Chapter 52
The night deepened. Another guard came and Vance left.
Peter stood by the barred window, trying to keep the white static at bay. It didn’t like the cell, or the fact that he was, for the moment, powerless to do anything useful. He stared out at the compound, hoping to see a friendly face.
Instead he saw a flurry of activity under the pole lights.
A pair of four-door pickups pulled up beside the big stone armory.
The trucks were rigged for rough travel with oversized tires, heavy-duty winches on their bumpers, and four rectangular five-gallon fuel cans mounted in each bed.
Wherever they were going, they’d need more than one tank of gas to get home.
Men got out of the trucks. Peter recognized Hollis, Vance, Nickels, and Boxall. There were three more men he didn’t recognize, and also a boy, Ellie’s age or younger. They went into the building and returned carrying rifles, ammunition boxes, and other equipment. Getting ready, Peter thought.
Boxall and the boy made a second trip inside and emerged with a pair of black spidery-looking contraptions that Peter couldn’t identify.
As Boxall passed his contraption to Vance in the back of the truck, it was momentarily turned on its side and Peter saw the rotor arms and propellers.
Two large drones. Probably the ones Reed had built.
The boy made a third trip into the armory and returned with a small case on a strap over one shoulder and a big smile on his face. Peter couldn’t figure out why he was part of the group.
Two of the men got back into the trucks and drove forward toward the second building and under a high open roof that jutted out from one side.
Beneath it were an old gas pump and what looked like the round end of a propane tank the size of a semitrailer.
The wooden roof structure would keep the rain and snow off the equipment and the people using it.
The other men walked up and began to pull the fuel cans from their racks and fill them from the pump.
“Peter?” Ellie came over to stand beside him. “What’s the matter with all these people? What do they want?”
“I’d guess the Messenger wants power and doesn’t care who gets hurt along the way.
Maybe his inner circle, too. But I think the others are just frightened,” Peter said.
“Things are changing too fast. A lot of people are getting left behind. They don’t feel like they have much control over their lives.
And they’re mostly right. The modern world is complicated and deeply flawed.
But they’re wrong to think that some earlier era was any kind of utopia.
Even if they’re successful, they still won’t be in charge of their own lives, not the way they hope.
They’ll just be subject to the Messenger’s whims, along with other forces like the weather or crop failure or disease. ”
She looked up at him. “So what’s the answer?”
“I wish I knew, kiddo. All I know is that we’ve never had control over anything but ourselves and our reactions to the challenges life hands us.
What we do have is the ability to make the best choices we can, and hopefully think further ahead than our next meal, our next paycheck, our next election.
If enough of us work together, we can change the world. ”
“You sound like my social studies teacher, Ms. Olsen.”
“A wise woman, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know about that. She’s got, like, ten cats.”
“Take your wisdom where you find it, kiddo.”
Ellie returned to the bench to huddle with Carlotta for warmth. Peter stayed by the window, watching the men and boy finish filling the fuel cans, climb in the trucks, and drive away.
He was thinking about Garrison Bevel. From the brochure, Peter knew the man was an electrical engineer. He’d worked at PG&E, so he understood industrial power systems. And Vance had shut down when Peter had mentioned the power grid. That had to be the target.
The grid wasn’t truly national, Peter knew, but three interlinked regional grids that covered the continental United States, along with parts of Canada and Mexico.
Each regional grid contained many smaller subgrids, connected in a complex web of power lines and legal agreements.
It was controlled by software that measured demand and shunted power from generating plants to wherever it was needed.
The software also controlled multiple safety systems, including giant circuit breakers that would trip in case of overload so the huge electrical loads didn’t melt power lines or blow up transformers.
But the software was notoriously full of bugs.
The switches and circuit breakers were often forty or fifty years old.
National security researchers had been talking about the grid’s vulnerability for decades.
There was speculation that the Chinese and the Russians had already hacked parts of the system.
Peter figured a brilliant coder like Geoffrey Reed was capable of doing the same.
The engineering text on Reed’s bookshelf, Industrial Power Systems, would have filled in any gaps in his knowledge about the grid.
If Reed had finished his work before he died, all it would take would be a few keystrokes by any amateur to trigger the attack.
Except hacking the software wouldn’t be enough.
They’d have to damage the hardware, too.
Power plants were hardened and secure facilities.
But they wouldn’t have to destroy the generating plants to create a national blackout.
The electrical substations, where the power was stepped up for transmission over vast distances on high-voltage wires, were often guarded only by fences.
With control of the software, if the Messenger’s people managed to destroy substation hardware in a few strategic locations, they could create a cascade effect.
Faulty circuit breakers and a few fallen tree branches had accomplished the same thing in the 2003 blackout in the Northeast. Fifty million people had been without power.
Of course, that blackout had only taken four days to repair. The Messenger seemed to think this damage would be permanent. How would he manage that?
It wouldn’t be enough to just shut down the grid and wreck a few substations.
To keep all those power companies from rebooting the system and bringing it back online, the Messenger’s people would have to destroy a lot of hardware.
The most vulnerable components were the high-voltage transformers at substations.
This wasn’t exactly a secret, either. In the last few years, Peter knew, attacks on substations had more than tripled. Gangbangers and extremist groups shot up transformers with hunting rifles, killing power to towns for weeks, and using the chaos as cover for robberies and revenge killings.
Then Peter realized what the armor-piercing rounds were for.
The black-tips would have no problem penetrating the metal transformer casings and shredding the copper coils beyond repair.
Transformers were expensive, and power companies didn’t keep many replacements on hand.
Building a new one was a complex and expensive process.
Most were custom-made overseas. There was no strategic national stockpile.
It could take several years to replace a single specialized unit.
If the Messenger’s movement had truly expanded its reach to other groups across the country?
Together they could destroy hundreds of transformers, or thousands.
Which meant restoring power could take decades or longer, and would require the combined resources of the entire industrialized world.
And not everyone would be inclined to help the United States.
China, for example, where most transformers were now made.
Dear God, Peter thought. Could these assholes actually pull this off?
He thought about what would happen if electricity stopped flowing nationwide.
First, the heat would go out. The cold would kill many older people, and not just in the northern states.
Food shortages would follow immediately after.
The food supply network was nationwide, and with no electricity to pump fuel at stations and pipelines, delivery trucks were dead on the road.
Few farmers stored their own seed and fertilizer over the winter months.
Once food stockpiles were gone, America would starve to death in a hurry.
He really hoped June had figured out where the hell this compound was located.
Then he heard the sound of singing.