Chapter 28
Manhattan, New York City
Joe Douglas could not sit down. He was nervous and excited, but mostly scared. Today was the thirty-first of October. Tonight, Halloween night, he would begin a process that would teach the world just how vulnerable their modern existence was. One man was going to bring the financial world to its knees with a pump, a few thousand gallons of diesel fuel, and two hundred gallons of “surprise.” The sobering truth was that the technological marvels of the modern world hung by a precarious thread. A thread, in the case of New York, which just one man with the most basic equipment was going to cut.
Joe made his final preparations. The fuel bladders were full with forty-eight-thousand gallons of diesel fuel. He had configured the pool plumbing so that it would come on and empty the pool into the bladder tank system at five a.m. It would take over an hour to empty the pool and all its contents into the city’s water system. And just to make it more difficult for them, he had decided to make a slight modification to the condo’s plumbing and HVAC system.
Joe walked down the stairs into the basement. On the side opposite from the fuel bladder tanks was a door behind which were the condo’s water heaters—two old A.O. Smith one-hundred-gallon, two-hundred-thousand-BTU units which provided all the hot water for the apartments. They worked fine but were not all that efficient since no one had maintained them for years. Several inches of calcium had built up in the bottom, and they made loud popping noises while running.
Joe turned off the gas for the water heaters and disconnected the burner manifold and pilot assemblies on both units. Unplugging the gas control valve from the water heater, he unscrewed the three-quarter-inch piping which led to the water heaters’ burner assembly. Reconnecting the pilot minus the burner assembly, he reinstalled the gas control valve. Into the three-quarter-inch outlet on the gas control, Joe connect a fitting, to which he connected fifty feet of three-quarter-inch cross-linked polyethylene, also know as PEX tubing. He ran the tubing out into the center of the empty basement parking garage and weighted it down. Then he went back into the water-heater room, relit the pilots on both water heaters, and turned both water heaters to their lowest settings.
Next, he set the timer on the circulation system pump to come on at nine a.m. Once the timer kicked on, it would begin circulating the hot water from the water heater tanks through the condo’s plumbing system. The water heaters would cool down and their thermostats call for heat. Once the thermostats on the water heaters kicked on, all the gas would be sent down the PEX piping into the center of the garage, where it would begin to mix with the available air. Anyone within a block of his condo a few hours from now was in for one hell of a surprise.
Joe blocked open the door to the water heater room and then opened the mechanical room for the forced-air heating system. Removing the access panels on all of the condo’s ten forced-air furnaces, he propped the door to the furnace room open and then went upstairs and set each programmable thermostat to turn on, only the blowers, at ten the next morning. About the same time that the gas water heaters began pumping the natural gas into the garage, the ten furnaces would begin to circulate the air in all of the condo apartments. The open fresh-air returns on the furnaces would take the air from the garage and begin mixing it with the gas from the water heaters. When the fuel-air ratio reached the proper proportions, either the pilots on the water heaters or the furnaces motors would ignite the mixture and cause quite a spectacular explosion. The explosion and resulting fire should make it almost impossible for anyone to find any useful evidence. And by that time he be would thousands of miles away fighting for the cause in another land.
Joe looked at his watch. Eleven p.m. It was time! Walking back down to the garage basement, he opened the wood partition and entered the room with the bladder tanks. He turned on the pump and began pumping the diesel fuel into the water system of New York City.
As he did, he began to shake a little. He had been so hell-bent on revenge that he had not really considered the full impact of his actions until now. With that little action of turning on a switch, the first doubts began to form in his angry mind.
But it was too late to change anything now.
With growing unease, he climbed into his truck, and pushing the button of his garage remote on the visor, he opened the garage door and drove off. On the way, he fingered the key to the storage unit. He wanted to get this part over with as quickly as possible.
After several minutes he reached his destination and drove up to the gated storage facility. He was shaking even more. Joe saw the keypad with relief and for a brief second thought he would have to turn around because his contact hadn’t provided an entry code. He was disappointed when he saw the keyhole in the gate control. He inserted his key and turned it. The well-oiled gate slid quietly open. Driving down poorly lit rows of storage units, he finally found unit nineteen.
Joe turned his truck and backed it up as close to the unit’s eight-foot door as he could. Climbing down out of the truck, he inserted the key in the lock and lifted the sliding door up. The room was bare except for a raised platform in the middle with four crated fifty-gallon drums sitting with a hand pallet forklift under one of them.
Joe lowered the tailgate and backed his truck up against the raised platform. Using the pallet fork, he loaded two of the crated drums into the bed of his truck. His truck bed wasn’t big enough to carry all four drums with their pallet crating, so he had to decide whether to remove them from their pallets or make two trips. It would be harder to unload them without the pallets; on the other hand, he didn’t relish the thought of making two trips to the storage facility. With his resolve quickly diminishing, Joe decided to remove the drums.
When he removed the plywood sides of the crating, Joe’s hair stood up on end. The drums were covered in lead sheeting. He almost bolted from the facility, leaving his truck and everything. He knew enough to realize that you only used lead sheeting if there was radioactivity involved.
Pull yourself together, he told himself. Finish the job. Each drum weighed over four hundred pounds, so they were incredibly difficult to remove from the crates. Not to mention the added fear of damaging the tanks and causing a radioactive leak. At least all those hours pumping iron in the prison gym could be put to good use now. Joe wondered how sensitive the radioactive monitors New York City had installed were. Would they be alerted to his cargo? With some consolation, he told himself that they hadn’t found them here at the storage facility yet, so he had a good chance of escaping notice.
After loading all four drums, Joe threw in one of the pallets and the pallet fork so he could unload them at the condo. He almost had a heart attack when, at a stoplight, a New York City cop pulled up alongside his truck. The officer looked over curiously at Joe and then glanced back at his load. Trying not to act nervous, Joe gave a friendly wave and drove away. The police cruiser stayed with him for several blocks, then turned off at an intersection.
Now Joe was shaking uncontrollably. Sweat was beading on his face, and he was breathing hard. If he ran into another police officer before he made it home, it would be all over for him. Somehow he made it the final few blocks to the condo. Turning off his engine, he sat in the garage shaking and trying to pull himself together. After thirty minutes, he restarted the truck and backed it up to the unloading ramp he had built. One by one, he carefully removed the drums from the truck, and with the pallet fork, moved them up to the first floor and the edge of the swimming pool.
Joe removed the lead sheeting from the top of each drum and unscrewed their two-inch plugs. Then, one by one, Joe tipped them over into the swimming pool. The final drum was not as close to the edge, and when it fell over, some its contents splashed onto the deck.
Joe didn’t notice the few drops of the liquid that splashed onto his left shoe.
With some relief, Joe Douglas walked to his apartment and gathered his belongings as he prepared to leave. Without thinking he walked to the bathroom and was
just about to open the faucet and wash his hands when he remembered what was taking place in the basement below. Pulling back his hand as if it had been burned, he returned to his bedroom.
With his suitcase and a few other belongings, he climbed one last time into his truck and drove out, watching in his mirror as the garage door closed behind him. It was now twelve-thirty a.m., November 1. Joe had about five hours until his plane left from New Jersey’s Newark International Airport. With an hour’s driving time, he would have about four hours to get checked in. Could he hold it together for five more hours?
* * *
An hour later and three blocks from Joe’s condo, Kim Brewer had just gotten off work. A third-year law student working as a cocktail waitress in a bar in the financial district, Kim hated her job—but in this economy, it was all she could find that would pay her rent. She detested the arrogant, drunk Wall Street brokers who tried to get their hands on her, but she figured she could handle it for a few more months until she graduated.
Kim unlocked the door to her apartment, and after locking it again behind her, she kicked off her shoes by the door and walked to the bathroom. A hot shower was what she needed now, hot water to wash over her tired body and the promise of a better life to come.
It was the smell that first registered in her conscious mind. That faint smell of gasoline—no, not gasoline, but diesel fuel. Opening her eyes, she saw the shiny, multicolored film running down her body and into the shower drain. She screamed, and turning off the water, got out of the shower and tried to remove the oily film from her body. The hot, steamy shower seemed to accentuate the nauseating smell.
In the following days, it would be determined that Kim Brewer was the first 911 call that night.
The operator told Kim it was not an emergency and that she should call the New York Water Authority. A message machine answered, telling her that if it was an emergency, to call 911. In frustration, Kim hung up and tried to decide what to do. She smelled like a bad diesel spill at a service station, and she needed a clean, hot shower after the day she’d had. Picking up her phone again, she called her mother in New Jersey and asked if she could spend the night. Slipping into a sweater and pants she packed a few additional items, then picked up her car keys and left.
She was one of the lucky ones.
* * *
Joe stopped at a McDonald’s near the airport. He ordered a large coffee at the drive-through window and drove around to the parking lot, where he sat drinking the coffee and trying to collect himself. In his current state of mind, he was in no condition to go through airport security.
After forty-five minutes, Joe felt somewhat better. Putting his truck in gear, he drove the rest of the way to the airport. Parking his truck in the long-term parking lot, he caught a shuttle bus to the international terminal. The balding middle-aged man behind the check-in counter looked over the edge of his spectacles at him. Joe handed him his ticket.
“May I see your passport, please?” the man asked after looking at the tickets for a few minutes. Joe fumbled in his shirt pocket and finally secured his passport. The man punched in some numbers on his keyboard, and after what seemed like eternity, handed him back his passport and his freshly printed boarding passes.
With relief, Joe returned the passport and the ticket to his pocket and set his suitcase up on the scale to be weighed. He had heard the airlines were charging for bags even one pound over a certain weight. After the attendant weighed the bag, he printed a luggage label and secured it on Joe’s suitcase, then pushed the suitcase through the wall behind the counter and onto a conveyor belt, sending it on its way to the plane.
With an even greater measure of relief, Joe left the counter and headed for security. One more obstacle, he thought to himself, and then he was home free. He walked slowly down the concourse to the long line at the security check-in. Was it his imagination, or did the TSA agents seem to be a little too alert? As Joe slowly made his way through the line, he grew more and more nervous. Every single person in line was being sent through the X-ray, or the “naked scanner” as he thought of it. Well, if they wanted to see him naked, that was their problem.
What Joe did not know was that the moment he had stepped through the terminal doors, the radioactive liquid on his shoe set off a newly installed radioactivity monitor. A silent alert was sent throughout the entire terminal, and the security command center was replaying the security camera, looking for those who had entered the terminal at the time the monitor picked up elevated levels of radiation. By the time Joe reached the security checkpoint, they had his picture along with three others.
When he approached the TSA screener, Joe could tell something was wrong. The screener was looking at Joe as if he recognized him, and several other officers approached from both sides of the room. The closest agent asked Joe, “Sir, could you come with us please?”
Joe looked up at the officer in obvious fear, his heart beating as if it was going to come out of his chest. The caffeine from the large coffee had hit his already fragile nervous system, and Joe Douglas, the man who would bring down the financial district of New York City, lost his senses.
Grabbing his carry-on bag, he swung it at the officer and missed. He charged the next closest officer, yelling, “Allahu Akbar!” They collided, and he jumped the security cordon and ran down the terminal yelling and screaming like a madman.
Joe ran about a hundred feet. Another security officer stepped in front of him, his gun drawn, telling him to stop and get down on the floor. Joe charged right into a nine-millimeter lead bullet. The officer’s aim was true. The bullet glanced off his rib and went right through his heart.
Joe Douglas was dead.
Chapter 29
Manhattan, New York City
Throughout the early morning, the 911 switchboard began to receive more and more calls about smelly, oily water. It wasn’t until three-thirty a.m. that the 911 supervisor on duty decided to call his supervisor. Another thirty minutes later, his supervisor decided he’d better call the police department. Several calls and another hour later, he got ahold of a departmental captain who would listen, and the captain called his supervisor. Finally, at six a.m. Monday morning, the situation was officially raised to incident status.
By that time, Manhattan residents were waking up all over lower Manhattan and jumping in the shower. By eight a.m., diesel fuel was in every main water pipe in lower Manhattan and in every commercial building, most condos, and houses. It took another hour before the mayor authorized the complete shutdown of New York City’s water system and three more hours before that was accomplished by the New York Water Authority. Lower Manhattan did not yet know that its lifeblood was permanently poisoned. Most people take it for granted, but clean water is the life of any modern civilization. Without it, the mighty spiraling cities of the world could not exist. New Yorkers were going to learn this painful lesson over the next few days.
Because the authorities did not know exactly where the contaminated water had entered New York’s water system, they shut everything down. It took eight hours to determine that only lower Manhattan had been contaminated. By that time, the damage was done.
It was a Twitter post that started it. The wife of one of the terrorist-response team member’s tweeted to her friends that city officials believed the contamination to be a terrorist act. The rumor spread like wildfire, and thirty minutes later, it was all over the news. Without water, New Yorkers quickly realized the city was uninhabitable. By nine o’clock Monday morning, every street and highway out of Manhattan was bumper-to-bumper cars. By ten, New York City streets were one large inescapable parking garage. People left their cars and just started walking.
* * *
A professor from New York University was the first to notice the radioactive contamination of the water. He had been taking samples of Manhattan’s water every morning since the Fukishima disaster, testing the water to determine whether Fukishima radioactive material had reached the groundwater of New York
. Monday morning, he opened his faucet and started to fill the sink. He noticed the oily film right away, but it wasn’t until he took a reading with his portable radiation particle detector that he knew something was wrong.
The professor emptied the sink, then ran the faucet for five more minutes, feeling slightly guilty for wasting the water. After five minutes, he again filled the sink with one inch of water. This time the reading was a little higher. Taking a clean container, he filled it with about half a gallon of tap water and left for the university. On the way, he noticed traffic was horrible. Since he had not turned on the radio or watched the news that morning, he did not know what was going on.
When he got to work and tested for specific radioactive particles, what he found made his hair stand up. There were actually trace amounts of plutonium in the water. Plutonium was considered a man-made element, although minute amounts had been found to occur in nature. The amounts in the tap water could only have come from a nuclear power plant. If plutonium was in the water supply, it was permanently contaminated.
The professor picked up the phone.
The 13th Enumeration Page 13
