Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels) (39 page)

“Now, the BLU-114/B was an updated version of that principle and worked even better in strikes against Serbia. We put three quarters of the country into darkness and as a result were able to do things I’m not gonna mention in front of the delivery boy there. See, the updated smart bombs utilized filaments that were only a few hundredths of an inch thick. When the carbon fibers hit transformers, signal switching stations, and especially the power plants themselves,
poof!,
you’ve got yourself a made-to-order short circuiting which, in turn, vaporizes the carbon in its electrical arc flow, leaving no trace, and thus no evidence, behind.”

Jones stopped to resteady his thoughts.

“Of course,” he continued, “to manage that, the Ranger’s friend Ana Guajardo would need a delivery system akin to the one we used. So unless Mexican bombers are gonna sneak through NORAD and our other air-defense networks, I’d say we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Not necessarily,” said Young Roger, working his keyboard again.

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Young Roger brought up a schematic on the big-screen television to which his laptop was linked. “This is what they were building inside Guajardo’s converted toy factory.”

Tepper squinted to better make out what he was seeing. “Looks like a model airplane to me. Remote controlled. Used to fly them when I was a boy.”

Jones moved closer to the screen, frowning. “And that’s supposed to scare me? No, sir, unless we’re missing something here, Ana Guajardo might as well attack the U.S. with a fleet of toy stock cars.” He shook his head, his frown growing into a scowl. “You don’t need Homeland Security here, you need Hasbro.”

“We
are
missing something,” Dylan said suddenly, drawing the rest of the eyes in the room to him. “That’s not a model airplane, least not the kind you used to play with, Captain.”

“Then what the hell is it, son?”

“It’s known as a monster-scale radio-controlled plane. I saw one at a fair last year. Built to scale and plenty big too, maybe twenty feet long with a wingspan almost that big. Much bigger flying range than what Hasbro might make,” the boy said, with his gaze moving to Jones, “but still controlled with a remote no bigger than a smartphone, maybe even a smartphone these days.”

“Okay, okay,” Jones broke in, not wanting to be outdone. “So what are we saying now, that Guajardo’s used all this carbon filament,
tons
of it, to make miniature bombs to match her miniature fleet?”

“No,” Caitlin said, breaking the silence that fell in the wake of Jones’s question. “What if, what if…”

“What if
what,
Ranger?” Tepper prodded.

“What if these planes
themselves
were the bombs? What if Guajardo layered this carbon into the frames and blew a couple thousand of them up directly over their targets? What then, Jones?”

He was speechless for a moment, his mouth hanging open and lower lips quivering in a motion more akin to a spasm. “You’d have a hell of a mess, Ranger.”

*   *   *

“But it wouldn’t be irreparable and would leave no lasting damage,” Jones continued immediately. “So if you think Guajardo’s master plan is to plunge us into eternal darkness this way, you must be drinking more of that Texas water.”

“Transformers,” Caitlin said almost too softly to hear.

“Say that again?”

“Transformers. Tell him, Young Roger.”

“Another of Guajardo’s companies. She bought a manufacturing plant in Germany from Siemens that makes them.”

Jones’s mouth started to lower again. “Siemens makes ninety percent of the transformers in this country.”

“You mean Guajardo does, Jones,” Caitlin said, “and has been for as much as five years now.”

“Oh, shit…”

“What is it?”

Jones looked like a young boy who’d been caught pinching quarters from his own piggy bank. “Looks like maybe that Texas water isn’t so bad, after all.”

*   *   *

“In the past five years, nearly three quarters of the transformers in the country have been replaced,” Jones continued.

“First I’ve heard of that,” noted Captain Tepper.

“That’s because it was all done under the radar to avoid attracting attention to the fact that Homeland had identified a major flaw in the system, specifically how vulnerable the older design was to overloads and its incompatibility with newer software. So we authorized a new design built to incorporate security measures that allowed for faster and more secure switching and transfer.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Young Roger. “You nationalized the grid so Homeland could take control, if it ever came to that.”

“Gold star, smart-ass.”

Young Roger flapped a frayed and tattered paperback at him called
Cyber War
by Richard Clarke. “If I’m a smart-ass, what’s that make counterterrorism expert Mr. Clarke here? I’ve read his book a dozen times and it scares me more each time. Wanna know what I learned from it?” No one at the table said yes, but Young Roger continued anyway. “Screw with these transformers and you end up with too much power being sent down high-tension lines that deliver electricity to homes. That destroys the line, maybe even resulting in a fire. Meanwhile, the resulting power surge overwhelms household surge protectors and fries every electrical device in the house.”

“You finished?” Jones asked him.

“Not even close,” said Young Roger, still holding Clarke’s book as if it were the Bible. “In two thousand three, a falling tree hit a power line somewhere in Ohio, creating a power surge. The backup systems that were supposed to reroute and compensate didn’t do their job and fifty million people all the way to the East Coast ended up losing power—all from a single tree limb. But that just scratches at the depths of the problem we’re facing here. See, the real crux of Guajardo’s plot to take us back to the Stone Age is to create uneven flow through the electric generators. Alter the spin rates on the subgrid from the standard sixty megahertz, change the rotation speeds to something other than what the programming calls for, and the turbines will literally tear themselves apart. The problem being that nobody’s storing these monster machines in a warehouse. They’re strictly built to order, custom made, and even under the best of circumstances it takes months. Now we’re talking about having to replace tens of thousands of them all at once. Years?” Young Roger asked, shaking his head as he let the Clarke book flop back to the tabletop. “Try decades. And that’s years and decades with factories shut down; distribution networks of food, produce, and other essentials destroyed; and financial markets back to the era of ledger books and abacuses.”

“While at the same time,” Tepper picked up, “her … what’d you call them again?” he asked Dylan.

“Monster-scale RC planes.”

“Her monster-scale RC planes loaded with this…” He looked to Caitlin this time.

“Carbon filament.”

“Carbon filament ignite over the nation’s top distribution stations and power plants serving the most populated areas of the country.”

“Not too hard,” added Young Roger, “considering that eighty-five percent of the population is concentrated in barely fifteen percent of the nation’s area.”

“We’re still missing something here,” said Caitlin, looking back toward Young Roger. “You said Guajardo bought a software company too, a software company that apparently wasn’t making any software.”

Young Roger spun the
Cyber War
paperback around. “Looks like I was wrong there.”

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“Her transformers would give Guajardo access to the software systems controlling them through a back door,” Young Roger continued. “Just what the mad doctor ordered when it comes to launching some virus her software engineers have been developing into the power companies’ SCADA—that’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition—systems that balance the flow between each company’s substations, transformers, and generators. This virus is the final piece of the puzzle that’s going to shut the power grid down and keep it shut down by sending faulty signals to the devices that regulate the electric load across the country. Power surges flood the grid with no failsafe or shutdown, since the virus has effectively disabled the backup systems, blowing every generator and every circuit breaker panel from coast to coast.”

“India,” Jones muttered, his gaze drifting out the window.

“I’m old, sir,” Tepper told him. “You mind speaking up a bit.”

“One year ago in India. Biggest blackout in goddamn history.”

Caitlin laid her hands on the table. “Don’t tell me, Jones, it was you.”

“Test run, Ranger, just to see what we could pull off by infecting their system with a virus and just a virus. Half a billion people lost power.”

“But they got it back within, like, a day,” Dylan pointed out.

“Right you are, delivery boy, because it was a simple worm and they were still in control of their transformers and didn’t have to worry about a hard rain of carbon taking out their physical capacity to boot. And our worm didn’t disrupt their system to the point of destroying their electric generators.”

“But you could have, right?” Caitlin challenged.

“That’s classified.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Take it however you want,” Jones snapped. “The bottom line here is we’re the
United States government,
not a pissed-off bitch with a grudge. Right now all we’ve got is assumptions with virtually no proof whatsoever to back them up. I don’t care how angry this woman is, she’s not capable of pulling this off; no one is.”

“You never met Ana Callas Guajardo,” Caitlin told him. “My interview with her was like having an audience with the devil. These aren’t assumptions, Jones, they’re
intentions.
She wanted me to know she was up to something and gave me just enough hints to figure out what. Know why? Because she doesn’t think we can stop her.”

“Can we?” Young Roger wondered. “You know how long it took us to build the power grid that’s up and running now? Over a hundred years. More than a century of work Guajardo plans to erase in a matter of hours, days at most. And I do mean erase, since a three-pronged attack like this would render every part, every segment of the grid, from power lines to substations to the circuit breakers in your house, nothing but a mess of useless junk. Could we salvage some? Sure. Is a lifetime an accurate estimate of how long it would take to bring us out of the second Stone Age? Nobody knows for sure.

“What we do know, pretty much anyway,” he continued, “is what all this is going to lead to. You can forget about using your local bank or ATM, because there won’t be any way to access your accounts. That means the only cash you’ll have for who knows how long is what you’ve got in your pocket when the attack hits. Not that it matters much, because there won’t be a lot of places where you’ll be able to use it before too long. Any food that isn’t swept up in the initial panic will spoil. Stores won’t be able to sell you batteries for your flashlights, because their cash registers and inventory control systems will be gone. And whatever’s on the shelves is all that’s going to be there for a long time because, here’s the kicker, we can also look forward to the collapse of the entire transportation system. No air traffic control means nothing flying. No switching stations means no trains running. No traffic signals means utter chaos in the streets that’s certain to spread to the freeways, which are going to become one big, fat parking lot since there won’t be enough early responders to respond to all the accidents or any effective way for the responders to talk to each other. In short, no way to move anything, any goods at all, anywhere. Remember, we’re talking no cell service, no landlines, no television, no Internet. Maybe a few radio stations operating on backup power for a while, but that’s it.” Young Roger took a deep breath, his voice sounding strained and hoarse when he resumed. “Sure, the power, at least some of it, will be restored eventually, but what exactly will the country look like when the lights come back on? We’re talking about civil disobedience taken to a whole new level. We’re talking about an epic societal breakdown on
every
level. You want to know what Armageddon really looks like? Stay tuned.”

No one at the table spoke once he was finished. No one posed any questions. They all just looked at one another amid the grim silence, until everyone’s eyes fastened on Jones.

“You think Homeland Security might actually be able to help the cause this time, Jones?” Caitlin asked him.

Jones’s expression looked as flat as a granite statue. “We’d need to come clean to President Villarreal of Mexico and enlist his help. But that means asking him to go up against the political power broker who runs his party and pulls all his strings. Take our side against Ana Guajardo.”

Caitlin almost smiled. “I don’t think he’ll have a problem with that,” was all she said.

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“Ranger,” Jones said an hour later, after emerging from behind the closed door of Captain Tepper’s office, which he’d appropriated for his own use, “I don’t know how you know what you know, but consider President Villarreal on board in a big way.”

“He’s got his reasons, believe me.”

“Okay, here’s the plan. Mexican troops are going to storm Guajardo’s software company and manufacturing plant simultaneously. Villarreal is also in the process of obtaining what they call an
orden de apprehension,
their version of an arrest warrant, for Guajardo so she can be taken into custody.”

“How long, Jones?”

“The troops are gonna hit the two locations at start of business tomorrow.” He checked his watch. “A mere ten hours from now. You don’t mind, I need to bring Washington up to date,” he said, starting back for the door. “Nice being on speaking terms with you again, Ranger.”

“Oh, you’ll find a way to disappoint me,” Caitlin told him. “You always do.”

*   *   *