Seven Unholy Days (28 page)

56

7:19 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

              Intel is starting to pour in on Hart now,” Larry said. “Matt, this is one bizarre bird. Here’s the skinny. Birth name is Abraham Hardier, son of Bernard Hardier. Daddy happened to be, now get this, one of the largest defense contractors in the state of Israel. They now buy most of their hardware from us, but thirty or forty years ago Hardier Enterprises built a lot of it for them using our specs ... why are you shaking your head?”

“No wonder he made it personal.”

“You saying you know this creep?”

“Never met him, but we’ve done battle before. Remember the fight for the CEPOCS contract?”

“Oh cripes! This guy is the Israeli that scrapped tooth and nail, isn’t he?”

“One and the same. The clock is ticking. Let’s get to the here and now.”

“Hang tight, bro. It all fits in, believe me. When little Abe was around nineteen or twenty years old, Mommy and Daddy met a grisly death. Chopped into itty bitty pieces in the kitchen at their house. So guess who got the family dough?

“Was he a suspect?”

“Numero uno for a month, at which time his team of lawyers managed to produce an airtight alibi. The gardener was eventually convicted.”

“How much money did he inherit?

“Billions, and that was a lot of cash back then.”

“It’s still a lot of cash.”

“You ought to know, boss.”

“Move on, Larry. No time to get chatty.”

“Okay, okay. Junior ran the company for around three years himself, but it started losing money hand over fist and he turned management back over to the guys who had been there for years, and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Five years later, he Americanizes his name from Hardier to Hart, moves over here, and starts gobbling up real estate. Matt, this sucker owns the equivalent of city blocks in New York and L.A..”

“Where else?”

“Where do you think?”

“Nebraska.”

“Bingo. Ten years ago he bought almost twenty thousand acres of prime farm land in a bunch of different parcels, scattered around Omaha. The place where the explosion took place was one of them. He started building on that land three or four years ago. There aren’t many neighbors out there, but the ones we’ve talked to said that he set a record for the longest time consumed building a barn and a few other structures.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s about it right now, but we’re still working. If there’s more on him, we’ll find it.”

“Have the investigators on the scene gotten inside the buil
ding yet?”

“They’re in, but there’s nothing up top to do us any good. Whatever detonated in there melted everything, and I do mean everything, including bodies. The underground area Ms. Fulton mentioned is sealed off but they’re working to clear it. You guys making any progress on the ten-twenty-six predicament?”

“Not yet. We’re about to disassemble the device and see if we can find a transmitter in it. No choice, we’re running out of time.”

“Good luck, bud. I’m here if you need me.”

“Thanks, Larry.” I switched the screen back to systems mode and stared at the fifteen states still running green. The President axed the plan to bring the other states back online after our little incident with the speedy countdown. I had spoken to him directly and it wasn’t pleasant. I don’t care how rich you are, how successful you are, how independent you are, getting reamed by POTUS is a unique experience.

Abdul was at his station, still convinced there was another layer to the encrypted file, something we hadn’t seen yet. Tark was in the lounge researching, or praying, or maybe he was outside howling at the moon, who knows. His theory was that the people who were killed in the explosion were the martyrs of the fifth seal. If true, the bastard had killed his own people. What a guy. I was sick and tired of seals and judgments, e
xhausted to a point that I had never experienced despite the few hours of sleep I got the night before. I wanted more, but I had a fake nuclear bomb to dissect and figure out in three hours.

              Major Todd Thompson was back on screen. I had the electronic components of the device laid out on a table and was moving the camera over them for him. “Hold right there, Mr. Decker.” I had just about given up on getting him to ease up with the formality. Some military men are just built that way and the major was obviously one of them.

“I need you to turn the countdown timer over and move the camera in close on the backside.” I held the camera right on it for thirty seconds, and looked up at the screen. His eyes were locked and tiny beads of sweat broke out on his upper lip. Men like him don’t often sweat.

“Talk to me, Todd.”

“Mr. Decker, this is not good. You see that next component to your left, that is indeed a transmitter. It’s disconnected from any power source now, so it obviously can’t transmit.”

“Exactly. We’re a step ahead of him for once. What’s the problem?”

“The problem, sir, is that I’m afraid it’s already transmitted its signal. It probably did so when the trigger occurred to i
ncrease the countdown speed.”

“How on earth could you know that?”

“The countdown timer is still running.”

“Yes, it still has a battery pack attached to it, but we can pull that and stop it.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“Why?”

“You see that little coil apparatus on the back of the countdown timer?”

“I do.” 22.3 was stamped on it.

“Mr. Decker, that’s a frequency. Twenty-two-point-three Megahertz. And that countdown timer? I’m afraid it’s a receiver.”

“You’re telling me it’s receiving this countdown from somewhere else?”

“Yes sir.”

The understanding fell on me like a pallet of bricks. “Todd, are you saying this same exact countdown is already running on some unknown something sitting out there, that this is just a remote display of it?”

“That is correct, sir.”

I laid the camera down, took a deep breath, and rubbed my eyes. I aimed it at myself and looked into the lens. “Major Thompson, what now?”

Thompson leaned over and whispered for about thirty seconds to Larry, who then said, “Oh my God.” And it wasn’t just what he said, it was how he said it. Three distinct, widely spaced words: Oh. My. God.

“Matt, we need to get some more experts in on this,” Larry said.

“No, you people need to tell me what’s going on. We’re the ones sitting here and whatever you think you see here, I need to know. Right now.”

“Tell him, Major,” Larry said.

The major brought his arm up and wiped the sweat off his face with the sleeve of his uniform. That crisp, starched uniform that could stand at attention by itself. The dressy kind that a man like Thompson would never defile in such a manner. “I believe that countdown is taking place on a nuclear device, Mr. Decker.”

Abdul’s clattering keys went quiet. I swallowed hard and felt my heart swell against my ribcage. “Go on.”

“That frequency, twenty-two-point-three Megahertz, is an old frequency we’ve seen before.”

“On what?”

“Russian portable nuclear device.”

“How big?”

“They come in different sizes, but since the terror attacks started in ‘01, we’ve done a great job of tracking down most of the previously unaccounted-for devices. We believe the only ones remaining are the smaller one-kiloton units.”

“I mean physically what size, Todd, so we’ll know what to look for.”

“They’re about the size of a golf bag.”

“Great. There won’t be over a couple of thousand hiding places around here for something like that. What exactly will it look like if that’s what this is?”

“Assuming it’s in its original casing, probably a flat military green color, rectangular in shape. My guess is this is the old box that Ms. Fulton mentioned.”

“I see. Earlier, when we were first found this device, you said a small one couldn’t do damage beyond a few hundred yards. How certain is that?”

“That assessment has changed considerably, Mr. Decker.”

“Todd, if you call me Mr. Decker one more time, or say ‘sir’ to me one more time, I’m going to explode myself! Got it?”

“Yes—uh, yes. Roger that, Matt.”

“Good. Tell me why the damage assessment changed.”

“I hadn’t had an opportunity to study your locale at that point.”

I thought for a moment and realized what the problem was. “You didn’t know about the waterway.”

“Correct. A nuclear detonation at the Yellow Creek facility, even a device of relatively small kilotonnage, would cause massive radioactive contamination of the Tennessee-Tombigbee canal. The contamination would instantly spread south to the Gulf of Mexico and there’s nothing, I repeat, nothing, that we could do to stop or even contain it. The results will be catastrophic.”

“How do we find it? Will Geiger counters pick it up?”

“That’s old technology, not suitable. What’s called for here are AD-PDR43 RADIAC’s, portable survey monitors designed to detect beta and gamma.”

“How soon can you have some here?”

“We’ll need a number of them in order to cover the space of the complex in time, so—”

“Quick question, Todd. How do we know it’s even here at the complex? Why couldn’t this receiver be picking up the si
gnal from miles away?” I asked.

“The tuning apparatus is a low-sensitivity unit. I’m conf
ident the source is within a few hundred yards.”

“Okay, back to the original question, how long until you can get them here?”

“The Oak Ridge nuclear research facility in Tennessee is fairly close. I can get a chopper full of monitors, and people to run them, out of there within a half-hour, and have them to you in another forty-five minutes.”

“By the time they’re on the ground, we’ll have under two hours. If they find it, what then?”

“Let me work on that.”

“Work fast, Todd. Larry, any word on my father?”

“A team is in place at Alpine Village. No leads yet, but I’ll keep you apprised.”

57

9:03 CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

              Da
mn Murphy. The helicopter on hand at Oak Ridge was too small to carry the entourage and another had to be brought in from Chattanooga. The teams were finally in place and searching but with less than an hour and a half to go. Even worse, Major Thompson had no answers as to what to do with the thing once we found it. Finding an expert on disarming Soviet suitcase nukes and getting him in visual communication with us in a couple of hours was looking like an impossible task.

“Matthew,” Tark said, “take a look at this.” He had a stack of blueprints and mechanical diagrams for the Yellow Creek f
acility laid out on the table in the lounge.

“I’m a programmer, Tark. Mechanical engineering plans are as meaningless to me as Chinese. If you have a suggestion, let me have it in plain English.”

“Okay, before this place was Great Central, it was meant to be a lot of other things. At one point they were going to build solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle, and then Boeing tried to set it up as an aircraft factory. None of it ever worked out. In the beginning, though, it was built by the government to be a nuclear power plant. They spent billions on it before the funding dried up. Now here’s the good part. Look right here.”

He was pointing to a drawing of an object I did recognize, the massive concrete housing for a nuclear reactor. It was a cu
taway depiction that showed the cylindrical housing for what was supposed to be a new, safer design. Tark ran his finger down the page. “This tunnel you see going down from the reactor, as well as the housing, was completed. All that was left was to drop the actual apparatus in place and tie it in to the labyrinth of pipes and valves and steam generators that magically turn a little fissionable material into lots of electricity.”

I tapped my watch. “How’s it supposed to help us right now, Tark?”

“This tunnel is six feet across and goes straight down into the ground for nearly half a mile. At the bottom it opens up into a huge cavern that was blasted with high explosives dropped down through the tunnel. After the cavern had been created, they started at the bottom and built a reinforced concrete wall for the shaft all the way up. The opening in the finished shaft is just over three feet wide.”

“This is all very interesting but—”

“Don’t you see? We can drop the bomb down the shaft.”

I looked at my watch again. Six minutes wasted hearing a plan to drop a nuclear bomb down a hole and then hang around while it blows up. “Tark, have you lost your mind? The blast will come right back up the shaft and—”

“Oh no it won’t. The sole purpose for this shaft was to evacuate the nuclear core and contain any radioactivity in an emergency. This will work.”

I shook my head and walked out. In the control room, I got Larry and the major back on screen and shared it with them. To my shock, Major Thompson said, “Very resourceful. I’ve seen the plans for these shaft-evac units before but I didn’t realize one had ever been built. Let me see if I can find some hard data on the system. Give me ten minutes.”

“With all due respect, Todd, what’s to keep the blast from coming right up the shaft and vaporizing this whole place?”

“I need to review the data, s—, I mean, let me go find the d
ata, Matt. Ten minutes.”

Larry shrugged and I clicked off.

“Abdul, any progress on that file?”

He was typing so fast and so hard I could feel the counter shaking. “I am almost in.”

“No way! You’ve busted strong encryption without a password?”

“No. For some reason this last layer of the file wasn’t pr
otected as strongly as the rest. It’s almost like he wants us to see this last part, Matt Decker.”

That made very little sense, but then again, what you can expect from a card-carrying psychopath? “Let me know when you get it.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” Tark said. He pulled out another drawing. This one was a more artistic rendering of the system. Above the reactor housing was a large telescopic pole that went from the top of the concrete cylinder all the way to the roof of the cavernous building, a good two hundred feet. “This thing drops down into the shaft in sections and winds up going a thousand feet deep. Once it’s locked in place, fifty butterfly valves inside it close off. In theory it has a baffling effect that subdues any energy coming back up the shaft, with the result being that most of any blast is directed into the cave at the bottom.”

“Let’s go see what Thompson has to say about it,” I said. Tark and I made our way back to the control room. On my o
rders, Sheriff Litman had moved everyone else out of the building and a quarter mile away from the complex. The three of us, plus Abdul and the RADIAC teams, were the only people still there.

“Matt, I found the documentation on the system. It was d
esigned to contain radioactivity from a problematic core, not a nuclear detonation. I don’t have a good feeling about it at all,” Thompson said.

“That makes two of us, but the key question is do you have anything better?”

“I don’t have anything else, period.”

“Then this is our plan.” I glanced at Tark to see if I’d spot a smug ‘I told you so’ look on his face. I did not. In fact, he was a trifle pale.

“Our plan is worth exactly squat,” he said, “if we don’t find the bomb.”