And Into the Fire

by Robert Gleason

  A half dozen uniformed guards sat on stools at a long row of high black desks. They greeted guests and studied the bank of computer monitors on the desktop before them.

  They waved Elias through with terse “Hi’s” as he walked through a maze of hallways following the exit signs to the building’s rear doors.

  Exiting the rear of the building, he saw the two white concrete-and-steel reactor containment domes. Flanking the one on the left was the Auxiliary Building, which housed most of the plant’s backup equipment. Once inside the Auxiliary Building, he waved to Mazini, who was marking the emergency pumps and generators for demolition with Xs fashioned out of duct tape. Plant foremen frequently marked equipment in that manner for repair. The tape would not attract attention.

  The overhead coolant tanks were so gargantuan, so glaringly visible that they required no such signage.

  3

  “You don’t want twenty thousand fuel rods burning up on you.”

  —John Selke

  Mazini passed through the Administration Building and entered the courtyard. The main control center—a big gray structure made of concrete blocks—was dead ahead.

  Entering the Control Building, Mazini went down the hall, took two turns, and reached the control room. When he entered, he went straight to the coffee station. As his two operators waved to him, Mazini toasted them with a cup of coffee and waved back. They immediately regaled him with shouts of “Hey wop” and “Yo dago.” He encouraged their mistaken belief—in fact, laughed right along with them—since he did not want them to know his grandfather had been Pakistani. No one in the firm ever traced his ancestry back to Pakistan, the homeland of his grandfather, and he liked it that way. He even peppered his diction with Italianisms and periodically cooked ravioli, manicotti, and lasagna at home and brought it frozen for his fellow workers to reheat in the microwave.

  Mazini entered the big windowless bunker that was the control room. He remembered the first day he entered it, shocked by its sheer size—fifty by a hundred feet, filled with endless arrays of computers, monitors, panels, alarms, and blinking lights. It had taken him a few years before he had learned enough to run it, and he always stayed in awe of it. A world unto itself, it was the nerve center of the facility. Its computers controlled the plant’s water circulation; turbine, steam, and electrical generators; the condensate-feedwater loop; reactor and storage coolant systems; pumps; the reactors’ control rods; and the emergency support systems. It even monitored the plant’s key installations and areas on the computer screens along the north wall.

  In the control room, Mazini was responsible for the cooling of twenty thousand fuel rods and well over two tons of spent fuel. Tonight, he would set them all ablaze and kill everyone in the plant, to say nothing of the millions of people living within a hundred-mile radius. He would turn the Tri-State area, including New York City, into a charnal house of nuclear annihilation and a permanently toxic waste dump.

  He felt no remorse over the violence to come. He knew in his soul that he was bringing a sort of rough justice to the people at the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station, at least to those who were in charge of the plant—an operation that Mazini viewed as morally monstrous as anything in the history of the Free Enterprise System.

  As for those friends and colleagues who would die tonight? How much feeling did they have for those innocent men, women, and children in Iraq who only sought to protect their land from the Infidel Invaders?

  Mazini walked over to the horizontal bench board, whose panels controlled the operating equipment. On the wall above that bench board was a colored mimic panel, which showed the status of the valves—whether they were open, closed, or in midposition. It also depicted the state of the pumps—whether they were running or not. Directly in front of Mazini were the middle panels of meters and computer monitors, which alerted him to the operating conditions.

  His main job was to manage the reactors’ radioactivity and to filter, then pump fifty million gallons of Hudson River water per hour—or fifteen thousand gallons a second—into the plant to cool the reactors’ fuel rods and the station’s nuclear waste. The water, which the fuel rods boiled, was turned to steam, which powered the twin turbines, located in the huge one-hundred-foot-high Turbine Building. Those dynamos generated the plant’s electrical energy.

  “How did the three-to-eleven shift go?” Mazini asked the man he was relieving.

  “The fuel rods are running a little hot,” John Selke, the previous shift operator, said. He was a tall, handsome engineer in a white lab coat and matching pants. A former all-state basketball player, he had a ready grin and a love of sports. He was captain of the HRNPS sixteen-man softball team. A dead pull hitter, he could hammer those oversize balls almost four hundred feet. No one knew where all the power came from.

  “They usually do,” Mazini said with a shrug.

  “Still, you should watch the coolant pumps,” Selke said. “I marked them for inspection later in this shift.”

  “I’ll ask a millwright to look at them,” Mazini said.

  “The problem might be electrical,” Selke pointed out.

  “If the millwrights can’t find anything,” Mazini said, “I’ll ask electrical to inspect them.”

  “Do that,” Selke said. “You don’t want twenty thousand fuel rods burning up on you.”

  Oh yeah? Mazini thought sardonically. Maybe you don’t.

  4

  The nuclear storage casks looked like cement corn silos.

  Elias exited the Auxiliary Building. On his way to the primary gun tower, he called Mazini on his cell.

  “You’re marking all the backup pumps and emergency generators for the men. Are you squared away?”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Good.”

  Elias clicked off. He was walking past the two dozen concrete-and-steel dry nuclear storage casks. Situated out in the open, in plain sight, they were painted industrial gray and looked like cement corn silos.

  Turning right, he headed toward two twelve-foot-high parallel wire-topped cyclone fences. Between them, seventy-five yards from the front gate, was a gun tower. A five-story concrete blockhouse, it had a thick steel door facing the inside of the plant. The interior security fence abutted the tower.

  At the front door, Elias punched in his code, and the tower bull buzzed him in.

  Entering the tower, he walked up to the heavy steel spiral stairs and began his long climb up to the tower house, where he would relieve the evening guard.

  It was eleven at night and the man had put in a twelve-hour shift.

  Elias would now begin his.

  PART XVIII

  Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death.… For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, neither shall be … and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.

  —Mark 13:12,19

  1

  “This whole government was built by slaves.”

  —George Caldwell, Jr.

  Shaiq was in his legendary gold limo with the First Lady and her querulous children. Her two kids had not wanted to attend the address, and they constantly treated their mother and Shaiq to tirades about how unhappy they were.

  “Hey, Mom,” the girl, Judy Caldwell, asked, “what’s the big deal about this boring speech and this boring Capitol Building anyway?”

  The Caldwells’ blond-haired eight-year-old daughter, Judy wore a blue and white dress with thin blue stripes and black shoes. She sat directly across from Shaiq. Next to her was seated her seven-year-old brother, George, Jr. Red-haired and freckled, he wore a black suit and a white shirt with no tie. He fussed continually with the collar and looked miserable.

  “Children, the ambassador here knows more about Washington, D.C., than anyone I’ve ever met, including most of our senators and congressmen.” Emily Cald
well gripped Shaiq’s hand with both of her own. “Please, tell the children a little about this building where their father will be speaking tonight and why the speech is important.”

  “Of course,” Shaiq said with a superior smile. “This building is the capitol of your nation’s capital. Finished in 1800, the city’s four quadrants meet at this edifice, and here the streets begin their numbering. So in a sense, it is the district’s nerve center. Its white granite and marble façade and its massive dome make the capitol visible to the people here for miles around. At night, when lit up, it appears from a distance as a pale, almost alabaster presence, a luminous symbol of everything America is and everything she will eventually be.”

  Eight-year-old Judy stared at him with wide, innocent, light blue eyes and said, “My teacher says we forced black slaves to build it.”

  “And when they didn’t work hard enough,” George said, “we whipped them.”

  “Your teacher was right,” Shaiq said. “Some of the workers were freed slaves, but many of them weren’t.”

  “What’s that ugly thing on the dome’s top?” Judy asked.

  “It’s a huge cast-iron statue called Freedom. It weighs almost eight tons,” Shaiq said.

  “Why’s it so ugly?” George wanted to know.

  “Its name is ‘the Statue of Freedom,’ and it’s not ugly,” Shaiq countered. “The sculptor’s depicting Freedom as a woman warrior in the style of the ancient Romans and Greeks. She wears a Chilton, or toga, and her helmet is topped with an eagle. In one hand she grips the sheathed sword of battle and in the other the laurel wreath of victory. Her war is over now. The Statue of Liberty could be viewed as her protégé, what Freedom can evolve into after the wars are over.”

  “It was also made by slaves,” Judy announced.

  “This whole government was built by slaves,” George said.

  “And we whipped them if they didn’t work hard enough,” Judy said, nodding vigorously.

  Their mother cleared her throat. “White people built lots of things, too, children. Now Mr. Ambassador, tell them where we’ll be seated and where their father will speak.”

  “We will sit in the gallery—” Shaiq started to say.

  “What’s a gallery?” Judy asked. Now she was starting to fidget.

  “A big balcony,” Shaiq said.

  “It was also built by slaves,” George said knowingly.

  “And did we whip them, too?” Judy asked.

  “Children,” their mother said. “Let the ambassador tell you about the House chamber. Try not to interrupt.”

  “It has many, many seats. Those on the floor run in a semicircle, and the representatives have 448 permanent seats. The senators have a hundred. The rest are for visitors. Tonight, we will be visitors.”

  “Mr. Ambassador,” Judy interrupted, “does your country have slaves?”

  Rolling back her eyes, the First Lady stared at the ambassador.

  “And do you also whip them?” George asked.

  The First Lady looked ready to explode.

  2

  “An eighty-two-year-old nun with a heart condition broke into the Y-12 nuclear storage facility, and it took several hours to detect her. We’ll be fine.”

  —Hamzi Udeen

  A lone man in a blue security guard’s uniform hid in the thick trees watching the highway. The last security jeep had just driven past, making its hourly rounds. He and his men had an hour to cut through the two chain-link fences and tie the rent back into place with thin strands of aluminum wire in an attempt to conceal the fence tears from passing guard patrols. They then had to sneak into the wooded grounds beyond the double fences. The lone man dog-trotted back up the twisting dirt road toward the big Chevy van parked deep in the trees. Filled with his fourteen men, it was concealed from the highway by the dense woods.

  Hamzi tapped on the rear window. The door swung open, and the men began climbing out. They wore either the white lab coats of the techs or the guards’ blue security uniforms. They all had professionally counterfeited plant IDs and badges with conforming IDs in their wallets. Their short hair was colored brown, gray, or blond. Hamzi had made them each shave three times.

  Under their coats and security-guard jackets were slung the short, silenced MP5 submachine guns along with silenced 9mm pistols holstered inside their pants. They kept extra magazines and other ordnance in their backpacks. Several of them carried duffel bags filled with shaped charges, rocket grenade launchers, and other weapons.

  “We’re on a special investigation,” Hamzi said to them in a voice just above a whisper, “if anyone asks.”

  “They’ll probably think we work here,” Amir said.

  “And if they don’t,” Fahad said, “we can kill them.”

  Amir nodded. “But we should be okay. We’re indistinguishable from the over eleven hundred employees working here. The turnover’s huge. No one knows who’s who.”

  “Okay,” Hamzi said. “One last time. Amir, you and your team are taking out the silos—dry and wet. Fahad, your men are helping Mazini with the Reactor Containment Building and the Auxiliary Building. Elias and Mazini will have marked the pumps and generators with duct taped Xs. Fahad and I will tape C-4 to the pumps, intake pipes, and emergency generators. As soon as the attack commences, Amir will blow holes in the bottoms and lower sides of the tanks with RPGs. Elias has stashed the launchers in a maintenance storage closet in the Auxiliary Building. It’s to your right—one hundred feet from the front door. A taped X will be on that, too.

  “Now, you have Mazini’s number programmed into your cell phones. You have maps and photos in your belt bags. I will point the buildings out to you. Everyone got it?

  “We’re at a blind spot in the fence. The perimeter is too enormous for effective surveillance and the cameras never work. Neither do the motion detectors. They get hundreds of false alarms nightly—deer, coyotes, raccoons, stray dogs and cats. Hell, an eighty-two-year-old nun with a heart condition broke into the Y-12 nuclear storage facility, and it took several hours to detect her. We’ll be fine.”

  They fast-walked up the dirt road to the highway. Checking to see that no one was around, they jogged across the road. Hamzi got a pair of twelve-inch Tekton bolt cutters out from under his belt and quickly clipped a large L-shaped tear in the chain-link fence.

  3

  If you’re going to greet the Reaper tonight, you might as well meet him with a grin on.

  —Elias Edito

  Elias was on the gun tower’s steel catwalk. Six stories aboveground, it circumscribed the tower room and afforded him a commanding view of the entire Hudson River Nuclear Power Station. More important, however, he could also stare up Highway 9, the two-lane road in front of the plant that ran due east, to where it crossed Highway 12. North of the intersection, on Highway 12, was a New York National Guard base. Ten miles south of the junction was a state police station. In case of attack, those two forces would be the first responders.

  Elias could see the intersection of H-9 and H-12 clearly. It was a moonlit, windless, cloudless night. The crossroads was well lit and 234 yards away. He knew the precise distance because he’d measured it on his pedometer and had adjusted one of his rifle scopes for that exact range. Elias felt good.

  When he finally saw a man step out of the nearby trees, it was 9:45 P.M. He was wearing a plant security guard uniform and had a heavy navy-blue seabag over his shoulder. Elias hung his Northern pulley hoist on the top catwalk rail, wound the line through it, then dropped it down to the man approaching the tower. Lashing the big seabag to the rope, the man jogged back to the tree line. Elias quickly pulled the heavy bag up to the catwalk, dragged it into the tower room, and shut the steel door behind him.

  The room was twelve feet by twelve feet with a ten-foot-high ceiling. It had steel floors, low steel walls, and bullet-resistant Lexan windows. If the guards had to fire their rifles, they were expected to do so from the catwalk. Were anyone to return fire, the guards were under orders t
o take refuge in the tower room and to call in the National Guard and the state police. Plant security was not trained or equipped to confront serious opposition.

  The furnishings weren’t much. He spent a good deal of his time at the small desk, on which he wrote out his nightly reports. Since a guard was expected to observe the plant and its grounds at all times, the bathroom facilities were exposed. Even seated on the toilet, Elias could see out the Lexan windows. At night, the post was essentially dark, so no one could see in. There were panel heaters for winter and an air conditioner for summer, which was currently broken. In the middle was a steel swivel stool on which the guards could sit. To his left was the locked, gray, metal gun box, six feet long, rectangular in shape. The tower bulls universally referred to it as “the coffin.” Some of the tower guards brought blankets and slept on the gun box—particularly those who also worked day jobs. It was strictly forbidden, but no one could check on the officer without getting buzzed in first. It was almost impossible to catch them.

  Nothing ever happened at the facility anyway. Why would anyone want to break into a power plant? Plant personnel said that all the time, usually with a laugh. Elias smiled grimly at the thought.

  He opened up the gun box and took out the AR-15 7.62mm NATO semiautomatic assault rifle and a dozen magazines. For anything under three hundred yards, it would do. He placed it on the floor. He removed the 12-gauge Remington pump shotgun along with five ten-round boxes of double-ought buck. He laid the boxes of shells down alongside the AR-15.

  He lifted the big canvas seabag onto the gun bin. He dragged out the Barrett M82 .50 caliber heavy vehicle sniper rifle and a dozen preloaded magazines. It was a de facto antitank, antiaircraft weapon. Then he dug out a 9mm Glock in a nylon holster plus silencer and magazines, as well as a Ka-Bar combat knife in a nylon belt sheath. Those last three were his evacuation weapons. Next to it he placed more magazines, grenades, and boxes of phosphorus rounds on the floor. Digging around in the bag, he finally found the file with which he would carve firing grooves onto the rails.