Warner and Roberts were both trained in explosives detection, but neither were electronics experts. After hours walking the subterranean maintenance corridors that snaked below the surface of Anchorage’s downtown area, they were exhausted. Plumbing, electrical conduit, fuel lines, telephone and data cables consumed every inch of wall space in the narrow tunnels at the base of which ran two large-diameter pipelines. One carried a constant stream of jet fuel from the Port of Anchorage to Ted Stevens International Airport. The other was full of highly pressurized natural gas flowing to routing systems that distributed it throughout the city.
Warner tapped a short metal baton against the pipe as they walked the corridor. The thick steel-encased pipe responded with a dull metallic thunk. The jet fuel pipeline was a dual-layer system with an inner pipe made of half-inch-thick steel protected by a layer of insulation and another layer of half-inch steel surrounding the actual fuel-carrying pipe. The design, while seeming like technical overkill, enabled it to withstand every conceivable type of breech from earthquakes to bombs.
Fifteen miles in length, the pipe consisted of thousands of four-foot segments bolted together at flanged seams. Flow control and pressure-release valves jutted from the pipe at every tenth section, allowing for repair or replacement within the forty-foot-long segment.
The trio had entered the tunnel from an access port on the park strip and walked half a mile on each side of the area where the president and his guests would be appearing. From the starting point of their inspection, several blocks north and beneath downtown, Warner had been tapping each four-foot segment of pipe as they passed it. The rhythmic “tink” sounded the same on every pipe the entire length they traveled. As they came to a point under the center of the park strip, Tomer stuck his fingers in his ears and wiggled them irritably.
“Warner, do you have to keep hitting that pipe every few steps?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact..”
“Why?” Tonia asked. “You're giving me a headache.”
She rubbed her temples with her highly manicured fingernails. The nails were not excessively painted, as that was against agency dress code, but they were immaculate. Just like Tomer's.
“Sorry to interrupt you two love birds, but I am inspecting the pipeline.”
Tomer flushed. Tonia looked sideways at Warner, then sheepishly looked away.
“I don't know what you’re talking about,” Tomer sputtered, “but you have hit that pipe at least a thousand times and it’s driving me nuts. It has made the same sound every time you’ve hit it for the past two miles.”
“Actually, I’ve only hit each segment of pipe once. We have passed six hundred and forty-six segments of pipe, which means I have struck that many times. And yes, every segment has sounded the same so far.”
“You counted every pipe?” Tonia said, a look of disbelief on her face.
“Of course,” Warner replied. He pointed to the pipe beside him. It was labeled with a string of numbers and letters. “JPF-3526-b stands for Jet Propulsion Fuel, segment number three thousand five hundred twenty-six. The number is the measurement in yards from the source, which means we are about two point seven miles from that source, assuming that all the segments are four feet. The 'b' indicates it has been replaced at some time in the past, as other, older-looking pipes are all designated 'a'. We started at one thousand eight hundred eighty and have only passed six hundred and forty-six segments, which also means we have only come about half a mile. The fact that every pipe sounded identical up to this point indicates that it is less likely any have been tampered with. I have also taken a cursory look at each of the shutoff valves and pressure-bleed ports along the pipe to see if any had recently been used by maintenance crews.”
“You have?” Tomer asked with unguarded astonishment.
“Yes, I have,” Warner said. “While you two were chatting and making googly eyes at each other, I have noted that there were six valves that had been used within the past few weeks, and two of those within the past twenty-four hours. This was obvious by varying degrees of dust missing from the valve handles. But none of the bolts on the pipeline seams themselves appear to have been tampered with.”
He gave a hard tap of the metal baton onto segment JPF-3527-a. It responded with the same dull thunk as the previous segments had. Tomer gave a supercilious look and motioned toward the mass of cables, pipes, and electrical conduit on the opposite wall.
“Oh, well, while you were doing that, I was inspecting the electrical cables and this stuff up here on the wall for signs of a bomb.”
“And did you find any?”
“Any what?”
“Signs of a bomb?”
“Oh,” Tomer replied, waving the question away with his hands, “no. No signs of a bomb on this side of the tunnel.”
“Good. Let's get this thing finished and get up top for dinner.”
“Finish?” Tonia said. “It's noon, and we’re still near the entry we came in by. We’re at the halfway point. That means it will be nearly five o'clock before we get this inspection done. My stomach is telling me it's break time now. And if you go telling that sorry story about going for two weeks on a single MRE in Afghanistan, I'm going to take Tony here and walk out on your skinny ass. 'Cause I am not going to waste away down here in this tunnel while you play drums on these metal pipes all day long.”
She emphasized her wishes by crossing her arms, lowering her head, and looking up at him with a “gotcha” kind of stare.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “I'm kinda hungry too.”
“Somehow,” Warner replied, “I doubt that either one of you would waste away down here — at least not for a couple of weeks.”
Tonia's mouth dropped open at the insinuation,“Did you just call me fat?”
“No. I'm just saying that it takes more than a month without nutrition to die of starvation. Serious weight loss doesn't even start for two weeks. I was simply stating the facts.”
“I'm not fat,” Tomer said, “just big. My whole family is big. You should see my brother.”
“Yeah, me too.” Tonia turned to walk to the exit stairs, “My momma looks just like me and my sisters. Now my cousin Fatima, well, she was just that…fatimama.”
Warner shook his head and followed them up the stairs, mumbling under his breath, “It was only a week, and we had two MREs per man.”
Chapter 15
The northern access hatch to the underground tunnel was housed in a small red-brick structure, similar to an outhouse, behind an office building on Eleventh Avenue. Its door had been locked, but Farrah's position with the gas company meant a master key to the system. Leka opened the door and climbed down the ladder, followed by Kreshnik, both laden with bags of tools and the heavy components designed to fit precisely inside the double wall pipe. When they placed the first one the day before, they discovered it was a sixteenth of an inch too thick and would not let the bolts line back up in their holes to secure the cover. They had replaced the cover without the insulation and gone back to the workshop at Farrah's rented house in order to resize the part. It needed to fit exactly in order to function correctly.
As they walked along the tunnel, Kreshnik tapped the pipes with a wrench, each resonating with a solid thunk in response. He kept striking the pipes until one rang out like a hollow bell.
“Here we are, cousin,” Kreshnik said in Albanian. “JPF-3528-a.”
“Get to work,” said Leka. “It had better fit this time. We need to get done before the Secret Service comes to inspect down here.”