The Enemy Within (41 page)

As alarms blared through several utility control canters, their computers swung into action, fighting for precedence among themselves as they tried to bring transmission lines back up. Power outages hopscotched across a vast area south from Gettysburg all the way to Williamsburg, Virginia. More and more substations and secondary lines went black as they were knocked off-line. The edge of each outage was easy to see. On one side of a street the houses and streetlights were bright and warm. On the other side there was nothing but cold darkness.

By the time the situation stabilised, more than 300,000 homes and businesses were left without power.

VEPCO
trouble crew, off Route 7, near the Potomac Rain pounded the red and grey
VEPCO
truck lumbering up the rutted access road. Water crashed down across the windshield in waves that drowned vision for seconds at a time. Branches scraped across metal as the fierce winds whipped the trees on either side of the narrow road into frenzied motion. For an instant, the truck skidded sideways as its tires lost traction in the mud.

Almost anybody with any choice was either at home or heading there as fast as the weather allowed.

Ray Atwater and his partner, Dennis Greenwood, didn’t have a choice. Both men had seen the weather coming and had said goodbye to their wives, not expecting to see them again until the storm stopped, whenever that was. While everyone else hunkered down, Virginia Electric Power crews worked to keep the lines up and everyone warm.

Right now Greenwood drove while Atwater pored over maps and diagrams of the power grid. Raised in Michigan’s stormy winters, Greenwood fought the rain-slick roads like a pro. Atwater was a rarity, a native of the area, and he was more than willing to let the other man have the wheel.

Their first job was to find the line break and see how bad things really were. In a sense, they were scouts for the construction crews assembling at utility yards throughout northern Virginia.

Atwater shook his head as he used a penlight to scan the intertie map. The first sensor reports showed that they’d lost the 500-kv line at one or both of the river transmission towers. He hoped the sensors were wrong. Even in good weather, trying to string new line across the Potomac would be a delicate, ticklish job. Under the current conditions, it would be all but impossible.

The troubleshooter put his charts away as the truck nosed out of the woods onto the long, mostly open slope leading to the intertie Potomac crossing point. He stared through the streaked windshield, straight into the center of total darkness. It was no good. He couldn’t see anything up ahead no steel latticework and no red warning light. Nothing but rainflecked blackness in the headlights.

Atwater glanced at his partner in surprise. “Where the hell’s the tower?”

He rolled down the window on his side, letting in the cold and wet, but also improving his view. Still nothing. “Shit.”

He thumbed the transmit switch on his radio mike. “Dispatch, this is One-Five ”

Rippling flashes lit up a small grove of trees only yards away. The windshield blew inward.

Both Atwater and Greenwood were killed instantly by a stuttering fusillade of automatic-weapons fire that ripped them apart. The utility trouble truck rolled on for a short distance and finally came to rest against the access road embankment. One lone headlight still gleamed, shining across the twisted wreckage of the 500-kv transmission tower.

HRT
ready-response section

A sudden gust bounced the UH-60 Blackhawk up and down through the choppy air. The clattering rotor noise rose to a new pitch as the helicopter’s pilot fought to maintain his control over the machine. They were only five hundred feet above the wind-whipped surface of the Potomac. Between the wind, the rain, and the bitter cold, flying conditions were right on the margin between dangerous and suicidal.

Seated right behind the cockpit, Helen Gray gripped her MP5 submachine gun tighter, trusting that her safety harness would hold. As the Blackhawk nosed down into forward flight again, she leaned closer to the copilot’s helmeted head. “How much further?”

“Not far.” He turned his head toward her, eyes invisible behind a set of night vision goggles, and gestured through the windscreen. “Maybe another half mile or so.’?

Helen slipped her own goggles down and stared hard at the wooded slopes ahead. It was difficult to make out any details through the downpour.

“There. About five hundred yards ahead. Just out of the tree line.” The pilot’s voice crackled through her earphones. “Looks like a vehicle. It’s not moving.”

Helen saw the
VEPCO
trouble truck at almost the same moment. It was stewed across an access road just below a pile of debris that must be the transmission tower they’d briefed her on. The driver’s-side door hung open. “Take us in.”

“Roger.”

The Blackhawk swooped closer to the hillside, shuddering again as it flew through more turbulence.
HRT
troopers in full assault gear slid the hero’s side doors open, bracing themselves against the sudden onslaught of rain and wind.

Helen leaned out through the opening, focusing on the ground rushing upward toward them. They were at one hundred feet. Fifty. Twenty-five. Her fingers unsnapped the safety harness holding her inside. “Here we go, people! Get set!”

The Blackhawk flared out just above the ground and hovered there, rotor pounding.

“Move! Move!” Helen threw herself through the side door and dropped prone with her
MPS
out and ready. The rest of her section spilled out after her and took up firing positions, forming a defensive ring on both sides of the helicopter. The instant they were all out, the Blackhawk transitioned to forward flight and climbed away into the darkness.

She waited for the sound of its engines to fade, scanning the ground in front of her for signs of movement. Tree limbs swayed in the wind, but she saw no evidence of anyone still lurking in ambush. “Anyone see anything?”

No one did.

Helen nodded, unsurprised. As she had feared, they were undoubtedly too late. Unsure of what had happened to its men and suspecting only a simple communications failure in the bad weather,
VEPCO
had delayed reporting any problem for nearly an hour. When the call came in, Flynn had immediately dispatched her
HRT
section to the scene. He had also asked both the Virginia and Maryland state police agencies to set up roadblocks in a wide perimeter around the power line crossing. She frowned. By now the terrorists were snugly and securely hidden among the D.C. area’s several million inhabitants.

Helen’s lips pursed as she sighted through her goggles at the bullet-riddled
VEPCO
truck. Why should they linger on at risk, when they had so easily and swiftly accomplished their mission?

Knocking down the two intertie transmission towers merely created a onetime inconvenience for several hundred thousand people. By killing the men sent out to cope with the problem, though, the terrorists had multiplied the effectiveness of their attack a hundredfold. How many utility crews anywhere in the United States would venture out to repair a line break or downed power pole until they were sure that
SWAT
teams or military units had secured the area? So power outages and other problems that once would have lasted only minutes or a couple of hours were bound to drag on for several hours or days.

Helen rose cautiously to her feet with the bitter taste of yet another defeat in her mouth. Whoever these sons of bitches were, they’d succeeded in throwing another monkey wrench into the intricately meshed gears of modern American life.

WJLA
late night news, Washington, D.C.

Rita Davis, one of the station’s star reporters, stood framed against the floodlit front steps of the Hoover Building. The petite, dark, curly-haired woman seemed dwarfed by the harriedlooking man next to her.

“This is Special Agent Michael Flynn, the man heading up the FBI’s special task force on terrorism. I’ve just filled him in on the phone call we received from the New Aryan Order, and he’s agreed to speak with us for a few minutes.”

The camera swung up and over to Flynn, who was clearly impatient and unhappy at being on TV. Davis couldn’t say so on camera, but she would certainly crow later to her colleagues about peeling Flynn away from the layers of public affairs people screening the FBI’s top investigator. Bartering hot information for interview time had worked.

“Agent Flynn, can you tell us how this most recent attack may fit into an overall neo-Nazi plan to set off a race war in this country?”

The
FBI
investigator frowned but answered smoothly. “As far as we know, Ms. Davis, there is no overall plan. Some of the terrorist groups may be loosely coordinating their operations, but we haven’t even found any hard evidence of that.”

One of Davis’s finely sculptured eyebrows rose skeptically. “No plan? Then how do you explain the wave of terror that’s been spreading across this whole country for the last three weeks? Is this all just a terrible coincidence?”

Flynn refused to rise to the bait. “I’m not prepared to discuss details of our investigations at this time, Ms. Davis. But I will say that an organized, nationwide conspiracy seems unlikely. Historically, none of these radical groups have trusted each other enough to work effectively together.”

“And you have no other explanation?” prompted the reporter.

“The best way to get answers is to find and arrest the men responsible.”

“And just how close are you to doing that?”

Flynn looked grim. “I can’t comment on that. We’re making some progress.” The tall
FBI
man turned away with a final, curt “That’s all I have time for, Ms. Davis.”

The camera followed him striding back into the building, surrounded by security men and aides, and then cut back to Davis. She addressed the studio-based anchorwoman. “Well, Fran, there you have it. Despite an intense effort, the
FBI
seems no nearer to stopping this deadly terrorist campaign than they were at the very beginning. This is Rita Davis, reporting live from the Hoover Building.”

NOVEMBER
25

Over Bushehr, Iran, on the Persian Gulf

(D
MINUS
20)

Captain Farhad Kazemi felt the C-130 Hercules transport plane bank sharply, beginning its descent over the blue waters of the Persian Gulf. They were on final approach to Bushchr’s tiny airport.

He glanced forward toward where General Amir Taleh sat reading deep in one of the unit readiness reports that consumed so much of the general’s time these days. Nearly sixty heavily armed soldiers wearing the green beret of Iran’s Special Forces filled the rest of the C-130’s troop compartment. Perhaps too many, Kazemi thought, but his near-raw nerves demanded that he take every measure imaginable to ensure his commander’s security.

When Kazemi was a young officer candidate, Taleh had saved him from execution by a Revolutionary tribunal, and ever since he had dedicated himself to keeping the general alive. That was getting harder to do.

The commander of Iran’s armed forces was playing a dangerous double game. His real plans were still a closely guarded secret. But opposition to his publicly stated policies was on the rise among Iran’s religious fanatics, some in the bureaucracy, and the survivors of the discredited Pasdaran. Taleh’s military and political reforms had wrecked many careers, most with good cause, but they had also left behind many angry men without much to lose. Such men were dangerous.

Kazemi felt himself pressed back into his seat as the Hercules bounced once and then braked sharply before taxiing toward one of the hangars at the airfield’s far end. They were down.

The Special Forces troops trotted down the C-130’s rear ramp and fanned out across the airfield, securing the small terminal building and the closest hangars before Kazemi allowed the general to emerge.

As a further precaution, Taleh would ride into town in one of three identical staff cars. The captain also dispatched a squad to scout the route ahead. Bushehr’s sunlit streets might make a pleasant change from Tehran’s crowded, polluted, frigid avenues, but they could prove just as hazardous.

Even though this was an unannounced inspection tour, Kazemi had no intention of taking unnecessary chances. Arranging some of Taleh’s own “incidents” had taught him just how vulnerable they were outside the well-defended precincts of their Tehran headquarters.

Headquarters, forward logistics base, Bushehr

The sleepy little town of Bushchr jutted out into the Persian Gulf at the end of a narrow, waterlogged peninsula. Sand colored mud-brick houses with balconies, latticed windows, and flat roofs lined the old city’s narrow, winding alleys and waterfront. Street urchins played leisurely, seemingly endless games of soccer, sticking to the cooler shadows wherever possible, dodging in and around brightly clad women out on their own slow, daily errands.

During the 1700s the town had been the country’s principal port. But when it was bypassed by the trans-lranian railroad in the 1930s, it had fallen steadily in importance and value. Exposed to repeated air and missile attacks during the war with Iraq, Bushehr had sunk further as a viable commercial harbor.

Now the port’s main business came from the Iranian Navy. During the war, Pasdaran Boghammer speedboats had used Bushehr as a base for raids on Iraqi and Kuwaiti shipping with some success. Since then, the Regular Navy had begun moving some of its activities northward from its crowded main base at Bandar-e Abbas.

Kazemi felt himself start to relax only when their wellarmed convoy of staff cars and troop carriers passed through the military checkpoint marking the logistics base perimeter. This was now friendly ground.

One week before, contingents of Iranian Army troops had occupied the old warehouse district adjoining the Bushehr naval base. They’d repaired and erected fences and barbedwire entanglements around the area, boarded up warehouse windows, and set up a ring of bristling sentry posts to keep the curious out and some of Taleh’s secrets in.