A Clear and Present Danger (11 page)

He moved toward her, past the other mumbling men and the few other women at the bar, through the clouds of blue cigarette
smoke cut by shafts of setting sunlight. She ignored him, keeping her eyes fastened on her car and on the small knot of neighborhood
boys gathered around it.

“A beautiful automobile,” he said to her in German, taking a spot at the rail next to her. He was quite close, but she wouldn’t
turn to him. He said, “I love beautiful cars. And beautiful women.”

With this she turned and, expressionless, examined him. Her eyes moved from his head to his feet, disdainfully. She responded
to him in English, as if to insult his attempts at her native tongue.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Ben. I’m American, just passing through.”

She nodded and smiled. It wasn’t an unfriendly smile.

“Your name is… what?” He had switched to English.

“Sigrid. And you want to buy me a drink?”

“Of course.”

“Then you should do it.”

The barman was not far away. He had watched the approach with admiration and would have whispered his congratulations if it
had been politic to do so. But not with Sigrid about. She was too austere, too absent of assumable humor, too German.

“
Danke
,” she said to him, lifting her glass in toast.

They drank. Then Sigrid removed her tinted glasses, revealing large, clear eyes of emerald.

“What did you do before you came to Andorra?” she asked, hurriedly. She didn’t wish to talk about herself.

“I was a war criminal.”

He had surprised her, as he intended. Her imperious defenses were shattered. Say the words “war criminal” to a German when
you have the conversational drop on him—or her—and you can reduce a hun quite quickly.

She was trying to speak, but her words came out in a stammer, a mix of German and French and English, betraying her sudden
confusion. He looked at her, at her eyes and the subtle touch of maroon on her wide lips.
Gott im Himmel
, she was beautiful!

“Vietnam,” he said to her before she could get sufficiently back in control to speak in sentences of any language. “I was
a fighter bomber. It was a terrible time in my life. I suffered while I was there, and longer, years longer, when I returned
home. I felt like a criminal. I still do.”

Outside, on the street, the boys were moving away from the Maserati, going their separate ways home to supper. Sigrid could
relax a bit.

“Can we sit down?” he asked. He waved his hand toward a booth. “It’s got a good view of the street, as you can see. Your car
will be all right, I’m sure.”

Sigrid nodded, and they took the booth. Ben looked back over his shoulder for the barman, to order up more drinks. The barman
formed an approving circle with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Drinks would be on the way.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “I mean about the war in Vietnam.”

“I enlisted,” he began, “during the early years, thinking I was doing the right thing, making the world safe for democracy
and all. Besides, I thought that the air force experience would be useful.

“But then I got sick. Not physically. But sick just the same, knowing I was killing by remote control. All bombers go through
the same thing.

“It got to the point where I didn’t feel any more. No feeling at all—subhuman. I was an automaton, a deadly robot. I just
flew and bombed, flew and bombed. And I waited for the same fate for myself. Someone would get me soon.”

Sigrid interrupted. “But did you not believe in your country’s leadership?”

“I believed my country had taken leave of its senses. I hoped it would be temporary. I hoped the people of my country would
one day remember that… remember that… ”

He looked out the window and scratched his head. If this was the woman he thought she might be, he would have to choose his
words carefully.

“Well,” he continued, “it must be kept in mind that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. One must look beyond
the easy answers in the press and current history.”

“I agree,” she said. She leaned forward. He could see the outline of her nipples through her shirt.

“In this case, of course, it was Ho Chi Minh. I didn’t think of him at first as the personification. I thought only of the
wonder of human survival, the dignity in it. And I thought, ‘What odds dignity must always challenge!’

“There I was, piloting a gigantic American bomber, flying in low over peasant villages in the far reaches of a wretched little
jungle country. I must have scared the be-jeezus out of them all. How many of them had ever even seen a plane close up? Too
often. I was raining down death every hour of every day, week after week, month after month.

“And what do you know? A little creature down there called man managed to survive even man’s genius for destruction. He managed
to survive it because of his defiance, and thank God for defiance. And the one guy down there who shook his fist the strongest
was this splindly little slope called Ho Chi Minh. Now there was a courageous man, so courageous he was mystical.

“It was only an accident of birth that I fought against the guy instead of for him.”

He stopped to sip his lager, and to let the theatricality of what he had said seep into his suddenly fascinated companion.
Some of what he had said he believed. Much of what he said he had let drop around the Catalonian district. Malcontents were
always in demand in Andorra, a city which would soon rival Zurich for laissez-faire capitalism and the old fables of Istanbul
for international intrigue.

He was happy to see that word had reached Sigrid, as he knew it would reach someone who had to be like her. Some self-styled
vanguard.

But would she lead him to the Wolf?

Slayton watched the emerald eyes across the booth glow hot and cold—eyes that contained a passion for razor’s edge politics
as well as a passionate curiosity about him. He was reminded just how sexy, how completely filled with raw sensuality, were
the 1960s.

She smiled for the first time. He had been waiting for this contact for a month. Now he was sure he had made it.

“You have strong principles,” she said. Her voice had gone lower. She almost cooed the words. “I like people who are strong.
They are survivors. They are the people who should rule.”

“They should be together.”

Sigrid accepted the gambit.

“Where do you stay?” she asked.

Slayton told her about the rooming house. Then he asked her about her quarters.

“In the mountains,” she answered, mystery dripping from her every pore as she looked out into the street. It was nearly dusk
now. She turned to him.

“You’re an interesting man. Would you like to see where I live?”

He rose from the booth, taking her hand as he stood. Slayton paid the barman, who winked lecherously, and guided Sigrid out
the door toward her Maserati.

“I am not just
any
woman,” she said, seated behind the wheel. She turned the key in the ignition. The engine responded at once. “You may be
surprised.”

“I am not just
any
man.”

Sigrid smiled at him for the second time.

Then the Maserati rumbled down the narrow slum street to the highway for the long climb into the Pyrenees foothills.

WHITE PLAINS, New York, 15 March 1981

He sat at the north end of a long ersatz wooden table in the well-lighted library, close to the government documents section.
He looked only slightly older than the high school students on term paper assignments, not out of place at all.

He looked up from the thick paper-bound tomes in front of him. Across the room there were perhaps twenty retirees browsing
through the stacks of gothic novels.

From the briefcase on the floor, he produced a yellow legal pad. He pulled a pen out of his pocket after slipping off his
trenchcoat.

There was no reason for him to be the least bit nervous, but he looked about the room anyway, his eyes darting from the desk
where three flat-chested women did their librarian tasks, to the water fountains where suburban mothers held thirsty snowsuited
toddlers, to the steel shelves where he had moments ago found his material, a conveniently canyoned arrangement for amorous
teenagers.

No one paid the slightest attention to him.

He wrote the title of the first of two bound documents before him on the top of the first page of his legal pad:
Barrier Penetration Database
. Then as he flipped through the pages of the government book, he noted:

• First barrier after I make it through the woods, toward perimeter, will be “barbed tape obstacle.” NRC says this will take
  minimum 15 maximum 21 seconds to clear
  .
  
• If I choose to ram through main security gate with light pick-up, NRC says it would take max 3 seconds, with no damage to
  truck
  .
  
• Once at plant itself, approx 300 yards from gate, light explosives necessary to clear 12″ reinforced walls; NRC specifies:
  “Wall is 500 psi concrete with 5/16-inch expanded metal on 2.5” centers. One needs 150 lbs of cutting torch and a 10 lb sledge
  hammer together with six lbs of bulk explosives to get through in 23 ± 5 minutes.”
  
• Roof of nuclear reactor itself is equally vulnerable, according to NRC, to wit: “With 4 lbs of bulk explosive and 20 lb bolt
  cutters, penetration takes 2.2 ± 0.5 minutes.”
  
• Reactor ceiling next. Will need 10 lb bolt cutter, 10 lb sledge hammer and JA-IV Jet-Axe explosive. Entry time, says NRC,
  1.6 to 2.4 minutes
  .
  

He spent the next hour making notes, from both the U.S. Government’s
Barrier Penetration Database
and a companion study, the three-hundred page
Barrier Technology Handbook
. In addition to careful instructions in the art of surmounting security fences, walls, floors, doors, and windows—skills
he already knew as a master—the government books thoughtfully included appendices showing the reader precisely how to slip
through corridors undetected and how to scale ladders while carrying the necessary valise full of burglar tools to enter a
security installation.

A few weeks earlier, he had been in Washington, where he had dropped into the public reading room of the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission. He looked like any other lobbyist, or perhaps like an earnest young man from Ralph Nader’s office.

There he read the words of Frank Bevilacqua, vice president of the Combustion Engineering Corporation and a contributor to
a 1976 NRC-sponsored workshop at Sandia Laboratories of New Mexico:

“… A small team and possibly even one or two people with sufficient knowledge and access to the plant equipment can sabotage
a sufficient amount of components to cause a release of radioactive material.”

A photostat of Bevilacqua’s remarks were in his briefcase, along with the industrialist’s urgent recommendation:

“Details of plant layout, vital systems, instrumentation and control circuitry and details of vital equipment and plant security
systems should not be placed in the public domain.”

The young man who had compiled the NRC material also had a satchel full of newspaper clips. Among them was an Associated Press
dispatch he had clipped from the October 21, 1979, edition of the Miami
Herald:

GUARDS CLAIM SECURITY IS LAX
AT NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

BUCHANAN, N.Y. (AP)—The men who guard the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant here in upstate New York warn that it is “here
for the taking” by skillful terrorists.

Interviewed were several guards, all of whom requested anonymity. They revealed:

• Alarms around the plant were often turned off, and because of heavy traffic the ones turned on sounded so often that “no
one pays much attention.”

• Fencing around some sections of the installation was so inferior that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) made Gleason
Security Service, which held the contract for protecting Indian Point, put guards on the spot 24 hours a day.

• Plastic entry cards, used to gain access to the plant’s most critical areas, were frequently lost by employees and replaced
without question.

A student at nearby Yonkers Community College who last summer held a part-time job as a private guard at Indian Point told
the AP, “I still have my ID card.”

The student also said training for him and other part-timers like him was “a joke.” He said, “Most guards wouldn’t know what
to do with a gun if they had to use one. Some would blow their foot off first.”

The young man’s satchel was further full of spiral-bound notebooks containing data he had not bothered to clip in full from
newspapers. He would simply come across the information during his normal course of reading newspapers in whatever city he
was living at the time.

In this way, he noted that five nuclear power plants across the United States had been shut down in March of ’79 due to plumbing
inadequacies. “Bad plumbing,” he wrote in his notebook, “combined with earthquake activity of even the gentlest measure can
cause lethal spillage.”

The idea of earthquakes in proximity to nuclear power plants occurred to him because of another jotting dated January 4, 1979:

“Today a gentle quake rolled across Westchester County south of Indian Point. My, my could this be a Biblical foreboding?
What a delicious thought.

“Something like 20 million people, or roughly 10% of the American population, live within 50 miles of Indian Point.”

One of the young man’s notebooks was entirely filled with details of more than two hundred “security incidents,” as the NRC
called them, most of them recorded by the NRC’s predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission. All the incidents occurred
between 1967 and 1975, according to the NRC and the AEC, and none mounted had been connected with terrorism.

“However,” the young man had noted, “the federal government has either completely ignored or chosen for some reason not to
reveal what the press has reported as several hundred pounds of enriched uranium and plutonium that is totally unaccounted
for in plant by plant inventories matched against centralized supply records.”