“Dom—”
“Shut up and give me your gun. Can you handle your pack?” Brian nodded. Dominic handed it to him. “You’re looking green, bro. Sure you’re okay to move?”
“We have a choice?”
“No.”
“Watch the window, give me the play-by-play.”
“Got it.”
Dominic laid both Brownings on the desk, looked around the room. He grabbed Almasi’s desk chair and shoved it toward the door, then did the same with a nearby side table. He bulldozed them through the door, down the hall, then tipped them down the stairs. They tumbled to the bottom and landed in a heap.
“How’re we doing?” he called.
“Nothing yet—wait. Got a body coming out, circling west. He’s got the AK.”
Dominic went into the first guest bedroom and grabbed a nightstand, a floor lamp, and a chair, all of which he shoved down the stairs.
“What the hell are you doin’, Dom?”
“Homemade barricade.”
He repeated the process with the next guest bedroom, then returned to the office. He grabbed his backpack and slipped it on, then grabbed up the Brownings and removed the noise suppressors, then shoved them into his belt.
At the window, Brian said, “You go, cowboy. The other three just came out. . . . Two heading for the porch, another around the front. First one’s coming around the east side now. Hey, I found a surprise in the closet.” He pointed to the corner, where a shotgun was leaning. “Twelve-gauge Mossberg 835. Six rounds loaded.”
Dominic stepped to Brian and gently opened the window. He helped Brian out and held on until he was splayed across the shingles. Dominic said, “I’m going to wait until they’re all in the house. I’ll yell for more ammo. You hear that, you go. How long will you need?”
“Two minutes.”
“I’ll be right behind you. We can’t have them on our tails.”
Dominic closed the window, turned around, snatched up the shotgun, and headed into the hall. From the west-side sitting room came the sound of breaking glass. Down in the foyer, something pounded into the door. Then again, then a third time. The doorjamb cracked, bulged inward. Dominic pumped the shotgun and dropped to his belly and eased the shotgun’s barrel an inch through the banister uprights. In the sitting room he heard a chair leg squelch on wood. A head peeked around the corner, pulled back, then returned. Dominic froze. He held his breath. Nothing to see here, asshole. The pounding on the door became louder, more insistent. The man in the sitting room took one last peek around the corner, then sidestepped, his AK up and tracking along the balcony. He sidestepped one of the toppled nightstands, then went back to the door. He took his left hand off the AK, reached for the doorknob.
Dominic adjusted the shotgun, laid the front site over the man’s chest, and fired. The man staggered backward and slammed into the door and slumped down. Footsteps pounded across the porch and faded away. A few moments later came the sound of breaking glass. One down, three left, Dominic thought. A thought popped into his head. He got up, ran back to the office, and opened the window. He handed one of the Brownings to Brian. “In case they decide to climb.” He closed the window and returned to the hall.
Downstairs, nothing was moving. A full minute passed, then somewhere to Dominic’s right he heard a whispered voice. To the left a hand appeared around the corner and tossed something up the stairs. Grenade, Dominic thought even as it bounced onto the balcony. The shape told him it wasn’t a frag but a flash-bang. They didn’t want to risk killing Almasi. Too late, boys. Dominic pushed himself up, rolled right through the office door, and clapped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. There was a ringing boom. White light flashed through Dominic’s eyelids. He felt the floor beneath him tremble. He rolled back onto his belly and wriggled back to the door. To his left, a figure was charging up the stairs, firing as he went. Bullets pounded into the wall. The man reached the top of the stairs and stopped, crouching behind the corner post. Dominic drew the Browning from his belt, took aim, and fired. The bullet tore through the man’s exposed kneecap. He screamed and tumbled backward down the stairs. Dominic changed back to the shotgun, got up, raced down the hall. He fired at a head peeking around the sitting-room entrance. Miss. He pumped another round into the chamber, swiveled right, and fired from the hip, hitting the tumbling man center-mass. He landed on the foyer floor and was still. Dominic spun left, ducked into the first guest bedroom, dropped to his belly.
“Almost out of ammo!” he shouted. “Get me some!”
Dominic checked his watch. Two minutes. He took stock. Almost two full mags for the Browning and six rounds left in the shotgun. He rolled left, then got to his feet and peeked around the corner. In the foyer, nothing moved. He took a step out, keeping behind the corner post. He checked once more, then spun and sprinted down the hall. Bullets peppered the wall behind him. He hunched over, covered the last eight feet, and ducked into Almasi’s master bedroom.
“Bro, where’s that damned ammo!” Dominic shouted.
He counted to ten, then stepped out, fired two blasts into the foyer, then closed the office door before stepping back into the bedroom. He slammed the door shut loud enough that it wouldn’t be missed. Once they made it up the stairs, they’d have to clear the guest bedrooms, then the office, leaving Almasi’s bedroom for last. The question was, how long would that take? How long before one of them went back outside to cut off the window exits?
He locked the door and pressed his ear to the wood. One minute passed, then two. From the foyer he heard the scrape of furniture on tile. Then the creak of a stair tread. Brian crept to the window, opened it, and climbed out onto the roof. He left the window open. He looked around, saw no one. He crouch-walked to the edge. It was a ten-foot drop. He stuffed the shotgun between his pack and his shoulder blades, then rolled onto his belly and let his legs and torso dangle. He let go. As soon as his feet impacted the ground, he bent his knees and rolled. He climbed to his feet and sprinted around the house to the east side, then mounted the porch and found the broken window. He slipped inside and crept across the sitting room to the foyer. He peeked around the corner. On the balcony, only one figure was visible. He stood, back toward Dominic, at the threshold of the second guest bedroom. Dominic stepped out, picked his way through the jumble of furniture to the center of the foyer. He drew the Browning, took aim, and shot the man in the back of the head. Even as he was falling, Dominic sidestepped and ducked beneath the stairs. He holstered the Browning, drew the shotgun.
Footsteps pounded on the balcony above, then stopped. The footsteps resumed, this time moving cautiously. With a splintering crack, a door flew open. Office, Dominic thought. Thirty seconds passed. Footsteps came out of the office, then paused. The master-bedroom door was kicked open.
See the window, dickhead. . . .
Another thirty seconds passed.
“Yebnen kelp!” a voice barked.
Dominic’s Arabic was mediocre, but the tone told him the phrase was a curse, somewhere along the lines of shit or sonofabitch.
Footsteps pounded down the hall, then down the stairs, then onto the tiled foyer. He heard the rattle of a lock being disengaged. Dominic crab-walked two steps, brought up the shotgun, and blasted the man in the back of the legs. The impact shoved him against the door. His AK clattered to the tiles as he slumped sideways. Dominic stood up and tossed away the shotgun. He drew the Browning and walked over to the man, who lay writing and groaning on the floor. He saw Dominic and put up his hands. “Please ...”
“Too late for that.”
Dominic shot him in the forehead.
He found Brian sitting on the ground behind the barn, his back resting against the slope. He saw Dominic and raised his hand in greeting. “Get ’em?”
“Every last one. How’re you doing?”
Brian gave a wobbly shake of his head. His face was ashen and glistening with sweat. “Got a confession to make.”
“What?”
&nbs
p; “Bullet missed my ribs, went clean through. It’s in my liver, Dom.”
“Jesus, are you sure?” He moved to open Brian’s shirt, but Brian waved him off.
“The blood’s really dark, almost black. Hollow-point probably shredded my liver. I can barely feel my legs, too.”
“I’ll get you to the hospital.”
“No. Too many questions.”
“Fuck you. Zuwarah’s ten miles away.”
Dominic knelt down, grabbed Brian’s opposite arm, and pulled him across his shoulders. He got his feet under him and straightened up. “You okay?”
“Yep,” Brian grunted.
The slog back up the hill took ten minutes, then ten more minutes for Dominic to pick his way down the opposite slope. When he reached the quarry floor, he started jogging toward the Opel. “You still with me?” Dominic asked.
“Uh-huh.”
He reached the Opel, then dropped to his knees and lowered Brian to the ground. From the backseat, Bari called, “What happened?”
“He’s shot. Is there a hospital in Zuwarah?”
“Yes.”
Dominic opened the back door and used his pocketknife to cut Bari free. Together they lifted Brian into the backseat.
“You know where it is?” Dominic asked Bari, who nodded. “Then you drive. Take one wrong turn and I’ll blow you away, understood?”
“Yes.”
Bari climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Dominic ran around the car and got into the backseat with Brian. “Go, go!”
70
THEIR TARGET was not in São Paulo proper but eighty miles north of the city and the center of Brazil’s exploding petro-economy. The largest refinery in all of Brazil, the Paulinia REPLAN facility processed nearly 400,000 barrels of oil per day, some twenty million gallons. Enough, Shasif Hadi had read, to fill more than thirty Olympic-sized swimming pools. Of course, as Ibrahim had told him during their initial briefing, sabotaging such a facility was no easy task. There were myriad safety redundancies to be considered, not to mention the physical security measures. Getting onto the refinery grounds would be no hurdle at all (the highest perimeter fence was ten feet tall), but once inside, there was little they could do. Explosives could destroy collection tanks, but these were spaced too far apart to hope for a domino effect. Similarly, the facility’s hundreds of control valves (officially known as ESDs, or emergency shutdown devices), which regulated the flow of chemicals to the labyrinth of distillation columns, fractionation towers, cracking units, and blending and storage tanks, were virtually invulnerable, having been recently refitted with something called a Neles ValvGuard system, which was, in turn, regulated from the refinery’s control center, which from their earlier reconnaissance trips they knew was belowground and heavily fortified. Shasif understood none of these particulars, but the essence of Ibrahim’s point was clear: The odds against causing a catastrophic leak within the Paulinia REPLAN were astronomical. But that word—within—Shasif reminded himself, was pivotal, wasn’t it? There were other ways to start the dominoes falling.
As planned, each of them had his own separate hotel, as well as his own rental car. Leaving at staggered times throughout the morning, each man took the SP-348 Highway out of São Paulo and drove north to Campinas, twenty miles south of Paulinia. At noon they met at a restaurant called the Fazendão Grill. Shasif was the last to arrive. He spotted Ibrahim, Fa’ad, and Ahmed sitting in a corner booth, and made his way over to them.
“How was the drive?” Ibrahim asked.
“Uneventful. And you?”
“The same.”
“It’s good to see all of you,” Shasif said. He looked around the table and got nods in return.
They’d been in country for five days, each with his own tasks to complete in São Paulo. The explosives—Czech-made Semtex H—had been shipped by commercial carriers into the country piecemeal, two ounces at a time, in order to lessen the chances of interception. Reliable as Semtex was, it also carried with it a dangerous flaw: a chemical taggant added during the manufacturing process to make its presence more detectable to “sniffers.” Prior to 1991 no such taggant was added, but these odorless batches had a maximum shelf life of ten years, so while the year 2000 was a societal milestone, it was also a watershed for terrorists, who either had to manufacture their own non-taggant explosives or devise special handling techniques for newer batches, which were perfused with either glycol dinitrate or a compound known as 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane, or DMDNB, both of which were “slow-rate vaporizers” that were perfume to a sniffer’s nose.
Luckily for Shasif and the others, they needed only sixteen ounces of explosives for their purposes, so the piecemeal shipments had taken only a few weeks. From this pound of Semtex they had formed six shaped charges—five each of two ounces, and one of six ounces.
“I performed my last survey of the facility yesterday. As we’d hoped, the diversion berm and canal aren’t finished yet. If we do our job correctly, there will be nothing they can do to stop it.”
“How many gallons, do you think?” This from Ahmed.
“Hard to say. The line is fully functional, and the capacity is almost three-point-two billion gallons a year—almost nine million gallons a day. From there the calculations become complex. Suffice it to say, it will be enough for our purposes.”
“No change in the exfiltration plan?” asked Fa’ad.
Ibrahim looked hard at him. He lowered his voice. “No change. Do not forget, though: Live or die, we must succeed. Allah’s eyes are upon us. If He wills it, all of us or some of us will survive. Or not. Those concerns are secondary, is that understood?”
One by one, each man nodded.
Ibrahim checked his watch. “Seven hours. I’ll see you there.”
After the initial excitement of their first getaway weekend and the flush of lovemaking faded, she began distancing herself from him, staring out the window, declining his suggestion that they go out, allowing just the right amount of pout to her lips. . . . After thirty minutes of this, Steve asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Allison replied.
“It’s something. I can see it on your face. You’re doing that thing with your lip.” He sat down beside her on the bed. “Tell me.”
“It’s stupid. It’s nothing.”
“Allison, please. Have I done something wrong?”
This was the question she’d been waiting for. Kindhearted Steve. Wimpy Steve, so worried about losing her. “Sure you won’t laugh?”
“I promise.”
“I was talking to my sister Jan yesterday. She said she saw this documentary, something on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic, I think. It was all about the geology of—”
“Of where I work? Allison, I told you—”
“You promised you wouldn’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. Okay, go ahead.”
“She said a lot of scientists are against the whole thing. There are protests all the time. Legal stuff, trying to shut it down. They saw there are earthquake faults all around that area. And they were talking about the groundwater, if there’s a leak.”
“There’s not going to be any leaks.”
“But what if ?” Allison insisted.
“The slightest leak would be detected. They’ve got sensors everywhere. Besides, the water table is a thousand feet down.”
“But the soil—isn’t it soft or something? Permeable?”
“Yes, but there are redundant systems, levels upon levels, and the stuff will be sealed in casks. You should see these things, they’re like—”
“I’m worried about you. What if something happens?”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Can’t you get another job? If you and I . . . I mean, if we keep going . . . I’d worry all the time.”
“Listen, right now it’s not even operational. Hell, we’re just now getting around to doing a mock delivery.”
“What’s that?”
<
br /> “Just a simulation. A trial run. A truck comes in, we offload the cask. You know, check all the procedures to make sure everything’s working like it should.”
Allison sighed, folded her arms.
Steve said, “Hey, I’m not going to lie. I think it’s kinda cool you’re worried about me, but there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Really? Here, look at this.” Allison walked to the nightstand, grabbed her purse, and came back. She rummaged inside for a moment, then pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Jan e-mailed me this.” She handed it to him.
Though only an artist’s cutaway rendering, it was detailed enough to show the facility’s main level, two sublevels, and far below that, through layers of brown and gray “rock,” a blue horizontal stripe labeled “water table.”
“Where did she get this?” Steve asked.
“She Googled it.”
“Ally, there’s a lot more to the place than this . . . cartoon.”
“I know that. I’m not stupid.” She got up, walked to the balcony window, and stared out.
“I didn’t mean that,” Steve said. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“So is Jan wrong? Are you telling me nobody at that place worries about this stuff?”
“Of course we do. It’s serious business. We all know that. The DOE has—”
“The what?”
“Department of Energy. It’s done years of research on this. Spent tens of millions just on feasibility studies alone.”
“But that documentary—it kept talking about these rifts in the ground. Weak spots.”
Steve hesitated. “Ally, I can’t really talk about—”
“Fine, forget it. I’ll just stop worrying. How’s that?”
Allison could feel him standing there, staring at the back of her head. He would be wearing that scolded-puppy-dog look and have his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. She let the silence hang in the air. After thirty seconds, he said, “Okay, if it’s that important to you—”
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