I knew a guy with technical expertise in the operation of nuclear power plants, who I referred to simply as The Old Man. He wasn’t exactly on the NeXus payroll, but he did unofficial consulting for me from time to time. He was why I was so well informed about the plant systems and how they worked, though few people knew that or anything about him. Both the Old Man and I preferred it that way. Turns out he lived just a few hours south of Willits, on the Central Coast of California. So it was best to pay him a visit in person, rather than go into any of this over the phone.
“Tell him I said ‘hey,’” Pete said.
“Will do. I’ll check in with Prichard and Marti later tonight. Maybe we’ll learn something then.”
“Marti? I assume that’s the senior resident on site? Anything else I should know about Marti?” asked Pete, with more than passing curiosity in his voice.
“If there is, you'll have to find it yourself. I just met her.” It was a discussion I didn’t want to get into right then.
I picked up the keys to my personal truck. On a trip like this, I wanted to be comfortable, and the rental car wasn’t going to do. I had my ride in a parking garage downtown and would have to go pick it up.
“One more thing. As you pointed out, if Jansen is in town, we know he’s not alone. He’ll have a team of well-armed and no doubt well-paid guys with him. We don’t know what kind of talents they have, so keep a low profile. I don’t want you taking any chances.”
“Roger that.”
CHAPTER 25
I liked sports cars. They were fast and high tech. I’d owned a few and I still liked them, but my current ride was an F-150 Harley Davidson pickup truck. It was supercharged, which meant it was fast; and it was a truck, which meant it was roomy inside. I liked the roominess but appreciated the high performance, even if it wasn’t a sports car. I’d become something of an adrenaline junky since my time on the teams. Nothing quite like hanging out of a Black Hawk helicopter in the dead of night, going like a bat out of hell, skimming the tree-tops, fifty feet away from another helo with no running lights on, heading out on a mission. My truck wasn’t a match for that, but for personal transportation, it wasn’t bad.
As I drove down the road, I thought about the Old Man. I knew a lot about tactics, weapons, and how to kill a man. The Army trained me well and I was very good at all of it. I wasn’t raised with guns, didn’t play football as a kid, and wasn’t technically oriented. But I grew up learning how to succeed. I learned a lot of that from studying traditional Japanese karate for fourteen years. I’d earned my black belt at the age of sixteen, the youngest you could be to earn a black belt in that style. There was no breaking boards or theatrical kicks. There were, however, doing pushups on my knuckles, lots of repetitions, and fighting. There was no talking in class, so when you got hurt, you learned to just cowboy up and move on. As it turned out, I had a knack for that.
However, I didn’t know anything about nuclear power. I had a bachelor’s degree in criminal science, but I never took a liking to technical disciplines, such as engineering. What I found, though, was that it wasn’t necessary for me to be a nuclear engineer to be able to evaluate security at nuclear power plants. Security was security. Strategy and weapons didn’t change much from one job to the next. But I had to admit it helped if I knew something about how the station operated so I would know what the security staff was trying to protect. This was where the Old Man came in. He was an expert in nuclear power, having worked in the industry for a few decades before he retired. So from time to time, I’d meet with him when it was necessary to my assignment. I didn’t advertise that of course, and he preferred it that way. He liked being retired and resisted many opportunities over the years to contract back to the industry he’d retired from. However, in his years in the nuclear power industry, he’d developed an expertise that made him invaluable to me. He had a degree in nuclear technology; held a senior reactor operator license for 20 years, which meant he knew reactor physics, heat transfer and fluid flow, thermo-hydraulics, electrical systems, and how to put it all together to make a highly technical plant work.
More than just the technical knowledge, he had a familiarity with plants, knew where things were located, what was flowing through the various pipes, and what a plant should sound like. That kind of expertise comes from a lifetime of being in the plant, not just book learning.
But a lot of people worked in nuclear power and had similar expertise. What made the Old Man unique was his additional knowledge of station security. He’d gotten involved in security after 9/11 when nobody else wanted to or even really knew the relevance of it to the nuclear industry. Each plant had to have someone who could look at the new threat area, and the Old Man got the assignment. As a result, he ended up working with various federal agencies like FEMA, the NRC, the FBI, and even the National Security Agency. Being involved meant he had access to information that most others at the stations did not.
In many aspects, it was a new field, and those who got in on it right away rose quickly to positions of influence. He‘d participated in risk analysis reviews of nuclear power plants and worked with local agencies to determine risk factors at various stations. He’d learned how the entire nation’s electrical system was interconnected so a person with sufficient knowledge could find vulnerable points. He’d experienced this for himself several years ago, when a freak accident was blamed for taking out the electrical grid for the entire Eastern Seaboard. He’d been on a plane in Boston sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off when the incident occurred, delaying him for several very long hours. The problem supposedly started at a Canadian nuclear plant just across the border on Lake Ontario and then cascaded into the US, causing a disruption to the electrical grid frequency, which in turn caused nearby nuclear stations to trip off line — resulting in more instability and more plants tripping off line. A domino effect. Cities went dark and airport traffic was temporarily suspended. As he sat on the tarmac, he had time to ponder how this could have happened so easily. Intrigued, he became something of an industry expert in a new field.
It was years later that he found out the grid disruption had actually been a computer fault. A subcontractor hired to maintain the system was installing a new program, and one of the mainframes saw it as a virus and started to shut down computers to protect itself, which started a cascade within the national power control grid that cut power to fifty million people. That information was never made public for fear of spreading panic and giving already inventive computer hackers new ideas.
The sun had already set behind the coastal mountains when I pulled into the Old Man’s driveway, past the huge rural mailbox that everyone out there had. It was getting dark, so it was good that I knew where he lived because there weren’t any streetlights. He lived out in the country on a ranch in the hills behind San Luis Obispo, a small college town a few hours south of San Francisco. I always liked visiting there when I could. I wasn’t a cowboy or a farm hand, but I enjoyed the peace and quiet and the smell of the hay fields and animals.
Sweet smoke was curling from the chimney and a warm glow was coming from the windows as I drove up the long dirt road to the main house just coasting — barely a couple of miles per hour — so I wouldn’t kick up too much dust. Living in the country meant there was no need for curtains as they only block the view from the inside. Privacy was obtained by living a good distance away from your neighbors — and protected by Smith and Wesson.