Hubris was a wonderful thing to exploit.
CHAPTER 28
Bennings had cloned the electronic keycards of Al Lara and the female scientist from Chili’s. He’d printed out a decal and bumper sticker with a bar code that mirrored Lara’s.
Armed with terrific fake credentials, Kit and Yulana easily accessed the sprawling, campuslike area of Sandia National Labs, located within Kirtland Air Force Base.
Sandia had come into existence from Z Division, the supersecret nuclear assembly, testing, and design apparatus of Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II. With the advent of a nuclear weapons testing moratorium in the 1990s, the focus of Sandia’s ten-thousand-strong personnel roster shifted in several nonnuclear directions, although they still remained closely connected to America’s nuclear weapons program.
Bennings and Petkova drove unescorted to Building 27A. He opened the rear hatch of the SUV and brought out the hand dolly. He muscled his toolbox with both hands—it contained a hundred pounds of steep pipe—and set it on the dolly. Yulana’s toolbox contained real tools and went on top of his. Yulana closed up the SUV, Kit tilted the dolly back and wheeled it to the entrance where they used their cloned keycards to enter.
Bennings had deliberately chosen a lab designed for unclassified work, so no biometric scan was necessary to gain access. The only workers present were those on a cleaning crew, who weren’t doing much in the way of cleaning; they pretended to get busy when Kit and Yulana showed up, and pretending to be busy was good enough for most government or government-contracted work. The cleaners quickly moved to another part of the building, no doubt in search of privacy.
Bennings found the clean room. He and Yulana donned clean-room garb over their clothes: lab coat, cap, and booties. As he entered the clean room behind her, he noted the overhead security cameras. She quickly prepped a worktable and two rolling polished-aluminum carts.
They lifted her toolbox and placed it onto a cart. Then they pretended his toolbox wasn’t heavy as together they heaved it onto the other cart. They opened the toolboxes and positioned the carts in such a way as to screen the cameras from seeing the switch they intended to make. Kit turned on the handheld radio clipped to his belt under his lab coat, connected the earbuds, and placed one of the earbuds into his right ear. The radio was another item from the Pelican case and was calibrated to monitor the frequency of the Sandia guards.
He checked his watch and was almost overcome by the temerity of what he was attempting to do. Yes, he had breached Sandia before, but he did so with ten days of prep, eight operators, and generous resources. Tonight was a rushed, last-minute cowboy operation flying on a wing and a prayer, with a Russian who seemed to enjoy large quantities of vodka. He started to have serious doubts about the entire plan and absentmindedly pressed hard on the migraine acupressure point on his hand.
But it was too late to start second-guessing now, and Yulana was watching, so he put aside his concerns and gave her a reassuring look.
“Stay relaxed, and in an hour, we’ll be driving out of Albuquerque,” he said with all of the assurance he could muster. In his heart he didn’t believe it and felt certain there was something terribly important he’d forgotten to do. But what, what had he forgotten?
He heard radio traffic in his earbud. It was exactly 12:15 A.M., and the security escort had arrived outside. The bomb was here.
Two Humvees and a specially rigged two-and-a-half-ton truck pulled up to the cargo bay of Building 27A. Soldiers from the 898th set up a special trolley and rolling jigs. They carefully removed a crate from the truck bed using a roll-out assembly, and by cranking a wheel, lowered it onto the trolley. The crate was made from some kind of nonmetallic composite material and was about the size of a steamer trunk.
The exterior roll-up cargo door of Building 27A was akin to a jumbo-sized garage door, and it slowly rose open. Soldiers wheeled the trolley through the doorway and into a large two-story-tall air lock, where Bennings stood waiting in clean-room garb.
Sergeant Simms, a lanky veteran noncommissioned officer, was in charge of the bomb transport detail, and Kit could tell the man wasn’t happy. Having spent many years in the army, Kit read Simms like a book; the sergeant was worried that this was one of those unscheduled last-minute deals that had a tendency to screw up easily. Simms held a clipboard as he approached Kit.
“You’re Doctor Gned?”
“That’s right, Sergeant,” said Kit, holding up the photo ID he had generated.
“May I see your CIA ID, sir?”
“Of course.” Kit handed over a CIA identification—another item that had arrived in the Pelican case—to Simms, who copied down information from it.
Simms handed back the ID. “Sign here, please.”
Kit took the clipboard and signed “Dr. Rick Gned.”
“If you and your men will wait outside, I’ll get this done as fast as I can,” said Kit, smoothly assuming the role of ranking authority figure.
“Sir, due to the last-minute and irregular nature of this inspection, I have to stay with the weapon.”
Damn! Kit hadn’t anticipated this. He couldn’t allow the sergeant to stay, or there could be no switch. He had to be careful how he handled his response.
“No offense, but I don’t want you in my clean room, Sergeant. Still, I understand your orders. I’ll tell you what: you, and only you, can wait here in the air lock. You can watch through these windows in the inner roll-up door here. That way you can keep eyes on the device if you feel that’s necessary.”
Simms thought about it. “That sounds okay, sir.”
Kit pushed the green button, and the exterior roll-up door closed, so only he and Simms now stood in the air lock. When the exterior door had closed, Kit crossed to a different control panel and pushed the button to open the interior roll-up door—an equally large cargo door with four rectangular eight-by-twelve-inch windows.
As the door rose they could see Yulana waiting in the clean room next to the rolling carts. Although she stood a good thirty yards away, Simms looked to be momentarily distracted by the sight of Dr. Petkova.
“Oh, and Sergeant, if you haven’t already, turn off your cell phone and two-way radio so we don’t have any unwanted interference with the inspection. If you have to have your electronics on, then you’ll need to wait outside the building with your men.”
Simms liked the whole situation less and less. He tugged on his ear as if thinking about the options.
“How long will your inspection take?”
“That’s classified, and you’re wasting my time with all of this. Why don’t you just wait outside, so you can keep your phone and everything else on,” said Kit pretending to be irritated.
“It’s okay, sir. I’ll wait here in the air lock.”
Kit watched as Simms turned off the electronics. Kit then wheeled the trolley holding the crated weapon into the clean room and closed the interior roll-up door, leaving Simms in the air lock, where he wouldn’t be able to hear them. Kit pulled the trolley over to the carts where Yulana waited.
“Good thing you’re covered up with the clean-room gear. Otherwise, he’d never stop looking through the window.”