by Brad Taylor
“Well, they’re about to shift gears. That guy in Oman is nowhere near the threat we’re facing now.”
67
Keshawn drove down the deserted dirt road and pulled the truck alongside his beat-up Honda Civic. He got out and began to transfer the loaded EFPs and other equipment. He had decided to ignore Rafik’s orders about using the BGE vehicle, feeling more secure in his own car. He had been pleased when he was told he was on his own, because he thought driving the company truck—with an Arabic imposter wearing a BGE uniform—was absolute stupidity. Others might blindly follow Rafik’s orders, but Keshawn refused to do so.
The transfer complete, he continued down the road to his first target, a substation in the middle of nowhere. One that he’d sketched a month ago. He pulled the car around the back, hiding it in the wood line, then broke out the aiming tripod, his first EFP, and the M57 firing device from the trunk.
He found the same line of sight he had sketched before, and aimed the EFP through the chain-link fence to the extremely high voltage transformer within. He attached the two wires from the blasting cap to the M57, then tested the circuit. He got a green light. Placing the cap in the well for the EFP, he spooled the wire out to its maximum extension, having no idea how big the explosion would be. He crouched behind a large pine tree and took three deep breaths, looking at the M57 clacker in his hand.
Here we go.
He placed it between both hands and rapidly began to click the handle. On the third stroke, the air was split by an explosion, but there was little debris thrown his way. He turned and looked around the tree. The tripod lay on the ground, with the EFP tray vaporized, a small cloud of dust lingering in the air as the only reminder that it had existed. He walked out, searching the giant transformer for damage. He saw a hole in the chain-link fence, and a large tear in the metal sheath of the EHVT. Nothing else. He wondered if he’d screwed up, if maybe he’d failed to set up the EFP correctly. Then he noticed a silence for the first time. He’d thought it was because of the deafening noise of the explosion, but he could hear birds chirping in the distance. What he couldn’t hear was the hum of electricity flowing into the substation. He smiled.
One down.
68
I waited impatiently at the gate to the West Wing of the White House, trying to get inside the parking area of the Old Executive Office Building where the Oversight Council had convened. As expected, it had turned into an enormous pain in the ass, with me getting pissed off enough to want to start ripping heads. Jennifer, who’d come along, kept me calm while sweet-talking the guard there so that I wasn’t arrested.
Eventually, we were cleared for entrance. As I pulled into a parking space, I saw Kurt come out the side door of the building. He didn’t look happy.
“What the hell are you doing, Pike? I told you to go home. Why are you still here? We’re in a very delicate phase in Oman, and with the election shenanigans, your bullshit might cost us Omega authority with the council.”
I jumped out of the car. “Sir, I know what the terrorists are up to. It’s not Cyrus Mace, and it’s not a bunch of skinheads. It’s the terrorists from Egypt, and they’re about to try to destroy our electrical grid.”
The comment brought him up short. He looked at me for a second, trying to decide if I was nuts or worth the risk to bring into the hallowed hall of the Oversight Council. He shook his head. “I’m going to regret this. Follow me.”
We entered the conference room, and even I was a little awed by the talent around the table, starting with President Warren at the head. All were looking at me expectantly, except Brookings, the secretary of state. He was glowering like he wanted to castrate me.
President Warren said, “Hello, Pike. I understand you have something you urgently want to tell us.”
I wasted no time, spilling out everything I had found. The information caused a ripple in the room. Nobody said a word for a minute, all trying to assimilate the intel. I ended with, “You need to let my team loose. Let us go get them.”
That caused Brookings to come out of his coma. “Bullshit. No way is Project Prometheus doing anything domestically. We have law enforcement for this. They’re already tracking the Cyrus Mace angle, with a manhunt for the explosives under way. All we have to do is redirect them.”
I went from him, to the president, to Kurt. “No offense, but it took me damn near an hour to just get inside here. There’s no way you can get the correct information into the system in time to stop this.”
“Stop what?” Brookings said. “We have no indication you’re right. Just your say-so. Even if it’s true, the attack may be days away. We have plenty of time to stop it.”
President Warren raised his hand, causing everyone to shut up.
“First, let’s get this information out. Right now.” He pointed at Alexander Palmer, the national security advisor. “Track these guys and see what they find.” Palmer started to leave the room, when I held out the document Holly had created, saying, “Sir… here. This is law enforcement speak.”
President Warren said, “Kurt, what do you think?”
Kurt said, “We need to get an assessment of our vulnerabilities. Figure out what they’re actually going to hit. The grid’s a big fucking thing. We need to neck it down instead of randomly guessing what they’re planning to hit.”
President Warren nodded, turning to the director of the CIA. “Get that egghead you had brief me a year ago on infrastructure vulnerabilities. The guy from the National Academy of Sciences. VTC him in here.”
We waited while the video-teleconferencing bridge was established, me pacing back and forth while we wasted time. Eventually, the Tandberg secure VTC came to life, with a guy on the other end looking exactly like the stereotypical absentminded professor. Wild hair, Coke-bottle glasses, and a twitchy demeanor. All he was missing was a white lab coat and a pocket protector.
He said, “Hello, sir. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
President Warren got right to the point. “You gave me a briefing on our critical vulnerabilities last year, but I need some specifics on the power grid. If a terrorist group was going to attack that, how could they do the most damage?”
“Well, that all depends on what they bring to the table. I mean, if they had an airplane, they could fly it into a nuclear plant, or if they had car bombs, they could—”
Warren cut him off. “We don’t have time for this. Say they have multiple small teams with explosive packets and the means to penetrate any security. What would they hit?”
The egghead looked nonplussed for a moment, clearly wanting to pontificate for a while but brought up short by the urgency in the president’s voice.
“Well, the best thing to hit would be our extremely high voltage transformers. You knock those out, and certain areas would be out of power for a while. But there’s no way to systemically bring down the entire grid now. After 2003, we started going to smart-grid technology. They could do some damage, but the grid’s fairly self-healing.”
President Warren said, “What about our nuclear facilities? Seems like that would be the logical place to hit.”
“Yes, sir, in a perfect world, but every nuclear plant has an enormous amount of security, and not just from someone who intentionally means harm. We built those things to withstand hurricanes, earthquakes, and anything else that can be thrown against them. In fact, the sites themselves do have to withstand a certain level of plane crash. The biggest problem with hitting a nuclear facility is our own government. After the Japanese tsunami and the troubles they had with their two plants, any attack, no matter how small, will cause the NRC’s Nuclear Security and Incident Response office to shut down the reactor until we can be sure it is safe. The event would bring about some economic damage but recoverable fairly quickly. Trust me, they can’t harm a nuclear plant.”
President Warren said, “‘Fairly quickly’ is a worthless phrase. Especially in today’s economy. They poke enough nuclear plants, and the impact wou
ld be catastrophic even if every attack was a failure.”
The egghead continued, “I wouldn’t worry about a nuclear facility, if you really want to know what’s going to hurt. As I said, the EHVTs are the way to go.”
President Warren said, “Why? It’s just a piece of equipment. Why is that so bad?”
“Because we don’t have any spares.”
“What do you mean?”
“EHVTs are enormous things, made one at a time, with most being made for a specific power system. They aren’t built all the same, sort of like a carburetor in a car. You can’t go to the NAPA auto store and say, ‘Give me a carburetor.’ You have to give the make and model of the car. EHVTs are the same, except there aren’t any NAPAs to buy them at, and they take six months to build. We don’t do that in America anymore. All EHVTs are made overseas, with a backlog of six months. Most U.S. energy companies keep a couple on hand, but if you took out more than we had to spare, you’d permanently alter our ability to provide power to an area.”
President Warren said, “So that’s what they’d hit? The EHVTs?”
“That would be my guess, but even then, it’s small potatoes. Taking them out individually would cause local power outages, but what you’d really want is a shutdown of the entire grid, with the EHVTs being the lynchpin. That can’t happen anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because, like I said, we’ve made the grid smart.”
When the scientist saw he wasn’t convincing anyone, he began speaking to us like we were children. “Look. The country is split into three zones—the Eastern, Western, and Texas interchanges. It should be neat, but it’s really not. Even between these zones, there are interchanges, and in fact, as we saw in 2003, our system impacts other countries, such as Canada. The problem with all of this is that electricity is an instant demand. We don’t store it, like oil. It’s produced and used instantly. The demand is constantly fluctuating, with the grid providing the response. If you interrupt that flow, you cause a ripple effect. If one substation that’s used to distribute power is taken off-line, then the burden is switched to another substation. If you take out that substation as well, you overpower the next substation tasked with taking on the additional burden, and it takes itself off-line before it does damage to itself. When that happens, the entire flow is shifted to another station, with exponential effects. Eventually, every single substation shuts down because it can’t handle the flow, like what happened in 2003.”
I spoke up. “You keep mentioning 2003. Forgive me, but I was out of the country for most of that year. What do you mean?”
The egghead focused on me like I was a simpleton, and said, “The blackout of 2003? You don’t remember that?”
“I wasn’t here. And had other things to worry about. Like getting shot at.”
“Well, I was getting to it anyway, because it’s why we don’t really have to worry about an attack against the grid anymore. Believe it or not, in 2003 a tree branch caused one high-voltage power line to short out, then what I just described happened. The northeastern seaboard—along with sections of Canada—went without power for three days, at an estimated cost of ten billion dollars. Along with a lot of deaths.”
I said, “Why don’t we need to worry about that now?”
“Because we learned from that experience and developed solutions. The old system simply shunted all power to the next available substation, which eventually became overpowered. Now we have a smart grid, wherein the system itself tests where best to put the load, then does so. No single substation is overpowered.”
I said, “So even if you took out the EHVTs, you wouldn’t cause a blackout?”
“Oh, you’d cause a blackout, but just not nationwide. It would be restricted to the area that was serviced. Still bad, but nothing like 2003.”
I said, “Just say they could do it. That they could overcome your smart grid. What are we looking at?”
“Well, they can’t, so it’s like asking what would happen if dinosaurs were to attack your house.”
I was about to lose my temper and my tone betrayed that. “The president of the United States is asking. What would happen?”
He snapped back at my sharpness, along with everyone else in the room. He paused for a moment, then said truculently, “Well, if by some black magic they could cause a blackout, it would be catastrophic. If they attacked the Eastern exchange and brought the EHVTs off-line, and managed to shunt the power linearly, it would shut down the entire eastern seaboard for months. Extrapolating from the three-day blackout, you’d be looking at losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and a huge loss of life, from simple traffic accidents to hospital deaths. But I’m telling you, that can’t happen.”
I looked at Kurt. “The terrorists would know that. They wouldn’t put this much time and effort into an attack without ensuring success. They spent years recruiting American prisoners, then placing them inside power companies. The theft of EFPs was very well thought out, and geared toward this attack. We’re missing something. You need to turn my team loose. We’re the only ones who know what we’re up against. The only ones who believe.”
The egghead on the screen heard me and became shrill. “Mister Whoever You Are, I’m sure you believe there’s a threat, but from where I’m at, I can tap into the power flow of the entire country. I can reach any interchange with the touch of a keyboard. We’ve put an enormous amount of effort into fixing the system. It’s ad hoc, but still better than anywhere else in the world. Doomsday just isn’t going to happen, not unless the terrorists have found a way to go back in time ten years.”
Kurt began to say something, and the lights went out.
69
Rafik paid his five dollars and pulled around into a small parking lot adjacent to a pond, seeing a trail wind into the forest across a wooden walkway. It had taken him close to two hours to reach the Calvert Cliffs State Park from downtown Baltimore, and during that time his pay-as-you-go TracFone had vibrated four times. Four text messages stating success. Four in two hours. Much faster than he had anticipated. If they kept up this pace, the grid would reach critical mass within six hours. He had planned on ten, assuming he would lose one team eventually. In truth, in the back of his mind, he had planned on failure.
Maybe coming to this park won’t end up necessary after all.
He was surprised at the number of people in the park, and wondered why they weren’t at work or school. Couples leaving to hike the trails with day packs, families with picnic baskets, and lone fossil hunters with trowels, buckets, and brushes headed to the shore of the Chesapeake Bay two miles away.
He had done the research on the park on the Internet, convinced the place would be deserted, and now wondered about his ability to stay for the duration of the attack. Looking at it logically, he decided there wasn’t a threat. Lots of cars were parked around him, and probably would be until the park closed at sunset. The only implication was that he wouldn’t be able to sit inside his vehicle without drawing attention to himself.
No matter. You need to conduct a reconnaissance anyway.
He slung a day pack over his shoulder, the water bottles inside making it sag awkwardly, and walked to a map tacked inside a display case. He saw that the trail he was parked in front of led straight east, to the shore and the fossil cliffs. That wouldn’t do. He needed one that went north, to his target. He located three other trails, all longer, that went north, then wound back to the east, starting at another lot farther into the park. He debated walking but then decided that he didn’t want to traverse the entire parking area loaded down with explosives if he was forced to execute this plan.
Better to get as close as possible.
He returned to the car and wound through the park, passing shelters and picnic tables, all overloaded with people. He found the area he wanted, right next to a gravel access road labeled for emergency vehicles only. There were no parking spots available, but he noticed that others had taken to parking wherever there was
space, with an apparent disregard for marked spots, which would work better for him. He pulled right into a grassy area at the trailhead, parking in the shade of a stand of hardwoods, and killed the engine. He debated for a few seconds about taking his sidearm, then decided against it, sliding it under the driver’s seat. If he was stopped, the pistol would only confirm suspicions. The minute he fired a shot, the mission would be over. Better for him to talk his way out of trouble.
As he entered the trailhead, he compared himself to the other visitors and was pleased to see he blended in fine. Some were carrying larger rucksacks, which he would have to do to carry the EFP toward his target should his primary plan fail, a contingency that was looking more and more remote.
He walked up the access road, alongside three couples headed the same way. Feeling self-conscious, he tried to act interested in the flora and fauna, using a cheap digital camera as a prop. Eventually, the couples split off onto the shorter trails, with him sticking to the longest because it continued north toward his target. When it began to traverse to the east, he split off, marking the point on his GPS. He continued straight through the forest, hiking on the bearing he had set in his GPS earlier.
He felt his phone vibrate inside the pack, and rapidly pulled it out, anxious to see which of the four had managed to conduct a second attack so soon.
He pushed the button for text messaging, and stared at the phone in disbelief. It was the imam’s team in Pennsylvania, and they weren’t texting success.
70
Inside the conference room, the cacophony of voices shouting in the dim light of the emergency illumination was giving President Warren a headache. He rubbed his forehead, then ordered everyone to be quiet until the generator could kick in.
Three minutes later, it did, with the fluorescent bulbs flickering back to life. The cacophony grew again, as one by one the members of the council began to raise their voices to be heard.
