She’s in love with you.
While Cassandra sang, on the six overhead movie screens—visible throughout the amphitheater—was projected the mating rituals of two bald eagles in upward flight, twisting and turning around one another, over and over and over again. In endless pursuit, in rising vertical rolls, they performed their seductive dance of courtship and foreplay, mating and procreation.
See the picture in my hand.
Portrait of my man
See him there on the right.
He’s holding me tight.
That long ago night.
See him holding me tight.
That Hiroshima night.
The eagles dissolved into a framed, close-up photograph of a young, innocent-looking Japanese woman in a white silk kimono with lowered eyes and shy demeanor. Her lover stood next to her and wore an army uniform.
Flames licked, scorched, and smoked the edges of the montage, sizzling, smoking, igniting the film’s edges until the two lovers burst into a fireball, shrouded in white mushrooming smoke.
Feel the flash
Now the blast
Now the bomb
Hiroshima’s gone.
The orchestra went full instrumental—woodwinds, strings, brass, percussion—then softened to a delicate diminuendo. Cassandra’s spotlight dimmed.
On the overhead screens, a Japanese girl stood nude, disfigured by yellowish keloid burn scars.
A hibakushu—a Hiroshima maiden.
The frame of the tortured teen froze on the screen, and a woman’s voice described her ordeal.
While the camera moved in slowly, the young girl spoke:
Almost every building was destroyed and in flames. There were people whose skin was peeling, leaving their bodies red and raw. They were screaming pitifully, and others already were dead. The street was so covered with the dead and the seriously injured that we couldn’t get through. To the west, I saw the flames coming nearer. I found myself on the riverbank. People suffering from burns were jumping into the river screaming, “The heat! The heat!” They were too weak to swim and with a last cry for help, they drowned. Soon the river was no longer a river of clear, flowing water but a choked stream of floating corpses.
Cassandra was once more in the spotlight, the musing rising in volume and amplitude.
Had me a man.
I knew he was mine.
He swore to love me
Till the end of time.
He got time—eternity.
And my scars
For a dowry.
The young, horribly ravaged Japanese woman was still visible, but now naked, full figure. She spoke:
The people were walking toward me as if in a daze, their skin blackened. They held their arms bent forward and their skin—not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies, too—hung down. Wherever I went, I met these people along the road, like walking ghosts. They didn’t look like people of this world. They had a special way of walking—very slowly. I myself was one of them.
Cassandra painfully wailed the chorus:
Feel the flash.
Now the blast.
Now the bomb.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
A nuclear fireball blazed, then dissolved into another shot of a young, hideously cicatriced Hiroshima maiden.
Who wants this woman.
Her face a mass of scars?
Who wants this little boy,
Who has no arms?
Who wants this blind girl?
She has no … eyes!
Screaming the word “eyes” at the top of her lungs, Cassandra softened and modulated her voice as she slowed and segued into the bridge:
Who wants their broken limbs,
So torn, worn, frail?
Who wants their empty eyes,
So vacant, bleak, and pale?
Who wants their desperate dreams,
Dreams destined now to fail?
Their scars, their bars,
Their hell, their jail?
Who wants their bloody arms,
Their crucifixion nails?
The spotlights faded, and Cassandra vanished into darkness. This time, the screens filled with several pair of rising, soaring eagles, each duo twisting and turning around each other, again and again and again, in their eternal ascent, then drifting languorously apart.
See the bird in the sky,
In the sky so blue.
Do you ever wonder why,
As she slowly glides by,
She’s in love with you.
She’s in love with you.
More massive fireballs, engulfed mushrooming smoke, exploded on screen, seeming to cover everything—the entire planet, life itself.
See the picture in my hand.
Portrait of my man.
See him there on the right.
He’s holding me tight.
That long-ago night.
See him holding me tight.
That Hiroshima night.
Then Cassandra wailed:
Feel the flash.
Now the blast.
Now the bomb.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
Hiroshima’s gone.
The spotlights and music dimmed. Cassandra faded into darkness, her body racking with convulsive sobs, and after a while, all was still.
Except for Elias, who was also racked by uncontrollable sobs.
What had happened to him over there in Iraq? What had he lost?
His soul?
His sanity?
And his balls?
Everything?
But now, he said to himself, it’s going to be all right. You’re gonna get back something of your own.
He still had a few hours before work. He decided to clean his guns again.
2
The sin that ye do by two and two, ye must pay for one by one.
—Rudyard Kipling, “Tomlinson”
Hasad caught I-95 near Petersburg, Virginia. He drove the van in a pounding rain up through Richmond, stopping only at off-ramp gas station, restrooms, and fast-food restaurants. In Arlington, he had his adjutants, Hamzi and Fahad, stash the men in an out-of-the-way hotel, while he made a quick trip into D.C. to once more appraise the Capitol Building.
He planned on handling that part of the operation last.
By himself.
Changing into a polo shirt, blue denim jacket, jeans, sneakers, and sunglasses, Hasad caught the Washington Metro in Crystal City, Virginia. Taking the train to the Capitol South stop, he got out and walked to First Street NE and East Capitol Street, the closest he could get to the building without a pass. He then found a nearby restaurant with a window view of the Capitol dome. Seated at an outdoor table, he ordered a cheeseburger and coffee while he reviewed his plan of attack.
* * *
Pakistan intelligence services—ISI—had first asked him to devise and present them with a plan for attacking three U.S. cities with terrorist nukes. The general’s orders were to develop a plan that would inflict maximum damage on the Americans, and Hasad had worked on it and prepared for it for almost four years. It consisted of three nuclear strikes, two of which would be incomprehensibly devastating and would cripple the U.S. economy for decades to come. The third strike would obliterate all three branches of the U.S. government.
Only one attack could accomplish that feat. Every year in January, the president, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, and the president’s cabinet officers met in the congressional chamber of the Capitol Building for the president’s State of the Union address.
In fact, this year the president would give a second State of the Union address: on July Fourth.
So there it was.
If a man were able to get a nuclear device close enough to that meeting, he could vaporize the U.S. government.
It was harder than it appeared, however. Hasad had traveled to D.C. and studied the security at the last two addresses. His five-kiloton HEU-fueled nuke had a blast radius of a third of a mile, but the security perimeter around the Capitol dome stretched well beyond that radius and was formidable. He did not see how he could get a vehicle carrying the bomb within six hundred yards of the congressional chamber, and he had to get at least that close. The Capitol Building was a veritable fortress.
Originally, it had been constructed out of sandstone, but over the subsequent decades the sandstone had eroded, and the government had replaced much of the crumbling rock with white marble. This upgraded marble-and-rock exterior was formidable enough to withstand a nuclear explosion detonated outside the bomb’s blast perimeter.
Was there any way to circumvent or slip through those defenses?
Hasad had studied ancient Greek history and literature in college, and he had been obsessed with the subject all his life. The Odyssey, in particular, haunted him—so much so that he’d come to identify with its crafty, ever-resourceful antihero, Odysseus, the man responsible for razing Troy and massacring every man, woman, and child within its walls. Hasad had once even visited the ruins of Troy in southern Turkey, sat on the remains of its amphitheater and reread his favorite passages from the Odyssey.
A high, heavily walled city, Troy had successfully resisted a bloody ten-year siege—until Odysseus conceived of the Trojan horse. A victory offering to the city, this hollow towering wooden equine hid twenty-nine silent soldiers in its belly.
After drunkenly celebrating their victory over the Greeks, the exhausted Trojans slept like the dead. The Greeks—who, during the day, had pretended to sail home—surreptitiously returned that night. The warriors in the horses’ belly then crept out through a secret, ingeniously concealed trapdoor and opened the city gates. The marauding army outside the walls poured into the city and murdered the Trojans in their inebriated slumber, burning Troy to the ground.
Hasad smiled. He, too, had a Trojan horse in place—a vehicle that could not be searched and that would be driven directly to the front entrance of the Capitol Building. He even had a man working for the car’s owner as a chauffeur-bodyguard. He had gotten the man the job almost three years ago when he had begun preparing for the operation. Hasad had worked with him many times all over the Mideast. The man had told Hasad repeatedly he was sick of the fighting and wanted to die a glorious martyr so he could ascend to Allah’s paradise and spend all eternity consuming seventy-two virgins. The man would be willing—indeed, eager—to immolate himself in the fireball’s blaze.
The man’s desire to die for the jihad was a well-established fact. On two different ops, Hasad had had to stop him physically from strapping on a suicide vest and blowing up himself, infidels, and half his own platoon.
His man was in charge of the limo’s maintenance—as well as acting as its chauffeur—and he’d arranged to have the trunk’s bottom and the rear axis heavily reinforced. Soon he would plant the nuclear device in the limo’s trunk. The moment they reached the entrance to the building, Hasad’s man would trigger the bomb electronically. Such a circuit would be impossible to jam. Moreover, the bomb had a backup detonating system. If necessary, a second man a mile or so away could set it off with a two-way radio detonator.
Even better, the vehicle carrying the concealed nuke was Shaiq ibn Ishaq’s gold-plated limo. Since it was property of the Saudi ambassador, neither the FBI nor the Secret Service had a legal right to search it.
Therefore, Shaiq would be one of the bomb’s first victims.
And General Jari? If Elena and Jules did not expose him for the treasonous bastard he was, Hasad would hunt him down himself.
And make him curse the day his mother had given him birth.
Even so, Hasad was not pleased with his new role. Like it or not, he was now the backup man, wielding the two-way radio detonator. He didn’t like being part of the mission, but he did like his overall plan. He felt the op was one of his more … creative. Among other things, he had no doubt the chauffeur-bodyguard would carry out his end. His only fear was that the man was too devoted, too fanatical, too eager to reach paradise and violate his seventy-two virgins.
He might detonate the trunk’s A-bomb before the limo reached the Capitol Building.
* * *
Hasad looked out the restaurant window, sipped his coffee, and stared wistfully at the Capitol Building. What were those lines Elena had loved to quote? Kipling?
“The sin that ye do by two and two, ye must pay for one by one.”
That was it. Elena had always been hard-nosed when it came to good and bad, right and wrong. As in the Kipling poem, she had wanted evildoers to pay for their transgressions—one by one by one. Remembering that, he began to recognize how quixotic his dream of winning her back had been. He was a terrorist in the employ of Pakistan’s ISI. She ran the CIA’s Pakistan desk. She made her living killing men like him. What had possessed him to think she might leave the Agency and run off with him—one of the most feared and hunted men on earth?
Well, better men than he had said love was a dangerous delusion.
Still, he could settle up with Shaiq, then the general.
And America.
That country had been asking for it for seventy years—seventy years of peddling the Arms of Armageddon worldwide—and now he was determined to see to it that America got a taste of what she had been so merrily retailing.
Yes, the sin that ye do by two and two, ye do pay for one by one.
* * *
He had only one regret. He was sorry he would miss the melting down of the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station.
Oh well, he thought with rare amusement, you never get it all in this life.
PART XIV
I sing thee Bomb Death’s extravagance, Death’s jubilee,
Gem of Death’s supremest blue … O Bomb I love you
—Gregory Corso, “Bomb”
1
He hoped and prayed his men wouldn’t beg to visit Graceland.
—Jamil Masoud
Starting out well before sunup, Jamil was hell-bent on making up any time lost at Donny’s Down-Home Barbeque. The men were begging for pit stops, but he kept moving. He had promises to keep.
Just past dawn, the big van reached Dandridge and entered Tennessee. At Dixie Lee Junction, he decided to circumvent Nashville. The men weren’t happy with that decision. In fact, they were openly irate. They were not only over their hangovers and demanding food, they said they wanted to listen to more country music and eat more barbeque—this time on Nashville’s Music Row and in Printer’s Alley.
To their chagrin, Jamil disdainfully ignored their pleas.
Moreover, at the one gas and restroom stop, Adman spotted a copy of The Memphis Flyer and picked it up. He and Jamil both read English, and Adman quickly spotted that on that very day Memphis was hosting both THE ELVIS AARON PRESLEY MUSIC FESTIVAL and THE WORLD’S BEST BARBEQUE COOK-OFF!
The big tent boasted countless blues bands and barbeque stands. Over three hundred barbeque vendors in all promised to cook more than three tons of pork, to say nothing of brisket, steak, beef ribs, and smoked chicken. They were competing for that much-coveted culinary prize—winner of the Whole Pig Cook-Off Championship
What the hell, Jamil thought.
Maybe he could pick up more souvenirs and T-shirts. It could help their cover, if they got pulled over.
Jamil turned off I-40 and onto the Memphis cutoff.
He hoped and prayed his men wouldn’t learn that Elvis had lived here and beg him to visit Graceland.
2
“If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
—Elias Edito
Sam and Elias had been hanging out for months now. Since Elias was in security, he and his colleagues
frequently discussed the different ways terrorists could circumvent the guards and melt down the plant. It was part of his job to worry about such things, and he’d developed a macabre fascination with these “intrusion-meltdown scenarios” as they were called in the antiterrorism textbooks.
And now he had a real expert with whom he could share his obsession.
Elias loved listening to Mazini as he explained at length and in detail how easy it would be for well-organized, well-funded terrorists—after breaking into the plant—to quickly incinerate the plant’s fuel rods and spent waste, turning the entire Tri-State area into a radioactive death trap.
One day when he met Mazini at a coffee shop, Mazini shared some of these speculations with his newfound friend. Since nuclear power operations were his specialty, Mazini was a bottomless trove of technological minutiae.
Elias poured more coffee. “Is the spent fuel really as lethal as I’ve heard?” Elias asked.
Sam nodded. “Radioactive iodine hits the thyroid like a heat-seeking missile. Cesium attacks the soft tissues. Strontium builds up in the bones and teeth and is long-lived. It’ll spend a full thirty years poisoning you.”
“I read that the stuff is radioactive for 100,000 years.”
“Depends on the isotope. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of twenty-four thousand years. Cesium-135 can last 2.3 million years.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have closed the Yucca Mountain central storage site,” Elias said.
“Maybe, but the truth is, in the long run, no site is safe. Eventually everything leaks, and security deteriorates. Also the longer the stuff is stored, the more valuable to nuclear terrorists it becomes.”
“Why?” Elias said.
“After a few hundred years, the oxides and compounds disintegrate, and the pure nuclear bomb-fuel is all that’s left. What used to be a storage tunnel in a mountain for nuclear waste is now a plutonium bomb-fuel mine. Nuclear traffickers will burrow into those mountain tunnels like miners to steal all that plutonium-239.”
“These Americans are evil,” Elias said. “We ought to melt this plant right down to the ground.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Mazini said, “but we would have to do it right.”
“Absolutely. If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
And Into the Fire Page 20