which was quite simple actually and would only take a couple of minutes, then get out.
They were armed with 9mm Austrian Glock 17 pistols equipped with suppressors that bin Helbawi had smuggled in and hidden at the back of his locker. Each of them carried a spare nineteen-round magazine of ammunition in their pockets along with satchels that contained three one-kilo bricks of Semtex plus a half-dozen electronic detonators that had been modified so that once they were in place they could not be disarmed and if moved would automatically fire.
DeCamp looked at him. “Are you clear?”
“
DeCamp had seen the same look on a mission he’d carried out for a lieutenant general in the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence service, a few years ago in the Hindu Kush along the border with Afghanistan. His job had been to find a pair of CIA field officers quietly searching for bin Laden and kill them before they got to the ailing al- Quaeda leader and put a bullet in his brain. As long as bin Laden remained elusive, Pakistan’s government could maintain the illusion that it was a staunch U.S. ally and continue receiving American military aid.
DeCamp had staged his push into the mountains from the city of Peshawar, which was the first decent-sized city on the east side of the Khyber Pass, with a pair of deep cover ISI field officers who knew the rugged tribal areas and who were smart but in the end expendable.
The day before they were to leave, DeCamp had been coming out of the hotel when a young man — perhaps in his early twenties, only a couple of years younger than bin Helbawi — had come across the street, clutching at his padded jacket. He’d had the same look in his eyes as bin Helbawi did now; what amounted to the same religious fatalism in the set of his shoulders and his gait. At that moment DeCamp understood what was about to happen and he ran off in the opposite direction, managing to get fifty or sixty meters away where he ducked around the corner of a stone building when the massive explosion destroyed the entire front of the hotel.
The young man had been a suicide bomber, willing to give his life for the cause. But whether or not DeCamp had been the target had been impossible to know, and after his successful mission, after he’d killed the two CIA officers as well as the two ISI agents assigned to him, and he’d returned to Nice one million dollars richer, he’d remembered the look in the young man’s eyes, and swore he’d never forget it, because recognizing it had saved his life.
And now bin Helbawi, who’d been sent to him by the same ISI general, had the same look as if he were preparing his soul for paradise and not escape. It was a look that he’d carefully concealed during his training in Syria and evidently for the past ten months here, because in addition to being a dedicated missionary he was bright.
He’d gotten his initial education, and militant Islamic radicalization, as bin Laden had, in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, at the King Abdul Aziz University where he’d studied physics and mathematics. Al-Quaeda, needing bright new minds for another spectacular push after 9/11, had brought him from Pakistan and had footed the bill for his BS. After graduation they’d sent him to Paris for eighteen months to learn French, and then to the International School of Nuclear Engineering at Saclay, and finally the Kestner Division of GEA Process Engineering in Montigny, which provided engineering solutions for nuclear power stations where he learned more engineering and perfected his French.
By the time he reached New York, on a French passport under the name Forcier, with an impressive resume, the first headhunter he’d approached got him the Hutchinson Island job in less than twenty-four hours. Nuclear engineers were in short supply.
Such a waste, DeCamp thought. All that education would end in a couple of hours because bin Helbawi knew damned well that he’d never get out of the control room alive. Or, if by some miracle he managed to hold out until just before the explosives destroyed the scram panels for both reactors, and if he could get to his car and make it through the gate and drive away, he wouldn’t have the time to get outside the radiological damage path. He would take a heavy hit of rems that would sicken and eventually kill him.
Either way, he would not survive this mission and he knew it; he’d probably known it from the beginning, as did his ISI general. His willingness to die for the cause — not such a rare trait among Islamic extremists — plus his intelligence were the very reasons he’d been selected.
Afterwards, his mother, three sisters, and one brother in the tiny town of Sadda on the Afghan border would get some serious financial help, enough so that his brother could be sent to a real school in Islamabad, or perhaps even Jidda. A way out for them.
All that had passed through DeCamp’s head in the blink of an eye, and he simply didn’t care about any of it. He was here to do a job and then go home. There were no other considerations.
DeCamp keyed his cell phone, temporarily freezing the camera in the hall and, making sure that no one was coming, let bin Helbawi cross the corridor first and use his key card to unlock the control room door.
DeCamp had spent thirty days with him at an al-Quaeda camp in the desert outside of Damascus where they’d gone over, in detail, every step of the mission. Bin Helbawi was a lot brighter than the average terrorist, even brighter than most of the upper-level planners who’d worked with bin Laden and knew what they were doing, so he’d caught on very quickly.
The door opened and bin Helbawi hesitated for a moment, then they both went inside. There were no cameras in the control room.
Before Stan Kubansky, the supervisor, leaning up against his desk, realized that someone had come through the door, bin Helbawi disabled the card reader so that no one could get in, and DeCamp pulled out his silenced pistol and marched all the way into the room.
One of the operators glanced up and started to say something, but DeCamp put one round into his head, the force shoving him against the man seated next to him at the first console.
Kubansky turned, his eyes wide, his mouth half opened, and reached for the telephone, but bin Helbawi fired three times, one round hitting the engineer in the neck just below his jaw, and he lurched sideways, his hand going to his destroyed neck, blood pumping out in long arterial spurts.
“The blinds,” DeCamp said, his blood singing again like it had in the old Angola days, and he shot the engineer in the head.
“Son of a bitch!” one of the operators shouted, and he reached for his keyboard, but DeCamp shot him in the head.
Still moving toward the two consoles, he shot the remaining two men, one round in each man’s head, and the control room was suddenly silent.
Bin Helbawi was standing behind one of the consoles, a lot of blood on the computer monitor and keyboard and splattered across the desk, not moving as if he were in a trance.
“The blinds?” DeCamp prompted.
Bin Helbawi glanced at him. “Locked.”
At the training camp in Syria, bin Helbawi showed DeCamp photographs and diagrams of how most nuclear power station control rooms were configured — the monitors, the safety devices, and their controls and most important the scram panels. Hutchinson Island was similar, but last week bin Helbawi had faxed several sketches, which showed the differences and exact layout, and DeCamp had committed them to memory while he waited in Miami.
The plan was simple. First they would destroy the panels that controlled the coolant systems, which would cause each reactor to overheat. Next they would destroy both scram panels, which would have sensed the overheat and automatically shut down the reactors. Once the Semtex was in place and fused, the only way to prevent a catastrophic meltdown would be to pull the panels apart and rewire them so the coolant and scram controls could be manipulated manually.
Bin Helbawi would remain behind until the last minute to make sure there would not be enough time for such a fix.
“I could do this thing myself,” he’d said the night before he’d left Damascus.
They’d been sitting at a sidewalk cafe just off Azmeh Square downtown, the evening soft, the streets busy and noisy. “It’s better if I come,” DeCamp said, sipping tea.
“But I’m the nuclear engineer, not you. It’s what I know. I can do this.”
DeCamp nodded. “It’s what you know. But my expertise is killing people. Are you an expert in this as well?”
