In the distance, a larger group of charter company personnel stood in the shade of the hangar, gaping at the devastation, a heat haze billowing toward them.
Fisher’s OPSAT was flashing with a message from Grim:
911 called. Feds and fire service on the way! Get back to the plane!
“Briggs!” Fisher could barely hear his own voice.
Briggs said something as he scraped himself off the asphalt. He turned back and proffered a hand to Fisher, who groaned and rose.
Just as he caught his balance, the flames roared more fiercely behind them, and Briggs’s lips moved in a shout that might’ve been, “Plane’s gonna blow!” but all Fisher heard was that steady and deafening hum.
They hauled ass out of there, with first responders’ flashing lights now out on the service road and the on-site fire crew rolling forward in their yellow trucks.
With another hollow burst, the rest of the fuel went up, tearing apart the wings with more tremors and sending sharp-edged pieces of the jet boomeranging in all directions.
Fisher charged toward the C-17’s aft, where the loading ramp was beginning to descend.
Something struck him hard in the back, knocking him flat onto his stomach.
He turned his head, saw a section of one seat lying on the ground beside him. He felt something wet on his right hand. More fuel. He shot up, and seeing Briggs race ahead, he dragged himself forward, stumbling in behind the man.
The pilot was wheeling the plane around, and it was Kobin who, with a line and harness attached to his waist, descended the ramp, ready to haul them aboard.
Looking like a bad actor in a poorly dubbed foreign film, Kobin screamed, cursed, and waved them aboard, a few of his words penetrating the hum in Fisher’s ears.
The smuggler seized Briggs, who turned back and took Fisher’s hand, and they bolted up the ramp, dropping to their knees inside the bay.
Fisher’s hearing was beginning to return, if only a little, and he looked at Kobin, whose mouth was still running a mile a minute. Fisher waved his hand then pointed to his ear. Can’t hear you!
A short stop suddenly knocked them to the right, then the plane began to turn once more. Emergency liftoff time.
Fisher and Briggs stumbled their way out of the bay and collapsed into chairs inside the infirmary.
For a moment, a wave of pins and needles passed through Fisher’s shoulders, working up into his head, and he thought, Well, maybe I’m going to pass out.
He didn’t, and when the light returned to his eyes, Charlie and Grim were there, with Kasperov standing behind them.
“I got it all on video,” said Charlie. “Especially the part where you told him we knew who he was and how Treskayev is going after the oligarchs now.”
“President Caldwell has the video, Sam,” Grim said. “And she’s sending it to Treskayev as more proof.”
Fisher nodded, then glanced over at Briggs, whose lip and nose were bleeding. “You all right?”
Briggs looked at him oddly for a second, then nodded, “Yeah, yeah, okay. Still can’t hear very well.”
“Good.” He faced Grim. “I thought Chern might’ve been their plan B.”
“No, they had a van full of C-4 following the lead truck,” Grim said. They tried to get into the zone after the tractor pulled over, but the FBI picked them up. Don’t have anything definitive yet, but rumor is they might be Iranians.”
“They find the explosives on the trucks?”
“Yeah, but only three of the eight were wired. Still, that would’ve been enough.” Grim faced Kasperov. “The president was right. You saved a lot of people today.”
“And so did he,” Kasperov said, lifting his head toward Fisher.
Fisher rubbed the corners of his eyes. “All right, no more messing with Texas. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Too bad we didn’t get Chern,” Charlie said. “But at least nobody else got hurt, right?”
Fisher rose and slapped a palm on the young man’s shoulder. “You’re right, Charlie. You’re damned right.”
* * *
WITHIN the next hour, the blunt trauma to Fisher’s body began to reveal itself in a patchwork of bruises accompanied by deep aches and pains that had him wincing as he sat down in the control center with Charlie and Grim. Briggs took up a chair behind them; Kasperov had returned to the infirmary.
“I wish I could say it’s over, but it’s not,” Grim began. “That hit Charlie got on Rahmani? It’s good.”
Charlie rapped a knuckle on one of his computer screens, where pictures of cylindrical devices with phone-sized or boom box–sized instruments attached to them were accompanied by cross-section drawings, labels, and text. Caps on the tubes’ ends bore stickers displaying the international radiation symbol. “Remember how Kasperov told us about his work hardening thorium reactor control computers against cyber attack? Well, he does a lot of work with a whole lot of energy companies, especially those who do oil and gas drilling. Obviously they need highly secure networks, and a lot of them geared up big-time after Stuxnet.”
Fisher was familiar with the computer worm known as “Stuxnet,” discovered in June 2010 by VirusBlokAda, an antivirus software vendor headquartered in Belarus. The word stuxnet in Russian meant “will spoil” or “will be extinguished,” but the worm’s name might’ve also come from key file names hidden in the code. The worm penetrated the air-gapped Iranian nuclear processing facility computer network in Natanz via infected thumb drives. Once inside, Stuxnet took command of the Siemens S7 industrial control system. The affected S7 sent false “normal” data to monitors while ordering the uranium-enriching centrifuges to spin at speeds outside their tolerances. Hundreds of centrifuges had been destroyed. Whether or not the United States and Israel had partnered to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program with the worm was, for some, still a point of contention; however, Fisher would neither confirm nor deny any information regarding U.S. involvement. Suffice it to say that Iran’s nuclear efforts in the past decade would have been fast-tracked had their facilities been protected by the kind of software that Kasperov Labs produced.
“Here’s what we’re thinking,” Charlie continued. “And I ran this by Kasperov and he agrees. The oligarchs might’ve gotten an idea from something based on Kasperov’s work.”
“What idea?” asked Fisher.
“One of his clients is a company called NGP. They’re the world’s supplier of neutron generators for what these guys call neutron porosity oil well logging.” Charlie regarded his computer screen. “That’s what I’ve been looking at here—pics of those generators.”
“What exactly do they do?” asked Briggs.
“Basically, engineers use these suckers to record the composition of the ground around oil wells. And that information is usually classified.”
Fisher nodded. “So how’s our boy Rahmani fit into all this?”
“Six weeks ago NGP shipped a generator to Iran. That’s pretty routine since Iranian engineers are always scouting out new oil fields. It’s the name on the customer’s invoice that blew my mind: Abu Jafar Harawi.”
“One of Rahmani’s known aliases,” Grim added.
“That’s right,” said Fisher. “Unless it’s another guy with the same name?”
“We don’t think so. The Special Activities Division has a contact in Iran, a MOIS agent who flipped. This guy ID’d Rahmani in Iran, and he confirmed that he saw Rahmani two days prior to that shipment. Rahmani was there and he took possession.”
“They’ve got a hundred pounds of enriched uranium, along with a neutron generator,” Fisher began, thinking aloud. “Are they using that generator to help build a bomb?”
Charlie shook his head. “Not help build it, but use it to act as a booster agent.”
“Back up,” said Grim. “I put out a BOLO to all our allies on that NGP shipping crate, and one of Israel’s Mossad agents played a hunch. He took a trip over to Natanz, which you’ll recall is Iran’s premier nuclear enrichment facility.”