Fallout

CHAPTER 32

Taking Craig’s theory with the utmost seriousness, the FBI joined with the DOE, the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to launch a prompt NEST response. June Atwood was instrumental in convincing the FBI Director of the validity of Craig’s conjecture. The Secret Service immediately wanted to veto having the President stop over — but the DoD insisted that any change of plans would be tantamount to announcing to the entire urban area that a nuclear bomb might be hidden somewhere on the streets. Air Force One remained on schedule, but ready to divert straight to Los Angeles at a moment’s notice.

The Nuclear Emergency Search Team catapulted into motion with its on-call equipment already loaded onto aircraft. Once the team was activated, they flew in immediately from California, New Mexico, and military bases in Nevada. It took less than three hours for the group to converge on Las Vegas: volunteer experts, scientists, security forces, Explosives Ordnance Disposal, and tactical commanders. They had no room for mistakes.

From the Las Vegas FBI Satellite Office, Jackson made numerous phone calls, finally securing an abandoned textile warehouse on the city outskirts to use as the NEST command center. Dozens of technicians swarmed through the building, hooking up phone lines, computer monitors, electrical connections, modems, and four satellite dishes. Rental cars and vans drove up to the warehouse.

In the eye of the storm, Craig stood outside the tall receiving door. Ryder trucks loaded with equipment ground up to the bays, while unmarked white vans and specially outfitted RVs pulled inside the warehouse. NEST workers rapidly stripped out the back seats of the vehicles, added monitoring devices, and rigged up the communications gear.

The commander of the operation, an Air Force major named Braden, stood with his arms crossed over his broad chest. He was a cool, hard-eyed man with a boyish freckled face, milk-white skin, and shockingly red hair. He never raised his voice, yet always managed to get the job done. Braden stood with a clipboard, using a red felt-tip pen as he looked over computer printouts, circling groups of names to be assigned together as teams.

“We’ve got a city to comb, Agent Kreident,” Braden said. “Normally, we’d plan for a dirty homemade fission device, but if your speculation is correct we’re looking for a bona fide warhead from the U.S. arsenal. And that makes me very nervous indeed. Given a terrorist weapon, there’s a better-than-even chance they’ve screwed up the assembly, and all we’d get is a big dud. But in this case, if it’s real — it’s real.”

“Are you going to evacuate the city?” Craig asked.

“Not just on circumstantial evidence. You caused one hell of a debate back in Washington. Right now my orders are to take your claim seriously.”

“Then should I hope I’m wrong?” Craig said.

Major Braden’s sea-green eyes looked at him strangely. “Of course not,” he said. “You should hope our team finds the device in time.”

Goldfarb rode in one of the unmarked NEST vans, cruising down the Las Vegas Strip, waiting for the sensitive radiation detectors to sound an alarm. The flickering lights of casino after casino dazzled the night. Tourists and gamblers streamed past the pirate ships of Treasure Island, beyond the Stardust, the Imperial Palace, the Gold Coast.

He leaned over to peer out the small porthole window of the nondescript van. Other team members scrutinized readouts from the gamma sensors that protruded from the van’s side walls.

Beside him an Army sergeant, a young Asian woman with short straight black hair, checked off their progress on the street map, tracing their search path with a yellow highlighter marker.

An Air Force lieutenant sat on one of the padded chairs in back of the darkened van, studying nuclear cross-section profiles, squiggly lines that danced across the screen of his laptop. Geiger counters sampled the ambient gamma levels every five seconds, but so far the lieutenant had seen no spike.

The vehicle cruised from block to block down the crowded Strip, which Major Braden had designated a likely hiding place for the militia weapon. Bryce Connors had kept a map of the casinos in Las Vegas — even though he claimed to know nothing about the militia’s October 24 strike.

NEST’s most likely scenario assumed that members of the Eagle’s Claw had somehow lugged the stolen device to a hotel room suite and locked the doors… or else they had parked it in a van in a long-term lot, much as the terrorists had done in the World Trade Center bombing.

The lieutenant continued to stare at his computer screen, blinking, obviously nervous but trying to maintain his composure. He looked up at Goldfarb. “Just like one of our exercises,” he said. “We do NEST wargames every year or so — and I always dreaded it ever happening for real.”

Goldfarb raised his eyebrows. One of the NEST first-aid techs had rebandaged his hand, but the broken little finger still throbbed. “So how does reality match with the exercises?”

“Similar, so far,” the lieutenant said. “The last one I did was called Mirage Gold, about a terrorist nuclear device hidden somewhere in New Orleans. We had three days to find and disarm the bomb, and we didn’t have many clues about where it might be. We received a red herring that it might be in the big sports stadium, you know, where the Saints play — but that turned out to be a dead end. Finally, in the last few hours, we tracked it down to a small shed near a runway in one of the smaller airports.”

“Did you win?” Goldfarb asked as the van continued along. “Did the bomb get defused?”

“Oh sure, we had thirty minutes to spare. Covered the shed with a containment tent, pumped the whole area full of foam, then we waded in with anti-C clothing to x-ray and defuse the device.”

Goldfarb considered this, his confidence dropping. “So you found it with half an hour to spare, but that was just a simulation. What would’ve happened if you’d had no leads?”

The lieutenant glanced at his computer screen, but still saw no change in the background spectrum. “The exercise controllers kept track of the timeframe and provided us with various clues and information as they deemed it necessary.”

“This time nobody’s going to give us free hints,” Goldfarb said.

The lieutenant didn’t answer as he continued to stare at his screen. Still nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The van drove on down the Strip, turning left onto Tropicana past the giant gold and emerald lion of the MGM Grand. The radiation spectra remained flat, showing no indication of a covert nuclear warhead.

If the terrorists had hidden it in Las Vegas, they had hidden it well.

Jackson carried one of the unmarked NEST briefcases, trying to look like a first-time conventioneer in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, Jackson’s demeanor carried an aura of formality that pegged him as a government official, no matter what he wore. Most of the time he reveled in the knowledge of his professionalism, but he did not know how to shut off that attitude when it became necessary to do so.

The hard lump of the radio earphone rested in his ear. He walked through the McCarran Airport terminal at a brisk pace, as fast as the detectors could analyze data. He and seven other NEST members carried identical briefcases loaded with sensing equipment. Voice-synthesis chips would speak into his earphone should he encounter background radiation that matched the anticipated signature of the diverted warhead.

But the earphone remained silent.

Jackson walked casually past the lockers, expecting, hoping, dreading that he might encounter such a pulse. Other inspectors worked the baggage claim areas, while additional teams walked at random up and down the terminals, the waiting areas by the gates, the line of restaurants and gift shops.

One of the NEST physicists who had ridden with him out to the airport had described an exercise dubbed “Busy Force I,” which had simulated a weapon-carrying aircraft crash near Salina, Kansas. Four fake warheads had been downed — one destroyed and scattered across the landscape, three damaged, but intact in the burning wreckage of the plane.

“Afterward we knew just how many mistakes we’d made, how many things didn’t work the way they should have,” the physicist had said. “And we didn’t have to find anything — we could see the burning wreckage, and it still took us days to get everything under control.” He looked exasperated. “This time we don’t know where the damned thing is, and we don’t even know how much time is on the clock. It could go off at any moment.”

Back in the converted textile warehouse on the fringes of the city, FEMA experts had already marked urban-scale evacuation routes, checking on available medical facilities and emergency care — in the event they did not find the device in time. They got ready to help the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who would become victims.

Back in Washington the debate raged on, voices raised against causing an unwarranted panic versus those who took Craig’s assessment at face value.

NEST Health Physicists had sent up weather balloons linked to computer models from ARAC, the Atmosphere Release and Advisory Capability; they would use the data to project distribution patterns of radioactive fallout, should the bomb explode. With the weather brooding, the thunderstorm gathering, the winds stirring up, the warhead detonation would not only wipe out Las Vegas, but would spread a swath of contamination over the entire southwestern United States.

Jackson continued to pace up and down the airport corridors, continuing his relentless search. He squeezed the handle of the briefcase again to send a test signal to his earphone. Everything functioned properly.

The airport had seemed a likely target for planting the bomb, but as Jackson covered his search pattern for a third time, he still found no indication of the hidden doomsday weapon.