And Into the Fire

by Robert Gleason

  At the bag’s bottom, he found the olive-drab army surplus ammo box. It was secured with a combination lock. Lifting it onto the desk, he opened it. Inside was a liter bottle of a 101-proof Wild Turkey and two six-packs of half quart Colt 45 in cans.

  If you’re going to greet the Reaper tonight, you might as well meet him with a grin on.

  Almost immediately, Elias spotted Fahad’s men on the plant grounds below. They had broken up into two-to-three-man groups, which were spread out along the main roadway over an area of around 150 yards. Dressed in white tech clothes and guards’ uniforms, their presence in no way looked out of place. He did not see how they would attract undue attention.

  The men had earpieces and part of his assignment was to advise them of any approaching trouble.

  “So far so good,” he said softly. “The guards haven’t reported anything. They’re probably asleep by now.”

  Two groups were now moving casually toward the Auxiliary Building. Four more men were heading toward the two Reactor Containment Buildings on the right of the Auxiliary Building. Two more men strolled past the Turbine Building and went into the huge sheet-steel shed, housing the belowground spent fuel rod storage pools. Behind and to the right was the even larger sheet-steel warehouse-sized shed containing the aboveground nuclear waste storage ponds, which two more men were approaching. The final group continued on to the dry casks, containing partially cooled spent rods. Those eight silos were on an aboveground concrete platform. They were out in the open.

  4

  “We get the chance to film a group of heavily armed terrorists turn a nuclear power plant into a raging volcano of radioactive fire.”

  —Jules Meredith

  Jules sat in the jump seat of an AS350 AStar news chopper that was parked at a small helipad eight miles south of the Hudson River nuclear plant. Her friend, colleague, and sister, Sandy Meredith, stood next to the chopper staring up at her. She was dressed, like Jules, in blue jeans and a T-shirt. Sandy wore a Windbreaker instead of a black hooded sweatshirt. They both wore baseball caps—Jules the Yankees, Sandy the Mets. Jules, however, wore hers on under her hood and also sported wrap-around shades.

  An independent producer-reporter who worked primarily for MTN, the world’s largest cable news network, Sandy specialized in filming impossible-to-get segments, particularly combat footage. The two sisters had covered wars all over the world but mostly in the Mideast—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Yemen, Gaza, Israel, and Afghanistan. They’d flown in thousands of news and military choppers during their journalism careers, sometimes with Elena.

  “You know I could go to prison for this,” Sandy said with a wry smile as she swung up into the cockpit and dropped down into the pilot’s seat.

  “I have a 9mm Wilson,” Jules said. “We’ll tell them I held it on you the whole time.”

  “And my own reason for going along with you—other than another opportunity to lie to the police, abet an international terrorist, and face certain death or life in prison—is…?”

  “If we fail, we get the chance to film a group of heavily armed terrorists turn a nuclear power plant into a raging volcano of radioactive fire,” Jules explained.

  “And this is also where I get the chance to have a squadron of Phantom jets blast forty or fifty heat-seeking missiles up my ass, blowing me straight into hell and gone with flames shooting out of every gaping orifice of my body?”

  “If we get there in time, we can transmit out footage to the military and the state police. We can stop these guys.”

  “We could alert the authorities now,” Sandy said.

  “Won’t work. Jamie tried to convince the FBI and failed.”

  “The FBI didn’t believe Jamie?” Sandy asked, shocked. “He built their whole antiterrorist computer system.”

  “They think we’re the terrorists. We’re the only ones they want to catch and kill.”

  “Jamie couldn’t even convince his friend at the Bureau?”

  “He said it was like talking to an Easter Island statue.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Sandy said again, still incredulous.

  “He described their response as ‘a black hole of skepticism,’ and he was talking to an old friend way the fuck up the food chain.”

  “Okay,” Sandy said, “suppose the feds are wrong. Suppose the terrorists do hit this place and melt it down. What happens then?”

  “HRNPS will spew fallout, soot, fiery debris, poison, and nuclear death all over the Northeast, fatally irradiating a minimum of twenty million people, transmogrifying the Tri-State area into a terminally toxic waste dump for maybe a hundred thousand years.”

  “In other words, I also get to die from radiation sickness?”

  “Not if the terrorists kill us first.”

  “I like it,” Sandy said, giving her sister an insidious grin. “In the immortal words of Gary Gilmore, ‘Let’s do it.’”

  She started the big Lycoming LTS101 turboshaft engine and the three-blade Starflex rotor began turning. Sandy gradually opened the throttle, cranking up the RPMs. After she lifted the left-hand control lever and the chopper pitched forward, she partially depressed the left pedal with her foot. Lifting the control lever higher and pushing the left pedal again, the chopper rose. Even as she adjusted the vertical stick protruding between her legs, she continued to work the control lever and pedals. Slowly, the chopper leveled out. Heading due north, she eased the stick left, heading northwest toward the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station.

  PART XIX

  And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

  —Revelation 6:8

  1

  Hamzi shot him in the face between his two pressed hands.

  Mazini sat in front of the big board in the control room. He’d spent the last half hour lifting fuel rods out of their coolant and locking them into place. Soon they would catch fire, and all hell would break loose.

  Inside the bunker-like control room, he heard the door buzzer. Someone wanted to enter. Mazini got up and buzzed him in. It was Hamzi, dressed in the white lab clothes of a tech. Mazini’s two assistant operators were also approaching, returning from their dinner break. Hamzi walked up to Raymond first, reaching out as if to shake hands.

  “Raymond,” Mazini began, “meet—”

  As Raymond leaned toward Hamzi, smiling, Hamzi removed a silenced Glock from under his white lab coat and shot him an inch and a half above the left eye. The other assistant, recognizing what was happening, immediately pressed both hands against his face and shouted, “No, God, no!”

  Hamzi shot him in the face between his two pressed hands. When the hands dropped, Mazini saw he’d hit the man squarely in the center of his face, giving him a bloody gaping hole where his nose had been.

  Mazini felt a twinge of regret for the dead men, but only for a second. Hell was about to break out in the HRNPS sooner than he expected. The three men from the Auxiliary Building—also dressed in white tech attire—were coming through the side door, guns cocked, locked, and pressed against their legs. They had already mined the pumps and generators in that other building.

  Soon hard, sharp, muffled shots were popping all around the No. 1 Containment Building. Finally, the men in his building gave him the thumbs-ups and he headed for the front door. Their mission was also accomplished, and it was time to move on.

  They exited the front and side doors in small groups in an attempt to appear inconspicuous—to blend in with the night shift. Hamzi had the remote detonator under his coat along with his own Glock, stuffed under his front waistband. Up in his gun tower, Elias, acting as the chief coordinator, would soon give him the signal, and Hamzi would press the hot button.

  2

  Heartbreak dead ahead.

  Hunched aerodynamically over the handle bars, blasting up I-95 on Jamie’s Kawasaki Ninja H2, Elena Moreno was riding the fastest commercially made street bike in the world. In an ebony leather jacke
t, matching pants, and a jet-black helmet with a darkly tinted windscreen, she looked like a kill-crazed ninja. All she could feel was the gale-force wind hammering her helmet, windscreen, and shoulders. All she could hear was its roar in her ears and the thunder roll of her blood.

  Shifting into fourth, she cranked the throttle up, up, up. Hazarding a glance at the speedometer, she saw it was now well over 100, then 110, then 120, then 130 mph. Keeping her eyes on the center line and the vehicles ahead, she struggled to stay focused. She had to do this full throttle—screw the fuzz, the highway, the cars, the bomb, death itself. Elena was now doing 160 on a crowded D.C. interstate. Lurching in and out of traffic, passing speeding automobiles like they were roadkill, she heard only the blare of their angry horns, her tires screaming, the engine howling, the wind’s roar, and the wild wailing of her soul.

  Fuck ’em all but six and save them for pallbearers.

  One heart-stopping, nerve-fraying, hair-frying turn and she was rocketing north up I-395. Her supercharged ninja bike—with its 210-horsepower engine—was barely five hundred pounds and had a max speed that easily topped 200 mph. With the power and torque of a race car and one-fifth the weight, it could go from 0 to 65 mph in two and a half seconds.

  If the rider could hold on.

  And, oh, Elena could hold on.

  Slowing to 80 mph, she swung onto Pennsylvania Avenue, burning rubber all the way. Angling north onto Fourth Street, she spotted the Capitol Needle Hotel—a towering, ultrathin hotel edifice of glass and steel—on East Capitol Street. According to Jamie, on the penthouse floor, with a 360-degree view of D.C., her old college boyfriend, Hasad ibn Ghazi, was waiting with a nuclear detonator in his hand.

  Heartbreak dead ahead.

  Slowing, she turned into the hotel entrance. Limos were lined up, drivers helping their affluent employers out of the vehicles while hotel workers rounded up their bags.

  Elena went straight to the head of the limo line, jumped free of the bike, and yanked off her helmet. With her short, platinum-bleached hair, Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses and raccoon eye makeup—a style Jules derided as “hooker couture”—she was not recognizable as the violent fugitive whose photo was now adorning every newspaper and TV screen worldwide.

  And anyway, when she shook hands with the uniformed doorman and he glimpsed the five folded $100 bills in his fist, he was instantly oblivious to her face. All he saw was the currency.

  “Leave it here up front,” Elena said. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll attend to it personally,” he said, surreptitiously pocketing the cash.

  “More where that came from,” Elena whispered sweetly, kissing his cheek.

  She entered the big automatic glass doors and crossed the palatial lobby toward the penthouse elevator.

  3

  One by one, Fahad dropped them into the cooling pools.

  By the time Fahad—dressed in white laboratory clothes—entered the vast, sprawling sheet-steel shed housing the belowground spent fuel pool, the last of the sharp silenced pops had died away and the building was pacified. A duffel bag bulging with a dozen Krakatoa shaped charges hung from his shoulder. The platform overlooking the sunken pool was a dozen feet above the ground. Fahad took the steel steps two at a time to the catwalk encircling it and overlooking the two silo-sized ponds.

  This one was at least twenty feet across. Its exterior walls were reinforced concrete, four and a half feet thick and twenty-five feet deep. A dozen feet of water covered the hundreds of spent fuel assemblies, each of which held over two hundred spent fuel rods.

  He took the first of the Krakatoa charges out of his bag. The size of Coke cans, they were each painted a dark gray and had thick, heavy lead slugs duct taped around the armor-piercing end of their copper-plated noses. The extra weight would assure that the charge—after dropping through a dozen feet of H2O—would reach the spent fuel assemblies with the business end pointed into them. Then when the charge exploded and the copper plate metamorphosed into a sharply pointed armor-piercing artillery shell, it would blast through the spent fuel assemblies and protective cladding with unstoppable kinetic energy.

  At the bottom of the bag, Fahad had a dozen phosphorous incendiary charges as well. They would guarantee the assemblies were set aflame.

  The first of the Krakatoa charges was preconnected with twenty feet of insulated copper wire affixed to the charge. When he hooked it up to his detonator and pressed the button, the explosion would sympathetically detonate the pool’s other impact-fused charges.

  He began removing charges from their seabag. One by one, Fahad dropped them into the cooling pools.

  4

  “The Divine Hand of Manifest Destiny.”

  —Governor Walter G. Arnett

  In the late afternoon, Jamil and his two friends stood at the top of a hill. At its base a mile or so away was the Teller Lab. They studied it through binoculars. The two Saudi gifts to the lab were still concealed by the black velvet shrouds.

  The five men were tired but pleased.

  The lab’s park area was packed with almost a thousand people seated in grandstands, many of them employees who were able to leave their job for a few hours. This was California, and most of the crowd was dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and sandals. The overflow stood under trees or sat on blankets on the grass. The weather was bright, sunny, and close to a hundred degrees. On a small grandstand behind the podium, two dozen dignitaries were seated. The men wore summer suits of soft gray, pale green, and powder blue. The governor—the Honorable Walter G. Arnett—looked particularly distinguished in his gray goatee and mustache, white linen suit, red tie, and a Panama hat of bleached straw. The women were decked out in summer dresses and heels. Even under the three big beach-style umbrellas—two at the ends of the grandstand and one in back—the dignitaries sweated profusely. Several cooled themselves with fans.

  At the podium, Secretary of Energy Harold Reeves was just finishing his speech. Dressed in a light-blue seersucker suit, he was so hot he’d been forced to loosen his tie and fan himself continuously. He’d just finished extolling the work of the employees and was now thanking them for “their irreplaceable labor on the front lines of geopolitical deterrence.”

  The local radio station was broadcasting the speeches in the lab’s park, and Jamil and his friends could hear them on their black Sony ICF-38 radio.

  “The Edward Teller Lab keeps the peace,” Reeves thundered, “by fearlessly forging the nuclear sword. Americans will sleep safe in their beds tonight because you are extending and expanding our nuclear might.”

  After the energy secretary finished, the managing director of the lab, Howard Roseman, went to the podium. A balding man with a bulging paunch, he was dressed in a light-weight lemon-colored suit, a yellow shirt, and green tie. Summoning all the hype and hyperbole at his command, he went on to extoll the governor for his work in the aerospace industry before taking office, as well as the nearly twenty years he’d spent working for Hardrock Enterprises International, the world’s nuclear contractor.

  Tall, craggy, rugged-looking, Governor Arnett stood, took off his hat, placed it on his chair, and went to the podium. Raising the adjustable mike until it was at mouth level, he began with the usual pro forma acknowledgments. After thanking the various personages, including the energy secretary, San Francisco’s mayor, and the lab’s directors and employees, he addressed the lab’s purpose, its raison d’etre:

  “Why are we celebrating this glorious day at the world’s foremost research center for nuclear arms? The same reason our close friend and ally, Shaiq ibn Ishaq, the dear and trusted Saudi ambassador to the United States, is honoring the lab with two magnificent gifts. He is donating them to the lab as symbols of his nation’s love for the American people and out of respect for those hard at work at the Edward Teller Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, who are so resolutely defending the free world.

  “We are also here to honor the great patriot who, 175 years ago, shed so much blood
and treasure to set California free, to throw off the yoke of Mexican oppression. We are here to honor the great James K. Polk, one of our country’s most audaciously farseeing presidents, a man who envisioned an America whose amber waves of grain and whose purple mountains’ majesty would stretch across the fruited plain from sea to shining sea, a man who recognized the Divine Hand of Manifest Destiny and who grasped it, who refused to be a doormat for Mexican aggression, and who stood up to the Mexican tyrant on our southern border.

  “We are here to honor the other great American patriots who also struggled to free California—those intrepid heroes of the great Bear Flag Revolt, to whom we Californians owe so much; Captain John Fremont—author, explorer, man of war; James Sutter, who—”

  Suddenly, the energy secretary came to the podium, took the governor’s arm, and interrupted.

  “Governor, if I may interrupt for a moment. As we all know, the president has assembled the Senate, Congress, the cabinet, and most of the country’s military and political leadership for a message of overwhelming national security importance. In the interests of national security and all those assembled, we are going to pipe his speech in over our loudspeaker system. Here now is the president of the United States.…”

  5

  They were about to pulverize those silos with some very heavy ordnance.

  When Amir entered the massive sheet-steel shed, which housed the vertical aboveground spent fuel pool, he was relieved to see his men had already disposed of the six techs working inside. They were dragging their bloody bodies into a corner.

  After his men sequestered the bodies, Amir ordered them to leave.

  He and Mustafa now had the building to themselves, which was just as well. When they finished with the big concrete storage silos, no one was going to want to be near them.