Blacklist Aftermath

30

That Fisher had run past Chern, beneath the charter jet’s nose, and toward Paladin One was a decision born of experience and not an instinctual reaction to fear. An untrained man would’ve unconsciously retreated to the rear, as nature had intended. You back away from danger, not run toward it.

But Fisher knew that sprinting across the tarmac and back toward the hangar would’ve left them unprotected and that the detonation would’ve first shredded them, then set ablaze what was left of their bodies. Having his remains positively identified by an FBI forensics team was not exactly on his bucket list.

As he and Briggs passed beneath the jet, Chern did, indeed, make his sacrifice to the motherland.

The explosion shook the asphalt and kicked the charter jet back toward Paladin One in the first second.

Next came the concussion that swept Fisher and Briggs off their feet and launched them into the air, even as their ears began to ring.

Strangely enough, as Fisher’s boots left the ground, his thoughts focused not on the impending doom and promise of physical pain but on identifying the nature of the explosion. And he sure as hell knew the sound of C-4 detonating versus other types of explosions. So there was a moment of relief — a sigh that lasted all of a second in knowing that this was a conventional explosion. This was not one of the famed or, rather, infamous RA-115s, aka “suitcase nukes” identified years ago by GRU defector Stanislav Lunev.

Better still, because the charter plane was taking the brunt of the explosion and they were wearing their Kevlar-weave tac-suits, Fisher thought maybe, just maybe, they might actually survive the blast.

They flew nearly twenty feet before crashing and rolling to the tarmac, the fireballs lifting behind them, the fully fueled charter plane engulfed in the flames.

Lying there, just a few meters away from Paladin One’s forward landing gear, Fisher wanted to stand and signal the pilot to get the hell out—

But there was no need. As if on cue, the plane began backing away from the fires, the engines spinning up as Fisher stole a look back, the world still spinning from his fall, the roaring just a muted bass note behind the high-pitched ringing.

The charter jet had been cut in half just behind the wings, its cockpit blown onto its side, the tail assembly lying askew and licked by orange fires spreading rapidly across the tarmac, fed by severed fuel lines. Puddles of pale yellow fluid swelled around the plane and whooshed into flames.

In the distance, a larger group of charter company personnel stood in the shade of the hangar, gaping at the devastation, a heat haze billowing toward them.

Fisher’s OPSAT was flashing with a message from Grim:

911 called. Feds and fire service on the way! Get back to the plane!

“Briggs!” Fisher could barely hear his own voice.

Briggs said something as he scraped himself off the asphalt. He turned back and proffered a hand to Fisher, who groaned and rose.

Just as he caught his balance, the flames roared more fiercely behind them, and Briggs’s lips moved in a shout that might’ve been, “Plane’s gonna blow!” but all Fisher heard was that steady and deafening hum.

They hauled ass out of there, with first responders’ flashing lights now out on the service road and the on-site fire crew rolling forward in their yellow trucks.

With another hollow burst, the rest of the fuel went up, tearing apart the wings with more tremors and sending sharp-edged pieces of the jet boomeranging in all directions.

Fisher charged toward the C-17’s aft, where the loading ramp was beginning to descend.

Something struck him hard in the back, knocking him flat onto his stomach.

He turned his head, saw a section of one seat lying on the ground beside him. He felt something wet on his right hand. More fuel. He shot up, and seeing Briggs race ahead, he dragged himself forward, stumbling in behind the man.

The pilot was wheeling the plane around, and it was Kobin who, with a line and harness attached to his waist, descended the ramp, ready to haul them aboard.

Looking like a bad actor in a poorly dubbed foreign film, Kobin screamed, cursed, and waved them aboard, a few of his words penetrating the hum in Fisher’s ears.

The smuggler seized Briggs, who turned back and took Fisher’s hand, and they bolted up the ramp, dropping to their knees inside the bay.

Fisher’s hearing was beginning to return, if only a little, and he looked at Kobin, whose mouth was still running a mile a minute. Fisher waved his hand then pointed to his ear. Can’t hear you!

A short stop suddenly knocked them to the right, then the plane began to turn once more. Emergency liftoff time.

Fisher and Briggs stumbled their way out of the bay and collapsed into chairs inside the infirmary.

For a moment, a wave of pins and needles passed through Fisher’s shoulders, working up into his head, and he thought, Well, maybe I’m going to pass out.

He didn’t, and when the light returned to his eyes, Charlie and Grim were there, with Kasperov standing behind them.

“I got it all on video,” said Charlie. “Especially the part where you told him we knew who he was and how Treskayev is going after the oligarchs now.”

“President Caldwell has the video, Sam,” Grim said. “And she’s sending it to Treskayev as more proof.”

Fisher nodded, then glanced over at Briggs, whose lip and nose were bleeding. “You all right?”

Briggs looked at him oddly for a second, then nodded, “Yeah, yeah, okay. Still can’t hear very well.”

“Good.” He faced Grim. “I thought Chern might’ve been their plan B.”

“No, they had a van full of C-4 following the lead truck,” Grim said. They tried to get into the zone after the tractor pulled over, but the FBI picked them up. Don’t have anything definitive yet, but rumor is they might be Iranians.”

“They find the explosives on the trucks?”

“Yeah, but only three of the eight were wired. Still, that would’ve been enough.” Grim faced Kasperov. “The president was right. You saved a lot of people today.”

“And so did he,” Kasperov said, lifting his head toward Fisher.

Fisher rubbed the corners of his eyes. “All right, no more messing with Texas. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Too bad we didn’t get Chern,” Charlie said. “But at least nobody else got hurt, right?”

Fisher rose and slapped a palm on the young man’s shoulder. “You’re right, Charlie. You’re damned right.”

Within the next hour, the blunt trauma to Fisher’s body began to reveal itself in a patchwork of bruises accompanied by deep aches and pains that had him wincing as he sat down in the control center with Charlie and Grim. Briggs took up a chair behind them; Kasperov had returned to the infirmary.

“I wish I could say it’s over, but it’s not,” Grim began. “That hit Charlie got on Rahmani? It’s good.”

Charlie rapped a knuckle on one of his computer screens, where pictures of cylindrical devices with phone-sized or boom box — sized instruments attached to them were accompanied by cross-section drawings, labels, and text. Caps on the tubes’ ends bore stickers displaying the international radiation symbol. “Remember how Kasperov told us about his work hardening thorium reactor control computers against cyber attack? Well, he does a lot of work with a whole lot of energy companies, especially those who do oil and gas drilling. Obviously they need highly secure networks, and a lot of them geared up big-time after Stuxnet.”

Fisher was familiar with the computer worm known as “Stuxnet,” discovered in June 2010 by VirusBlokAda, an antivirus software vendor headquartered in Belarus. The word stuxnet in Russian meant “will spoil” or “will be extinguished,” but the worm’s name might’ve also come from key file names hidden in the code. The worm penetrated the air-gapped Iranian nuclear processing facility computer network in Natanz via infected thumb drives. Once inside, Stuxnet took command of the Siemens S7 industrial control system. The affected S7 sent false “normal” data to monitors while ordering the uranium-enriching centrifuges to spin at speeds outside their tolerances. Hundreds of centrifuges had been destroyed. Whether or not the United States and Israel had partnered to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program with the worm was, for some, still a point of contention; however, Fisher would neither confirm nor deny any information regarding U.S. involvement. Suffice it to say that Iran’s nuclear efforts in the past decade would have been fast-tracked had their facilities been protected by the kind of software that Kasperov Labs produced.

“Here’s what we’re thinking,” Charlie continued. “And I ran this by Kasperov and he agrees. The oligarchs might’ve gotten an idea from something based on Kasperov’s work.”

“What idea?” asked Fisher.

“One of his clients is a company called NGP. They’re the world’s supplier of neutron generators for what these guys call neutron porosity oil well logging.” Charlie regarded his computer screen. “That’s what I’ve been looking at here — pics of those generators.”

“What exactly do they do?” asked Briggs.

“Basically, engineers use these suckers to record the composition of the ground around oil wells. And that information is usually classified.”

Fisher nodded. “So how’s our boy Rahmani fit into all this?”

“Six weeks ago NGP shipped a generator to Iran. That’s pretty routine since Iranian engineers are always scouting out new oil fields. It’s the name on the customer’s invoice that blew my mind: Abu Jafar Harawi.”

“One of Rahmani’s known aliases,” Grim added.

“That’s right,” said Fisher. “Unless it’s another guy with the same name?”

“We don’t think so. The Special Activities Division has a contact in Iran, a MOIS agent who flipped. This guy ID’d Rahmani in Iran, and he confirmed that he saw Rahmani two days prior to that shipment. Rahmani was there and he took possession.”

“They’ve got a hundred pounds of enriched uranium, along with a neutron generator,” Fisher began, thinking aloud. “Are they using that generator to help build a bomb?”

Charlie shook his head. “Not help build it, but use it to act as a booster agent.”

“Back up,” said Grim. “I put out a BOLO to all our allies on that NGP shipping crate, and one of Israel’s Mossad agents played a hunch. He took a trip over to Natanz, which you’ll recall is Iran’s premier nuclear enrichment facility.”

“Oh, man,” Briggs said. “This sounds bad.”

“No kidding,” said Charlie.

“The shipping crate should’ve been found at an oil field distribution depot, but yeah, it wound up in Natanz,” Grim said. “So let me posit this: Our Russian oligarchs helped the Iranians obtain the neutron generator because they’re building a simple uranium target-ring type bomb using the stolen material from Mayak. It’s definitely not a newer plutonium implosion device because the facility at Natanz doesn’t have an airtight lab or room. Plutonium’s a bitch to machine and work with. Just ask the Russians at Chernobyl all about that.”

Fisher exchanged a look with Briggs as Charlie picked up where Grim left off:

“So they’ll use this off-the-shelf neutron generator to pump in a stream of slow-moving neutrons to boost the bomb’s nuclear yield. If they’ve done their homework and surrounded the uranium with a good tungsten carbide tamper to act as a neutron reflector as well as delay the explosion of the reacting material, then they’ve got a cheap, Walmart-style version of a working nuke.”

“Is the generator still there?” asked Briggs.

“We think so,” said Grim.

“And here’s another theory,” added Charlie. “The Iranians could use the generator, so they can list it within a larger shipment—”

“Which would help disguise the bomb,” Fisher concluded.

Charlie shrugged. “It might, but we don’t have a clue what they’re using for a trigger — meaning we don’t know what the finished bomb will look like.”

Fisher nodded then turned to Grim. “Potential targets?”

“Historically, the Iranians don’t directly engage in terrorism; they use proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah,” she said. “A bulky gun-type nuke warhead won’t fit on the tip of an aerodynamic missile, so Israel’s not the target. But, consider this: The market value of Iranian oil is inversely proportional to the flow of Arabian oil, and that Arabian oil is sitting just across the Strait of Hormuz.”

“So you’re thinking an oil well,” Fisher said.

“Or at least some place that would routinely receive neutron generators as part of a larger shipment. The Iranians do the oligarchs’ dirty work and both parties score big.”

“All right, I follow you so far,” Fisher said. “But now this has me thinking — we confirmed that the Iranians were not involved with the Blacklist Engineers. So what makes the Russians better partners?”

“I’m not sure, but I bet the oligarchs have been working with the Iranians on this for a lot longer than we realize. The Iranians stood by and watched Sadiq and his Blacklist Engineers initiate their plan, and they observed us and targeted our weaknesses,” Grim said. “And maybe they found in the oligarchs a better-connected and — financed ally who could pull off a theft like the one at Mayak. Maybe there were political or ideological differences between Sadiq’s people and the Iranians, and the outcomes may not have benefited Iran.”

“Maybe they thought Sadiq was an asshole,” said Charlie.

Fisher repressed a grin and nodded.

Ollie called from his station. “POTUS on the line.”

They turned their heads to the overhead screen, where President Caldwell offered a curt greeting. “I’ve been on the phone with President Treskayev all afternoon. We just showed him the video you took.”

Fisher narrowed his gaze on her. “Did you ask him if he had any suspicions about this man Chern?”

“I did. And he wouldn’t talk about that. He’s says the oligarchs on our list must’ve been tipped off and fled, but all the intel assets in Asia and Europe have been alerted. When I informed him about the neutron generator and Natanz, he flatly denied that any Russian citizens would be involved. I told him that for a veteran politician he was acting rather naïve.”

“I agree,” said Grim.

“Honestly, though, he’s not my biggest problem right now. Israel’s Knesset is debating a preemptive air strike on the Natanz facility, and the country’s air force has already slipped into our equivalent of DEFCON One. Now this whole thing could turn into a Middle East powder keg.”

“Sounds like we’re going to Iran,” said Fisher.

Caldwell sighed in frustration, then finally nodded. “If I recall, you know your way around there, at least Quds Force headquarters, anyway. You’ll have my help.”

Grim was at the SMI table. “If we fly into Baghdad, we’re still looking at an eleven-hour road trip.”

“HALO jump?” Fisher asked.

Grim shook her head. “They’ve got some serious antiaircraft guns. There’s just no good way to get there. It’s smack in the middle of the desert.”

“We’ll work it out,” Fisher assured the president.

But they were wasting their time—

Because not six hours later, as they cruised over the Atlantic, Grim heard back from one of the Mossad ground agents assigned to be their eyes and ears on Natanz.

He breathlessly reported that one of his colleagues had been in a struggle with a perimeter guard and that both men had died. Just before his death, the agent had photographed traffic coming in and out of the facility — government cars, military vehicles, and various delivery trucks.

Even more importantly, he’d moved in close to a loading dock and had captured something large and draped in tarpaulins being transferred into a tractor trailer. The agent died before he could transmit those images, which were found stored on his camera.

“That has to be it,” Grim said. “They couldn’t attach the neutron generator in the field.”

“So they’ve built their bomb,” said Fisher.

Grim nodded. “And now it’s gone.”