Bin Helbawi would remain behind until the last minute to make sure there would not be enough time for such a fix.
“I could do this thing myself,” he’d said the night before he’d left Damascus.
They’d been sitting at a sidewalk café just off Azmeh Square downtown, the evening soft, the streets busy and noisy. “It’s better if I come,” DeCamp said, sipping tea.
“But I’m the nuclear engineer, not you. It’s what I know. I can do this.”
DeCamp nodded. “It’s what you know. But my expertise is killing people. Are you an expert in this as well?”
“I can shoot a gun and mold plastic explosive,” bin Helbawi had argued stubbornly.
“By the time this happens some of those people may be your friends.”
“Never,” bin Helbawi had replied angrily. He had gotten himself worked up, and DeCamp had reached across the table and laid his right hand over the boy’s.
“No one doubts your dedication, Achmed, least of all me. I know what you’re capable of doing. It’s why you were sent to me. But you’ll need patience, too. And trust. We’ll work as a team. You’ll see.”
Bin Helbawi had looked away and remained staring at the passersby for a long time, as if he were trying to memorize the scene, knowing that he would probably never see it again, and DeCamp had allowed him his peace for the moment.
When he’d turned back, he nodded. “I was told that you were an expert, and that I should listen to you and obey your orders.”
“Instructions,” DeCamp had corrected. “You taught me about nuclear power stations and I taught you about weapons and explosives. We will do this together.”
Careful not to step in any of the blood, DeCamp stuck his pistol in his belt and went around the computer desks to the panels and consoles on the back wall that controlled reactor one. He set his satchel on the floor, took out one of the Semtex bricks, removed the olive drab plastic wrap, and plastered it against the reactor coolant panel, his movements precise.
Bin Helbawi remained standing in front of the supervisor’s desk, looking down at the dead man. He glanced over at DeCamp. “Stan interviewed me for this job,” he said, his voice strained.
“Forget him, you have work to do. Get on with it.”
“Bastard,” bin Helbawi said, and DeCamp thought the remark was meant for him and he reached for his pistol, but bin Helbawi fired one round into Kubansky’s body. “ Salopard .”
“Enough,” DeCamp said.
Still bin Helbawi hesitated for a few seconds, until finally he came out of his angry trance, laid his pistol on one of the computer desks, and came around to the panels and consoles for reactor two, and began setting the Semtex bricks on the controls for the reactor coolant pumps and the scram unit, finishing just behind DeCamp.
“How long would it take to rewire just the two scram panels to bypass what we’ve done here?” DeCamp asked.
“At least an hour, maybe a little longer,” bin Helbawi said. He seemed to have steadied down. “They’d have to be careful not to disturb the plastique.”
“The detonators are set for two hours, so once they’re cracked you’ll have to hold out here for seventy-five minutes. Can you do that?”
“Of course. Insha’ Allah. ”
It took less than two minutes to place the detonators and activate them.
“Seventy-five minutes,” DeCamp said. He took off his coveralls and employee badge, and tossed them aside, then laid his pistol and spare magazine on one of the consoles.
“I know.”
“Jam the door lock after I leave.”
Bin Helbawi was staring at Kubansky’s body, and he nodded but didn’t turn around as DeCamp went to the door and opened it a crack to make sure no one was in the corridor. He keyed his cell phone, shutting down the camera, and without looking back stepped out of the control room, went down the hall, and out the back door where he headed over to the visitor’s center, a bland expression on his face. The reactors would melt down in two hours and no one would be able to do a thing about it.
SIX
Gail was in the driveway between condenser building two and its turbine building when Karl Reider, one of the Barker security people at the visitors center, called her FM radio.
“One of the people on the noon tour just showed up here. He’s leaving. Says he’s sick.”
“Are you holding him?” Gail asked, worried for reasons she couldn’t define at that moment. But then Wager maintained that worried was her normal state of mind, while she thought it was nothing more than a matter of being a stickler for detail. A precision freak.
Reider hesitated for a moment. “There was no reason for it,” he said. “He just walked out the door so he’s probably still in the parking lot, do you want me to bring him back?”
Ever since she’d come aboard, discipline at the plant had definitely tightened up. She’d fired a couple of security people in her first ninety days, which had sent a definite message to everyone else: Don’t cross the bitch. They were on their toes, no one wanted to get on her bad side.
Just now no one was around, and except for the heavy industrial whine of the turbines and generators, the day was bright, warm, and at peace, yet she had to force herself to keep on track, because she’d never believed in intuition — feminine or not. “No reason for it,” she radioed. “What’d you say his name was?”
“Robert Benson,” Reider said. “I pulled up his tour app, he’s a schoolteacher from San Francisco. Short guy, slight build, light hair.”
The security team had definitely sharpened up in Gail’s estimation, and she remembered the man in the second-floor corridor as the tour group had passed. He’d been at the rear and had glanced at her briefly before looking away. Guilty secrets? Or just so nervous at being so close to a pair of live nuclear reactors that he had already been getting sick?
“Good job, Karl,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Yes, ma’am. EE out.”
She switched channels and pulled up a page showing the closed-circuit cameras around the plant, scrolled down to the single camera under the eaves of the visitor’s center that was pointed at the parking lot and hit Enter. A black-and-white image of the half-filled lot came up on her FM radio’s small screen. One car was just turning into the driveway from the beach road, A1A, and as it went left she spotted a lone figure just getting into a dark blue Ford Taurus parked next to the Orlando tour bus, his back to the camera. Moments later the car backed out of its spot, turned and went out to the highway and headed south.
He hadn’t been in a hurry, and he definitely hadn’t acted like a man who was nervous either because of his surroundings or because he had done something wrong and was making a getaway, and yet something about him bothered Gail. She couldn’t put her finger on it, except that he had seemed almost too self-assured for a man who’d gotten sick and had to cut the tour short. On the way to his car he hadn’t looked around nervously or over his shoulder to see if anything was happening behind him.
The screen on her FM radio was too small for her to make out the license number, but that would show up on the recordings in security, and there’d been something about the incident that made her want to follow up.
She switched back to the main calling channel as she turned and headed around the corner to where she had left her golf cart. “Post one, this is Newby,” she radioed.
“Post one, Reider.”
“Did you talk to this guy?” Gail asked.
“No, that would have been Deb Winger, the tour guide.”
“I meant there at the center. Who checked him in and out? Who talked to him?”
“Monica checked his ID and gave him his package, but no one checked him out. He just came in, laid his badge and hard hat on the counter, said he was sorry, but he had to leave, he was sick, and he walked out the door.”
Gail got in the golf cart, made a sharp U-turn, and headed over to the visitor’s center. Something wasn’t right, damn it, she could p
ractically taste it, smell it in the air. She really didn’t believe in intuition, but sometimes she had hunches. “Is she still there?”
“She’s on her lunch break.”
“I’m on my way over, I want to talk to her,” Gail said. “Newby out.”
* * *
Some schoolkids and their teachers from Vero Beach were still in the visitors center, working with the interactive displays. They were scheduled for the one o’clock tour and had probably eaten their lunches on the bus on the way down. Reider came over when Gail walked in the back door. He was a big man, a high school football standout who’d never made it in college, so that now at thirty-one he could only hope for a supervisory position with the security company one day. But he’d sharpened up over the past year or so, and he never seemed to resent his job.
“Monica’s waiting in the break room for you. Is there something I should know about?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Gail told him. “But you did the right thing to call me. I don’t like anything unusual to happen around here, if you know what I mean.”
“I hear you.”
Gail nodded at the other security officer and woman standing behind the counter and went back to the break room where the greeter who’d checked Benson in was seated at one of the tables. She was a middle-aged woman, slightly round, with a pleasant face but frizzy hair, and just now she looked nervous, most likely because Reider had filled her in about the Ice Maiden who ran security. She started to rise, but Gail waved her back down.
“Monica?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Gail shook her hand. “Look, this is probably nothing, but I just wanted to check out something with you, if that’s okay.”
The woman nodded and wet her lips. She looked as if she were about ready to jump up and run out the door.
“You’ve done nothing wrong, I just need to ask you about the guy you checked in. The one who came back a couple of minutes ago, said he was sick, and left.”
“Mr. Benson. He didn’t look sick when I processed him. He was sort of calm, and pleasant. Nice manners, soft-spoken.”
“Did he say why he was taking the tour? He was a schoolteacher, maybe he was doing this so that he could bring something back to his classroom. Did he mention anything?”
“No. He just told me that he had an appointment later this afternoon so he’d join the Orlando tour. I offered the two o’clock because it was a much smaller group, but he turned that down.”
Gail had another thought. “How often does something like this happen? Someone getting sick and leaving in mid-tour?”
“I’ve been here three years and it’s never happened while I was on front counter duty.”
“Has the tour guide been notified?” Gail asked.
“I don’t know.”
Gail went to the door and beckoned for Reider, who came over. “Has anyone told the tour guide that she’s missing one of her flock?”
Reider looked sheepish. “No, ma’am. You’re the only one I told.”
“You’d better let her know.”
“Shall I call her back in?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Gail said sternly. “But I want to see her in my office as soon as she’s done. Damn sloppy.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Gail turned back to the desk clerk in the break room. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Mr. Benson? Anything, any little detail that might have caught your attention? You said that he was soft-spoken, nice manners. Southern?”
“No, he was English, maybe Australian, or something like that. I don’t think I’ve heard the exact accent. But it was nice.”
“A foreigner?”
The woman shrugged. “He had a California driver’s license.”
Even easier to forge than a passport, Gail thought. “You said he told you something about needing to take the noon tour because he had an appointment? Did he mention where?”
Monica brightened. “As a matter of fact he did. He said he had to be in Jacksonville.”
For a split second it just didn’t sink in, but when it did Gail’s heart tightened. The car had turned to the right on A1A. To the south, toward Miami. Jacksonville was to the north.
“Christ,” she muttered, and she went back through the visitors center in a rush, ignoring Reider who’d looked up in alarm, and out the back door to her golf cart and headed back to the South Service Building as fast as the cart would carry her.
Steering with one hand she keyed her FM radio. “Security Center, this is Newby.” They had a copy of Benson’s driver’s license, but before she called the Florida Highway Patrol, she needed the license number on the blue Taurus. She had an incredibly bad feeling about this situation.
“I was just going to call you,” Wager came back. He sounded excited. “We have what might be a developing situation in the main control room.”
“Shit, shit,” Gail swore. She keyed the FM. “What?”
“No one’s answering the phones, and the observation blinds have apparently been locked from the inside.”
“I’m on my way.”
SEVEN
DeCamp got off the island highway at Jensen Beach a few miles south of the plant, and once on the mainland headed for I-95, keeping a few miles per hour over the speed limit, while at the same time clamping a lid on his feelings of triumph.
It wasn’t the money, exactly, though two million euros was significant, it was the almost rapturous feeling of accomplishment he felt when an operation of his design worked. It was almost like a drug to his system, really, and it was something he’d never shared with anyone before, not even with his comrades in the Buffalo Battalion, not even after a battle from which they’d emerged victorious, everyone pumped with adrenaline.
No deaths had been necessary this time, except, of course, for the four engineers and their supervisor plus bin Helbawi in the control room, and for the other people in the power plant when the reactors melted down, releasing a lot of radiation into the atmosphere, and for possibly tens of thousands directly downwind, but he’d not had to go in with a squad strength force of specialists like in the old Battalion days and risk casualties.
He had no ill will toward the local authorities who would have been involved in just such a firefight, but the operation this afternoon had been clean; it had been even elegant in its simplicity. And that was something he’d admired ever since the colonel had taught him the concept, simple moves in hand-to-hand, simple moves in the field, no wasted efforts, no unnecessary casualties to reach an objective. And it all had made perfect sense to him then as it did now.
Merging with traffic heading south on I-95, he took an encrypted sat phone from his bag on the passenger side floor and speed-dialed a number that connected him with an automatic rerouter in Amsterdam that would use a different satellite to connect with a number in Dubai. The two-second delay in transmissions was nothing more than a minor irritation.
Gunther Wolfhardt answered in English on the first ring. He’d been expecting the call. “Yes.”
“One hour, forty-five minutes.”
“Troubles?”
“None.”
“The operation has taken longer than we originally expected.”
This type of questioning was something new, bothersome. “It is what it is.”
“And what of your team?” Wolfhardt asked. Although DeCamp never discussed his methods, or the names and qualifications of any team members he used — if any — the German had to believe that the operation was more than a one-man job.
“Untraceable.”
Wolfhardt hesitated for a few seconds beyond the delay, and DeCamp, who’d met him only twice before this assignment, still knew him well enough to see the man’s wrinkled brow because he’d not gotten the answer he wanted. “Dead?” he asked, his tone mild.
“Untraceable,” DeCamp replied.
Again Wolfhardt hesitated. “You are aware of the consequences of failure,” he warned.
“Certainly. Are
you?”
“When I see the news on CNN your account will be credited. And there will be further assignments.”
“For which I’ll need more time.”
“These will be of a simpler nature,” Wolfhardt said. “But perhaps equally as important.”
“We’ll see,” DeCamp said, and he broke the connection and laid the phone on the passenger seat. Wolfhardt’s attitude was completely different this time. He’d never pressed for details until now, nor had he ever issued any sort of a warning. He’d come to DeCamp because of a recommendation from General Jan Van Der Stadt who’d been a close personal friend of DeCamp’s mentor Jon Frazer, and who had been the Buffalo Battalion’s commandant at the end, so there’d been no need to present bona fides or make silly promises or answer stupid questions.
But then it came to him that Wolfhardt, or perhaps the man or men he represented, was frightened. Because of the fourteen months it had taken to pull off this bit of business. But a man of the German’s obvious background — there was no doubt in DeCamp’s mind that Wolfhardt had been East German Stasi, the stamp was practically a scarlet letter on his broad Teutonic forehead — would know what planning and training had been necessary. He would understand the delicacy of such an operation. It was one thing to go into a situation — a bombing, an assassination, an act of sabotage — with no expectation of coming out alive but something completely different otherwise. And such operations took time.
Wolfhardt had evidently been under pressure to produce results. In a timely fashion because … of what? DeCamp asked himself. Money was a possibility, though where the profit would be in destroying a nuclear power plant was a puzzle. Certainly the German was not allied with an Islamic radical organization, there was no fit there that made any sense. Nor had Wolfhardt ever made even an oblique mention of his employer.
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