Authors: David Vinjamuri
“And you think he’s concocted a radiologic device?”
“We think he—or a group he’s been associated with—plans to scare the markets by disrupting the country’s coal supply.”
“How?”
“He’s affiliated with a group that may have stolen spent fuel rods from a reactor. If he did set a device, there’s a good chance it’s at his own mine—the largest surface mine in the state and the second largest mine overall. The biggest one is the underground site where we found the conventional explosives.”
“That seems a little self-destructive. Blowing up his own mine, I mean.”
“He wasn’t going to keep the job for long. We think he faked his own death this morning.”
“You’ve had quite a day,” Harris said. I exchanged a glance with Nichols.
“This group has been very aggressive in trying to keep us out of their business. Is your team armed?”
“Heavens no! We’re scientists. We like to be attached at the hip to law enforcement. We’ll rely on you for security,” Harris said, glancing at Special Agent Nichols.
“There’s a state SWAT team meeting us on site. How do you need to conduct your search?”
“We can do it from vehicles if we drive slowly. The trick is separating the signature of a radiologic device from background radiation, which may be especially difficult in a mine. But we have lots of experience with doing our job in difficult conditions and this isn’t the worst we’ve seen.”
“I’m sorry to bring you out here in this weather. I’m afraid it’s about to get a lot worse.”
“I work in a lab without windows all day. I love getting out in bracing weather like this.”
I smiled. “I think we’re going to get along just fine, Dr. Harris. Did you bring something for me?”
“Ah, yes, the courier almost missed our departure, in fact. We have several bags for you. Heavy ones.”
“They always are.”
40
A shot rang out, shattering the silence of wind and rapidly falling snow. I didn’t see the muzzle flash; I’d been looking too far north as I scanned the ridgeline. Nichols tapped my shoulder. “Eleven o’clock at 1600 yards,” she said. I pivoted slowly and adjusted the infrared scope. I found what I was looking for: the glowing white silhouette of a prone man with a sniper rifle, the barrel still hot. As I adjusted the scope again for the range and calculated the effect of the wind, another shot rang out. Sirens wailed and the Hobart mine exploded into activity.
We’d met the State Police a quarter mile from the main mine entrance. The command staff rode in a purple and blue recreational vehicle functioning as a mobile command communications center. A dozen cruisers and two armored trucks accompanied them. Nichols had wrangled a warrant to search the mine and its offices, but Colonel Smith—the gray-haired, green-clad head of the State Police—didn’t ask to see it. After five years in which not a life had been lost, the West Virginia State Police had two troopers killed in August, when a detained suspect produced a hidden weapon in the back of the car.
Now four of his men had perished at Jason Paul’s mansion, and a dozen more had been wounded. The troopers were hungry for blood. Surrounded by tragedy in the face of a rapidly building blizzard, they had lost interest in the niceties of criminal procedure. If we had asked them to level the mine offices with bulldozers, they would have done it.
The task of searching the mine for an explosive device in a snowstorm was compounded by the mine’s size. The Hobart mine sprawled over an area ten miles wide by five miles long. The entire site was sunken below the surrounding topography and shielded by ridgelines. Five roads entered the mine, not counting the main entrance, but in practice four of them ended at cliffs several hundred feet above the mine site. The roads had disappeared as surely as the mountains they’d once scaled.
We spread topographic maps on a planning table inside the purple RV and pored over them with Nichols, Dr. Harris, Colonel Smith and Sergeant Ogletree from the West Virginia Special Response team—as the state SWAT team was called—along with Quigley and Walters.
Dr. Harris confirmed that the most likely place to plant a device would be near the active mining activity, where the conventional explosive would stir up enough dust to allow the thorium, plutonium and depleted uranium from the control rods to disperse as widely as possible. That put our primary search area under a sheer wall shaped like a horseshoe that ran up some 300 feet above the mine. I’d seen the site twice in the daylight—once from the inside and once from above—and I was worried.
I ran the math in my head again, to make sure I’d lined the shot up right. I relaxed, slowed my heart rate, held my breath and then gently, smoothly squeezed the trigger of the rifle. The big Barrett—an M107A1 if it matters—punched against my shoulder. It was a lighter punch and less of a bang than I remembered because this was a new model, and suppressed at that. But it still made a big noise when it fired and I held myself absolutely still under the thermal blanket that Nichols had pulled over us. The blaring sirens of the cruisers helped to cover the sound of my counter-fire, but anyone near enough to the bullet would still hear the supersonic whine.
“Got him! I mean,
hit
,” Nichols corrected herself. “Next target one o’clock, 1900 yards.”
When we looked at the mine site, Colonel Smith, Sergeant Ogletree and I saw the same thing: a shooting gallery. We hoped Harmon had planted the device and left—or better yet, that we were really on a wild goose chase and there was nothing to find. But if it had been me and I really wanted the thing to go off, I would have put snipers up on top of the ridge overlooking the mine. They could bring any search to a dead standstill for hours, and remotely trigger the device when they were forced to retreat.
And that’s exactly what they’d done.
It took me longer to find the second target. He was better dug in and I couldn’t see his entire body with the thermal scope—just his head and the silhouette of the gun barrel. I wouldn’t even have spotted the gun barrel if it hadn’t been warm because he’d just fired it. I switched between monochrome and color display on the FLIR scope. Nineteen hundred yards is over a mile, and the wind was gusty and unpredictable. Several inches of snow had already drifted onto the heat-reflective blanket we were under and without the thermal scope I couldn’t see much past ten feet.
“Miss! Say eighteen inches to the right,” Nichols hissed. My second shot went wide. But it was close enough so that the shooter felt the round impact the ground next to him and realized he was in my sights. He rolled, jumped to his feet and started to run. “Hammer, we have a target on the move in sector three.” Nichols spoke over the State Police radio, about the only communications device that functioned reliably in the hills.
We’d divided the horseshoe-shaped ridgeline around the mine into eight sectors. The rapid response teams had cut around the mine and were waiting to comb the woods as we identified the shooters. To conduct the search at ground level, we paired the NEST scientists with State Police cruisers and sent them in through the main entrance. They started with lights flashing but no sirens, so we’d hear if someone started shooting. And someone did.
Sergeant Quigley took one of the FBI Suburbans in through the main entrance and Dr. Harris rode with him. Nichols and I followed the rapid response teams around the perimeter of the mine, cutting off-road to avoid the half-hour it would have taken to connect the main roads. We stopped pretty quickly, choosing a spot on the extreme southern end of the site, nearly at the beginning of the cliff wall. It made for some long shots to the opposite canyon wall, but gave us a wide field of vision. We had parked the Suburban at the base of the hill and stripped down quickly, donning the white camouflage artic combat uniforms I’d asked Alpha to send along with my care package. I averted my eyes when I caught a flash of a sports bra and remembered briefly that Nichols was unmistakably a woman. We sorted and divided the rest of our gear before scrambling up the hill and settling in before signaling the others to proceed.
“Third target, 2300 yards, two o’clock. Check that, third and fourth targets.”
I might make a shot like that in a competition, or on a nice day at the range. But the odds weren’t good with the wind picking up and snow pelting us and melting off the barrel of the Barrett. I went through the routine anyway, calculating how much the round would drop, guessing at the wind, calming myself and holding my breath before I squeezed again.
“Unbelievable! Hit! On the shooter. Spotter is on the move.” Nichols put a hand on my shoulder as she said it.
I didn’t wait, chambered another round and sent it flying toward the second man. He was bent over the shooter for a second, then sprang to his feet.
“Miss. Two feet left. Spotter is moving away from the hill.” A pause. “Hammer, we have another target moving in sector...ah, sector 5.” An instant after Nichols said the word, a mound of snow erupted just in front of us, temporarily blinding me. I rolled over Nichols with the rifle as a second round struck where I’d lain. I reached my feet and grabbed Nichols’s hand, pulling her behind me. She sprang forward as a third round puffed behind her, the crack of the rifle following it. I ducked behind an old oak and pulled the rifle back to my shoulder. She settled next to me and was back on her infrared binoculars.
“I think I’ve got him,” she said after a moment. “He’s thirty yards north of the third shooter. Say three o’clock.”
I dropped to the ground and took aim at the fourth shooter. I went through the calculations quickly but I knew that in these conditions, the shot was a Hail Mary.
“Miss. Four feet to the right. Target is up and moving.” Nichols relayed the last man’s location to the SWAT team. I raised my scope and watched. I briefly got a bead on the man again, but he was darting and weaving. The Barrett rounds can penetrate the steel plating on an armored car, so I didn’t want to take the chance of hitting a state trooper when the shooter was heading right for them.
Nichols and I must both have been tracking the man because I heard her gasp as I saw a streak of light flash onto my scope. Then suddenly the man was down, wrestling with a ball of light.
“What was that?” Nichols asked.
“Unless I’m mistaken, that was Officer Cody.”
41
Nichols and I had done our part.
Even though I’d missed half my shots, we’d spotted five men. The three I hadn’t hit fled straight into the SWAT dragnet. I watched through the scope as a swarm of white bodies appeared along the ridgeline. There might have been more than five National Front guys dug in out there, but any soldier with half a brain would have turned tail by now given the combination of counter-sniper fire and mop-up teams.
“We’ve got three in custody now,” Nichols said, “and two confirmed kills.”
“Good.”
“Do you think it worked?”
“We’ll have to wait a little longer to know.”
We held our breath. Whoever had put the snipers on the ridge wanted the dirty bomb to detonate, but didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when it did. Instead of setting it on a timer and leaving, he’d left snipers to protect the device. That only made sense if one of the snipers had a remote detonator to trigger the device when they were pulling out. They’d figured the authorities would turn cautious when they started shooting and that it would bog things down for hours. That’s not what happened.
One of the pieces of equipment I’d requested from Alpha was a high-power signal jammer. We were hoping they’d constructed the dirty bomb with a commercial rig, because we could jam that part of the radio spectrum effectively. If they had military-spec equipment, Nichols and I might be covered in radioactive dust very soon. We waited for what seemed like an eternity. The snow was coming down harder every minute. It was cold—absurdly so for a place that had been eighty degrees a couple of days earlier. I tugged at the sleeve of my jacket and peered at my watch. It was past midnight. Nichols crept back toward the edge of the cliff and grabbed the thermal blanket. She shook it off once. It had a hole in it. She pulled it over us and we crouched close, waiting. I pulled the rifle back up and kept my eye on the scope. There were patrol cars slowly moving around the mine site, trying not to get stuck in the snow, sand and muck.
Then Nichols put a hand to her ear, listening intently.
“They found something.”
* * *
“This would have done the job quite nicely,” Dr. Harris said. They’d already disassembled the device by the time we got there, and separated the radioactive material from the high explosives, blasting caps and assembly. Harris had just pulled the headgear off of a radiation suit and motioned us to join him after taking a radiation reading. He showed me the trigger mechanism.
“Does this look familiar?”
“Sure enough. It’s rigged the same as at Gilroy.” Walters answered for me. I looked down at Cody, who was sitting alertly at Walters’s side, as if he hadn’t just taken down a veteran sniper.
“They over-engineered this device. There was enough plastic explosive to send a dust cloud over Charleston with the prevailing winds. I doubt it would have killed anyone, but you could be sure there’d be a lot of cancer ten or twelve years from now...”
“That’s a cheery thought.”
We walked away from the NEST team and drove back to the mine entrance. We’d just gotten out of the Suburban when one of the SWAT vans approached the pool of cruisers parked around the purple RV. Sergeant Ogletree hopped out.
“That was some damn fine shooting. What the hell was that, two thousand yards?”
“Twenty-three hundred,” Nichols said.
“I was Marine recon and I’ve never seen anything like it—not in these conditions.”
“It was a lucky shot,” I said. I saw from his face that I would never convince him, but I was telling the truth. It was amazing I’d hit anything at all with the wind swirling and gusting to forty miles per hour. I changed the subject. “Did you get them?”
Ogletree nodded. “Three alive and two dead. Even had a bomb dog take down one dirtbag.”