“So?” Mazini asked. “Would you want to do it right? If I put together a team of guys—stone pros, who wanted to teach America the error of its ways—would you help us?”
“In a fucking heartbeat.”
* * *
And now it was about to happen.
3
Like moon-mad dogs baying their brains out in hydrophobic rage.
The event was even bigger than Jamil had ever imagined. Memphis was holding its festivities on King Street in Elvis Aaron Presley Park. He and his men arrived there on the first night of the festivities and found themselves in a throng of over 100,000 drunken, barbeque-reeking rednecks. Girls in killer cutoffs, tight halter tops, or even tighter T-shirts adorned with renderings of Elvis in his myriad incarnations—Teen Idol Elvis, “Love Me Tender” Elvis, “Hound Dog” Elvis, “Jailhouse Rock” Elvis, “King Creole” Elvis, “GI Blues” Elvis, Hawaii Elvis, Tuxedo Elvis, Black Leather Elvis, Karate Elvis, Vegas Elvis, Fat Elvis, Skinny Elvis, Dead Elvis. Many of them stood behind stands, hawking Elvis barbeque and Elvis brew.
Men everywhere were attired in boots or sneakers, dirty-scruffy jeans, and the ubiquitous Elvis T-shirts, most of them with the sleeves cut off. Their baseball caps featured more ludicrous likenesses of the King.
Everyone had a beer in one hand and food in the other. Barbeque stands were up and down the streets and all over the park. Mexican fast food, however, was also popular, and many of the celebrants were stuffing their mouths with burritos or tacos. Stands also peddled mashed potatoes with burnt-bacon gravy and fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches—two of Elvis’s favorite foods.
Jamil had never seen so many people in one spot outside of Mecca’s holy hajj. But there the pilgrims were gracefully arrayed in white robes and behaved with dignity and decorum. These pilgrims pounded down plastic quart containers of draft beer like they were straight shots. They attacked the ribs, fried chicken and pulled pork like feral wolves on a kill.
His own group immediately got into the spirit. Loading their Styrofoam plates with ribs, chicken, and pulled pork, juggling quart cups of beer, they worked their way through the mob toward the bandstand.
It was easy to spot. They only had to follow the earsplitting, skull-crushing din of the band.
Jamil was oblivious to the music. If he could just get his men out of Memphis in one piece, he’d be happy. The prospects did not look good.
Fake Elvises were performing on bandstands all over the park as well as up and down the nearby streets. The festival’s headliner on the main stage was a top Las Vegas Elvis impersonator. He was hammering through Elvis’s long litany of hits—“Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Return to Sender,” “Marie’s the Name,” “Promised Land.” In full Vegas regalia, he was bringing down the house with a raucous rendition of “Trouble.”
Jamil’s men instantly turned into bombs and exploded as the sneering, leg-shaking, karate-punching, arm-trembling Elvis doppelganger snarled the song’s opening lyrics.
If you lookin’ for trouble
You came to the right place.
If you lookin’ for trouble.
Just look right in my face.
Jamil had now lost control of both his men and his sanity. What had happened to them? These previously devout young boys were now beer-chugging, dope-smoking, pork-gobbling, music-screaming, woman-lusting louts. That America could corrupt his committed young men so quickly and thoroughly proved, for once and for all, that it was indeed Gehenna on earth, the Great Satan’s own lewd, lascivious lair.
Jamil surreptitiously fingered his prayer beads, silently muttering, “Astaghfirullah … Astaghfirullah … Astaghfirullah” nonstop, meaning, “I seek refuge in Allah … I seek refuge in Allah … I seek refuge in Allah,” while his men hammered beers, devoured pig, gyrated their rear ends, pumped their crotches, vibrated their legs, wave-trembled their arms, sneered, leered and howlingly mispronounced the words to “Trouble,” “Suspicious Minds,” “All Shook Up,” and “Jailhouse Rock,” which they could not even remotely understand, like moon-mad dogs baying their brains out in hydrophobic rage.
4
They were going to make the Great Satan pay.
Sam and Elias went out night after night after night. Elias shared his most secret fantasies with Sam. He identified powerfully, almost irresistibly, with Charles Whitman, an ex-marine who one afternoon in 1966 had climbed to the observation deck of the University of Texas clock tower in Austin. There, for ninety minutes, with a Remington 700 6mm rifle and a .30 caliber M1 carbine, he shot people, mostly students, killing fourteen and wounding thirty-two. Elias had the same, almost erotically murderous urge, to enter one of the nuclear power plant’s guard towers and to gun down plant employees until the authorities finally killed him.
“I want to do it so badly,” Elias had told Sam, “I sometimes fear if I don’t, I’ll lose my mind.”
“You’re kidding,” Sam said.
“Not in the least,” Elias said. “I’d like to go up in one of those gun towers and smoke every one of these sickos working here.”
“You really want to shoot them?” Sam asked, amazed.
“I want to do them so bad my dick hurts,” Elias said.
That night, Sam had put an arm around Elias’s shoulders. “I understand. I really do.”
Elias felt he’d found the brother he never knew he had.
They also shared a passion for the great singer-songwriter Sister Cassandra and the End Time. When they hung out at Sam’s house, they would play her CDs over and over again, blasting her music into the night, full force.
One of their favorites was “First Strike.”
It’ll be a First Strike (Boom!)
For world peace.
A final fatal blow
To our sworn enemy.
Our last true chance
To finally be set free.
To save the planet earth
Oh, our country ‘tis of thee.
Then came the soft melodic bridge:
When the dust has settled,
When the thermonuclear dust comes down,
When the fallout drifts slowly,
Slowly to the ground.
Will anyone be around?
Will anyone be around?
Then back to more hard, hammering, earth-shattering rock:
A levitating fireball
And all our pain will cease.
Blast waves, firestorms,
War’ll no longer be.
We’ll finally kill them all,
The godless enemy!
We’ll save the human race,
O sweet land of liberty!
One time after an intense night of beer and Sister Cassandra’s apocalyptic rock, Sam confided to Elias his own fantasy: “I think all the time about melting down the HRNPS. Maybe we could somehow combine our two dreams.”
“You help me, I’ll help you?” Elias said.
“Exactly,” Sam agreed.
It turned into a fantasy game for the two friends. They evaluated the different ways they could wreak havoc on the HRNPS. They began by evaluating the plant’s various vulnerabilities. Since Mazini was the chief reactor operator, he was a genuine expert in these matters, and he quickly convinced Elias that America’s nuclear plants were utterly vulnerable to terrorist attacks. In a sense, they were terrorist strikes waiting to happen.
“Why doesn’t the U.S. government protect these sites against well-organized, heavy-duty assaults?” Elias asked.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission—otherwise known as the NRC—runs the whole show. It has the last word on everything, but it’s in the pockets of the nuclear industry.”
“Which means the NRC doesn’t want to spend additional money on nuclear security?” Elias asked. “All the NRC wants to do is to generate revenue for the nuclear power companies.”
“You got it,” Mazini said. “Neither entity wants to spend the money necessary to protect the plants and the surrounding population
. Particularly when it comes to securing spent fuel. It would cost too much to cover all the nuclear waste pools with domes of reinforced concrete. That’s why we keep them in sheet-metal sheds.”
“Why doesn’t the NRC force the nuclear industry to protect their facilities with in-depth defenses?” Elias asked.
“The Supreme Court has ruled that terrorist attacks are a national security problem and that private industry is not required to protect the nuclear plants against such assaults. Nor is the nuclear industry responsible for losses sustained by such strikes.”
“Why doesn’t the federal government bring the troops in then,” Elias said, “and build up perimeter defenses until HRNPS looked like a fortress?” Elias asked.
“The NRC, Congress, and the courts have ruled that creating and maintaining such defenses would cost too much and would be too intrusive to the operations of the plant.”
“What’s the real reason they don’t want our troops defending nuclear plants?” Elias asked.
“Taxpayers wouldn’t want to pick up the tab, and the expense of such troop deployments and in-depth perimeter defenses would bankrupt the nuclear industry,” Mazini said. “Also, once our war colleges analyzed our nuclear installation defenses, they’d come to the same conclusions I have: nuclear power is militarily indefensible—unless you’re willing to send costs soaring out of our solar system and into the Outer Dark.”
“Does the nuclear industry know how indefensible their plants are?”
“Of course. How could they not? They just don’t want anyone else to know,” Mazini said.
“So there is no way to protect any of our nuclear installations against trained, committed, organized terrorists?”
“One way, and one way only: shut them all down.”
* * *
And so it went. On and on into the night, they’d sit and plan—plan, scheme, connive, and dream.
And now the time had finally arrived.
All their scheming and dreaming was coming to fruition.
They were going to make the Great Satan pay.
And always, through all their planning, scheming, conniving, and dreaming, the Good Sister was there for them—inspiring them, beguiling them, wailing to them of the End Time to come.
It’ll be a First Strike (Boom!)
For World Peace.
A final fatal blow
To our sworn enemy.
Our last true chance
To finally be set free.
To save the planet earth
O our country ’tis of thee.
PART XV
“I’m not sure anyone can defend nuclear plants like these. After all, we aren’t trying to rob Fort Knox. All we want to do is burn up a highly flammable firetrap. You can’t defend the facility if all the arsonist wants to do is set it aflame—and if he’s willing to die to do it.”
—Hasad ibn Ghazi
1
“We’re going to do to this plant what that tsunami did to Fukushima.”
—Hamzi Udeen
The next day, Hasad was again behind the wheel, with his crew packed like lemmings in the back of the Ford Transit-350 Passenger Van. Just outside of Arlington, they got back on I-95 and then stayed on it through East Baltimore and East Philadelphia, taking it all the way through New Brunswick and Elizabeth to Newark, NJ. Catching the Lincoln Tunnel just outside of Hoboken, they crossed under the Hudson River and entered Manhattan. Hasad immediately turned off onto the West Side Highway, which carried them uptown, where it became the Henry Hudson Parkway. They stayed on the HHP until they reached Route 9, then Route 9W, which they stayed on until the Kingston exit. After which a succession of city streets followed by county roads brought them to another safe house—this one a massive four-story clapboard farmhouse with jutting gables and gingerbread trim. Hasad entered its adjacent barn.
Parking inside, Hasad got out first, turned on the lights, and shut the barn’s huge sliding door.
He then let the men get out, use the barn lavatory, and grab some coffee and sandwiches. He then had them return to the big barn.
“This is your headquarters,” Hasad told the assembled team. “I’m going to go over plans and operations with you. I know we’ve been over this before in Virginia. Consider this a refresher course. We’re going to go over it one last time. Then I must take off to complete an attack of my own—one even more devastating than this strike. Hamzi, who accompanied me on a similar strike overseas, will ably lead your assault here. You will follow his orders exactly and explicitly.”
Hasad looked out over the sixteen assembled men. Like himself, they were all dressed in Levis, T-shirts, and sneakers. Hamzi was handing each of the men tan manila envelopes filled with eight-by-ten glossies of the HRNPS, taken both inside the main buildings and outside of them.
“I want to again stress the importance of what you will be doing,” Hasad said. “This will not be an isolated mission but the beginning of a series of global nuclear power plant strikes.”
“We’re giving them the ultimate nightmare from hell,” Hamzi said.
“We’re making America pay for its crimes against humanity, its nuclear crimes,” Hasad said. “The first of our attacks will be here on the HRNPS. We will use shaped charges to shatter the spent rods, driving them into contact with each other. We’re going to blast and burn off the spent rods’ one-millimeter protective covering, boil the water away, and expose the spent rods to air. When the nuclear waste interacts with the air, those rods will turn to flame, and those thousands of tons of waste will go critical. We will render almost 50,000 square miles off the East Coast uninhabitable and kill twenty million people minimum. The damage we will inflict on the HRNPS will dwarf that of Chernobyl, which stored relatively little spent fuel and which was largely a fuel-rod meltdown, not a spent-fuel conflagration.”
“I know some of our people are already working at the plant,” Fahad said. “Tell us how the rest of us will get in.”
“On an isolated stretch of highway at night, you’ll cut through the fence and walk to these buildings through the woods,” Hasad said. “Now you do have to be alert to sensors—not that it matters that much if you do set one off. Deer and raccoon trigger so many that the guards typically ignore them.”
“It’s not that tough,” Hamzi said. “We told you how an eighty-two-year-old nun with a heart condition broke into a nuclear weapons plant, a place that was far more closely guarded than this power plant. If she can do it, we can do it.”
“So we’re all in the plant,” Hasad said. “Here is a master shot of the Auxilary Building’s interior. Here are the three emergency diesel generators.” Hasad pointed them out. “Saif Mazini—known to his colleagues as Sam—will mark those pumps and generators with duct taped X’s. You will then mine them all with C-4—the residual heat removal pumps, the auxiliary pumps, all the coolant pumps, and the emergency diesel generators.”
“In an Auxiliary Building storage closet, Saif has hidden a seabag filled with C-4,” Hamzi said. “Saif’s also secreted more guns and shaped charges in one of the locked storage closets. You’ll have keys to it and to the other storage closets. Here it is on the screen. Hamzi can also direct you to it, and you have a glossy in your manila envelope showing you its location.”
Hamzi pointed them out to his men. He then showed them close-up slides of each pump and handed them eight-by-ten glossies of each of the slides.
“After we have secured the building, Faiz, Mahmud, Fahad, Ghurayn, Gohar, you will tape C-4 to the pumps,” Hasad said. “Back in the control room, Saif will sit at the big board and lift the HEU fuel rods out of the coolant, then lock them in place. Fahad, you will mine the controls with C-4 while Hamzi is mining the reactor coolant pump adjacent to the reactor. When the HEU fuel rods catch fire, Saif will exit the control room, remotely blowing up the pumps and computers after all of us leave the building.”
“By this time, won’t the U.S. military and the state police be storming the compound?” Fahad asked
. “Hamzi told me they have bases nearby.”
Hasad treated them to a rare smile. “We will have a skilled marksman in the main gun tower. Their trip to the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station will not be … uneventful.”
Laughter filled the barn.
“Inside the Turbine Building are the main feed pumps and the condensate pumps,” Hamzi said. “The circulation pumps are between the Turbine Building and the cooling tower. After we detonate those pumps with RPGs and blow out the bottoms of the massive overhead water tanks—which will deluge the plant with tens of millions of gallons of water—the reactors and storage pools will quickly run out of circulating coolant and boil away the water still surrounding them.”
“Excellent,” Hasad said. “Now Elias will man the front gun tower that night. He will drop a line down and one of the men will lash an ordnance bag to it.”
“Correct,” Fahad said. “Amir here will assist.”
Amir raised his hand. “It will contain a Barrett M82 with a night scope and a daylight scope, an MP7, and a 9mm Glock, as well as grenades and preloaded magazines for all the weapons.”
“Sirens will be blaring,” Hamzi said, “sprinklers will be set off. Blinding, burning smoke will fill the plant. Bombs will be going off. Water will be pouring out of the tanks in torrents.”
“You will need nose-and-mouth gas masks and after the lights go out maybe even night goggles,” Hasad said.
“The plant will smoke and burn for a long, long time to come,” Hamzi said.
“The Americans may never put it out,” Fahad said.
“Especially when the spent fuel starts to burn,” Hasad said. “The plant stores almost two tons of spent fuel, the bulk of it in pools. That’s ten times the amount of toxic radioactivity contained in the HEU fuel rods. We’re going to blow everything to hell and gone with shaped depth-charges, then finish them off with a dozen or so Russian-made phosphorous charges.”
“The phosphorous is really that devastating?” Fahad asked.
“You clearly never fought the Russian army in Chechnya,” Hasad said. “Ask the Chechens, who were on the receiving end of those bombs. Our phosphorous charges will burn those spent rods down to their raw, radioactive core.”
And Into the Fire Page 21
