Fallout (32 page)

“There’ll be plenty of time for them to discover all the reasons I should be fired,” he said. “But for now our job is to track this guy down. No stone unturned. No idea unexplored. He snuck into our tent and set the whole thing on fire.”

Cindy nodded. Her computer screen was playing streaming video of the San Onofre plant in the California sunshine with the growing cloud of death clearly visible against the blue ocean. “What can I do?”

“We have to figure how he got here, how he got bombs, and who picked him up in the ocean. Way I see it, it’s Pakistan until they can convince us it isn’t. I just heard that Congress is convening in special session today to determine whether to declare war against Pakistan.”

“Seriously?” Cindy asked. “Seriously? War?”

“Very seriously. This attack was by members of their military. It was a brilliantly executed military attack, with an escape planned to include a submarine. That means some country was involved. If not Pakistan, who the hell would be prearranged to pick up Pakistani Air Force pilots and help them escape from an attack on the United States?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Exactly.”

“And the fact you claim no responsibility for an act of war by your military is interesting, but it doesn’t get you out of the box. We clearly have enough to declare war against them. And frankly, I don’t know which way Congress will want to go with this.”

Katherine sat across from Luke. Between them was a set of thin metal bars. Her face showed much of the stress she felt, but she was trying to be calm and supportive. She could tell that Luke was at the end of his rope. She replied softly, “It is radioactive.”

His one oasis of good news, that they hadn’t hit the nuclear plant, was quickly eroding. “The plants were completely intact!”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said, also amazed. “Apparently it was radioactive waste. It was stored on site.”

“Waste?” Luke asked, mystified. “Waste? What waste?”

“I don’t know. All I know is the experts are totally hysterical. They’re saying all kinds of things. On my way here from the airport, I heard that the big issue they’re trying to decide now is whether to evacuate Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles? Are you kidding me?”

“No. The cloud is being pushed northwest by the Santa Ana winds. The President has declared an emergency. The Governor has declared an emergency. They’re comparing this to Chernobyl. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is running around in circles, the Navy is searching for an invisible submarine, and the Air Force is looking for anybody in the air who’s unauthorized. But the lead story on CNN isn’t the attack, it’s the fact that the government stopped funding antiterrorism efforts at nuclear plants about three years ago. Too expensive. Everybody screamed how stupid it was at the time. You know how good the press is at ‘I told you so.’ ”

Luke was disgusted. “They didn’t find the sub?”

“The Navy isn’t saying much, but based on what I’ve heard, I think the nearest U.S. submarine was about two hundred miles away from where the F-16 went in. They sent out helicopters and P-3s, but nobody has found anything that I’ve heard about.”

“They’re long gone. It was a diesel. They’re too quiet. If they got even a couple hours’ head start, there’ll be no catching them.” Luke cradled his head in his hands. “I’m really sorry about this, Katherine. You think this was their plan all along?”

“Sure looks like it. Down to the last detail. I’ll bet the original plan was to go to TOPGUN. We just walked into it.”

Luke was speechless. He didn’t know what to do next. “Are we getting hammered in the news?”

“They finally know about the school, the four Pakistani students, the whole thing, but they’re not quite sure what to make of us. There’s a lot of amazement that a school was allowed to operate in Nevada with Russian fighters and that Pakistanis were allowed to come and operate supersonic fighters in the U.S. Oh, and Pakistan claims to know nothing about the attack. They claim to be equally outraged—”

“Right.”

“I’m just telling you what they’ve been saying. They know the pilots, but say they had no prior history of terrorist or radical activity. They think they might have affiliated with some other group, like the Taliban from Afghanistan, or the Iranians—a lot of possibilities. But nobody knows.”

“Can you see the cloud?”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “It must be ten miles across now and really high, maybe fifty thousand feet. You can see it from here.”

Luke leaned back in his wooden chair and closed his eyes. He was unable to clear his head of the shame and anger. He looked at Katherine. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You did everything you could to to stop him.”

“I didn’t listen to Brian as much as I should have. He had the scent of these guys. I didn’t listen. I looked right by. ‘But their security clearances were guaranteed by the United States government. The Undersecretary will look out for—‘ “

“Yeah, except the Undersecretary disappeared. I heard it on the news.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yeah. Vanished. No trace of him.”

“We’re dead.”

“Well, we’ll see where all this leads. My first job is to get you out of here. I’ll have to hire a lawyer.”

“Tell the other guys at the squadron to keep flying. Finish the class.”

Katherine braced herself for getting up out of her chair. “They can’t.”

“Why not?”

She’d hoped not to have to tell him. “The FBI padlocked the gate. The school’s been shut down.”

“Kevin,” Brian said breathlessly, sick from the developments of the last twenty-four hours and blaming himself, “you’ve got to help—”

“Where the hell are you?”

“The Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah.”

“Brian, I can’t even talk to you! Everybody involved in that school is a leper!”

“You’ve got to help,” Brian repeated, trying not to sound desperate.

“People a lot bigger than me are looking hard, Brian. You can be sure of that. People are looking under every rock. FBI, everybody. Trust me. This is way out of my hands. I can’t do anything.”

“Yes you can. Call Renee.”

Kevin was furious. “Don’t ever mention her name again! Ever.”

“You’ve got to get back to her. Find out what she knows!”

“Do you really think that with four Pakistani pilots attacking the United States we’re not going to be exercising our intelligence assets in Pakistan? How friggin’ stupid do you think we are?”

“And the Undersecretary. Find out who his contact was.”

“We already know!”

“What? Who? I haven’t heard anything on the news.”

“We don’t typically do news releases here.”

“So who was the contact?”

“Guy in the Pakistani embassy. His name was Yushaf.”

“Is somebody having a chat with him?”

“Seems he anticipated there might be a reaction to his pilots bombing our nuclear power plant. He was on an airplane when the attack was still under way.”

“He left before it was in the news?” Brian said, thinking.

“What?”

“He must have been in on it. How else could he have known to get on an airplane?”

“I’m not sure,” Kevin replied.

“That shows it was Pakistan’s plan all along. They pulled their guy from Washington before the shit hit the fan!”

Kevin pondered the implications. “Maybe. Maybe he’s just like this pilot. Maybe they’re all working against their country’s interests. Plus, Yushaf didn’t go back to Pakistan. He vanished.”

“Meaning what? He was working for somebody else?”

“We don’t know.”

“Where’d they get the bombs? Those have to have come from Pakistan.”

“They did. An armory near Islamabad was broken into a couple of months ago. That’s probably when they took the bombs.”

“You’ve got to work this, Kevin. There’s a radioactive cloud hovering off Southern California, the school has been shut down, and Luke is in jail. Can’t you do anything?”

Kevin said, “I’ll be in touch.”

Luke and Katherine were ushered into a conference room at the end of the hallway. It was poorly lit but well ventilated, with the thick wire screens over the windows. Luke was still in his khaki flight suit with the Russian wings on his nametag. He felt silly wearing the insignia of a Russian Colonel sitting in a jail on a Marine air station.

They waited patiently; they’d been told that they were to be interviewed immediately. Luke refused to sit. He wanted to fix everything, to make it all disappear. But he knew that the chance to do so was well behind him. The big wooden door opened, and four men and one woman walked in briskly. She was carrying a small black wallet, which she flipped opened and held in front of her. “FBI. Special Agent Helen Li. Please sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit.”

“Sit down,” she insisted. He did. She put her identification back into a small shoulder bag, then placed it on the floor next to the chair. She remained standing and leaned against the chair, holding the top of it with both her small hands and looking down at Luke. She was of medium height and very thin. Her straight hair didn’t quite reach her shoulders. “Are you Luke Henry?”

“Of course I am.”

“I’m here to question you about what happened. There are many things I need to ask you—”

“Aren’t you going to give him his rights?” Katherine interrupted.

Helen looked at her. “No.”

“He’s under arrest, you’re here to question him, and you’re not going to give him his rights?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I’m going to instruct him not to answer any questions.”

“You may instruct him to do whatever you wish,” Helen replied quietly.

Luke looked at Katherine and shook his head subtly. “What do you want?”

“There’s a radioactive cloud drifting toward Los Angeles. The entire West Coast is at risk.” She let that sink in. “I know that the pilots who conducted the attack were being trained by you in a secret desert airfield for the last three weeks.”

“It wasn’t secret.”

“That’s not really important right now,” a man said as he stepped forward.

“Right,” Luke replied. “Who are you?”

“This is Keith Berger,” Li said. “He’s with the Department of Energy.”

Luke looked at the short, round man, and saw deep pain in his face, like the pain of someone who’s just lost a child. “Do you know what happened at the plant? There are only two active plants there. Right? I mean, there are two operating reactors,” Luke said. “And they missed them completely. How the hell can there be a radioactive cloud?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “They hit another building. Almost certainly by intent.”

“What building? What was in there?”

“Nuclear waste.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“A lot of it?”

“Yes. High-level radioactive waste. A lot. The waste from Units Two and Three that has been produced in the last ten years. Even more.”

“Wasn’t it safe?”

“It didn’t have the protection of the two generating plants. And the waste is stored in an open pool of water. I’m afraid the Pakistani pilots knew that.”

“An open pool?” Luke asked, his eyes growing larger. “How did they know?”

“They hit the plant at its Achilles’ heel. The concentrated radiation in the waste was worse than if they’d penetrated one of the reactors. The bombs were able to penetrate the non-reinforced building. The spent waste was blown up with the water in which it was stored.”

“What was it doing there? Why was it stored like that?”

He was obviously distressed. “There’s been an argument ongoing for more than ten years within the federal government on where to store high-level nuclear waste. We built a place in Nevada, but then . . . there was concern about earthquakes. Look, we just couldn’t get agreement. So the waste has been sitting there—pretty much like it was at San Onofre—at most of the nuclear plants around the country.”

Luke stared straight ahead. “This is a disaster,” he said to no one in particular. He looked at Berger. “How could the Pakistanis know that?”

“All you have to do is follow the debates on nuclear waste, and you can find where virtually all the radioactive waste in the country is. There are maps all over the Internet. This waste is as bad as it gets, and it’s right on the coast.”

“But if the wind changes, it won’t get to L.A.”

“Then it would go to San Diego or Palm Springs.”

“So pray for still winds.”

“Then it will settle into the Pacific and ruin the coast of California for a couple of centuries.”

“Ruin?”

“Kill every living thing in the ocean for miles and pollute the bottom and food sources.”

Luke was despondent. “It doesn’t dissipate?”

Berger sighed. “Unlike love, radiation is forever. Or at least close enough to forever to count as forever.”

Helen leaned toward Luke and put her hands on the table. “We must try to control the impact of what has happened. We must try to prevent this from ever happening again. That’s what Mr. Berger is trying to do. But I’m here to find out who did this and why. I need your help. I want you to answer some questions.”

“I don’t think you should say anything,” Katherine interrupted. “We need to get you an attorney.”

“I don’t want a damned attorney!” Luke exploded.

“Do you agree to talk to us?”

“What are you guys doing to try to catch this guy?”

“Who is it that we should be trying to catch?”

“The guy who did this. Major Riaz Khan of the Pakistani Air Force. Do you not know what happened?” Luke asked, looking at Helen, then Katherine.

“I’d like to hear it from you.”

Luke was bone tired. Being awakened from a dead sleep to race to his squadron, only to find a catastrophe under way, had begun to catch up with him. The fact that he had just been in the biggest air battle an American had participated in since Vietnam seemed unreal. Instead of throwing back drinks and telling his friends all about it, he was sitting in a brig, explaining why he should be allowed to breathe. He’d done all he could. He’d fought as hard as he could, but it hadn’t been enough. Five minutes’ more notice, and everything would have been different. Maybe if he’d listened to Brian a little more closely, he wouldn’t be having the self-doubt he felt flooding him. Now he had to try to explain it to people who had no chance of figuring it out. “You know the story . . .”