Dead or Alive

facility.”

“Talk to us about corrosion, Mr. Jenkins.”

“Our corrosion testing is done at the LTCTF-sorry, the Livermore’s Long-Term Corrosion Test Facility.”

“As in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory?”

Thanks for the softball, Jenkins thought but didn’t say. Lawrence Livermore was a household name, and while most people couldn’t tell you exactly what LLNL did, it was nevertheless held in high regard. Again, if Lawrence Livermore was on the job, what was there to worry about?

“Right,” he said. “The testing process involves aging and stressing metal samples called ‘coupons.’ Right now they’re testing eighteen thousand coupons representing fourteen different alloys in solutions common to this area. As of now, the average corrosion rate on the coupons is twenty nanometers a year. A human hair is five thousand times wider than that. At this rate, the Alloy 22 used in the nested canisters would hold up for about a hundred thousand years.”

“Impressive,” said a man in a cowboy hat, one of the Idaho delegates, Jenkins assumed. “What say we talk worst-case scenario. What if something leaks and starts seeping into the earth.”

“The chances of that are-”

“Humor us.”

“First of all, what you need to know is the water table beneath our feet is unusually deep, running at an average of fifteen hundred feet, which would be eleven hundred feet below this emplacement drift.”

This was another point of heated debate, Steve knew. While what he’d just told the delegates was true, some of the project scientists were lobbying for deeper emplacement drifts-some three hundred feet below this one. The truth was, there was no firm answer to the percolation question. How fast various liquids would seep through the rock beneath the facility was an unknown, as were the effects an earthquake might have on percolation rates. Then again, he reminded himself, the best estimates put the chances of a catastrophic earthquake affecting the storage levels at one in seventy million.

If anything was going to be the inescapable death knell for the facility, it would be the nature of the water table. Up until ten months earlier, it was uniformly believed that the area beneath the facility was what’s known as a closed hydrologic basin, an inward-sloping formation that offered outlets to neither oceans or rivers. Two exhaustive studies, one by the EPA and one by the USGS, now contradicted that belief. If accurate, aquifers might extend as far as the West Coast and the Gulf of California. Until the matter was settled, however, Steve’s orders were clear: The closed hydrologic basin model was the gold standard.

He said, “For waste to even begin seeping into the rock, dozens of systems and subsystems-both human and computer-would have to fail. Again, we need to put this into perspective: Compared to the security protocols this facility would operate on, sneaking into an ICBM silo and launching a missile would be a stroll in the park.”

“Is any of this material fissionable?”

“You mean can any of it explode?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it would take someone with a couple Ph.D.s at the end of their name to answer the whys, but the answer is no.”

“Say someone managed to sneak through security and get down to the storage levels with a bomb-”

“By ‘someone,’ I assume you mean Superman or the Incredible Hulk?”

This got outright laughter.

“Sure, why not? Let’s say they did. What kind of damage could they do?”

Steve shook his head. “Sorry to rain on your parade, but the logistics alone make that incredibly unlikely. First of all, you’ll notice this diagonal tunnel is ten feet wide. The amount of conventional explosives it would take to do any significant damage to the storage levels wouldn’t fit into a moving truck.”

“And nonconventional explosives?” asked the Idaho delegate.

Then, Steve thought, we’d have a problem.

43

OKAY, PEOPLE, time to change up the game,” Gerry

Hendley announced as he filed into the conference room and found a seat.

It was another morning at The Campus, and the conference table was laid out with carafes of steaming coffee and platters of pastries and doughnuts and bagels. Jack poured himself a cup of coffee, grabbed a whole-wheat bagel-no cream cheese-and found an empty spot at the table. Also present were Jerry Rounds, chief of analysis/intelligence; Sam Granger, chief of operations; Clark and Chavez; and the Caruso brothers.

“It’s time we start taking a focused approach. From this point on, every person in this room is going to have nothing else on his plate except for the Emir and the Umayyad Revolutionary Council-except for myself, Sam, and Jerry, of course. We’ll also be keeping the lights on and the doughnuts fresh, but the rest of you start shifting your workload. We’re going to live, breathe, and eat Emir twenty-four-seven until he’s caught or dead.”

“Hoo-yah,” Brian Caruso said, getting a round of laughter.

“To that end, we’ve given the group a fitting name: Kingfisher. The Emir thinks he’s a king of sorts, fine. We’re going to fish him out. From now on, this is your workspace, and everyone’s door is always open-that means me, it means Sam, and it means Jerry.”

Holy crap, Jack thought. Where’s this coming from?

“First things first. Dom and Brian were tracking down leads in Sweden,” Hendley said, then recounted Jack’s discovery of the DHS/FBI intercept about Hlasek Air. “We’re going to keep pulling at that thread, but nothing jumped out. Mechanic’s turned himself into the Swedish national police, but he’s got nothing to give. Cash transaction for a little work on a transponder and a charter full of maybe Middle Easterners.”

“Kingfisher,” Hendley continued. “If you’ve got an idea, tell someone. If you want to try something new, ask. If you just want to brainstorm or play what-if, get together and do. The only dumb questions or ideas are the ones we don’t ask or put out there. We’re going organic, people. Forget the way we were doing things and start thinking outside the box. You can bet your ass the Emir is. So: Questions?”

“Yeah,” Dominic Caruso said. “Why the change?”

“Got a piece of good advice recently.”

Jack saw Hendley give John Clark a barely perceptible glance, and then it made sense.

“We’re too small a shop to be running it like a bureaucracy,” Jerry Rounds added. “The three of us will be rotating through here regularly to make sure we’re still on the rails, but the bottom line is this: The Emir is an extraordinary character, and we have to change our tactics accordingly.”

“What does this mean for the operational side of things?” Chavez asked.

Sam Granger answered, “More business, we hope. A lot of the new stuff we’ll be generating won’t be verifiable in the hypothetical. That means beating the bushes and running down leads. A lot of it might be scut work, but it adds up. Don’t get me wrong, we’d all love a home run, but you don’t stumble ass-backward into them. You’ve got to work for them.”

“When do we start?” Jack asked.

“Right now,” Hendley replied. “First order of business is making sure we’re all on the same page. Let’s lay out what we know, what we suspect, and what we still have to find out.” He checked his watch. “We’ll break for lunch, then meet back here.”

Jack popped his head into Clark’s office. “Whatever you did, John, you sure as hell got Hendley’s attention.”

Clark shook his head. “I didn’t do anything but nudge him where he was already headed. He’s sharp. He would’ve gotten there eventually. Come on in. Got a minute to sit?”

“Sure.” Jack took a seat across the desk.

“Heard you want to get your hands dirty.”

“What? Oh, yeah. He told you, huh?”