“Nothing but the inbound tanker we’ve been tracking since eleven. She’s still ten miles out.”
They’d met their control officer, Major Pedro Ramirez, in a crappy hotel in Nuevo Laredo two days ago. All of them had flown up from Caracas the week before, and had taken different routes to reach the border town.
“We have a car outside with U.S. plates and the necessary paperwork for the three of you,” Ramirez said. He was a short, narrow-faced special operations officer in SEBIN.
They’d worked for him before, and although Campinella had a great deal of respect for the man, he didn’t trust him.
“You will drive to Corpus Christi where you will pick up the boat, go out into the Gulf at Port Aransas and from there back inside at Port O’Connor.”
They’d studied the relatively simple in-and-out mission before they’d left Caracas, and the three of them, especially Campinella, had been chosen in part because of their good English, but also because they were expendable.
“Weapons and explosives?” Campinella had asked.
“Aboard the boat.”
A nautical chart showing the Intracoastal Waterway and the first ten miles of the Colorado River was spread out on one of the beds.
Ramirez pointed to a bridge. “County Road 521. You will turn the boat around and tie up there. It’s not likely there’ll be any traffic at that time of the morning.”
“How far to the transformer yard?”
“Two miles upriver, on the west side of the power plant,” Ramirez said. “You can’t miss it. It’s protected by a twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire.”
“Is the fence electrified?”
“No, nor will there be any guards.”
“Estupido,” Campinella had muttered.
“Sí,” Ramirez agreed. “Even after everything that has happened to them it hasn’t occurred to anyone to take better care with something so valuable and so vulnerable.”
They were to hike upriver, cut their way through the fence, and place explosives on three of the six high-voltage step-up transformers which increased the nuclear power plant’s low voltage to two-point-five megavolts that was sent through the Texas Interconnect transmission lines. These huge transformers, each nearly as big as a Greyhound bus, were manufactured by Urja Techniques in India, and couldn’t be replaced in under two years. In Campinella’s estimation it was another bit of American stupidity.
“What if we are caught?” Gomez asked. Like Campinella and Ricardo, he was slightly built and dark.
Ramierz had given him a hard stare. “Don’t,” he said.
When they had crossed the border without incident and were on their way over to Corpus Christi, one hundred sixty miles to the northeast, Campinella had explained what the major had meant.
“We’re carrying nothing that could identify us as Venezuelans. We’re Zeta soldiers from the Mexican drug cartel, pissed off that a fifty-million-dollar shipment of coke was seized two weeks ago by the border patrol. This is payback time.”
“But after the attacks in North Dakota, and then the blackouts the FBI won’t be that stupid,” Gomez had argued.
“That’s right. And it’s why we can’t be caught. Alive. Nothing must link us to Caracas.”
“They will know anyway,” Gomez said.
“But they won’t be able to prove it,” Campinella told them.
Except for the occasional lit ICW marker the night was dark. Port Lavaca well to the north showed up only as a faint glow in the sky, and the other small towns up the bay toward the port were only pinpricks.
At twenty knots Campinella figured to reach the bridge by two, the transformer yard a half hour later, a half hour to cut through the fence and place the thirty kilos of Semtex and acid fuses, and another twenty minutes to get back to the boat. By three thirty at the latest, when the explosions came, they would be on their way back to the Gulf and dawn by the time they dropped off the boat and got their car.
Unless something went wrong.
* * *
THE NIGHT was even darker upriver when they reached the highway bridge. Campinella turned the boat around so that it was facing downstream, and backed it up into the much deeper shadows next to the riverbank where they tied it to a bridge piling. They were invisible from the road.
Each of them hefted a nylon rucksack packed with bricks of Semtex and acid fuses. They were armed with U.S. military standard-issue 9mm Beretta semiauto pistols, and slung over their shoulders were 5.56mm Colt Commando assault rifles, which were the shortened version of the U.S.-made M16. Along with several magazines of ammunition for each weapon, and hydraulic bolt cutters for the fence, they carried nearly twenty kilos—more than forty pounds—on the forced march through the mud, rock riprap along the riverbank, and occasional tall grasses.
Units one and two of the South Texas Project Electrical Generating Station were well lit, the nuclear plant’s cooling towers rising into the night sky, red lights blinking atop them. There was no traffic here, but as they got closer they had a good view of the parking lot which was more than half full. It was a busy place even in the middle of the night.
A quarter mile to the left three strings of tall H-shaped towers led the high-power transmission lines away from the transformer yard, disappearing in the distance to the west, east, and north. They looked to Campinella like the Martian monsters from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which was the only book he’d ever read in his life.
The yard itself was about the size of several tennis courts, and was jammed with six transformers, three for each unit.
They pulled up short about twenty meters from a rear corner of the yard, and hunkered down. They were a few minutes early, and Campinella wanted to use the time to make sure that no guards had been posted.
“Incredible,” Gomez said softly.
They could hear the deep-throated rumble of heavy machinery somewhere in the distance toward the generating stations, but the sound was very low, almost inaudible.
“There is a lot of high voltage in there,” Ricardo whispered.
“You’d have to climb a ladder to reach the connections,” Campinella said, but he had a great deal of respect for the power contained inside the big machines.
They rose up on his signal and hunching low, ran to the fence, where they put down the rucksacks, and cut a man-sized hole in the fence, leaving one side attached like a door, and peeled back the fence so they could step inside.
Campinella hesitated for only a moment, but then pointed out the three transformers they were to take out and hurried to the center one in the line of three, and set up the ten kilos of Semtex at the base of the big machine that hummed as if it were a living thing.
When he was finished he reached out and brushed the case with his bare fingers and pulled back, startled. The metal fin was warm to the touch, and he could feel the vibration. It was alive. A monster.
They finished in under twenty minutes, climbed through the hole, and Gomez bent the chain link back roughly in place so that someone passing by in the night might not notice that anything was wrong.
Hunching down again they ran back into the darkness and made their way downriver to within thirty meters of the boat where Campinella motioned for them to hold up. Nothing moved in any direction, and from where they were concealed behind a stand of willows he couldn’t see any signs that someone had been to the boat and were waiting for them.
Nevertheless he unslung his rifle and switched the safety off. Gomez and Ricardo did the same, and the three of them cautiously approached the boat expecting trouble at any second. But the night remained still, and within three minutes they had untied from the bridge pilings, Campinella had started the boat’s engines, and they slowly headed downriver to the ICW, a full fifteen minutes earlier than they had planned.
* * *
THEY HAD just reached the pass at Port O’Connor out into the Gulf when the lights from Port Lavaca twenty miles to the north went out, and Campinella couldn’t help
but wonder at the stupidity of the Americans for not taking better security precautions, but at the even greater stupidity of his own government.
Chavez, el mico mendante, as some people had nicknamed him, was stark raving mad. It was likely that he was goading the U.S. into a shooting war that would end up terribly for everyone.
57
IT WAS NINE on another dismally overcast morning when Karn finally came out of the bedroom, her hair tied up in a scarf. She was wearing a GO BRAZIL sweatshirt and jeans, her feet bare, no makeup as usual. “You going to be a zombie for the rest of the day, or what?” she said.
Dekker had been sitting at his computer all night, switching between his 10-D game and the virus that would crash the entire mainland U.S. electrical grid. Just a couple of firewalls to get through, and a few keystrokes, maybe forty-five uninterrupted minutes or so, and it would be like a thousand nuclear bombs going off all at once. He looked over his shoulder.
“I can’t launch the game.”
She came to him, a sudden look of concern on her pretty round face, and used the mouse to get to the top level of the ten dimensions, where she hit the start button, and the first rockets came out of the battle star hanging in orbit above the earth. All of it was invisible to earthlings because everything at that level existed only in a superdimensional universe.
“Looks good to go to me,” she said. “Send it out. It’s going to blow their fucking minds.”
“Not yet.”
“You’re such a baby, why not?”
“I don’t have a name, and it’s no good without it, they’d laugh their asses off at me.”
Karn guffawed. “Not a chance, you’d destroy them if they did.”
Dekker’s anger spiked, but he held himself in check. Maybe the gamers, who knew about him and would be interested in matching wits with his game, might not laugh. But Karn did it a lot lately, just like the other night at the train station when he’d caught her with the guy she was probably fucking.
“Anyway let’s go,” she said. “I want to buy a couple of birds, and I need to find a decent pair of sneakers.”
“Not this morning.”
“Yes, this morning. And I’ll make a deal with you. Buy me some lunch and I’ll figure out a totally radical name. Ten-D wormhole. Black hole.”
Dekker was suddenly interested despite himself. “Too plain.”
“Okay. Hawking’s Folly.”
“Shit, shit.”
“What?”
Dekker stared at the top-level images on his monitor, his brain suddenly racing. Something had been missing deep inside of his game, and it was one of the reasons he hadn’t been able to come up with a good name—until now. But he’d held back because he hadn’t been able to figure out what he needed to add—until now.
“I’m so goddamned stupid, sometimes,” he groaned.
“You’re anything but,” Karn said.
“Hawking came up with the math for black holes. The event horizons, the ejecta—like light beacons—the swallowing of whole galaxies and the evaporation rates, and even when those big puppies begin to evaporate like ten to the hundred years from now. First the Big Bang and then fade to black.”
He looked up at her to see if she was getting it, but she shook her head.
“Okay so it’s a neat game,” he said. “But it’s way too easy.”
“I don’t think so.”
“This one isn’t for amateurs, this one’s for the pros, the supernerds. And you just helped me figure it out.”
Karn spread her hands, mystified.
“I have the dimensions right, but the time frame is way too short. We’ll speed it up, create black holes on every dimension; evaporate them, entropy in reverse, the universe clocking down to the big fade. Thing is, the player has to get to the goal before that happens.”
“What’s the goal?” Karn asked, and Dekker had to grin.
“The biggest prize of all, of course. Survival.”
* * *
A LOW overcast had settled over Amsterdam, and it was at times like these when Dekker wished for a warmer, sunnier place to live. He had bought a pair of lovebirds for Karn on Westerstraat in front of the Noorderkerk, the plastic cage in her left hand as she prepared to release them.
“They won’t survive,” he said. “Weather’s too cold.”
“They’ll live long enough to know freedom, so that their sprits will soar.”
“Right,” Dekker said, and a familiar face in the market-day crowd on the square caught his attention.
Karn opened the cage door and the birds immediately flew out and up into the sky, at the same moment the man turned and disappeared.
It was the same bastard from outside the train station, and Dekker’s gut was instantly tied in a thousand knots, as if he’d suddenly come down with stomach cancer or something.
Karn was looking at him. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m sick,” Dekker said. “I need to lie down before I upchuck.”
“I thought we were going to have lunch.”
“First I have to go home.”
“Do you want me to come with you, or do you want to meet me somewhere?” Karn asked.
Dekker shook his head, his brain seething. “Help me get home first. And then you can go—” He almost said to her lover, but he bit it off.
“Okay,” she said, and arm in arm they headed back to the Haven, not saying much of anything, until they got to their building.
“I’ll need help upstairs,” Dekker said. The elevators had never worked as long as they had lived here, and consequently they both were in pretty decent condition.
“Sure,” Karn said, and they trudged up to the tenth floor.
She had been decent to him the whole time, but after the train station Dekker had begun to wonder if everything she had said and done, all of their lovemaking, had been nothing but a big lie. He just wanted to tell her to get the fuck out, because he didn’t need her shit. But he couldn’t. In fact he’d come to depend on her more than he wanted to admit. And even now, heading up, he had to examine his own mind to make crystal clear what he intended doing. But he could see no way out of it. In fact his logic was unassailable.
First he would deal with her.
Second he would finish his game, and send it out.
Third he would pull the pin on the Russian virus, and set it loose.
* * *
“YOU OKAY, sweetie?” Karn asked when they reached their apartment.
“I’m going to lie down. Get me a glass of water.”
“Sure,” Karn said and she went into the kitchen.
Dekker slipped into the filthy bedroom, and waited just inside the door until she came back.
For just an instant she had no idea what was happening as Dekker slammed his fist into the side of her neck and shoved her forward, down onto the floor.
“Barend,” she cried. But he clamped his hands around her throat, his thumbs pressing into the carotid arteries in her neck.
He’d searched the Internet last night for ways to best kill someone using only bare hands. Her face began to turn red and her struggles ceased in less than one minute, but still he pressed as hard as he could. Until at one point he peed in his pants and he reared back.
Karn was truly dead, no way of ever bringing her back.
Dekker went into the bathroom where he stripped and got into the shower. He figured that it would take him a very long time to get clean, but when he was fully cleansed physically as well as mentally, he would get on with his important work and then leave Amsterdam forever.
58
THE MOOD IN the White House Situation Room at nine in the morning was somber because the thirteen members of the National Security Council gathered for the emergency session knew what the president was going to ask them to consider. And waiting now for Thompson to show up, Mark Young couldn’t help but feel as if they were all standing at the edge of a very deep precipice.
The dark mood was further deepened beca
use the president had sent Vice President Lorraine Weiss out to the Cheyenne Mountain Directorate which was home to NORAD and buried deep within the Colorado mountains. The Speakers of the House and Senate had left earlier this morning for vacations somewhere unspecified. And security at a number of Washington’s headquarters buildings had been quietly heightened.
To this point the press was dealing with the explosions in Texas as a non-nuclear accident in one of the transformer yards; an arc-over with no casualties. The public was being reassured that power would be restored in a matter of twenty-four to forty-eight hours. And this was an isolated incident having nothing whatsoever to do with the recent rolling blackouts that had been caused by the act of a terrorist group that had not yet identified itself, though al-Qaeda was being mentioned.
The president came in and took his seat at the end of the long table. The flat-screen monitors on the walls were blank, no tablets or pencils had been set out for the members, nor was there any coffee service. An aide closed the door.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Young said.
Thompson was a short, slender man, normally reminiscent of Truman with a pleasant if vacant expression. But this morning he looked like an angry pit bull on the verge of striking. “What’s the latest on the ground in Texas?” he demanded.
“They may have come by boat, we’re checking the marinas between Galveston and Corpus Christi, with no results so far,” Edward Rogers, the FBI’s director, said. “We have good cooperation with the Coast Guard, as well as the local police and Texas Highway Patrol. But we may already be too late.”
“Tell me.”
“Three men, who were identified as businessmen from San Antonio, rented a thirty-foot sport fisherman from Dugan’s ICW Marina in Corpus, yesterday. They said they were going to do some offshore fishing for one week. But the boat was returned this morning, before the marina opened, and there was no sign of the men.”
“No one saw anything?” the president asked.
“No. But we just got imprints of their driver’s licenses, and we’re doing a computer search with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles.”
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