And Into the Fire
Page 33
• On February 2, 2013, The New York Times reported that TTP militants killed nine Pakistani soldiers and four government-hired mercenaries—possibly more—in an assault on an army base in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The militants were equipped with military machine guns and rockets; they also murdered ten civilians. A spokesman for the terrorists said they were avenging the drone assassinations of two Tehrik-e-Taliban leaders.
Similar attacks continue to this day.
Moreover, the Pakistani military heavily protected the bases these terrorists assaulted. Not so in the U.S. rent-a-cops secured U.S. nuclear weapons labs, our fissile nuclear bomb-fuel sites, and our nuclear power plants; and according to the Supreme Court, they did not have to defend these sites against serious 9/11-style terrorist attacks by a dozen or more heavily armed intruders. For the kind of superbly organized, rigorously trained terrorists who detonated portions of Pakistan’s nuclear bases with such effectiveness, blowing up America’s nuclear sites—especially its nuclear power plants—would be a day at the beach.
Slowly, the basic elements of my nonfiction book on nuclear terrorism came together. It also took years out of my life, but I eventually finished it. I called it: The Nuclear Terrorist: His Financial Backers and Political Patrons in the U.S. and Abroad.
As if to confirm my descriptions of how poorly secured U.S. nuclear installations are, in 2012 Sister Megan Rice, an eighty-two-year-old nun with a heart condition, broke into the Y-12 fissile nuclear bomb-fuel storage site. Along with two late-middle-aged men, she reached the main storage building, which contained 100,000 tons of bomb-grade highly enriched uranium. Spray-painting peace slogans on its walls, they sat on a curb and sang peace songs. Only after Sister Megan and the men spent several hours in Y-12 did security guards accidentally spot and arrest them.
Instead of pinning a medal on Sister Megan and her two friends for exposing the ludicrous lack of security at our nuclear sites, the Obama administration tried and convicted them as nuclear terrorists. All three were given lengthy sentences. Sister Megan was to do her time in a federal lockup in Brooklyn, New York. Since I live in Manhattan, I wrote a letter to her. I began visiting her on a weekly basis.
Sister Megan is perhaps the nicest, sweetest person I’ve ever met. I felt immediately as if I had known her a long, long time, and in a sense I had. I’d written a character very much like her in End of Days. Sister Cassandra, one of the novel’s main characters, is an antinuclear activist-nun who is always in and out of prisons. Long before I met Sister Megan, I’d imagined her. After all my work on nuclear issues, it was as if I’d been looking for her my whole life.
Ironically, I also have a long prison history. I grew up near a maximum security facility in Michigan City, IN, and some of my earliest memories were staring at its high white walls in something resembling awe. The town had a sizable community of corrections workers and ex-convicts who settled down there after they were released. Prison people were scattered all over the city, so the penitentiary seemed to be everywhere.
In high school during the summers, I played eight or nine tennis tournaments inside the walls. Since the prison had a single tennis court, only one or two of us could play on the court at a time. The other three or four players had time to kill, so we’d walk the rec yard and talk to the inmates. We frequently played basketball with them, almost like we were cons ourselves. In those days, prisons—even a hard-nosed lockup like my hometown maximum security facility—were a lot more relaxed than they are today.
* * *
The Most Frightening Father Any of Us Kids Had Ever Heard Of
Back when I was playing those tennis tournaments on “the Big Yard,” my family had two highly memorable neighbors. One was the prison doctor-psychiatrist; the other was the prison torturer. (Yes, they had a prison torturer.) After a tennis match, I’d memorize and write down the serial numbers of the inmates, then give them to the doctor-psychiatrist. He’d pull their file jackets and let my old friend, Jerry Gibbs, and me read them. They all contained the prisoners’ pre-Miranda police confessions, their conviction records, and often lengthy psychiatric interviews.
Jacob Bronowski once wrote that “violence wears the face of fallen angels.” He also called violence “the sphinx by the fireside,” and many of the prisoners gave that impression. They were intensely ingratiating—soft voices, soft eyes—but we soon learned from their file jackets that they’d all done terrible things. The most ingratiating of the inmates and the prison’s best tennis player was an axe murderer.
Jerry and I would then tell my neighbor, the torturer, about the men we played and who they were. He’d nod and explain to us, in his unforgettable words, “I’ve beaten the mortal piss out of all of them.”
He was a huge man—six three, biceps like cannonballs, over three hundred pounds, much of it hard fat—and very scary.
“I can whip any man in the Indiana State Prison,” he used to brag, “young or old, big or small, white or colored. I take them into a sub-basement cell, put on the kid gloves, take off the cuffs, and cuddle with them for a half hour. I never leave a mark on them.”
He smiled a lot, but the smile never reached his eyes. In fact, he had the deadest eyes my friends and I had ever seen on a human being. We also knew his son, and we agreed unanimously that his old man was the most frightening father we had ever heard of, let alone seen. My friends and I all went to bed every night and prayed to God, thanking him for not having made that monster our father.
* * *
After graduating from high school, I worked seven years, on and off, in the steel mills in Gary, Indiana, getting through college, and one of the mini-mills I worked in signed parole papers for convicts. Half the workers there were ex-offenders, so one way or another I got to know a lot of convicts and ex-convicts growing up.
Even when I moved to New York, prisons seemed to follow me. My first year as an acquiring editor, I happened to publish a couple of very good ex-con writers, Nathan C. Heard and Malcolm Braly. (At the International Association of Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN) we still give the annual Malcolm Braly Award for the best book, fiction or nonfiction, written by an inmate.) As a book editor, I’ve had to travel a lot, and these two authors encouraged me to visit the local prisons during my trips. I’d talk to inmates about getting free books from publishers, organizing book classes, and writing, both commercially and for pleasure. Over the decades, I’ve published a score or more of inmates and ex-cons. When New York City learned of the work I’d done in prisons, they named a day after me. Atlanta presented me with a similar award.
So I began visiting Sister Megan each week. The living area in which she and her fellow women inmates served their time was cramped, congested, and shockingly inhumane. The facility housed approximately 115 of them in sixty bunk beds in a space the size of a high school basketball court. The bunks were so close together the women could touch the prisoner in the bed next to them. For the 115 women, there were six sinks, six showers and six toilets, several of which were often broken; all of them were enclosed inside the same small area where the women slept. The women had no access to an outdoor exercise yard, and they had no mess hall. They received food trays through a hole in the wall. Most of them had to eat off the trays, sitting on beds. For a recreation area, they had a room with a TV and some chairs. They had no educational opportunities, and the counselor could only give them approximately ten minutes a week to schedule visitors’ appointments. They had no real guidance or career counseling. A number of the women were doing life. This would be their home until they died. It was to be Sister Megan’s home until she died or was released.
Sister Megan and her fellow prisoners were warehoused and locked away like forgotten furniture in a storage attic.
The women’s prison was so horrendous I suspected that the administration would not allow journalists inside for fear they would expose the conditions to the media. (I later discovered my suspicions were correct. A New Yorker writer had not been allowed
to interview Sister Megan in the prison.) Still, I managed to help a reporter, Linda Stasi, get into the jail. She wrote an electrifying, full-page-with-no-ads exposé on Sister Megan’s disgraceful incarceration in The New York Daily News.
Linda, The Daily News, and I tweeted and e-mailed everyone we could. We asked them to read the linked newspaper piece, forward it to other people—do something, anything to get Sister Megan and her two friends released. We also argued that the Federal Bureau of Corrections need to improve conditions in the prison—or better yet, shut it down.
Approximately ten days after Linda’s newspaper piece hit the stands, eight federal judges—all of them women—descended on the facility; they spent an entire day inspecting the living conditions and interviewing the women prisoners. Within another ten days, Sister Megan’s conviction was denounced by the federal appeals court as a grotesque miscarriage of justice and overturned. She and her two friends were instantly released.
* * *
Sister Megan’s shameful imprisonment summarizes everything that’s wrong with Washington, D.C.’s policies toward nuclear weapons and the management of our country’s nuclear facilities.
* * *
As frightening as the subject matter was, however, the nonfiction book was not without hope. I did offer answers on how to deal with the nuclear terrorist threat. One of them I thought was obvious. Generals Sherman and Sheridan defeated America’s Plains Indians in large part by depriving them of their sustenance—the buffalo. They waged a war of extinction against the great herds, and by 1900, there were fewer than a thousand bison in North America. We can question the ethics of Sherman and Sheridan’s strategy—and I certainly do—but we cannot question its efficacy. To defeat Middle Eastern terrorism, the U.S. would have to do the same thing: deprive it of its sustenance—in this case, its financial sustenance. We could purge the Middle East’s terrorists of their life’s blood by freeing the world of oil. Do that, and in three years Saudi Arabia would be Somalia, Iran would become Afghanistan, and if Saddam Hussein were still alive, he’d be invading his neighbors on a dromedary, waving a scimitar.
After the book was published, I did several months of radio and TV. The History Channel had me host and star in the two-hour special on man-made catastrophes. Part of my assignment was to also speak for a half hour on nuclear terrorism.
A Harvard instructor began asking me to come up and speak on nuclear terrorism. The first time I visited there, I talked about how insecure the world’s nuclear sites were, particularly fissile nuclear bomb-fuel sites, and how culpable so many Saudi terrorist financiers and American politicians were. As I spoke, however, I also began to envision a possible novel on the subject. Instead of a nuclear apocalyptic epic, this would be a nuclear terrorism thriller. In midspeech, I could suddenly see it all: I not only had my Pakistani nuclear terrorists, I also had my Saudi and American supervillains—witty, sophisticated, erudite, politically powerful billionaire-plutocrats, funding the terrorists and pulling the other characters’ strings like pernicious puppet masters from the pit of hell. I also knew where my fissile nuclear bomb-fuel was, and I knew how to steal it. I had some U.S. nuclear sites my terrorists could easily destroy, as well as any number of cities I could incinerate with my horrifyingly lethal, Hiroshima-style terrorist nukes. Heroes? Over the years I’d known some very courageous war correspondents and undercover intelligence officers who could serve as my heroes. Two women, in particular, came immediately to mind. The two I was thinking of would do anything to pull our so-called republic back from the nuclear terrorist’s abyss.
The plot and characterization for the book hit me as if I were Paul, traveling the road to Damascus, instead of an author talking to a classroom full of Harvard students.
My old friend William Burroughs once defined Naked Lunch as that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Standing there in front of those Harvard students, I had my “frozen moment” when I could glimpse the nightmare horror that was truly “on the end of every fork.”
I was still seeing it the next day on the train ride from Harvard back to New York. What the hell, I finally said to myself, sitting there in that Acela Express car, You’ve done your research. You’ve written your nonfiction book. Why not write the novel?
I decided to call it And Into the Fire.
Getting out my laptop, I began to type.
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. Since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
—Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
BOOKS BY ROBERT GLEASON
Wrath of God
End of Days
The Nuclear Terrorist: His Financial Backers and Political Patrons in the U.S. and Abroad
And Into the Fire
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR AND INTO THE FIRE
“Bob Gleason knows how to tell a story relevant to our times. The plot is realistic and believable. Readers will find And Into the Fire a suspenseful, high-stakes, high-octane thriller to be a page-turning must-read.”
—Major General Sid Shachnow, U.S. Army (Ret.), former head of all U.S. Special Forces worldwide and coauthor of the Colby Award–winning memoir, Hope and Honor
“Gleason writes with undeniable authority on the threat of nuclear terrorism. His new book, And Into the Fire, is an eye-opening, hair-raising, up-all-night thriller that should be required reading for all members of Congress.”
—Byron L. Dorgan, former U.S. senator and New York Times bestselling author of Gridlock
“Riveting, powerful, and thoroughly enjoyable.”
—Colonel David Hunt, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Without Mercy and Fox News military commentator
PRAISE FOR ROBERT GLEASON’S END OF DAYS
“Gleason’s work has made him an expert on all things apocalyptic, a subject he returns to with gusto in this wildly expansive tale of the Coming End Times.… A thrilling take on a frighteningly possible future, one that makes the journey in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road look like a stroll through the park.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A narrative knockout. Comparisons to The Stand and Swan Song are well founded, but Gleason’s novel is in a class by itself.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Gleason has been to the jagged edge of the pit and peeped in; he’s been seared by the heat of the eternal furnace, smelled the brimstone, listened to the mournful wailing of the damned. The Dante of our age, he’s back to tell us about it.”
—Stephen Coonts, New York Times bestselling author of The Assassin
“What an amazing story, sweeping in scope, terrifying, uplifting, outrageous, funny, and shocking, forming an unforgettable picture of humanity’s ‘end of days.’ And what a stupendous cast of characters, from crazy Russian generals to shamans, torturers, visionaries, religious leaders, scientists, and even a brilliant computer named Thucydides, who is nevertheless flummoxed by the human race and falling in love.”
—Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of Impact and Blasphemy
PRAISE FOR END OF DAYS’ SEQUEL WRATH OF GOD
“Passionate readers need not fear Philip Roth’s lament that fiction is dead, since the writer’s imagination is outstripped each night by the evening news. Gleason has conjured up a post-nuclear holocaust Islamic horde that has conquered Europe and Asia and is pushing inexorably through the American West. Only a rawhide-tough old woman, and her unlikely allies—George S. Patton, Stonewall Jackson, Amelia Earhart, and an adolescent triceratops—stand in the way of the triumph of utter barbarism. Equal parts fantasy, historical fiction, sci-fi, Western, and morality play, this novel is sprawling, epic, cinematic, and a ripping good adventure yarn. If Gleason has forgotten anything about fashioning a book that will get widely read, the reader won’t discover what it might be. All public libraries will want to put in an order.”
—Thomas Gaughan, Booklist (starred review)
“The publisher should issue a cash prize to
anyone who can put down the book without finishing it.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“A compulsive page-turner!”
—Hartford Courant
“The wildest read of the year!”
—Clive Cussler
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Gleason, author of End of Days, has worked for forty years in the New York book industry, where he has published many scientists, politicians, and military experts. He starred in and hosted a two-hour History Channel special, largely devoted to nuclear terrorism, and has discussed the subject on many national TV/radio talk shows, including Sean Hannity’s and Lou Dobbs’s TV shows and George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM. He has also spoken on nuclear terrorism at major universities, including Harvard. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Special Thanks
Acknowledgments
Epigraphs
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Chapter 1
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4