Fallout

21

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…”

Helen didn’t respond.

Luke debated with himself, then began. “Khan and three other Pakistanis were students of my Nevada Fighter Weapons School. Last night—this morning, actually—a bunch of men in trucks broke into the base. They killed the security guards and brought in bombs. I have no idea where they got them. They loaded their airplanes and took off. I got a call from Raymond—one of my employees who happened to be outside the base—and he told me what they were doing.” He sat forward and leaned on the table. “I raced down to the airfield, and four of us climbed into our MiGs. We were under a contract to do some missile testing, and it was scheduled for later that morning. Instead we went after the Pakistanis. We got to the nuclear power plant just as they were—”

“How did you know to go to San Onofre?”

“We didn’t. We just took off and chased them down. About halfway through, the FAA guy and I—Catfish was his call sign—concluded that’s where they were headed. It should all be on the tape. You can listen to it.”

“Go on.”

“Like I said, we were too late, but we got all of them but one. Vlad got shot down.”

“Is he okay?”

“Yes. He’s fine. He landed a couple miles north on the beach.”

“Vlad, you said?” Helen asked, acutely interested in this piece of information she hadn’t previously heard. “How well did you know this Vlad? He’s Russian?”

“Yes. He’s with MAPS. The company that did our maintenance.”

Helen considered the events from a new perspective. “How do you know he wasn’t involved?”

Luke frowned. “Other than the fact that he got shot down?”

“Yes,” Li replied. “Other than that.”

“I guess by the same way I know you weren’t involved. It’s a ridiculous thought.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he had no idea the Pakistanis were even coming. My hooking up with him was my doing. I’m the one who called MAPS to ask them to work on our airplanes and help us with the upgrades. You’re right, maybe he was involved with the Trilateral Commission, or maybe he was on the grassy knoll when Kennedy—”

“You don’t have to get sarcastic.”

“Well, it’s insulting when you ask questions like that.”

“Why did they do it?”

Luke sat back and breathed in loudly, then exhaled equally loudly. “I have no idea. He clearly had—”

“Khan?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded.

Luke continued. “He clearly had an attitude toward India—that’s understandable—and he had some negative things to say about the U.S. But nothing that rose to the level where I thought he would do something like this.”

“Did he ever talk about the nuclear testing that Pakistan did?”

“Sure. He thought there was an anti-Muslim bias in U.S. foreign policy.”

“Did he ever get more specific than that?”

“No.” Luke waited for Helen to ask him another question. She was obviously thinking. Something he’d said had stimulated an idea in her mind. Luke asked, “What about the trucks? And the men who killed the security guards?”

“The trucks were parked inside large hangars at an airfield nearby.”

“What airfield?” Luke asked.

“The one at Tonopah.”

“Ours?”

“No, no, the one—nearer the town, an old one…”

“Right off Route 6?”

“Yes.”

Luke shook his head. Of course. They had other planes waiting for them. “Any radar tracks flying out of there?”

“They’re checking all the FAA tapes now, but no one remembers seeing anything in that area.”

“So you have no idea where they’ve gone?”

“We’ll find them, but we don’t have anything yet.” Helen sat down at the desk. “There is one thing you may know…”

Luke nodded.

“What kind of submarine was it?”

He sat in the chair, his elbows resting on the beat-up table, embarrassed at what his answer had to be. “I’m not sure.”

Helen Li glanced at one of the men behind her, who handed her a large folder. “What kind of submarine do you think it was?”

“It wasn’t a Boomer.”

“It wasn’t a ballistic missile submarine? You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Was it nuclear?”

Luke closed his eyes and tried to regenerate the image in his mind, but all he could see was Khan swimming toward a black structure. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I’m no submarine expert.”

“You were in the Navy.”

“I was never in submarines.”

Helen spoke softly. “I’m told that all Navy pilots are trained to recognize submarines.” She was looking at him as if he were lying, as if his inability to be clear about the submarine might in fact be evidence that he was more deeply involved than she had originally thought. “Isn’t that right?”

He bit his tongue. “It’s been a while.”

“So was the submarine you saw nuclear?”

“I don’t think so,” Luke said, his frustration building.

“Why not?”

“Nuclear submarines have a certain shape. A teardrop, rounded-bow sort of shape. At least I think so. I’m really not sure, but if there are nuclear submarines that don’t have that shape, I don’t know about them.”

“This one didn’t have that teardrop shape?”

“No.”

“It was a diesel boat?” One of the men suddenly interjected, sitting down next to her.

Luke stared at the man, who was intense and angry. “Who are you?”

“It was a diesel boat? You sure?”

“What’s your name?”

“George Lane. Look, we don’t have much time. Are you sure it was a diesel boat?”

“I believe so.”

“You said you knew Russian submarines. Was it—”

“I said the submarines that we studied were mostly Russian submarines.”

“You used to be able to recognize Russian submarines. Right?”

“Mostly nukes.”

Lane riffled through a large stack of photographs and handed Luke one. “What is this?”

Luke studied the photograph. He didn’t want to get it wrong. “I’m not sure,” Luke said. “Maybe a Kilo.”

“Exactly,” Lane said. “Is that it?”

Luke recalled the image of the submarine again, as he looked down on it from his MiG over the Pacific Ocean. “It might have been. It was just sort of… nondescript. Black, the usual diesel look…”

Lane put another photograph in front of him. “What about this?”

“Whiskey class? Aren’t those things about fifty years old?”

Lane glanced at Helen. “Yes. They are old. But some of them have fallen into hands outside of the control of governments. One of these could be owned by people who don’t like the United States.”

“Definitely not.”

Lane thought for a minute. “What about this?” he said, putting another photograph in front of Luke, a large black-and-white glossy of a submarine on the surface. Luke stared at the photograph. “I don’t know. What is this?”

“French. Daphne class.”

“Let me see that.” Luke held up the photograph and examined it carefully. His eyes raced from one side to the other, the top to bottom. He drank in the entire shape, tried to envision the shape in the ocean behind a swimming Riaz Khan. “I just can’t tell. This doesn’t look quite right, but I can’t say for sure it isn’t either. Whose is it?”

“This particular one is French. But the Pakistanis have four of them.”

Luke looked at the picture again, harder, longer. He still didn’t know. “I’m just not sure.”

Lane frowned and gave Luke another photo. “How about this one?”

Luke studied it and shook his head. “What is it?”

“Type 209. German-made.”

“Did you ask the Air Force guys? They saw it, too.”

“They said it’s a sub, and we should ask you ’cause you’re a former squid.”

“Nice,” Luke said, handing the photo back to him. “Sorry.”

Lane was growing frustrated. Like Helen, he was beginning to doubt. “How can you not recognize submarines?”

“We never studied French submarines.”

He put three photographs next to each other on the table in front of Luke. “What about these? Last chance,” Lane said.

Luke studied the photos. “I don’t think it’s this one… What’s that?”

“That’s the Hashmat, a Pakistani Agosta-class sub.”

“Definitely not that one.”

“What about the other one?”

“The Khalid. New Agosta 90Bclass Pakistani sub. If you can’t tell us what it is, nobody will know what to be looking for. Even if we find a diesel boat in the Pacific now, we have no grounds to stop it. Without a positive ID from you, they have every right to be there and not respond to our request to surface, let alone allow us to search them. They’ll just politely say no. We’re at a dead end here, Mr. Henry. If you could give us some distinguishing features of this submarine, we might be able to make some progress.”

“I just can’t tell you anything else. I’m sorry.”

Lane put away his file. He looked at Helen, who nodded. He hurried out of the room, clearly to try other sources of information to track down the submarine.

Helen brushed the hair away from her face. “What about these Pakistani pilots?”

Luke sighed. “I know their names. I know they were approved and cleared by the DOD, and their entry visas were authorized by State. I know they were flying California Air National Guard F-16s and that they were flying F-16Cs back in Pakistan. I know the leader—”

“Riaz Khan.”

“I never trusted him. But never so much that I could tell him to leave.”

“You didn’t do any background investigation on them before accepting them to your school?”

Luke tried not to yell. “I’ve told you! They were authorized by Undersecretary of Defense Merewether. He said he’d take care of all clearances and ensure that their backgrounds were properly investigated. I relied on him to do it.”

“Did he ever put that in writing to you?”

“They sent us the clearances. You can look at those.”

“I already have. They’re not standard.”

“That’s my problem?”

Helen looked at him. She backed away from the chair and turned toward the small window, which was dirty on the inside, under the chain screen covering where it was impossible to clean. “We need a picture of this Khan.”

“There aren’t any.”

“No class photos? No welcome-aboard photos? Nothing?”

“Nothing. He avoided photos. He forbade his pilots from being photographed.”

“Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Yeah, a lot. But what are you going to do?”

“What’s your opinion on why this happened?”

That was the question Luke had been pondering since he got back on the ground. “It was why they came. The whole reason they were here. But just because he was mad at the U.S.? I guess that could be the whole reason, but my bet is there’s more to it. And frankly, I don’t know what else there could be.”

She glanced at the other two FBI agents, who watched silently. “And for whom do you think he was working?”

He hesitated, studying her face, wondering if he was missing something. “Well… Pakistan,” he said slowly. “Right? I mean, he was a Pakistani pilot. How could he be working for somebody else?”

“I don’t assume anything.” Li was thinking about other things. She looked into the distance.

Luke remained silent.

“Did you see any preparation on their part? Anything they did that pointed to this?”

“They asked us to help them plan a strike, but we do strike planning all the time. Nothing really unusual about that. They were focused on air-to-ground stuff, but again, for F-16s that’s not so unusual. That’s their primary role.”

Helen prepared to leave. “I’m having them release you.”

“What?” Katherine said, taken completely by surprise.

“The agents who arrested you were overzealous. The irresistible urge to arrest someone for something bad that has happened. It allows you to feel better about yourself.” She slipped her purse over her shoulder. “I suggest you go back to Tonopah and think of whatever you can that will help us catch him. Anything at all. Ask all your instructors.” She handed him a business card. “If you think of anything, call me. We must work fast. It’s my belief that he’s not finished.”

Luke glanced at Katherine, confused. “What do you mean?”

“He intended to hurt us. But I agree with you. I don’t think that was his final objective. I think that was one step in a larger plan.”

“What makes you say that?”

“My friends from the Agency believe that very strongly. They’re trying to figure out what his end game is, as they call it.”

“What could it be?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she said over her shoulder as she walked out. Then she stopped. “I’ve told them to reopen your base. We’ve seen what we need to see there.”