Except for the ten million people of New York. That, too, was a tragic requirement for the liberation of the world.
“You store your city views?” Kealey asked.
“For twenty-four hours,” Perlman said.
“What have you got of the marina from the last hour or two?”
Perlman opened the video library, typed in the street he needed, brought up a fuzzy video of the marina from an hour before.
“That’s the best we’ve got,” he said. “We were over Midtown, between Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Second Street.”
The FBI launch had not yet arrived. There were several boats that did not appear to be there now, yachts mostly. They would probably have headed out to sea, where there was room to maneuver, up-the-coast or down-the-coast choices available.
“Can you pick me a good frame and print it out?” Kealey asked.
Perlman stepped through the video, selected an image, enhanced it as best he could, then handed Kealey an eight-by-ten glossy. Kealey looked at it. Any one of them would be a suitable, anonymous strike ship. They would have to look for all of them, listen for the GPS signal, hope to hell they could get to it in time.
“You don’t happen to have grenades on board?” Kealey asked.
Perlman shook his head. “Just the OICW.”
“You better keep it handy,” Kealey said.
“We need authorization from Aviation HQ just to take it off the-”
Kealey took the handgun from his jacket. “I don’t have time for bureaucracy. I’ll shoot the bastard with this if I have to, but no one is going to fire a nuke on my watch.”
Sagal and Perlman exchanged looks. Sagal nodded. Perlman angled awkwardly behind him and unscrewed the wing-nut bracket from the stock and barrel of the weapon. He kept it in his lap.
“Thanks,” Kealey said.
The intelligence officer nodded.
Times Square, Herald Square, Grand Central Station, the United Nations, the Empire State Building-those were obvious targets for a sniper. Some would make meaty bull’s-eyes for a nuke. If that were the case, though, why did Hunt head south toward the harbor? Why circle the island? He could have had the nuke left somewhere in that vicinity, in a van or car trunk or a storage unit.
Kealey considered the other options. Aside from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge or Statue of Liberty, which he’d already determined could be destroyed by conventional weapons, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Atlantic Ocean were the closest southern targets. He didn’t think those made sense. Farther south were Philadelphia and Washington, but Kealey didn’t believe Hunt would want that kind of exposure for the time it would take to reach them. North was… what? The George Washington Bridge. Highways clogged with cars trying to get out. A pair of baseball stadiums, which would be empty in light of what had happened that morning.
There was a map on a monitor that sat on a thin metal arm beside the seat.
“How do I work this?” Kealey asked.
Perlman held up an index finger, wagged it up and down.
Kealey nodded, used his finger to scroll the map. It responded faster than MapQuest on his laptop.
“You can expand the view using your thumb and index finger,” Perlman said.
“Got it. Thanks.”
Kealey followed the river north, out of the city and into Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess counties. Nothing jumped out. He magnified the image and went back toward the city slowly.
“Shit,” Kealey said suddenly.
“What is it?” Perlman asked.
“They may not be going after people this time.”
He expanded a view. Perlman looked at it on his screen.
Save for the whapping sound of the rotors, the cabin was very quiet.
“We need to stop this,” Perlman said.
“We do,” Kealey agreed. “But if we commit to going north, and he isn’t there, we’re screwed.”
“I can take us to the GW Bridge and wait for the ping,” Sagal said. “That’ll put us more or less equidistant, in reach of him north and south.”
“In reach or on top of him?” Kealey asked. “We won’t have a lot of leeway here, about thirty seconds.”
Sagal shook his head. “No way to answer that, Mr. Kealey. It depends where he plants himself. If he goes ashore, tucks himself under a bridge or tunnel-”
“Of course.” Kealey considered their options. They hadn’t any. “Let your aviation unit know. They have other choppers they can put on this?”
“Yeah, plus maritime,” Sagal told him.
“But we’re the only ones that can hear the GPS signal.”
“In time to act,” Perlman said. “It’ll have to go through channels to turn all our ears on this.”
“Time is something we don’t have,” Kealey said. “Let’s get other eyes up there and head for the bridge.”
Sagal gave him a thumbs-up and turned the helicopter north along the river.
CHAPTER 33
BUCHANAN, NEW YORK
It was called the Indian Point Energy Center because nuclear power plant had an unfashionable connotation that summoned images of Chernobyl and Fukushima. In operation since September 1962, the facility had undergone many upgrades since then, some in response to geological concerns, others as a result of terrorism 38 miles to the south, in New York City.
The red buildings with their yellow-golden domes were a familiar and inherently ominous sight to local residents. Despite assurances from Entergy Corporation, which owned the facility, the truth was that no nuclear power plant could ever be made entirely safe.
Though the plant had received the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s top safety rating, and there was a National Guard base a mile away, Alexander Hunt had read the reports from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory findings that the power plant was nonetheless vulnerable to earthquakes and megaton-level attacks. With the sophisticated radiation detection systems attached to any nuclear plant, no one was anticipating anyone being able to smuggle even a well-protected nuke into the vicinity.
Hunt had also read a 2003 report prepared for then governor George Pataki, which noted that radiological response systems were inadequate to protect the citizens of three states from radiation that could be released from Indian Point in a worst-case scenario. Yasmin’s mission was to be a one-time hit. This one would be a lingering and constant reminder that the Muslim world represented an ongoing and inevitably catastrophic danger. The sooner they were dealt with, the quicker the world could move from the present Dark Age.
The runabout entered Haverstraw Bay, which carried them northwest around the promontory that preceded the plant. There were other boats moving through the area, some of them pleasure vessels, others patrol ships on alert because of the events in New York. As long as Hunt kept them moving north, they would be fine. No one would think to stop a vessel that had already passed by the facility.
The facility was on the northeastern side of the large outcrop of land; the first part of it that became visible was the white smokestack with its distinctive red bands. It sat between the three domes.
Like an ace of clubs, Hunt thought as the entire complex rolled past. He had instructed Samson to take them to the western side of the river, where 202 broke off from Old Ayers Road, the route that ran along the Hudson. He would fire the rocket from that point, and they would move farther up the river to West Point. That was where Dr. Samson would leave and a heroic FBI officer would shoot the monstrous Dr. Gillani. She was sitting placidly beside him, playing absently with a drawstring on the Windbreaker she had donned against the brisk river breeze. A cloud cover had rolled in, and the wind had a bit of a nip. The scientist was probably trying to figure out how things had gone wrong with Yasmin Rassin. Maybe they hadn’t. It was possible that Bishop or Kealey had caught up with her at One West, prevented her from completing her mission. That was why they needed two nukes. As with the rest of her mission, Yasmin was there to keep the authorities moving, distracted, focused on someone who was more or less a sideshow. The irony was that all those people she had chased from Manhattan with her sniping- all of them would be even more vulnerable to the radiation cloud that would spew from the reactors. Most of them were closer now, in their suburban homes.