Authors: David Vinjamuri
“I’d like to see them.”
“The live ones aren’t talking,” Ogletree said, “and we’ve got someone from the U.S. Attorney’s office here now so we have to play it by the book.” This he added with some regret.
“I just want to take a look at them. I’m looking for one man in particular.”
“Ah, gotcha. Hang on,” Ogletree said as he spoke into the radio he’d clipped to his vest. “Okay, the live ones are in the back of our MRAP and the meat wagon is coming around with the other two.”
We walked around to the back of the armored vehicle and Ogletree pounded on the back. The doors swung open and another black-helmeted trooper swung down.
“Haul ’em out for inspection,” Ogletree said to the trooper. Two more state troopers carefully brought out the three men. A man in a hooded raincoat over a suit scrambled after them. He interposed himself between the prisoners and us.
“I’m Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sweeder,” the suit said. “These men have invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and asked for their attorneys, and I’m afraid I’ll have to direct you not to question them until he arrives.” From my perspective, Sweeder looked to be about nineteen years old, but I had to assume he’d finished law school.
Sweeder addressed Nichols. She pulled out her I.D. “Special Agent Sabrina Nichols, FBI. I’m invoking the public safety exception to Miranda—New York v. Quarles. The Nuclear Emergency Search Team just defused a radiologic weapon one mile down that road. Do I have your attention, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sweeder?” she snapped as Sweeder looked down the road that led past the mine office into the mine.
“Yes, ma’am, er, yes Special Agent Nichols,” he said. The boy lost about two inches during the exchange.
“We will interrogate these men at length, but first we need to attempt to identify them. Sergeant, can you please give us a good look?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ogletree replied, snapping to attention. He barely concealed a grin. The state troopers stood the three men up and hit them with the floodlight from one of the cruisers. I stepped closer. They’d lined the perps up by height. The first guy was 5’10 or so, thin and had dark hair and a bushy beard. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. The second was my height with sandy brown hair and a mustache. He kept his gaze straight ahead as well. The last guy was a true Aryan specimen: 6’2”, blond with the strapping kind of good looks you imagine all Swedes must have until you visit that country.
“Daniel Lee Stewart. Marine Scout Sniper, 2004-2008. Twenty-five confirmed kills. Bronze Star, Unit commendation, Purple Heart. Dishonorable discharge after court-martial trial for raping an Iraqi woman in a mosque. Was he firing an M-14?”
“Yes he was,” Ogletree answered. Unlike the other two, Stewart had his eyes on me. He was angry.
“You very nearly got me, Corporal. That was a hell of a shot in this weather.”
Silence.
“Agent Nichols, I recognize Corporal Stewart because he is one of our video stars from Africa. He was part of the team that infiltrated the Koeberg nuclear power station, set an explosive device and apparently stole control rods.”
Stewart looked surprised. It only lasted a second, just a minor facial twitch, but I knew I had him. In fact, I was bluffing. I knew his face and background from the profiles of National Front members I’d reviewed that morning. But he wasn’t one of the faces they’d matched from the reactor. He’s the man I would have taken on that job, though, so I guessed, and I could tell that I was right.
“Let’s look at the bodies,” I said as one of the Surburbans pulled around. The State Trooper inside popped the trunk and Ogletree gingerly zipped open the bag. “Gotta be careful, here. This boy is not all in one piece. That cannon of yours nearly cut him in half.”
This one I recognized. Bobby Glenn. He had served with the 82
nd
Airborne. He was one of the saboteurs the Activity had spotted in Africa. The last body was another stranger.
I was turning back toward Nichols when I saw Colonel Smith over her shoulder. He had his hat on and he’d straightened his tie.
“I have some bad news. I gather you haven’t been told. The first shot hit Sergeant Quigley. I know he was with you today at the Gilroy mine. They just pronounced him dead on arrival at Charleston General. There were two more troopers hit and they still have a fighting chance. I want to thank you for helping us stop these lunatics. It’s a shame we couldn’t have brought all the terrorists in like that,” he said, glancing at the body bags.
My fists clenched involuntarily. I swallowed. I looked at Nichols and saw a reflection of what I was feeling. I remembered that Quigley had mentioned having a young boy and felt myself retreating, growing cold around the heart. Nichols and I stood silent for a moment. I realized for the first time that she’d known all the FBI agents who’d been killed earlier in the day—and perhaps their spouses and kids, too. I met her eyes.
“None of these guys is Anton Harmon,” I said.
“Where does that leave us?” Nichols asked.
“With unfinished business.”
42
Monday
I remember a particular helicopter ride in the Hindu Kush. It was at the beginning of the fighting season, the last year that I was with the Activity, in the Nuristan province of Afghanistan. There’d been a heavy firefight that day. The Taliban had ambushed a Special Forces team trying to extract one of their leaders. At they end they’d identified their man but had to withdraw with heavy casualties. I was sent in alone that night to finish the job. It was just past winter, in the tallest mountains in the world, in a specially modified helicopter flying at the extreme limit of its operating ceiling. Riding any helicopter in those mountains felt like being the little white ball in a table tennis match, but that one was worse. There are some times you just know that an aircraft has given everything it has but it’s still not enough, that your life depends on how severe the next burst of wind shear is and whether it slams you into the mountain.
When Colonel Paine pulled the nose of the Gulfstream off the runway in Charleston, I had that feeling again. As the aircraft powered off the white strip, a huge snowy fist slammed into us and we were suddenly staring at the ground. The stall warning went off as the fierce blast of wind pushed us downward.
We’d figured it out in the Suburban, as we crawled back from the Hobart mine toward Charleston and the blizzard got steadily worse around us.
“Anton Harmon was at the Gilroy mine yesterday and Hobart today, right?” Nichols asked, her eyes fixed on the road ahead as she drove with complete confidence in zero visibility conditions.
“Definitely at Gilroy. If he was at Hobart, he left before we arrived.”
“Why did they leave snipers guarding that device?”
“To keep us from getting to it.”
“No, I mean why didn’t they just put it on a timer and set it to detonate as soon as they were a safe distance away? Why risk sending men to guard it? What’s the point of that? Now we can connect the device to the National Front.”
“What do you want to bet that those men end up swearing that Jason Paul hired them? This could be part of making him the fall guy.”
“So if the National Front was so keen on making sure the dirty bomb wasn’t defused before it detonated that they were willing to leave snipers to guard it, why didn’t Harmon stick around?”
“Maybe he isn’t suicide squad material?”
“Or maybe he had something bigger to do. And maybe that’s part of the reason for the snipers...to give Harmon time to do something else.”
“Go on...”
“Didn’t you say that the woman you’re looking for sent an e-mail to her mother last week?”
“Right. That’s why I came here to begin with.”
“And in the message she says she’ll run out of insulin on Monday, right?”
“Yes.”
“Not Sunday?”
“No, it was Monday.”
“So if that message was a warning, then it wasn’t about what happened today. It’s about what’s happening tomorrow.”
“It’s already tomorrow. I mean it’s after midnight now. It’s Monday.”
“Right, but all the explosives at Gilroy were set to go off on Sunday. Even the dirty bomb at Hobart was set to go off before midnight.”
“So?”
“So maybe there’s another part to the plan. One that Anton has to finish himself.”
I chewed on that for a minute. “Anton has an electrical engineering background. I think they said he was a civil engineer.”
“Okay...”
“So I wonder where he was actually working before he went fulltime undercover for the National Front.”
“Why don’t we ask your magic 8-ball?”
“He’ll love that you called him that,” I said and pulled out the satellite phone. Alpha was still awake and at the tactical operations center. He had the answer in five minutes.
“Mr. Harmon was sentenced to three years for sexual misconduct and battery. He had relations with a seventeen-year-old girl and assaulted her when she tried to end the relationship. But he spent two of those years on work release in Illinois.”
“And what was he doing?”
“He was working in a power plant.” Alpha sounded angry, undoubtedly unhappy that the analysts at the Activity hadn’t asked the same question about Harmon’s background.
But I wasn’t angry at all. The last puzzle piece slid into place. Suddenly it all fit together. I put the phone on speaker so Nichols could hear.
“Sir, I think I know what the National Front is trying to accomplish. It’s more than just raising funds. I think I know why they infiltrated the power plants in Africa.”
“Blackmail of some kind?”
“No. The National Front has been building political influence for the past ten years. Part of their strength is that they’re not partisans, at least not in a conventional sense. They focus on minutiae—small, technical, local issues—and they give money to both Democrats and Republicans. They mask their real motivations behind a bunch of political action committees. And they’ve avoided national politics because that would tip their hand. But right now a black president is running for re-election. And I’m told the vote will be close.”
“You think they’re trying to tip the election?”
“They wouldn’t do anything that revealed their role because it could backfire with voters. That’s why it’s too dangerous for them to get involved with big national elections on the political level, right? Too many questions,” Nichols chimed in. She knew where I was going.
“Right. But if you know the election is in the middle of a busy hurricane season, then...”
“Power outages,” Nichols said.
“Right. A blackout. A huge, messy, utter blackout like the one we had on the East Coast back in 2003.”
“Which makes everything that happened in Africa a trial run,” Nichols concluded.
“Pennsylvania is a swing state in this election,” Alpha said.
“Right. And if you handled it right—if you hacked the grid, you could ensure that some kind of isolated power problem turned into a widespread outage just as a storm hits.”
“But they couldn’t have known that a storm would hit so close to the election,” Alpha pointed out.
“Maybe that wasn’t part of the original plan. A messy blackout could have hurt the administration regardless of the circumstances. But they had to be thinking about hurricanes. The eastern seaboard has something like a 50% chance of being hit by a hurricane every year,” I argued. “So maybe they wait for a hurricane but decide that they’re going create a power outage within a week of the election even if there’s no storm. And then along comes Sandy and all their prayers are answered. A massive power outage that makes hurricane relief and recovery harder would make the administration look incompetent right before the election.”
“But if it was shown to be the work of terrorists, it might have the opposite effect.”
“Maybe. But short of us wandering into the middle of this whole scheme looking for Heather, what are the odds that it gets uncovered in the next forty-eight hours? After that it’s academic.”
“Good point.”
“Sir, do you have any information from the National Front servers?”
“Our cryptographers have full access, but they’re working through a tremendous amount of data. A good deal of information was deleted, but we apparently have the ability to recover some of it. Now that we have something specific to look for, we might move quicker.”
“Did you check Anton’s credit cards?” Nichols asked.
“I believe we ran a check. Hold the line.”
Nichols and I rode in silence for a half-hour with the line open before Alpha returned. I could tell he was excited because he spoke more precisely.
“We have something. There is a single credit card charge from Mr. Harmon’s personal credit card about two hours ago from a gas station in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. We also crosschecked power plants in that area against the National Front information we’ve decrypted and found schematics for a coal-fired plant near Reading. Homeland Security is speaking with management at the plant right now.”
“They’ll have called everyone available in to work by now, right? And security will be high. If Harmon went there, I bet he’s already on the payroll.”
“We can work with the plant manager to identify him.”
“Do that but don’t have them approach him. Right now he still thinks he’s in the clear and this plan only works if it goes undetected. If he gets an idea that we’re on to him, he may do something unpredictable.”
“We can get a team there in two and a half hours,” Alpha said.
“Sir, with your permission I’d like to finish this. Special Agent Nichols and I can track down Harmon.”
“I thought you were stranded in the middle of a snowstorm?”
“Agent Nichols is driving us through that, sir. If you can get us a plane, we can get to the airport.”
“Actually, there’s a government Gulfstream G650 fueled and sitting in a hangar at Chuck Yeager airport right now,” Nichols said, loud enough for Alpha to hear.
“I can get you that plane,” Alpha said, “but the pilots may not be willing to fly in this weather.”
“Let us handle that end,” Nichols said.
“I’ll see what I can do.”