Off the Grid

by C. J. Box

  “So if not a bomb . . .”

  “Not a bomb.”

  Nate was skeptical.

  “Look,” Ibby said, “all you need in order to build a small EMP device, say small enough to kill a smartphone forever from two feet away, is a simple circuit board, a nine-volt battery, a high-voltage capacitor, a voltmeter, a switch, and copper wire to coil around a post. These are all things you can buy at any hardware or electronics store; they’re not state secrets. When it’s completed, it’s about the size of a paperback novel. I’m no engineer, but even I can put a small one together now. It’s not brain surgery or nuclear science.”

  “So who is building this thing?”

  “Some of our team members who are engineers. They’re as upset at the government as you and I are for what it’s doing. I gave them the task of building a larger version of the EMP device I just described. A much larger one.”

  Nate said, “I saw the eighteen-wheeler in the first shed.”

  “There’s two of them in there, side by side, actually,” Ibby said. “We’re putting the giant EMP devices into the trailers of both trucks so they can fire a highly concentrated pulse out the back. We’re just days away from deploying them.”

  Ibby opened the shed door to the outside and gestured to Nate to follow him. He said, “By this time next week, there will be no more illegal surveillance of Americans. The government won’t know what hit them.”

  • • •

  NATE TRAILED IBBY to the second shed. As he did, he glanced over his shoulder. The “volunteers”—including Sheridan—had apparently gone around the third shed and entered a makeshift dining area. He caught snatches of distant conversation in the still morning.

  “I need my weapons back,” Nate said.

  “Sorry, but we’ve got a strict ‘no firearms’ policy here. When you leave the premises, you’ll get your guns back.”

  “I’ve had bad experiences without my guns.”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “The policy doesn’t seem to be in effect for Saeed and his goons, I noticed.”

  “They’re security, Nate. Of course they’re armed.”

  Nate shook his head. Ibby ignored him.

  “When I found this ranch, I was amazed to discover that the former owner had apparently prepared for the coming nuclear war by building one hell of an underground bomb shelter,” Ibby said. “Keep in mind that this place was built in the early 1960s. I wasn’t around then, but I’ve read all about the paranoia. Apparently, the owner thought the Russians might drop one on him way out here in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t make sense to me, but the fact that he built it sure has been useful. If the team and the volunteers operate out of sight at all times, there’s no way the spy satellites can figure out what we’re up to.”

  Ibby stopped and looked up. He said, “This is my dream, that someday soon I’ll be able to stand here and look up and see the sky, the clouds, and maybe my falcons without someone up there looking back at me, wondering what I’m doing and making an electronic record of it. Or me calling my family without knowing some spook is listening in. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you?”

  Ibby looked down, but not before Nate caught a wink of moisture in his eyes.

  “Not that my family has any idea where I am or what I’m doing,” he said. “If my father knew . . . God help me.”

  • • •

  THEY ENTERED THE SECOND SHED, the one filled with parked vehicles and equipment. It smelled of decades-old sheep manure, dust, and spilled fuel. The floor was hard-packed dirt, and since there were no rooms partitioned inside like the third shed, it was cavernous. Swallows had built hundreds of bulbous nests in the rafters, and the small birds swirled high above their heads.

  “There are still some pigeons I haven’t yet trapped to feed my falcons,” Ibby pointed out. “You’re welcome to them if you need them.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nate could feel a slight thrumming vibration through his boot soles as he stood on the floor of the shed.

  “Generators,” Ibby said in explanation. “As you might imagine, we’re entirely self-contained. We get our electricity from our own source and water from a well. It gets pretty lonely at times for everybody, so I allow weekend breaks, but only at night.”

  He smiled and said, “Not that there are many places to go from here. Wamsutter or Rawlins . . . well, you get my drift. There’s a little café on the interstate I have an interest in. It’s not much, but most of us go there when we need a break.”

  Nate knew the place. It used to be a strip club.

  Ibby approached what looked like the entrance to a storm cellar in the corner of the shed. The cinder-block base had slanted horizontal double doors on it. Before grasping the door handles, Ibby spoke into a rusty Schlitz beer can sitting on a windowsill over the entrance.

  “It’s me.”

  Nate heard a dull click from the other side of the double doors. Apparently, the beer can hid a microphone.

  Ibby grinned at Nate. He was obviously very proud of this place, Nate thought.

  “Watch your step,” Ibby said.

  • • •

  THE BOMB SHELTER was constructed of thick concrete and it ran nearly the entire length of the shed. Bare bulbs were strung along electrical wires attached to the ceiling, bathing the space in harsh white light and creating deep shadows in the corners. As they descended from the entrance on a stout ladder, Nate looked over his shoulder to see four or five curious faces looking up from crude desks and workstations.

  Ibby waited for Nate to climb down and join him, then said to the others, “This is Nate Romanowski, folks. He’s a brother of mine from the world of falconry. More important, he’s a brother to all of us when it comes to our mission here.”

  A fiftyish man wearing a dark jumpsuit said, “Welcome to our world.”

  Nate nodded to him. The man looked like an engineer; half-glasses, disheveled hair, bulbous nose, rough hands, grease-smeared tool handles sticking out from every pocket of his overalls.

  “This is Bill Henn,” Ibby said. “He’s our chief designer. Bill helped build the Utah Data Center and he was there when it opened. But Bill was under the impression the facility would be used only to find and target terrorists. When he objected to its actual use, Bill found himself suddenly unemployed.”

  “I’d rather be doing the Lord’s work,” Henn said. “Which is what I’m doing now. My wife, Donna, came with me and she does most of the cooking.”

  “Bill can answer any technical questions,” Ibby said. “This is his baby from start to finish.”

  Henn nodded quickly, then went back to soldering on a circuit board of some kind on his desk.

  A young, hard-looking woman with frizzed black hair and a feline cast to her eyes approached them. She was tall, slim, and fit. She wore a suede vest over a long-sleeved T-shirt and tight gray slacks.

  “Suzy Gudenkauf,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Nate shook her hand.

  “Suzy’s our outreach director,” Ibby said. “She’s been with us as long as Bill.”

  “Outreach?” Nate asked. “I thought you used couriers?”

  “We do,” Gudenkauf said. “But that’s just part of what I do. Maybe the smallest part.”

  Nate found himself mesmerized by her deep brown eyes, and she didn’t look away.

  Ibby said, “Suzy’s talent is in networking. She’s incredibly well connected with people who share our outlook. She identified funding sources and distribution paths that keep us in business. As you can imagine, it’s really super-expensive to buy all the parts and equipment we need and to do it all under the radar so it isn’t tracked. Suzy has people on both coasts who trust her and our mission to the point that they’ll send hard, untraceable cash through the couriers.”

  Gudenkauf said, “If
Bill over there needs a half ton of copper wire to get delivered to a pickup point along I-80, I make sure it gets handled. If he needs industrial batteries or two big-ass Caterpillar generators, I find sources who can deliver them. If Ibby here just has to have his chai tea latte in the afternoon, I make sure he gets it.”

  Ibby nodded at that.

  “So if there’s anything at all you need . . .” She let the sentence end in a slight smile.

  Nate ignored the implication.

  • • •

  “WANT A TOUR?” Ibby asked Nate.

  “Sure, but first I have a question.”

  “Is it technical?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Then ask Bill.”

  Henn looked up expectantly.

  Nate said, “I’ve been at facilities overseas that were prepped to withstand an EMP attack. I saw copper-mesh cages over the top of the electronics that could absorb a pulse and divert it into the ground. I can’t imagine the NSA hasn’t built screens around the hardware at the data center. Or is your device so powerful it can cut through the shield somehow?”

  Henn nodded. “They’ve got a shield around the supercomputer that my EMP device probably can’t penetrate. The pulse may be powerful enough to leak inside and screw up a few things, but there’s no way it would create the massive failure we hope for.”

  Nate looked over to Ibby.

  Ibby said, “We’ve thought of that. Actually, Bill thought of it early on. So we’ve got a work-around.”

  “I know you said no one will get hurt,” Nate said. “But having done special operations, I know that something unexpected always happens. What if there’s someone walking around in there with a pacemaker in his chest? Wouldn’t an EMP kill him?”

  “It’s possible,” Ibby said. “We pray that won’t happen, or anything like it. Believe me, that kind of thing has kept me up at night. But in the end I have to accept the possibility of unintentional collateral damage. It sounds harsh, but it’s true.”

  “Kind of like disabling the vehicle of that spy you told me about?” Nate said. “You hope he can walk to the highway without dying of exposure.”

  Nate and Ibby stared at each other for a moment before Ibby looked away. Ibby said, “It would be unfortunate. We’re doing everything we can to minimize casualties. You’ve got to believe me on that. There are so many other ways we could’ve taken out the data center—bombs, a frontal assault—and we think we’ve chosen the one that will do the least human damage. I hope at least you’ll give us credit for that.”

  Nate grunted. Neither a yes nor a no.

  To Henn, Ibby said, “Let’s walk him through.”

  “Mind if I tag along?” Suzy Gudenkauf asked while linking her arm through Nate’s.

  • • •

  “I COULD BORE YOU with the jargon associated with supercomputers,” Bill Henn said as he slowly led Nate and Ibby through a concrete hallway that connected the workroom to another space directly beneath the first shed.

  “Petaflops, nodes, processors, how many quadrillion floating points per second, chiller plants—all that—but it’s simpler for a non-engineer to simply understand if you think of a supercomputer as a giant brain and everything built around it as organs that exist to keep the brain healthy and functioning. If the organs fail completely or blood stops circulating, the brain will die rather quickly.”

  Henn stopped and turned around so he could use his hands to gesture while he talked.

  “A supercomputer is millions of dollars’ worth of interconnected hardware and software running at maximum capacity doing billions of calculations of ones and zeros every second. For every watt of electricity used, a watt of heat is generated by the machine. There’s no way around it. Those computers get hot fast, and in order to function they must be kept cool. Think of the fans they used to have in old desktop computers. Those fans were there for a reason.

  “So the supercomputer must be kept cool at all times—sixty-five degrees, to be exact—or the nodes inside will delaminate, meaning they’ll fall apart and fail. What you need to keep in mind about a supercomputer facility is that for every foot of space occupied by the brain there needs to be an additional four feet of space devoted to keeping the brain cool. It’s all about keeping the brain cool at all times. There can be no fluctuation at all. If the temperature fluctuates, the nodes delaminate and the data goes kablooey.

  “That’s why there are so many cloud server centers out here in the West,” Henn said. “High elevations, dry air, and long winters mean cooler temperatures. That’s why they built the Utah Data Center where they did.

  “So, how do you keep the brain cool? Water and air, but mostly water. You circulate cool water over, under, and through the supercomputer itself. They haven’t come up with anything more efficient than just plain cool water, and believe me, they’ve tried. That’s why every supercomputer facility has water storage, chiller plants so water heated by the machines can be cooled down again, and a shitload of cooling towers outside. Think of water as blood to the brain.

  “In order to keep that water flowing at all times, there’s a power substation plugged into the electrical grid. But of course they have backups to their backups. Remember: it’s all about cooling. If the power goes out for some reason, there is massive battery backup in one of the buildings that keeps the power going so the water can continue to circulate. But batteries don’t last forever, either, and if the power is out for hours there are sophisticated backup generators on site that fire up. They’ll power the electricity and water supply as long as fuel can be delivered to them.”

  Gudenkauf squeezed Nate’s arm. “I love this part,” she said. “Now Bill is going to tell you how we’ll kill the evil, diseased brain of the U.S. government.”

  “We’re going to act like a smart boxer,” Henn said. “Instead of head shots, we’re going to do a series of body shots. We’re going to knock out all the infrastructure that keeps the brain cool. Kill the body . . .”

  “. . . and the head will die,” Nate finished.

  “Exactly.”

  “Bill knows everything about the data center,” Ibby said. “He knows where the cooling towers are most vulnerable, where the power plant can be breached, and where to hit the water plant and the chiller plants. Once they’re all shut down, the brain will fry itself into a silicon block that can never be used again.”

  Nate shook his head, still skeptical. He said, “I just can’t buy it that the people inside that facility would stand around and let the supercomputer and the storage of all those records just burn up. Aren’t there manual ways of just shutting it all down before it seizes up?”

  “Sure,” Henn said. “It’s not easily done, and there’s no doubt some of the data would be corrupted before they could get it all shut down, but sure, they could do it.”

  “And that would preserve what they’d already collected, right?” Nate said. “So after they get everything repaired that you knocked out, they’d still have all those records stored away. It might take a while, but once they’ve got the place running again, they wouldn’t even have to start over.”

  “Look,” Ibby said, interrupting. “We really don’t want to reveal everything to you right now, but what you need to know is we’ve got it figured out.”

  Henn smiled slowly. Nate could tell that he really wanted to let him in on the whole plan because he was very, very proud of it.

  Nate pressed on. “The head may die, but they can bring it back to life once they get the body repaired, right?”

  “Right,” Henn said. “Unless, hypothetically, there was a bug in the overall facility’s computer programming that is so masked and hidden away no one could ever find it. Let’s say, again hypothetically, that the bug is designed to come to life only upon a reboot of the entire system. And playing this out, let’s say the bug would infect the system so rapidly that it wo
uld corrupt all of the remaining records before they could be searchable.”

  “Which means,” Ibby said, sharing Henn’s enthusiasm, “if they bring that facility back to life, they’ll find it’s filled with gibberish. No phone records, no metadata they can use. If they want, really want, to pursue this illegal data collection, they’ll have to totally rebuild from the ground up. That will take years and billions more dollars. By then, I hope, the citizens of the nation will stand up and say, ‘No, damn you. Not again.’”

  • • •

  “KNOWING YOUR BACKGROUND, I’ve got a question for you,” Ibby said to Nate.

  Nate responded with raised eyebrows.

  Ibby moved to the doorway so he could click on a set of lights that illuminated the previously darkened corner of the room. Nate noted a large schematic map headed UTAH DATA CENTER taped to a whiteboard. Next to the map were aerial photos of the facility shown in context to the landscape surrounding it.

  “Here it is,” Ibby said, approaching the map. The huge facility itself was peanut-shaped and ran north to south. It was outlined by high fences. The largest buildings within the compound were dead center and were labeled DATA HALLS 1 & 2 and DATA HALLS 3 & 4. Between them was an oblong administration building.

  Flanking the data halls to the north and south sides were power buildings, chiller plants, water storage, fuel tanks, and six cooling towers built cheek by jowl.

  A power substation and power line coming from Bluffdale to the north sat outside the perimeter of the fence. On the southeast bend of the perimeter was a visitor center.

  Ibby said, “If you were to hit this facility with two trailer-mounted EMP pulses, where would you set up?”

  Nate approached the map and studied the aerial photographs. The UDC sat on a huge flat swale beneath some foothills to the east. There was no residential housing in the area outside the perimeter. Only sagebrush.