Jim DeFelice
Threat Level Black
For the men and women in the FBI who bust it every day and end up dodging as much political BS as bullets.
Part One. Shut out the Lights
Chapter 1
The last light went off in Manhattan three seconds after the bomb blast.
Brooklyn, farther from the epicenter, flickered for another half-second…
The D train had just entered the tunnel under the East River and slammed to a halt, sending its nearly one hundred passengers hurtling toward the front of the cars. The magnetic pulse that had exploded over the Con Ed power yard at the top of the island had wiped out more than just the power; all electrical devices within twenty-five miles stopped functioning — watches, radios, backup generators, old-fashioned fuses, computers, Walkmen, TV sets, electric toothbrushes, hair dryers, toasters, microwave ovens, fire alarms, security devices, video cameras, and children’s toys died, their microchips fried. Transformers, regulators, transistors, capacitors — they were all cooked by the blast.
With the lights out in Manhattan, two cars ran through Times Square, crashing into the lobby of the Loup Theater, where a crowd had just gathered for the revival of Cats. Flight 704 from London managed to land on the darkened runway at Kennedy but then slid off the apron, just in time to witness the midair collision of two flights trying to land at nearby LaGuardia. The nearly sixty thousand people crowding into Yankee Stadium for the start of the World Series against the Braves began to riot as they rushed for the exits. A fire truck speeding to a car fire on the access ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge skidded out of control at the jammed intersection. Striking an obstruction, it went airborne, flying up and over the bridge into the dark water below. On the George Washington Bridge, a distracted driver swerved his SUV into a liquid propane truck, sending the truck crashing into a rail. The tank hit the metal obstruction at just the right angle to compress the tank sufficiently to make it explode, turning the exit for the West Side into a yawning gate of flames.
Over on the east side of the island, the tram to Roosevelt Island stopped over the river, perched exactly 250 feet above the water. A woman aboard the car pressed her face to the glass, awed by the sight of New York completely dark. A dark shadow looped toward her; she stared at it for a moment, wondering if it was a cloud or some avenging angel sent by God. In the next moment the shadow materialized into the underside of a traffic helicopter whose gauges and controls had been devastated by the blast. The skid of the helicopter pierced the glass of the gondola, spearing the woman and her nearby companion before tearing the tram and its assembly down into the water in a huge fireball. The flames landed squarely on the deck of the Elflon Oil, a barge en route to a new floating power station about a quarter-mile upriver. The barge began to sink at the rear, leaking its fuel out into the water. Miraculously, the helicopter did not set the oil on fire; that happened a few minutes later when gasoline leaking from a tanker ignited, heating the thin layer of fuel sufficiently to turn the river into a layer of red and yellow fingers grasping desperately at anything in reach.
Then things got really ugly…
“Serves the bastards right for outlawing smoking,” said Andy Fisher, turning away from the computer where the simulation was running.
“That help you?” asked the programmer.
“Only psychologically. I can’t stand New York.”
“Of course, that’s only the first five minutes. It’ll take at least three months to get replacement parts for that electric yard that was fried in the blast, and God knows what else. It won’t be confined to New York, either. Remember the blackout in the summer of 2003? Spread from a few power lines in Ohio, right? Well, this thing will spread twenty times as far and at least as fast. And when the power goes out this time, it’ll stay out, at least in New York. Because the E-bomb fries everything. You don’t have a chance to pull the circuit breakers: They’re all fried. Everything’s fried. You know how long it’ll take to get replacement parts?”
“Months.”
“In some cases years. So you think: city without power for months? No lights, no elevators, no subways— ”
“Yeah, but I’m sure there’s plenty of downsides.” Fisher took a last swig of the coffee — Chase & Sanborn, 2003, north side of the mountain — then went outside to have a cigarette. He was joined there half a smoke later by Michael Macklin, who headed the CERN — Homeland Security joint task force that had called Fisher in.
“What do you think?” Macklin asked.
Fisher shrugged. “You couldn’t have worked Godzilla into the picture somehow?”
“He does Tokyo.”
Fisher took a long drag on the cigarette, working it down toward his fingertips. Something about the air in suburban Virginia made cigarettes burn quicker. Fisher had a theory that the burn rate increased in inverse proportion to the distance from Washington, D.C., with the Capitol building the epicenter of inflammability. Undoubtedly there was a flatulence factor involved.
“So is this something we worry about, or what?” asked Macklin.
“Oh, you can always worry,” said Fisher.
“Should we, though?”
Fisher took a last drag of his cigarette, then tossed it to the ground and took up another. Macklin had a kind of earnestness-grating, even under the best of circumstances, whatever those might be.
“Turning lights off in New York — not exactly the sort of thing that’s going to piss off Middle America,” said Fisher. “I know a bunch of ministers who might even get behind it.”
“The DIA thinks it’s a real threat,” Macklin said.
“Well, there you go, then,” said Fisher. “Obviously it’s nothing to worry about.”
“You’re joking, right?” Macklin eyed his cigarette, but Fisher wasn’t sharing, at least not with him: The head of Homeland Security had just suggested a five-cent tax on smokes to help pay for his department. “They say it’s good intelligence. There are intercepts between this Muslim cell in Syria talking about power going out. Problem is, they’re to a cell phone that no one’s been able to find. But the DIA thinks it’s good intelligence.”
“They ever tell you they had bad intelligence?” asked Fisher.
Macklin shifted around nervously. “Should we go to an orange alert?”
“What color are we at now?”
“Yellow.”
“You get a raise if the color changes?”
“No way.”
“Sucky job. You should never have left the FBI, Mack. You wouldn’t have had to worry about colors or the DIA. New York gets fried, it’s somebody else’s problem.”
“Hey, come on, Andy, give me a break here. I didn’t want to work for Homeland Security. Leah made me do it.”
Leah was Macklin’s wife. The pair had met while working together at the FBI several years before and, despite extensive counseling, had gotten married. From the moment he uttered the words “I do,” Macklin’s life had nose-dived: The poor slob had given up smoking, cut back on coffee, and according to the latest rumors even enlisted in a health club.
