Authors: David Vinjamuri
Alpha made good but was right about the pilots. There were two of them. The Gulfstream’s captain was a civilian government employee and the co-pilot was uniformed military—an air force Colonel. As far as Captain Malisse was concerned, a non-nuclear emergency didn’t make his list of priorities. He wasn’t about to take the plane out of the hanger in a blizzard, let alone fly it. He had a civil servant’s “you can’t fire me” attitude about the orders he’d received from Washington. As far as he was concerned, he was the man on the spot, the plane was his and it wasn’t going anywhere if he didn’t think it was safe.
Nichols saw it differently. She started with national security and used progressively stronger language until she actually pulled a pair of handcuffs from her belt. The Captain, a tall thin man with slicked back hair, turned and walked out of the hanger. The uniformed officer, Colonel Christian Paine, didn’t move.
“Colonel Paine, will you fly us out of here?”
“I’ll fly you through the goddamn hurricane if you want, but it’s a two-pilot aircraft.”
“I’ll be your co-pilot,” Nichols said.
“Are you rated on a G650?” Paine challenged her.
“Nobody is, other than the two of you,” she responded. “This jet isn’t supposed to exist yet. I thought the first delivery was going to be next month to some billionaire.”
Paine smiled. “Tell me more.”
“I’m rated on the 550 and current,” she said. I looked at her quizzically. Her expression said
long story, don’t ask.
“There are important differences, but you’ll do. Are you gonna cover my ass when Captain Malice complains?”
“I’ll take care of that,” I said.
“You’d better. Or I’ll be grounded.”
Which was exactly how it was looking as the earth approached us in a rush just seconds after takeoff.
Paine and Nichols had worked side by side on the electronic navigation systems; quickly running through the checklist and filing an instrument flight plan as the plane rolled to the runway. I sat in the jump seat behind the two pilots and watched as a plow finished a sweep of the runway that cleared four inches of snow from the tarmac.
Then we took off. It was a surreal experience. I’ve been on small jets before, but most of my time in aircraft has been in helicopters and big, ponderous troop transports. The Gulfstream was a rocket. Until it wasn’t.
We’d been flying into the wind to take off, but it must have shifted direction, because the bottom seemed to fall out from underneath us and the stall warning went off. We were less than two thousand feet in the air and we lost half that altitude in a few seconds. Paine and Nichols stayed calm, though, and suddenly the plane started ascending again.
We left the snow behind in West Virginia. But some time after we’d left the Hobart Mine, Hurricane Sandy had made its anticipated left turn back toward the continental United States. Instead of a hurricane, we’d soon be dealing with a superstorm. It was still sixteen hours before the storm made landfall but already a driving rain and high winds were lashing the seaboard. Even inland, the weather was disturbed. We touched down on the 7,000-foot runway at Lancaster Airport. The power plant was about halfway between the airport and the town of Reading. As the Gulfstream engines powered down, Nichols flashed me a brilliant smile. She looked alive in a way I hadn’t seen her in the three days I’d known her.
“You enjoyed that flight, didn’t you?” I asked, shaking my head.
“It never gets old,” she replied, patting the aluminum skin of the Gulfstream as we walked down the staircase toward the cascade flashing lights surrounding the runway.
Paine stayed in the plane and kept one engine running, ready to set off again quickly if necessary.
“Are you going to vote for him?” she asked me, shifting topics as walked down the stairs onto the runway. I understood the question. The majority of military guys vote Republican. But we were risking our lives to save the political future of a Democrat.
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t much care one way or another. I’ve met politicians and they all sound pretty much the same to me. But I’m not going to let a bunch of supremacists rig the election. And electoral fraud isn’t the worst part. You know what happens when there’s a long blackout? People die, especially seniors. Hospital patients get sicker instead of having surgery. It’s harder to clean things up and ordinary, hard-working people suffer. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that happen.”
Nichols smiled again. I guess I passed the test.
43
“The men you’re looking for aren’t here,” Mort Anderson, the plant manager of the Lime Rock Generating Station, told me the minute we’d cleared security. He must have seen the look in our eyes because he quickly added, “They left less than an hour ago. One of them had a family emergency and the other guy was his ride. They were only on shift for four hours.”
We could have passed them on the road from the airport, I realized.
“Wait, men? More than one?”
“Yes, two men from the list.” Anderson looked at us as if he’d need to spell the big words out. “Isn’t that what you were expecting?”
Both Nichols and I started to speak at once but Anderson held up his hands to forestall us. “I’m sorry, but the call I received from Washington was very specific: I was not to do anything but figure out if any of our employees matched your head shots. So I had to sit down with my security director and the head of HR and match entry records and badge numbers to photos without alerting anyone else. That took two hours. This request came at the worst damn time for us, too. There are incidents from Long Island to North Carolina right now and it looks like we’re going to have a bunch of blackouts in New Jersey in a matter of hours.”
“We understand, Mr. Anderson,” Nichols said. She’d pulled an FBI windbreaker on in the Gulfstream after we landed. “Did they explain what those men were here to do?”
Anderson nodded vigorously. “Ruin my career! Turn the next month into a living nightmare! Yes, I understand. The men we identified—Harmon and Greenwalder—”
“Greenwald,” I corrected. He was one of the National Front men who’d taken part in the South African plant sabotage.
“Whatever. They were contract engineers. They’ve been here about a half dozen times in the last year, always together. We’ve isolated the section of the plant they were assigned to today and we’re inspecting it carefully. If they sabotaged something, we’ll find it. Given the concerns about the integrity of our software, we’re also about to reboot the mainframe and restore our operating system from a backup. Do you know what that involves? This is a twenty-seven-hundred megawatt facility. Do you know what happens when we go offline for an hour? Do you understand how complicated that is for the grid, especially right now?”
“We understand what will happen if eight states go dark during a hurricane, Mr. Anderson. We believe that any damage these men did to this facility would have to look like an accident, or it wouldn’t accomplish their goals. We’ll leave you to your business but we need to see if we can identify the vehicle that Harmon and Greenwald are driving.” Nichols understood that there was nothing we could do at the power plant. If the men had set something up to fail, it would have to be subtle enough to look like an accident when it caused the blackout. I hoped Anderson and his crew were up to the job of figuring it out. I was pretty sure they’d have plenty of help very soon.
“If you catch them, bring them here and we’ll fry them for you,” Anderson said, stopping at a door just thirty yards or so from the main entrance. He knocked before tapping his security pass against the gray pad and entered when the lock disengaged.
“This is Eddie Capella from HR and Jill Seeley. Jill is our security director. Jill, these FBI agents need to get a visual of the gate entrance for badges...” he paused to look down at his clipboard, “55327 and 56134. Subcontractor is Webb Engineering, names are Anton Harmon and Alexi Greenwald.”
“The guys we just identified?” Jill asked.
“The same.”
Jill stood and walked over to a printer, pushing her head to the side with the heel of her hand to stretch her neck. She came back with two pieces of heavy photo paper and handed them to Nichols. I looked over her shoulder to see pictures of Harmon in a Mustang with stripes on the hood at the guard gate and the back end of the same vehicle on its way out. The time stamp on the second photo showed that he had almost an hour on us.
“I figured this would be the next thing you people asked for when we realized these guys left the facility. Unless I’m mistaken that’s a 2009 Mustang Shelby GT500. West Virginia plate number G23 569. That car’s a scorcher, but I wouldn’t want to be driving it in this weather.”
“Thanks very much. This is impressive.” Nichols shook Jill’s hand.
“I hope you catch the sonofabitch,” Anderson said. He was edging back to the door, clearly anxious to get back to his task.
“Pennsylvania has highway cameras all over the state. You can even access them on the web. The state can grab you the last location of a specific vehicle if you have a plate number. There won’t be too much traffic right now,” Jill said and leaned down to grab a pen. She scribbled a name and number on a post-it and handed it to Nichols. “My ex works for the highway authority. Tell him the check is late.”
44
“We’ve got a hit,” Nichols said as we boarded the Gulfstream. She had her cellphone pressed to her ear. “The Mustang is on Interstate 76 heading west. He was six miles east of Harrisburg ten minutes ago.”
“Speed?”
“They’re calculating. We need to get airborne and get ahead of him.”
We touched down at the Somerset County airport about 120 miles east of the Lime Rock plant twenty minutes later. Paine had left one of the Gulfstream’s engines running, and he stayed in the cockpit chatting with the nervous airport manager for our entire absence. I strapped into the jumpseat directly behind Paine and Nichols as they ran through the last steps of the preflight check while we rolled onto the runway. Our departure was less dramatic than the escape from West Virginia, but the flight was just as nauseating. By the time we were in the air, the air traffic controller was clearing us for a flight plan to Somerset airport some 120 miles to the east.
Some math geniuses with the Pennsylvania State Police had pegged the Mustang’s speed at 72 miles per hour, which was aggressive for the weather conditions even though the speed limit on that stretch of road was 70. State police set up a roadblock two miles from the airport, and on our request an all-wheel drive Ford Taurus Police Interceptor stood empty alongside the tarmac in Somerset with an escort of three fully-manned cruisers. We had just ten minutes to make the roadblock. There was already a line of traffic on the westbound lane of the highway when we arrived.
“I’m Captain Lee, from Troop K.” The police commander introduced himself when we hopped out. “If your suspect is on this road, we’ll get him.”
“How far back does this jam extend?” I asked.
“Two miles right now. It’s building, but nothing like it would be without this weather.”
“How long until it backs up far enough for traffic to start bailing at the last exit?” Nichols asked.
He shook his head. “That’s twenty miles. Unless we’re running this until rush hour in the morning, it won’t be half that long. Especially with the hurricane coming.”
“We need a snare,” I said. Both Nichols and Captain Lee looked at me oddly.
“A snare?”
“A tempting diversion to trap him with. This guy,” I said, speaking loudly over the rain, the sound of sirens and police loudspeakers, “has been trained in evasion. Once he sees the roadblock, he’ll find a way to take off. If we don’t channel him, we could get a bunch of people hurt. What we need is to leave him an escape route that we can control. Somewhere we can take him down safely.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Do you have any gated service roads on this highway? Something that leads off to a rural area that isn’t built up and doesn’t have a lot of connecting roads?”
Lee nodded vigorously. “There’s one about a mile and a half east of here, at the intersection with Huckleberry Highway. Troopers use it. The only way he’ll be able to go from there is north, and the only town near there is Shanksville, which has a population of around 200.”
“Send a cruiser through there right now,” I said, getting into the Taurus on the passenger’s side, “and have him leave the gate unlocked and a hair open. Let’s get on the other side. I want three or four miles to run him down. He’s not going off-road in that Mustang.”
“Okay, follow me,” Captain Lee said. His eyes were dilating a bit and his skin was flushed. “I’ll take you the back way and we’ll figure out the plan while we drive.”
I let Nichols drive because I understood the difference between a good pursuit driver and a naval aviator. Her instincts were a lot better at high speeds.
“Is this a good idea?” she asked as we peeled away.
“If you try to take a man like Harmon down in a crowd like this, he’s going to blow something up, I guarantee you.”
“Because that’s what you’d do?” she asked.
“No, not here. Not with civilians around. But I’m not him.”
45
Waiting is always a letdown after you’ve raced hard to get somewhere. That’s when doubt creeps in. What if they don’t come this way? What if we’ve read the whole situation wrong? But I had some confidence in our plan. One vehicle had already escaped through the hole we’d created—an impatient trucker hauling cupcakes. We let him go. The Activity had managed to retask a satellite and get eyes on the highway and they identified the distinctive striped top of the Mustang just as it reached the traffic backup a half-mile from the gated exit we’d unlocked.
Nichols and I sat in the cruiser just a few hundred yards from the off-ramp. We had the Taurus pulled back on a dirt road beside a red horse trailer in the shadow of a ramshackle farm building. We were staring at a tiny cemetery on the other side of the road with fifty or so unadorned headstones silently bearing the rain. It was past dawn, but the pallor of the sky was unrelieved by direct sunlight. The State Police Captain was parked next to us and a series of units blocked off three side streets in the next mile of road that weren’t dead ends. I was thankful we were in farmland.