“Calamity Jane takes all of that into account. It brings down banking system. It exploits vulnerabilities in military computer systems, and it interferes with GPS. Even Chinese have nothing like it. And more you try to kill it, more powerful it becomes.”
President Caldwell closed her eyes, bracing for impact. “How much time do we have?”
“You’ve misunderstood,” said Kasperov. “I refused to release it. That’s why I ran. They asked me to construct it, assured me it would be nothing more than deterrent, and I even convinced myself that creating it would help me to write best software to combat such virus. Keep your enemies close, right?”
“Yeah, but you had to suspect something,” said Fisher. “You had to know that one day, they’d ask you to use it.”
Kasperov pursed his lips and shook the hair out of his eyes. “Maybe in more limited way and on much smaller scale. I always assumed that ruining America’s economy would ruin Russia’s. Conventional wisdom no longer true for oligarchs. They will take risk and break world’s dependence on your economy. They say clean break is only way.”
“So they came to you, gave you the orders to throw the switch, and you told them to screw off and bolted,” said Fisher. “But why the loud exit?”
“I wanted to go quietly, but I knew my people would suffer. I wanted to give them time for escape. I couldn’t just leave them with nothing.”
“Can the Kremlin gain access to the virus?” Grim asked emphatically.
“No,” said Kasperov. “There is no way.”
“Are you willing to turn it over to us?” asked Caldwell.
“Absolutely not. Men should not wield such power.”
“Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you started banging in your code,” said Fisher.
“Maybe so.”
“You said their plan has three stages. If you’re out, can they still go through with the other two?” asked Grim.
“I would think so.”
Grim’s tone grew more demanding. “And what are they?”
“First, some important background. One of my company’s more recent projects involves hardening thorium reactor control computers against cyber attack.”
“Thorium . . . is that a nuclear material?” asked Fisher.
Grim had already pulled it up on her tablet computer and read from the screen. “It’s a fissile material that can be used for nuclear fuel. They call thorium reactors the ‘clean reactors.’ The stuff is a lot safer to work with than uranium or plutonium but pretty toxic nonetheless, especially if you get it into your lungs.”
“That’s right,” said Kasperov. “Well, we received pressure from government to limit scope of our research—for political reasons, of course. There’s a lot of money at stake here, so I began small investigation, trying to understand why Kremlin wasn’t supporting my work.”
“And what did you find?” Fisher asked.
“It was quite simple. Once hundreds of thorium reactors in Europe go online, Europeans will eventually become fossil fuel independent—and this will destroy Russia customer base. I had no idea my work would help undermine Russian economy.”
Grim frowned. “But how does that involve us?”
“I’ll tell you how,” Caldwell interjected. “We just struck a deal to sell our current stockpiles of thorium to Europe, along with moving out some material belonging to France and India. The buyers were lining up.”
“Yes, I know all about that,” said Kasperov. “And I know that oligarchs are not happy about sale.”
“Exactly how unhappy are they?” asked Fisher, sensing where this was going.
Kasperov hesitated. “Unhappy enough to make sure your thorium never reaches destination.”
Grim’s tone grew urgent. “Madame President, you said we just struck a deal. What’s the status of the thorium?”
“Final approval on the sales occurred last week. I assume it’s being prepared for shipment.”
Grim bolted out of her chair and went charging across the room, toward the hatch.
Fisher glanced to Kasperov. “Come with me!”
26
CHARLIE was calling out to Grim as Fisher and Kasperov arrived in the control center:
“Just got a huge hit on our old friend Rahmani from Bolivia.”
“It has to wait, Charlie!”
“All right, but—”
“Listen, right now we need to get into hazmat transport out of Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Ghost truck fleet. We need direct access to their command center in Albuquerque. I need to know if they’re currently shipping any thorium.”
“Did you say thorium?” Charlie looked at her for a moment, letting that sink in.
“Charlie!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it!”
“I’ll help him get access,” said President Caldwell, her image coming up on one of the control center’s big screens.
“I’ll assist,” said Briggs, rushing into the room and dropping into a computer station.
In the meantime, Grim stared determinedly at the SMI’s screen. She brought up a 378-page Oak Ridge National Lab report on the thorium stockpile in Nevada, and Fisher scanned a bar graph over her shoulder.
There were 3,500 tons of thorium stored in 21,585 metal drums. Each drum weighed an average of 330 pounds. The United States owned 18,924 drums of monolithic material, India had 760 of granulated pebbles, and France had 1,901 of dry powder all stored at the same site, buried in the side of a mountain.
Not a second after reading that, Grim typed in a request, and a wireframe representation of a tractor trailer began rotating on the screen, with data scrolling beside it:
A twenty-foot-long truck could hold approximately 120 drums. This was assuming no pallets, the drums packed into shipping containers. A tri-axel slider chassis could carry up to 44,000 pounds on U.S. roads. The 120 drums would have a total weight of approximately 40,000 pounds.
Over 800,000 hazmat shipments hit the roads every day, and all were highly regulated by the government. There were even classified routes across the United States for the transfer of such materials, with attempts made to keep them away from large population centers, but that was often impossible. The most recent map glowed beside Grim’s truck; however, when the government wanted to ship something highly classified such as nuclear materials, weapons, or other such top secret military technology, there was no map to be found, no record of the shipment. They’d call upon a “black” or “ghost fleet” of trucks whose drivers would not answer to their civilian employers but be directed by the government operators themselves. No other entities save for the government could track them or communicate with them. The dispatchers at their respective companies would be aware that drivers were on the road and transporting “something,” but no other information would be available.
Ghost fleet cabs were fitted with custom composite armor and lightweight armored glass, as well as redundant communications systems with dashboard panic buttons. The comms were part of a Qualcomm-like fleet management computer wired directly into the truck’s data bus. The command centers could monitor and track a vehicle’s GPS coordinates, get readings from the dashboard instrumentation, and engage in encrypted communications directly with the driver via an in-cab keyboard. Drivers or command center managers had the ability to disable the truck via traditional means such as shutting off the fuel supply and by the recent adoption of flux compression generators so the vehicle could not be moved or opened, its electronics permanently disabled by a localized electromagnetic pulse wave. Drivers had nicknamed that switch the “PON-R,” pronounced “pone-ar” and meaning “point of no return,” a familiar term also used by aviators to reference a point where their fuel level would no longer allow them to return to the airfield.