And Into the Fire

by Robert Gleason

  “Phosphorous sucks the air right out of water,” Hamzi said. “It’s also self-feeding. It’ll burn in outer space.”

  Fahad stared at them, astonished. “I don’t believe how vulnerable these plants are,” he finally said. “It’s as if they’re begging us to burn these nuclear plants down to the ground.”

  “I’m surprised they don’t pay us to do it,” Hamzi said, agreeing.

  “Well, America is paying us, sort of,” Hasad said.

  Fahad looked confused.

  “Ever heard of petrodollars?” Hasad asked.

  “The operative word is ‘dollars,’” Hamzi said.

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “This is going to work, isn’t it?” Fahad said.

  “We’re going to do to this plant what the tsunami did to Fukushima,” Hamzi said.

  “But ours will be a tsunami of C-4, RPGs, and shaped charges,” Hasad said.

  “You are so confident, my friend,” Hamzi said facetiously. “You act as if you’ve done this before.”

  “You all saw the news footage of the terrorist assault on that Pakistani nuclear site a while back,” Hasad said. “That was one of my operations.”

  “Nor was that our only other Pakistani nuclear assault,” Hamzi said. “I must say, however, it is a relief to be attacking the infidels’ installations instead of Pakistan’s.”

  “It’s very cathartic,” Fahad agreed.

  “Still, those last Pakistani nuclear attacks were excellent practice,” Hasad said.

  “And one of them got us the bomb-grade HEU,” Hamzi said, “with which we fabricated our new nuclear weapons.”

  “The raids were exceedingly instructive, and thanks to lessons learned, we will set the HRNPS’s waste aflame, after which it will spew radioactive death for tens of thousands of years.”

  2

  He was going to arrive on time after all.

  Starting out at dawn, Jamil and his crew crossed the mighty Mississippi over the massive arch bridge connecting Memphis, Tennessee, with West Memphis, Arkansas. Named after Hernando de Soto, the explorer, in part because his body was reputedly interred in the big river, it was six lanes wide and 5,954 meters long. Jamil rolled over the great waterway in less than four minutes.

  Slipping back onto I-40, they followed the path of the old Beale Wagon Road. Built over 150 years ago by the U.S. Army, it originally used camels as pack animals for the highway’s construction. Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald finished the job in 1859, linking California to the east with the country’s first major thoroughfare. Spanning the thousand-mile stretch between the Arkansas–Mississipi River crossing and California, the road was eventually replaced by Route 66 and later I-40.

  Jamil was making good time, but he was still concerned he might not reach the Sandia nuclear weapons lab on the edge of San Francisco within thirty-six hours. Rounding Little Rock and then North Little Rock, Jamil rocketed past Conway, then Russellville, then Fort Smith, where 140 years earlier Judge Isaac Charles Parker had hanged outlaws and renegades by the score. Once, after lining up six prisoners on the long plank trap, he solemnly announced, “May God have mercy on your souls,” and with a single yank on the trapdoor’s lever, his hangman sent their earthly souls plummeting into the everlasting night.

  At Fort Smith, he ignored the old fort—now a museum—and he stopped only for gas, a quart of 20-weight, and nothing else. The men didn’t even get a restroom break. He told them to tie a knot in it or piss in their beer cans.

  He had miles to cover and highway to burn.

  In Oklahoma, he barreled through Elk City, Clinton, Henryetta and Roland, stopping in Oklahoma City again for gas with no restroom break. Blasting out of OKC like a bat out of hell, he hit the Texas panhandle and made no stops at all until Amarillo.

  New Mexico was a blur. Gallup, Santa Rosa, Albuquerque, more Indian reservations that he could not name or remember.

  Into Arizona, thundering past the Grand Canyon’s South Rim—no, he wouldn’t let them stop to gawk—past Flagstaff, Williams, and the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the world.

  He could not believe it. He was smoking into California less than a dozen hours later.

  He was going to arrive on time after all.

  3

  “All we want to do is incinerate a highly flammable firetrap.”

  —Hasad ibn Ghazi

  Hasad stood on the bridge of a thirty-five-foot trawler with Fahad and Saif al-Mazini, aka Sam Mazini. The anchored boat rocked in the river’s chop, and Hasad carefully gripped the rail. They were all dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and running shoes. The cloudless summer sky was a brilliant blue—the perfect weather for an afternoon on the Hudson.

  Mazini had bought the trawler three years earlier when Hasad had first approached him about the operation. Hasad had wanted it as a possible getaway boat. Now, standing on the bridge and holding the rail, Hasad stared in silence at the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station, ninety-five miles upriver from Times Square.

  “Why are you so sure you can get us into the plant?” Fahad asked Mazini.

  “I work the midnight shift, and my boss is a drunk. By eight o’clock, he’ll be in his office with the door shut, chugging vodka out of his Evian bottle. By ten fifteen, his head will be on his desk and he’ll be sound asleep.”

  “He doesn’t care about getting caught drunk?” Fahad asked.

  “I warned him the company’ll can his ass,” Mazini said. “The idiot said, ‘The company can go fuck itself.’”

  “Sounds to me like he needs an attitude adjustment,” Fahad observed.

  “Too late for that,” Mazini said. “He’s six weeks from retirement and just wants out. He’s also battling metastasized prostate and bowel cancer, which he blames on the job. He plans on suing the plant before he dies.”

  “So you just blow the cooling pumps?” Fahad asked. “That’s it?”

  “That’s part of it,” Mazani said. “Since I operate the reactor, I can melt the fuel rods down from inside the control room. That way we can accelerate the process.”

  “We’re really going to do it?” Fahad whispered, astonished.

  “Balls out, pedal to the metal,” Mazini said.

  “Same plan as Pakistan,” Hasad said. “We’ll have guns, silencers, ammo, and explosives. We’ll be wearing guard uniforms or white coveralls with matching lab coats. You’ll all have impeccable credentials—badges and IDs. We’ll also have ordnance stashed in storage closets. First we mine the cooling pumps with C-4, then Mazini’ll hightail it to the control room. After Mazini gets the fuel rods out of the coolant, he’ll go outside and blow the pumps remotely.”

  Fahad stared at Mazini, amazed. “How the hell did you get to be a reactor operator?”

  Mazini shrugged. “It doesn’t take much. I’ve been there fifteen years, but all you really need is a high school diploma and three years’ experience, one year of which has to be at the current plant. You need three months’ actual experience in the control room. You have to pass two or three bullshit exams. That’s it.”

  “What do we do about security guards?” Fahad asked.

  “They’re nothing. The major leagues are holding their all-star game on July Fourth, and all the security guards will be crowded around the rec room TVs.”

  “You’re kidding,” Fahad said.

  “It’s always like that, for any ball game,” Mazini said. “Look at it this way: security work at a nuclear plant is one of the most boring, uneventful, low-paying jobs in the world. Nothing happens. Nothing. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “He’s right,” Hasad said. “What we’re doing is unprecedented. They have no plan for it, and we’re going to catch them with their pants down.”

  “And if someone stumbles onto us,” Mazini said, “we’ll all have silenced pistols in our bags.”

  “And?” Fahad said.

  “We kill them all,” Hasad said.

  “I read that at Fukushima they had auxili
ary pumps and emergency diesel generators,” Fahad said.

  “Yes,” Hasad said. “We will blow them up as well.”

  “We’ll be a tsunami of fire,” Fahad said, smiling.

  “We leave no turn unstoned,” Mazini said.

  Only Hasad got his joke.

  “How is it possible?” Fahad asked. “Seriously. We’re going to render most of three states unlivable for at least twenty million people, and we’re up against almost no resistance.”

  “I’m not sure anyone can defend plants like these,” Hasad said. “After all, we aren’t trying to rob Fort Knox. All we want to do is incinerate a highly flammable firetrap. You can’t defend it if all the arsonist wants to do is set it aflame—and if he’s willing to die to do it.”

  Hasad looked at his watch.

  “I have to run. I’ve got a charter plane to catch. I have to be back in my D.C. hotel in three hours. I have a big day tomorrow.”

  PART XVI

  And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows …

  —Mark XIII: 7–8

  1

  “That’s not much of a plan.”

  —John C. Jameson

  After twenty-three straight hours at the computer, Jamie walked into the kitchen, got a mug of coffee, and sat down at the dining-room table. He was in gray gym shorts and a white T-shirt. His hair was unwashed and uncombed, his face grizzled. He wearily stared into his coffee, then took a drink.

  Everyone else was up, sitting in the living room, watching the news, reading the papers, and also having coffee. They joined him at the dining-room table.

  “Learn anything?”

  “Shaiq and General Jari are skeptical of everyone and everything, including each other,” Jamie said. “You can see it in their private e-mails. They pretend to trust each other, but that’s a façade. They can’t stand each other.”

  “But they’re working together,” Elena said.

  “They have common interests.” Jamie drank more coffee. “They’re trying to keep close tabs on Hasad ibn Ghazi, who’s the strategic and tactical planner behind this operation. They had to coerce him into accepting the final phase of the job, and they know how much he hates them. All this, of course, helps us, because they make him account for his actions in triplicate. So I know where he and his people are headed. Therefore, I also know where their targets are.”

  “Are you sure?” Elena asked.

  Jamie gave them a hint of a smile. “Why else would Hasad send his people to the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station just outside of New York City? You think his men are going there for a seminar on nuclear power?”

  “Oh, shit,” Jules said.

  “You mean Hasad won’t be going with them?” Elena asked.

  “No, after a day or two he’s leaving them at the plant and heading south to D.C.,” Jamie said.

  “How do you know he’s hitting D.C.?” Elena asked.

  “He’s registered at the Capitol Needle Hotel—a full suite,” Jamie said. “You know, the new needle tower?”

  There was a heavy silence.

  “Any idea when all this goes down?” Jules finally asked.

  “That’s the tricky part,” Jamie said. “Hasad, Shaiq, and Jari talk like it’s next week. That doesn’t sound right though. Hasad’s team has been in place for several days and is ready to rock.”

  “Also tonight the president is holding a special Fourth of July State of the Union address,” Elena pointed out. “If Hasad hates Shaiq, Caldwell, and these guys as much as you say he does, Jamie, what better time to wreak vengeance on them at the Capitol Building?”

  “He wouldn’t get his final payment,” Jamie said.

  “If Hasad hates them as much as we think he does,” Elena said, nodding thoughtfully, “his revenge will be the payment.”

  “You used to know Hasad,” Jamie said to Adara. “Is that plausible?”

  “He sure as shit doesn’t like people messing with him,” Adara said, “and he doesn’t need the final payment.”

  “He looks to have about $30 million in offshore accounts,” Jamie said, glancing at his computer.

  “In the black ops world, he’s always been high end, top of the line,” Adara said, “the best at what he does.”

  “You think he’d try to take out Shaiq and Caldwell with their own bomb?” Jamie asked.

  “Shit, yeah,” Rashid said.

  “You may be right,” Jamie said. “Those guys gave him cause. They bragged in their e-mails about how they threatened to kill his sister and fuck him out of his last payment.”

  “We’ve got to tell the feds,” Jules said. “Jamie, you can get to them. You have copies of what you’ve hacked, and you have great connections with the Bureau. You’ve done a hell of a lot of work for them.”

  “Sure, but we’ve got no real smoking-gun evidence,” Jamie said. “None of these guys implicated Shaiq and Caldwell and Jari in these coming attacks. All I have is Hasad arranging for lodgings at these locations, and for himself in D.C. I also have Shaiq and Jari bragging about how they fucked Hasad over.”

  “Nothing else?” Adara asked.

  “Oh, I do have President Caldwell’s and Shaiq’s offshore tax-free black-hole bank accounts. Shaiq has practically made that bastard a billionaire.”

  “We might be able to do something with that,” Elena said.

  “I doubt it,” Jules said. “Jamie broke about a million laws invading Shaiq’s and Caldwell’s privacy.”

  “Everything he learned,” Elena said, “is ‘fruit of the forbidden tree,’ as lawyers say, and inadmissible in court. Jamie’d probably end up doing time.”

  “I also examined the way they’re set up,” Jamie said. “It looks to me like our president could deny knowing anything about them. He could probably get away with it.”

  “Just shoot me now,” Jules said.

  “It gets worse,” Jamie said. “I found e-mail, text, and phone metadata confirming that Elena’s been communicating with Hasad.”

  “You mean Rashid,” Elena said.

  “I found time lags in those e-mails. Rashid was sending them to Hasad, who then bounced them to you, using Rashid’s server.”

  “Why?” Elena asked.

  “You were running the Agency’s Pakistan desk,” Jamie said. “Why was he doing you such a spectacular favor?”

  “He wants his baby girl back in his life,” Jules said, laughing. “The motherfucker’s still in love—after all these years.”

  “Couldn’t be anything else,” Adara said.

  “That’s right,” Jamie said, “and while I can’t prove the president, Shaiq, and Jari are connected with Hasad’s coming attacks, I can connect you to him. In fact, after Hasad launched his assaults, you’d most likely be viewed as a coconspirator.”

  “If Elena and I called the FBI,” Jules said, “and told them what we know, they’d still think we were involved in the coming attacks.”

  “They’d say we’d gotten cold feet,” Elena said, “and were now chickening out. That we hoped to curry favor with the feds by ratting out our coterrorists, thought it might help clear our names.”

  “Let me try,” Jamie said. “Anything else you want me to do?”

  “And then there’s those eleven feds we killed.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Jamie asked the two women.

  “You said you know where Hasad is staying in D.C.?” Elena asked.

  “He’s due to check into the Capitol Needle Hotel today,” Jamie said.

  “It’s on East Capitol Street about a mile and a half due east from the Capitol Building,” Jules said. “I wrote a piece on that building once.”

  “I read it,” Jamie said, nodding. “You called it ‘a monument to hubris.’”

 
; “‘And predatory greed,’” Jules said. “The condos are perfect squares, seventy-five feet on edge. The hotel is made up of suites offering a 360-degree view of D.C. It’s a hundred stories high and less than ninety feet across.”

  “Its western view includes the Capitol Building itself,” Jamie said.

  “So Hasad has a gorgeous room,” Elena said.

  “My money’s on Hasad nuking the State of the Union address tonight,” Jamie said.

  “Since his fellow terrorists plan on melting down the Hudson River nuke plant,” Jules said, “that’s where I’m heading.”

  “Hasad will want simultaneous strikes,” Elena agreed.

  “It’s how the terrorists did it on 9/11 and during the African embassy attacks,” Jules said.

  “And what will you do up there, Jules?” Jamie asked.

  “I have a sister, Sandy Meredith,” Jules said.

  “Do you trust her?” Jamie asked.

  “With anything,” Jules said.

  “I trust her as much as anyone I’ve ever known,” Elena said. “And I’ve known her since she was ten.”

  “What’s she do?” Jamie asked.

  “She’s a TV news reporter,” Elena said. “Her specialty is helicopter news broadcasts—particularly superdangerous war stories. She does a lot of work for MTN News.”

  “She gets the shots no one else can get,” Jules said, “and she’s covered every war on the planet for the last eighteen years.”

  “So have you,” Elena said, “for the print media.”

  “What do you plan on doing up there?” Jamie asked Jules.

  “If Hasad’s men try something,” Jules said, “maybe Sandy and I can spot them, and Sandy can alert the authorities. At the very least she can cover it for the news.”

  “That’s not much of a plan,” Jamie said.

  “It’s better than hanging around down here doing nothing,” Jules said.

  “Jamie, you said you thought there was a third attack scheduled,” Elena said.