Shadow of the Burj

by J Jackson Bentley

  Chapter 47

  Al Kifra B1 Power & Desalination Plant, Jebel Ali, Dubai:

  4th March; 11am.

  Rie Ruitgen was continually kept busy during his shifts at the power plant. Back in his native South Africa, the indigenous labour was slow but they did obey orders and procedures to the letter. Here in Dubai he had spent four years training the Indian, Pakistani and Malaysian turbine hall workers to follow procedures, but he knew that as soon as his back was turned they would do things the easy way rather than the right way.

  A heavy-set, bearded man in his fifties, his harsh Afrikaner voice sent shivers down the spines of any slacking worked within earshot. This morning he was yelling about the cleanliness of the turbine hall floor. The floor was marked with different coloured lines, some denoting a route that had to be followed (blue to the boilers, red to the HRSG) but the parallel yellow lines, about a yard apart, denoted a safe pathway through the plant. Anyone walking between the lines would not face a trip hazard or bump his head, hence the designation, ‘safe route’. But this morning the path was blocked with wooden pallets which had been used to deliver two new pumps. The pumps had now been installed, but no-one had removed the pallets.

  Two workers in blue coveralls raced out from their resting place and dragged the pallets to one side.

  “Paresh!” Ruitgen shouted. “Why aren’t you keeping an eye on these little perishers?” An answering voice came from the walkway behind the turbine.

  “I was about to discipline them, Mr Rie.”

  “What are you doing up there, Paresh?” the Afrikaner demanded.

  “I heard a rattling noise, and you know how fragile these turbine blades are. I thought I should check it out. But it is OK. One of the casing screws had vibrated loose. I have corrected it.”

  “Good man, Paresh, but you have to watch these farm boys like a hawk.”

  Ruitgen supposedly ran the plant from his office beside the entrance to the plant, but in reality he had twelve reliable men like Paresh who ran the plant for him in shifts. They kept the tradesmen and the labour in check, and that was why Al Kifra B1 power plant produced four per cent more power from the same equipment in an average year than either Al Kifra A1 or A2. In fact, in the last two years, Al Kifra B1 had out performed any other power plant in Dubai, when measured turbine by turbine, something Rie Ruitgen was deeply proud of. He was producing almost six per cent of Dubai’s power from his little empire, and without him the people of Dubai would be in deep mire.

  Paresh watched his South African boss leave the turbine hall and then he opened up the protective casing and finished attaching the Korean’s little explosive charge and timer.

  ***

  Kwong Chong Lee was sitting in a queue at the border crossing, watching the Border Police checking visas and making a cursory inspection of vehicles. He was in the shorter of the two queues, but he knew that this was no guarantee that it would be the shorter queue in five minutes.

  To pass the time he switched on the radio and tried to tune into Virgin Radio Dubai. He heard the Australian presenter and knew he had the right station. He had only just tuned in when the radio made a staccato buzzing sound. From long experience, Kwong picked up his mobile phone, recognising that the interference forewarned of an incoming call. The number was showing as unknown. He pressed the green telephone button and listened, not prepared to give any information to the mysterious caller.

  “Kwong, are you there? Can you talk?” It was Khaweini.

  “Yes, I am sitting at the border crossing, in a line of cars. What do you want?”

  “Good. That is ideal,” Khaweini said as the line went dead.

  “Shit!” Kwong yelled as he opened the car door and tried to exit as fast as he could. It was too late. The mobile phone under the seat buzzed, and there was a huge explosion.

  Kwong was thrown fifteen yards from the car, but his legs and his left forearm did not travel with him. As he passed into oblivion he almost laughed at the irony of being killed by his own bomb.

  ***

  “The airport authorities are on high alert. They will be checking all maintenance operations, but they are confident that it would be next to impossible to plant a device in an aircraft engine. In their email they cite ‘operational and technical difficulties’ that would be too onerous to overcome,” Max summarised for the others.

  Gathered around him were Todd, Jamie and Dominic from Vastrick Security, whose resources had proven so valuable over the past few weeks. They were dividing up tasks between them. They would have to visit as many power plants as possible to see which, if any, might be Khaweini’s target.

  “What I don’t understand,” Max said, frowning, “is why choose a power plant? The largest of them would take a nuclear bomb to destroy, and then it would only be a minor inconvenience because any one power station only provides about five per cent of the Emirate’s power.”

  His thoughts were interrupted by a musical tone that was emanating from the laptop. The laptop screen, which was being projected on to the wall, showed a red and a green phone handset with a request beneath each to reject or accept a video call from BDPSVL, Bur Dubai Police Station Video Link. Max clicked on ‘accept’ and a picture of Max and the others appeared on the right had side of the screen, whilst a circling arrow rotated on the other side. When the arrow stalled the Brigadier was pictured in full uniform, sitting in front of a plant and a national flag.

  “We have the Shadow,” he announced without preamble. There was a sigh of relief in the room as everyone relaxed in their chairs. “But it is not the good news we had hoped for.” Everyone looked perplexed.

  “Will he talk?” Todd asked.

  “Perhaps, but it may be too late for that. He was fleeing the country when a bomb went off in his car. He lost both legs and a part of an arm. He will probably not survive. Luckily for him the border guard was an ex-army medic who was able to stem the blood loss, but the man is unlikely to speak to us soon, if ever.

  I would like you to stand by for a video call from London, from an expert in explosives who had had previous experience of Kwong. His name is Doctor Lionel Preece. He should be coming through in a few minutes’ time. I do not need to tell you we are desperate for information. If, as seems to be the case, the Shadow was leaving Dubai, the plan could already be under way.”

  When the Brigadier disconnected, Dominic took out his mobile phone and dialled. The call was answered at once.

  “Ardash? You must speak to the Brigadier and arrange to examine Kwong’s laptop and phone. See whether anything can be retrieved from them. If you need a forensic examination of the hard drive or the phone memory, call Simon in London. He is our specialist. He has the software he uses for his police cases. We need answers, Ardash, and we need them soon.”

  The blue screen lit up again as a new call came in from the UK. It was routed through the University of London video lab.

  “Can you hear me?” The voice was plummy and clearly belonged to a public schoolboy.

  “We can, Doctor,” Max responded.

  “Good morning, everyone. Before we begin, I would prefer it if you would call me Len, not Doctor or Lionel. Could you all please introduce yourselves, so I know who I am speaking to?”

  The four operatives introduced themselves in order of how they appeared on the screen from left to right. Max, Jamie, Todd and Dominic gave a brief resume about what they knew about explosives, which wasn’t much, although Jamie knew a little more than she was admitting.

  Len Preece was an ex-serviceman, one of the few bomb disposal experts to reach retirement age, which for him was 32 years old. That was four years ago, and now he had a Doctorate and he consulted on IEDs around the world. He had the team’s respect immediately.

  Len Preece was shown in the middle of the screen, and to his left was video of Todd’s Porsche smouldering and of Kwong’s badly damaged Nissan Almeira.

  “Kwong is an artist. His signature is a targeted explosion, little collateral damage, a
nd all executed with a handful of plastique. Traditionally he uses remote control detonation, but he has also used timers and booby traps. I think that someone with little or no experience with small improvised devices set the charge that blew our Korean friend to pieces.

  Look what happened to the Porsche. The bomb was placed where it would cause maximum damage, and the charge was shaped to direct all of its percussive and explosive force in a single direction.”

  Everyone looked at the photograph of the Porsche, which was bent upwards on an axis cutting through the driver’s seat. “Then we look at the Almeira. Sloppy and unprofessional, it relied entirely on the fact that the victim was on top of the charge. I would say it had been placed by someone who had basic bomb making skills, probably taught in the Middle East, and almost certainly in Pakistan.”

  “Sounds like Khaweini was cleaning house. No witnesses and no second payment,” Todd offered.

  “That would be my conclusion, too,” Preece concurred. ‘Now, as to your enquiry about turbines and specifically turbine blades; I think you can forget about aircraft.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Dominic.

  “Yes, I’m reasonably sure, and this is why. Maintenance staff will be all over aircraft when they are on the ground. The engines are still idling and the engine casings are sealed. In any event, why try to disable an engine when a plane might still land safely on a single engine? No, with a relatively small charge in a concealed area within the airframe you could bring down a plane, and the charge could be in place for days before it was discovered, if it was ever discovered. That would be a much better way to kill a plane.

  I like the idea of a power station better for Kwong. I have modelled some explosions using an existing model used by the University’s Aerospace Department, as the vanes or blades are very similar to those of steam turbines. This is what I discovered.”

  The screen cleared of all other video, and a wire frame view of a turbine filled the screen. A hundredth of a second timer ran in real time at the bottom of the screen. The figures, other than the full seconds, were just a blur. From out of the speaker Preece narrated.

  “Here we see the turbine at full capacity. In five seconds, detonation scenario number one will be portrayed.” The wire frame changed and then, in stop motion format, the explosion was modelled and the turbine stayed in place whilst the blades dropped out of alignment, the blades destroying themselves against the supporting steelwork and the casing.

  “Now, as you can see, that was rather dramatic. That was a small charge placed just above the spline that connects the axle of the turbine to the strut. Now, in a moment, scenario number two will launch.” The white wire frame returned to its pristine shape against the blue background for a second or two, before the next explosion forced out around a third of the blades, which deformed and then were mangled against the casing as the turbine continued to turn.

  “As you can see, the first scenario is a perfectly placed charge shaped for maximum damage. The second is a clumsily placed unshaped charge which relied entirely on explosive force.

  As I’m sure you have all realised from these projections, either one would put the turbine out of action for weeks and would burn out the controls. You would need to speak to a specialist in power station turbines to determine the true damage to power generation, but my understanding is that, if you take out the turbine, you take out the power generation.”

  “So you could take out a whole power station without a massive explosion?” Max asked.

  “You could, but power stations have redundancy built in. You would have to take out all of a power station’s turbines at once, which, to be honest, still wouldn’t use the amount of C4 you people say is still missing. Are you sure he wants to shut down a power station? I mean, it makes a statement, but in a place like Dubai it probably wouldn’t even be reported in the newspapers.”

  Thoughts were developing in the heads of the operatives. Each was imagining their own nightmare scenario. Jamie was the first to acknowledge Len Preece’s contribution.

  “Thanks, Len. You’ve been a great help. Len, if you wanted to take out twenty turbines at once and plunge Dubai into darkness, how much C4 would you need?” The gathered group saw the look of horror on Preece’s face.

  “My word! Twenty properly assembled and shaped devices would need no more than 250 grammes of C4 each. That would be five kilos in total, and the Brigadier thinks that there are over fifty kilos still out there.”

  There was a pause whilst the group absorbed this potentially tragic news. They were not searching for one bomb, but many.

  “Timer, or remote control?” Todd asked.

  “Timer, definitely,” Preece responded, after a moment’s thought. “There would be no issues with signals being disrupted by heavy electrical pulses, and they could all be timed to explode simultaneously, to cause maximum damage and disruption.”

  He stared gravely into his webcam. “Good luck, guys. I wish I was there to help, but I suspect by the time I flew to Dubai I might be too late.”

  Chapter 48

  Al Kifra B1 Power & Desalination Plant, Jebel Ali, Dubai:

  4th March; 4pm.

  Jamie and Dominic had stayed behind at the villa to analyse the small amount of data that was being recovered from the Shadow’s phone and laptop. Both had been damaged in the explosion, but neither had its memory corrupted.

  Todd and Max were waiting to speak to a man by the name of Rie Ruitgen, the Operations Director for Dubai’s most proficient power station. The authorities on this occasion had acted with alacrity, and had ignored protocols and complaints from well-placed Emirate management to arrange this urgent meeting.

  A large framed picture of a Rolls Royce steam turbine hung on the wall. The legend under the photo read ‘RB211- 605 Aero Derivative Unit: 31KW’. The picture showed a man in a dark blue uniform, in a pristinely clean turbine hall, entirely overshadowed by the huge engine.

  “They look indestructible to me, Max,” Todd said, impressed by the photograph.

  “I think they are invulnerable to destruction, but they seem to be so finely balanced that a relatively small amount of damage will take weeks to repair.”

  Rie Ruitgen, a jovial man with a strong Afrikaans accent, ushered them into his office. After the introductions, which were uncomfortable, given that the Ops Director clearly didn’t like having his time wasted, the two agents gave the man a rundown of what they had been told by Preece. Suddenly they had his full attention. Rie Ruitgen answered their most pressing question first.

  “Doctor Preece was quite correct. If a unit is damaged badly we would try to swap it out, because repairs are so time consuming that they are best done back at the manufacturer’s plant. Then, when the replacement comes in, we have cold commissioning, hot commissioning and around sixty to ninety days of setting to work, where the unit is running and producing at least some electricity.”

  Ruitgen paused. “However, I might be able to replace one turbine in that time period of four to six months, but any more than one failure and we would be in real trouble. The waiting list for new turbines is around three to four years.”

  Max and Todd’s jaws dropped in unison. “That can’t be right, surely? Not in an emergency,” Todd said naively.

  “It is true, I’m afraid. We are planning a new plant, C1, and the two Alstom units we have ordered won’t be ready until 2016, and they already have those in their manufacturing pipeline.”

  For the next hour Ruitgen explained his plant, the Dubai Energy Disaster Plan and the massive impact that a loss of generation would have on the Emirate.

  “Gents, if we lost this power plant we could get by, by rationing water and power. If we lost more than one Jebel Ali plant, water would be in seriously short supply and we would have brown outs, possibly a rota system where areas are switched off for four to six hours out of any twenty four hour period.

  The truth is that if the situation was any worse than that I would have no-one to repair or r
eplace the turbines anyway. We are already competing against China, where they are opening a new power station every ten days.”

  “Would you stay in Dubai, knowing that you only had power for part of the day?” Max asked solemnly.

  “Probably, but I would send my family home and, to be honest with you, I’m not sure the answer would be the same if I lived in a high rise or worked in a tower block where the lifts weren’t working, not to mention the air conditioning or the lights.”

  That was an issue the two agents hadn’t considered until now, and it left an empty feeling in their guts.

  “Look, Rie, this plant has got to be the favourite target if the terrorists are planning to take down a power plant,” Todd suggested. “So, can we please look at the turbines? We’d like to check if there are any signs of interference.”

  Ruitgen leapt up from his chair and almost yelled.

  “What? You think someone may have placed explosives in my turbine hall? Bloody hell, man! There are people working in there! Why didn’t you say this earlier? We need to evacuate the plant at once!”

  “Wait, wait. You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Todd said, trying to calm the situation. “This is what we know. Explosives are missing. They are in the hands of a terrorist whose emails say he is going to bring down Dubai. A turbine blade specialist has been blown to pieces by the same terrorist, and your plant is the largest in Dubai. We’re simply trying to join the dots. We don’t have any hard evidence, but there’s a possibility we’re right. We’re speculating, no more than that.”

  Ruitgen sat back down and dialled a three figure number on his desk phone.

  “Ari, I am coming down to the turbine hall with two inspectors. They want to inspect the turbines.” There was a pause whilst he listened to the reply. “Ari, I appreciate the day shift have gone for the day. It will be just you and me, OK?” He replaced the hand set. “Follow me, gentlemen. I didn’t want anyone who might be thinking of placing a bomb in my plant to know we are examining the turbines. It would be extraordinarily unusual, and it might cause them to panic and detonate something early.”