“Damn, I’m just trying to make nice over here. Not exactly in a good mood, are we?”
“You make nice by calling your buddy.”
Fisher left the man standing there by the servers. Yes, Kobin had been a great help, but his abduction of Sarah and desire to have Fisher killed meant that no amount of “making amends,” “earning his keep,” or anything else could fix what he’d done. Ever.
Before returning to the control room, Fisher took a moment to calm himself. That bastard had set his blood to boil, and he knew he’d take it out on the team if he didn’t let go.
After a deep breath, he started forward. “Hey, Charlie, we get anything?”
“Perfect timing, because, yeah, I found a link I’ve been looking for.” The kid swung around in his chair, rubbed his eyes, then waved his peanut butter spoon like Excalibur. “Come see this.”
Grim and Briggs joined Fisher at Charlie’s station.
“If this is another dead end…” Grim warned.
“Hell, no, boss,” Charlie answered, pointing to satellite photos of a seaport labeled King Abdulaziz.
The port was in the city of Dammam along Saudi Arabia’s east coast and about halfway down the Persian Gulf, between Kuwait City and Abu Dhabi. Fisher recalled that it was one of the largest in the entire gulf. A data window beside one image indicated that the port was a main gateway through which cargo entered the Eastern Province and moved on into the central provinces of Saudi Arabia and was strategically placed to service the oil industry. The port had its own administration offices; mechanical and marine workshops; electrical, telephone, and marine communication networks; and water treatment plants. A clinic, a fire department, and housing complex for employees with nearby mosques and supermarkets helped classify the surrounding harborage as a city within a city.
Was this the oligarchs’ third target?
“Given our timetable, it’s possible that our device could’ve been transported down to the southern coast like Sam said, then put on a ship — because three different Iranian ships called on the port within the last four hours.”
“So they want to blow up the port?” Fisher asked.
Charlie shrugged. “The generator’s a booster, yeah, but I’m thinking these guys are bolder than that. They’ll bury it within a bigger shipment and try to slip it past security. They wouldn’t worry about that if they wanted to blow the port. Hell, they could leave it on the ship and just detonate it there.”
“Come over here,” said Grim, crossing back to the SMI. “Great work, Charlie. You finally got something that points to Abqaiq. I’ll take it now.”
Charlie grinned. “I knew you would.”
Grim zoomed in on a map of Saudi Arabia, the vast plains of desert stretching out across the display like a piece of tanned leather. She narrowed the image toward a splotch of gray, a birthmark on an otherwise unbroken flesh-colored stretch sixty miles southwest of the port. The image came into focus to detail a cookie-cutter community with adjacent industrial facility to the east. Photos popped up in a gallery to the left, along with more data bars that identified the region as Abqaiq — pronounced “Ab-cake.”
While the overhead image showed circular storage tanks and rectangular buildings, the photos revealed an even vaster network of pipes — like the exposed bowels of some metallic beast — along with huge columns of smoke backlit by flames shooting skyward in long, thin tongues.
This wasn’t just an oil well. This was an oil processing facility, and it was located within a gated community of thirty thousand owned by Saudi Aramco, a Saudi Arabian national oil and natural gas company based in Dhahran.
“You’re looking at one of the largest oil processors in the world,” said Grim. “This facility handles more than half of Saudi Arabia’s daily oil exports. It’s a key node in the global energy pipeline. The main thing they do here is remove hydrogen sulfide from the crude oil so it doesn’t spontaneously explode during shipping.”
Grim tapped one data window to bring up a list of news stories. “Al-Qaeda launched an attack on Abqaiq back in 2006. They tried to get two cars carrying a ton of ammonium nitrate close to the processing plants, but the Saudis shut that down pretty quickly. They have security and entrances set up like an old medieval castle, where after you cross the gate, there’s a wide open area nearly a mile long that allows the second tier of forces to take you out. Since then, there have been hundreds more attempts, all of them small and barely worth mentioning. The Saudis have increased security — higher fences, electronic surveillance, and a garrison of over thirty-five thousand troops. They have operators from the Special Security Forces, Special Emergency Forces, the General Security Service, as well as local reps from fire and police. The bigger players include specialized brigades of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, the Royal Saudi Navy, and even the Coast Guard. They have a contingency plan for hijacked aircraft being flown into the plant, with F-15s from their nearest base on continual standby.”
“Tighter than Fort Knox,” said Briggs.
“And the Russians know it,” Charlie added.
“So what’re you thinking, Grim?” asked Fisher. “They’re smuggling the device into the processing plant?”
“There are two equipment warehouses on the east side in an area called Material Supply.” Grim spread her thumb and forefinger apart, coming in tight on the buildings. “The device could be hidden within some larger shipment and move through security. Some of those neutron generators — not all of them but some — emit radiation, and they’re expected to do so. I’m not sure the fluctuations or increase in readings would be picked up by those security teams when they’re already expecting some radiation — and I think that’s what the oligarchs are counting on.”
Fisher snickered. “So we won’t find a nose-cone-shaped warhead with a ticking clock on it, huh?”
Grim rolled her eyes and typed something on the touch keyboard. The screens faded to expose another map of the region with concentric circles of devastation flashing in crimson red, along with data bars popping up all over the screen to detail the destruction. “A fifteen kiloton nuclear explosion — about the size of the detonation in Hiroshima — would kill everyone at the plant and surrounding community, some 65,000 in all, including many American engineers.” She flicked her glance between Fisher and the SMI. “Within the first two to four months of the bombing, the acute effects of Hiroshima killed 90,000 to 166,000 people, with roughly half of the deaths occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefecture health department estimated that, of the people who died on the day of the explosion, sixty percent died from flash or flame burns, thirty percent from falling debris, and ten percent from other causes. Now take a look at this.” Grim brought up another series of windows with charts, graphs, and tables. “This data comes from conflicting sources, and the Saudis are always giving us the best-case scenario and boast that they’ve got enough backup supplies, reserves, facilities, and personnel to take a major blow like this and come out unaffected.”
“No way,” Briggs said.
“Yeah, I know,” said Grim. “Shutting down Abqaiq could take up to fifty percent of Saudi oil off the market for years and with it, much of the world’s spare capacity.”
“To hell with the oil. There are too many lives at stake — including Americans,” Fisher said. “And we lose credibility if the world learns assets were in place and we didn’t act. Let’s get on the horn right now.”