It was immediately apparent to Turbee that he had missed the obvious. This was how 4.5 tons of Semtex could destroy a city. They would blow up the Hoover Dam, not Las Vegas. With the dam gone, Las Vegas would be deprived of power and water. Without power to run the air conditioners, and without water, Las Vegas would return to the desert that it was. The city would die slowly. The buildings would remain, but they would be uninhabitable.
“Is he out of his fucking mind?” shouted the President, addressing his National Security Advisor. “We have battalions of troops, helicopters, Marines, Army Reserve, boats, and fighter jets swarming all over the Hoover. How in the hell can he blow it up? And why haven’t we figured it out yet?”
All those assembled in the Situation Room were likewise perplexed. Within 20 minutes of Jennifer Coe’s news that the Hoover Dam was the target of the terrorist strike, the sixth message had hit the airwaves. All of the American networks were interrupting regular programming to run commentary on the Emir’s threat. Within hours? The Hoover Dam? After Message Five, the Hoover had become heavily fortified. After Jennifer’s warning, it had a greater level of protection assigned to it than the White House itself.
The Secretary of Defense was likewise perplexed. Perhaps a missile strike on the dam? The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nixed that. It would have to be a huge missile, and there was no Intel of any sort about that. And in any event, the hit would need to be very precise, which meant highly sophisticated missile guidance systems, and there had been no indication of such a possibility. Perhaps it had been inserted into the dam itself, someone suggested. After all, with all of its complex diversion tunnels, intake and outtake works, and the powerhouse, the Hoover was a monstrous structure, much larger than it appeared to be in photographs.
“No way,” said Admiral Jackson, who was linked to the meeting by fiber optic line from the Pentagon. “We’ve had hundreds of people combing through every inch of that structure, and nothing has shown up.”
“Make them search again,” growled the President.
Admiral Jackson nodded in agreement, not saying that, with the fifth message, the search crews within the dam structure had doubled in number, and had now doubled again. “We will, sir, but there is no evidence of any Semtex in, on, or under that dam.”
“We’re missing something,” said the President. “God dammit, we’re missing something. The Emir must believe that he is actually going to do this. This bastard wants to boot the US in the balls, and become the next living legend for doing it. How the hell can we stop him?”
“What do you want us to do?” asked the Secretary of Defense. They were all looking at the President intently, waiting for their orders. They were ready to do anything to stop the tragedy, but they needed guidance. Ultimately, the burden rested with the President.
“Go to maximum mobilization, gentlemen. Martial law in the Southwest. Everything we can mobilize in that region should be mobilized. And, regrettably,” he added to his Chief of Staff, “regrettably, get the head of FEMA on the line. This is starting to look very, very ugly.”
The pandemonium that always reigned in Las Vegas, which had multiplied since the fifth and then sixth messages, intensified with the President’s orders. What had been a bad situation became even worse. The outbound lanes of the freeways were clogged with traffic, and the Nevada Department of Transportation decided to flip all six lanes of the 15 and 95 freeways to outbound. The city’s emergency planners called such a reversal of traffic a “contra flow.” The military guys called it a clusterfuck. Not all exits and onramps were monitored and patrolled, and there were invariably those individuals, drunk, doped, or just plain inattentive, for whom a routine drive to work was mindless and automatic, who failed to notice the change in traffic flow. The resulting accidents just added to the chaos. Ambulances and fire trucks began using the shoulders and even grass medians, trying to get through to those who needed their help. Trucks scattered into the desert surrounding the freeway, taking advantage of four-wheel drive to avoid the congestion.
Adding to the commotion were the low-flying squadrons of F-117’s and other jets coming from nearby Nellis Air Force Base. Military helicopters of every description were hovering in and about the strip. McCarron International Airport was jammed with passengers, all outgoing. Despite the usual American practice of grounding planes in times of crisis, the President had ordered that every form of transportation be utilized during the evacuation. The results were mixed. As the planes were filled and then packed almost to bursting, the airport stewards were forced to turn would-be passengers away more and more often, resulting in riots and violence. Airport rage, freeway rage, hotel rage, and bus rage were the order of the day. Tempers flared and moods were desperate.
The few vehicles entering Vegas were routinely stopped and searched. Crank calls multiplied, and overworked law enforcement agencies were stretched to the limit, some units working without any breaks, in heat that reached 110 degrees in the daytime. Search crews patrolled the sewers, the streets, the stores, and the casinos. Parked vehicles were towed. Towed vehicles were searched. There were many strokes and cardiac events, and the Lake Mead HMC, Sunrise, and other major medical centers began to feel the strain. For the first time in the city’s history, the slot machines were silent, and the card tables empty. The first stages of a terrorist attack were already underway. Terror ruled the city.
During the chaos of the evacuation, almost no one in Las Vegas had actually seen the airing of the sixth message. But they knew about it, and everyone had seen the fifth message. Public theories ran rampant as the stream of humanity leaving the city about how it would be destroyed. What would it be? A nuclear strike? An airliner plummeting into a casino? Buildings blown up? The Hoover destroyed? Anthrax or bubonic plague? Were they already infected? Were they already the walking dead? The public speculation was endless and, at the end of the day, pointless.
The Emir was well aware of these events, as he had an extensive network of informants. While he could not, for obvious security reasons, upload information in his tunnel computers, he could download. DVD’s of western newscasts were brought to him as they happened. He chuckled to himself. A twenty-minute videotaping, split into six equal parts, had brought an entire American city to her knees. Power. He had it. Maybe he should send out a DVD advising the world that he would take out New York as well, and then stand back and watch the fun. Of course, the whole world would go crazy, but only if he had credibility, if he had the power to deliver. That was why the messages were so vital. To advertise in advance that he was going to take out a city, and then in fact do it, and much more, would give him god-like status. In his visions, Mohammed had told him this — that he, the Emir, would be seated beside Mohammed in Paradise. He, the Emir, was the new Mohammed, the new sword of Islam, the next Saladin. This had been foretold, and it would come to pass.
“I don’t get it, George,” said Turbee.
“What, little buddy?” asked George, staring avidly at his computer screens, in the workstation next to Turbee.
“We’ve got more than four tons of high explosives loose, in the hands of terrorists, in the American heartland,” Turbee responded. “The Emir has said that he’s going to take out the Hoover Dam, presumably using the Semtex. But it won’t work.”