Give Us This Day

by Tom Avitabile

“It’s easy, Brooke. Reactance of a coil is dependent on the frequency of the current put into it,” Kronos explained like he was detailing how to make a two-scoop ice cream cone.

  “You think that helped me?” Brooke said with a half-chuckle.

  “The frequency of the grid across America is a constant sixty hertz,” Kronos tried again.

  “Not exactly,” the other engineer from Con Ed said. “We do allow for a deviation of .0167 cycles per second.”

  “True, but for the purposes of his theory it’s negligible.” Remo then stood up. “Gentlemen, what if they intend to alter the frequency of the power transmission?”

  “Can’t happen. There are synchronous breakers as well. If a turbine or rotator were to go out of sync it would be cut from the grid.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because the resulting counter EMF would cause the other turbines to . . . to . . . to overheat . . .” the chief engineer said, slowly seeing some merit in Remo’s point.

  “Okay, so let’s say they somehow reduce the frequency of the output to . . . let’s say fifty-four cycles or ten percent.”

  “Again, can’t happen.”

  “Humor him, please,” Brooke said.

  “Well, let’s see.” Both engineers grabbed their pencils and started scratching out formula’s and filling them in and talking amongst themselves. They finished and the chief engineer spoke. “The hysteresis-synchronous curve for a ten-kilowatt transformer tells us that at a ten percent reduction in power line frequency, the inductive reactance of the coils would increase eight hundred percent. But again can’t . . .”

  “Yeah I got that. What is the average transformer rated for in terms of maximum operating temperature?” Peter said.

  “Off the top of my head I’d say . . . I would say a fifty percent margin for heat dissipation before the coils breakdown.”

  “Or in other words, if veering off the designed resonant frequency of the device is sufficient enough, it will cause a rise in core temperature to the point of melting the device?”

  “Wait. Core temperature? Isn’t that a nuclear reactor thing?” Brooke was confused.

  “Sorry, Brooke, I should explain. All transformers have iron cores that focus and transfer the induced electricity efficiently.”

  “So, if I am following you, the transistor . . .”

  “Transformer.”

  “Sorry. This transformer would heat up if someone changed what you called the constant hertz? How much hotter would it get if, say, they can do the ten percent Peter was proposing?”

  “At eight hundred percent more reactance, the heat would be sixteen times normal.”

  “What’s normal?”

  “Core temperatures are usually between 120 and 150 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on load.”

  “So the fifty percent margin gets us to 225. But sixteen times 225 is . . . is . . .”

  “Is 3,600 degrees!” Kronos said.

  “Iron melts at 2,700 degrees,” Remo said

  “One more thing, Peter. At these power levels, the rapid rise in temperature would be almost instantaneous,” Kronos added.

  “Meaning what?” Brooke asked.

  “Meaning a transformer suddenly under these conditions would explode like a bomb.”

  “Okay, so how many transformers are in the system?” Brooke said.

  “Around 28,000 and change,” the Con Ed man said, then realized the sudden danger in that number.

  “What? Where are these?” Brooke said.

  “On every pole, under every street,” Peter said.

  “Plus, everything in every house that has a motor or transformer or ballast is also tuned for sixty cycles per second,” Kronos said.

  “Oh my God. You’re saying people’s washing machines, TVs, and refrigerators will explode?”

  “Theoretically, yes.”

  “Please, please. We must stop this speculation,” the man from Con Ed urged. “Synchronous deviation is impossible. There are safeguards at every place along the distribution line.”

  “What are they?” Brooke asked.

  “You know those breakers that are as big as a house? Well, a smaller device called a synchronous breaker will trip the large breaker if the frequency went beyond twice the allowed delta or .0304 percent. So you see this whole line of speculation is implausible.” The chief engineer of Con Ed read the faces in the room. They were very skeptical. He relented and said, “Look, I’ll show you.” He turned to the computer operator. “Can I access my computer from here?”

  .G.

  There was a truck yard alongside the Ravenswood generating station so the red Con Ed gas repair truck was as conspicuous as a piece of straw in a haystack. They rolled right up to the gate, waved to the security guard, and he let them pass. He didn’t notice the Yeshiva school bus turning into the driveway until it was almost up to his little guard booth. He stepped out and a hand came out of the driver’s side with a gun in it and he felt his chest explode as he fell to the floor. The door of the bus opened and sixteen men wearing bulletproof vests piled out with weapons and grenades. Two army humvees with mounted .50 caliber machine guns reacted to the sight of the fallen guard and came towards the front gate. The back doors of the red Con Ed truck that had passed them opened up and six men got out with squad automatic weapons and shot the humvees from behind. The six soldiers in the two vehicles were killed instantly. The men fanned out quickly and approached the massive generating station known as “Big Allis,” the largest generator in New York’s power grid. Eighty percent of the electricity used in the five boroughs came from her.

  Inside the distribution shed located out in the transformer farm on the river side of the power station, Yusuf heard the shots and went into his lunch pail. He pulled out a 9 mm Glock-26 and calmly, without a scintilla of regret, put a bullet in the head of Frank his co-worker and “friend” for the last three months. Frank’s head hit the control panel, leaving it bloody as it slammed down when he collapsed, dead.

  “Now you see, I am the terrorist,” he spit on Frank’s crumpled form. Yusuf then went outside and there were two linemen pulling a new feeder cable from a towed spool of heavy wire. He walked up to them.

  “Hey, Yusuf. How’s it going . . .”

  Ron’s words were cut off as a bullet entered his forehead. Ted jumped back. “What the fuck, Yus . . .”

  The side of his temple exploded as Yusuf extended his gun hand almost to Ted’s face and pulled the trigger.

  Yusuf then went to the large forklift over by the building.

  .G.

  “Here we go. Here’s my screen at work. Now let me get the transformer camera up and I can show you the transfer relay, which acts as a breaker,” the chief engineer said as the picture came up on the big screen in the conference room.

  This time Remo got up and walked close to the screen.

  The chief engineer joined him. “You see this large device here?” He outlined it with his finger on the large screen. “That’s the relay or breaker.”

  “It does look like a large mouse trap,” Brooke said.

  “So you see . . . if anything happens, sudden load or synchronous fault, this unit kicks in and breaks the circuit and then the whole station is off line and off the grid.”

  “Has that ever happened?”

  “Once since it was installed. You remember the blackout of 2003?”

  “Hey, what’s he doing?” Remo asked.

  “Who?”

  “That guy with the forklift.”

  “I don’t know. He’s right by the mousetrap, er . . . relay,” Brooke said.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I’ll tell you what he’s doing. He just shunted the relay with that huge girder. And now he’s going back to get the other one,” Kronos said.

  “Why didn’t it spark?” Brooke said
. “Is it off?”

  “Nah, it’s not off. It’s carrying current. What he’s doing is shorting out the contacts so when it trips and breaks the circuit, the circuit will go through the girders instead.” Kronos used his hand across his two spread fingertips as he explained.

  “It will be like the relay never tripped,” the engineer said.

  “Is this the safeguard you said would stop every transformer and refrigerator in the city from becoming a fire bomb?” Brooke asked as she turned to the comm officer. “Get me Bird Dog now!” Then she turned to her agent. “Get me a chopper fast! I want to be there.”

  “Bird Dog is on the radio, Director Burrell,” Comms said.

  “Bridge. Target is Ravenswood generating station on the Queens side of the East River north of the tram and the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. Four big red-and-white smoke stacks. You can’t miss it. I am going to join you. Direct everything you got there. We’re calling in NYPD, ESU, and Hercules teams for additional support.”

  She bolted out of the room. The comm officer grabbed the mic and said, “Over.”

  Chapter 45

  Grounded

  Yusuf had the next twenty-by-two-foot steel girder on the forks of the heavy lift. He misjudged the distance and the end of the girder hit a terminal on the top of one of the step-up transformers in the farm. He froze. His machine had rubber tires, but he was now ungrounded and forty thousand volts were flowing through him and his machine; but without a ground there was zero current to kill him. At this point the voltage was like the barrel of a gun but it needed amperage as the bullet. Slowly, he started backing the lift away. At first the massive girder was adhering to the magnetism that was focused on the top of the terminal. The enormous one-ton piece of metal was now acting like a giant bar magnet. The metal slid off the forks as the machine moved under it. If the metal beam hit the ground while still attached to the terminal, the whole plant would short out and the relay would activate and break the main distribution circuit even though he had already shunted half of it. Big Allis would be off-line and their whole mission would fail. Every time he rocked the handles that operated the lift in an attempt to wiggle the girder loose, it just got closer to toppling off the raised forks. Worse, he couldn’t get off the lift without jumping clean away, because if his foot found the ground so would the path of electricity, and at that high-voltage level the amperage that would go through him would cook him in an instant.

  .G.

  “Is he stuck?” Brooke asked.

  “God dammit, somebody answer the phone,” the chief engineer said as he frantically tried to reach his people at the generating station.

  Remo got his attention. “Do you have any other video feeds?”

  The chief engineer tapped an agent next to him on the shoulder and motioned for him to take over working the computer. “Show him the other feeds there from the thumbnails on the side of the monitor. I’m trying to get some fucking idiot to answer the phone.”

  “Got any of the front gate?” Brooke said.

  The agent scanned the list of cameras on the right side of the screen and found “Main Gate.” He clicked on it. Someone in the room muttered, “Good, God.”

  On the screen was a scene of carnage: dead soldiers draped across two humvees near the camera, and farther off by the guard shack a blue uniformed body lay in a pool of blood.

  .G.

  Out back in the transformer farm, Yusuf was still trying to free the girder. One of the south’s team members made it to the back area of the building and saw Yusuf struggling. He ran as he called out, “I’ll help you.”

  Yusuf barely had a second to scream, “Nooooo!”

  The young man went to step up onto the forklift. As soon as his foot touched the metal cowling over the engine, he completed the circuit to the natural ground. His body began to smoke and cardiac arrest was instantaneous so he didn’t scream; Yusuf, holding the wheel of the now-electrified machine, burst into flames as his body shook from the forty-thousand-volt surge of now-deadly current. A split second later, the spasming body of the young man who tried to get on the machine exploded.

  .G.

  Dequa entered the generating facility. His men had killed the entire shift of workers. He stepped over bloody bodies on his way to the master control panel. His chief engineer was busily setting the gauges and flow valves.

  “Any difficulties?”

  “Not here, but Yusuf has yet to report the shunting of the master breaker.”

  “I’ll go check on him. Expect the counter attack any second now.”

  “We’ll be ready as soon as the shunt is in place.”

  Dequa trotted out to see why Yusuf hadn’t completed his task in the appointed time frame. As he turned the corner of the building, he was momentarily stunned by the horror. Dequa, who was trained as an electrical engineer at the University of Tripoli before the Russians had invaded his beloved Afghanistan, quickly surmised the chain of events. The girder leaning on the step-up transformer’s exposed terminal told him all he needed to know about the delay. The ash and boiled body fluids and two burnt leather shoes told him someone had attempted to get onto the lift. What he didn’t know was who it had been and if they were doing it to stop Yusuf, or help him. The still smoldering body in the seat of the machine was unrecognizable, but he assumed it was Yusuf. He scanned around and saw what he was looking for. He ran over to the side of the building and found a stack of skids that the forklift used to move freight around. He grabbed one and ran back to the lift.

  He placed the wooden skid on the ground and stood on it. He thought about it for an instant and rechecked his logic. He took a deep breath and stepped onto the machine, half expecting to die in a blaze of plasma, but the wood was dry and it provided lifesaving insulation from the ground.

  He got up on the machine and placed his foot on Yusuf’s immolated body and shoved him off the seat. Part of his rear end stayed stuck to the melted rubber seat. The mission first in his mind, he sat down on the boiling, fatty remains. It burned his own rear end. But he endured because everything they had planned for, trained for, and sacrificed for, as well as the next thousand years of Utopia, were at stake. He gently pushed the lever that lifted the forks forward. He eyeballed the girder to be level, at which point he drove forward with the wheel and turned slightly to the right. He slowly crept forward as the sound of helicopters faded up at a distance. A main feeder cable was now up against one end of the metal beam. Very carefully, he pushed forward as the beam pivoted against the feeder cable. The fork bucked a little but eventually the magnetic attraction was defeated and the heavy girder fell to the ground harmlessly, although with a resounding clang that sounded like an echo under water. He backed up, lowered the fork to the ground, and gunned the machine forward. The forks slipped under the beam at the middle and he raised it up. He spun the wheel a few times as the forklift pivoted. Now the girder was poised to span the blades of the relay. Once it was in place, the electricity, which would have been stopped by the disconnection of the relay contacts, would have another way to complete the circuit through the massive steel beam. The shunt had been made. Now when the change in the line frequency triggered the master kill switch, the arms of the relay would drop away, but instead of the electric circuit being broken, the beam would effectively take over, offering a very stable path for the electricity to feed the city—very deadly, decreasing frequency electricity.

  He jumped down from the large yellow Hyster forklift and ran, as best he could with a blistered butt, back to the main building.

  .G.

  RDF 1 and 3 were twenty seconds out. Two Black Hawk units would hover over the roof and ten operators would rappel down on ropes. The Cobra gunships would hover and take up defensive positions to cover the platoon of men who were landing in two Chinooks in the front equipment yard.

  Bridge didn’t like the tactical scenario. The fact that they had met
no resistance yet meant one of two things: there was no resistance or, worse, they were dug in with fortified positions and holding their fire until his troops were in a crossfire kill zone.

  A single Ranger scrambled to the abandoned Yeshiva school bus and tossed in a flash bang grenade. He then went in through the front door and scanned for any children or enemies. When he got to the back of the bus he opened the emergency door and yelled, “Clear!”

  The first squad of troops off the Chinook advanced relay fashion around the bus. Then it exploded! Sharp shrapnel that was the body of the bus and shards of glass went in every direction. Seven soldiers died instantly, four were sliced up and seriously injured.

  .G.

  Dequa rejoined his engineer at the master control panel as his job of slowing the rotator was underway. He heard the explosion outside. “They’ve reached the bus. We only have a few minutes.”

  “When the speed dropped below fifty-eight cycles per second, the entire New York power zone was dropped from the northeast grid,” the engineer said. He didn’t have to add that this was automatic due to the national electric grid system’s own protection mechanisms. Relays like the one Dequa shunted in the state’s pathway to the national grid.

  At that point there was no longer any interfering voltage to electromotively speed up the rotator, thus inadvertently turning the giant generator into a motor. A motor that would have been taking electricity from the national grid, rather than feeding it. Now free of the state and national grid’s counter EMF, the approximate rate of slowing they could achieve meant the rotator would reach thirty cycles per second in four minutes. Prior to that, at fifty cycles per second, most coils would start overheating; at forty cycles per second, smaller devices would start melting; and at thirty cycles per second, also called thirty hertz, everything that had a coil, every transformer on every pole, or under every street, as well as every motor in every home, from air conditioners to refrigerators, would explode. With the two steel beams shorting out the master disconnect, there was no way to stop the reduction in frequency’s devastating effects.