White: A Novel (35 page)

Borders Atlantic is full of secrets . . .

Something caught Sirad’s eye as she drove. Just a reflection, a glint of light in the corner of her windshield, but it flashed in her head like a lightning bolt. Suddenly everything made sense—the beatings, all the talk of dueling and honor . . . even the attacks on Quantis.

Borders Atlantic may have lots of secrets—
she smiled as she yanked the steering wheel and raced up to the security gate—
but it seems that Jordan Mitchell has finally cleared the way for me to keep a few for myself.

NO ONE NOTICED
the Montagne Mountain Goat STOL circling carelessly over a frozen stretch of tundra one hundred miles south of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. These stout workhorses of Alaska’s bush pilot trade were familiar sights in a state that boasted more aircraft per capita than any other. This was a particularly isolated geography, too—just north of the Arctic Circle and dozens of miles from any human habitation.

“How about that snowfield right down there?” the copilot suggested. He pointed to a shiny section of wind-matted snow that looked hard enough to support the plane’s skis.

“You’re the navigator,” the pilot answered. He throttled back the lone engine and circled right, dropping the aircraft into a steep descent.

“You gotta love these buggers,” the copilot said, impressed with the easy handling and responsive throttle. The Mountain Goat, a relative newcomer to Alaska Air, boasted heavy payload capacity, 160-mile-an-hour cruising, and a stall speed of just 25 knots. That made it the perfect craft for today’s flight.

“Hang on,” the pilot advised. “Ya never know what’s under this crust.”

But there was no need to worry. The plane landed softly, turned right, and stopped, facing into a giant steel snake that ran eight hundred miles from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez.

“Twenty minutes,” the copilot said. The logistics cell had worked out every detail of this operation, from Alyeska Pipeline Service Company surveillance flight schedules to weather forecasts.

“I won’t be late,” the pilot answered, pulling the hood of his heavy parka up over his wool cap. “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass out there!”

The two men climbed out of the plane, shouldered eighty-pound backpacks, and started in opposite directions. Their job was pretty simple, actually. The Trans Alaska Pipeline may have been one of the engineering wonders of the twentieth century, but it lay dreadfully vulnerable to the simplest sabotage. Of its eight-hundred-mile length, more than four hundred miles lay aboveground, often propped atop ten-foot stilts designed to afford migrating elk and caribou a free range.

More than 9 million gallons of crude oil lay in the pipeline at any given time, flowing six miles per hour, pressurized at up to 1,180 pounds per square inch, heated and treated with additives to reduce drag. At forty-eight inches in diameter, each forty-foot section of concrete, steel, and insulation weighed some seventy-five thousand pounds.

First came the explosives.

Each man went to work on risers spaced about twenty-five yards apart. They wrapped two coils of lead sulfate flex linear shaped charge around each upright. The blasting caps had already been affixed, as had the detonation cord, which strung the whole thing together like a 750-foot length of pyrotechnic Christmas tree lights.

Attacking the pipeline would have been difficult if they had gone after the conduit itself, but the risers made everything much easier. All they had to do was cut the narrow legs out from under it and let its massive weight come crumbling down. By the time system engineers down in Valdez registered a flow disruption and shut down pump stations to the north and south, they would have lost a couple million barrels.

Next came the detonators—just one for each man’s string. They were simple devices, radio activated with backup batteries and redundant firing mechanisms. Of military design, they were built with components that could quickly be linked to bombs used in other attacks during the previous week.

By the time the two men met back at the plane, their hands and faces were numb with cold. Fortunately, the plane came equipped with a more-than-adequate heater.

“Damn this weather,” the pilot said, throttling up. “Can you imagine living out here?”

“Well, at least it’s pretty,” his partner said. He made sure the packs were stowed behind his seat and visually checked their work.

“Pretty for now,” the pilot said. He pointed the nose into a twenty-mile-an-hour wind and fire-walled the engine. “But I’d hate to be an Eskimo in an hour.”

COLONEL ELLIS WAS
running students through CQB drills in the Kill House when Heidi found him with a cell phone. He knew when he saw her that it would be important. Everyone knew better than to bother him when there were firearms and tuition checks on the line.

“Excuse me, fellas,” he said, stepping off to the side while one of the other instructors carried on as if nothing had happened.

He took the phone from his daughter without asking for clarification. He could tell by the look on her face that this was no courtesy call.

“Hello?” he answered.

“He placed a call,” the voice said. Ellis recognized it as one of the Cell Six members, a former platoon leader with the Tenth Mountain Division. His new element had already moved into DC to help with logistics for the final stages of the operation.

“Is that a problem?” the colonel asked. He had expressed his concerns about operational security, but Jeremy had a life. It could have been anything.

“We think so,” the man said. Ellis could hear children playing in the background as the man talked.

“And?”

“Caleb thinks this is a priority. He’s broken off from planning to deal with it.”

Ellis shook his head. Enemy infiltration had always been a possibility in his line of work, from Phoenix operations in the jungles of Indochina to compartmented projects at the Pentagon. He thought check valves built into the leaderless resistance model of the Phineas Priesthood had minimized the risk. Maybe he was wrong.

“To deal with what, exactly?” he asked.

“We tracked his call to a house in Stafford, Virginia,” the man said. “The mailbox reads Waller, no
k,
” the caller said. “We think that raises some serious questions. This guy is beginning to look like a real unknown.”

Ellis barely took time to weigh the variables.

“Well, you know how I feel about unknowns,” the colonel said. “Do what you have to do to get me some answers.”

“ALL RIGHT”—THE
vice president exhaled—“we’ve got less than twelve hours to pull this country back together. Where are we?”

Her immediate circle of advisors had distilled into three distinct groupings: law enforcement, intelligence, and politics. In addition to the chief of staff, who covered all the bases and kept the president’s interests foremost in mind, that meant Alred, Havelock, and the general. CIA chief Vick and the DHS director had been cut out of the loop, as had the entire cabinet. The most dangerous thing in times of crisis was loss of control, and all of these agency heads represented redundancy.

“HRT hit the safe house in Columbus early this morning,” Alred said. “It was our best hope of establishing a link between Ansar ins Allah and the Saudis.”

“Was?” Beechum asked. “What did they find?”

The FBI chief shifted in his seat.

“Two assault teams hit the front and back, simultaneously,” he said. “They encountered pretty stiff resistance but fought their way to the computer room, where they secured the hard drive. We flew it down to the lab in Quantico, and our cybercrimes division has pretty much concluded their exploitation efforts.”

“Excellent!” Havelock blurted out.

“Not really.” Alred scowled. “We killed five of them in the raid. There were three survivors who swore they thought HRT was a gang of anti-Arab street thugs. Seems they’d suffered a string of burglaries, death threats, and a couple assaults since the terror attacks started. As a security measure, they bought weapons and posted sentries inside the mosque. They said they were just trying to protect themselves.”

“My God . . . ,” Beechum said. “Are you telling me we never checked for gun permits?”

“We checked.” Alred nodded. “So what? Legal or illegal—we couldn’t read their minds. HRT had to consider the permits justification for use of deadly force.”

“What about the hard drive?” Oshinski asked. All this talk of casualties didn’t seem to bother him.

“Utility expenses, congregation addresses, fund-raising tallies . . . stuff you would expect to find on a business computer. There were some sermons the mullah kept, nothing really inflammatory. We’re still running down leads, but we’ve got to be prepared for the possibility that this is a dry hole.”

“Dry hole?” Chase exclaimed. “Are you telling me that all we’ve got after five days of investigation is five dead Muslims and a hard drive full of Excel spreadsheets?” She stood up and slammed her fist into the back of an empty chair. “Wait until the AP gets ahold of this!”

“We’re a country under attack, Andrea,” Havelock reminded her. “We’re still pulling bodies out from under Space Mountain for Chrisakes. Five bucks says this won’t even make the national news.”

“What about ties to the Saudis?” Beechum asked, ignoring his assessment of the Fourth Estate. “This was the cornerstone of our case against them, wasn’t it?”

“Hardly,” Havelock said. He reached into a blue three-ring binder embossed with an Air Force logo and gold letters that said
COMPARTMENTED MATERIAL ENCLOSED.

“I have assessments from the NSA, DIA, and CIA, everything from overhears—not chatter, but actual intercepts—to sole-source human intelligence and banking traffic. There’s very little doubt that the Saudis are moving money to accounts we can track directly to al Qaeda sympathizers and Palestinian separatists.”

“What am I going to do with bank transfers to al Qaeda sympathizers?” Beechum asked. “We need something concrete, something actionable.”

“Let’s not forget about the claims of responsibility,” Alred noted. “We have videotapes: Arabs spouting off information only the actual bombers would have known.”

“Hell, I can fake an Arab accent,” Chase mocked him. “This could be anyone.”

“Why?” Alred asked. “Why would anyone claim responsibility for barbarism like this unless they were responsible?”

“Look at the impact,” Chase said. “More than three thousand dead; the western half of the country is dark and cold; the mayor of Los Angeles is threatening martial law to stop the looters; civil aviation is paralyzed; markets are crashing. We had a guy in Miami shoot a meter reader thinking he was a terrorist sneaking around his backyard, for God’s sake! I never thought I’d live to say it, but we could be facing something cataclysmic here.”

“That’s enough,” Beechum announced. “The citizens of this country didn’t elect a government to throw their hands up and blame the referees.”

“She has a point,” Oshinski said, referring to Chase. “Our troops are spread very thin overseas, in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan. Intelligence-gathering operations are strung to the breaking point watching North Korea, Iran, and China. We can’t listen in on the Saudis because they have Jordan Mitchell’s goddamned Quantis phones. The president can’t even calm the American people because he’s in a drug-induced . . .”

“Reminding me of things I can’t control accomplishes nothing,” Beechum barked. This time it was she who stood. “I don’t need a council of briefers—I want to stop the next wave before it . . .”

“Excuse me, Elizabeth,” Vick said, striding into the room. “But we’re a little late for that.”

He walked to the wall and turned on television coverage of the latest bad news.

“Three new incidents: a major disruption of the Alaska pipeline, two container ships sunk in the mouth of the Mississippi just north of New Orleans, and huge fires at natural gas storage facilities in Boston. Very few casualties, but these are economic and ecological disasters.”

Blood rose brightly in Beechum’s eyes.

“That pipeline represents fifteen percent of our domestic oil supply,” Alred pointed out. More than 80 percent of America’s infrastructure was privately owned, and he had memorized Bureau threat assessments on all of it. “The Port of New Orleans controls shipping to the Midwest via the Mississippi. Boston’s natural gas reserves are . . .”

“Move the president down to the PEOC,” Beechum ordered, dismissing his analysis. The Presidential Emergency Operations Center lay beneath the East Wing at the other end of the mansion and had been built as a Cold War bomb shelter. “I want National Guard and reserves activated in all fifty states. I want the Pentagon to shift operations to Raven Rock and to step up DEFCON INCONUS to its highest alert. I want financial markets closed, all civil aviation grounded, a call-up of all reserve units . . .”

She thought for a moment and then nodded as if agreeing with a crazy thought.

“And I want a press conference in twenty minutes.”

“Press conference?” Chase blurted out. “You can’t conduct a press conference without the president.”

“The hell I can’t!” Beechum yelled. “Until David wakes up, I’m the chief executive of a country under direct attack. That gives you two options, Andrea: either get the president out of bed to entertain us with some hymns or get your ass to work. It’s time we fought back against these bastards and that is going to start with NBfuckingC!”

CHRISTOPHER WAS CHASING
Maddy through what remained of the snow in front of their house when the blue Isuzu Trooper pulled slowly up Coopers Lane.

“I got you, Maddy!” he yelled, holding a long stick in front of him like a rifle. “Pow! Pow!”

“Missed me!” his sister yelled back, dodging imaginary bullets in their run-and-gun game of HRT tag. Their dad wouldn’t let them play with real toy guns, so they used sticks instead.

“I did so get you!”

Christopher promptly slammed his imaginary gun on the ground, his cast hanging at his side, and began to pout.

“That’s not fair, Maddy,” he complained. It was late in the day, and he hadn’t had a nap. “You always say I missed.”