Craig Kreident #2 Fallout (27 page)

The commander of the operation, an Air Force major named Braden, stood with his arms crossed over his broad chest.
 
He was a cool, hard-eyed man with a boyish freckled face, milk-white skin, and shockingly red hair.
 
He never raised his voice, yet always managed to get the job done.
 
Braden stood with a clipboard, using a red felt-tip pen as he looked over computer printouts, circling groups of names to be assigned together as teams.
 

“We’ve got a city to comb, Agent Kreident,” Braden said.
 
“Normally, we’d plan for a dirty homemade fission device, but if your speculation is correct we’re looking for a bona fide warhead from the U.S. arsenal.
 
And that makes me very nervous indeed.
 
Given a terrorist weapon, there’s a better-than-even chance they’ve screwed up the assembly, and all we’d get is a big dud.
 
But in this case, if it’s real — it’s real.”

“Are you going to evacuate the city?” Craig asked.

“Not just on circumstantial evidence.
 
You caused one hell of a debate back in Washington.
 
Right now my orders are to take your claim seriously.”

“Then should I hope I’m wrong?” Craig said.

Major Braden’s sea-green eyes looked at him strangely.
 
“Of course not,” he said.
 
“You should hope our team finds the device in time.”

Goldfarb rode in one of the unmarked NEST vans, cruising down the Las Vegas Strip, waiting for the sensitive radiation detectors to sound an alarm.
 
The flickering lights of casino after casino dazzled the night.
 
Tourists and gamblers streamed past the pirate ships of Treasure Island, beyond the Stardust, the Imperial Palace, the Gold Coast.

He leaned over to peer out the small porthole window of the nondescript van.
 
Other team members scrutinized readouts from the gamma sensors that protruded from the van’s side walls.

Beside him an Army sergeant, a young Asian woman with short straight black hair, checked off their progress on the street map, tracing their search path with a yellow highlighter marker.
 

An Air Force lieutenant sat on one of the padded chairs in back of the darkened van, studying nuclear cross-section profiles, squiggly lines that danced across the screen of his laptop.
 
Geiger counters sampled the ambient gamma levels every five seconds, but so far the lieutenant had seen no spike.
 

The vehicle cruised from block to block down the crowded Strip, which Major Braden had designated a likely hiding place for the militia weapon.
 
Bryce Connors had kept a map of the casinos in Las Vegas — even though he claimed to know nothing about the militia’s October 24 strike.

NEST’s most likely scenario assumed that members of the Eagle’s Claw had somehow lugged the stolen device to a hotel room suite and locked the doors . . . or else they had parked it in a van in a long-term lot, much as the terrorists had done in the World Trade Center bombing.

The lieutenant continued to stare at his computer screen, blinking, obviously nervous but trying to maintain his composure.
 
He looked up at Goldfarb.
 
“Just like one of our exercises,” he said.
 
“We do NEST wargames every year or so — and I always dreaded it ever happening for real.”

Goldfarb raised his eyebrows.
 
One of the NEST first-aid techs had rebandaged his hand, but the broken little finger still throbbed.
 
“So how does reality match with the exercises?”

“Similar, so far,” the lieutenant said.
 
“The last one I did was called Mirage Gold, about a terrorist nuclear device hidden somewhere in New Orleans.
 
We had three days to find and disarm the bomb, and we didn’t have many clues about where it might be.
 
We received a red herring that it might be in the big sports stadium, you know, where the Saints play — but that turned out to be a dead end.
 
Finally, in the last few hours, we tracked it down to a small shed near a runway in one of the smaller airports.”

“Did you win?” Goldfarb asked as the van continued along.
 
“Did the bomb get defused?”

“Oh sure, we had thirty minutes to spare.
 
Covered the shed with a containment tent, pumped the whole area full of foam, then we waded in with anti-C clothing to x-ray and defuse the device.”

Goldfarb considered this, his confidence dropping.
 
“So you found it with half an hour to spare, but that was just a simulation.
 
What would’ve happened if you’d had no leads?”

The lieutenant glanced at his computer screen, but still saw no change in the background spectrum.
 
“The exercise controllers kept track of the timeframe and provided us with various clues and information as they deemed it necessary.”

“This time nobody’s going to give us free hints,” Goldfarb said.

The lieutenant didn’t answer as he continued to stare at his screen.
 
Still nothing.
 
Absolutely nothing.

The van drove on down the Strip, turning left onto Tropicana past the giant gold and emerald lion of the MGM Grand.
 
The radiation spectra remained flat, showing no indication of a covert nuclear warhead.

If the terrorists had hidden it in Las Vegas, they had hidden it well.

Jackson carried one of the unmarked NEST briefcases, trying to look like a first-time conventioneer in Las Vegas.
 
Unfortunately, Jackson’s demeanor carried an aura of formality that pegged him as a government official, no matter what he wore.
 
Most of the time he reveled in the knowledge of his professionalism, but he did not know how to shut off that attitude when it became necessary to do so.
 

The hard lump of the radio earphone rested in his ear.
 
He walked through the McCarran Airport terminal at a brisk pace, as fast as the detectors could analyze data.
 
He and seven other NEST members carried identical briefcases loaded with sensing equipment.
 
Voice-synthesis chips would speak into his earphone should he encounter background radiation that matched the anticipated signature of the diverted warhead.
 

But the earphone remained silent.

Jackson walked casually past the lockers, expecting, hoping, dreading that he might encounter such a pulse.
 
Other inspectors worked the baggage claim areas, while additional teams walked at random up and down the terminals, the waiting areas by the gates, the line of restaurants and gift shops.

One of the NEST physicists who had ridden with him out to the airport had described an exercise dubbed “Busy Force I,” which had simulated a weapon-carrying aircraft crash near Salina, Kansas.
 
Four fake warheads had been downed — one destroyed and scattered across the landscape, three damaged, but intact in the burning wreckage of the plane.
 

“Afterward we knew just how many mistakes we’d made, how many things didn’t work the way they should have,” the physicist had said.
 
“And we didn’t have to
find
anything — we could see the burning wreckage, and it still took us days to get everything under control.”
 
He looked exasperated.
 
“This time we don’t know where the damned thing is, and we don’t even know how much time is on the clock.
 
It could go off at any moment.”

Back in the converted textile warehouse on the fringes of the city, FEMA experts had already marked urban-scale evacuation routes, checking on available medical facilities and emergency care — in the event they did not find the device in time.
 
They got ready to help the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who would become victims.
 

Back in Washington the debate raged on, voices raised against causing an unwarranted panic versus those who took Craig’s assessment at face value.

NEST Health Physicists had sent up weather balloons linked to computer models from ARAC, the Atmosphere Release and Advisory Capability; they would use the data to project distribution patterns of radioactive fallout, should the bomb explode.
 
With the weather brooding, the thunderstorm gathering, the winds stirring up, the warhead detonation would not only wipe out Las Vegas, but would spread a swath of contamination over the entire southwestern United States.

Jackson continued to pace up and down the airport corridors, continuing his relentless search.
 
He squeezed the handle of the briefcase again to send a test signal to his earphone.
 
Everything functioned properly.

The airport had seemed a likely target for planting the bomb, but as Jackson covered his search pattern for a third time, he still found no indication of the hidden doomsday weapon.

CHAPTER 33

Thursday, October 23

8:06 P.M.

Las Vegas

When Craig and his team launched the frantic NEST response, searching for a nuclear weapon hidden somewhere in Las Vegas, Paige found herself left alone in her room at the Rio with too much time . . . too much time to think about everything that had happened.
 
And too much time alone to ponder the craziness of it all.

Like Craig, she had looked at the numbers, at the part identification codes, at the complex forms.
 
The forest of documents could have hidden any number of conspiracies.
 
Plans within plans within plans
. . . .
 
If all the separate pieces of a missing warhead had indeed been covered up in a labyrinth of paperwork, buried under shifting signatures and complex serial numbers, any such plan would have required the active participation of someone very important, someone near the top of the chain.

PK Dirks must certainly be involved.
 
And she could see how Carl Jorgenson had been enlisted to help.
 
But still, there
had
to be someone else.
 
Someone with knowledge of the overall workings of the Device Assembly Facility. . . .

She refused to think of the inevitable, and instead forced herself to race through the other options.
 
Any
other option.
 

Could it be a contractor like Warren P. Shelby, someone who had infiltrated the DAF?
 
Or what about the Russian Nikolai Bisovka — he certainly knew a lot about the DAF, and his obvious feelings about “the good old days” implied he might want the disarmament process to fall apart.
 
Sabotage from inside the disarmament team itself?
 
Now that would be a weird alliance, a radical militia group and a Soviet sore-loser.
 

But none of those people had proper access to the security codes, and the timeframe was all wrong.
 

Paige kept coming up with the same answer, again and again.
 
It had to be someone above reproach.
 
Someone even the FBI wouldn’t suspect.

Someone like Mike Waterloo, Manager of the Device Assembly Facility.
 

She couldn’t believe it.
 
Paige had known Uncle Mike her entire life.
 
He and her father had worked together, taken vacations together.
 
He was one of the most patriotic people she knew.
 
Mike was a “regular guy,” not a violent terrorist, not an anarchistic, and certainly not a bloodthirsty militia commando.

Of course not.

She picked up her cellular phone and started to call Craig.
 
It was crazy for her even to think Uncle Mike was involved, but she couldn’t shake it from her mind.
 
Craig would give her a “sanity check” on the idea.

But then again, he was in the middle of the NEST investigation, which had the absolute highest priority.
 
Was she allowing the pressure of the last week to cloud her judgment?
 
Perhaps some of Craig’s paranoia had rubbed off on her.
 
She had to know first.
 

Paige flipped shut her phone.
 
She was a big girl.
 
She could do this herself, straighten it all out.

Despite all her efforts to block such thoughts as she drove over to Uncle Mike’s home, she considered how he had changed over the past several years, as if a part of him had died along with Genny.
 
Paige
had
to look him in the eye and ask him if he knew anything more.
 
She owed that much to him at least.
 
She would know if he was lying.
 
Lying to her.

She accelerated through a yellow traffic light, paying little heed to the other cars.
 
The evergreen air freshener hanging from her rear-view mirror smelled old and stale.
 
She kept driving, blinking back disbelieving tears until she found the Waterloo residence.
 

Scrubby weeds had grown up in the yard of the modest ranch house, and most of the grass had died.
 
Newspapers lay scattered on the driveway, though she knew he went home regularly.
 
Uncle Mike just hadn’t bothered to pick them up.

No lights shone from the house windows, though it was long after dark.
 
She looked at her watch and frowned.
 
No one seemed to be home, but she rang the doorbell anyway.

Her stomach clenched with ice.
 
What would she say to him if he answered?
 
“Excuse me, Uncle Mike — are you by any chance a member of the Eagle’s Claw?
 
Did you help plant the bomb at the Hoover Dam on Tuesday?
 
Did you plan to blow up all those people on the Amtrak train this morning?
 
Say, what are your plans for tomorrow?”