Authors: David Vinjamuri
“Eighteen minutes,” Nichols said.
Walters swore. “There’s not enough time. There are two fully autonomous devices here, and I think both of them are booby-trapped and cross-connected.”
“What if you had three sets of hands?” I asked.
“How long has it been since you disarmed an explosive device?” Walters asked.
“You don’t want to ask me that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Quigley interjected. “It’s the only way. We’ll never make it out of here in time. And I for damn sure don’t want to run to a safe room right now, hope we survive and try to live down here for a week while they dig us out. Agent Nichols and Mr. Jones can hand us tools. Walters, you’re on the primary and I’m on the hidden device. We’ll do this step by step. Herne, you stand above me and do exactly what I tell you.”
“Okay.”
There’s a game called Operation my sister Amelia bought for twenty-five cents at the Goodwill when I was six that we played obsessively one winter. It’s a battery-powered board with a cartoon version of the human body on it. Each turn you draw a card and have to remove some bone or organ from the body. Each one of these—or at least the half of them that our game still had—sits in a recessed well with metal sides. You use metal-edged tweezers plugged into the board to do the surgery. If you touch the sides when you’re operating, the game buzzes and a light comes on. We never had the rules so I don’t even know how it was scored, but Amelia was great at getting inside my head to make me flinch. This time the stakes were dangerously—fatally—higher.
I spent nearly a decade in the Army, all but the first two years during wartime. I’ve seen a lot of explosive devices. I set some of them myself, but most of them were IEDs I discovered and marked. I disarmed my share, and some were tricky. But as far as explosives go, I’m more like a backyard chef or the guy who mods his Mitsubishi Evo than a real expert. I was looking at a device that was out of my league. We worked quietly, furiously for fifteen minutes. Then Walters came around to the backside of the loader with a hard plastic case that he’d been toting around in a gear sack. He opened it up and started assembling a tripod while Quigley explained.
“We’ve taken down the trip wires, the motion sensors and disabled the commercial device. But now we’re at the tricky part and we only have about three minutes left. Do you see these blasting caps? They’re not commercial, but I think there’s a commercial cap inside. The outer layer is a hypergolic failsafe. If we remove the wire to the blasting cap from the power source, a small charge will dissolve a membrane in the sleeve surrounding the blasting cap that’s currently separating two chemicals. Think shells and hydrochloric acid in middle school chem class, but about a thousand times more explosive.”
“How do you disable that?” I asked as Walters completed the tripod and began mounting what looked like an oddly-formed telescopic rifle site on an articulating metal arm extending from the end of the tripod.
Quigley gestured to the tripod. “It’s called a recoilless EOD disrupter. We shoot a water jet at the cap at a very high velocity. It knocks out the initiator and stops any chemical reaction.”
“And it will disable the chemicals in the outer sleeve and the blasting cap inside?” Nichols asked.
Quigley shook his head as he knelt in front of the device. “That’s the theory, but honest to God, I have no idea. I’ve never seen a design like this before. But this is our best shot.” He looked at the timer and then at Jones. “Is there a safe room within sixty seconds of here?”
Jones shook his head. “It’d take at least five minutes to get to the closest shelter, even on the mantrip.”
Quigley turned back to his work and finished positioning the disrupter. He looked up before he triggered it. “If I’m wrong, it’s been good working with you all.”
36
“We’ve matched both of the National Front men we identified in Africa with video records from the mine,” Alpha told me as I sat on a hill overlooking Earl Jones’s office, talking on an encrypted satellite phone. The signal was a lot better with a clear line of sight to the southern horizon. In the compound near the mine portal, officers from the State Bomb Squad stood alongside a dozen FBI agents flown in from Pittsburgh. Nichols and Quigley briefed them.
“So that gives us a definitive connection to the National Front?”
“Not definitive. But it should be enough for the FBI to obtain a search warrant for the National Front compound.”
“I’m glad to hear that, sir. We won’t find Heather unless we can get back in there.”
“Based on your reconnaissance, do you believe that you can find her?”
I hesitated for a moment because I’d already answered this question for Alpha the day before, when Nichols had first given me the gear bag containing the satphone after I’d taken my involuntary motorcycle ride off the bridge. I reconsidered what I’d seen in the apartment Heather shared with Anton Harmon.
“I can’t be sure, especially with someone her age. She could have stuffed a few essentials into a daypack and taken off. But she left a lot of insulin in the fridge. Apparently Harmon beat her pretty badly some time in the last few days. If she left the compound with visible bruises after that, she’d be gone for good. I think she would have taken all of her insulin. So if I have to guess, I’d say she’s still there.”
“Her parents were comforted to hear that she hasn’t run out of insulin.”
“That’s the part that worries me, sir. If she was really sending a coded message about these devices, she could be in trouble.”
“I agree.”
“What about the mines in Wyoming, sir?”
“No progress. The mining equipment has been carefully inspected and it hasn’t been tampered with. The FBI is doing a sweep of the sites, but they’re enormous. We also have a conceptual problem understanding how those particular mines could be sabotaged. Surface mining as it is practiced in the western states involves blasting holes in the earth using a tremendous amount of explosives. Those mines routinely employ charges hundreds of times larger than what you found in the Gilroy mine today. The draglines are very specialized, expensive pieces of equipment, so disabling them would have an economic impact on the mines. But no evidence of tampering has been found. It’s very difficult to see another way that this type of a mining operation could be impeded. Our theory of an attack on these Wyoming mines may be wrong.”
“Then it’s just a document release on the Hobart mine and the explosive devices we found here?”
“So it appears.”
Neither Alpha nor I were entirely settled with that.
“With the immediate terrorist threat passed, I would appreciate it if you could refocus your efforts on locating Miss Hernandez.”
“I’ll do that, sir. But I also need to get back to work.”
“Very few in Foggy Bottom are going to work tomorrow, Orion. The State Department is limiting non-essential personnel to help ease the rush hour in preparation for Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to make landfall some time in the evening. I’d advise you to stay put for the time being. There’s no sense stepping into a hurricane.”
But that was exactly what I was doing.
37
We sat in the back of a long, narrow restaurant with oak floors, a series of round mirrors and green-hued walls studded with modern artwork. I was staring at a pizza that had marinated pulled pork, caramelized onions, pineapple and jalapeños with the sort of distrust I normally reserve for the tap water in Pakistan. I was raised on a narrow set of staples: meatloaf, mac & cheese, hot dogs, that kind of thing. I’ve struggled with food ever since. During my years overseas I learned to eat lots of other things, from kebab to curry, but to me it was just like putting a sixty-pound ruck on my back—part of the job. A tentative nibble of the slice I’d been served confirmed my visual analysis. The place was called Pies & Pints and I couldn’t blame them for my food issues. Nichols, Quigley and Walters had already wolfed down most of the colorful pizza.
“You’ve been run off the road, hit, kicked, bitten, tortured, shot at, rode off a bridge and nearly blown up in a mine, but you still haven’t found that girl you came looking for?” Nichols said evenly as she reached for another slice.
“I’ve had better weekends,” I admitted.
“Hell no you haven’t,” Walters grunted. Laughs all around.
“I found the apartment she’s staying in on the compound. I understand that there’s enough evidence now to tie the National Front to the Gilroy bombs. When is the FBI going to get into that compound?”
Nichols shook her head. “Everything’s a mess right now. Six agents from my office are dead and a dozen are in the hospital. And now they’re saying that this hurricane is going to turn into some kind of superstorm in the Northeast. Pittsburgh is our managing field office. They flew in a forensic team today to investigate the blast at Mr. Paul’s house and sent an explosives unit to Gilroy, but we’re not getting any more help until after the storm. I think the Bureau is redeploying a lot of agents to East Coast cities right now. We’re on hold until this storm passes.”
“That’s ridiculous. The National Front will erase every trace of what they’re doing.”
“Don’t you think they’ve already done that? They know we’ll get a warrant soon. They’ve known that since you escaped yesterday. Anything that can be erased already has been. If there’s a case to be made against them, we’ll have to get someone to talk.”
“Okay, fair point,” I conceded.
“Are your people still watching the compound?” Nichols asked.
I looked at Walters and Quigley before I answered. My status was still a gray area as far as they were concerned. But they must also know that the governor had personally interceded with their bosses, so it was obvious that I had someone backing me. And they’d kept me from getting buried under a mountain, after all.
“Yes, they have eyes on, but they haven’t seen anything helpful yet. They’re not in a position to track the principals.” The Activity was watching the National Front compound with drones, so they knew which cars were coming and going. It was possible to track individuals, but they didn’t have detailed enough visual profiles of the National Front leaders to maintain that level of surveillance.
“That’s frustrating,” Walters said, “because they’re bona-fide terrorists, that’s for sure. What kind of West Virginian would want to kill miners, for God’s sake?”
“Eric Price and Jason Paul are both out-of-staters.” I found myself echoing Roxanne’s words. It was true of her, too.
“Figures,” Quigley grunted.
“I’m still a little surprised they killed Paul,” Nichols said, fiddling with a piece of crust. “It’s a terrible way to cover their tracks.”
“Maybe they plan to pin it on the eco-terrorists?”
“No way. That wouldn’t fly. They needed Paul to furnish the evidence to connect the dots to Reclaim. And this kind of murder looks a lot more like a gangland hit than the work of some radical lefty group. Besides, when you kill FBI agents, you’re guaranteed to trigger the kind of investigation that’s going to uncover the truth.”
“That’s a good point. These guys are professionals. They could have arranged for a heart attack or a traffic accident for Paul if they really wanted him out of the way.”
“You met Jason Paul the other day. Did he strike you as a committed racist?” Nichols asked.
“No, but that’s what you told me to expect, right? The MO of the new National Front is dentists and accountants for racial purity, that sort of thing. But still...he seemed more like an opportunist than anything. He might have some of the prejudices of the National Front folks, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who joins an extremist group. On the other hand, the PA has a lot of political pull. I can see why he’d want to be part of that. But it’s still hard to imagine him putting anyone else’s agenda in front of his own.”
“So what if he was playing his own game? Joining the PA and helping the National Front, but all the while making his own side bets?” Nichols tapped fingers on the table.
“But if they didn’t kill him...wait...are you thinking what I’m thinking? He faked his own death?”
Nichols nodded. “Either that or the National Front faked it to give him a way out. Listen, I bet they’re still working the scene. Do you want to take a look?”
“I do.”
“Mind if we tag along?” Quigley asked and glanced at Walters, who nodded.
“Don’t you guys have somewhere better to be on a Sunday night?” I asked.
“My boy is already down for the night. And if there’s anything I can do to get the sonofabitches who planted those bombs, I’m in,” Quigley answered. Walters nodded to say that was enough commentary.
“You guys can come if you bring the dog,” Nichols said as she dropped three twenties on the table and stood up. I got a feeling that this particular restaurant didn’t welcome mutts, but after taking a look at the police uniforms and the FBI windbreaker, the hostess had decided not to press the point. With a wistful look at the uneaten pizza, Cody followed us out. We’d been huddling in the back of the restaurant and the place was now more than half full. I couldn’t tell if the stares we got were from the dog, the uniforms or the coal dust that blackened our faces. Probably all three.
“What about the boyfriend?” Nichols asked as we walked outside.
“Harmon? What about him?”
“Did you find him?”
“No, he was gone. Sent away after he beat Heather up.”
“Away out of town?”
“I don’t know, but I understand he left the compound.”
“Did you track his credit cards?”
“What?”
“If he’s not spending cash, it’s an easy way to get a fix on him.”
I pressed the heel of my hand against the side of my forehead. “It honestly never occurred to me.”
“You’re not much of an investigator.” Nichols smiled.
“Most of the people I’ve hunted never used plastic. I have no idea how you’d track a credit card in Yemen, anyway.”
“Here in the US, people use them reflexively. Sometimes even when they don’t mean to.”
The rain was coming down cold and I turned my face up toward the night sky to let it wash some of the dust off my face as we piled into Nichols’s Suburban.