And Into the Fire

by Robert Gleason

“Couldn’t get anything on it,” Jamie said. “If there’s another team, I’m not sure Hasad has anything to do with it.”

  “I better take off now,” Jules said. “Jamie, you always had a lot of cool motorcycles, if memory serves.”

  “A bunch.”

  “Good, I’m biking it up to the HRNPS. I can make it in five or six hours if I go flat out.”

  “I got a better idea,” Jamie said. “Rashid, you and Adara will drive Jules to meet her sister. Then you’ll cut across to the Greenwich Harborside Marina in Connecticut, where I have a power launch. Head up the coast to the Crestview Cove, where Jules and her sister can meet with you after they cover their story. It’s less than forty miles from the power plant. You’ll have extra cans of gas, rations, weapons, whatever at the dock. We’ll all rendezvous later down the coast. Prepare it for a long trip. If these guys melt down that power plant and the nukes start going off, the sea will be your best chance of escape. Elena, I know what you’re planning, and I’m going to try to talk you out of it. What you’re thinking is suicide. In fact, you and I will want to hit the water as well if and when this goes down. I have a second really fast boat we can use. We can rendezvous later with Jules and her people somewhere along the coast.”

  Jules, Adara, and Rashid went to their rooms to pack a bag.

  Jamie turned to look at Elena. She didn’t look happy. Her face was an angry mask of obstinacy.

  Still, he had to try.

  He didn’t want her going anywhere near the Capitol Building.

  2

  Kid, Sandy said to herself, sounds like we’re going to war.

  Sandy Meredith’s cell phone rang eight times before she had the strength to roll over and answer it. She’d been up in her news chopper covering a hurricane that had ravaged Long Island’s Southampton coast for nearly seventy-two straight hours, and she’d never been so tired in her life. Fumbling blindly for the cell, she finally pulled off her night mask and picked it up.

  “This better be the end of the world,” she rasped irritably.

  “Pretty close,” the voice said.

  Sandy froze. She knew who it was.

  “Goddamn you to hell,” Sandy said, careful not to use the woman’s name. “I hope you don’t need something.”

  “Oh, do I ever.”

  “Not from me. You’re all over the news, kid.”

  “Which is why I’m calling you on one of your throwaway burner phones,” Jules said, “so no one can tap into our call.”

  “Maybe,” Sandy said, “but you’re still in a whole world of hurt. You and your friends are burning up the news media worldwide, and people are screaming for your blood.”

  “None of what they say is true.”

  “Tell that to the thirteen men you guys smoked. The attorney general is even bringing treason charges against your friends. They still can’t identify a couple of them, but they will. They claim you’re also plotting nuclear strikes on the U.S. and that the FBI is authorized to shoot you on sight. They’re ready to gun you down like Dillinger.”

  “I’ve got the story of a lifetime for you,” Jules said.

  That stopped her cold. Her sister could smell a real story ten thousand miles away, and she knew Jules wouldn’t shit her. Her news instincts fought her survival instincts.

  “What do you need?” she asked cautiously.

  “I need a fully tricked-out news chopper ready to roll by midnight tonight.”

  Shit, Jules did have a story. She couldn’t believe it.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re asking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what I have to go through to get an unscheduled spur-of-the-moment chopper all to myself on such short notice?”

  “Yes.”

  “The lies I’d have to make up.”

  “Sandy, you may have to steal one.”

  “Yeah, right. Steal a news chopper?”

  “Complete with a fully integrated electronic news-gathering system, which can transmit, receive, and record live AV. Oh, and we’ll need at least two really great cameras.”

  Christ, now she was interested.

  Sandy picked up a pad off her night table and began jotting down notes.

  “We’ll need audio, a video switcher, in-cabin monitors, a microwave transmitter, and a minicam as well,” Jules added.

  “We’re using R44 Newscopters now.”

  “Any good?” Jules asked.

  “The best—six cylinder, fuel injection, a forty-eight-gallon fuel tank, a 350-mile range, and an operating altitude of over fourteen thousand feet. I’ve covered wars in them.”

  “We also need two really good cams—a nose-mounted, gyro-stabilized HD and a tail-mounted microcam,” Jules said.

  “We got them,” Sandy said, “but you’ll have to run them off a laptop. Do you still know how?”

  “Does a shark shit in the sea?” Jules asked.

  “You really want to pull a Grand Theft Chopper?” Sandy asked.

  “I’ll bring a piece. We’ll say I kidnapped you at gunpoint.”

  “They’re already indicting you for treason and thirteen counts of murder one. What’s a little kidnap time, right?”

  “Just tell me where the helipad is,” Jules said.

  Sandy gave her the pad’s location and their time of takeoff.

  “Sis,” Jules said, “we’re going to rock the world news like it’s never been rocked before.”

  “Just as long as it isn’t the Jailhouse Rock.”

  “You’ll be ‘the cutest little jailbird I ever did see.’”

  “Then I’ll see you on the women’s rec yard at Atlanta Fed,” Sandy said.

  “We’ll rock that joint, too,” Jules said.

  “Over and out.”

  Kid, Sandy said to herself, sounds like we’re going to war.

  Then she laughed. Turning on the light, she glanced in the side mirror and saw that she was smiling reflexively. She could not help herself. She could not express how much she loved Jules.

  Jules was the only person she knew who was crazier than she was.

  Except maybe Elena.

  PART XVII

  When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world …

  —Hamlet III, ii, 380

  1

  “For America to believe we would never use their nuclear weapons technology against them—which they so arrogantly sold us—is pathologically stupid, suicidally … naive.”

  —Jamil Masoud

  It was a long hair-raising drive, but Jamil and his crew—Adman, Bahram, Dawad, and Hanif—had finally made it. Just east of San Francisco, they stood on a hill overlooking the Edward Teller Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. Like himself, Jamil’s men had on a clean change of clothes—Levi’s, country music T-shirts emblazoned with the likenesses of Elvis, Willie, Waylon, and Taylor Swift, and running shoes. They were freshly shaved, and their recently lightened hair was cut short.

  Below was the Teller Lab, an assortment of over a hundred gray concrete-block buildings, sheet-steel storages sheds, warehouses, and crisscrossing rail tracks, all converging on the main train station. The facility encompassed an area the size of a small town. Near the entrance stood four huge, nine-story limestone buildings. They were the lab’s main office buildings. Two concentric wire-topped cyclone fences surrounded the facility.

  At the edge of the sally port, which all the visitors and employees had to pass through, stood a vast sprawling parking lot packed with thousands of cars. Twenty yards into the facility was the Visitors Center—a long rectangular one-story building with high wall-length windows. Beyond the Visitors Center and in front of the massive eight-story Administration Building was a large grassy park filled with clumps of pine, spruce, and oak, small colorful gardens, park benches, and drinking fountains. Near the entrance were also gift shops, the Edward Teller Museum, and restrooms made of cement blocks. Statues of nuclear scientists were also scattered throughout the park, as were popcorn, hotdog, and so
ft drink stands. There was also a statue of President Truman, who oversaw the completion of the first atomic bomb and the beginning of the hydrogen bomb program. Towering above the other buildings and monuments was a statue of Edward Teller himself, carved out of gray New Hampshire granite. A brass plaque was affixed to its five-foot-high gray granite base. Inscribed on it was:

  1908–2003

  “I WAS THE ONLY ADVOCATE FOR THE HYDROGEN

  BOMB, AND THAT, I THINK, IS MY CONTRIBUTION.”

  To the east, north, and south, the lab was surrounded by high wooded hills. Due west through an open valley lay San Francisco.

  “There, my friends,” Jamil said, “we see before us one of the world’s great weapons labs. And that lab deserves our respect. We owe those scientists down there a lot. For the last seventy years, for instance, they’ve worked tirelessly on the miniaturization of nuclear weapons so they could shrink them down until they could be squeezed onto the tips of cruise missiles.”

  “Nonetheless, we will blow them all to Gehenna and gone,” Hanif said.

  “Tomorrow at 5:00 P.M., give or take a few minutes,” Jamil said.

  “Good,” Bahram said. “Burn the infidels.”

  “They are generous in a perverse kind of way,” Hanif said.

  “Arrogant is the more accurate word,” Adman said. “They think they are smarter and better than us. That’s why they invited our best scientists over here and taught them how to build these wicked weapons.”

  “The word you’re looking for is greedy,” Jamil said. “Americans sell anything to anyone.”

  “What was it Lenin said about capitalists?” Adman said. “They would sell him the rope he would use to hang them?”

  “They sold us everything we need to make our own nuclear bombs,” Jamil said, “with which to incinerate them.”

  “For money,” Adman said.

  “And not just us, they did the same for India,” Hanif said, “our most implacable enemy.” They were all Pakistani.

  “And Iran,” Jamil said, “another one of our nemeses. Even now, the U.S. is trying to sell nuclear power reactors to our patron and closest ally, the Saudis.”

  “Which will soon be turned into a nuclear bomb-fuel factory,” Adman said. “All they need to do is construct a low-tech nuclear bomb-fuel reprocessor with which to extract the bomb-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods.”

  “Which our friends can build out of the equipment from an old dairy farm or old winery,” Jamil said.

  “These infidels are insane,” Dawad said. “They deserve anything they get.”

  “Indeed,” Jamil said. “For America to believe we would never use their nuclear weapons technology against them—which they so arrogantly sold us—is pathologically stupid, suicidally … naive.”

  “Tomorrow,” Adman agreed, “we will teach them the error of their ways.”

  “You assume they are educable,” Jamil said, “which is a fact not in evidence.”

  “They’ve had these weapons close to eighty years,” Adman said, nodding his head sadly, “and still haven’t learned anything, have they?”

  “As Napoleon said of the pre-Revolution Bourbons,” Jamil quoted, “‘They learned nothing; they forgot nothing.’”

  They were silent a long moment.

  “Who would invent such demonic devices?” Hanif asked.

  “Fiends from hell,” Adman said.

  “Then this place is … what?” Dawad asked.

  “The infernal … pit,” Hanif said.

  “I am glad we are vaporizing it,” Dawad said.

  “I am, too,” Jamil admitted. “Still, I feel a modicum of regret. We would not be the atomic weapons power that we are today if not for the people here in the Teller Lab.”

  “Who was Edward Teller?” Bahram asked.

  “The craziest of them all,” Jamil said. “He thought you could stop surreptitiously smuggled nuclear bombs with a Star Wars space shield.”

  “He was clearly mad,” Adman said.

  “Madder than mad,” Bahram said.

  “What else did he do?” Hanif asked.

  “He worked on the atom bomb,” Jamil said. “His claim to fame, though, was creating and running the hydrogen bomb program, advocating the expansion of nuclear weapons systems, opposing all nuclear peace treaties of any sort, and most famously proposing the ‘Star Wars’ space-based missile defense system.”

  “He sounds Satanic,” Adman said.

  “His critics thought so,” Jamil said.

  “What’s under those two big black shrouds?” Bahram asked, studying them through his binoculars. Each of the shrouds was draped over a large object.

  “The Saudi Kingdom,” Jamil said, “in honor of the 175-year anniversary of the California Republic, is presenting the Teller Lab with a statue of the great grizzly bear on the state flag, except their version of the grizzly is rearing up on his hind legs. Under the other tarp is another Saudi gift—a replica of the famous cannon that the Bear Flag rebels commandeered at the Old Spanish Fort and then spiked. In this case, it’s a poor excuse for a replica. It’s actually an old 155mm howitzer with a ten-foot barrel. The stupid Americans can’t tell the difference between a twentieth-century artillery piece and a 175-year-old relic.”

  “Don’t tell me that’s the bomb we worked so hard on?” Bahram asked, astonished. “That’s where it ended up?”

  “You got it,” Jamil said.

  “We turned that cannon down there into a nuke?” Hanif asked.

  “Why not?” Jamil asked. “That is essentially how the Hiroshima bomb was made. A bunch of bomb-grade rings of highly enriched uranium placed edge-wise and parallel to each other in a howitzer barrel. Our howitzer nuke is the same. The ends of the barrel are tamped shut. One group of HEU rings is backed with extra-high explosive. That group of rings is six feet from its target HEU. The explosive-backed HEU—the so-called bullet—will blast into the target. Scientists called it ‘the gun-barrel bomb’ because the HEU is housed in a howitzer ‘gun barrel.’”

  “You’re shitting me,” Hanif said, amazed. “We’re giving America an atom bomb as a Mexican War anniversary present?”

  “It’ll be an anniversary they’ll never forget,” Jamil said, nodding. “It’ll make 9/11 look like a Ramadan prayer meeting.”

  “I wish Osama were here to see it,” Dawad said.

  “He’d laugh his ass off,” Adman said.

  “We’ll laugh extra hard for him,” Hanif said.

  “They’ll be having a grand old time honoring the grand old Bear Flag. The flag itself will be up and flapping in the breeze in all its glory. The governor of California, the secretary of energy, San Francisco’s mayor, a bunch of nuclear power officials, and a mob of tourists and plant employees will be in attendance. When the officials pull the black velvet shrouds off the two statues, the local high school band will play ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ and a half dozen men with old rifles, wearing what will presumably be Bear Flag Revolt uniforms, will fire a five-round volley salute.”

  “What part do we play?” Dawad asked sleepily.

  “We’ll be up here on the far edge of this hill with a remote detonator,” Jamil said. “We’ll have earplugs, very dark glasses, plain white clothes, white gym shoes, and lots of iodine tablets. Also heavy layers of fifty SPF sunscreen. When we hit the remote, we will instantly race down the opposite side of this hill.”

  “I may be too tired to race down any hills,” Dawad said.

  “Your work will pay off. The days and nights we were driving here,” Jamil said, “then working our asses off, installing the detonator and welding the tamps shut. The last seventy-two hours we worked around the clock, no breaks.”

  “So we were loading that cannon onto the limber,” Dawad said, “so the delivery crew could haul it here and roll it up next to the bear statue.”

  “I have to admit,” Hanif said, “I’m amazed.”

  “Oh, it’ll be even more amazing after the bomb goes off,” Jamil
said. “All those wildfires due east of here have changed the wind patterns. Prevailing winds tomorrow are predicted to blow to the west, straight toward San Francisco. Those winds will blanket the city of St. Francis with shockingly toxic radioactivity.”

  “Will it really be that bad?” Dawad asked.

  “Know why no one has ever ground-tested a nuclear weapon?” Jamil asked. “Set one off that’s flush on the ground? The sheer quantity of fallout would be so prodigious, so inconceivably lethal it would kill over time almost every living thing in a radius of a hundred miles. Even worse, that kill zone would remain lethal to human beings for at least tens of thousands of years.”

  “So the City on the Bay is going to eat a trillion tons of radioactive dirt,” Dawad said.

  “We’re burying it alive in eternally toxic shit,” Jamil said.

  2

  The tape would not attract attention.

  Dressed in his blue officer’s uniform, Elias passed through the three detectors—metal first, then explosives, then the radiation detector. As usual, he cut through the Administration Building—the most direct route to his work site. As a tower guard, he attracted no troublesome attention.

  Elias had had no difficulty finding duplicate work clothes and counterfeit IDs for the men. Plant security would find distinguishing between the attackers and their fellow workers almost impossible—at least at first glance. When they cut through the cyclone fence that night and sneaked into the plant, they would look exactly like the real guards and technicians.

  For the guard impersonators, Elias had obtained blue pants and matching jackets, white shirts, black shoes, and plastic-encased IDs to be strung around the neck in clear cardholders. For his fake techs, he’d gotten white coveralls and white lab coats. Such clothing was widely available and used in many industries. The difference was that his men would have shoulder-slung silenced MP5 Personal Defense Weapons under their jackets and coats.

  The lobby was sixty feet by eighty feet with a twenty-foot-high ceiling. Elias briefly noted the rear wall. At least two dozen computer screens were mounted on it. Surveillance cameras, indoors and out, dutifully recorded the plant’s daily activities and transmitted the footage to those rack-mounted wall monitors.