Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [243]
Hell, Weaver thought, you could no more get into the damned thing than you could steal it with anything short of a truck, a crane, and perhaps a heavy-lift chopper. It would be like those idiots you occasionally see on television who hook a chain to an ATM, drag it off, then dump it somewhere because they can’t break it open.
“Never seen one up close,” Weaver told the dock foreman.
“Looks like something from a sci-fi movie, doesn’t it?”
“Sort of is, in a way.”
Per protocol, the two of them walked around the flatbed, checking “preflight” items off their forms as they went. Each tie-down chain was new, and had been stress-tested at the plant, as had the ratchets, each of those secured by dual padlocks. Satisfied the cask wasn’t going anywhere before it reached its destination, Weaver and the foreman signed and countersigned the forms, each taking his own copy.
Weaver waved good-bye and climbed into his cab. Once the engine was going, he powered up the GPS nav system affixed to his dash, then scrolled through the touch-screen menu and selected his route; the unit had been preprogrammed with dozens of them by the DOE. Another safeguard, he’d been told. No driver would be given his until leaving a pickup facility.
The route popped up on the screen as a purple line overlaid on a map of the United States. Not bad, Weaver thought. Major highways for most of the trip, 1,632 miles total. Four days.
72
TEXT MESSAGE from our Russian girl,” Tariq said, striding into the living room. The Emir stood at the window, staring out at the desert. He turned.
“Good news, I trust.”
“We will know in sixty seconds.”
Tariq powered up his laptop, opened his Web browser, and went to a website called storespot.com, one of dozens of free online file-storage sites available on the Internet. All that was required to open an account was a user name, a password, and an e-mail address, and for that there were sites that offered throw-away “self-destructing” e-mail addresses.
Tariq logged in to the account, clicked on three links, and found himself in the upload/download area of the site. There was one item waiting, a plain text file. According to the annotation, the file had been uploaded twelve minutes ago. Tariq opened the file, copied the contents to his clipboard, then deleted the file from the account. Next he opened the laptop’s built-in text program and pasted the contents into a new file. He took two minutes to scan the contents.
“It’s all here. Everything we need.”
“Which entrance?”
“The south.”
The Emir smiled. Allah was with them. Of the two, the facility’s southern entrance saw less activity than the northern main entrance. This meant fewer security personnel. “Where exactly?”
“The third drift layer, five hundred meters in and three hundred meters below the surface. According to Jenkins, that’s the area the engineering department is most concerned about. Next week they’re having a meeting with the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission to discuss backfilling and capping the entire drift before they start accepting shipments.”
There was, however, a drawback to using the south entrance, the Emir knew. Within minutes of the truck turning onto the service road from Highway 95, sensors and cameras would likely record its passage and alert the monitoring center at the facility’s main entrance. Once the staff realized the truck was headed toward the south entrance, how would they react? It seemed unlikely an alarm would be immediately raised; this was, after all, only a trial shipment, and the first of its kind. More likely, the staff would assume the driver had taken a wrong turn. Calls would be made, perhaps a vehicle sent to the south entrance to collect the wayward truck. Musa and his men would take care of it.
Of all the feasibility