Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  It was ten in the evening in Washington when President Howard Lord entered the main conference center in the complex of offices that was collectively called the Situation Room, on the ground floor of the West Wing. Already seated around the long cherrywood table were the director of the CIA, Walter Page, who had been a Fortune 500 company CEO; the National Security Agency Director, Air Force General Lawrence Piedermont, who was short and slender with thinning hair and a titanium stare, and who was said to be the most brilliant man in Washington; FBI Director Stewart Sargent, who was tall with a stern demeanor, who’d worked his way from a New York street cop to chief of the entire agency, while at the same time acquiring a Ph.D. in criminal science; the president’s adviser on national security affairs, Eduardo Estevez, who’d been deputy associate director of the FBI, specializing in counterterrorism; Director of Homeland Security Admiral Allen Newhouse, who’d been commandant of the Coast Guard; and Department of Energy Deputy Secretary Joseph Caldwell, who’d been in nearly continuous conferences all afternoon and early evening with Joseph S. French, who ran the NNSA’s Division of Emergency Operations. The only key player missing was Director of National Intelligence Avery Lockwood, currently on his way back from Islamabad.

  The main flat-panel television screen on the back wall facing the president’s position was running scenes from the Hutchinson Island disaster, as the media had dubbed it, and it was immediately obvious that the meltdown could have been much, much worse.

  Everyone got to their feet.

  “Good evening,” Lord said. At six-six he was the tallest U.S. president ever, a full two inches taller than Abraham Lincoln, and he’d been a decent basketball player at Northwestern, though the team was lousy. He was also one of the brighter men ever to sit in the Oval Office, but with that intelligence came a fair amount of arrogance that sometimes got in the way of his accepting advice from members of his staff who he thought weren’t as smart.

  The vice president, who sometimes sat in on emergency meetings such as this one, had been sent to Offut Air Force Base in Omaha along with several key members of Congress and two Supreme Court Chief Justices. After 9/11 no one was taking anything for granted; Hutchinson Island had been hit, and it was possible that more attacks would be forthcoming, maybe even here in Washington.

  “Good evening, Mr. President,” Admiral Newhouse said. “I’ll be giving the briefing.” He was a short fireplug of a man with a dynamic personality, and he was one of the men in the room whom Lord genuinely respected and liked. During a particularly disastrous hurricane season a few years ago, the Coast Guard, under Newhouse’s direction, had been the only federal organization that actually knew what it was doing.

  “What’s the word on casualties?” the president asked, taking his seat at the head of the table. The preliminary briefing book was on the table in front of him, but the information it contained was already two hours old, and he ignored it.

  “We caught a couple of breaks,” Newhouse said, moving to the podium to the right of the main monitor. “Nine people were killed inside the plant, counting the suspected terrorist—”

  “He blew himself up,” Stewart Sargent said. “I think that makes him more than just a suspect.”

  “But he probably had help,” Newhouse said, obviously disliking the interruption, and Lord motioned for him to go on, thinking that although Sargent was a good fit at the Bureau, he never knew when to keep his mouth shut.

  “Two of the casualties — Alan Lundgren and Marsha Littlejohn, both of them National Nuclear Security Administration Rapid Response team members — managed to disarm the explosives on one of the reactors, preventing its meltdown. But they were too late to completely disarm the second one. Apparently it had something to do with defective detonating units. The explosives were triggered as they were working on the detonators, killing both of them instantly.”

  “They were true heroes,” Joseph Caldwell said. “I never personally knew them, of course, but the public should be made aware of their sacrifice.”

  For which the DOE would take the credit, Lord had the nasty thought. “We’ll hold on that for the time being,” he said, and Caldwell wanted to protest. “We don’t want to announce our abilities to the enemy.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “What about civilian casualties?” the President asked.

  “A few cuts and bruises during the evacuation of the facility, and a fairly high number of traffic accidents on the highways within a twenty-mile radius, but reasonable considering that more than one hundred thousand people tried to get away from the possible damage path.”

  “Deaths?”

  “Only three, Mr. President, which is remarkably low,” Newhouse replied. “The biggest problem authorities on the ground are trying to deal with is convincing people at least five miles out to return to their homes. The winds all day were mostly out of the west, which pushed the bulk of the relatively small radiation leak harmlessly to sea.”

  “How soon before the cleanup operation can begin?” Lord asked. No one enjoyed briefing this president, because he hammered the presenter with an almost continuous barrage of questions.

  “Actually some cleanup operations have already begun,” Newhouse said. “A fair amount of debris, mostly concrete in sizes ranging from eight to ten pounds all the way down to dust, along with some metal slag, and water fell in the immediate area around the containment dome and the South Service Building where the control room was located. We’re dealing right now with the outside areas, along with about one mile of A1A — that’s the only highway on the island.”

  “How long before the plant is back up and producing electricity?”

  “That’s up to the nuclear engineers and waste disposal people. Could be a year, could be a lot longer.”

  “Could be never?” the president asked, already thinking ahead to the trouble the industry would face as the more than thirty permit applications for new nuclear-powered generating stations were ruled on. Granting any of them would be almost entirely dependent on public sentiment.

  Newhouse nodded. “No one wants to admit the possibility, Mr. President, but I think we need to consider that Hutchinson Island may never reopen. It may have to be capped, and the immediate area evacuated and quarantined, much like Chernobyl.”

  “How many families would be affected?”

  “I don’t have that number yet.”

  “Get it by morning,” the president said. “Include it with your overnight update.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about the radioactive material that fell into the sea? How much of it has or will drift ashore?”

  “That was another break,” Newhouse said. “It looks as if the bulk of the material is migrating into the Gulf Stream, which will carry it north while at the same time vastly diluting its strength. Shipping interests have been notified to stay clear, which will cost them money, of course, since they won’t get the boost from the Stream, but the effects shouldn’t last long. Perhaps less than a week.”

  “What about damage to marine life?”

  “It’s too soon to tell, but it’s my understanding from Loring that NOAA is addressing the possibility.” Ron Loring was the secretary of commerce, of which NOAA was a department.

  Lord glanced at the Hutchinson Island images on the big flat-panel monitor at the other end of the room. It hadn’t been another 9/11, but it could have been. It had been meant to do the U.S. even more harm.

  “Is there any reason for us to consider this as anything other than a terrorist attack?” he asked. “An incident with a national backing?”

  “The CIA has no direct information of such a possibility,” Walter Page began. He was well dressed as was his custom, and looked as if he had just stepped out of a Savile Row ad in The Times . “But a former director of the Agency was on site, and was apparently instrumental in saving some important people.”

  “Kirk McGarvey,” the DOE’s Deputy Secretary Joseph Caldwell said with a smirk. “A loose ca
nnon if ever there was one.”

  “You hired him,” Page shot back. “And yes, he’s a loose cannon, but he’s done some spectacular things for this country.”

  Lord knew of McGarvey, of course, everyone around this table did, and while he could see that Page had a great deal of respect for the man it was a view he didn’t share. McGarvey was of an old, dangerous cold war school; the sort of a figure who approved of places like Guántanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and renditions, even assassinations. He’d done good, even great things for the U.S., but he’d also caused a lot of serious frustration and embarrassment for previous administrations.

  “What was he doing at Hutchinson Island?”

  “He was in Miami training one of our new Rapid Response teams to deal with actual face-to-face encounters with a terrorist or terrorists,” Caldwell said. “But to this point he’s been more bother than benefit. It’s highly unlikely that our people would ever find themselves in such a situation.”

  “This time they did,” Page said.

  “Are there any current or developing threats against us or our interests that have recently come to light? Any possible connections to this attack?”

  “Nothing that’s not already on the table,” Page said.

  “We’ve picked up nothing recently,” the NSA’s Director General Piedermont said.

  “For the time being the incident will be publicly treated as an accident,” the president said.

  “We may be too late for that, Mr. President,” Newhouse disagreed. “Too many people were on site in the middle of it — several of them senior SSP&L officers. And those people definitely will not want to support any claim of an accident. It would give them a black eye.”

  “Get me a list of names, and I’ll talk to each one of them personally.”

  “Yes, sir,” Newhouse said, and he glanced over his shoulder at the monitor, and the president and everyone else in the room saw the CNN graphic comparing this event to 9/11.

  The genie was already out of the bottle, and Lord’s anger spiked, but he contained himself. “So, we’ve passed that point already. Has anyone claimed responsibility?”

  “No, sir,” the admiral said.

  “In addition to the cleanup efforts, the next steps are clear. We find the bastards who did this to us, and take them out.” Lord said and he looked each of his people in the eye. “Priority one.”

  “It could be helpful if we also found out why,” Page said. “This attack could be an isolated incident, but it could be the opening shot of something much larger.”

  “I agree, Mr. President. Al-Quaeda and some of the other terrorist organizations have gotten a hell of lot more sophisticated since nine/eleven. We need to find out what’s going on.”

  “I’ll coordinate that effort,” the president’s national security adviser Eduardo Estevez said.

  “We’ll need to put someone in overall charge in the field,” Page suggested.

  “Do it, but quietly,” Lord ordered. “This will not end up as another nine/eleven media circus.”

  But everyone in the room, including the president himself knew that an incident of this magnitude could not be manipulated. The American public had become more savvy since 9/11 and things like this always seemed to take on a life of their own.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It had come to her in a dream three days ago that something awful was about to happen, and that because of it she would be in a great deal of personal danger. She’d awakened at three in the morning, drenched in sweat, alone as she had been for the past five years since her divorce, and she’d gotten up, walked to the window, and looked out over the city of Caracas, goose bumps on the back of her neck and on her arms.

  But it wasn’t until late this afternoon when flash traffic from CIA Headquarters alerting all station chiefs worldwide about the attack on Hutchinson Island’s nuclear power facility, that chief of CIA Station Caracas, Lorraine Fritch, suddenly put together most of the bits and pieces of information her people had been gathering over the past four months into one big — and to her — terrifying picture.

  She’d had an epiphany, and she’d convinced herself it was because of Hutchinson Island. The connections had become crystal clear in her head, but not so clear that she would be able to convince her boss, the deputy director of operations, and especially not the DCI, by e-mail, no matter how detailed, or even by encrypted phone. This she had to do in person.

  She’d messaged her boss, Marty Baimbridge, that she was flying up to Washington with something even more important than flash traffic could convey. This was something, she’d told him, that would have to be face-to-face. The one word reply had been: “Come.”

  It was late evening by the time she climbed into the backseat of an embassy Escalade, her driver and bodyguard in front, and they left through the front gate, and merged with steady traffic on the Avenida Miranda and headed out to the Aeropuerto Internacional de Maiquetia Simon Bolivar. Ordinarily embassy personnel, including CIA officers, were supposed to fly commercial, and coach at that. But Continental flights left first thing in the morning, and, stopping in Houston, didn’t get to Baltimore until nearly midnight, so she’d chartered a private Gulfstream that would fly directly to Miami where it would refuel and then onward to Reagan National Airport in Washington, getting there first thing in the morning.

  She could sleep on the flight, if she could sleep at all, which considering her state of mind at the moment was highly doubtful. It was one of the many reasons her husband had cited for their divorce: When she was engaged in something, she was superengaged to the point of completely tuning out her family, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. Another of the reasons, of course, was the fact she couldn’t discuss her work with her husband, and she would often drop everything and fly off to somewhere in the world at a moment’s notice, again without telling him where she was going, what she would be doing when she got there, and how long it would be before she got back.

  She was engaged now, and she was flying out, but the only one she’d had to inform was Ambassador Turner, who hadn’t cared to demand a detailed explanation before she spent the money for the flight. It was her station’s budget, not the embassy’s.

  It had began for her four months ago when she’d accidentally overheard a chance remark during a lunch at the Tamanaco Inter-Continental Hotel with a pair of advisers to President Chávez, who knew who and what she was, and were pushing her to make a mistake. They’d met with her on orders to find out what the CIA was up to, and she to get a hint of just how much SEBIN, Venezuela’s intelligence service, knew or guessed about what was going on right under their noses.

  It was a little before 12:30 P.M., and they’d just sat down and ordered drinks when a man, medium build with a mustache, his hair graying at his sideburns and temples, with lovely dark eyes, walked in with a pair of men just as expensively dressed as he was. Lorraine thought that he was extraordinarily handsome and vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t dredge up a name though she thought it would be in her best interest if she could.

  One of the men at her table looked up, and did a double take, and said something in rapid-fire Spanish to the other adviser.

  It was too fast for Lorraine but she did catch the name, Señor Octavio, and it came to her that he was Miguel Octavio, Venezuela’s richest man, and one of the most reclusive multibillionaires in the world — even more so than Howard Hughes had been. His was oil money, of course, but the fact he was here like this was nothing short of extraordinary, and she’d had the thought that only something very important could have brought him out in public.

  “Do either of you recognize the two men with Señor Octavio?” she’d asked, and the two advisers looked at her with genuine fear in their eyes, and told her no, that they were strangers to them. Of course she hadn’t believed them.

  And it might have ended there, nothing more than a curiosity except that the obsequious maître d’ led Octavio and his companions to a window table, passing within a couple of fee
t from where Lorraine was seated. They were talking, in accented English, their voices low but not so low that she couldn’t guess that at least one of the men was an Arab speaker, and hear the initials UAEIBC mentioned, and her stomach had done a flip flop.

  Lunch had been made difficult for her because she wanted to get back to the embassy and start working out what connection Octavio had made or was making with the United Arab Emirates International Bank of Commerce, which had been long suspected of funding a number of terrorist groups, including al-Quaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, and the lesser known group Islamic Jihad and their front cells and ancillary organizations — or at least funneling money from various Islamic fund-raising organizations into the groups. The bank had no direct connection with the UAE government in Dubai, but its books and client list were more closely held than any offshore bank in the world.

  None of that had been proven yet, but consensus among top-ranking people in U.S. and British intelligence services compared the UAE bank with the Luxembourg-registered Bank of Credit and Commerce that had been funded by the government of Pakistan, likely through its intelligence service the ISI. The BCCI, which had collapsed in the nineties, had engaged in money laundering, bribery, and tax evasion, plus supporting some of the same terrorist organizations that the commercial bank in the UAE was supporting now. The BCCI had even dealt in arms trafficking, as well as brokering the sale of nuclear technologies. In the end the BCCI had collapsed under its own weight, its officers walking away with $20 billion that had never been accounted for.

  That afternoon she’d set her assistant chief of station Donald Morton to the task of finding out everything he could on Octavio’s financial connections outside of Venezuela. Don was a Harvard MBA, and had been sent to Caracas to keep his ear to the ground in the oil ministry. Because Venezuela was the fourth largest supplier to the U.S., keeping track down here was of vital importance.

  “I want his background as well,” Lorraine had ordered. She was finally on the hunt of something worthwhile and she’d already begun to love it. That trait in her had been the reason the CIA had snapped her up from her small, but exclusive, law practice in Beverly Hills fourteen years ago.