Checkmate (34 page)

3:00 p.m.
30 minutes until kickoff

“What is this I hear about you meeting up with Richard Basque?” Director Wellington asked me sharply.

“Later, Margaret. There's something a lot bigger going down right now.”

I was still on hold on the cell phone, waiting for the Knoxville Southeast Railway dispatch office's supervisor to reroute M343.

As quickly as possible, I brought Margaret up to speed.

“But you don't know yet what's on that train?”

“It's carrying hazardous materials. That's all I have at this point. I'm trying to see if they can redirect or stop it.”

She thought for a moment. “And how close is this to the textile mill where Ingersoll and his team are?”

“A quarter mile away or so.”

“I'll have them inspect the tracks for explosives, any sensors, any detonation materials. In the meantime, we have how many people in harm's way?”

“There's an open-air stadium nearby. They say twenty thousand people are there.”

“Alright, I'm going to make a call, see if we should evacuate that stadium.”

I didn't always agree with Margaret, but we were on the same page right now.

The tracks crossed under I-277 at the Carson Boulevard exit ramp. The mine extended out under that area. I told her about it. “Everything converges at that point.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

+ + + +

Margaret Wellington hung up with Patrick Bowers and called the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

She'd worked with FEMA before and, from what she could tell, Director Adler was a sharp guy and he wasn't afraid to stick his neck out if he needed to.

After she'd told him what was going on, he said, “Our number-one priority is getting potential victims to safety in a cautious and defensive manner. In this case our response will depend on the chemical released, the humidity, wind conditions, the size of the spill.”

“Think worst-case scenario.”

“Start by evacuating everyone within a sixteen-hundred-meter radius.”

She hung up and phoned the mayor of Charlotte to have him evacuate that stadium and Uptown Charlotte.

And to shut down I-277.

+ + + +

Kurt Mason was in his newly acquired Lexus SUV, the body of the previous owner stowed in the backseat.

As he found his way out of the city, he used his cell to monitor the train's progress.

It was in signal territory and was running at about fifty miles per hour. He knew that a train that size, going that fast, on a level track would take nearly a mile to stop.

That is, if the air brakes were working properly.

Without the normal braking capability, it would take at least twice that far.

A local radio station was carrying a live feed of the pregame festivities. He tuned in to monitor things as they progressed.

+ + + +

I heard back from the woman in charge of the Knoxville Southeast Railway dispatch office.

“Hello?” She did not sound excited to be on the phone with me. “Who am I speaking with?”

“Patrick Bowers, FBI. Who is this?”

“Deanna Lambert.”

“Ms. Lambert, listen to me, there is a very real possibility that your train that's heading for Charlotte—M343—is the target of a potential terrorist attack. We need that train rerouted or stopped.”

“Under whose authorization?”

I decided to go straight to the top. “The Director of the FBI.”

“I'll need to speak with him.”

“Her.” I rattled off Margaret's cell number. “In the meantime, e-mail me the manifest. And who can I talk to about the chemicals?”

“That would be Benson.”

“Put him on.”

I gave her my e-mail address, then used one of the computers on the desk beside me to go online and pull up my account so I could read the file.

Seconds later, the e-mail from Ms. Lambert arrived.

Benson came on the line as I was scanning the document. I didn't recognize most of the chemicals or different hazmat designations. “Talk me though this.”

“Well, it lists the contents and location of all the cars on the train. You can tell which ones are hazardous because there's a boxed-in set of asterisks on the left of the
manifest for that car. There's always a five-car buffer between any loaded hazmat cars and an engine.”

I held the phone against my ear with one hand, used the mouse with the other. I scrolled through the pages. There were dozens of boxed-in sheets. This was not helping.

“Think like a terrorist,” I said. “You want to blow this train knowing there are lots of people close by. What chemical would you be hoping to release?”

“I don't know. I couldn't— You really think someone is going to try and blow this train?”

“It's possible. Look at the list. What jumps out at you?”

I checked the time.

3:07 p.m.

“Well, there are a couple boxcars of dynamite. It's also shipping hydrazine, which I'm not too excited about.”

“What's hydrazine?”

“It's basically rocket fuel.”

Oh.

Perfect.

“What else?”

“Well, the one thing would be . . . But . . .”

“What are you thinking?”

“Anhydrous ammonia. There are twelve tankers of it.”

“Tell me about anhydrous ammonia.”

“It's a liquefied compressed gas. ‘Anhydrous' just means ‘without water.' Its primary use is in fertilizer. Because of the nitrogen content it's also used in power plants and, because it absorbs so much heat—it boils at minus-twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit—it's also used in refrigeration and as a coolant.”

“Is it flammable? Will it explode?”

“It doesn't have a flashpoint, but its upper explosive
limit really depends on the vapor concentration in the air. It has a short window of flammability, but, especially in indoor situations where it's being used as a coolant, it might get mixed with oil and that would widen the range. There'll be a deflagration, not an explosion exactly. It'll burn up very fast.”

“Alright. Well, that's what we want.”

Good, good, good.

“But it does create a vapor cloud,” he continued. “It's a very strong base, causes severe chemical burns on contact, and, since it's moisture seeking, it'll spread fast.”

“So, inhalation,” I anticipated where this was going, and it was not a good direction. “Your throat, your lungs—it'll coat them.”

“Yes. And your eyes. Corneal burns and blindness. The vapor is lighter than air. Heat, low humidity, wind—they can take a plume up hundreds of feet into the air.”

“Let's say the wind carries it toward an open-air stadium. Would it settle in there?”

“A stadium?”

“Yes.”

“Well, because of the eddy created as the vapor passes over the upper edge, sure, it would settle in. Is there really a stadium downwind?”

I recalled the breeze in the graveyard.

“There is.”

I could picture a vapor cloud curling over the lip of the stadium, then pooling down inside of it. Thousands of
people gasping for breath, blinded, panicking, climbing over each other trying to escape.

“But,” Benson tried to reassure me, “those pressurized tank cars are reinforced by up to three-quarters of an inch of steel. Most of them have a thermal shield as well and another one-eighth-inch steel jacket covering that. These things do not just spring a leak.”

“But what about getting the ammonia in or out? It has to have valves of some kind.”

“All the valves and fittings are protected from rollover by a housing on the top of the car.”

“For now let's just assume our guy knows what he's doing. What would happen if these twelve cars ruptured and the vapor cloud entered that stadium?”

“Depending on the density of the plume, you could be talking about a life-safety situation.”

“Fatal levels of exposure.”

“Yes.”

To tens of thousands of people.

Benson was quiet. “But it won't come to that. Those cars are designed to withstand a derailment.”

“Think. If it were possible to puncture the cars.”

“It's not.”

“But if it were—and we're not just talking about a few tank cars rolling onto their side, but a dozen of them blowing up or potentially dropping hundreds of feet into a network of collapsed mines. Would they rupture?”

“I mean . . .” There was a distinct change in his tone. “With heat impingement . . . Anhydrous ammonia has a direct pressure-to-temperature relationship so as heat goes up, so does the pressure . . . Each of those cars is carrying over thirty thousand gallons of . . . Oh, my God.”

I got an incoming call from Margaret and put Benson on hold. I started to tell her what I knew, but she leapt in. “Ingersoll's men found some sort of pressure-release mechanism. It's welded to the track in several places. The only way to dismantle it is by removing that section of track. And even then we're not sure what might happen—it might be rigged to blow those shafts.”

I whipped through what I'd found out from Benson: “Anhydrous ammonia. This train, M343, has twelve tankers of it—over three hundred fifty thousand gallons. It creates a vapor cloud that can be lethal. We have to stop that train.”

“I have a call in to the head of the railroad. You're there, Patrick. You know more about this situation than anyone. I want you up in the air, getting real-time eyes on this thing. Where are you?”

“The Charlotte Regional Medical Center.”

“Good. They should have a helicopter there. And they'll have a pilot on call or on-site.”

I'd landed here yesterday after my confrontation with Mason in the mine. “They do have a landing pad, but—”

“I'll clear things with the hospital. Just get to the
pad.”

3:19 p.m.
11 minutes left

Glenn received word from dispatch and tossed the automatic brake valve handle to put the train into emergency status.

Along with the dynamic brakes, he also engaged the head-end device and flipped the switch to get the EOT, or the end-of-train device, to dump air from the rear of the train so there would be continuity in the braking.

Still, it was going to take a while to stop.

+ + + +

By the time I arrived at the landing pad, the on-call pilot was firing up the helicopter. “You must be well connected, my friend,” he called over the sound of the rotors. “The order to take you up came straight from the top.” I wasn't sure if he was referring to someone from the hospital or to Margaret, and at this point I didn't really care.

I'd ended the call with Benson, but I still had the cell phone with me. However, with the sound of the rotors, I wasn't sure it was going to do me a whole lot of good on the helicopter. “Can we patch in to a landline from the headset, or does it only connect with emergency services?”

“Sure. No problem.”

We took off. I set up a conference call with Margaret and the president of Knoxville Southeast Railway, a
nervous, twitchy-sounding guy named Albert. I didn't catch his last name.

I told the pilot, “Take us over the stadium.”

As we flew across the city, I could see that traffic on I-277 near the overpass had been blocked and the cars were already backed up for nearly half a mile. No vehicles were on the overpass itself. All the roads leading out of Uptown Charlotte were clogged with traffic—and that was just going to get worse as we tried to evacuate the stadium.

I didn't know how Margaret had gotten word out so fast, but then I saw that we were not alone in the sky—a news chopper was hovering above the stadium. Maybe it'd been there to cover Fan Celebration Day or maybe—

“We can't reroute the train,” Albert said frantically into my earpiece. “And it's not braking like it should.”

“What does that mean?” Margaret asked.

“Something's wrong. It's not going to be able to stop in time.”

As we soared near the stadium I could see fans streaming out of it and, considering the possibility of a poisonous vapor cloud spreading across the area, I briefly wondered if it might have been better to have them stay in it.

No, Pat. They would have been trapped there with the gas.

I imagined that by now hazmat teams, fire engines, and EMTs would all be on their way.

We can't reroute the train.

We can't stop it in time.

All the parking spots near the stadium were filled. I'm not a great judge of numbers, but I'd say at least twelve to fifteen thousand people were still inside the stadium itself.

We need to do something to stop those tankers from rupturing.

My pilot swiveled the chopper around and I saw M343 approaching from the southwest.

I eyed the track leading in the other direction as it went toward the northeast. “Take us up there,” I told the pilot.

He tilted us forward and we shot through the sky.

There's a pressure mechanism on that track. There's no way to get it off in time.

But you have to stop this. You have to!

“Can we derail the train?” I asked Albert.

His voice was tense, desperate as he replied. “Even if that were an option, we could never get a derailer out there in time.”

“A semi on the tracks? Anything like that?”

“That's not going to do it.”

But by then I was only half listening. I could see that about three-quarters of a mile from the stadium the tracks branched out into a train yard. M343 was coming up from the opposite direction . . .

That's crazy, Pat.

Maybe. But—

“There's a rail yard northeast of the stadium,” I said to Albert. “I see some engines there with the Knoxville Southeast Railway logo. Is that your train yard?”

“Yes.”

“Are there any engineers there?”

“Certainly, but—”

“How soon can we get an engine fired up and on its way out of there?”

“What are you thinking?”

“How soon!”

“Just a matter of minutes if I put the call through, but—”

Margaret interrupted him. “What is it, Patrick? What are you thinking?”

With that pressure-release mechanism out there, the track is going to blow when an engine crosses over the—

But you're talking about several acres of land dropping away and over a quarter of a million gallons of poisonous, liquefied compressed gas escaping a few hundred meters from a stadium filled with—

Albert muttered, “There's no way we're going to be able to stop that train.”

“Then,” I said, “we need to blow the track before it gets there.”

A pause. “What are you talking about?”

“Send one of those rail yard engines down the track to—”

“What?” he gasped. “Toward M343? A collision course?”

“Yes. Run it across that pressure mechanism so the tracks will blow.”

“But M343 will derail when it hits the blown section of track or collides with that other engine,” he countered.

“The guy at your dispatch center, Benson, he told me those tanker cars are reinforced, that they're designed to withstand rolling over—but they're not designed to withstand being blown up or dropping into collapsed mine shafts.”

“So,” Margaret said, “you're thinking we blow the track and just let the cars derail?”

“Yes.”

Albert said, “That's insane.”

“I'm out of ideas. And we're out of time.” I was staring at the stadium. All those people. “What else do you propose?”

“Well, we need to come up with an action plan and—”

Margaret cut in. “There's no time for that. We need to stop M343 before it crosses that section of track. Is there any other way we can do it?”

A blunt silence. I assumed that Albert was processing everything, the implications, the risks. “The engineer will have to jump after he gets it rolling.”

“Well, then, tell him to get ready to jump,” Margaret said, “because we can't let those hazmat cars blow.”

“Alright,” Albert agreed at last. “I'll call dispatch and get an engine en
route.”