The Enemy Within

CHAPTER 17 BLACKOUT

A severe autumn storm the howling, roaring creation of high winds and driving sheets of ice-cold rain tore across Maryland and Virginia just after dark. The long, black wall of clouds came pouring down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, scudding eastward across rolling hills, woods, and open farmland toward the Chesapeake Bay. Thirty miles northwest of Washington, D.C., the storm swept over the tall steel towers of the PennMarVa Electrical Intertie.

The intertie’s transmission lines linked Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia electric utilities together in a common power pool. Under normal conditions, the network enhanced each company’s market and power supply position.

Lines running north gave them access to cheaper hydroelectric power routed from Canada. The intertie also made it possible for member utilities to swap electricity back and forth to meet unexpected demand or to make up for out-of-commission generating plants.

Now, though, the power transmission network was a liability a weak point open to attack. Its long high-voltage lines were especially vulnerable where they crossed the Potomac.

Sefer Halovic turned his face to the bitter, clearising wind with something very like exultation in his soul. For him the storm was a manifestation of God’s power a vast and elemental force lashing out at America’s sophisticated technology and its material works. It was surely a sign of divine favor for his own secret war.

Strengthened by this revelation, he swung back to the task at hand.

A massive electrical transmission tower loomed out of the darkness above him like some primeval monster. As warning to low-flying aircraft, a ruby-red light blinked at its peak, one hundred and fifty feet above the ground. The fierce wind keening through the tower’s steel girders rose and fell in eerie counterpoint to the low, crackling hum of raw electricity coursing through the 500-kilovolt lines it supported.

Halovic peered through a blinding torrent of rain, following the swaying power lines northward across the Potomac until they disappeared in the swirling darkness well short of the Maryland shore. Another tower soared there, visible only as a hazy, pulsing glow in the distance. Truly, this was the place to strike, he thought. Once again, General Taleh’s planners had done their work well.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned.

Khalil Yassine had to yell to be heard over the wind and rain. “The charges are in place!”

“Good!” Halovic patted the backpack slung from his left shoulder. “I will place the detonators myself Use the radio. Find out how Nizrahim and his men are coming along.”

The young Palestinian nodded sharply and slithered down the rain-soaked slope toward where they’d parked the vehicle they were using tonight a dark-colored jeep Wrangler. It held the automatic weapons they would need later, spare explosives, and communications gear.

Halovic moved in the opposite direction, toward the nearest leg of the giant transmission tower. He knelt beside the white blocks of plastic explosive Yassine had molded to the steel, and reached inside the backpack for a reel of detonator cord. More blocks of C4 were visible on another of the tower’s four supports. Ignoring the freezing rain soaking through his jacket, the Bosnian began his delicate work. First, he stuck sections of the detcord into all of the charges the younger man had placed. Then he spliced the separate lengths together. He did not hurry. Men who took foolish chances when rigging demolitions rarely lived to regret their haste.

Satisfied that his splices would hold, Halovic started back toward the Wrangler, carefully trailing the detonator cord behind him. Again, he took his time, making sure of his footing before taking any step. Slipping in the mud now could undo all his hard work.

The Bosnian would have preferred using a surer, easier means to set off his explosives, but that was impossible. This close to a high-voltage source, timed or electrical detonators were too likely to malfunction or go off prematurely.

Yassine rejoined him halfway down the slope. “Nizrahim says they are almost ready. He is standing by.”

Halovic nodded without looking up.

Five minutes later, he knelt again, this time on the muddy access road next to their stolen Jeep. This far away, the transmission tower was only a halfseen blur through the pouring rain. A dirt embankment offered rudimentary cover. He pulled more equipment out of his backpack. In quick succession he taped the end of the detcord around a nonelectric blasting cap and then attached a time fuse and fuse lighter. Ready.

Halovic climbed up the embankment and gently placed the detonator assembly on the ground within easy reach. Then he slid back down the embankment. Set.

Yassine crouched beside him holding the walkie-talkie to his face as though it were a sacred talisman.

The Bosnian reached up and gripped the pull ring on the fuse lighter. He glanced at his companion and nodded sharply. “Go!”

The younger man clicked the transmit button on the walkie-talkie.

“Fire!”

In that same instant Halovic yanked the pull ring out of the lighter and flattened himself against the embankment. The blasting cap exploded, sending fire racing through the detonator cord at 21,000 feet per second.

THUMMP. THUMMP. Harsh white light flared against the dark, rain-drenched sky as their plastic explosives went off, shearing through hardened steel supports as though they were butter.

Two more explosions echoed across the river as the charges Nizrahim’s team had set on the Maryland tower detonated.

Halovic cautiously raised his head over the embankment to check his handiwork.

With two of its four steel supports shattered, the Virginiaside transmission tower shuddered, whipping back and forth through the rain. Then gravity and its own enormous weight took hold. Girders and bolts buckled under stresses they were never designed to withstand. Slowly first and then faster, amid the wrenching scream of tearing metal, the tower swayed sideways and toppled.

The long, twin 500-kv lines fell with it, whirring downward through the air, smashing through trees, and splashing into the white-capped Potomac. On the way down, they made contact and shorted out. Streamers of hellish blue light arced back and forth between the swishing wires like bolts of lightning trapped in a narrow space. Abruptly, everything went black.

Halovic blinked away the dazzling afterimages and turned toward his staring, openmouthed companion. “Come, Yassine. We have much more to do before we are done.”

The Palestinian nodded and followed him down the embankment to their waiting vehicle.

As planned, the terrorist attack came at the worst possible time the hour just after sunset when the demand for electricity peaked. Streets were now brightly lit against the gathering darkness. Office lights, computers, and copiers were still on. And millions of people coming home from work or school were flipping on lamps, televisions, ovens, and microwaves.

So when the PennMarVa Intertie’s 500-kv line went down, it created havoc in seconds. Current was still flowing south with nowhere to go. Emergency circuit breakers tripped automatically, desperately shunting the electrical load to secondary 230-kv lines. But the cascading load was too much for them to handle. Line temperatures rose rapidly, climbing toward the danger zone. More circuit breakers blew out across the entire system.

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.

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.

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.

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 harried looking 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.”

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 Bushehr’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.

The sleepy little town of Bushehr 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-Iranian 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.

Military equipment and supplies of all kinds were pouring into Bushehr. Convoys of trucks piled high with tank, artillery, and small-arms ammunition had begun arriving from the north mostly at night and always under heavy guard. Other materiel arrived at the airfield, flown directly from overseas arms dealers.

Taleh had handpicked a trusted officer, one renowned as a master logistician, to manage the all-important buildup here. Now it was time to see if he was doing his job properly.

Surrounded by a small cluster of his own aides, General Shahrough Akhavi was waiting for Taleh in front of the headquarters building, an old commercial shipping office taken over by the Army. He was a short, solidly built man, but his wire-rimmed glasses and full beard gave him a bookish air, like a university professor or a bookstore proprietor. He wasn’t one of Taleh’s inner circle, but the general had marked him as a fine officer, another man with Western training who had suffered at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards.

Taleh emerged from the car, and the two generals greeted each other warmly. Kazemi ignored them and concentrated instead on rechecking his security arrangements. What he saw pleased him. The Special Forces detachments were in place, ubiquitous but unobtrusive. There were no signs of trouble in any of the surrounding buildings. Good.

The captain turned back to his superiors.

Akhavi was introducing his staff to Taleh. As each man stepped up and saluted, Kazemi studied them closely. He always found it interesting to watch the faces of junior officers when they first met the Chief of Staff of their nation’s armed forces. Fear was common, as was awe, and sometimes open admiration. He was possessive enough about his commander to take something of a proprietary interest in their reactions.

One man, a tall, scarred major, seemed to keep his emotions very carefully under control when he met Taleh. But as he turned away, a flash of some strong emotion rippled across his features. He looked as though he’d smelled something bad or seen something disgusting. The expression was gone as quickly as it had come, but seeing it raised the hairs on the back of Kazemi’s neck.

A bad attitude like that was not conducive to a smoothly running operation, and this was too important a post to let the matter pass. The captain resolved to discuss Akhavi’s staff with Taleh at the next available opportunity.

The group, led by the two generals, started up the steps into the headquarters building. Kazemi hung back as was his habit, to make sure the security people were keeping up.

There was the tall major again, he noticed, moving quickly, maneuvering through the crowd of officers to approach Taleh from behind. The man’s right hand was held tight and flat over his pistol holster, slowly lifting the flap.

For an instant, Kazemi froze. The major was not simply a disgruntled staff officer. He was an assassin.

The captain started moving, racing up the steps without calling out. The security detail was too far away and the would-be assassin too close for an outcry to do Taleh any good. He could see the man’s pistol slowly coming clear of the holster. No!

Desperate now, Kazemi shoved a fat colonel out of his way and lunged up the last few steps. Still moving full tilt, he crashed into the assassin from behind, knocking him to the ground in a tangle of flailing arms and kicking legs. The pistol skittered away, unfired.

Shouts of surprise echoed above him, and Kazemi caught fleeting glimpses of men running, some away from the struggle, others toward it. He felt the other man attempting to rise and slammed an elbow into the back of his neck hard enough to stun him. In seconds it was over.

A pair of hard-faced Special Forces troops arrived at a run and yanked the would-be murderer to his feet, pinioning him between them. Another retrieved the cocked automatic and held it out for all to see. That was all the indictment required. At Taleh’s curt nod, the guards hustled the dazed assassin away for interrogation.

Kazemi picked himself up, bruised and scraped but barely winded by the brief struggle. He looked around him. General Akhavi’s look of horror seemed genuine enough, and the staffs of both generals were confusion personified. There appeared to be no more immediate danger.

Flanked now by guards with their weapons drawn, Taleh walked over as the captain brushed himself off. Concern filled his voice. “You are all right, Farhad?”

“Yes, General.”

“Once again it appears that I owe you my life.”

“It is yours to take, General.” Kazemi smiled, half in pleasure at his own success, half in knowing Taleh was safe.

The general touched his arm. “Can you take charge of the investigation? I must still hear General Akhavi’s report.”

“Of course, sir.” Kazemi actually would have liked a quiet cup of coffee somewhere, but he knew the time to act was now, before any other conspirators escaped or fabricated convincing stories. He hurried off to find his opposite number on Akhavi’s staff.

Two hours later, General Amir Taleh emerged into the bright afternoon sunshine, blinking. He’d sat quietly through Akhavi’s prepared briefing, projecting an image of stability and confidence. He was fairly sure that the logistics expert had not been involved in the attempt on his life, and he wanted to show his trust in the man both for Akhavi’s sake and to reassure his staff. The Bushehr base was too important to the success of SCIMITAR to leave in unwarranted turmoil.

But while half his mind had listened to the reports, the other half had been busy running through the possible implications of this sudden, unexpected attack. His security arrangements were so tight and well managed that the possibility of a betrayal or a conspiracy within his own personal staff was very slight. Nonetheless, such a thing could not be completely discounted.

Taleh made another mental note to review their procedures with Kazemi if the young man’s investigation turned up nothing more here. The alternative was even more frightening than betrayal by one of his own men. It was the possibility that some of the officers in the Army were so disaffected by his reforms and by his apparent rapprochement with America and the West that they were willing to shoot him on sight even at the certain cost of their own lives.

He shook his head slowly. Perhaps his hold on power was even more tenuous than he had imagined. His shoulders stiffened. Well, then, all the more reason to press ahead with his plans.

His operations here and in the United States were nearing a critical stage.

It was time to use one of his most jealously guarded and sophisticated weapons the special weapon his agent had acquired in Bulgaria so many months ago.