPS. The company that did our maintenance.”
Helen considered the events from a new perspective. “How do you know he wasn’t involved?”
Luke frowned. “Other than the fact that he got shot down?”
“Yes,” Li replied. “Other than that.”
“I guess by the same way I know you weren’t involved. It’s a ridiculous thought.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he had no idea the Pakistanis were even coming. My hooking up with him was my doing. I’m the one who called MAPS to ask them to work on our airplanes and help us with the upgrades. You’re right, maybe he was involved with the Trilateral Commission, or maybe he was on the grassy knoll when Kennedy—”
“You don’t have to get sarcastic.”
“Well, it’s insulting when you ask questions like that.”
“Why did they do it?”
Luke sat back and breathed in loudly, then exhaled equally loudly. “I have no idea. He clearly had—”
“Khan?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded.
Luke continued. “He clearly had an attitude toward India—that’s understandable—and he had some negative things to say about the U.S. But nothing that rose to the level where I thought he would do something like this.”
“Did he ever talk about the nuclear testing that Pakistan did?”
“Sure. He thought there was an anti-Muslim bias in U.S. foreign policy.”
“Did he ever get more specific than that?”
“No.” Luke waited for Helen to ask him another question. She was obviously thinking. Something he’d said had stimulated an idea in her mind. Luke asked, “What about the trucks? And the men who killed the security guards?”
“The trucks were parked inside large hangars at an airfield nearby.”
“What airfield?” Luke asked.
“The one at Tonopah.”
“Ours?”
“No, no, the one—nearer the town, an old one . . .”
“Right off Route 6?”
“Yes.”
Luke shook his head. Of course. They had other planes waiting for them. “Any radar tracks flying out of there?”
“They’re checking all the FAA tapes now, but no one remembers seeing anything in that area.”
“So you have no idea where they’ve gone?”
“We’ll find them, but we don’t ha
ve anything yet.” Helen sat down at the desk. “There is one thing you may know . . .”
Luke nodded.
“What kind of submarine was it?”
He sat in the chair, his elbows resting on the beat-up table, embarrassed at what his answer had to be. “I’m not sure.”
Helen Li glanced at one of the men behind her, who handed her a large folder. “What kind of submarine do you think it was?”
“It wasn’t a Boomer.”
“It wasn’t a ballistic missile submarine? You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Was it nuclear?”
Luke closed his eyes and tried to regenerate the image in his mind, but all he could see was Khan swimming toward a black structure. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I’m no submarine expert.”
“You were in the Navy.”
“I was never in submarines.”
Helen spoke softly. “I’m told that all Navy pilots are trained to recognize submarines.” She was looking at him as if he were lying, as if his inability to be clear about the submarine might in fact be evidence that he was more deeply involved than she had originally thought. “Isn’t that right?”
He bit his tongue. “It’s been a while.”
“So was the submarine you saw nuclear?”
“I don’t think so,” Luke said, his frustration building.
“Why not?”
“Nuclear submarines have a certain shape. A teardrop, rounded-bow sort of shape. At least I think so. I’m really not sure, but if there are nuclear submarines that don’t have that shape, I don’t know about them.”
“This one didn’t have that teardrop shape?”
“No.”
“It was a diesel boat?” One of the men suddenly interjected, sitting down next to her.
Luke stared at the man, who was intense and angry. “Who are you?”
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