Dead on Arrival

77

DeMarco got out of bed, trying not to wake Ellie, who was a shapely mound under the sheets, one tanned leg sticking out. DeMarco smiled. He was a lucky man.

He went to the bathroom, took a quick shower, and put on shorts, a faded Redskins T-shirt, and flip-flops, and then made a pot of coffee. He looked out at the lake through the kitchen window and then up at the sky. Perfect. The lake was flat and the sky was cloudless. It was going to be another good day to go jettin’ around in Ellie’s aunt’s boat.

He went outside and got the paper, then took the paper and his coffee out onto the deck. He wished he had a big house with a deck on a lake. He slipped the rubber band off the paper and saw the headline: TERRORIST ATTACK FOILED AT LAKE ERIE REFINERY.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he said out loud, then read the article.

Last night, security guards at the Sheffield refinery on Lake Erie foiled a terrorist attack that could have resulted in hundreds and possibly thousands of deaths. According to FBI spokesperson Jerome Hickson, the terrorist was a fourteen-year-old American Muslim from Cleveland named Javed Khan, who is now in police custody.

At approximately 1A.M., Khan dug a shallow hole underthe refinery’s security fence, entered the refinery, andattached three explosive devices to tanks and pipes containing hydrofluoric acid. According to Dr Matthew Trace, a professor of chemistry at Ohio State University, inhaling even small amounts of hydrofluoric acid can be fatal or cause permanent damage to organs.

Khan also had a fourth bomb attached to his clothing. The FBI believes that Khan had intended to wait until refinery workers were entering the facility on Tuesday morning, and then he would have gotten as close to the refinery’s main gate as possible and exploded all four bombs simultaneously, including the one on his person. By doing this he not only would have released the hydrofluoric acid to the atmospherebut would also have killed or injured numerous refinery workers and made it more difficult for the refinery to deal with the catastrophe. It is unclear how many people would have died if the bombs had been deton ated, but experts said that if the acid had been released, it could have affected people as far as ten miles away from the refinery.

Two security guards, Edward Kolowski and William Horton, were making a routine patrol of the refinery’s perimeter when they saw Khan crawling under the secur ity fence. He had already planted his explosives and was attempting to leave the facility. When Khan was captured, the remote control for detonating the bombs was in his jacket pocket, but because Kolowski and Horton seized the terrorist as he was crawling under the fence, Khan was unable to reach the remote. Had he been able to reach it, the FBI believes that he would have exploded the bombs at that time, killing the guards and himself and releasing the acid to the atmosphere. The FBI spokesperson stated that Khan had an accomplice, a man driving a pale green Chevrolet El Camino; all law enforcement agencies in the area are looking for the vehicle.

Mr Hickson noted that the possibility of terrorists attacking refineries has been a concern for some time and that Congress has held hearings on the subject. John Tolliver, plant operations manager for the refinery, stated that such concerns have been overstated and last night’s events showedthat refinery security procedures were effective. Tolliver said, ‘We have state-of-the-art security equipment at our refineries, but our primary line of defense is highly trained, alert security personnel like Ed Kolowski and Bill Horton.’

The Cleveland Plain Dealer discovered that Javed Khan’s late father, Ishaq Khan, had been detained by the FBI approximately a year ago for possible links to al-Qaeda and speculated that Khan may have been carrying on his father’s work. Attempts to contact Khan’s mother …

Wow, DeMarco thought. He wondered if he and Ellie had been in any danger. Damn good thing those security guys had been on their toes. Yep, he was a lucky man, he said to himself again, and turned to the sports page to see how the Nationals were doing.