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
