Which actually made Trace’s job more difficult. She had to toss the poor lug over her shoulder and carry him back up to his bedroom. By the time she came down Hulk had the company’s backup ambulance out of the bay and was already playing with the light switches to see what cool patterns he could make in the night.
We’re considerate Tangos, aren’t we? We left the main ambulance, took only the backup, and tarried not to slit the paramedic’s throat. That’s terrorism in the twenty-first century, for you.
Roughly a half hour later, precisely as the shifts were changing at the power plant, a rented twenty-two-foot Chris Craft 22 Launch plowed into the Wappino plant’s dock area. The air cracked with the sharp reports of explosions. Light flashed. Smoke spewed forth.
Sean used too many flash-bangs for the pyrotechnical display, in my opinion, but you can’t argue with the results. As that was happening, the ambulance Trace and Hulk had borrowed barreled off the highway and sped toward the main security gate, lights and sirens flashing. They were prepared to crash the gate, but for some inexplicable reason, the guard there flung it open without even challenging them. Trace leaned out the window and yelled, “We’re here for the heart attack victim. Heart attack, heart attack!” she repeated as the ambulance rolled through the security perimeter and turned toward Containment Building Four.
As Trace shouted, several items dropped from her hands. These were soon revealed to be a flash-bang and two smoke grenades. By the time the ambulance turned onto the perimeter road a hundred or so yards away, the sentry area looked like a volcano.
These nearly simultaneous explosions—we were off by about thirty seconds—signaled the “indoor team” to move along with the main event. Hulk and I, along with four of our newest and brightest, had slipped inside the campus almost an hour earlier, coming through the woods where the previous night’s excursions had shown infiltration would be child’s play.
We hadn’t been twiddling our thumbs all that time. We’d arranged a few oil drum smokers to provide additional busy-work and confusion for the security team. These are about as low-tech as you can get. They consisted of a) one oil drum, b) some oil and an accelerant to make it burn (the possibilities are endless), and c) matches. We set four alight, then headed out. By the time we cleared the inside perimeter, thick smoke furled out near the edge of the parking lot, and we could hear not only the plant fire alarms but the city’s fire siren going off by the time we reached Containment Building Four.
Give credit where credit is due—as Hulk burst through the door, two guards pulled their pistols and leveled them at him.
By the time he ducked away, the guards had lost their pistols and were rolling to the floor, covered by netting from a special shell in my M209 grenade launcher. The shell scattered them with pepper spray as it exploded. It’s intended to be a fine mist, but it comes out more like a spluttering splat than a sustained shower. That’s not particularly important unless you happen to get one of the splats in your eyes, in which case you scream like a motherfucker. (Another toy I snookered off the shelves of Law Enforcement Technologies; it pays to be a board member to make sure you are a winner.)
Poor bastards. I had to cover my ears as I ran down the corridor with the rest of the team.
We were now inside the reactor building, which lay wide open and empty before us. What would you do with a nuclear reactor? Fire an antitank missile at it? Steal the control rods? Break the machinery? Whip out the Duracells and recharge for free?
We could certainly have done all of that, though the truth is that such mischief would have only amounted to vandalism and very bad PR for the company. The reactors are designed to withstand stresses like those I’ve mentioned without catastrophe. I’m not saying that we wouldn’t have caused damage, just that none of those scenarios—the kind you’re always reading about in doomsday stories—would have had the same impact as blowing up the cooling system and neutralizing the air pressure system in the containment building, which could be accomplished with a mere daub of explosive.* We put happy face stickers in the appropriate spots to demonstrate that we could have done all of those things. Oversize coffee cans filled with cement were strapped on the most vulnerable point of the building—no, I’m still not telling you where it is—to show where plastic explosives would have been located to crack the containment vessel. They weren’t enough to bring down the building, but that wasn’t the goal; all we were looking for was a hole wide enough for the radioactive material to plume out through.
Meanwhile, Trace and the ambulance had gone to the building where the control room was located. A security officer trotted over as Trace and Sean, dressed in what looked like ambulance uniforms, jumped out. He was yelling at them that the plant was in an emergency situation. Talk about your understatements.
“We know, we know!” said Trace.
“Your gun loaded?” Sean asked, pointing to the holstered Glock.
“Uh—”
“Mine is,” said Sean, producing an H&K MP5 from behind his hip.
The ex-SEAL told me later that he’d never seen hands shoot up so fast. Or that much piss stream down a leg.
Around this time, my team left the containment building and headed for the other entrance to the control area. It was at this point that the video camera Trace had planted proved its worth. Capel, monitoring the device from the seaplane, spotted a security SUV heading in our direction. He warned me, and we were able to take cover before it passed by, rushing to the oil fires we’d set a few minutes earlier.
The plant had certain sensible procedures the people inside the control room were supposed to follow in case of an unspecified emergency, which this one was. They’d gotten as far as locating the black spiral books where the procedures were recorded when we swept in. The four people in the room stared in disbelief as four black-clad ninjas with shotguns and submachine guns vaulted the pipe railings and spread out around the room.
All of the security people assigned to guard the control room were doing just that—guarding the control room from its two entrances at the far side. We came in through the restroom hallway, having noticed from the photos that the windows were not barred and were large enough even for Hulk’s bulky frame. There were no security people inside the control room. Not that they would have made much difference, I suppose, but it is something to note.
The plant operators remained dumbstruck for a few moments, unable to react or speak. The reactors are controlled by a very large panel of switches that look like something out of an early Star Trek episode. There are a number of pull buttons and levers. We’d had a chance to study up on the controls in advance, thanks to that new story and photo spread we’d found on the Internet. This made tagging the proper switches pretty quick.
“What the fuck are you doing?” said one of the operators as I hung my last Oops! sign. “What the hell is this?”
“Armageddon,” I muttered. When I turned around I found a middle-aged Greek woman, five-four and all koutsomoures tiganites—a strong fried fish—staring at my kneecap.
“We’re blowing up your reactor,” I told her. “Sorry if it’s a bad time.”
“Like fucking hell you are.”
I like cursing in a woman, especially a woman past fifty. So when she marched up to slap me, I merely grabbed her arm.
“Careful now,” I told her. “Unlike your security force, our weapons are loaded.”
With plastic bullets, but still…
“Fuck yourself. No one told us there’d be a drill today.” She snapped her hand back and put it on her hips. I felt as if I were back in elementary school and getting ragged out by the vice principal, Mrs. Sit-on-Your-Face.
“Terrorists usually don’t announce themselves in advance,” I said. “You’re the supervisor?”
“I’m the fucking President of the United States as far as you’re concerned, asshole.”
Which is how I came to carry the fucking “President of the United States” out of a nuclear power plant, screaming until I gagged her. I
lashed her hands and feet as well, but she squirmed like a shark on a line.
Trace and Sean had stolen two of the workers’ vehicles from the back parking lot and were waiting for us as we emerged. The “President” was placed in the trunk of one of the cars. I slipped into the driver’s seat and drove to the gate. I had to turn the music up loud to drown out my passenger’s thumping in the truck.
By now, the security force had realized that something deep and dirty was going down and belatedly began to respond with the serious intent a goatfuck requires. (Their goatfuck, not ours.) The guard at the gate seemed to recognize the car as I came up but was unsure about stopping me. We’d caught them in the middle of the shift change, when people were always coming and going.
I made the decision for him, pausing to chat.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked. “What’s all this smoke? What’s with the alarms?”
“Some sort of fire on the south side,” he said. He glanced at the ID I was holding out, though I doubt he actually stopped to read it. If he had, he might have asked precisely how my first name was pronounced.
The tag read: “Phck U. Dickhead.” Even Tangos like to have fun.
“Are we under attack?” I wondered aloud.
“Attack?” he repeated.
It was at that moment that I pushed the transponder to set off the IEDs we’d planted the night before.
*There were only two reactors, each with its own building. They were, however, called Reactor Three and Reactor Four, apparently because the original plans had called for four reactors to be built.
*Actually, you could kick the machinery for the air pressure system apart with your foot. But with my flair for the dramatic, I always favor the option that includes blowing something up.
Chapter
8
Were the explosions on Turbine Building Three the coup de grace? Or was it the chain on the main gate applied by one of our sleepers on a bike as the last escape vehicle cleared the facility? Hard to say, really. By the time we rendezvoused back at Peekskill’s Squat and Stomp for lunch, a five-county region was under a nuclear cloud. The local bridges and highways were jammed; the air above was filled with helicopters and fighter aircraft. The sirens had stopped sounding, but I had a feeling that Furness wasn’t going to be smiling the next time he saw me.
I’d taken the precaution of getting the fee up front and using his company credit card to cover our expenses. I think he said that was the way I was supposed to do it. Though as I look back on our conversation now, I can’t seem to recall how the card number came up in conversation, or why it would have included the extra security code on the back. I’d say that he lent it to me when I stopped by the day we arrived just to say hello, except that he wasn’t around his condo at the time to let me in.
Our luncheon’s guest of honor turned out to be half Greek and half Sicilian, which accounted for her fury. When I picked her up out of the trunk, she tried running down the street, which wasn’t ideal with bound feet. I let her work off some of her energy, then when she’d calmed down a bit I explained who I was and what we had been doing. This didn’t mollify her, either, a fact she made clear when I undid the gag on her mouth. A torrent of abuse streamed out.
“You don’t have to impress me,” I told her. “I already like you.”
She screamed even louder. I folded my arms and waited for the storm to subside. When she ran out of breath, I told her the situation and the plan. “We’re going to pretend that you’ve been kidnapped. You can set whatever terms you want. A raise, maybe?”
“Pretend that I’ve been kidnapped?”
“Look, you can go if you want,” I said. “But then you’ll miss lunch. Whatever you want, it’s on the house. Well, your boss is paying for it. Come on. Have a drink.”
I took out my long combat knife and hacked through the restraint at her feet. I was surprised that she didn’t kick me.
“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Mar-chink-o,” she said, drawing it out as if she were one of my Navy instructors back in the golden days of yore. “Don’t fuck with me, either.”
“I may yet give it a shot.”
“Screw yourself.”
“Where would the human race be if we could?” I started to laugh, and she did, too.
“Well, all right, if I’m being kidnapped,” she said finally. “I guess I might as well get something to eat. And have a beer.”
The Squat and Stomp won’t find itself listed in any haute cuisine guides, but the fried clam fritters weren’t half bad. I let the kids enjoy themselves a bit, then gave Furness a call on his cell phone.
“Well, you kicked our butt, I’ll give you that,” he said, a sadder but wiser man than the last time we’d talked. “My phone lines are jammed, I have a stack of messages from the local media, and every elected official this side of Syracuse wants to slit my throat, after they tar and feather me. What do you think I should tell them?”
“The truth—that you wanted to find security deficiencies and you called in the best in the business to find the flaws.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t notify the local police and emergency agencies because that wouldn’t have allowed you to do a realistic drill.”
“Yeah.”
“For obvious reasons, you can’t discuss the results, but they will be implemented in a comprehensive plan to make Wappino the safest nuclear toaster on the planet.”
Sometimes I think I should go into PR.
I can’t say his mood lightened, but we did set up an appointment for Tuesday. Then I turned the phone over to our hostage, who managed to squeeze a week’s worth of paid vacation from Furness for her trouble. I have no doubt she could have gotten more if she had wanted to.
I’d just racked up a set of balls on the pool table to see how good Trace was when she wasn’t wearing camouflage when my cell phone rang. It was Capel, who was running our Shadow-watch team from the DEA aircraft.
“Dick, we found your Caravan out on Route 9 a few miles from where Trace and Sean left it,” he told me. “Back near the plant. You want to go down there and take a look.”
That’s Capel—short and to the point, especially with bad news.
Chapter
9
Sean had parked the Caravan, which had been rented from a local Rent-A-Wreck the day before, in the lot behind the ambulance company building. We might have been tempted to think that the paramedic had followed the team to the plant, except for the fact that he was still back at the company building.
That and the fact that there was a high-powered rifle with a sniper scope in the front seat of the van.
“They weren’t close enough to penetrate the building,” said Trace.
“That wasn’t what they were trying to do,” I told her. “They could’ve gotten anyone coming in and out of that road there.”
Anyone including me.
I hate getting sucker-punched.
The van’s engine was warm but not hot. Capel suggested getting a thermometer to figure out how long it had been sitting there, but I didn’t see the point. Nor was there any sense in scouring the car for DNA or fingerprints; it hadn’t been particularly clean when it was picked up.
Of more interest and value was the sniper weapon: a Russian-made Mosin-Nagant.
The weapon used by Charlie’s snipers in Nam.
The Mosin-Nagant 7.62 x 55mm M1891/1930 sniper’s rifle was antiquated by the time the Vietcong and NVM army got hold of it. As I understand it, most of the guns were hand-selected from standard stock, originally issued to the Soviet Red Army in the 1930s. Their sights were small stubby things, especially when compared to the scopes Americans used. In the hands of a good marksman—and despite what you’ve heard, not every commie with a gun was a great shot—the Mosin-Nagant was accurate to about a thousand yards. If you gave me my choice of weapon from the period, I’d much prefer the modified or hand-built Remington 700s that Marine snipers favored. But, as any sniper will tell you, the finger
on the trigger is more important than the trigger itself.
“Well, they’re going to an awful lot of trouble to tell you they remember you from the old days,” said Trace.
I put on a pair of gloves and took the gun from the car. It was loaded. I turned in the direction of the power plant entrance, back about a mile and a half, trying to see what the sniper could have hit. I’d driven down this way. Had I seen this motherfucker along the road?
No, I didn’t think so. Admittedly, I hadn’t been looking for him; I was paying far too much attention to the ruckus in the truck. Still, I think I would have noticed him sitting in the van. I think I would have noticed the van, even if I didn’t recognize it as ours.
Most likely he’d parked the van there after I’d passed, continuing his little campaign of head games. He knew he couldn’t get to me, or the nuke plant for that matter, but he could make me think he could.
“Charlie, or us?” asked Capel over the phone. He couldn’t see the gun from the sky, but we’d told him what we’d found.
Capel’s question threw me back thirty-something years to Phong Dinh, where I’d spent some of my shortest days and longest nights in the South Asian Theme Park. We’d fuck the VC by bringing along two sets of footwear—GI issue and native—leaving different tracks in the muck. We left our M16s at home, preferring AK-47s, which didn’t shout “SEAL Team Round Eyes!” every time we used them. We’d switch their cached ammo with doctored versions so it would boom when they fired at us. We’d put on French Foreign Legion togas every so often, sending the walking ghosts out to spook the gooks in the middle of the night. It was all about head games, blowing their minds before they blew ours.
“Not Charlie,” I told Capel.
“He work with you there?”
“Maybe.”
It hurt to admit that. The pain was more than I could say.
We kept Capel’s team in place watching the nuclear plant, then dispersed to new hotels across the river. Our gear would be picked up by a separate team later on. We used a buddy system, two to a cell; no cell knew where the other was staying. Trace and I buddied up, sharing a room with two beds in a Super 8 Motel about five miles off Route 17 in northern Noo Joisey. We rendezvoused at a fancy restaurant called Xavier’s in Piermont, New York, around nine, our last big splurge on Furness’s credit card. By that time, I’d spoken to Karen and told her to stay at Rogue Manor for the foreseeable future. A few trusted friends would sleep outside her door for the duration. She argued and she complained and she claimed that I was being overprotective, and I told her what she could do with that. Karen can certainly take care of herself, but I wasn’t in the mood to take any chances. Until I found Shadow, the people close to me were vulnerable, too.
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