Three Minutes to Midnight (33 page)

“Explosives? How much?”

“Ten kilograms. It's more than enough to drain the pools. That's like five explosive formed penetrators you saw in combat.”

Mahegan processed everything she was saying. They might not be changing out the drill bit. He considered the possibility that they could lower the perforating charges and blow a hole in the concrete.

“Could they lower the charges without finishing the drill?”

Maeve stared at him. “It's possible, but risky. If you want to guarantee you're through the concrete, the drill will do it. The explosives are to create havoc after the hole is punched. I'm certain. Punch a hole in the pool, let the water drain, and then set off explosives that rupture the casings for the fuel rods. That's tantamount to a nuclear detonation.”

Mahegan nodded. “Where's the Russian? Petrov?”

“He's at the drill site,” Maeve said.

“And Gunther?”

“Just on the other side of the door from the control room. Gunther and his son, Jimmy.”

Mahegan felt a buzz run through his veins.
Gunther and Sons.
He thought about his mother and the love that he still carried for her. He looked at Piper and back at Maeve, daughter and mother.

“You go with Piper. I'll figure the drill out. Grace, take them to the rally point. Tell the watchers I'm going in. And make that phone call.”

Maeve shook her head. “I need to make amends. I can help you stop this thing. I trust your friend to take care of Piper. And if we don't stop it, then we're all dead, anyway.”

“Your call. I can do this, but if you can help, I can use it.”

Grace intervened. “She's the expert on the drill and geology.”

To Maeve, Mahegan reiterated, “Your call, but we need to move now.”

“I'm in,” Maeve said. Can you cut these off?” She nodded at the flex cuffs.

Mahegan used his knife to slice through the plastic. Maeve leaned over to hug her daughter. Maeve said, “Baby, go with this nice woman. She will take care of you. And I need you to be a big, brave girl, okay?”

Piper, scared, nodded. “Big, brave girl.”

“That's right, baby. BBG. Just like we talked about before I left for Afghanistan. You did so great then, and you'll do great now.”

“Big, brave girl.”

Grace lifted Piper when the mother was done hugging her daughter. “I've got her,” Grace said. “Help Hawthorne.”

“We need to move,” Mahegan said. He wanted to tell Grace his real name, thought she deserved to know at least that, given the skin she was putting in the game. They were out of time. “Don't forget,” he said instead. “Make that call.”

Mahegan turned and pushed back through the manhole cover that led from the tunnel to the operations area above as Grace led the Bosnian woman and Piper to the gate at the other end of the tunnel.

Emerging from the tunnel into the hallway, next to the dead Chinese man, Mahegan felt Maeve behind him, nimble and quick. He heard a loud whine, like from a turbine engine spinning up, as the lights came back on.

CHAPTER 35

R
ETIRED
S
PECIAL
F
ORCES COLONEL
S
AM
B
LACKMON WATCHED
the monitors at the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant. As was his style, Blackmon had moved to the location of the threat. He paced the floor of the command center in the Shearon Harris nuclear facility. Giant HD television screens displayed dashboards full of charts and systems information. All systems were green, which was good. The outer perimeter was secure. The fence had not been breached. The patrol boats were scanning with night-vision devices. The Aegis machine guns were ready for another aerial attack like the one at McGuire. He even had a drone flying with night-vision optics that piped information back to the command center.

Crossing his muscled arms, Blackmon looked at the display monitors that provided a persistent stare through mounted cameras at the most vulnerable aspect of the plant's operation: the spent fuel rod cooling pools. At nearly one hundred yards long each, they looked like giant swimming pools. Four cameras showed four pools connected by a quarter mile of circulating water that flowed seamlessly along directed currents. The spent rods were stored vertically in racks, like architectural columns, with ten rods to a container. Blue underwater lights gave each pool an eerie glow, as if the intent were to make the scene look as though it was radiating nuclear energy.

To attack the pools, the terrorists would have to get through several layers of defense over land, over lake, or from the sky. Blackmon felt he had all of that covered fairly well. Thankful that the other two “attacks” appeared to have been ruses, as reported to him by his contacts inside the Department of Homeland Security, Blackmon had to believe that the lack of activity at Shearon Harris was not a good sign. The overt attempts at the other two facilities were hands quickly played. Here, there was something missing.

The Fukushima, Japan, disaster in 2011 had left over thirteen hundred fuel rods primed to create the worst nuclear incident in history. Only Herculean and surgical cleanup efforts had prevented the fuel rods from being exposed to the atmosphere, where they would have ignited on contact with the air. The protective layers that Blackmon had built into the security here, coupled with the design of the nuclear plant, essentially ruled out any possibility of nuclear disaster.

A tsunami had created the Fukushima situation. A lack of maintenance and engineering had led to the power surge and the subsequent fires that created the Chernobyl, Ukraine, disaster in 1986. Both were accidents, not the result of terrorist activity.

As he paced the floor of the command center on location at the nuclear power plant, Blackmon stared at the cooling pools again. He began thinking about how someone might attack the place. He thought about inflated boats over the lake and quickly dismissed that notion. They could parachute onto the roof and use explosives to breach the facility, but his security teams would have time to react. Plus, he had increased the sensitivity on the Aegis systems so that they would detect anything larger than five feet long descending from the sky. There were no real options over the land, unless someone planned on a Pickett's Charge into the teeth of his defenses.
Bring it on
, he thought.

He thought about tunneling options and stopped pacing. An insurgent attack from underground was something he had not really considered before. It had never seemed likely, and still didn't, but neither had drone or ship attacks. He paused, looking at the monitors, and spoke into his headset.

“Stix, come see me ASAP, please.”

Blackmon had called Roger Stickman, his security specialist for this location. The two men had served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were friends and trusted one another. Hiring and working with people he trusted was the only way that Blackmon operated. A few minutes later the muscled African American man walked into the command center.

“Hey, boss. What's up?”

“Tell me more about the capacity of our sensors or protections against someone tunneling into the facility.”

“We have seismic indicators on the perimeters that would pick up any earth disturbed down to fifty feet below the ground. The remote sensors are in a circular pattern and are spaced fifty feet apart all the way around the outer fence line, which is about a half mile from the facility. No way a tunnel operation could get through there.”

“Unless it was deeper than fifty feet, right?”

Stickman hesitated. “Well, sure, boss, but this is the industry standard.”

“Since when did we care about industry standards, Stix?”

“What are you thinking, sir?”

“Nobody in their right mind would come at this thing on land, over the lake, or from the air. But they could come underground.”

“It'd have to be a big-ass operation, and there'd be a lot of dirt piling up somewhere.”

“Could be done.”

“Possible, but not likely.”

Just then, the two men turned and looked at the cooling pool monitors. Red lights were flashing on the screen showing cooling pool number two.

In all, seventeen hundred spent fuel rods were in the water there. Blackmon stared at the screen, wondering exactly what might be happening.

“What the hell?” Stickman's eyes were wide with concern. He began tapping on a keyboard, bringing onto the five-foot display monitor a blueprint image of four cooling pools. Immediately, they saw the small, red, pulsating dot at the breach point beneath pool two.

More tapping of keys brought up a split screen, with the new half showing the water level in the pool. The indicator was showing that the level was beginning to fall.

“Somebody's draining the pool,” Stickman said.

“How is that possible?”

“It's not. Unless someone's drilling from China. This is the equivalent of a nuclear explosion. Those rods touch the combination of oxygen, argon, and nitrogen that we call air, this place burns down and we get mega Chernobyl. Everybody in the Triangle region will be getting chemotherapy, whether they want it or not.”

“I'm aware of all that, Stix. But this has to be a leak, right?”

“No way. Someone drilled or dug their way into that spot.”

“What are we missing?”

 

Less than four miles away, Johnny Ting sat at the control panel, tired of waiting on Cassidy. He had watched her enough to know that it was a fairly simple process once she had navigated through the layers of igneous and metamorphic rock, preserving the precious depleted-uranium drill bits. With one bit remaining, Ting had Petrov retrieve the miles of cable at the wellhead, remove the worn-out bit, replace it, then feed the cable back into the previously drilled hole. Now that it was done, he didn't even need Cassidy anymore. Ting could now clumsily navigate the path himself.

Cassidy and her kid were nowhere to be found, but he didn't care now. She had done her duty and provided them a real fracking well that was ready to pump gas, deluding the American proprietors into believing this was a legitimate operation.

Watching the high-definition display on his screen, he manipulated the bit straight down the three-thousand-foot-deep pipe, hit the kickoff point, and pushed the bit southeast 3.74 miles through the previously drilled channel. Then he hit the next kickoff point and followed the path up three thousand feet. Using the directional drill required concentration and focus, which Ting had to spare. But he could see why they had needed Cassidy for most of the work. He was an impatient man, he knew he had an airplane waiting on him, and he knew that the Chinese government's plans to call in their debt hinged on his ability to create a real-world nuclear disaster here in the United States.

The drill had trouble climbing the three thousand feet from the second kickoff point since it had no rock and sediment to bite into and pull against. It was like trying to turn a screw in a worn-out hole. But he finally got it to the base of the concrete pool, where the drill worked best. Its sharpened and hardened edges made easy work of the cement.

Soon he felt the bit move more quickly and knew that he had punched through the bottom layer. The camera at the end of the cable, behind the drill bit, was flooded with water, which was a good sign. He retracted the drill bit and punched it through the pool bottom in a few more places, like making air holes for a pet in a shoe box. He let the drill climb through the pool like a Hydra and bang against the racks holding the fuel rods, cracking their bindings, so that the rods began to tumble on the floor of the pool.

Once he was able to get the explosives into the cooling pools, he would show America that China was the true superpower.

CHAPTER 36

T
HE ONE TEXT MESSAGE MAHEGAN HAD SENT FROM HIS GOVERNMENT
smartphone needed to work. He also needed the watchers to follow through on their mission. Without those two components to his plan, the entire region was going to be a nuclear wasteland. He knew that once the spent fuel rods came into contact with the air, they would be like struck matchsticks, igniting from spontaneous combustion inside the reactor.

The way he saw it, he had two of three problems to solve. He had to find a way to stop the drill and the explosives Maeve had described to him. Or, if they had already breached one of the pools, then he had to plug the hole to prevent the nuclear wastewater from draining into the earth and to keep the fuel rods underwater. Independent from those two issues was the fact that Gunther could not leave the premises alive. Technically, Mahegan had done his duty in securing Maeve Cassidy, but he knew that was a moot issue now. The looming nuclear disaster overrode any obligations Mahegan had to keep secret Cassidy's Afghanistan mission, as General Savage desired.

He turned to Maeve as they stood at the door leading to the command center and observation room. It was a standard heavy metal door that could be locked with a key from either side. Looking over his shoulder, Mahegan saw men lying in single beds, with intravenous fluid bags hanging from nails punched into the stone walls. He recognized some of the wounded as those he had fought. He could see that the tunnel was a combination of centuries-old earth and recent efforts to create living quarters for the EB-5 workers.

In for a penny, in for a pound
, Mahegan thought to himself again as he looked at Maeve. He didn't trust her and wasn't sure what her angle was, but if he could get her on the drill, they had a chance. He noticed her sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, which accentuated the narrow planes of her face. Her hair was slick from days of sweat and oil. She still wore the uniform that she had on the night she came back from Fort Bragg. Her visage and aroma reminded him of combat . . . and reminded him she was a soldier.

“I can make amends,” she had said.

He believed she needed the opportunity.

“I see your wheels spinning,” Maeve said. “You can trust me. Let's just knock this out. Then you can figure out what to do with me.”

Mahegan nodded. “Can you kill Jimmy if you need to?” he asked.

That was the rub, the real test.

“I can.” She nodded. “It's all I've thought about for months. He raped me, knocked me up, and made me complicit in his scheme. The question is, can you stop me?”

Mahegan nodded. “Fair enough.” He paused. “Pete is dead. Jimmy or one of the commandos killed him.”

Maeve's hand came to her mouth. Tears snuck out of the corners of her eyes. Mahegan had deliberately given her the information now so that she wouldn't be shocked if they got into a situation where Jim or someone else told her in an effort to make her pause.

“No.”

“Yes. I saw him on the floor of your playroom, with a bullet hole in his head. After dumping you in the wooden cell—”

“You saw that?”

“Yes. I found your name tag and watch. Regardless, Jimmy probably circled back to your house after your husband had picked up Piper from the babysitter's, either that night or the following morning. Then he shot your husband and kidnapped your child to extort you into stealing natural gas for him and his father.”

“I can kill Jimmy.”

“Thought that might help clarify the situation,” Mahegan said. “Now the hard part. The guys who were questioning you when you returned? They work for my boss, Major General Savage. They let you get away, hoping you'd lead them to the Chinese. They picked up on some cyber exchanges between this location and Beijing. The texts were encrypted and hard to decipher but mentioned your name and fracking in the same sentence,” Mahegan said.

Maeve's eyes narrowed. Her mouth twitched. The hands that were wiping tears now became fists, which she flailed at Mahegan.

“You used me as bait!” she hollered.

Mahegan lightly grabbed her wrists, which continued to pump like pistons.

“You know what this is. You've known all along,” Mahegan said.

“How the hell would I know?”

“The watch. Three minutes to midnight. You may not have known precisely how, but you knew that this was a nuclear event.”

Her arms stopped flailing. Her countenance shifted from one of fury to that of recognition. Mahegan felt her go slack.

After a moment she cast her eyes up at him.

“Yes. I knew.”

“I thought it was fair I gave you both pieces of information. I believe in informed decision making. And Maeve?”

“Yes?”

“If General Savage had not wanted you to escape the compound, you never would have.”

“I get it. Now I know. Let's go.”

He went over the plan with her briefly, then pulled open the door and stepped into the hallway leading to the observation room. Maeve pointed at the back of Ting's head, which was looking at the monitor.

Maeve pointed through the wire mesh window at the back of Ting's head as the Chinese man looked at the monitor. Mahegan opened the door and with five quick, silent strides Mahegan was on the Chinese man. After wrapping a powerful forearm around the man's neck, he squeezed until his adversary passed out. Mahegan laid Ting on the floor facedown. Removing some flex cuffs, he zip tied Ting's hands and feet, then pulled a section of rope between the cuffs so that he was effectively hog-tied. He removed the man's wallet, saw that his name was Johnny Ting and that he was here on an EB-5 green card.

Maeve was already in the seat where Ting had been and where she had spent the past several days. “Look at that,” she said, pointing at the display.

It was a video image of the drill bit spinning in the nuclear fuel rod pool, like an alien monster erupting from an embryonic hibernation. The bit was smashing into racks of fuel rods, breaking them open, and shattering the metal rods into millions of radioactive shards, which littered the water like snow in a globe. The camera behind the drill showed the spinning bit to be an artificially intelligent terrorist bent on destroying everything in the pool.

“Can you pull it back?” Mahegan asked.

“I think so, if no one has jacked with the controls.”

She maneuvered the joystick and began retracting the drill cable, pulling in the slack. The drill bit spun and actually faced the camera, as if to question the motives of its operator. Through the camera Mahegan could see dozens of fuel rods stacked on the bottom of the pool, free of the racks. They looked like cut timber in a cleared forest. It was difficult to gather much more information, because the drill bit kept moving the base of the cable, but he had seen enough to know that as soon as the water drained from the pool, the fuel rods would create an enormous radioactive fire.

“I've got it,” Maeve said. He could see she was pulling the drill bit back through the hole. Water was coursing past it, drowning out the image.

“How do we stop that leak? It has to be at least four feet wide, based on what I saw.”

“I'm thinking. It's impossible to block it at the base of the pool. The nuclear guys will not have prepared for this contingency. A minor leak, sure, but not this. They have divers that go down and check the rods on a regular, frequent basis, but the water at the bottom of these pools is as radioactive as it comes.”

“And it's now rushing into our hole and will come shooting out of the well just down the hill, like newfound oil,” Mahegan said.

“Hadn't thought about that.”

“Where is the channel the most narrow between the pools and the well?”

“You're a genius,” Maeve said. “The second kickoff point. I can lower the drill and try to make the channel collapse on itself.”

“What about the explosives? You said something about perforating charges. Can you use the fracking explosives to collapse the well?”

“Yes. One-two punch. Let me get the drill to try to make the rock and earth block the channel. Then we'll pull out the drill and put in the explosives to collapse the vein.”

“You need the workers in the yard to do that, right?” Mahegan asked. “Where Petrov is?”

“Yeah. He has been handling the operation down there. They are short on people to do the heavy lifting now . . . thanks to you, I guess.”

Mahegan turned to Ting, who was now conscious. Using his knife to emphasize his point, Mahegan put the tip under Ting's chin and said, “You are an enemy of my country. You're a terrorist. I have full authority to kill you. Now, tell me, what were your last instructions to Petrov?”

Ting shook his head. “You kill Chun,” Ting said. “He the one in charge. I am low-level foot soldier.”

“Then I guess I don't need you,” Mahegan said. He lifted the knife, pulled back Ting's head, exposed his throat, and placed the knife's razor-sharp edge near the carotid artery. “I did kill Chun, and I didn't even think about it. In fact, I had already forgotten about him, until you just reminded me.”

A personal radio in Ting's pocket came to life with a Russian voice. “We are commencing retraction of the cable and preparation of the explosives.”

Mahegan pressed the tip of the knife next to the Chinese man's larynx, pushed it in and drew blood, then pushed it in a little more, until the man screamed.

“Okay. I'm going to grab this radio, and you're going to say, ‘Hold at kickoff point. Then pull back.'”

Ting shook his head, until he realized he was making the gash in his neck hurt worse with the knife still in an inch there.

“Say it once for me so I know you've got it,” Mahegan said.

“Stop at kickoff point. Then pull back,” Ting said in his thick Chinese accent.

“Okay, so I'm going to press this button, and you say it again. If you say anything else, I will cut your throat, and you won't say anything ever again. Understand?” He pushed the knife another half inch into Ting's throat. Blood was pooling on the floor.

“Understand.”

Mahegan pushed the button, and Ting shouted, “I am not—”

Those were the only words he was able to say, because Mahegan cut his throat and shut off the radio in a simultaneous motion.

“Petrov's pulling the cable back. I'm going to have to fight him at the kickoff point,” Maeve said.

“I speak some Mandarin,” Mahegan said. “I know Ting's accent is Beijing Mandarin. I can probably replicate it once, so let me know when you need me to do it.”

Mahegan stood behind Maeve as they watched the drill bit head fall through the channel under her direction. Water sluiced past the camera, drowning the image.