Bad Days

Bad Days

Complete story but not polished

Keith Henson

Chapter 1 Pipe Dreams

The turret vent blower sucked away the acrid smoke from the previous shot. The loader pulled down the handle and the just-fired base plate and electric primer fell out. He hit the knee switch and the ammunition door opened.

"Sabot!" the tank commander's voice snapped through the earphones over the muted whine of the tank's turbine engine.

The loader hit the release tap and pulled out a sabot round by the base. He flipped it around and shoved the cardboard cased round into the chamber. The breechblock came up; the loader looked to be sure the ammunition door had closed, lifted the arming handle, and said, "Up" into the intercom.

Moving the sights away from the tank he had just wrecked, the gunner centered the M1A2's 120 mm smooth bore cannon on the next Iraqi tank.

The laser rangefinder indicated the T72 was 2735 meters distant in a grove of palm trees.

The gun firing pounded their ears. The aftermath felt like they had stuffed their ears with cotton as 68 tons of tank rocked back on its treads.

The discarding sabot round left the tank's main gun at nearly a mile a second. The aluminum and plastic spacers that kept the 25 mm round centered in the barrel fell off in the first hundred meters. The armor-piercing, depleted uranium round arrived 2 seconds later--with devastating effect.

"Turkey shoot.” The tank driver said over the intercom. "You think there's anyone in those ‘72s?"

"Only one way to be sure.” The commander replied. "Sabot!"

After blasting the turret off the last tank, the Abrams started down the road toward Baghdad, leaving behind 30 pounds of depleted uranium, nearly pure U238, that had formed the long, lethal sabot rounds. (Post action analysis confirmed the driver's suspicions. With all the air strikes, the crews for the three T72 tanks were not foolish enough to sit in the parked tanks.)

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Oklahoma operation center

Winter came early and hard. Summer had been freakishly hot, and had given way to snow early in the fall with hardly a noticeable transition. The company's weather forecasters were predicting a bitter cold snap in late January. Lucky Pipelines was drawing all the gas it could from wells thousands of miles distant, and packing their pipelines to the Northeast.

Herman Horst, a 45-year-old, nearly white-blond, baby-faced German had immigrated too late to speak English without an accent. His younger partner, Eric Kovarno, had Eastern European antecedents he never mentioned to Herman.

Lucky's management felt its pipeline controllers should be in uniform, but in the interest of saving a few dollars, they stopped with the shirt. This offended Herman's German sense of orderliness. While the rest of the controllers dressed in jeans, Herman bought, and faithfully wore, matching khaki trousers to his short-sleeved shirt with the embroidered company logo. (The company didn't spring for winter shirts, but it stayed warm in the control room.)

Watching a "supervisory control and data acquisition" (SCADA) terminal on a pipeline was almost all the time on a par with watching ice melt.

The high point of a 12-hour shift was usually eating lunch. The only thing that made this lunch (a tasty pastrami on sourdough sandwich his wife had made, a Twinkie, and some grapes) different from the thousand before it was Herman dropping a grape. The grape rolled under a cabinet where Herman could not retrieve it and was on the road to becoming a raisin.

To understand what happened to break the boredom (besides Herman's dropping a grape), you need to go back a number of years to a plot (if you can dignify it with the term) where some would-be terrorists engaged in a fantasy about blowing up the fuel pipeline to JFK airport. They probably could not have blown up an outhouse with a box of dynamite and instructions in four languages. However, thanks to the FBI's PR department, it made the news around the world.

A Palestinian petroleum engineer (his name was Muhammad, but that's not distinctive) had apprenticed in Nigeria on pipeline engineering. He was working for ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia when he read the story and decided he should talk to an imam about it. Muhammad was closer to an atheist than any kind of Muslim, but his hatred for Israel and the US for the damage done to his family was enough to overcome his distaste for talking to a puritanical Wahhabi sect imam.

The Wahhabi imam Muhammad visited wrote a letter that eventually reached into the high ranks of al-Qaeda. An educated, insanely fanatic agent of al-Qaeda who was using the name "Ahmed" that day traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet Muhammad. They spent a few hours talking in a coffee house. Muhammad was not entirely happy with the meeting, but the agent promised not to reveal Muhammad's name.

Through the thick tobacco smoke, Muhammad explained that electric current kept pipes from rusting. Power supplies for this current were located along pipelines at 10-km intervals. Electrodes were buried a km or two away at right angles to the pipeline. The electrodes were made of material such as carbon or titanium that did not corrode. The pipelines connected to the negative side of DC power supplies and plated positive metal ions back on the pipes in places where breaks in the tar and paper or plastic layers put the pipe in contact with corroding ground water.

The al-Qaeda agent sat through the technical explanation wondering why he subjected to a boring exposition. He knew about Muhammad's family background and expected a more political discussion. Eventually Muhammad reached the point.

"If you reverse the leads on a cathodic protection system, the metal will corrode all the way through the pipe causing leaks and disastrous failures."

The bemused agent asked, "Is this better than blowing up the pipe with explosive?"

"How long does it take to patch a hole in a pipe?"

Having had experience blowing up pipelines in Iraq and Chechnya, Ahmed replied, "A day, a few days."

"How long would it take to fix a thousand leaks in a pipeline?"

Ahmed was no fool. He sat quietly for half a minute turning the concept over in his mind then said, "I see. So what does it take?"

"Open the power supply box and reverse the two wires. Or cut the wires outside the box and reverse them."

"How long before the pipe breaks?"

"A year, possibly a bit longer."

There was a long silence in the drifting cigarette smoke. They each took a sip of the thick sweet coffee. Finally, the Ahmed said "The right people will be informed. You will not speak of this meeting.” Ahmed departed to wherever al-Qaeda agents go.

You can't say reversed cathodic protection was an entirely new problem for pipelines. A long time in the past, before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was set up, a major gas pipeline on the Arizona-California border ruptured under a campground, blowing out a hole more than 100 feet in diameter and killing a dozen campers. The gas had roared out of the ruptured pipe for a minute or two before encountering an ignition source, possibly a fleeing camper who tried to start his pickup. That lit off a flame more than 500-feet high. The radiant heat fried the campers like moths in a candle flame.

The investigation eventually determined the reason the pipe failed was an accidentally reversed cathodic protection power supply that had caused parts of the pipe in contact with ground water to corrode and fail. Under pressure from the CIA, the NTSB doctored the report blaming the incident on internal corrosion from water condensing inside the pipe and ran down to a low spot. The pipeline company settled the lawsuits with the camper's relatives before their lawyers could ask the right questions. The consequences of reversing leads on a $50 DC power supply were mostly lost to the rest of the pipeline industry for legal and security reasons. It turned out (on the night Herman lost the grape) to be an expensive lesson not to have learned.

That night the op center was "packing,” raising the pressure along a thousand miles of gas pipe. Packing pipelines in anticipation of a cold snap had been common practice for well over 60 years. It cost extra energy to compress natural gas to 900 psi from the summertime pressure of 500-600 psi, but it close to doubles the capacity of a pipeline for a short time. Herman and the computers behind the SCADA terminals were watching the pipeline pressure creep up a few pounds per hour.

The pipeline rating was 1100 psi, hydrostatically tested to that pressure when new. Pumping it up to 900 psi should have been safe. However, this time a hole about 1/8th inch in diameter blew out of an electrically corroded weld. There wasn't a lot of rust in the pipeline even after 50 years, but the flakes of rust abraded the hole in the weld already thinned by electrical corrosion.

The gas pipeline construction included burying it in sand; fall rains had waterlogged the sand. The gas rapidly blew the water out of the sand under the frozen surface layer, lifting the fill over the pipe a few inches. A cross trench provided a path of least resistance, and a hundred yards down the trench it was crossed by a water line trench that provided entrance to the basement of a house. The wet sand would have filtered out the mercaptan odorant, not that it would have mattered, since pipeline gas doesn't have it and nobody was home to smell the gas.

Two hours after the leak started, the concentration in the basement of the nearby house reached the explosive level, and, with a little help from a pilot flame in a water heater, the building blew up. The local gas connection was broken and set on fire. Before the fire department could respond to reports about a house blowing up, the hole in the pipeline, eroded to better than an inch long, abruptly fractured all the way around the pipe. The ground lifted in a giant bubble, and the 36-inch pipe packed with 900-psi gas erupted with a roar. The escaping gas dug a hole, fifty feet wide and 200 long. The roar shook the ground so hard seismometers a hundred miles away picked up the signal.

A minute and fifty seconds after the pipe ruptured the gas-air mixture reached the burning flame from fire in the house the leak had already blown up and ignited the gas with a boom and a roar heard for miles. The flame shook the ground so hard seismometers in several states picked up the signal. The flames were over 500 feet high and around 200 feet wide at the base.

The house that had blown up was the closest one to the pipeline. Current codes would not permit houses that close, but back in the 1950s people worried more about nuclear war than pipeline ruptures. About 500 feet away on the other side of the pipeline there were newer apartment buildings. The people inside saw night become day and searing heat came through the windows facing the fire.

The apartment residents grabbed babies, pets, cash, and keys. The more organized ones grabbed papers and photographs and got out before the curtains burst into flame. Most of them ran out in nightclothes.

The residents moved and saved the cars parked in the shadow of the apartment building. The ones on the side toward the towering flame were already smoking, as were the closest leafless trees. The plastic covers on the bumpers of these cars melted and formed puddles on the pavement.

Herman had finished his Twinkie and was wondering if he should try to retrieve the grape when his SCADA terminal started beeping at him. This was not a good sign. According to SCADA, a compressor station some 4 miles down the pipeline from the break was reporting low suction pressure. The compressor station was unattended, as it had been since the early sixties.

"Eric, there's a problem with the New River compressor station.” They watched numbly as the station, over a thousand miles away, sent messages it was starving for gas and going into emergency shutdown. Low gas pressure caused the turbo compressor to speed up to the limit point. The one-way valve at the compressor station slammed shut, but that didn't have any effect on the towering gas flame.

Herman and Eric had only a limited view of what was going on. The nearest flow monitoring station was 40 miles upstream. It had not yet seen the pressure drop and increase in velocity from the rupture. Herman called the countrywide gas dispatcher to alert her something was wrong.

Twenty minutes after the rupture, fire and police were as close as they could get to the intense radiant heat of the flame. The fire department set up and showered cooling water on the apartment buildings and houses that hadn't already burst into flame.

By 45 minutes after the rupture, refugees and gawkers who were roasting on one side and freezing on the other were wondering why the pipeline company had not shut off the gas. The pipeline maintenance crew was having a bad night trying to do just that.

There were no remote controlled power shutoff valves on the pipeline because an analysis back in the 1990s had shown the expensive valves were unlikely to ever reduce the cost or loss of life in a rupture. The nearest valve on the upstream side was only about a mile from the break. The last valve test was almost a year ago, but that wasn't the cause of their anguish.

The valve had a motor on it operated by gas pressure vented through the motor. That close to the ruptured end of the pipe there wasn't enough pressure in the pipe to run the valve closing motor, and closing a 36-inch valve by hand was a nearly impossible task. It took 350 turns on a 4-foot hand wheel. As the valve seated, it generated increasing resistance from the rising force against the downstream side of the valve seat by the gas flow.

So Mark and Eddy, the pipeline maintenance crew who had been called out on that bitterly cold night, worked up a sweat trying to close the valve by hand for nearly an hour before they gave up on the halfway closed (and now stuck) block valve. They called in and told Herman they were moving to the next valve upstream of the rupture.

There weren’t any houses nearby this time. They left their truck idling with a spotlight on the valve so they could see what they were doing. There was enough pressure here to operate the valve closing motor.

Unfortunately, the gas velocity in the pipeline was high from gas flowing out the rupture, and when they closed the valve, the pressure from converting the velocity into pressure broke another corroded weld not a hundred yards upstream from the valve. Mark and Eddy ran as hard as they could into the light wind from the northwest and were outside the fireball when their idling truck ignited the gas cloud. They both had cell phones. Upwind about a half-mile and over the roar of the new fire Mark was able to call pipeline ops.

"Ops center, Herman Horst."

"This is Mark Davis. Eddy and me closed the block valve at milepost 1121. Soon as we did, the gas line blew up a hundred yards upstream of the valve. We ran and got away before the sky lit up like day. You're gonna have to get other guys to close the next valve upstream ‘cause our truck is sitting right under the fuckin' fireball."

He paused, seriously out of breath.

"And soon as you get it done, get someone out here at milepost 1121 to pick us up 'cause soon as the fire goes out we are gonna freeze our asses off out here!"

After about ten minutes of watching the flame and walking around the towering fire, Mark called Herman back.

"Ops center, Horst."

"Hey, Herman, this is Mark again. We're walking down the pipeline road to where county road 25 crosses it. You located someone to close the block valve at MP 1102?"

"Not yet, haven't been able to rouse anyone, too many on vacations where it's warm."

"Eddy had an idea to call a cab, but why don't you get a sheriff deputy to pick us up at the county road and we can get him to take us down to the next block valve."

Herman had a page full of scribbled New River emergency numbers by now so it took him only a few minutes to get in contact and have a patrol car dispatched.

The deputy didn't have any problem finding them, not with 500-foot fire lighting up the woods for the second time that night.

"Sorry about the hard plastic seat back there," he said. The hard back seat of a patrol car brought back a load of bad memories to Eddy. Too many bar fights. Mark, glad to be out of the cold, directed the deputy to the next block valve almost 20 miles away as the pipeline goes and more like 30 over roads. The deputy put the flashing lights on and hit up 100 mph over the country roads. Mark yelled at him.

"Slow down damn it! You'll get us all killed and that won't get the valve closed."

The deputy said something hard to hear through the plastic that protected the deputy from drunks spitting on him. Asked to repeat it, he said he knew the roads just as he hit a bump and the car's bounce banged Mark and Eddy into the roof. (There were no seatbelts in the back seats.) He slowed down to about 70 and apologized.

The first fire burned another half hour before the pipe ran out of gas. The new fire burned a little over an hour before Mark and Eddy could get the next upstream valve closed. Before they did, freaked-out pipeline engineers called out of bed told Mark and Eddy to put a pressure meter on the upstream side and close the valve slowly enough to keep the pressure from rising above 850 psi.

They were out of range of a cell tower at MP 1102 so the sheriff dispatcher patched the instruction through the deputy's radio.

"You mean screw in the pressure gage we keep in the truck?" Eddy asked sweetly. Puzzled at the question, the pipeline engineer answered in the affirmative.

"We're out here with a fricking gate key and our bare hands. The truck and our gages are under the fireball at MP 1121!"

There was a hurried discussion on the other end.

"Any tools at all?"

The deputy had an X-type lug wrench in the trunk of his patrol car he used to change tires for good-looking women. One of its sockets happened to fit the 3/4-inch pressure set nut on a blow-off valve on the upstream side of the block valve.

"Ok, back the adjustment nut off four turns. That should take it down to about 850 psi. Then close the block valve half way then in steps of an inch watching for the pressure relief valve to start opening. When the blow-off opens just a bit, wait a minute or two until it closes before you make another step closing the block valve. And for god's sake, don't have any sources of ignition around! If you have to use a flashlight don't turn it off."

Mark and Eddy acknowledged, sent the deputy and his patrol car up wind, and managed to close the block valve without tripping the blow-off valve or rupturing the pipe again. By the time, they finished another Lucky Pipelines truck was close, so they only had to spend 15 minutes sitting in the uncomfortable (but warm) back seat of the patrol car.

By early morning, gas transmission was affected all the way back to the wellheads. Herman, Eric and de Silvia, their shift boss, had the dubious distinction of being on shift for the only double break in pipeline history. Two pipeline ruptures indicated something was terribly wrong. Perhaps it was an attack on infrastructure.

However, the pipeline ruptures didn't look like an attack. Attacks should happen at places where the pipeline went above ground, and both ruptures were underground. Puzzling.

Starting before daylight repair crews were at both scenes of smoking ruin. They cut out the damaged pieces and replaced them with spare pieces of pipe left along the pipeline every few miles when the pipeline was constructed. A team of failure engineers examined the damaged pieces. The engineers were horrified to see a pit a few inches from the broken weld almost eaten through from the outside. Stan Bowman, one of the failure engineers, borrowed an old analog meter from a phone repair crew that was replacing cable burned up in the first fireball.

Stan stuck a positive probe in the dirt and touched the pipe. The meter pegged below zero. He reversed the leads and read almost a volt.

"Oh shit, the pipe is positive. No wonder it ruptured.” Like most of his profession, he had heard vague rumors of what had caused the pipeline under the campground to fail years before. Stan and his boss, and his boss's boss, a company vice president, went to Washington a week later and spent a bad couple of days explaining cathodic protection to DHS and FBI agents who had forgotten what a metal ion is if they ever had known.

It horrified all three of them that the people who were in charge of keeping people and infrastructure safe had so little knowledge of the underlying physical reality.

Over dinner one evening with Angel Dilante, the one FBI agent in the group who understood more than guns and catching bank robbers, Stan groused, "It would be interesting to see the SAT math and science scores of these DHS managers."

Angel commented. "A few years ago a particularly annoyed FBI agent who I won't name did that."

"And what did he find."

"It was sad. The right half of the bell curve was seriously depressed. And when you look at the schools they attended—a lot of them got in on alumni preferences.” Angel took a thoughtful bite of his medium rare steak.

"There was a time right after WW II where the best and the brightest went into government service. That lasted until the Vietnam War in the late '60's when government service became unpopular. After that the best and brightest went into industry, high techs, the Dot Coms and some of them got filthy rich.” He went on:

"Government has had to make do with lazy high-paid second-raters trying to regulate people who are in many cases way smarter than they are. They'll never catch up. The ones who just show up for work get cost of living increases. The ones who make their bosses look good are promoted. Those who suggest the real world problems need a different solution that involves work are made to feel unwelcome. You can only be booted out if you are convicted of a felony or don't show up for work for a long time. A company staffed with employees who think like those who work for the government would go out of business."

"You’re the most technically astute of the whole group of people we've been trying to brief. How come you're in the government?" asked Stan's boss.

"I'm in it for the adventure."

Stan looked skeptical. Angel continued.

"My dad was one of those who got filthy rich. I don't have to work. Management knows it. I get shifted around to interesting high tech cases, like this one. If I don't, they know I'll quit."

Perhaps because they didn't want to admit critical infrastructure had been under an undetected attack for at least a year, or perhaps because nobody wanted to try to explain cathodic protection to the press, DHS tried to put the incident under seal. They hinted it was an accident, while at the same time issuing urgent orders to the pipeline companies to inspect their cathodic protection circuits. Dozens more reversed wires turned up. The real story leaked to the press over the next three weeks, the final installment being about the suppressed California campground incident. The lawyers for relatives petitioned the court to reopen the case. The press vilified the previous head of DHS saying it was the worst decision since Katrina. Then someone noted the decision had predated DHS being set up and the stories had to be retracted.

The FBI determined from the cut marks on the wires that only two cutters were used on the cathodic protection circuits. Only a few were subverted by reversing power supply wires inside the box; apparently, the seldom-opened padlocks were too hard to pick. The cut marks were of no use in identifying the people who reversed the wires. Several hundred interviews of people living near the cathodic protection points yielded only that the last one was older than six months, a date consistent with the tarnishing of the cut wire surfaces and the depth of metal eaten out of the pipes.

Direct damage was about as expected, $80 million to patch the pipe and pay for the trashed cars and burned out apartments. It took a lot more money running "smart pigs" down the pipelines, replacing the questionable pieces, adding remote current and voltage meters to the cathodic protection circuits and adding to the SCADA programs.

Fourteen months after the double rupture a mouse discovered and nibbled on Herman's raisin. The same day the National Transportation Safety Board came out with this:

Findings

1. The following were neither causal nor contributory to the rupture or its aftermath: overpressure of the pipeline, external damage to the pipeline through excavation or other activities, and internal corrosion nor was the interruption in or loss of supervisory control and data acquisition system communication. Transient pressure after closing the block valve at MP 1121 probably contributed to the second rupture and fire near that location.

2. Lucky Pipeline's Line B ruptured in two places because of severe external corrosion causing a reduction in pipe wall thickness to the point the remaining metal could no longer contain the pressure within the pipe.

3. The corrosion of Line B at the rupture sites was almost certainly caused by a reversal of the cathodic protection circuit by parties unknown at some time in the previous 18 months.

4. Had Lucky Pipeline put in place a program to monitor the cathodic protection voltage, this reversal would have been found when it happened.

5. Federal pipeline safety regulations did not provide adequate guidance to pipeline operators or enforcement personnel in monitoring cathodic protection circuits against intentional manipulation. The Pipeline safety board has issued emergency regulations requiring monitoring of cathodic protection circuits.

6. A previous incident with fatalities occurred where an accidentally reversed cathodic protection was the probable root cause. The decision at that time by DHS predecessor organization to keep the probable cause of this pipeline incident out of the public record and to take no steps to implement monitoring of cathodic protection resulted in direct costs exceeding $80 million dollars and indirect costs due to the shutdown of Line B. Inspection and repairs to other pipelines exceeded a billion dollars. NTSB is simultaneously releasing a corrected report regarding the suppressed analysis of the previous incident.

Probable Cause

The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause of the January 23, 20xx, natural gas pipeline ruptures, and subsequent fires near New River, Pennsylvania, were due to a significant reduction in pipe wall thickness due to severe external corrosion. The severe external corrosion occurred because parties unknown had reversed the cathodic protection circuits on this and other pipelines, and Lucky Pipeline's personnel failed to detect this reversal. The decision of Federal agencies to suppress the analysis of a previous cathodic reversal incident probably contributed to this incident.

Chapter 2 Flash

The line inched forward taking 11-year-old Qismat and his bucket of dirt closer to the buyer. The dirt buyer, a turbaned Arab of uncertain origin, had given Qismat and his friends’ plastic radiation meters to help them find the special dirt around places where tanks had been destroyed in the early part of the Iraq war. Qismat pushed a button on his meter. After a moment over the slightly radioactive dirt, it read in the acceptable range.

The government food ration was enough for his family to avoid starvation. The extra money he got from the dirt buyer let them eat well.

Qismat finally got to the head of the line. The dirt buyer put the plastic pail in a box, waited, and when he got a satisfactory reading, paid Qismat. He poured the dirt into a heavy plastic bag inside a burlap bag. The bags were stacked on a flatbed truck. Stenciled on the doors of the truck in Arabic and English was: Environmental Cleanup (a UN not-for-profit corporation).

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A few minutes after 6 am Ben Malner stormed out of the surveillance room into the Border Patrol administrative office at Sonoita, waving his hands and freaking out. He had been looking at the data from a Predator unmanned platform.

"What's the problem, Ben?” Jack Stamp asked. It was too near the end of their 10-hour shift to be freaking out.

"While we were bringing in that bunch of wetbacks last night, some asshole moved a goddamn semi-truck and trailer through the second cattle guard east of Lochiel. The dawn tape shows they parked it a few miles in and drove the tractor back across the border."

“Is it still there?” Jack hoped not. He wanted to go off shift on time.

"It shows on the tape from 5 a.m., but I doubt it. A whole freakin' semi-trailer!"

Jack knew it was useless to try to get the DEA or Customs to go look at it, so he sighed. "OK, let's check it out.”

They woke up Ralph, the station's dope-sniffing dog and took him along. Ralph was a big dog, mostly Labrador they thought, coal-black, and friendly as they came. Spring and fall, when they could, they would let Ralph hang his head out the window. Ralph would go out of his mind with joy from his ears flapping in the breeze. Ralph was one of those dope-sniffing dogs who like marijuana too much for a minor bust since he would scarf up the evidence. That wasn't a problem with a bale—or a truckload of bales. Jack had been on the Border Patrol for a decade, Bob for about a year. Jack knew how to play the game, Bob probably never would. You didn't clamp down too hard on your sector because the runners would move elsewhere, and at the end of the year, when you had only made a few dozen arrests, they would cut your funding for your section and transfer your people.

He could see the signs Ben wasn't going to cut it as a Border Patrol agent. The guy took the job too seriously. The problem was he had a wife teaching school at Huachuca City, and felt locked into the job. Jack thought about talking to the station boss about Ben, but how does a boss tell an employee to slack off and quit worrying about 90 percent of the smugglers getting through? Perhaps he should talk to Ben about becoming a deputy sheriff where his military training would be an asset and not a problem.

They hit the border road near Lochiel and turned east. A few miles down the road, they came to the cattle guard in the border fence. Ben had freaked out about them, too, but closing the cattle guards in this isolated area would just result in cut fences. They drove a half a mile further and took the ruts off the road where the truck had turned off. Three-quarters of a mile later, they saw the truck box sitting there in a low area, backed over a bunch of creosote bushes. Ben and Ralph were practically bouncing up and down, Ben slavering about people with the gall to drive a semi-truck and trailer over their chunk of the border, and Ralph just happy to be out in the desert.

As they approached, it was clear the driver had just backed the trailer into the desert at right angles to the track, lowered the trailer legs, unhooked, and left. The trailer turned out to be an intermodal frame carrying a shipping container. There didn't seem to be a lot to learn from the tire tracks, so Jack stopped their SUV on the ruts, and the two of them walked around to the back of the container. Ben was carrying bolt cutters in the expectation of having to cut off a lock. There were tracks in the sand back to where the driver had lowered the landing legs, but no further back. As he went around the rear, Ben could see there was no lock on the container.

Ben and Ralph were expecting to see 100 bales of marijuana. Jack was hoping not to see the container full of dehydrated bodies. Donning gloves, they opened the container doors.

The container was empty.

There wasn't even an odor of pot around for Ralph to get excited about.

The three of them (counting the dog) stood there for a minute, too amazed to speak. Ralph looked as them as if to say, "And why did you bring me along?"

Finally, Jack said, "This makes no sense. Why would somebody drive an empty shipping container and a perfectly good set of wheels over the border out in the middle of nowhere, when they could just drive it across at Nogales?"

Ben thought about it and said, "All I can think of is that Williams (Williams was the ranch owner) got a deal on a shipping container in Mexico, and didn't want to pay duty."

"What's a used container worth?"

"$1,600, maybe. The trailer under it might be worth a bit more," Ben replied. Pointing to the front corner where small plastic panels in the roof and side let in a little light he continued, "It's a fairly new one; a shipper puts a gadget that's a GPS cell phone sort of package in the bracket up there and it reports where the container is every few hours."

"I've heard about them," Jack said. "Some keep track of the doors being opened and report on that as well. They are for high value legit shippers, but smugglers have been using them to tell if their load has been detected.” He closed the doors and they all started back to their SUV. "Well, screw it; no credit for this trip. Let's get back and go off shift."

Ben, ever the stickler for regulations said, "We should report it to the sheriff as an abandoned vehicle."

Both of them knew a report of an empty trailer out in the desert, in the very corner of the county would fall to the bottom of the pile. A deputy might come out sometime in the next month or two, or might not. It was equally likely a rancher would spot the container and put it to use.

Ben wrote it up, including the container number and frame serial number. He filled out a federal incident report. Ben talked informally to a county deputy, who asked them to check on the container in a few weeks and see if it was still there.

Sure enough, the container vanished in a few days and the incident forgotten as just another harmless element of strangeness on the border.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Environmental Cleanup's employees dumped the dirt buyer's sacks, loaded with perhaps 1/5th of a percent of depleted uranium, on the floor of an abandoned greenhouse lined with a big plastic sheet. Working barefoot in the soft dirt, women spread it out with rakes about a meter deep and turned up on the edges. Two men pulled soaker hoses on top of the dirt and hooked them up to a tank in the rafters. A solution of weak sulfuric acid, about as strong as vinegar, with a little hydrogen peroxide trickled into the dirt, and after a few hours started running out of the heaps onto the plastic. A sump pump sucked up the solution after it ran through cloth filters to a low point.

The solution contained uranium ions. It went through a series of three 2-meter tall ion exchange columns made out of 30 cm plastic pipe. A trailer moved from site to site held the ion exchange columns and a generator to run the pumps. The uranium was absorbed on resin beads in the columns. One of the men periodically tested the solution, and added more acid and hydrogen peroxide. The regenerated solution went back through the leach heap to pick up more uranium.

There was a radiation monitor on the output of the columns. When it indicated the columns were full, i.e., uranium was coming through; they turned off the sump pump, back flushed the columns with strong acid to strip the uranium out, and precipitated it as uranyl peroxide. When dried, it became U3O8--yellowcake. Keeping the generator running was a nuisance. It took about 20 kWh/kg of extracted yellowcake to run the pumps.

There had been several hundreds of tons of depleted uranium scattered in the wars.

The low budget Environmental Cleanup operation figured on collecting about a hundred tons, plus or minus a few tens of tons. The accounting wasn't very good, so it was not surprising that several 500 pound drums of yellowcake vanished somewhere in the process. Nobody cared; depleted uranium is not a "special nuclear material."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"What the hell is this?" Bob Hogan, a grizzled sheriff deputy asked, "County Health and Hazmat can't make head or tail of it”.

"It's a setup to make sodium chlorate," Max said sourly.

"What's sodium chlorate?"

"It's a weed killer the IRA used to make truck bombs in the '70s.” Max Green was a chemical engineer who worked in electrowining copper for one of the mines south of Tucson and for fun was a licensed pyro technician. He was also a reserve sheriff. The sheriff’s office called him in to make sense of the mess of piping and power supplies. The room smelled faintly of chlorine. He looked very unhappy after spending 20 minutes looking at the dozen plus electrolyte cells.

"It's not a drug lab?” Bob asked

"No. Worse.”

"Uh, explain please?” The deputy was confused.

"How much chemistry did you take?"

"High school, 30 years ago. Don't remember beans. Seen lots of drug labs, though. This doesn't look like one."

"It's not. This is for making explosives, and it has seen hard use."

"What are all the PC power supplies for?"

"DC power. They were electrolyzing salt water."

"That makes explosives?"

"It makes chlorine and hydrogen and sodium hydroxide. The chlorine goes up through this 10-foot-high plastic pipe over the electrodes and dissolves in the water and sodium hydroxide that comes off the other electrode. That first makes bleach—sodium chlorite. Then it adds more and more oxygen, the overall reaction is like this.” Max took out a notebook and wrote:

NaCl + 3H2O + power  3H2 + NaClO3 23+35 + 3x18 = 58 6 23+35+48 = 106

"So 58 pounds of salt plus water and power makes 106 pounds of sodium chlorate.”

"I did that stuff 30 years ago," Bob mused. "This sodium chlorate is an explosive?"

"Partly. Every 106 pounds of it has 48 pounds of oxygen it can release. Add anything—charcoal, flour, diesel fuel, wax— that will burn, and it makes a powerful improvised explosive.” Max wrote:

3C + 2NaClO3  2NaCl + 3CO2 3x12 2x106

So 36 pounds of charcoal and 212 pounds of sodium chlorate would go bang. Big bang.

Max was looking at the electrodes. "These are titanium. Someone knew what they were doing. I think these are out of vaporizers."

"Why titanium?" Bob asked.

"It's one of the few materials you can use for electrodes that are not chewed up by chlorine.” Max whistled tunelessly. "Any idea how long this place operated?"

"Over a year, we think."

"Let's see: a mol of electrons is about 10,000 amp seconds. So to make a gram-mol of sodium chlorate would take about 60,000 amp seconds, or about 17 amp hours per mol. There is about eight gram-mols in a pound of salt. Eight times 17 is about 133, so 133 amp hours per pound, or 5.5 amp days per pound. Hmm. The 3-volt section on these power supplies is rated at 20 amps, so each of the 14 columns was making as much as 3.6 pounds a day, three point six pounds times 14 columns.” Max muttered under his breath, "Fifty pounds per day, 400 days, 20,000 pounds of salt, or 36,000 pounds of sodium chlorate. Mother of god, they could have made 18 tons!"

"That's not all," Bob said darkly, and led Max into another shed. "What do you make of this?" There were about 100 blenders on the shelves around the room. Each blender had three ball bearings in it and a film of aluminum powder. There were a few flakes of aluminum beer cans on the floor. The walls were lined with sound-absorbing tiles. There was a considerable mound of broken and worn-out blenders in a large box in one corner.

"I can tell you what they were doing here: making aluminum powder. Must have been unbelievably noisy.” Max wrote in his notebook:

2Al +NaClO3  NaCl + Al2O3

2x27 106 54

"So they needed about half as much aluminum powder to make 25 tons of flash powder. You know the big flash bangs—the salutes they use for Fourth of July fireworks shows?"

"Yeah, never liked them, make me jump."

"The biggest of them uses a few pounds of flash powder.” Max noted.

"And you're saying this place could have made 25 tons of flash powder?" Bob was horrified and his voice showed it.

"That's what it looks like.”

"How big a bang is that?"

"Timothy McVeigh used about 2-1/2 tons of explosives to take down the Murrah Federal Building. The stuff made here could be up to 10 times as much bang."

"Christ!"

"Yeah, 'the devil to pay and him out to lunch.' When a fireworks factory with about a hundred tons of flash powder blew up in China, the shock wave was detected on seismographs thousands of miles away."

"Well, nothing has showed up in the news yet," Bob said, with some relief. "Explosive detectors will keep it out of aircraft."

"Ah, that's a problem, Bob."

"Why?"

"Explosive detectors detect nitrates, not chlorates.”

"You're telling me there are as much as 25 tons of undetectable explosives out there somewhere?"

"It looks like it."

"What are we going to do?" Bob asked.

"Turn it over to ATF, I guess.” Max shook his head. "Plastic pipe, salt, computer power supplies, aluminum cans, vaporizers, electricity, blenders. None of these can be controlled."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"That's huge.” The half ellipsoid was fully 4 feet long and six feet in diameter. The shop was spinning it out of a disk of aluminum a bit over six feet in diameter

"It's for stadium lights in the US. We're going to add it to our catalog. They didn't ask for an exclusive so we gave them a good deal on a teak spinning die.” The die was a large hollow mass of glued up wood sticks carefully shaped on an NC boring machine into an ellipsoid shape.

There was a metallic screech as the computer-controlled spoon started forming the six-foot disk of soft aluminum onto the die. The spinning took only 10 minutes to complete, including a flange on the lip of the huge half ellipsoid. The aluminum spinning would go on to have four additional holes punched for mounting lights at the focus, and a dozen holes punched in the lip for some unknown reason. They polished the inside of the prototype run of a couple of dozen reflectors to a mirror finish before boxing them up and shipping them out by air to a firm in Chicago.

http://www.metalspinningworkshop.com/MovieClipTwo.html (Movie of the Process)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Deputy Bob Hogan and Reserve Deputy Max Green were out at the ranch house looking at the chlorate plant again when an FBI agent, name of Angel Dilante drove down the road to meet them. Angel, known as a high tech crime trouble-shooter, had recently transferred out from Washington. His car kicked up a plume of dust looking like an ostrich feather from a distance.

Angel himself was a sharp looking Mexican American with mirrored sunglasses. He spoke with no detectible accent. The Corvette he was driving seemed slightly over budget for an FBI agent. Perhaps it was a rental.

After Angel introduced himself, Bob told him the story concluding: "ATF came out. They took samples and allowed it was chlorate, but because chlorate's a legal chemical and we could not show any of it had been made into explosives they didn't think it was a crime.”

Max said. "I wasn't here, but, according to Bob, the ATF guy from Georgia didn't understand chemistry or how much could have been made. Now, if it had been a still.... "

Angel said, "Bob's email mentioned up to 25 tons. Any evidence of how much they actually made?"

"No," Max sighed. "The electric bills would help, but they bypassed the meter, so we can't even use that. It could have been from a few hundred pounds to a number of tons. Personally I think tons from the number of electrolysis cells, but I can't prove it.”

After they showed Angel around, the three of them stood in the shade of the dusty ranch porch.

"This is going to be a hard sell to my bosses," Angel commented.

"That's what the ATF guy said," Bob lamented.

Angel went on, "What you have is a several-months-old possible crime scene even the Hazmat guys didn't think needs cleanup."

"That's true. Aluminum isn't toxic, and, while chlorate is, they left only traces," Max admitted.

"Up to 10 times the Oklahoma City blast… Any leads at all?” Angel queried.

"Not a thing. The people who were here paid the rent in cash. The owners probably thought they were renting to a jumpy, and probably armed, meth producer, so they never came out here. They waited two months after the rent was overdue to come out and look. At that point, the crew had been gone three to four months," Bob, recounted.

Angel asked, "Fingerprints?"

"Lots," Bob said. "But only one matches, off the plastic pipe. They belong to a guy working for a lumber store in Tucson with a 10-year-old drunk driving arrest record. He's been unloading pipe for years. We suspect they were illegal aliens imported for the project and sent home when it was over."

"Trash?” Angel was grasping at straws.

"None.” Max said. "The mailman said they never got anything but junk mail. It looked like they burned their trash."

"You're not making this easy.” Angel shook his head. "Perhaps someone made a few tons of chlorate explosive, or maybe fireworks. The crime, if it was one, is six months old at least."

Bob said waving his hand at the building with the electrolysis cells and aluminum blenders. "The strangest thing is that they didn't haul all the pipes and blenders off to a dump."

"Maybe in the year plus it took them, they decided not to use it.” Angel mused.

"If that's the case, somewhere out there, there are a few dozen drums of flash power stashed in a storage shed.” Max went on, "If the shed burns down the three nearest counties will hear about it.”

"OK," Angel said resigned. "I'll write it up, so if someone finds it we might get notice. Now that it's a possible federal crime, can I still talk to you, or do you need to be deputized by a judge as federal marshals?"

Bob and Max had both been deputized the year before when they were working on a DEA case. Their commission was open-ended and didn't state an agency. Angel filed a report, but none of them expected they would hear about it again.

^^^^^^^^^^^^ They cleaned the yellowcake of depleted uranium of impurities by dissolving it in nitric acid, and running it through a countercurrent solvent extraction process using tributyl phosphate dissolved in dodecane. The organic extractant collected the uranium. A dilute nitric acid solution washed the uranium out of the organic phase. The solution was evaporated to uranyl nitrate UO2(NO3)2.6H2O crystals.

Several subverted base-load power reactors--running full power--were losing a few grams of neutrons a month to a loop of depleted uranyl nitrate in water. The loop had replaced one of the control rods. The multi-walled pipe was zirconium with a vacuum space, and there were thermal radiation shields of the same material surrounding the inner pipes. Those, plus the fast flow (the solution spent only a few minutes in the core), kept the uranyl nitrate solution from getting much more than warm inside the pressurized water reactor. This was a good idea because hot uranyl nitrate solution is excessively corrosive.

Outside the core, the solution went through a cooler, and into the laminar flow tank where it took a bit over an hour to get through a bed of glass beads. This let the U 239 decay into neptunium 239 that could be chemically distinguished. The solution flowed into a tank of ion exchange resin optimized to capture neptunium. On average, the neptunium stayed stuck in the resin for two and a half days until it decayed by beta emission into plutonium. The decay released the plutonium, virtually all of it Pu239. The Pu239 flowed into another ion exchange column where it was captured. Every few days the column was backwashed to flush out the plutonium nitrate. Every gram of lost neutrons made 239 grams of plutonium.

Two years before, Alexavier, the short supreme leader of Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation (TCMS), the sacerdotal machine cult, had fluttered his dalmatic, stomped his foot and screamed at Dr. Formoq, his nuclear architect, who had just explained the expected production rate from the first reactor they were subverting.

"That's too damned slow! It will take longer than the fool flash powder project your unlamented predecessor sold me."

Dr. Formoq shrugged. He one of very few Alexavier could not push around. "We can't steal more than a small fraction of the neutrons from a power reactor or people will notice. We'll have enough for a bomb in 6 to 8 months."

"One isn't enough, you fool! We must have at least three to make it look like a foreign attack. That was the problem with using flash powder to wipe out the zoning board. Our 'friends', who provided the DU, must have one in payment.

"It's no more trouble to make four than to make one, but if you want them faster, we'll have to tap more reactors."

"Get it done!"

"It will cost another 6 million to tap 3 more reactors, not counting the effort to quietly corrupt the plant managers and engineers."

"Chicken feed. We spend twice that much on investigators to blackmail judges and agency heads."

^^^^^^^^^^^^

It was a considerable surprise when Angel got a response a few weeks after he filed the report. A rancher had complained about a locked container with no license on it parked a few miles off I-40. It was far enough off the road to be a low priority for anyone to look at it. The container had been there for months before the rancher cut the lock off and found it was full of drums of aluminum powder. Angel reached Max at home on Friday night.

"Hello."

"Hi, Max. It's Angel."

"Didn't expect to hear from you. The flash powder went bang?"

"No, but we might have a line on it. Want to go check it out?"

"Where is it?"

"Twenty miles west of Flagstaff. A rancher found it, and the locals matched it with the report I filed.”

"Sure. What about Bob? Does he want to come?"

"He's on vacation."

They arranged to meet at the FBI office in Phoenix. Max got out at daylight for the three-hour drive to Phoenix, and another two hours out to the container. They took Max's four-wheel drive SUV. A Coconino county deputy had faxed Angel a map.

The doors on the container were closed, but not locked. Max parked the SUV where he could climb up into the container on wheels, pulled off a drum lid, and took a sample.

"This isn't flash, just aluminum powder.” Taking a small sample off to a bare spot, Max tried to light it and failed except for a few sparkles. It was mixed with what looked like specks of paint. There were 90 drums in the container.

"I wonder if this stuff is related to what we found down south. The paint specks make it look like this is ground up beer cans.” Max got back into the container and worked his way toward the front, whacking the sides of the barrels with his hand. The first ones gave like the one he knew was full of fluffy aluminum powder, but about halfway back, he hit one that felt like it was full of sand. Max unlatched the locking ring on the barrel, pulled the lid off. The odor of chlorine bit him; he put on gloves and raked a hand through the granulated chlorate.

"Angel, this is it! The barrels in the front half of this container are full of sodium chlorate.” He closed the barrel, counted them, worked his way to the back, and jumped down.

"I would guess, from the number of barrels, about 25 tons," Max said. "Close enough to what I predicted from looking at the chlorate factory. At least it isn't mixed. I wonder how they were going to mix it without being blown to bits."

Angel just stood there for a while. "I wonder who is behind this.” He paused. "And how could we find out?"

"No plate, but we might be able to trace the container number or the VIN on the wheels.” Max wrote down the numbers.

"Maybe," Angel said doubtfully. "We can try, but it's going to be hard to get resources to investigate a container load of abandoned chemicals, at least non drug making chemicals. If it were cocaine, we could get Army Rangers to sit up on a peak and watch it with a telescope for months."

"Yeah, I saw the Rangers watch a 1,000-pound cocaine air drop for nine months down near the border. Nobody ever picked it up."

"I wonder if we have cell phone service out here.” Angel pulled his out and looked at the signal strength. "Not real good service, but good enough.”

Angel pulled a fanny pack out of the SUV and took out a GPS cell phone with a magnetic base and a very long-life battery. Angel set it up to text message his cell phone every four hours, or if it was moved more than a few feet. Working his way forward into the container, he put the tracer on the bracket next to the plastic panels.

Angel called the sheriff's deputy who had faxed him the map. The deputy said he would ask the rancher to leave the container in place. Angel picked up the cut-off lock. He would have the lock repaired with the same cylinder, and put back on the trailer.

On the trip back, Angel talked to Max about what he knew about containers.

"Those simple boxes made as much change in the world as the invention of steam power, maybe more.”

"How so?"

"Did you ever see Brando in _On the Waterfront_?

"Long time ago on TV. That movie was made a decade before I was born."

"That film was a fairly accurate picture of the way shipping docks were run. Lots of cargo was lost to dockworker gangs, and it took a week or more to unload a ship. Containers cut the load and unload time to hours, and the locked containers keep most of the goods from being stolen. Before containers, a lot of stuff was made near where it was consumed. After containers, and the ships to carry them, the cost and time for shipping was cut so much that high labor products such as clothes could be made economically out of the US. There are close to 15 million of those things coming into the US every year now."

The container number was a dead end, too. There was one report from border patrol nearly two years old in which reported the container as coming across the border--empty. The container had a history, but it ended in Mexico where it had been sold as storage shed for cash. The platform VIN came back as "manufactured in Mexico," but who owned it was unknown.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When Dr. Formoq first encountered the Trans Cranial Magnetic Stimulator, he "saw God.” Alexavier's goal was to destroy the zoning board that had thwarted his plans for a particularly ugly temple.

After deciding in a rare flash of rationality that wasting the zoning board with tons of flash powder would be too obvious, Alexavier found he could use the TCMS machine to disrupt the activity of the medial anterior prefrontal cortex of Dr. Formoq. This allowed Dr.Formoq to think about certain topics due to a lack of moral consideration for the consequences--making him more useful to Alexavier—who also enjoyed frequent applications of the TCMS. Application of the TCMS encouraged Alexavier's psychotic traits beyond those typical of cult leaders. CHAPTER 3 LIMPETS https://www.bigbigforums.com/news-and-information/541967-tanker-fire-destroys-part-macarthur-maze-sf-ca.html

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/WHOLE-MEDIAN-BLEW-UP-3159041.php

They had stuck the limpet mine on the front trailer of Jim Brock's double tank LPG tanker the previous night. Only about the size of a teacup, the shaped charge was stuck to a cross member with a strong magnet and pointed at the tank. It had been designed to punch through a steel oil well casing and 10 feet into the surrounding rock. The shaped charges had been stolen from an oil field service company in the Mideast and smuggled into the US sealed up in food cans to prevent explosive sniffing dogs from finding them.

Some limpets (also known as IEDs) detonated by cell phone calls. But cell phone service was not reliable deep in a maze of freeways and it was hard to predict when the call would go through. They also could be traced. The one on Jim's tanker detonated with a model aircraft controller.

Abdul and Mohamed were pacing the trailer about 100 meters behind it. Abdul was driving and Mohamed had the model airplane controller in his lap. The RC had a short range; they had to be within 50 meters of the truck to fire the limpet mine. The two had taken a beta-blocker (i.e., "stage fright") drug that morning so their heart rate was just up to normal as the freeway maze approached.

Abdul accelerated and their car entered the maze abreast of Jim's big Peterbilt tractor, which had slowed to 45. A hundred feet short of the deepest part of the maze, Mohamed pushed the RC elevator lever. Nothing! In spite of the drug, he felt panic.

"Drop back.” He barked in Arabic to Abdul who dutifully hit the brakes. The limpet mine was only about 50 feet away when Mohamed hit the lever again.

This time it worked, there was a deafening blast next to the car. Abdul put the accelerator to the floor to get away from the developing inferno.

Jim had glanced down when the car next to him started to drop back. He had seen the radio controller and later guessed what had happened. He wasn't ready for what came after the blast broke open and set the first trailer on fire. The blue car accelerated out of the fireball behind him, cut in front of the tractor and the driver stomped on the brakes. Jim, as an elite tanker driver had been impressed with the need to get a flamer out in the open. There are limits to overriding the reflex to hit the brakes when a car tries to stop in front of you. The tractor brakes worked, but the trailer brake lines had been cut by the blast. Even at 45 mph, the rig jackknifed, the tractor going through the barrier and the heavy front bumper snagging a pillar supporting three layers of freeway.

Seeing the tractor and tanker trailers jackknife behind him, Abdul accelerated away from the flaming wreckage that suddenly doubled in size as the second trailer tipped over, ruptured, and added to the intense flames starting to spall the concrete. With luck, all three layers of freeway would be unusable and the physical cost to repair the damage would be dwarfed by the cost of transport delays to the economy.

Abdul, who had been prepared to let the tanker crush his car to cause the wreck heaved a sigh of relief and said, "Allah be praised. We did not pack our suitcases for nothing.” Mohamed twisted around in his seat looking back at the flame and smoke. He was too overcome to speak. He had been this close to martyrdom.

Suddenly the radio control unit seems unclean, being a link to the inferno they had caused made it incredibly dangerous to possess. Pulling out aircraft shears, Mohamed cut the box into pieces smaller than a cm and pulling up the rug under his feet to expose a small hole in the firewall, he dropped the pieces out where they became hard to recognize road debris. It took him about 20 minutes during which they covered half the distance to the airport. The both were relieved when the task was complete and the hole stuffed with a rubber plug. The snips went into a box of worn tools on the floor of the back seat.

The car went into long-term parking. The other members of the cell (who they had never met) could recover the car if it seemed safe. Even well-funded terrorists have to economize.

They put on their tweed sports jackets and hurried into the terminal. They had a bit more than two hours to check their bags (full of presents for relatives, nothing suspicious there) before the plane departed. They spent much of their time watching with bored expressions (hard to do) local news reporting of the wreck and fire that had made such a mess of the freeway maze. The tanker wreck was being treated as an accident, not an act of jihadist war, though that would surely change when the wreck cooled off enough to examine it and the shape charge hole found. The one disturbing part of the report was that the driver had lived, though the reports said he had been burned.

Jim had been burned, but he was a lucky guy that day. When the tractor's bumper caught a pillar, it spun around and the flaming tank broke loose and went by. The tank behind it gave the tractor a hard push and it joined the first. All 25,000 gallons of LPG wound up under the maze blazing away about 100 feet from the tractor.

In spite of the sudden wrenching, spinning deceleration, Jim was, as they say, "highly motivated" to get away from the hell now behind him. The driver's side door was stuck. Getting out of his seat belt (it was part of the reason he survived the wreck) he wrenched open the passenger's side door and ran away from the blaze filing the roadway. He gained speed as his polyester shirt melted on his back and his hair smoked. Jim ducked behind a pillar just before his hair would have burst into flame. Then the developing updraft pulled the fire back and, with first and second-degree burns, Jim ran from pillar to pillar until he got far enough away that the heat from the flames was just uncomfortable. Then he dropped to a fast walk, which rapidly became a stagger as he ripped off the melted shirt. Some tens of yards beyond he collapsed on the edge of the freeway, face down to spare his back.

Off in the distance Jim could hear sirens wailing. The freeway drivers behind him had been able to stop and had backed up to a point a few hundred yards from the wreck. Jim noticed the drivers in the first few ranks had abandoned their cars. One of them ran up and offered to help Jim, who was still breathing too hard to respond. The fellow had gray hair but was solid as a stump. Leaning on him, Jim became aware of intense pain from his back and neck. The stranger started thumping on car windows as they went by, asking for water or ice. The sixth car back (the heat from the fire was just something you could feel on your face) had a cooler in it, with a bunch of sodas in ice. The stranger took off his shirt, undershirt, and made Jim put on the undershirt. Over this, he poured ice water out of the cooler down Jim's back. Instant relief!

Putting on his shirt and deputizing the cooler owner to go back further in the ranks of cars for more ice and water, he set Jim on the hood of the car. "Cold in the first 10 minutes will knock a second-degree burn down to first degree," he said. "I learned that way back in my volunteer-fire-department days.” Hooking a thumb toward the towering conflagration, he asked, "You the driver?"

"Yeah, could you pour a little more water on my neck?"

"Name's Chris," his benefactor said, and poured more cold water out of the corner of the cooler on Jim's neck.

"Jim.” After a pause to collect his thought, "damn tanker blew up just before a car cut in front and made me jackknife the rig.”

Over the continuing roar of the LPG fire, Chris and Jim could hear overheated concrete spalling off like a crackle of small-arms fire. Jim expanded his story: "Blue four-door compact came by even with the cab. Saw a dark-skinned guy had a controller box in his lap."

Jim paused, and Chris poured more ice water down his back. "Ah, thanks.” He went on. "I was only doing 45, but the car dropped back real sudden.” He paused, trying to get the words right. "Then there was this awful, sharp crack. Ears are still ringing from it. And there was this god-awful fireball behind the cab. The blue car came shooting up, passes, cuts into my lane, and slams on the brakes, smoking tires and all.” Jim took a shuddering breath. "So, I tapped the brakes, and everything busts loose. Tractor hits a pillar, spins around, and the tanks—one flaming—go by. More water, please.”

Chris poured more water onto Jim's shoulder, more generously, because he could see the car owner had scored and was coming back with a big cooler, and the cooler's owner tagging along.

"Some asshole blew up my rig and made me jackknife the damn thing in the middle of the Maze!"

Jim wanted to call 911, but his cell phone had been on charge in the Peterbilt cab. By now the lead-free solder holding the parts to the circuit board had melted, after the hundred-gallon diesel saddle tanks had burst from the radiant heat.

After pouring some more ice water on his back, Chris handed his phone to Jim.

"911. Police or fire?"

"I'm calling from the tanker fire in the Maze.”

"We know about the fire. Hang up, now.” Jim's face got red in places unburned by the fire. He stared at the dead phone.

"Let me try.” Chris said. Jim handed the phone back.

Chris hit a button and put the phone on loudspeaker so Jim could hear.

"Hotline,” It said.

"Sandy Newcomb, please.”

"This is Sandy. Clean the wax out of your ears, Chris. Why are you calling? Thought you'd retired."

"I did, but I'm still on consultant status as needed. At the moment, I'm needed. You got a flash on the tanker truck fire in the freeway maze?"

"Just came in, it's chalked up as a probable accident."

"Good. Keep it that way. It's not, though. I want top-down authority to run roughshod over the Bureau and the locals, and then I will be gentle with them."

"You have to do better than that if you want a blank check."

"Short form: foreign bad guys burned an LPG tanker truck under a freeway interchange, trashing the interchange. In a stroke of bad luck, I was half a mile behind the marshmallow roast. I've got the driver with me, pouring ice water over his burned back. I can turn him over to the locals and go home, or we can try 'softly, softly catchee monkey.'"

"Wait."

"The Highway Patrol is going to close out this option in about a minute.”

"Stat," she said.

Jim stared at Chris. "Who are you with?"

"If I told you, No, I'm not with any agency now. Retired CIA. Want some more ice water?"

"Chris?" the voice on phone spoke up.

"Yes," Chris said, clicking off loudspeaker mode. "We're going to let you spin it your way for a few days, but there's no way we can keep a lid on this long term."

"Understood."

"How're you doing for locals?"

"A motorcycle cop is coming up on the freeway shoulder."

"OK. Ready on this end.” Sandy switched on a remarkable device that allowed her to speak with the President's distinctive voice. The patrol officer put the kickstand down on his enormous motorcycle and walked over.

"You the driver?" he asked Jim.

Before Jim could do more than nod, Chris handed his cell phone to the patrol officer, whose nametag said ‘Powell.’ "The President wants to speak to you.” Surprised, the officer took the phone.

"This is the President, your name and badge number?" Powell's eyes went wide open. He snapped to attention.

"Officer Powell, sir, 42937.

"The man who handed you the cell phone is a CIA agent. I want you and the Highway Patrol to cooperate with him."

"Yes, sir.”

"Your superiors can call the White House for confirmation if they feel the need. What just happened looks like an act of terrorism. The agent will take the driver to the local FBI office. If he needs help, provide it."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Officer Powell. Please give the phone back to him."

"Yes, sir!" And the officer handed the phone back to Chris.

The President's voice continued, "The local Bureau's office should be cooperating by the time you get there. A couple of Highway Patrol investigators, too."

"Understand.”

Officer Powell was on his radio. Traffic on the other side of the freeway dwindled, and they could see an ambulance coming up the wrong way on the other side. The fire trucks on the higher levels and the ones that had come down the ramp from the wrong direction were pouring water on hot metal and concrete, raising a huge cloud of steam. There was a crash as part of the overpass fell down.

"Jim, time might be critical. Do you mind giving a statement at the FBI office before going to the hospital?"

"No. As long as they have ice, I'm OK.”

"Officer Powell, two things I'd like you to do."

"Yes, sir!"

"First, get someone to tape off 1,000 feet of the right lane behind the wreck. If they need it, the FBI can help the Highway Patrol vacuum up the scene as quickly as possible. I expect they will find bomb fragments. Second, have someone drive my SUV—it's the green one over there in the second rank—over to the FBI office, when they get the cars off this side of the freeway.” This last request was accompanied by handing Officer Powell the keys to Chris's green SUV.

"Yes, sir! I will do it myself and have another officer bring me back here.”

Chris and Jim squeezed through a gap in the center divider and approached the ambulance crew. "Gents," Chris said to the attendants, "we have a national security situation. The patient is burned, but as you can see, not seriously. We are going to the local FBI office for him to make an urgent statement. You will leave him there, and he will be treated as a doctor sees fit. Any problems with this plan?"

Officer Powell had tagged along looking fearsomely protective. "Do you want this officer to go with us?" Chris asked.

"Hey, no problem, man. We do it. We log it, and the office can figure out how to bill it."

The other attendant asked, "Is he under arrest? We get extra for being a paddy wagon.”

"Absolutely not, he's a victim. Tell your bosses to bill the local FBI office for the trip and don't talk about it to reporters.” Chris said.

It took about 20 minutes to get to the local FBI office. Jim spent it face down on a gurney with one of the EMTs putting cold packs on his scorched back. Chris had them stop at a convenience store so he could pick up a bag of ice to refill the cooler chest he had kept. An assistant director, the director himself being in a Congressional hearing, had sketchily briefed the local FBI office by the time they got there.

The local special agent in charge, guy name of Miner, was amazed at orders to cooperate with a retired CIA agent coming from such a high level. Attention from such high levels usually meant heads were going to roll. Chris soothed him and made him think Chris was a harmless retired CIA agent.

"Jim here was the driver of the truck that burned up under the Maze about an hour and a half ago. My function is mostly to pour ice water on his back so he can talk to you and not scream with pain. “

“From what he said, the wreck in the Maze was almost certainly a terrorist act, and that makes it a federal crime, but since it happened on Highway Patrol turf, they should be in on it too.” Chris said this as two Highway Patrol officers in civilian clothes identified themselves at the front desk. "It's also arson, so ATF and local fire department arson people may have to be involved. Your call on those.” Special Agent in Charge Miner decided he should hear the story before making a decision to complicate the investigation. At times, he thought there were way too many cooks in the law enforcement kitchen.

The Special Agent in Charge found himself and a hard case/technical expert agent name of Angel Dilante in a conference room with Jim, Chris (whose last name turned out to be Hobbs), and two Highway-Patrol investigators. There was a moment of silence as all sat down, interrupted by the dripping of water on towels under the backless (because it was broken) chair pulled out of a storage area. Miner turned on the cameras and asked, "What happened?"

Jim told his story in a few minutes. Chris nodded and said:

"Same account Jim gave me on the freeway. I was back about a half mile when it happened. I can't add anything except to say Jim was one lucky guy to get out.”

The older Highway-Patrol agent nodded to the younger one, who opened up his laptop and stuck in a CD. "Anticipating something like this, we made a copy of the traffic camera records for the 15 minutes before the wreck. This is from a mile north of the Maze. You can't see the wreck. It's around the curve, but here's the car that was behind the tanker. Unfortunately there isn't enough resolution in the traffic cameras to read the license plate."

Chris asked, "What's the file format?"

"MPG."

"How big?"

"60 Megabytes."

"Is there an Ethernet connection to the net around here?"

Angel pointed, "On the wall below the screen."

Twenty minutes later, ten used finding a cable, the file had been uploaded to Dropbox, and the location emailed to Jeremy, a senior data analysis jock who had worked with Chris for years. Jeremy had a neat program originally written for the NRO to make satellite images shaper by adding multiple photos. Chris called Jeremy to give him a heads up and be sure a spam filter didn't eat his email.

Jim had looked through a catalog of remote controllers on the net and identified as best he could the one he had seen in a brief glance. Of course, it was the most common model. He made a few minor corrections to his quickly typed up statement and was given the option of going to the hospital or going home in Chris's SUV that had been delivered to the parking lot by Officer Powell. He elected to go home; he had only a few places on his back were forming blisters. The hospital he should have gone to kept denying they had the truck driver, but the reporters refused to believe them.

[Footnote] Powell had sense enough not to talk about the phone call from the President having doubts he would be believed. His report only stated he had helped get the driver from the tanker truck fire into Federal hands to be interviewed about a suspected terrorist incident. A few weeks later, though, letters of thanks from both the FBI and the Whitehouse showed up for his personnel file. Sandy was good.

Jeremy called Chris back in a bit under an hour with the license number. He also sent an MPG file as an email attachment. While one of the Highway Patrol officers called in for the owner of the car, the other loaded the MPG and they were all treated to seeing the license number come up out of the fuzzy image as more and more pixels were synthetically added to the size adjusted image of the license plate.

"Amazing what it does to improve low resolution data by geometry adjustment."

The license number was followed up. The neighbors said the two guys who owned the car had gone to visit friends and family in Pakistan. In spite of real effort to move faster than normal for police work, it was more than a week before the license number of a car in the long term parking garage was matched up. A week later, Angel called Chris.

"Hello"

"Chris?"

"Yes."

"This is Angel. The ball is in your court."

"Oh?"

"We should probably not discuss this on the phone, but what the heck; it will be on Drudge in a day or two. After a lot of trouble the airport police found the car at the airport."

"Any evidence in it?"

"Aircraft shears that were probably used to chop up the radio control box the tanker driver saw. Forensics says there is fresh aluminum and copper on the blades."

"Where did they go?"

"To Mexico City and on to Venezuela using Saudi passports."

"Saudi?"

"Forged, or so the Saudis say.”

"Well, they're out of reach now.”

"I agree. Formal report goes to the CIA, but we don't expect the Company to find them. Pointless, since there are lots more where these came from."

"I don't see any news stories making the Maze fire out to be anything but an accident. How did you keep the tanker driver away from reporters?"

"We sent him, his wife, and kids on a vacation to Hawaii with 'alternate' ID.”

"I see. Long-term response?"

"DOT is giving serious consideration to spraying fireproofing on the most vulnerable points."

"Oh, man, what's that going to cost?"

"I neglected to ask, hundreds of millions, at least. It's a hard call to just do it because of real accidents, there have been about a dozen of them, or make the attack public to get fireproofing money."

"If the media doesn't pick up on it, DOT could play it both ways and secretly brief the congress critters."

"I'll pass that on to my DOT contacts. They need ideas. Chris, is this terrorism business ever going to get better?"

"Not in our lives, Angel. The think-tank boys claim rising income per capita will turn off support for terrorism. They make a case that's what happened to the IRA, as a consequence of the Irish women cutting back on the number of kids they had."

"I've heard this before. Makes sense."

"It sure makes a case for a bleak future. Even if the Islamic countries were to inexplicably adopt a one-child policy next week, like China did, income per capita would still fall for decades."

"Bummer."

"That's a fact," Chris said glumly.

"Well, it's been nice working with you, Chris. Back to retirement?"

"No, I was activated for a year. If you need someone out of the Company in the next year, let me know."

"Will keep in mind. You're a resourceful guy."

CHAPTER 4 SUBSTATIONS

A white van drove up and parked 30 yards from the humming substation. Abdul, the driver, checked he had his cell phone, got out, locked the van, and, putting his cell phone to his ear, walked a block to a circle K where he could loathe western consumer culture for a few minutes without being obvious.

In the van Qadeer opened a trap door in the roof of the van and sat a freshly charged drone on the roof. In spite of its high price, more than a hundred thousand of them had been sold in the year since this toy came on the market. Its distinctive feature was that it could lift 2 kg. It was the latest in a line of remotely operated toys from the Saudi-Chinese firm of KinBo. The payload it was lifting had started out as a Frisbee. It was actually a GPS cell phone, solar cells to keep the phone recharged and a copper lined shaped charge that had been perfected to target convoys in Afghanistan.

Qadeer closed the trap door and sat in front of a laptop linked to the drone’s little LCD camera. Scattered city glow was enough to light the scene like it was daylight. He flew the drone over the substation fence. .

This 40-year-old transformer had a step in the top where three four-foot tall insulators were mounted. Qadeer got his bearing from the middle one, and placed the shaped charge where the jet would go right into the high voltage coils. He called the gadget on its cell phone and verified it was working. After getting a favorable report, he activated it. A hot wire broke open a capsule of glue that stuck it to the transformer and connected a switch in the bottom to the detonator so it could not be pried off without detonating. It would also explode if it lost the GPS signal for an hour. This was to prevent a screen box from being dropped over it so it would not get the cell phone order to explode.

Then Qadeer flew the drone back over the fence and landed on the roof of the van, pulled in the drone, and put it on charge. He messaged Abdul to let him know this one was done, turned off the laptop screen as Abdul started the van. Total elapsed time was under ten minutes; they would drive to the next one several times that night.

Abdul and Qadeer were one of ten teams trained for this venture. They didn’t know eight of the other teams had failed to deploy. They had put charges on 341 transformers and the New England team (unknown to them) had put charges on 144 transformers. Had all the other teams been as active, they would have been approaching ten percent of the substation transformers in the US. Qadeer and Abdul were surprised that none of them had been detected yet. But, if you thought about it, who was going to shut down a substation to remove a stray Frisbee? But surely an electric company worker was going to notice Frisbees on a bunch of transformers. When they did, the disturbed Frisbee would send a message and the rest of them could be set off by cell phone messages.

CHAPTER 5 FIRST

It had been a year of exceptional dryness in Inland City. The year had seen none of the usual 20 of inches of rain. This morning looked like it would break the drought. An enormous storm cell was working up over the center of Inland City, the kind of storm that kills from flash floods.

Headed right into the storm was train 791. The train crew, engineer Mike Halverson, brakemen Manuel Garcia, and conductor Lea Andrews showed up on time to take the train out of Los Angeles in the early morning. It was an all containers train, headed for various places east. Consisting of three SD40-2 engines and 70 cars loaded with 128 containers, train 791 departed at 6 am. It was pulling about 7000 tons of Chinese merchandise. Many of the containers were for a Walmart distribution center in Arkansas. The rest of the containers were full of Israeli dates and couscous, tires from Japan, and a variety of local products headed east--from aircraft parts to chemicals.

Most of the train came as short blocks of cars to the yard from the port. The yard switchers added a few containers of local origin to the rear end of the container train. The crewmembers knew each other, and with little chitchat they checked out the train. Manuel and Lea made certain "FRED" and Wilma were talking and tested the air brakes.

"FRED" was a flashing rear-end device, also known as an end-of-train device. Decades ago they took the place of a caboose--reporting that the rear end of the train was still attached to the front end. In the lead locomotive there was a Head-of-Train Device (HOT) known to rail crews as a Wilma (a play on the Flintstones cartoon). Since there are many close trains, and one set of frequencies, a FRED was "married to a Wilma" by setting thumbwheel switches to the same code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashing_rear_end_device

Testing air brakes was not as important going up the grade out of LA as it was coming the other way. After going over the summit east of LA, it was a different story.

Decades ago, a train had headed out of the LA basin without being checked. When it went down the grade toward the Colorado River, the train crew found it did not have brakes because the valve behind the engines was closed. That train ran into the rear of another train killing the engineer, the conductor, and one of the two brakemen.

About two hours after they started out of the LA yard, the train was passing through Inland City (trains passed through Inland City every 15 minutes). The zoning commission meeting had started at 9 am. The train went by about 30 minutes into the meeting just as the rain came down hard.

Most of the street traffic went under the train tracks, but a few streets had cross arms that came down as the train approached. Mike and Lea were watching the tracks, not that they could do anything about traffic or suicides they ran over. The typical train engineer ran over several before he retired.

There was a large delivery truck parked on the side of the road between the freeway and the tracks. It started to back up before the lead engine passed the crossing.

"What's that crazy dude doing?" Mike pointed at the truck grinding backwards and showing no sign of slowing down. Manuel stuck his head out the window looking back. If it didn't stop, it was going to hit the train a few cars behind the last engine. It didn't stop. He started to say the delivery truck had no driver.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

After two years of accumulating plutonium and months casting and machining the “pits” and other parts, events sped up. Both blasting caps in the flash powder worked. The flame front burned out to the surface in a fraction of a millisecond. The intense light flash reflected off the elliptical surface. The light took 8 nanoseconds to impinging on the explosive ball around the pit. This detonated the ball over the entire surface, and drove the aluminum "pusher" into the uranium tamper. The tamper in turn collapsed the hollow plutonium pit into supercritical.

The collapse smashed the “urchin,” a tiny amount of polonium and beryllium in the center of the pit intimately mixing the two elements. Alpha particles from the polonium smacked into the beryllium atoms, generated a small number of neutrons. These doubled and redoubled dozens of times as the dense plutonium fissioned. The energy released was about the same as the Trinity test in 1945, equal to 25 thousand tons of TNT. The only significant difference from Trinity was a space between the pusher and the tamper.

When the truck was five feet from the train there was a glare of light that happened too fast for Manuel's brain to register it before all of his body hanging outside the window vaporized. Shielded by three locomotives at hundred and eighty tons each, Mike and Lea were just able to perceive the glare. They felt the locomotive launched forward through the air before their nervous systems burned out

The plutonium expanded beyond critical density in a microsecond. The bomb crate and the truck evaporated under the intense x-rays. By 100 microseconds, the fireball was 15 meters in diameter obliterating the tracks and several containers on the train. At a millisecond, the x-rays moving out from the fireball ionized the air to block light. This would have alerted one of the monitoring satellites that a nuclear blast had occurred (double flash). But the huge thunderstorm blocked the light from going into space.

The fireball lasted a little under a second, expanding to 200 meters in diameter, and digging out a crater that extended across the freeway.

When the supersonic fireball reached about 300 meters in diameter, it had slowed enough for the shock wave to detach. The shock wave moved away at mere sonic velocity of a mile every 5 seconds. For the next 11 seconds the wave moved out across Inland City before dropping to the 1-psi level where it still caused moderate structural damage. (One psi doesn't sound like much until you realize it is 144 pounds on a square foot, or 7.2 tons slamming into a ten by ten foot piece of wall.) Most of the buildings remained standing beyond 2 miles from the blast point even if the glass blew out. It was in California, where they construct buildings with earthquakes in mind.

The crater where the rails had been was over 40 feet deep and 300 feet wide. It touched the edge of the Interstate. The county building (with the zoning board meeting) was on the far side of the Interstate, one of those glass and steel constructions. Stubs of a few of the beams remained standing. It provided almost no shielding to the reinforced concrete county jail structure behind it. The blast blew down all eight stories of the building with pieces landing as much as half a mile away.

The 911 emergency center located in the basement of the county building ceased to exist. Not that they would have been of use, because police and fire services were completely overwhelmed. The shielding provided by the building kept the initial blast from killing the zoning board and staff. They died seconds later from a variety of burns and trauma as the building collapsed.

The main fire station and the police station likewise, had no survivors. After the blast, downtown went up in a firestorm. Torn-out gas pipes and wrecked buildings leaked gas until they ignited from shorted car batteries or other sources.

California Power was one of the first to know about the detonation, because a substation was on the edge of the crater. The two inbound feeders shorted out from radiation before blast broke the shorts by knocking the wires down. Remote automated circuit breakers tried to reclose. They couldn't because the line was still shorted, computers went screaming for human help. "The Inland City central load is gone!"

Mike DeLong was 100 miles away. He picked up a phone and autodialed a remote operations center. The pattern worried him. There was more than one substation gone, part the load was gone from several others. Mike knew there were major thunderstorms in the area, but the pattern of loss didn't look like anything he had ever seen. The phone produced a quick-buzz, circuits-overloaded, busy signal. Puzzled, Mike alerted his boss.

"Nick, Inland City dropped load, and I can't reach them by phone. It's not like an earthquake.” At this thought, Mike brought up the USGS real-time earthquake reports. "The seismic signal from Inland City is gone, too."

"Air crash into the middle of town? Were you able to contact anyone local?"

"No. It's like someone punched a big hole out of Inland City.”

While Mike and Nick were scratching their heads over why the Inland City area had dropped load, an ops trainee, Tony Domingo, came tearing in.

"Just heard. A trainload of bombs went off in the middle of Inland City.” He stopped to take a breath. "Huge flash. Guy phoned KFLA, said his neck was burned a mile away by the flash.” Mike and Nick looked stricken, and the blood drained out of their faces.

"Tony," Nick said, "Chemical bombs don’t cause flash burns. That's a nuke.” All three of them ran outside and looked off in the direction of Inland City. Towering rain clouds obscured the view. Mike went back inside to keep the ops center manned. He looked at the amount of load dropped, and did some rough calculations. All Inland City had not gone offline, so it wasn't a big bomb. He could see the load was still dropping, and he wondered why.

The reason was fires shorting out transformers. That and fuses blowing out on distribution lines, lines shorting out and tripping substation breakers.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

"CNN breaking news: there has been an explosion in Inland City, California. A traffic helicopter is en route. People on scene are uploading pictures to our Web site as we speak. They report a flash and a shock wave that blew cars off the Interstate for miles. Loss of life will exceed any historical disaster. Perhaps more than 100,000 people have died."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

National Intelligence Office

"Sir, we're getting news reports of a nuclear blast east of Los Angeles, near the middle of Inland City. NORAD does not confirm. No double flash reported."

"That's strange.”

"The breaks in fiber optic cables are consistent with a ground burst nuclear explosion on the rail line. Seismic is consistent”

"Confirm this is nuclear or not soonest."

"Yes, sir."

(A few minutes later)

"Sir, confirmed report of a ground nuclear blast approximately 25 kilotons on a rail line, ground zero within 100 meters of the railway station at Inland City. The reason NORAD didn't see it is there was a major rainstorm right over the blast."

"Casualties?"

"Tens of thousands from the blast. Radiation deaths may be worse. The weather is too rough to do aerial recon. There is no experience with a ground burst into a rainstorm. The fallout downwind will be intense.”

"CNN has video of the crater on the air right now. So much for rough weather recon. If you can contact the station, tell them to have their helicopter stay upwind, and when they land have people there to check them for radiation."

"Yes, sir, I was thinking along those lines. Wind is from the north-northwest at 15, so the intense fallout should be 5-6 miles downwind by now."

"The crater is going to be as radioactive as hell, though.”

"The helicopter reporter has one of those cell phones that measures radiation. He's picking up high radiation levels.

"Should we declare a national nuclear emergency?"

"CNN gives us no choice. They're now showing cell-phone photos of the blast. I'm going to call the White House before they call us.”

"Oops, too late. The White House is calling now.”

"The President wants to talk to you now."

"Yes, sir.”

"Sam, I'm looking at CNN and Fox. What the hell is going on?"

"Sir, I was just picking up the phone to call you when you called. We have what seems to be a nuclear detonation in Inland City on a rail line. Deaths are in the tens of thousands."

"Any chance this is not a nuclear bomb?"

"No, Mr. President," Sam sighed. "The CNN pictures relayed from the traffic chopper show a devastation area too large for a chemical explosion."

"Legal staff says we have to wait for the California governor to ask for help.”

"I can't imagine that taking more than an hour. Ah, CNN says they will go on the air in 30 minutes to declare a state of emergency. That's fast, but this is unprecedented."

In fact, it was close to an hour before the Governor's office called off the press conference. His staff had insisted on getting a request from Inland County that the disaster exceeded the ability of the county to cope. The effort failed because they could not locate the people who had the legal authority to request a state of emergency. The situation was so confused nobody could figure out to whom the authority had devolved. Shortly after they cancelled the news conference, Governor Joshua Greenstone called the President. After a short delay to get the President on the line, he asked, "Joshua, what happened to the news conference?"

"Lawyers, Ed," Greenstone complained. "My staff lawyers say I can't declare a state of emergency without a request from elected county officials."

"They won't request?" the President said in an amazed tone.

"Far as we can tell, every elected official is dead."

"Oh."

"We are going to change laws next session, but my legal staff tells me you can declare a national state of emergency."

"My legal staff didn't tell me. Declaration isn't going to make relief get there sooner, but let me ask.”

"One last thing, who did it?"

"The assumption is Islamic terrorists. The other question is how the bomb got into the country."

"Please get on your legal staff."

"Will."

Chapter 6 Tunnel of Love

"Court, Brenda," Hernandez, one of the nicer guards, banged on the door and woke Brenda up again at 7 a.m.

She was a bit groggy, having been awakened at 3 a.m. for "pill call," awakened again at 4 a.m. for "breakfast," milk, cereal, an inedible biscuit, and a hard green pear. To top it off, the jail had sent her mother's mail back the night before because some jail clerk had interpreted the "no sticker" rule to include printed postage stamps.

Brenda was locked up pending trial for welfare cheating. She was in protective custody because her former boyfriend had former and current girlfriends known for violence in jail. She had been in solitary confinement for 8 months over $2,400 of welfare.

Hernandez chained her up; hands cuffed to her waist and ankle shackles that limited her to a shuffling walk. They went down the elevator to the basement and through a tunnel that jogged back and forth under the street. Brenda noted the locked doors and cameras in the ceiling and made slightly flirtatious small talk with her guard. She had to walk in front which kept her from being able to watch Hernandez's cute butt. His elaborate tats on his muscular arms kind of turned her on. But then after not being laid for that long….

Hernandez didn't really flirt with her as they walked over, but he thought as he watched her buns she was a nice piece of ass. He knew from a casual (and illegal) look at Brenda's jail medical records she didn't have HIV or herpes and had had her tubes tied. Hernandez knew he would risk his pension by getting involved with a prisoner, or even a former prisoner, but he could not help thinking about getting her in bed, especially since his wife had left him four months ago. Brenda, limited in jail to lipstick, didn't look as bad as you might expect for a 36 year old woman who had had her first kid at 15. Even the blue jail suit didn't clash that bad with her blondish hair.

At the end of the tunnel, Hernandez took her upstairs and locked her in a metal cage outside the court. The cage was so small her knees hit the far wall. Brenda was 5'6" and weighed 140 pounds, but the 28 x 32 inches cage was cramped even for her, with a tiny shelf in the corner, which she could almost sit on. She had a hard time imagining how a 200-pound man could be stuffed inside, but had passed several such cages with big guys in them in the hall under the court.

There were a number of Black and Hispanic women brought down from the jail. One of them, who weighed about 250 pounds, was stuffed into the cage next to Brenda. Brenda tried to strike up a conversation.

"Hi.” She said. After a minute of silence, Brenda offered, "I'm in here for welfare."

After another minute of silence, when Brenda had given up, the other woman said, "I'm Lupe. Murder."

Lupe and Brenda chatted for the next few hours about boyfriends strung out on meth, kids, and cops and being horny in jail. Lupe was taken to court before lunch and Brenda never saw her again. She was given a sack lunch, which was almost impossible to eat with her hands chained to her waist.

Early afternoon, her public defender, Jim Notoro, came by and, talking through the cage door, suggested he might be able to cut a deal for time served if she pled guilty.

"Brenda, the penalty for welfare fraud is 6 months to a year. With the clogged courts, you have no chance for going to trial in the next six months. You want me to try to cut a deal with the DA for time served? The eight months you have been in here gives you a year credit."

"I was workin' and takin' welfare so I could move where Hogman wouldn't find me. I get out and he'll kill me and maybe my daughter's kids. Hogman's really pissed at me for trying to rat him out."

Jim considered the ethical rules. "Hogman was arrested after nearly killing a guy in a bar fight last week. He's not likely to get out for at least a year."

Brenda replied. "OK, if you can get my granddaughters back to me, plead me out."

"Who has them now?"

"My mother. She's getting too old to take care of young kids. My daughter, their mother's been missing for years."

Jim managed to plead Brenda out for time served. The new state law requiring judges to consider what it cost to keep a person in jail had not passed this session, but the judges were keenly aware of it. Brenda's $2,400 welfare cheat had cost the county over $24,000 to keep her in protective custody for eight months.

What with filling out all the paperwork, Brenda was last out of the court, and the very last walked back to the jail to be processed and released that night. Hernandez had taken an extra four-hour overtime, all of which would go to his divorce lawyer, so he walked Brenda back through the tunnel. In spite of the penalties, he was making small talk to Brenda and thinking about asking her out (and getting in her pants) when there was a glare from both ends of the tunnel, followed at once by the tunnel lurching left and right two or three feet and the lights going off. As Californians, they both thought "Earthquake!"

Hernandez managed to keep his feet after banging his shoulder into the tunnel wall, but Brenda, with her hands chained to her waist, went down hard in the dark. Dust rained down from new and old cracks. Hot air blew in. There was overpressure that nearly popped their eardrums. The air was sucked back out a few seconds later

Hernandez dug out his LED flashlight in the dark.

The right-hand wall had hit Brenda, and the floor had been yanked from under her feet. For all that, in the LED's cold light, she didn't seem to be hurt just a little dazed. Hernandez pulled out his radio and keyed it. The radio squawked the "lockout" tone, indicating the radio would not connect. Hernandez had only a vague idea of what caused a "lockout" tone. (The radio could not contact to any repeaters. This was understandable, since the repeater antennas on the top of the former building were incandescent vapor now being sucked up into the fireball.)

Hernandez checked Brenda, who was lying on the floor. He ran back toward the court, to find the last 50 feet of the tunnel choked with hot chunks of concrete. Hernandez played his light over the choked tunnel and walked back to Brenda. She was trying to sit up against the side of the tunnel. Giving her a reassuring "Back in a minute." he went to the other end of the tunnel, where there was a similar pile of rubble. He turned off his light and looked at the fading nuclear afterglow trickling down through a few small chinks.

Hernandez slowly walked back to Brenda. He pulled his handcuff keys out and, holding his flashlight in his teeth, unlocked the handcuffs and leg irons. "We have about an hour, Brenda."

He was wrong. They had almost two hours before the radiation leaking in killed them.

A year and a half later, a robot exploring the tunnel found their intertwined bones on top of a guard's uniform and a prisoner's jumpsuit.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ CHAPTER 7 SECOND

"Mr. President."

"What is it, Sam?"

"This is not on the air yet, though it will be in the next 10 minutes. There's been another blast."

"Where?"

"Pennsylvania, Allegheny Tunnel. It went off inside the mountain, so NORAD didn't see it, either, but we have seismic data on the yield—about the same as the Inland City blast."

"Oh, shit. Just a sec."

"Allen, set up for me to make an announcement in 15 minutes. TV if you can, radio if not. We have a chance to get ahead of the curve. John, tell the legal staff I'm going to declare a national state of emergency right now. I want the wording for the announcement in 10 minutes.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"My fellow Americans, the United States is under a nuclear attack by unknown parties. Besides the attack on Inland City, another nuclear device on a train blew up in a tunnel in Pennsylvania 45 minutes ago."

"I have signed a declaration of a national state of emergency. It includes limited martial law in places where the local authorities are overwhelmed. I have issued an order, on the advice of National Security staff, halting container train traffic. In all possible cases, we will halt trains carrying containers outside of cities for inspection, in case there are more bombs onboard.”

"My staff was only able to find a few reporters at this late hour on a Friday night. I will let them ask a few questions. Ms. Abrahamson?"

"How many casualties?"

"CNN indicates 20,000 to 50,000 killed by blast at Inland City. That probably brackets the immediate casualties. There may be many more that die from radiation. The Army is releasing their stocks of the radiation treatment Prochymal. Mr. Bracket?"

"Who did it?"

"Terrorists, we presume. None of the known groups have taken credit so far. Mr. Cummings?”

"How did the bombs get through the ports?"

"We don't know. I assure you we will spare no effort to find out. Ms. Abrahamson?"

"How big were the bombs?"

"DoE tells me about 25 kilotons. That's subject to correction. Mr. Bracket?"

"Were the bombs in shipping containers?"

"We think so, but are not sure yet. From the wreckage, we know they were on container trains. Mr. Cummings?"

"How long will the government stop the trains?"

"A few days. DoE has an inspection program that will start tomorrow at daylight. I'm cutting questions off. I don't know more than the news services. No point in repeating them.

The President continued:

“Two other matters. Health and Human Services tells me there will be a huge need for blood over the next month. The blood donors' sites will register all those who want to give blood. They will take blood only from those with a particular ending social-security digit for the first few days. Later, they will call for donations from other ending numbers. We learned from 9/11.”

“For those in the devastated areas, state and federal forces are moving as fast as they can. Some will be on-site by morning, but the bulk of the relief effort will take several days to organize and arrive."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The President opened the Emergency cabinet meeting, and asked for a report. The Secretary of DoE deferred to a younger female. "I have not had time for a briefing. Dr. Jones has the latest.”

Dr. Jones reported. "As has been all over the news, four hours ago we had two medium-sized nuclear blasts on rail lines. It is clear we are under attack. It is not clear who attacked. Both were container trains, so the assumption is that the bombs came into the country in containers. DOT has ordered all container trains to stop well outside cities. Since it is difficult to time a train detonation inside a tunnel we think the enemy is using GPS to set off the bombs. We're pressing to turn off the GPS satellites. The military is reluctant, since it would degrade our capability in the Mideast. A lot of commerce depends on GPS signals as well, like the time stamps on ATMs.

“It could have been worse. The one in Pennsylvania went off in the middle of the largest tunnel on the major east-west rail line for the northeast. It's not very populated there, probably no more than 1,000 dead around the west tunnel entrance. The one in California we estimate has killed about 20 thousand people outright. The fallout could kill or injure another 50 thousand. Since it was a ground burst right in the middle of a rainstorm, the fallout downwind is intense."

"Who?" The President asked, with an intense stare.

"We don't know yet. Fallout samples are in the air on the way to Oak Ridge. In a few hours they might tell us something or they might not."

"I want to know night or day, as soon as you get news. What have the Russians said?"

The Secretary of State spoke up. "The Russian ambassador says they're not their nukes. I take that with a grain of salt."

The President looked at the Secretary of Transportation, who obviously wanted to speak, and raised an eyebrow.

"We are in trouble. We have to do a fast inspection on those trains and get them moving, or there will be food riots.”

"How much time do we have?"

"Two weeks, more or less. We can shift some food shipment to trucks that might give us more time, but trucks use twice as much fuel as trains and there are not enough of them."

"How in the hell did a nuke get through Customs?"

"At least two did, one on each coast. The question is now how many more are out there.”

"Assuming there are more on the stopped trains, how do we find them?"

The Secretary of Energy looked to Dr. Jones.

"We can fly a radiation detector over the trains, but it's a mystery why they were not picked up by radiation detectors at the ports.”

The President said, "We are under attack."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"The California Governor would like to talk to you. Shall we set up a time?"

"No. Delay the next meeting and let me speak to him."

"The President will speak to the Governor now."

"Hi, Ed."

"Morning, Joshua."

"It’s just barely morning for you. You going to get that declaration business fixed?"

"No. Turns out people anticipated knocking out a whole level of government. Regional emergency services can request a declaration in the place of county officials. Nothing like this had ever happened before, so my legal staff didn't know about it."

"I wonder what the laws are like in other states."

"Similar, or so my legal staff tells me now. Laws were passed back in the '50s for nuclear attacks, but forgotten. But I didn't call you to talk laws."

"What's on your mind, Governor?"

The Governor paused, as if reluctant to speak. "There is a rumor going around that a religion prominent in California was somehow involved.” He paused. The President didn't respond, so he continued. "This rumor should get no idle circulation.” The pause got uncomfortable. The Governor finally added, "Or the attention of law enforcement. I am sure you understand my concern.”

Finally, the President could respond. "I understand your concern.”

The Governor went on, "I am sure your concerns are the same as mine."

"This is getting ridiculous," the President thought. "This son of a bitch is trying to blackmail me.” "Thanks for calling, Governor. Don't hesitate to call again about the unfortunate situation.” With that he said goodbye and hung up.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

CHAPTER 7 THIRD

A helicopter with a dangling scintillation counter went thumping along over a train stopped in farm country. On the side was “Oak Ridge.” The helicopter vanished into the distance.

Under pressure, the military turned off GPS. Nothing happened for an hour. A train crew in a van headed out so the crew can take the train on to its destination. They were a few miles away when there was a blinding flash and a mushroom cloud over farmland.

At an emergency cabinet meeting with the President,

“Dr. Jones, what's the situation?"

"Sir, a third bomb went off one hour to the minute after we turned off GPS. If they were all the same, that's probably the last of them, but we have a problem."

"You're telling me? OK, what is it?"

"We flew a radiation detector over the third train an hour and a half before we turned off GPS, and the train blew up. We now think the bombs are made out of an impossible grade of plutonium. The debris from the first two is anomalously low in PU240. In fact, it might have been completely pure. We don't know how to make plutonium that pure.”

"I know you mentioned this in the last meeting, but for those who were not there please explain again," the President said.

"Making plutonium 239—that's the kind that goes boom—in a reactor always makes some plutonium 240 as well. The 240 has a high rate of spontaneous fission, which is what we expected to pick up with the scintillation counter. The fission releases neutrons. That's part of the problem with older bombs. The neutrons damage everything, but the point is someone has figured out how to make higher-grade plutonium than any the US ever made."

“The plutonium you get out of a power reactor is about 20 percent plutonium 240. By briefly exposing uranium in a reactor, the US made bomb grade as low as 1 percent 240. The plutonium in these bombs is lower in 240 than the best the US ever made, how much we can't tell, because the detonation makes a little 240. But the point is the plutonium in these bombs was not made by any process we know about on Earth."

"You're proposing the bombs were from space aliens?" the President asked.

"I hope not, but we can't tell you where the plutonium came from. I can say it's not ours, not the Russians, not French or British, probably not Chinese. The fact we didn't see it at all when we went over the third train means it must be nearly free of plutonium 240. Since the inspections presume bombs will have some plutonium240, these things can get right through the ports."

"OK, what do we do?"

"Short-term we inspect by x-rays, all shipping containers. If we find one, we should have an idea of how the bombs are built from container x-rays. Longer-term, we can shoot neutrons into the containers and watch for fission events. We built a prototype to inspect for U235 bombs, but after Iran gave up enrichment, we shut down the program."

The Secretary of Energy said. "But there is a hell of a problem. How did everyone miss at least three bombs being built and imported?

The President interjected, "Who did it and how?"

"We have no idea who. As to how, we don’t know that either. It is considered impractical to sort out isotopes with a one or two-atomic-unit mass difference. It takes huge, hard-to-hide plants even to sort out uranium, and that's a three-atomic-mass-unit difference. “

"Oy vey! You're saying someone is far ahead of the US in making plutonium?"

The Secretary of Energy said: "Mr. President, the US has not made any weapons grade plutonium for decades. We have tens of tons in excess of any possible need—leftovers from the Cold War. The Russians, French, Brits—probably even the Chinese—are in the same boat."

Wearily, the President asked, "OK, how're we going to find these things?"

Dr. Heather Jones and the Secretary of Energy looked at each other. He nodded, she spoke. "Mr. President, we know from the debris roughly how much plutonium was in those bombs. With plutonium 239 that pure, they could have used a gun-type bomb, but they didn't."

The President asked, "What the heck is a gun-type bomb.”

Dr. Jones looked again at the Secretary of Energy, and he nodded again. "Sir, the first bomb the US used on Japan was a gun-type, a U235 bomb, where two masses of U235 were slapped together. You can't do that with plutonium, if it has plutonium 240 in it. The second US bomb—and most of the bombs since those days have been implosion devices where you use explosives to crush a sphere of plutonium or rarely U235 and make it go supercritical. This happens much faster and avoids a premature chain reaction started by plutonium 240 fusion neutrons. It also takes less fissionable material. We have a close estimate on the amount of plutonium in the bombs.

“What we can do is fly over the trains with a scintillation counter and a neutron source. The neutrons will induce fission in the plutonium and we can see the fission events."

"How soon can you start?"

Dr. Jones passed this back to the Secretary of Energy. "Mr. President, neutron sources are used to log oil wells. We can borrow them from companies that do that service."

"Do you need an executive order to get them?"

"I don't think so. Everybody is really eager to cooperate."

"How long will it take to get the trains moving?"

"There is about 50,000 miles of main track where most of the trains are stuck," the Secretary of Transportation said. "In the first survey, we were getting 500 miles of track per helicopter per day. That's 100 'copter-days. We have 100 helicopters and scintillation counters."

"How many neutron sources are available?"

The Secretary said: "23 in the US. About the same number owned by US logger companies outside of the US. There are an unknown number in Russia."

"Get them."

"Twenty will clear the trains in five days."

"Do it faster if you can, speak with my authority. If you need help from my office, ask.”

"Call me when they find out what country the bombs came from.”

The meeting was adjourned.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Just a sec.” Noise level in the background faded as Chris pulled to the side of the road and stopped.

"Chris, this is Angel. With the mess, how hard are they working you?"

"Not at all yet, but if you want me, say so now."

"I want you.”

"You're in luck. They have me still on liaison assigned to the FBI."

"How soon can you get to Burbank Airport? Figure a week or 10 days working out of New Orleans."

"An hour. I have an overnight kit in my SUV. Two hours if you want me to pick up more socks."

"Stop by your house. Bring a suit too."

"Meet you at the American terminal. We have a 5 pm flight out."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Angel and Chris were seated in front of the first-class section with an empty seat behind them. "How did you get your office to spring for First Class?" Chris asked.

"Frequent flyer upgrade.” The conversation stayed on travel matters until they were well up in the air, heading east and staying north of air traffic still swarming around the Inland City crater. Angel looked around at the empty seat behind them. "It isn't in the news yet, but the train with the third bomb had been scanned before it went off."

Chris waited for Angel to continue. "The NEST boys didn't find it, but after it went off there were only a few containers that could have held the bomb."

"Oh, boy," Chris sighed. "Undetectable bombs. How did they do that?"

"I was at a Presidential briefing. Dr. Heather Jones, sharp physicist from DoE, thinks someone has figured out a way to make plutonium with no PU240 in it."

"How does that make them undetectable?"

"The PU240 that up till now contaminates all PU239 is unstable. It fissions and spits out, neutrons and other radiation and that's what the bomb detectors look for."

"So bombs without PU240 can't be detected?"

"Not with current detectors. DoE really wants to find one before it goes off so they can pick through the entrails."

"So what are we going to do?"

"Trace where these containers came from. I brought you along because chances are good the container came in on a ship. Plus FBI agents are not supposed to run around alone. To say we are shorthanded is to minimize the situation."

"Man, this reminds me of 9/11.” Chris sighed.

"Why?"

"They could only do it one time. Of the four they tried that day, only three worked. Then the passengers of the last plane heard what had happened to the others and solved the problem for good."

"True," Angel said. "Hijacking aircraft won't work again. But there are more than 15 million of these cargo containers coming in every year."

"What's in them?"

"Coming in? Furniture, clothing, auto parts, tires, toys, and computers. You name it.

"And bombs," Chris said sourly.

"And bombs," Angel agreed.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Neither Chris nor Angel got a lot of sleep on the plane. It was 2 a.m. local time before they were on the ground, 3:30 before they got to sleep, 9 a.m. before they left the hotel (with bags),10 by the time they reached the local FBI office and got an assignment, and a bit after 2 pm by the time they reached Electric Supply Company.

The container Electric Supply Company shipped had been in the middle of the third bomb crater area, but had a low priority because the container from there had not come off a ship.

"It hadn't been parked at our dock for five minutes when we got a call telling us the container had been sent to the wrong address and the shipper would send a truck to pick it up."

Earl, the manager of this Electric Supply Company office, was talking to Angel and Chris when they showed up asking about the container that had come to their dock the previous week. They were in his upstairs office and could look out over an acre of industrial shelving full of boxes. "They did."

After a pause, Earl said, "I didn't see it, but my dock manager, Manny, said it was packed full of stadium lights in boxes. We didn't have an order for them. Hang on a minute.” He used an intercom to the deck to call Manny, who came up to the office in a few minutes.

"Manny, these gentlemen wanted to know what was in the container we shipped back last week."

"Was there something missing? We just closed it back up and put a seal on the container. Didn't touch anything."

Angel reassured him. "No, we just wondered what you saw.”

“It was full of boxes of stadium lights, big ones. There was an inflated air bag on one side to keep the boxes from shifting.”

"Remember the name on the boxes?"

"Luma-something. Luminol, maybe?"

"Any address on the boxes?"

"Chicago. No street name. I remember the boxes said ‘made in China.’ Damn shame. Less and less is made here."

"Can you remember another container like this?"

"Yes and no. About once a year we get one shipped here that should go to another branch, and once we got one for a competitor on the other side of town, but nothing previous from a company we don’t do business with."

"Did you know the driver who picked it up?"

"No. It wasn't for us, wasn't one of our POs, so the computer wouldn't let us receive it. Since we hadn't received it, we couldn't generate any outgoing paperwork.” Manny scratched his head reflectively. "He did show me an order to pick it up.”

"Can you describe the driver?” Chris asked.

"Mexican looking, but no accent. Tats on his arms. No hair. Homeboy, maybe 30, 35. Heavyset, but not overweight. Looked like he works out, but a lot of drivers look buff from moving cargo."

Further questions didn't develop any more information. "If you think of something else, give us a call," Angel said, handing him a card.

Manny went back to the loading dock. After Earl escorted the two agents out, he walked back to the loading dock. "Manny, what the hell was that about?" looking at the card. "The FBI won't get involved for a container of stadium lights."

"Earl," Manny looked down at his feet. "I don't know, and I don't want to know, but three days after that container started back to Chicago a freakin' container train blew up 200 miles north of here. They think we had a nuke parked at our dock.”

Earl turned a greenish shade and sat down hard on Manny's wasted office chair.

"Omigod," he said softly.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Chris drove and Angel spent time on the phone with the Chicago FBI office. By the time they reached the airport with intention to fly to Chicago, the Chicago office had determined the address for the shipping container was deserted. That made flying to Chicago pointless.

So Angel and Chris flew to Washington. Angel knew Heather from a previous investigation. They met in a MacDonald’s in Arlington, not far from where Heather lived. The place was almost deserted. With nukes going off, people were staying home, not that staying home made them safer.

“Dr. Jones, this is Chris Hobbs, retired CIA, reactivated, and on loan to the FBI. I met him during a terrorist investigation, the one where the LPG tanker burned out a chunk of a freeway maze. We were just in Louisiana tracking the container that was right in the center of the last blast. It was being shipped back to Chicago when it went bang.”

Heather, who had not met many CIA agents, looked at Chris with some interest. She saw a kind of craggy looking guy, who either worked out or was a high testosterone type who stayed in shape without much working out. For a first guess, he might be 45 or 50. The thing that hit her was that he smelled good.

“Chicago?” She said, forcing her thoughts back on business. “That’s bizarre. Who could be behind the bombs and why would they go to the trouble to make us think they are being shipped in?”

Chris commented, “If we can answer either question, the answer to the other one will likely be obvious.”

Heather thought about the situation for a bit. “The President himself is involved in this investigation. It seems like a good idea to keep this information to ourselves for the moment. Will that cause you any trouble, Angel?”

“No. Not if the President is involved.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Mr. President, Dr. Heather Jones is on the line. She says it's important."

"Anything from that young woman is important. Put her on."

"Mr. President, because we flew over and photographed the third train, we had only a few containers to trace for the one that held the bomb."

"Go on."

"It may be these bombs are originating inside the US rather than being shipped in. The last one—and maybe all of them—came from Chicago."

"That's crazy! They were headed the wrong way!"

"We think the one that blew up the last train had come from Chicago and was being shipped back. That’s from an FBI and CIA team who talked to me this morning.”

"Where in Chicago?"

"Still running it down, but it looks like it was a shell corporation that's gone."

There was a considerable silence. "So someone is trying to make it look like these bombs came from outside the US?"

"That seems to be the case with the last one—maybe all of them."

"Dr. Jones, how large are these bombs?"

She hesitated. "The US made bombs small enough to fit in an 8-inch artillery shell, these fit in an 8 by 8 by 40 foot shipping container. I can't say much else without getting a look at one of them."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

CHAPTER 8 MORE

"I am looking at CNN right now.” The President took a breath and, dropping the tone of his voice, said, "What the hell is going on with those substations?"

"Sir," said the Marine Corps colonel who had answered the phone. "We don't know more than you do, only that over 400 substation transformers blew up.” He paused. "We assume sabotage. We'll get ATF and FBI people on site soonest, but they're all busy with the nukes.”

As it turned out, Daniel Breakwater of the Chicago Bomb Squad found the first dud. As he explained later to Heather: "The power engineer told me the grid almost went down with all the load loss. The power company managed to cut generation, so there were a few places out there where the lights were still on. I looked at two wrecked transformers to get an idea of where they were attacked—gaping holes blown in the middle of the tops. Had to get up on a fire truck ladder to see them. Then we went off to one of the few that had not blown. Had to call out another fire truck to get up high enough to see the top, and there was this Frisbee-looking thing in the same place as the holes on the other transformers."

"And?"

"The choice was a dud or it hadn't gone off yet. So I got the power boys to shut off the transformer. Boy, I can tell you, they were unhappy. We borrowed some x-ray film and a radiation source from the pipe-welding shop where my brother-in-law works. We got a sheet of x-ray film over it and stuck the source inside the transformer. Man was that a mess, they had to drain out a couple of hundred gallons of transformer oil. After we got a picture, I put on a flak jacket, leather pants, earplugs, safety glasses, a motorcycle helmet, and tried to move it with a stick. Wouldn't move. By that time, they found another dud over on the East side. The power company guys were about equally freaked out by my suggestion we cut it out with a torch which would have set the transformer on fire or have it go off."

"So what did you do?"

"Whacked it off with the end of an 8-foot 2 x 4. Sucker was glued down."

"Geez, that took nerve!"

"Not really. I'd seen what the other ones did. I’ve been that close to that much C4 going off before and it mostly would have gone down."

"So what did the x-rays show?"

"The one taken in place didn't show a lot other than an embedded cell phone. So we cleared out a hospital x-ray unit and got some high resolution pictures. The x-ray tech who made the shots suggested we do a CT scan while we were there. FBI and ATF are looking at them right now. It's a GPS cell phone, one of those low-standby-current ones. It's hooked up to a solar-cell charger and a loop of wire that might be feeding off the transformer leakage."

"So it could have been there for weeks?"

"Years, even.”

"Oh my. Any idea why it didn't go off?"

"Probable the phone failed, but that's the wrong question."

"Oh?"

"Why did 250 of them go off here and 150 in New England go off within a minute or two of 4 pm here and 5 pm in New England? It's clear they were meant to be detonated by a cell phone call. Was this connected to the train in Louisiana that got nuked this afternoon?"

"Probably, we turned off GPS at 3 pm Central time. The train went off at 4."

"Well, there's more news. A warehouse full of them went off about two hours after you turned off GPS. Maybe another two or three thousand of them, and a white van full of them and two guys blew up in The Loop about the same time."

"It won't make page three outside of Chicago, what with three nukes going off.”

(Later)

"Mr. President," Heather said, "We now think there might be two groups, one behind the nukes and the other behind the substation attacks. But they might have been connected, using the same or similar cell phone detonators."

"Go ahead."

"It looks like the substation attack was premature, set off by accident when we turned off the GPS.”

"Why do you think so?"

"Because there were thousands more of them had not yet been planted."

"Who did it?"

"The FBI will give it to you officially. It looks like an al-Qaeda-type operation, which is weird. They usually try to kill people not infrastructure."

"And the nukes?"

"That's not obvious. In fact, the transformer attacks seem to have been triggered too soon by turning off GPS."

"Too soon?"

"There are 50,000 substation transformers in the US. From the size of the Chicago warehouse blast, they had thousands more transformer wreckers to plant. By accident, we seemed to have set them off when they had mined only about 400 transformers. The last nuke went off when we turned off GPS. The substation group apparently didn't expect that to happen, so their gadgets went off before they had many planted."

"So what now?"

"We clean up the mess. The power companies are talking about rewinding some of the transformers where they sit. They are talking about moving some from places where they can to cover an area from other substations."

"How long is this going to take?"

"The last people should get limited power back in six to eight weeks. Full power is going to take three months. That assumes ramp up of the EPRI HF transformer production."

"I know I should not ask, but what the heck's an 'EPRI HF transformer'?"

"I had to get a briefing myself. EPRI is 'Electric Power Research Institute.” They developed a transformer that shifts the 60-Herz-power frequency to 60,000 Hertz, transforms the voltage down, and converts it back to 60 Hertz. Takes a lot less iron and copper they tell me."

"One more question, Heather. What's a 'Hertz'?"

"A Hertz is one cycle per second. Power line voltage is 60 Hertz; it used to be called 60 cycles per second.”

The President gave a sigh. "It is disturbing to have to rely so much on other peoples' knowledge."

"Scientists and related engineers make poor politicians. I can't think of one who made a name in politics. Carter and Hoover were engineers, not scientists, but neither of them was considered great politicians."

"How's the train inspection coming?"

"We should fly over the last in the morning. No more nukes found so far, which is sad in a way. I would sure like to see how someone constructed them. Not to mention keeping one from going off.”

At the cabinet meeting next afternoon, the Secretaries of Energy and Transportation gave reports similar to Dr. Jones's. The Secretary of the Treasury gave a first estimate of what percentage of the GNP the train bombs and substation attacks would cost. The Secretary of Transportation said the country would probably avoid food riots if the Inland City shoofly (bypass) was built in time.

The fallout had gone southeast, so the railroads were driving a corridor through damaged housing a few miles north of the old line. They would worry about the property issue later. He gave the floor back to the DoE Secretary, who talked about plans to scrape up the highest fallout zones in Inland City and bury them. The idea was to keep the rains from leaching them into the groundwater.

"In a way we were lucky the bomb went off into a rainstorm. The fallout concentrated into a relatively small area, but some of it is going to run downstream to LA. How much depends on how much rain they get and how soon.” He mentioned a cleanup cost estimate which caused the Secretary of the Treasury blanch and take notes.

"Blast Two: most of the fallout stayed in the tunnel, and what did not contaminated a few hundred acres of ground right outside. Staff is still trying to decide how to keep the radioactive isotopes from moving downhill into the local water supply. We may have to build an ion-exchange plant and operate it for several decades. Blast Three, most of the fallout came down on the west side of the Mississippi, though there is a big hot spot on the east side. There just isn't much we can do to clean up radioactive swamps, but after the first pulse the Mississippi's high flow will dilute the fallout. There may be too much bio concentration to eat fish from the river and Gulf for a few years."

He sat down. The H & HS Secretary tried to make a joke: "And the good news is?"

The weary secretary didn't get up but said, "Actually, there is good news. The fallout from the three bombs is only a small fraction of Chernobyl, and they survived. It could have been a lot worse if whoever did it had put them in cobalt cases. Just hope there are no more of those things.”

The Secretary of Defense muttered: "Is there any doubt?" On that cheery note, the cabinet meeting broke up and the members filed out except for the Secretary of DHS. A word to the Secret Service guards brought in John Shafter, head of the Secret Service and Doug Hunter. Hunter was the head of the head of the Whitehouse protection Secret Service.

"Mr. President," the Secretary said, "I am told you may need some help from the Secret Service outside of their usual duties."

"That's the case John."

"Is it related to those trains?"

"Yes."

"How many agents will you need sir, and how long?" This came from John Shafter.

"A few for a not more than six weeks or two months. And some logistical support for a tiger team."

"Do I want to know more?" asked the Secretary?

"No.” The President said.

"Gentlemen," intoned the Secretary, "the situation is so bad the President has declared martial law. I expect you to continue your normal duties, but in this business, whatever it is, you are under the direct orders of the President. Is that clear enough?

"Yes Sir," they both said.

[section where zoning is mentioned as the reason for the attack]

Two days later Heather and Angel were in the President's office. Heather spoke first:

"Crazy as it may seem from the other evidence, the nuclear and substation attacks may be related after all. On a hunch, we flew a search pattern around the warehouse where the unused transformer killers had been stored. The operator picked up a blip on their way out to refuel. It looks like there is a 4th bomb."

"Oh God.” The President put his head in his hands. "What do we do? Evacuate?"

"I want a look at the bomb.” Heather said. "Without a look we won't know where they are coming from. I think a raid to capture and disarm it is worth the risk. The fact it didn't go off when we turned off GPS indicates it might not be armed."

The President looked at Angel as if to get another opinion.

"Dr. Jones is right. Worst case the team gets vaporized along with a square mile of warehouses, best case we get the bomb. But if we go get it without an evacuation, we are going to have to keep it secret."

"Hang the politics, right now I don't want this job another term anyway. When can you do it?

"Tonight.” Heather and Angel said together.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Dr. Formoq had a problem. Alexavier had ordered the bomb detonated, but with GPS off, the bomb could not be powered up without going off at once. Dr. Formoq had pulled the crate for the 4th bomb open and put a bulb in place of the blasting cap. On, flash. On, flash. Dr. Formoq's conditioning had not been for suicide and he longed for more brain stimulation. Think, damn it. Ah, his laptop had a mode to call it and fire a destructive charge to destroy the control room from which he had managed the bombs. Dr. Formoq locked up the warehouse and left for his safe house.

An hour later, he came back with the laptop disconnected from the thermite charge intended to destroy it. As he came back, he realized something was wrong. There were too many slovenly dressed but clean-shaven bums on the street. A block before the warehouse he turned and after going a mile with no sign of being tailed, he retraced his route. (He was spotted by a traffic camera Chris was watching.) How had they found the 4th bomb? TCMS had been so careful. Well, there shouldn't be anything in the bomb to lead them back to TCMS. The parts were made in China except for the plutonium and people who thought they were working for al-Qaeda reprogrammed the detonator cell phones in Morocco.

Dr. Formoq's safe house had been chosen with care. His Wi-Fi signal came from a motel across the street. He spent a few minutes plugging the laptop back into the destruction charge that would vaporize it when the time came, picked up a packed carry-on case, and walked to the metro. Chris got a photo of him on the way.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Dr. Jones, and Angel, along with Daniel and a dozen FBI agents broke into the warehouse. They went in armed to the teeth, but the warehouse was deserted. Outside passes with a counter and a neutron source had pinpointed the location of the bomb to a few feet. It wasn't needed because there was only one crate on that side of the warehouse and it was clearly broken open.

"It looks like someone already disarmed it," Daniel said looking at the pulled out wires.

Several hours later Dr. Jones had to agree. "Son of a bitch," she said, "This is both the most and the least sophisticated bomb design on record."

"How so?" Daniel asked. Angel and Chris had left, looking for the responsible parties. They were alone, the other FBI agents not wanting to be any closer than they had to be to a catastrophe.

"From the neutron count, the plutonium has less than 1/100th of the plutonium 240 of the best grade the US ever made. That's amazing must have been made a new way because the US government never made any that pure. You could build a U 235 gun type bomb with stuff this good, but they didn't.” Nuclear weapons design was out of Daniels experience so Heather had to explain when he looked at her with raised eyebrows.

"Plutonium 240 spits out neutrons, which make a slow gun device explode as a fizzle before the masses are fully together.” She pointed to the x-ray picture. "That why the Manhattan project developed implosion weapons. This dark spot is the hollow plutonium core and a uranium tamper; it is “levitated” which is to say there is a space between the aluminum ‘pusher’ and the uranium tamper. The big halo is an explosive sphere around the aluminum.”

“The other focus has a sphere, which is most likely, some kind of flash power. Light from the flash bounces off the ellipsoid and detonates light sensitive explosive. Does it all at once or within a few nanoseconds over its entire surface. The design is like one described by Dr. Winterberg in _Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices. Except he proposed using a flash of soft x-rays from a fission fizzle to ignite a thermonuclear bomb.” Dr. Jones had a slight edge of hysteria in her voice.

"I don't understand why you are so upset.” Daniel wondered.

"Look at this thing! It's simple. It's cheap. Any two-bit terrorist outfit can build them, you don't need the resources of a state except for the plutonium, and I don’t know where they got it. All the previous bomb designs used elaborate electronics to set off the implosion from points all over on the outer surface. They needed elaborate fast circuits to do so plus complicated explosive lenses to bend the explosive wave into a spherical collapse.

“This thing makes do with flash powder from a fireworks solute and an elliptical reflector.” She took a deep breath. "I bet they went to an implosion device to save plutonium. However they made the plutonium, it must be hard to come by. Implosion lets you get results from less than critical amounts. They are a little over 6 kg each so whoever is behind the four bombs made at least 25 kg.

"OK.” Daniel said, more or less following the explanation. "What do we do now?"

"What I would like to do is back over the horizon, upwind. Taken apart it’s not a problem but I am not keen on doing that in a city."

Daniel pointed out three of the bombs had been shipped thousands of miles without going off.

"True.” Heather said. "You have any idea of what kind of explosive that is?" They had run a bore scope in beside the monofilament nylon that held the flash powder and implosion sphere at their respective focuses. "Have you seen black explosive before?"

Daniel took another look as they move to the end hole. "Black spray paint would be my guess, not explosive.” He said after a while. "You can see over-spray on the nylon support strings. Shine the flashlight in the top support hole, please.” Dr. Jones did and Daniel reported he could see a parting line around the middle of the explosive sphere. “It looks like the only thing they had to do to make it light sensitive was black spray paint.”

"OK, the choices are still to ship it out or take it apart here.” Daniel said.

Heather dithered a bit more "Can you get a sample of the HE sphere?"

"I think so but we will have to chop into the reflector."

"Go for it."

Daniel dug out some aircraft shears and starting from one of the string support holes chopped a hole in the aluminum reflector large enough to stick in his arm. "Hand me a sample bag" Dr. Jones rummaged in the tool kit and found what Daniel wanted. After a minute, he pulled out with a tiny flake of the explosive, which he put in the bag. "The support nylon was cast in and I broke a bit off by where the nylon went into the sphere. Might be C4 but it looks like plain old TNT. Gas chromatography will tell for sure.”

Daniel took the bag outside and gave instructions to a Chicago police officer about what to do with it. The officer left at once.

Daniel came back. "The lab should give us an answer in an hour or two. Let's open up the other end.” Shortly there was another big hole in the flash end of the ellipsoid. Daniel put in a plastic container and gently poked a hole in the paper sphere with a non-sparking tool. The tool came out covered with a dark powder.

"It's flash powder.” Daniel said. "Finest quality German black 3 micron aluminum and either potassium chlorate or perchlorate. I think we can drain it out.” Taking a sample in another bag he drained the rest of the flash powder into a plastic bowl.

Dr. Jones and Daniel walked outside through the nervous FBI agents. Daniel poured the flash on the street in a 20-foot long line. Then thinking about it he poured out a teaspoon of power 40 feet away and dropped a match on it. There was a woof and a blinding flash.

"Wow, this is hot stuff.” Borrowing a cigarette from one of the "bums" Daniel said. "Guard your eyes folks.” He flicked a lit cigarette into the long line of flash powder. Whump! The flash powder lit up the street for blocks. Shaking his head, he and Dr. Jones went back to the now defunct bomb.

Daniel got a cell phone call. "RDX and TNT, Dr. Jones, high on the RDX.”

“Not surprising,” Heather remarked, “Cyclotol, is a high RDX/TNT mixture. The bomb designer used it in several early US weapons. I’ve had to replace it in close to 1000 bombs.” This impressed Daniel. Nuclear weapons were out of his league.

Daniel said, “We can split the explosive sphere if you want, but the flash gone, the RDX would take a rifle bullet to set it off."

"I don't know if it would release plutonium if we opened it up. Let's put it on a truck and get it out of here. Without the flash power it’s not going to go off"

They closed up the crate, opened the cargo doors at the back of the warehouse, and, using a pallet jack, moved the crate into an air ride van borrowed from a moving company. It was headed for a deep tunnel under the Nevada desert.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"From the fact there was nothing on the news it must have gone OK Dr. Jones."

"Mr. President, somebody defused the bomb had before we got there. We still don't know who did it, but we do know why the last one went off. The Quantico cell phone programmers tell us the firing circuit goes off after an hour of no GPS signal or at once, if you try to start it with no GPS signal. Very similar code to the one we took off the transformer wreckers.”

There was a pause as the President digested this.

"You still think we still might be dealing with different groups?"

"That's a possibility, in which case the two warehouses being three miles apart was just dumb luck for our side. It's hard to tell from the cell phone Java code. One group might have stolen the code from the other or they both got it from a common source.

"So where is the bomb?"

"A hundred and fifty miles down the road to Nevada where some DoE experts will take it apart deep under a mesa. We shipped it out after pulling its teeth and deciding it would not go off en route. That reminds me, there’s a bomb tech on the Chicago Police force, Daniel Bridgewater, who deserves recognition. Same guy who got us the first transformer bomb."

"That might be a problem."

"I know. Secret ceremony, maybe. We passed off the raid in Chicago as an illegal fireworks factory. The bomb tech and I were the only ones who saw the guts of the thing. We have a problem."

"You're telling me?"

"I mean we've really have a problem, two of them."

"Speak."

"First, the plutonium isn't ours. It isn't the Russians', the Brits', the French, the Indians', or the Pakistanis'. It might be Chinese, but I doubt it. It wasn't made by any process we know about. It's something like 100 to 300 times better than any the US ever made back in the days when we were making bombs."

"Space-alien plutonium—check."

"Second, the bomb design is dead simple. Three or four kilograms of flash powder at one focus of an eight-foot-long ellipsoid, sphere of explosive containing a plutonium pit at the other focus. Set off the flash with a squib or a blasting cap. The light from the flash bounces from the inside of the ellipsoid and sets off the explosive, all over and all at once. The plutonium pit gets crushed and goes prompt critical. I have pictures. The holes are from us cutting into it for a sample and to pull out the flash powder.”

The President looked blank.

Dr. Jones went on. "Other than the plutonium—and we still don't know where it came from—the price of a nuke has just fallen to where an LA street gang could afford one for a turf war."

The President looked stricken. "So how many people know about this?"

"Too many: you, me, the bomb tech. But we are not the problem, they are, whoever the heck they are.”

"Any results in that direction?"

"Chris and Angel managed to track down someone probably involved with the last bomb. He left a laptop plugged into a firebomb, a skeleton seated in a chair, and the laptop plugged into a phone line.”

"A skeleton?"

"So when the room burns we will think the laptop user burned. We think the guy was using the laptop's webcam, but analysis of the outgoing packets shows no frames, so he probably failed to start the webcam program.”

"You went way over my head.”

"Mine too, but what we are waiting for is a phone call to the laptop. When it sets off the thermite, we are going to grab the laptop out of there and let the house burn down."

Dr. Formoq rode the Metro to O'Hare. From there he called an airline that only flew out of Midway and made a reservation for the next day, then checked into the hotel on a fake German passport. Next morning he took the shuttle to Midway and flew back to Inland County, landing at an airport 75 miles to the west of Inland City.

Freeway traffic was way down, even with the bypass north around the crater. Nobody from LA wanted to be anywhere close to the radioactive mess. Refuges with bright yellow "Decontaminated" wristbands) were all over the area. They were in hospital gowns or paper coveralls and moving into temporary housing or to refugee centers. Big as the Inland City mess was, the US had seen more people displaced when Katrina hit New Orleans.

Arriving at the TCMS compound, Dr. Formoq called his laptop, safe in the knowledge that the FBI would not follow up a call from a TCMS number.

Angel was trying to keep the stakeout known to as few as possible, so he had just traded off with Chris when the laptop’s phone rang. They had pulled out the igniter so Angel was able to grab the calling phone number and stick the laptop in a metal lined bag. Standing outside the room he lit a flare and tossed it into the pile of thermite bricks. There must have been over 200 pounds of high-grade thermite in the room. The house became fully involved in less than a minute. Angel had his cell out thinking about calling 911 when he heard sirens in the distance, so, walking down the street, he called Heather's cell.

She answered at once. "Hi, Angel.”

"The goodies are in the bag.”

"Good. How long?"

"There's a military jet waiting for me at O'Hare. Say 3-4 hours to Quantico."

"Call me when you get anything."

---

"Heather?"

"Yeah. Let me turn on a light, Angel.

"The laptop phone was called from a TCMS headquarters phone number.”

"Oh, shit. How about the rest of the stuff on the laptop."

"They're still looking at it, but it seems to be the one that tracked the bombs getting reports from the GPS cell phones. Strangely, there does not seem to be any contact with the first bomb that went off in Inland City.”

"OK. Impress on the geeks the President needs flexibility to deal with this problem out of the press.”

It was excessively late or excessively early, depending on your view, but orders are orders. Heather called the President on his newly installed secure phone number. He answered at once. "How little sleep does he need?" Heather thought.

"Yes, Dr. Jones."

"The firing phone call you asked to be informed about came from the TCMS compound. They didn't make any effort to hide it.” When the President didn't speak after a long pause, Heather went on. "Angel tells me the FBI investigation into the Inland City nuke was leading in the same direction. The crater was offset, both rails bent to the south, so the first bomb might not have been on a train. A zoning dispute with the County seemed to have been the cause, so of course the FBI backed off.”

"Of course. I don't suppose they have any idea who in TCMS was involved."

"Presumably, the Supreme Leader, Alexavier and a certain physics guy, Dr. Formoq probably a few dozen others, chemists, machinists and the like. Angel tells me the FBI's files on TCMS were ordered destroyed years ago, and they are not permitted by the Justice Department and the courts to gather any records on TCMS at all.”

"It's not without precedent," the President said. "The Mafia kept the FBI off their backs for decades by blackmailing Hoover, and Hoover blackmailed everyone else. Any progress on where they got the plutonium?"

"No, I don't suppose we could fly our detectors over their compound."

"No. They would have the courts issuing injunctions before you landed. Bad enough the public thinks al-Qaeda bombed the trains. If the news media finds out it was domestic…. I don't want this to spread out more than it has. I want you, Angel, his CIA partner, what's his name? Chris? and the bomb guy from Chicago to meet me at the White House at 10 this evening. Use the Blair House entrance."

"Yes, sir.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ CHAPTER 9 A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

"Mr. President."

"Mr. Ambassador" and they shook hands

The President motioned the Secret Service agents to leave them. They walked toward the couches, but before they got there, the Ambassador started:

“Mr. President, nuclear bombs used on US cities are intolerable. Next it will be Chechnyans using terror nuclear bombs on Moscow.” He paused, "We are ready and willing to do what has to be done."

"Sit down Andre, it not that simple.” Andre started to protest, but the President waved him into silence."

"We think, no, we are sure a US based cult made the bombs."

"Islamic?"

"No, though they might have been working with the al-Qaeda splinter that blew up the substation transformers. The three that went off led to us finding a 4th one that did not."

Andre was startled. "You captured a terrorist bomb? My country's experts need to examine it!"

"That can be arranged; though after they see it you may regret having them look. The bomb greatly surprised our experts who still don't know where they obtained plutonium of exceptional quality. But the capture of the 4th bomb led to a cult the US government can't control."

"This cult is responsible?"

“We're sure now. They destroyed Inland City to attack a government agency that controls land use. Insane as that sounds, it has happened before. Aum Shinrikyo's first use of saran gas was for the same reason. mprobable,

Footnote from Wikipedia

"On the night of 27 June 1994, the cult (Aum Shinrikyo) carried out a chemical weapons attack against civilians when they released sarin in the central Japanese city of Matsumoto, Nagano. With the help of a converted refrigerator truck, members of the cult released a cloud of sarin which floated near the homes of judges who were overseeing a lawsuit concerning a real-estate dispute which was predicted to go against the cult. This Matsumoto incident killed eight and harmed 500 more.[30] Police investigations focused only on an innocent local resident, Yoshiyuki Kouno, and failed to implicate the cult at the time. It was only after the Tokyo subway attack that Aum Shinrikyo was discovered to be behind the Matsumoto sarin attack."

The other two bombs were to obscure their action and make it look like an external terrorist attack.  We cannot let this become public."

"My God, they killed 100,000 people and you can't destroy them?"

"No. It’s like Aum Shinrikyo having the power to force the Japanese government to fall.

"How could this be?"

"They have power over the courts and they control too many highly placed people by blackmail, bribery, and many of them by magnetic mind rewards.

"Magnetic mind rewards?"

"Trans cranial magnetic stimulation."

"Ah. The KGB had a group working on that."

"You may wake up one day to find the KGB group is in control of your government Andre."

"That's why I said ‘had.’ We realized it was too dangerous and disbanded them. Had it been back in the Cold War days we might not have. "

"That was sensible. Unfortunately, we don't have the power to shut down TCMS. It's a historical problem dating back to the founding of this county by religious fanatics."

"Were they also responsible for the transformer attacks?"

"We don't think so. That seems to have been an al-Qaeda splinter group, poorly timed, since less than 10% of their stock of transformer wreckers was in place when we shut off GPS. That caused them and the third terrorist bomb to detonate.

Andre returned to an earlier point in the conversation. "Both of our governments know what it will take to end this Islamic terrorism business. Imagine your southern border of your country ten times as long and the county beyond your border filled with suicidal religious maniacs."

The President nodded, the grim reality had been understood for a decade. The equally grim reality was that a government which took such awful steps probably would not survive. There was a lengthy silence as the President thought about the unthinkable.

Lapsing into full Ambassador Mode, Andre said, "My government is close to taking drastic action against the supporters of Islamic terrorism.”

The President just nodded.

"On my own, it would seem to be a wise move for your government to take equally drastic moves against this mind control cult.” He paused, looking thoughtful and choosing his words carefully, "Perhaps we could be of service helping to deal with each other's problem."

"That's possible.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ CHAPTER 9 MISSION IMPROBABLE

The Secret Service agents who met them did not ask for ID or enter them into the visitor log. The agents escorted the group through the tunnels, and by narrow back stairs up to the President's personal study. It was a cozy fit. The President almost never had meetings there. The President himself dragged in an extra chair from his bedroom. One of the middle-aged female Secret Service agents, stayed with them. In a substantial violation of protocol, the President introduced her as Janice.

"You four and Janice here are the only people who know the nuclear half of our recent problems is due to TCMS, though there are others who suspect it. Most people are sure the nukes were an Islamic terrorist act like blowing up the substations. TCMS went to considerable trouble to get people to think so, shipping bombs from Chicago to the east coast, south coast, and blowing them up on the way back. We don’t know for sure about the Inland City blast, it might have been next to the tracks rather than in a container on the train because both tracks were blown south. Angel thinks the object of the first bomb was a vendetta against Inland County's zoning board. They met that morning and the other two were to mislead, but who's going to believe that?"

There was a murmur of agreement.

“We can’t go after TCMS. They have infiltrated the IRS, Justice, the State Department, and to some extent, DoE. Dr. Jones thinks that might be where they got the plutonium, from some off-the-books black research project."

"Like the US public, the Russians thought al-Qaeda or some spin off did both attacks instead of just the substation attack. After I told the Russian ambassador TCMS was behind the nukes, the Ambassador put President Pabukov on a video conference. He made a remarkable proposal that I accepted. TCMS wasn't even on their radar. They are now on a par with al-Qaeda.

The President went on. "We can't go after TCMS. They have too much power over the courts and frankly too much blackmail power over too many people in government. However, sometimes a person with two problems is better off than someone having only one. The nuclear attack accidentally aborted the larger part of the substation attacks.

"Four weeks from now, TCMS is having a mass meeting at the Megatorium in LA. All the leaders and 7,000 of their zombies will be there for the release of the Mark IX Trans Cranial Magnetic Stimulator.” He paused, and went on:

"What I am considering is repairing the fourth bomb and using it to blow of the lot of them to hell. Blame it on al-Qaeda. Advise me please."

None of them rejected the idea out of hand. After a few moments, Angel said. "To put it in the least favorable light, you are proposing the four of us blow up the Megatorium and kill thousands of TCMS cult members."

"Not exactly.” The President said. "I am proposing the four of you engage in a commando raid against an enemy who has already killed close to 100,000 of our citizens.

They were silent for a while digesting this. Finally, Angel spoke up again. "I suppose you have considered other options?"

"I have.” The President spoke gravely. "As Angel knows, the legal system is completely useless against TCMS. It is, as you all know, not our only problem. The Islamic terrorists who destroyed the substation transformers are a bigger problem, and long range their body count will be higher. The problem is an intractable culture where the population has grown with limited economic growth. The projections are for a pool of terrorists in the several millions, in the next decade including tens of thousands in the US. We have discussed and modeled the situation for years without a solution. To get them out of this mode will require cutting the Islamic population in half.

"That's a billion people," Heather said.

"That many are going to die anyway from famine over the next few years.” President Pabukov, our advisors, and I have discussed it over the last two years. Today, six hours ago, while discussing the nuclear attacks on the US he proposed how. I am willing to give orders to waste a few thousand TCMS members to prevent them from nuking more cities, or maybe just revenge for them killing 100,000 people and trashing the economy. He is willing to kill a billion by putting smallpox back into circulation."

"You aren’t worried about us talking?” Daniel asked.

"No. Nobody would believe you. Hell, nobody would believe me if I told the public TCMS was behind the nukes. TCMS is a religion, which puts them beyond reproach." He paused. “At least that is the situation at present.” He took a sip of water and brandy. "Practically everyone is sure al-Qaeda or some spin off did it. If I were to try to bring this out a ‘lone nut,’ possibly someone close, would assassinate me. TCMS would never be associated.”

"You paint a bleak picture Sir.” Angel said.

"It's been like this for decades. TCMS isn't the first cult to get a stranglehold on our government."

They refrained from asking. They looked at each other.

"The collateral damage could be up to half a million dead depending on which way the wind was blowing" Heather said.

The President made a motion of dismissal:

"That's nothing compared to what Pabukov proposed this afternoon. He offered to have an agent spray smallpox on the TCMS meeting, and he would spray it all over the Mideast a week or two later. I accepted his offer even though it won't solve our TCMS problem because too many of them would survive. Smallpox will cause upwards of billion deaths, mostly in the Mideast and Africa. That should put al-Qaeda out of business for decades before the population in Islamic countries rebounds. It will look like an al-Qaeda revenge act gone out of control, something they would do to TCMS for wrecking their timing on the substation attacks if only they knew."

Death on the scale of billions can be contemplated only as an intellectual exercise. It just does not register emotionally. Unless a person lost a loved one, the Holocaust, Pol Pol in Cambodia, or the Rwandan machete killings don't register.

"There are two practical considerations.” Daniel spoke up again. "Dr. Jones and I pretty much trashed the fourth bomb, cut big holes in the reflectors. They would have to be replaced, and I don't know if we could get a pair of 6 by 4 foot elliptical reflectors on short notice. The other problem is nukes and biological weapons don't work well together if you want to do both."

Chris mouthed ‘flash’ at Angel who nodded and Chris said. "Someone, maybe even TCMS, made 25 tons of flash powder out in the Arizona desert.” He sighed. "Angel found it a month ago in a shipping container we can't track because the container was smuggled in from Mexico. It's on a ranch west of Flagstaff. That much flash is six to ten times the bang Timothy McVeigh used to take down the Murrah Federal Building. Angel put a sensor on it in hopes he could figure out who made it, but as of yesterday nobody has touched it."

Heather said. "I know a half million deaths from blast and fallout is a drop in the bucket compared to what the Russian smallpox release will do. I understand something drastic has to be done, but given an alternative, I would rather not use a nuke."

"Angel?" the President said.

"A nuke is overkill, even half as much flash power would be enough."

They looked at each other again and nodded. Heather said. "You have yourself a team Mr. President, but only for the flash powder. We have had more than enough nukes go off."

"I am glad you have another way. That bothered me even though it's not as bad as not objecting to President Pabukov’s offer.

"China? India? Mexico? Chris asked.

"I don't know.” The President said. "This time next year the world may have only half the population it does now. Is smallpox better than famine or wars? Again, I don't know, but President Pabukov is going to thin out the Islamic populations on his southern boarders no matter what. The Russians have a more decisive culture than we do. And tons of weaponized smallpox."

Daniel spoke up again. "The four of us are not a large enough team to mix and deliver tons of flash powder."

"Recruit whoever you need.” The President said. "But try to keep this as closely held as possible."

"There is a chemical engineer/deputy sheriff in Arizona who already knows about the flash powder.” Angel said. Janice asked Angel for Max’s name and details.

"What support do we get?" Chris asked.

“We will square Angel being away with the FBI. Chris, you can go back to retired. DoE already has Dr. Jones on indefinite assignment to the White House. Janice can get Daniel temporarily assigned to the ATF or something. We will do whatever is needed for anyone you recruit.

"You will become temporary Secret Service agents. Money, fake ID, credit cards, transport, whatever you need. After the smallpox starts to spread . . . Angel, if the FBI wants to raid the TCMS compound in the confusion they can do it. With the TCMS leadership blown away, their lawyers and corrupt judges will lack direction.

Janice picked up a file folder and opened it. "Letters of marque for the four of you.” She passed out the letters embossed with their pictures and signed by the President.

The President spoke up. “It’s the first time since 1815 the US has issued letters of marque. The Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001 gave me the authority to issue them. I doubt anyone imagined such letters would be used against an internal enemy. Fortunately, the US never signed the 1856 Paris Declaration, which forbids such letters. I have no idea how they might be treated by the courts, but unless you make them public, which I hope is never needed, the question should never come up. Keep them safe.”

The letters were short. They authorized the four to act in the President's name to deal with nuclear terrorism in any way they saw fit. To each were clipped brand new Secret Service ID cards and three credit/debit cards.

Janice said, "The cards can be used to draw cash as you need it. If you need a lot, call the Secret Service office here and we will locate a bank in the area where you can draw large amounts of cash. Those phone numbers in with the cards are for the White House Secret Service office. The staff will also get you any help you need, transport, documents, shell companies you name it."

The President expanded on her remarks. "A satisfactory outcome of this business and you can keep the cards and draw $200k a year on them for life.” He continued. "If we meet again, do not try to remind me of this meeting tonight. After you leave, I am going to take a drug, scopolamine to be exact, and forget the last 12 hours. I simply could not play the role required of me if I remembered what I have started. Janice will provide cover for you. She will lead a team of Secret Service agents who will be doing advanced work for a speech I am supposed to give at the Megatorium in 5 weeks."

"Janice is also an MD. She will vaccinate you against smallpox on the way out."

Janice took the four down the back stairs to a medical treatment room in the basement. She broke a reconstitution vial after taking it out of the treatment room refrigerator. Dipping double-ended needles in the cowpox virus, she quickly vaccinated all four having the rest watch her closely. Then she dumped the needles into a sharps bucket and gave remaining six doses to Heather along with six needles. “You have at least one more on your team to vaccinate.”

"Shouldn't you vaccinate the President?” Heather asked.

"No.” Janice said. "When the epidemic starts, that will be soon enough. Probably do it on national TV. Incidentally, I know the Megatorium from leading security for Presidential speeches there. There were about 100 drums of water stashed under the stage. They date from long ago and are probably still there. If you pull the old drums out, nobody is going to notice new ones replacing them. You might have a use for DHS ID. I will expedite whatever you need.

https://losangelestheatres.blogspot.com/2017/03/warner-huntington-park-basement.html

In his office, the President wrote himself a note, taped it on his huge flat screen, and stood considering the pills in his hand for almost a minute. "The death of half a day.” He thought and washed them down with his leftover water and brandy. He undressed and went to bed before the "scop" affected him.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

None of the four spoke on the walk back. Secret Service agents had brought Heather's car around while they were underground so they got right in.

"Jeeze, that was weirder than an exploding tape. Did we really accept the mission?” Heather said as she headed to the motel where the three men were staying.

"When this is over we all might be looking for a way to erase the last year.” Angel said.

"I work for the toxicology people when it's a slow day in the bomb biz.” Daniel said. "There is nothing I know about that will wipe out a year of memory. But if he took it, the President's memory of the last 12 hours will be gone like a popped soap bubble. They used to give scopolamine to women in labor so they wouldn’t remember it."

None of them seems eager to take the leadership position so Heather finally said, "OK, we need cell phone detonators like the ones in the transformer bombs. We have to mix and move 25 tons of flash powder from Arizona to LA and stash it in the Megatorium. Who can drive an 18 wheeler?” It turned out Angel could and Daniel knew how because he sometimes drove heavy trucks to remove bombs.

Angel said, "Let's see if this White House contact is any use.” He called the number. Being this late, a duty officer answered. Angel identified himself only by his new Secret Service badge number. "We need heavy truck driver's licenses for me and (he gave Daniels badge number) so we can drive 18 wheelers, any state is fine. And four of us need to fly into Flagstaff. Can you arrange tickets?” Angel got a funny look on his fact. "OK" he said and hung up. "This job comes with some serious perks, any time after 9 am tomorrow there is a Lear Jet waiting for us at National.”

Angel called his contact at the Quantico lab. In spite of the late hour, he reached the people who were still examining the code on Dr. Formoq’s laptop, the cell phone taken off the 4th bomb and the transformer busters. Angel explained he needed a clone of Formoq’s laptop and three cell phones loaded with the detonation application “for a sting.” The lab was highly cooperative since they knew Angel was working on the nuclear bombs and the substation attack.

“Do you want the external connections as well? Long-life batteries?”

“Yes. Angel said.

“When do you need them?”

“A week would be fine.”

“Where do you want them?”

Angel thought about the logistics and requested overnight shipment to the Flagstaff FBI office.

Angel called Max on a secure connection. It wasn’t much past 9 pm in Arizona.

“Max, sorry to bother you at this hour.

“No problem. Wife is out for the evening. Someone moved the container?”

“No. However, the highest level of government constituted a tiger team to mix it and use it against the organization that made the train bombs. This is unconventional, but required by the odd circumstances. “

“Who is on the team?”

“Besides me, there is a CIA guy I have worked with, a bomb squad tech from Chicago, and a physics PhD high in DoE. We need help; you are the only one I can think of with pyrotechnical experience.”

There was a long silence on the phone.

“How long will this take?”

“Three or four weeks.”

There was a medium pause.

“OK, I have months of sick leave I could take.  When and where do we meet?”

“Tomorrow, after 10 am, meet at the Flagstaff airport, private terminal. We also need half a dozen blasting caps or squibs. Put your cell phone on airplane mode before you leave.”

Heather delivered the men to their motel, went home, packed, and ordered a van to take them all to the airport in the morning.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Omigod!” The President's alarm clock woke him up. He had a pounding headache.

Staggering out of bed, he took the strongest painkiller he dared and looked at himself in the mirror. "What the hell was I doing last night?" Had he tied one on? Even the dire meeting of yesterday morning with Dr. Jones seemed foggy. He could remember absolutely nothing from early afternoon on.

He resisted the thought of getting the White House doctor out of bed. But feeling he could not go back to bed until the painkiller kicked in, he quietly let himself into his private study...

His computer sensed movement, and the screen switched on. He sat down and stared, not at the screen, but at the post-it note on the screen. The note read,

"Last night you/I made a decision and issued orders. The orders were of such a horrific nature we could make no record of them, not even in our memory. Don't try to figure out what they were. The very survival of the US depends on you not knowing. I/you took 125 mg of scopolamine to wipe out the memory of last night. Destroy this note now.” It had his signature. There was a P.S. "In case you have any doubts who this is from, consider Mandy.”

The President turned white at the memory, peeled the note from the screen, and dropped it in a crosscut shredder. There was a brief whine, and paper fragments fell into the collection bin. He pulled out the bin and contemplated the small collection of paper shreds, took the bin into the bathroom, dumped it in the toilet and flushed.

"Good god," he thought. "I wonder what I could have ordered.” Ever since the days of Johnson and Nixon, the White House was wired for recording. He brought up the meeting minutes of the previous afternoon and evening. There were briefings on restoring power in the Northeast and Chicago before winter. The record ended at 10 p.m. Chances were the meeting happened between 10 pm and midnight. He could not help wondering what he had decided. Truman had made the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan on the record. What had he done? Better not think about it.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Chapter 11 MIXING

The pilot handed them a thick envelope. Shortly after 9:30 they were at the end of the runway, a pair of hulking jumbo jets behind them and a 737 ahead. The pilot was in a chatty mood. "They put us ahead of the big guys so we don't have to wait for the wingtip vortexes to blow off the runway. Oh, be sure your phones are in airplane mode.” After the 737 lifted off, the Lear 60 accelerated.

DC to Flagstaff is plenty of time to get up to "Lear jet country," in this case 51,000 feet where the sky is indigo with a few bright stars showing in midday. They were at altitude about a third of the trip.

Examining the contents of the envelope, they found a letter of marque for Max, setup burner cell phones with encryption. Also Secret Service ID badges for a second set of names, DHS and EPA ID, for all of them. Plus driver's licenses for Angel, Daniel, and Max to operate heavy trucks, and regular driver’s licenses under fake names for Heather and Chris.

There was also a lengthy explanation about the operation of the encrypted phones. It including instructions to put their personal phones in airplane mode or turn them off.

Landing in Flagstaff was hot due to the high altitude. Lear Jets land only slightly faster than passenger planes. The windows though are much closer to the ground. Heather and Daniel had not had the experience before. They were treated to the strange effect common to Lear Jet landings of feeling deceleration while the ground seem to be going faster and faster.

The Lear taxied to a stop at the private terminal on the northwest side of the runway. Max Green who had driven up from Tucson met them. In a corner of the private terminal, the team discussed what they needed to do over decent coffee. They briefed Max on their assignment and gave him his letter of marque, Secret Service identification and the credit/debit cards. They also gave him a burner encrypted phone that was in the morning envelope. Max understood the problem of investigations shut down by political pressure. It had happened to an investigation he knew where an investigation into politically powerful people had been nixed.

Max’s comment when he read his letter of marque was, “Wow. A license to kill. And you said the President wiped out his memory of signing them? “

Heather mentioned Janice, the Secret Service officer at the meeting who had handed them out. She knew. Moreover, they had the active support of the White House Secret Service office.

“Still,” Dr. Jones mused, “I don’t know if we should carry them or put them in somewhere safe, like a safety deposit box. My guess is no investigations are going to happen, certainly not before TCMS is trashed and maybe never. Speaking of keeping investigations down, Chris, can your technical contacts get the record of the container being found wiped?” Chris thought it was possible (and it was).

Max and Daniel discussed the problem of mixing tons of flash powder without having it accidentally detonate.

Max had given the mixing problem some thought. “I only looked at one of the drums of chlorate. Don’t know about the other drums, but that one was free flowing like fine dry sand. What we need is one of those bulk pneumatic loading transport trailers, the kind used for flour and cement. Those things stir the contents with air. I think we can get away with making that much, though I never knew of an amateur fireworks crew making more than a few pounds at a time.”

Dr. Jones, again defaulting to organizer, asked. “OK, where do we get one? What else do we need?

Max answered. “We will need a tractor to haul the mixer out to the container and to haul the container over to LA. We will also need a front-loader type forklift with a drum attachment to lift the drums and dump them in the mixer. We can most likely rent a front loader in Flagstaff, but the mixer. . . I doubt there is one closer than Phoenix.”

Max dug out his laptop and connected via local Wi-Fi. A few minutes of searching located a used truck operation in Phoenix with a few large pneumatic loading trailers and several available tractors.

Dr. Jones who had been taking notes, and generating a PERT chart on a napkin with a sharpie asked. “What else do we need to do?”

Max and Daniel hit it off quickly due to their shared pyro background. They made it clear they needed to test the flash and detonation system. Angel told them about the cell phones and a control laptop that was on the way. Max had brought a handful of blasting caps from the mine he worked at and half a dozen pyrotechnic squibs.

Angel mentioned coordinating with the sheriff to get the rancher to stay out of the way. Daniel suggested a cover story that they were treating a batch of illegal chemicals to make them safe. (They were, of course, doing the exact opposite.) Max noted the fine aluminum powder would fit in between the grains of chlorate leaving perhaps ten drums they could fill with bottled water and MRE. Heather added labels and drum seals to the PERT chart and shopping list.

Looking at the PERT chart, Heather added a day to drive to the Megatorium via Barstow and a day to pull out the existing drums and replace them with the drums full of flash powder.

“I think we want to have this done a week, or better ten days before the meeting. We may need a letter from DHS to the Megatorium management arranging to replace the out of date drums. I can get such a letter from Janice.

“That means we have about 15 days to buy a mixer trailer, mix the flash, reload it in the drums, put the drums back in the container. Then we have to drive to LA, swap the drums, put in observation cameras, and set up somewhere to detonate it.”

Chris said, “We can use my house. It’s big enough and no credit card records. We are going to have to rely on political pressure keeping official investigations down. Unofficial investigations by news people will be the biggest threat. Still, don’t use your real identify, cell phones, or personal credit cards. I think if any law enforcement people follow up the Secret Service credit cards and run into a federal money link they will stop. There are a few people who suspect TCMS was involved with the nukes. They aren’t going to complain if TCMS gets wiped out. . . .”

The other four looked carefully at the time estimates, added a task or two, and agreed.

Max who was familiar with PERT planning in the mining business asked Heather where she learned to do it.

With a bleak look, she told them, “Two years of designing nuclear weapon refurbishments at Lawrence Livermore Lab. Then DoE moved me to Washington to be a technical advisor to the Secretary.”

“Moving right along, we have to split up. Max and Angel need to go to Phoenix to buy a mixer trailer and a tractor. Locally we need to rent a place to stay and a forklift with a drum dump attachment. Which reminds me, what are we going to do with the mixer afterwards? Same question for the container and the tractor.”

These questions required a coffee refill. The idea finally emerged was to make up a story about EPA treating the contents. They would give the rancher the mixer, the container and the tractor “in compensation” for finding the container and using the rancher’s land for the “cleanup.” In fact, they should buy and register the equipment in the rancher’s name to compensate using his land temporarily.

Angel called the sheriff’s deputy he had met and the deputy introduced Angel, Max, Heather, Chris, and Daniel to the rancher over the phone. (The deputy used their EPA identities). They set up a time late afternoon for a visit, rented a car on one of the cards and a 5 bedroom furnished house for a month on a certified check they got using one of the debit cards. That evening Heather vaccinated Max. The laid out their letters of marque on the kitchen table and each took pictures of them with their personal cell phones, being sure they were on airplane mode.

The visit went well. The rancher had no problems with their story of how they could spend money for vehicles but getting rid of them was a problem. He agreed to register and license the frame under the container and to take title for the pneumatic mixer and the tractor. When insurance came up, he said his fleet insurance covered new vehicles as long as he reported them in 30 days. The rancher gave them the details needed for the titles and insurance.

Max and Angel took off early the next morning for the truck and trailer dealer. By noon, they had picked out, a fairly new Kenworth tractor and a Beall trailer. A local bank had no problem issuing a counter check for $80,000 and change on one of the debit cards. Max drove the rig out to the site with Angel driving Max’s SUV.

Forklifts were not hard to find in Flagstaff but they had to have the drum dumper attachment shipped up from Phoenix. It put another thousand dollars on a credit card. Max had called them with the size of the top loading hatch. Chris and Daniel looked around for something they could use as a funnel but wound up having one fabricated at a local sheet metal shop for cash.

Angel picked up the laptop and cell phones, Daniel and Chris tested the cellphone detonators.

They offloaded the aluminum powder and dumped the chlorate into the pneumatic trailer (Heather did most of the forklift driving). They started the air pump and saw it was mixing. Then they dumped in the aluminum powder and with considerable trepidation ran the air pump for 30 minutes. Daniel took a small sample far down wind and dropped a match on it. Not as fast as the flash initiator in the bombs, but fast enough he thought it would detonate in quantity.

To be sure, they borrowed shovels from the rancher, dug a 4 foot hole, buried a gallon can half full of flash powder. Max and Daniel connected a squib inside the can to one of the cell phone detonators with 50 feet of wire. They did this a mile further into the ranch in a sandy wash. When they called the phone and gave the correct instruction, the flash detonated as expected. The sand muffled the sound well enough; it was barely audible at the mixing site. It left an eight-foot crater they filled in. The next rain would finish erasing the crater.

Both Max and Daniel had experience with getting rid of excess dynamite this way.

They were satisfied the flash would explode. Wearing masks to keep from breathing chlorate and aluminum dust, they refilled the drums from the hose connection on the bottom of the trailer. Then they reloaded the drums back in the container. Sure enough, they had ten drums left. They filled the drums with MRE bought at a surplus store in Phoenix, bottled water from a grocery, and put those drums in the container. With considerable reluctance, Max and Daniel installed the cell phone detonators in three drums. They had battery power for a month. They were very careful that the flash powder did not get across the battery terminals.

Through Janice, Heather got license plates for the tractor and the platform that were still in the system, but came off a wrecked tractor and trailer in Indiana. She also got a number for a destroyed container. They applied a film to the container and stenciled the new number on the film.

They finished with 11 days left, returned the forklift, closed out the house, hooked up the tractor and late one evening drove off the ranch and started down I40. Max and Daniel drove the tractor-trailer, Heather, Angel and Chris followed in Max’s SUV. Chapter 12 UNDER STAGE

On the way into LA, they picked up Chris’s SUV and Angel’s Corvette from the Burbank airport.

Getting the flash in place was almost too easy. The Megatorium had a forklift; the stage had a hydraulic lift. After they stacked the out-of-date drums of water on the loading dock, they moved in fifty 500-pound drums of flash powder. They placed the drums with the cell phone detonators in the middle of the mass of drums.

They put the ones with MRE and bottled water on the outside where, if anyone looked at the drums, they would appear innocent. It took only four hours to unload the truck and get all the drums in place. Loading the water drums back in the container took less than two hours. When they finished Daniel and Angel used the laptop to check the detonation phones had connected to the network. They had.

Not wanting to leave the container and tractor in Los Angeles any longer than needed, Max and Daniel headed back to Flagstaff that evening. About 100 miles into Arizona, they changed the license plates back to the ones owned by the rancher and peeled off the fake container number.

After they turned the container and tractor over to the rancher, Max drove on to Tucson. Daniel went with him to Phoenix, and hopped a commercial flight to Chicago on fake ID using one of the untraceable government credit cards. It just didn’t seem worthwhile to ask for a Learjet.

They talked about meeting at Chris’s place a day before the TCMS meeting and decided it would not be a good idea. Angel and Chris had thought the meeting might be canceled after the last bomb had vanished. But no, TCMS persisted with the show, though they suspected the attendance would be down.

A web camera they tapped was watching the drums under the stage. It had seen no one taking an interest in the drums.

Angel went back to the local FBI office. Miner, his boss, met him in the hall, looked up and down to be sure nobody was watching, and motioned to his office.

“Last I knew you were off to New Orleans on the train-nuke business with that ex-CIA guy. Next thing I get this call from the FBI director asking me to cut you all the slack you want. Before you showed up in this office, I had never heard from that high a level. You show up and it happens twice in two months. Can’t say I wasn’t warned, your former bosses said, smart, useful, but a trouble magnet.”

“The first time wasn’t my fault; that was Chris who had the misfortune to be behind the LPG tanker the terrorists burned up under the Maze. He went through his contacts in the CIA and properly put the case in our hands a week before would have been dumped in our laps anyway. Shame it didn’t work out better. I was impressed that you kept the details out of the news.”

Somewhat mollified, Miner continued. “It doesn’t take too much imagination to guess you got involved with DoE over the train nuke business. I know you have high contacts there from a previous case. While you were gone, we got a memo to cc our investigation reports on the train nukes and anything about TCMS to this obscure office in DoE. If you ask who occupies that office, they ask about your Q clearance. I have no idea of what you have been doing. Should I?”

“No.”

“In that case, I don’t think I want to know. So carry on with my blessing.”

Heather decided against going back to Washington. As they entered his house, Chris said: “Take your choice of bedrooms.”

Heather looked at him thoughtfully and said, “If you don’t mind Chris, I would rather sleep with you.” Chris started to express surprise; Heather cut him off. “I know you are twice my age, but I’ll need someone to hold when the flash goes off.” She continued, “I held off coming on to you till the job was finished because I assumed leadership of our little band. It’s not the best idea for a leader to become involved with a member of the band. Perhaps leader is not accurate. You guys took almost no direction to get the job done.”

Chris privately thought Heather was underestimating her leadership. He could not think of someone who had done a better job of getting a complicated and frankly terrifying job done under tight time pressure. However, not being a fool, he went along with the arrangement. Not only was Heather the smartest women he had ever met, she was nice to look at, cuddly to hold, and as he found out, good in bed.

A week later, he asked Heather why she had not taken an interest in Angel. Heather explained that Angel was married to his job. The 50-hour week and moving around a lot meant some FBI agents didn’t have families or even girlfriends. Chris told her being a CIA agent was much the same. Heather didn’t mention Chris smelled good.

Heather talked to Janice over an encrypted link about the Megatorium security staff. Janice used her contacts to determine that TCMS brought in its own security staff when they used the Megatorium. One less thing on her conscience.

Heather also asked about the Russian smallpox.

“Dr. Jones, we may be the only people in the US who know about that. The President does not seem to have any memory of it. He talks about giving a speech in the Megatorium the week after TCMS will be there. I don’t know if the Russians will install smallpox sprayers or not.”

“The Secret Service as part of inspecting the place for the upcoming speech, installed a bunch of tiny web cams that watch the intake and air handlers at the Megatorium. If we see something being installed, I will send you the link so you can watch it.”

Next time Heather and Janice talked, Janice told her the web cams had spotted someone installing what they thought was a weaponized smallpox dust dispenser Janice sent Heather a link to the webcam watching the dispenser and an a link to a government video chat server so they could get together for the event. Janice was in Washington, Daniel in Chicago, Max in Tucson, Heather, Angel, and Chris was in his house in LA.

Janice had told Angel about the cell phone jammer in the Megatorium, so he set up the cell phone detonators to go off automatically 30 minutes after they lost connectivity with the phone network or 40 minutes into the meeting time.

Chapter 13 MEGATORIUM

They all joined the online meeting two hours before the TCMS show started.

With time to kill, Janice asked them to talk about their adventures.

Max started off. “In "LA Story," Steve Martin does a famous fumble routine when he realizes it is open season on the LA freeways. In real life it isn't as funny.

“My wife, Lynn, and I were driving back from Phoenix. My custom Ford Excursion SUV, with less than 700 miles on the odometer, was in the No.1 inside lane. There were three Harleys in front and a car just in front, in the No.2 lane. I noticed this red car coming up fast in the No.2 lane. It came even to where I could glace over and see the driver's wild expression. The driver clearly intended to pass on the right and cut in front of my SUV. As soon as he realized the road was blocked by the motorcycles, he dropped back. I could just see something long and black stick out of the window when there was this loud bang and the car was suddenly filled with wind noise. The driver had used a shotgun to shoot out the right rear window of my SUV.

“I dropped back. He shot forward. The motorcycles pulled to the center and stopped. Car ahead and we pulled off to the road to the right, and checked that no one was hurt, then went on about a quarter of a mile to an off ramp The motorcycles scattered, and he roared off at high speed. I got the license. Lynn got a description. We took the next ramp, and called the Arizona Highway Patrol from the top of the ramp.

“The young officer they sent out took our report but suggested it had only been a rock that took out the window, in spite of the pockmarks from the shot around the window. I guess he didn't want life to be any more complicated that day. We drove into Tucson, where we were able to block the window—it was cold—with cardboard and duct tape. Next day the insurance adjustor ($1,500 to replace the window) thought the rock story was just fine. It was the first claim I had made in decades, but when I vacuumed out the glass, there was a lot of birdshot mixed in with it. At least it didn't take a lot of effort for the shop to repair: a few screws and they were able to replace the window.

“Some six months later, the Highway Patrol called to give me an update. The driver had been fleeing the scene of a robbery when he shot out my window, and they still had not caught him. In spite of two attempts, he was still at large.

Chris's forced retirement from the CIA at 54 has left him with a lot of property rented out in six cities. Not want to continue as a remote landlord when he had no likely use for the apartments, he sold them all. Tax consideration would not let him keep the money and rent a retirement place so he bought a large expensive place in the Hollywood hills. He intended to keep it only a few years and sell it because he could take the profit that way without taxes.

In the year he had been there he had come to love the place, view, pool and all. A reclusive author had owned it. The author's remote relatives didn't want the almost new furniture so it went with the house.

So Chris moved out the medical bed, replaced it with a nice king sized, rebuilt one of the four bathrooms that had a rotted floor, refilled the pool, hire a maid who came in one day a week and a pool service.

Chris thought he might hold parties for his old CIA buddies, but he had only managed to do it twice so far. One of his friends, Nick, who he had worked with in Italy, Turkey, and Greece had been at the first party; at the second, he was the major topic of conversation.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol5no4/olson.htm Aum Shinrikyo: Once and Future Threat?

Nick had been married twice, same as Chris. None of those marriages had worked out. Women who could put up with the demands that a "spook for a husband" lifestyle puts on them were rare indeed. It was no wonder that James Bond had a different woman in every movie!

Before they worked for the Company, the two of them were part of a team that provided protection for NATO generals. Once they had dropped one off at an airport and by the unlimited speed on the autobahns and some air traffic delays the same team had picked up the general at his destination airport.

Another time they were in a small convoy of armored Mercedes and Ford Excursions when they had to cross a border with a trunk full of automatic weapons. If they had had a general with them, it wouldn't have been a problem, but without one, they had to use considerable verbal judo to keep the local border police from looking.

Nick had retired to Idaho. He was living alone in a plush cabin with a beautiful view of a lake. Unfortunately, Nick had fallen through a plate glass window and cut his throat. By the time he was found his Jack Russell terriers had devoured enough of him that it had to be a closed coffin funeral.

How one falls through a plate glass window behind some furniture was the subject of much speculation at Chris's second party. In the end they were split between the CIA rubbing him out for some reason they didn't know about and it being done by a foreign government (the remaining opinion was that against all odds it was an accident). However, for Chris, the attractiveness of living in remote places declined considerably.

Heather was next.

“Summer after my freshman year I worked as an assistant tech in a hospital for a MRI company. It took two days to charge or uncharged the magnet. It was a big magnet, 4 Tesla, the energy in the field was about equal to a box of dynamite or a gallon of gasoline.

“The big magnet was scary. The field was so intense a piece of aluminum would fall slowly through the air if you released it inside the bore. There were warnings all over the place about not bringing anything iron into the area. You can probably see it coming.

“Some of the MRI patients were on oxygen. Not a problem, most of the E cylinders they used were aluminum, which is more common than the steel ones of that size. But one day an orderly brought in this old lady for an MRI scan with a steel E cylinder. Those are about 5 inches in diameter and 3 feet long. When she got about 20 feet from the magnet bore the E cylinder broke loose, it just vanished; peak acceleration was maybe 50 g. Fortunately nobody was in the way. Took us 5 days to shut down the magnet, get the cylinder out and bring the magnet back to strength.”

"Did the magnet ever dump?” Angel asked.

"Not while I was there, but the chief tech I worked for said it had happened to him twice."

Angel talked about how easy a lot of crimes were to solve. “Most of the people who commit crimes are not very smart. It’s like they cover the crime scene with business cards.

Daniel was last, "I have a story which explains why there is no banana wine.

"When I was in high school, just after I got my license to drive, we found this huge heap of boxes filled with overripe bananas out by the trash at a grocery store. I mean boxes and boxes of them. I had this beat up station wagon and we loaded close to a thousand pounds of them without putting much of a dent in the pile.

"We gave away all we could to friends and families, but we were still left most of them. We were starting to look for a dumpster to get rid of the rest of them since they were attracting fruit flies when "Jim the chemist," one of the guys we ran around with heard we had them. He came up with a plan to make banana liquor out of the rest of them.

"So he hunted up a barrel from the local bakery, one of those blue plastic 55 gallon ones. It had about 3 gallons of glucose in the bottom. Jim said we didn't need to clean it out. Three of us spent an afternoon pealing bananas and mashing them into the barrel. I don't remember where he got it, but Jim had some wine yeast he dumped in with what must have been 500 pounds of mashed bananas. Was all the three of us could do to move it over to the corner of the chemist's basement. The chemist put some sort of airlock on it and we all forgot about it for close to six months.

"I should mention the chemist's parents were the most indulgent parents I ever met. His dad wanted to know what Jim was doing, but just to give him advice. If Jim wanted to do something that would blow up the house, his dad would take him out to the quarry to do it.

"Anyway, being busy with high school we forgot about it for fully six months. Finally Jim opened it up. The surface was covered with the worst looking scum you ever saw, but under the scum was pure alcohol and intense banana flavor. Well, not pure, but it must have been at the limit for yeast, maybe 20% alcohol. Jim siphoned out a gallon and we drank most of it.

"Fortunately all three of us passed out in Jim's musty basement and I didn't try to drive home that night.

"But oh, the next day! Pounding headaches all around. We all felt like death warmed over. Too late Jim figured out the fermentation process had converted banana flavor, amyl acetate, into amyl alcohol which is a nasty poison."

Max took a sip and of his beer and said. "My dad was much like Jim's. He never had a problem with me making pipe bombs. He did insist I set them off where people would not be hit with the fragments, a policy my military explosive ordinance disposal instructors approved of.

They had worried TCMS might cancel the meeting leaving them with disarming and moving out the flash powder drums from the Megatorium. It was almost a relief when TCMS went ahead with the meeting. With the help of Secret Service technicians, they had a feed of the gaudy meeting. About half an hour before the meeting started, the little window with the Russian smallpox dispenser showed the motor measuring dust feeding into the main air handlers.

Daniel remarked, “Until I saw that thing grinding out smallpox dust, I wasn’t sure the Russians would deliver.”

“They are doing it for their own reasons.  They want someone to blame it on when the virus starts killing people in the Mideast.  I wonder who will be hung out to dry.”  Chris shook his head sadly.  “There are enough actors in the game to confuse things forever.  Kind of like the Kennedy assassination.”

The camera panned down on the first row. Angel was not surprised to see Dr. Formoq. But two seats over was Governor Greenstone.

“Ah, Janice, did you know Governor Greenstone was going to be at the TCMS meeting?”

“No, but I’m not surprised. The day after the Inland City bomb went off he was trying to blackmail the President on behalf of TCMS.” She went on, “Nothing we can do about it. They turned on the cell phone jammer.”

The next half hour was strained. The end came when the video feed suddenly dropped. A flash lit up the sky on the horizon and half a minute later there was a distant impressive boom. Chris turned on the TV. Five minutes later the local news broke into a program with a report, another nuke had gone off, this time in the Megatorium.

The news stations sent up a traffic helicopter and from the fact there was some left of the Megatorium, it became obvious it was not a nuclear blast. At least it was not on the same scale as the three previous ones. Radiation surveys quickly confirmed it was a large chemical explosion.

Sobered, they shut down the virtual meeting and went to bed. Angel stayed the night, and Heather did hold Chris much of the night.

By morning, the news reported fire and rescue had pulled a couple of thousand live out of the mess and more than 1000 bodies. The fire and rescue people estimated between 500 and 1000 had been blown into pieces too small to identify including everyone on or near the stage and the first 20 rows of seats. It was late morning before the news reported that apparently the Governor was among them. A judge swore in the Lieutenant Governor by noon. Her first action was to order the flags flown at half-mast for the late Governor. By evening, news commentators were asking questions about why he was there.

After a somber breakfast, Angel went in to the FBI office. The only thing in his inbox was a short memo reminding them of the Justice Department’s long standing order about not investigating TCMS. Now that’s interesting, Angel thought. Is the Justice Department assuming TCMS blew themselves up?

Perhaps they were making an analogy to the mass suicide of the People’s Temple cult. If this became the accepted story, it would divert attention from the team. Hard to investigate as well, people who have been blown to tiny fragments are hard to interview. Of course, TCMS leaders and members had been executed on orders of the President, but he and only five other people knew that. Come to think about it, even the President didn’t know.

The FBI and ATF didn’t investigate the Megatorium blast, still being busy with the nukes and the substation transformer attacks but the LAPD did. They combed the blast site and (from force of habit?) reported the results to the local FBI office. It quickly became obvious a few tens of tons of sodium chlorate and aluminum dust had gone off. The only organization that had used sodium chlorate as an explosive was the IRA. That was decades ago and nobody could imagine a reason the IRA or any spinoff would have it in for TCMS.

The investigators could locate no obvious industrial source for either the chlorate or the aluminum powder. They sifted tons of debris looking for the detonator. They finally concluded whatever it was; the intense heat from the flash powder had vaporized it. They found fragments of barrel lids and sealing rings but they didn’t lead anywhere. Neither did the MRE or the bottled water fragments. On a guess a cell phone detonated the flash; they looked at the nearby cell tower records but found cell service jammed in the Megatorium half an hour before the blast.

They might have gotten something from the security cameras. That was a dead end as well; the cameras overwrote the files after a week so there was nothing to look at since the explosives were placed there ten days ago or more.

Chapter 14 SMALLPOX

A week after the Megatorium blast, hospitalized patients started running unexplained fevers. An alert (and paranoid) doctor figured out it was smallpox within a day and a half. A few hours later, the CDC was on scene with half a million doses of vaccine and brincidofovir, an antiviral specific to smallpox.

By that time, due to the traffic out of LAX, the smallpox was worldwide. Except for a small number of old people, few had any immunity. By the time an international flight landed, most of the passengers were infected if there was one infected person on board. Flights out of LA were canceled, but too late. Smallpox rapidly spread throughout the Mideast so fast President Pabukov held off then canceled further distribution of the virus. Russia was one of the few countries with a large stash of vaccine. They lined up and vaccinated their whole population.

The CDC wasn’t on TCMS’s list of government agencies to infiltrate or blackmail. In fact, CDC didn’t even know the Justice Department had forbidden investigation of TCMS. The CDC sent a formal request to the FBI to search the cult’s compound for evidence of manufacturing smallpox. They made a case someone infected with the virus had been blown to a fine mist of particles that had infected people far from the stage. (Actually, the intense flash of light had killed the smallpox particles in the air.) The FBI kicked the request to the Justice Department with a note they would assume the CDC’s request granted if there was no response in a week.

It was now two weeks after the Megatorium blast, a week since the first smallpox cases. The President had indeed been vaccinated on national TV. It didn’t help as much as expected since there were initially many people who refused the vaccine. The number of those who refused the vaccine fell sharply as pictures of confluent (and fatal) smallpox cases were released. But there were still a substantial fraction of the population who refused to be vaccinated and a smaller number who couldn’t due to immunosuppression

As far as Angel could tell, nobody in their little group had been connected to the blast. Nor was there meaningful speculation where the explosives had come from or how they had been delivered. Janice, who still talked to Dr. Jones from time to time, had not felt the need to intervene at the Presidential level to close down investigations. So far no investigations had touched the Federal credit cards nor had the truck or shipping container been connected to the blast.

That afternoon Special agent in charge Miner called in a couple of dozen agents.

Addressing the lot of them, Miner said. “As you can guess, the CDC is livid about the smallpox. They want our cooperation to raid the TCMS compound out in Inland County to look for a setup for growing smallpox. They will send their people along to help go through whatever we find.” One of the other agents asked if the long standing orders about not investigating TCMS had been canceled.

“You bring up an interesting point. CDC asked the FBI, the FBI asked the Justice Department in a letter saying if they didn’t hear back, they would assume permission granted. It’s been a week. Apparently he letter has been kicking around ever since among the top levels of the Justice Department that is doing its best to lose the request.”

The agent who had brought up the point looked doubtful and said. “Suppose they lose the letter?”

Miner grinned, “Shame on them.”

The agent persisted. “My worry is about us getting into trouble. TCMS has a reputation for suing everyone in sight. My law degree and their corrupt judges make me nervous.

Miner took perhaps 10 seconds to organize his thoughts. “I see your point. Perhaps I should make participation in this raid voluntary. I’ll think about it. Smallpox vaccination will be mandatory for everyone who goes.”

Angel had not intended to speak, but he wanted to support his boss. “I don’t think they will go after anyone in the courts. The people who directed their lawyers--most of them anyway--died in the Megatorium blast. And if we find they were growing smallpox. . . .”

The agent who had complained realized he was out on a limb. “Angel has a point. OK, permission or not I’ll go. When?

“Monday. That gives me two days before the weekend to line up support. I don’t want to try to go in there without overwhelming firepower support.”

Chapter 15 BRADLEY

Miner called up the commander at Fort Irwin National Training Center. The commander was hesitant at first but the martial law declaration made it easy to talk him around. It helped that Miner said he could cover the 400-mile lowboy cost from FBI funds and mentioned the chances of the Bradley firing a shot were almost zero. The crew was volunteers who thought this was a remarkable way to spend a couple of days. They were deputized as Federal Marshals just in case.

A little after seven, the Bradley was off loaded a few miles from TCMS’s gate. It went slowly down the road with a procession of FBI cars and trucks following. One rented truck had a dozen shopping carts in it to collect evidence.

Ten minutes before eight, the Highway Patrol closed off the road to the east and west. A little later, the Bradley rumbled up to the gate. Miner got out of his car next to the Bradley and presented the guards with the search warrant. He didn’t say a word about the Bradley or the 25 mm chain gun, didn’t need to, the guards eyes were “big as saucers.” One of the guards remembered enough of his training to snap a picture of the warrant and make a pro forma objection. After a look into the guard shack and seeing the walls covered with weapons, the agents wound it with yellow police line tape to keep the guards out. (The warrant didn’t mention weapons.)

The FBI agents and their CDC helpers fanned out to the buildings they thought might have records or labs. Angel went along with those going through Alexavier’s office. At noon, he met Miner at the food truck the FBI had commissioned to feed the agents.

“So far it looks like we brought the wrong experts.” Angel opened the conversation.

“Explain.”

“No biological lab yet, but we may have found the origin of the nukes.”

“That’s not what I wanted to hear. What now?”

“I think there is a DoE technical expert in town, though she may have gone back to Washington. Do you want me to try to get her to come out here? She was staying with Chris Hobbs, the retired CIA guy who is still on consulting status with us.”

“Yeah, spreading out the blame for bad news is always a good idea.”

Angel called Chris who put his phone on speaker with Dr. Jones. After a short cryptic conversation, she agreed to come out with Chris soon as they could get there, early afternoon. By 4 pm, Angel had showed her enough of Dr. Formoq’s notes to figure out how TCMS made the high purity plutonium. Angel, Dr. Jones, and Chris hunted up Miner.

“This is Q clearance material,” she reported to Miner, “so I don’t know how much detail I should cover. Overview though, TCMS subverted four power reactors, stealing neutrons to make the plutonium for the bombs. It’s really cleaver trick, the US never figured out a method to make plutonium 239 that pure and I don’t think anyone else has either.”

“Which reactors they subverted is not clear, they are listed A through D and so far no key to location data has shown up.”

“Great.” Miner said in a sarcastic tone of voice. “That is just what I need to take to a US Attorney who answers to the Justice Department. Justice is terrified of TCMS. And they might be justified, no idea of who controls the blackmail material now.”

“Can’t help you with that, but DoE can stop the reactor subversion if it is still going on. All it needs to do is inspect for extra pipes going into the reactors. The inspectors certainly will find them if DoE asks them to take a look.”

Miner was silent and looked thoughtful for a long time. “That will tip them off we are on their trail if this raid doesn’t do it. On the other hand, it may not matter. I presume the TCMS leaders who should hang for the bombs died in the Megatorium blast. The Justice Department and DHS really want the bombs to be an Islamic plot. Presenting them with solid evidence it was a made-in-the-USA TCMS project, is not going to make them happy campers.”

Angel said, “I have a little insight into the reaction to TCMS at the highest levels. You’re right.”

Miner looked at Angel like he wanted to ask questions but thought better of it and said:

“Our reason to be out here is the smallpox. If we don’t find a lab or something, we can just fold up our tent and go home. We can take our time on the nuclear issue, or ask at higher levels what they want us to do. Talk about a hot potato. “

Miner went off to end the subpoena service, brought in the lowboy to pick up the Bradley and had the police tape unwound from the guard shack. The agents loaded up 15 shopping carts full of paper records and computers and headed back to their offices in LA. They would start going through them in the morning.

Miner stayed up until after midnight writing a terse report on serving the search warrant, both what they didn’t find (a smallpox lab), and what they did. He mentioned the presumed smallpox lab could be somewhere else, and that a Canadian graduate student had made the closely related Horse Pox for $100,000. He copied it to the mystery DoE address.

Angel had been in one of the FBI vehicles on the way out; he rode back with Chris and Heather. They waited until they were on the way to talk about what they should do next. Chris was driving, Heather turned to the back. “I think it is time to update Janice, if not the President.”

Angel and Chris agreed. Chris mused, “It’s not going to be easy to talk to the President since he doesn’t seem to have any memory of when he talked to us.”

Angel noted, “It will be midnight in DC before we could go online. Morning?”

Heather agreed but said she would give Janice an email heads up that they wanted to talk in the morning.

They dropped Angel at the FBI office so he could pick up his Corvette and went back to Chris’s place—, which Heather was staring to think of as home.

Next morning Angel came over and they got on an encrypted video chat with Janice. Angel related what they had found; Dr. Jones talked about the subverted reactors. Angel added a coda, “I am not sure we had express Justice Department approval for the raid. I didn’t ask.”

Janice already knew the details, having read Miner’s report that morning. “You didn’t. Justice managed to lose the FBI request, but given what else the FBI found in the raid, I don’t think anyone is going to mention it.”

Janice sighed, “We have known TCMS made the train bombs since Angel and Chris traced the phone call back to them. Longer than that if, you count Governor Greenstone trying to blackmail the President over the issue. Now we have TCMS documentation and DOE will soon have physical evidence of whatever is attached to the reactors. The question is how to spin this mess for public release and disarm the blackmail. It would be ideal if we could blame the train bombs on an Islamic splinter rather than TCMS. Any ideas?”

There was a long silence, and Angel said, “The Quantico lab found the code in the transformer wreckers and the bomb detonator to be nearly identical. I suppose we could make up a story that an al-Qaeda splinter got control of TCMS and used them to make the bombs. It’s not true, but it might sell.”

Chris said, “The CIA has a rumor testing organization.”

Dr. Jones contributed, “TCMS spent a truckload of money, at least ten million, subverting those reactors. I agree the Justice Department is useless, but DoE might find an honest court and put them in receivership. It would be interesting to find out how they washed so much money. Another question is where they got the depleted uranium they used to make the plutonium. That might be difficult since DU is not tracked.”

Chris commented, “I guess the main question is how much of the TCMS leadership is left and who has the blackmail material. Angel, did you run into any data on bent judges?”

“No, but we have a couple of dozen computers and a huge heap of paper to go through. It will take weeks. If TCMS had any sense, those records are in lawyer’s offices where we can’t get them without another subpoena.

Janice said, “TCMS has around 200,000 members and operations where they owned the buildings in many major cities. There is a good chance mobs will attack their operations when the news come out that they made the bombs. They also have a few billion in assets. It’s hard to know exactly because religions can hide assets. It may be time to change that. I will see what I can do with the President’s speech writers.”

Chapter 16 Normal?

A week later:

“My fellow Americans: I have several requests for you, but first let me tell you we now know who is responsible for the train bombs. It is the Trans Cranial Magnetic Stimulation ‘religion.’ TCMS made the bombs by subverting power plants for the plutonium.

“The FBI and other law enforcement agencies, backed up by the National Guard and the Army, are raiding every TCMS operation at this moment. Please stay out of their way. Please don’t harass the people who were TCMS members. Few of them knew anything about the bombs and most, perhaps all, of those who did died at the Megatorium. Please don’t damage the buildings. We intend to sell them and use the money to help compensate the train bomb victims. The government will liquidate TCMS and outlaw their magnetic brain stimulators.

“We have not made a decision about the lawyers and corrupt judges who made it difficult for years to investigate TCMS. There may be many disbarments and impeachments after law enforcement finishes going through the records from the FBI raid two weeks ago on the TCMS compound in Inland City. Two examples are records of large cash payments to a judge who is now dead and a video of another judge being serviced sexually on his lunch hour in a massage parlor. The last is a minor crime well beyond the statue of limits, but still priceless blackmail material. There is also extensive evidence of TCMS corrupting or blackmailing many high government officials.

“Not everything is clear. We presume the Megatorium blast to have been a People’s Temple type murder-suicide on a larger scale. It might have been brought on by the FBI and DoE investigation closing in on the train bombs. The smallpox may be another TCMS operation, but we are still looking. As reported the substation attacks, were an al-Qaeda splinter, which may have had connections to TCMS, but this is not clear. The people who knew blew themselves to bits.

“It’s been a rough three months, but with any luck, things should return to something close to normal in most places in another couple of months. If all who can get vaccinated for smallpox do so it will help.

“I am ending martial law at midnight.

“Good night and God bless you.”

Not sure, she would say yes, Chris asked Heather to marry him. She (who had just turned 28) asked him about kids. If she wanted them, it was fine with him. If he lived as long as his parents (who were still alive and in good health) he would have time to help raise them. Through her connections at DoE she got a professorship in physics at UCLA.

Angel was offered a managerial position in the FBI. He turned it down to remain a hard case investigator. Max and Daniel prospered a reasonable fashion, but never forgot they had done something exceptional. Nor did they talk about it unless they met up with the others.

END NOTES, NOT PART OF THE STORY

Tom Clancy in The Sum of all Fears details the design, construction, and detonation of a thermonuclear terrorist weapon at a Denver Super bowl game. In his end notes Clancy goes into detail about how easy it is to get the information and machine tools needed to construct an H-bomb. He comments that his description is incorrect in a place or two, not that that would stop a terrorist from building a weapon from the same open sources he used.

Could an Aum Shinrikyo or Jim Jones type cult build working nukes from the rough description here? I don't know, I am an electrical engineer who never had more than a passing interest in weapons design before wasting some months in jail, thoroughly annoyed at a cult (my lawyer tell me I cannot even name), and the local, state and federal government agencies the cult corrupted or intimidated. I was working on a concept (cable powered space elevator, geosync power satellites, and synthetic fuel plants) to reduce the cost of gasoline back to under a dollar a gallon before I was jailed.

That project was at a stage where I needed computers and contact with other engineers to make progress and I could not work on it in jail. My interest has shifted to writing a novel and I don't know if I will ever get back to this project.

Engineers, particularly pissed off ones, can't help thinking, especially when they are forgotten for an hour or two by the jail guards who locked them in a shower. Tom Clancy finessed the hard part of nukes by having Israeli-US weapons grade plutonium fall into the hands of the bad guys. To appreciate the hard part you need to understand how weapons grade plutonium is made, or rather was made. A little weapons grade plutonium may be have been made in recent years by the smaller nuclear powers but as far as I know none of the major nuclear powers have made any for more than a decade. How it is made? Any reactor that has U 238 in the fuel makes plutonium by neutron capture. A substantial fraction of the energy power reactors make comes from the plutonium they make and then fission.

The problem with trying to use power reactor plutonium for weapons is the Pu 240. Usually the Pu 239 fissions when it is hit with a neutron, but some of the time it will absorb a neutron becoming Pu 240. Pu 240 is nasty stuff to have in weapons because it decays by spontaneous fission, i.e., it splits and spits out neutrons. The neutrons degrade the explosive and make the bombs easy to detect as well as being unhealthy to be around. According to Clancy's description, the way nukes are set off is to implode and compress the plutonium. When it is close to maximum density, a shot of neutrons from a little cyclotron/target initiate the chain reaction for maximum yield.

The problem is that spontaneous fission neutrons from Pu 240 will start the chain reaction before the ideal point of compression. The more Pu 240 in the fuel, the more likely you will have a "fizzle" like the first North Korean bomb test is thought to have been. "Weapons grade" plutonium is made in dedicated reactors. There is a tradeoff between grade and production. For high grades the slugs of uranium are pushed through the reactor core in a shorter time so relatively little of the newly formed plutonium picks up an additional neutron. The slugs are dissolved in acid and the plutonium sorted out chemically.

A decade or so ago it occurred to me that the extraction step could be combined with the exposure step and the newly formed Pu 239 could be removed before it became Pu 240. (I kept this to myself for many years.) All you have to do is circulate uranyl nitrate (or sulfate) in a high neutron flux such as you get in a power reactor core and remove the plutonium 239 as it is formed. Over a fuel cycle (a few years) a large power reactor makes kgs of neutrons. Stealing a tenth of a kg of neutrons would make 24 kg of extremely high-grade plutonium, enough for about four bombs. Power reactors have holes in the high neutron flux zones of the core used for control rods. Replacing one or two with a loop circulating depleted uranium (U 238) solution would not present much of an engineering challenge. Obtaining depleted uranium would not be difficult either. If for some reason weapon builders didn't want to leave tracks by buying it, the US left hundreds of tons of DU in the Mid East in the last two wars. It would not be hard to collect.

The chemical processing to get plutonium out of solution is well understood; the whole process can be considered kitchen chemistry (if your kitchen contains a power reactor). There are ways to make neutrons without a reactor. If one of them is practical on the scale of tens to hundreds of grams of neutrons then the threshold for bomb builders is reduced even further. Given plutonium in kg quantities, the next problem is how to implode it to a super critical state. (The above method should make plutonium good enough to use in a gun type device, but implosion gets results from smaller amounts.) Normally a ball of explosives around a sphere of plutonium accomplishes this. The explosives have to be exquisitely shaped and set off from many points on the surface with precise timing. The design of these explosive "lenses" is a demanding task.

While I was waiting for a guard to let me out of the shower, I realize that there was a way discussed in Dr. Robert L. Forward's SF story “Camelot 30K” where a nuclear "fizzle" is used to bootstrap a thermonuclear explosion. It uses a flash source at one foci of an ellipsoidal reflector to focus soft x-rays on a target at the other foci. It occurred to me that the intense light from a few pounds of flash powder would be enough to set off a light sensitive ball of explosives at the other foci--with close to perfect timing and over the entire surface. This trick eliminates the complicated design problems that require hydro code programs, complicated electronics, and krytrons. It may reduce the difficulty of creating such devices to the level it could be done by a decently funded street gang. It's not a compact design, per the text 8 feet long and 7 feet in diameter, but if it's being shipped in a container, it doesn't need to be small.

Would it work? Darned if I know, here it's just an element in a story I wrote while in jail.

As to a cult leader being insane enough to try to kill thousands of people--that has already been demonstrated. If Jim Jones, Heaven's Gate and Aum Shinrikyo aren't enough, consider Pol Pot, Rwanda and Osama bin Laden (as a cult leader). Ideally, this is a cautionary tale, one that might get the IAEA inspectors to watch for pipes being used to steal neutrons out of power reactors. Perhaps Sum of all Fears has had such an effect and someone is watching the sale of precision machine tools good enough to make parts for nukes. But Clancy's Debt of Honor (1998) included a jumbo jet being used in much the same way as the 9/11 attacks and this bestseller unfortunately didn't help the FBI agents trying to get the attention of FBI high level bureaucrats when they were trying to report Arab pilots learning to fly (but not land) 767/757 aircraft.

Probably nobody will take this seriously either until a nuke goes off in a US city.