THEIR TARGET was not in São Paulo proper but eighty miles north of the city and the center of Brazil’s exploding petro-economy. The largest refinery in all of Brazil, the Paulinia REPLAN facility processed nearly 400,000 barrels of oil per day, some twenty million gallons. Enough, Shasif Hadi had read, to fill more than thirty Olympic-sized swimming pools. Of course, as Ibrahim had told him during their initial briefing, sabotaging such a facility was no easy task. There were myriad safety redundancies to be considered, not to mention the physical security measures. Getting onto the refinery grounds would be no hurdle at all (the highest perimeter fence was ten feet tall), but once inside, there was little they could do. Explosives could destroy collection tanks, but these were spaced too far apart to hope for a domino effect. Similarly, the facility’s hundreds of control valves (officially known as ESDs, or emergency shutdown devices), which regulated the flow of chemicals to the labyrinth of distillation columns, fractionation towers, cracking units, and blending and storage tanks, were virtually invulnerable, having been recently refitted with something called a Neles ValvGuard system, which was, in turn, regulated from the refinery’s control center, which from their earlier reconnaissance trips they knew was belowground and heavily fortified. Shasif understood none of these particulars, but the essence of Ibrahim’s point was clear: The odds against causing a catastrophic leak within the Paulinia REPLAN were astronomical. But that word-within-Shasif reminded himself, was pivotal, wasn’t it? There were other ways to start the dominoes falling.
As planned, each of them had his own separate hotel, as well as his own rental car. Leaving at staggered times throughout the morning, each man took the SP-348 Highway out of São Paulo and drove north to Campinas, twenty miles south of Paulinia. At noon they met at a restaurant called the Fazendão Grill. Shasif was the last to arrive. He spotted Ibrahim, Fa’ad, and Ahmed sitting in a corner booth, and made his way over to them.
“How was the drive?” Ibrahim asked.
“Uneventful. And you?”
“The same.”
“It’s good to see all of you,” Shasif said. He looked around the table and got nods in return.
They’d been in country for five days, each with his own tasks to complete in São Paulo. The explosives-Czech-made Semtex H-had been shipped by commercial carriers into the country piecemeal, two ounces at a time, in order to lessen the chances of interception. Reliable as Semtex was, it also carried with it a dangerous flaw: a chemical taggant added during the manufacturing process to make its presence more detectable to “sniffers.” Prior to 1991 no such taggant was added, but these odorless batches had a maximum shelf life of ten years, so while the year 2000 was a societal milestone, it was also a watershed for terrorists, who either had to manufacture their own non-taggant explosives or devise special handling techniques for newer batches, which were perfused with either glycol dinitrate or a compound known as 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane, or DMDNB, both of which were “slow-rate vaporizers” that were perfume to a sniffer’s nose.
Luckily for Shasif and the others, they needed only sixteen ounces of explosives for their purposes, so the piecemeal shipments had taken only a few weeks. From this pound of Semtex they had formed six shaped charges-five each of two ounces, and one of six ounces.
“I performed my last survey of the facility yesterday. As we’d hoped, the diversion berm and canal aren’t finished yet. If we do our job correctly, there will be nothing they can do to stop it.”
“How many gallons, do you think?” This from Ahmed.
“Hard to say. The line is fully functional, and the capacity is almost three-point-two billion gallons a year-almost nine million gallons a day. From there the calculations become complex. Suffice it to say, it will be enough for our purposes.”
“No change in the exfiltration plan?” asked Fa’ad.
Ibrahim looked hard at him. He lowered his voice. “No change. Do not forget, though: Live or die, we must succeed. Allah’s eyes are upon us. If He wills it, all of us or some of us will survive. Or not. Those concerns are secondary, is that understood?”
One by one, each man nodded.
Ibrahim checked his watch. “Seven hours. I’ll see you there.”
After the initial excitement of their first getaway weekend and the flush of lovemaking faded, she began distancing herself from him, staring out the window, declining his suggestion that they go out, allowing just the right amount of pout to her lips… After thirty minutes of this, Steve asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Allison replied.
“It’s something. I can see it on your face. You’re doing that thing with your lip.” He sat down beside her on the bed. “Tell me.”
“It’s stupid. It’s nothing.”
“Allison, please. Have I done something wrong?”
This was the question she’d been waiting for. Kindhearted Steve. Wimpy Steve, so worried about losing her. “Sure you won’t laugh?”
“I promise.”
“I was talking to my sister Jan yesterday. She said she saw this documentary, something on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic, I think. It was all about the geology of-”
“Of where I work? Allison, I told you-”
“You promised you wouldn’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. Okay, go ahead.”
“She said a lot of scientists are against the whole thing. There are protests all the time. Legal stuff, trying to shut it down. They saw there are earthquake faults all around that area. And they were talking about the groundwater, if there’s a leak.”
“There’s not going to be any leaks.”
“But what if?” Allison insisted.
“The slightest leak would be detected. They’ve got sensors everywhere. Besides, the water table is a thousand feet down.”
“But the soil-isn’t it soft or something? Permeable?”
“Yes, but there are redundant systems, levels upon levels, and the stuff will be sealed in casks. You should see these things, they’re like-”
“I’m worried about you. What if something happens?”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Can’t you get another job? If you and I… I mean, if we keep going… I’d worry all the time.”
“Listen, right now it’s not even operational. Hell, we’re just now getting around to doing a mock delivery.”
“What’s that?”
“Just a simulation. A trial run. A truck comes in, we offload the cask. You know, check all the procedures to make sure everything’s working like it should.”
Allison sighed, folded her arms.
Steve said, “Hey, I’m not going to lie. I think it’s kinda cool you’re worried about me, but there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Really? Here, look at this.” Allison walked to the nightstand, grabbed her purse, and came back. She rummaged inside for a moment, then pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Jan e-mailed me this.” She handed it to him.
Though only an artist’s cutaway rendering, it was detailed enough to show the facility’s main level, two sublevels, and far below that, through layers of brown and gray “rock,” a blue horizontal stripe labeled “water table.”
“Where did she get this?” Steve asked.
“She Googled it.”
“Ally, there’s a lot more to the place than this… cartoon.”
“I know that. I’m not stupid.” She got up, walked to the balcony window, and stared out.
“I didn’t mean that,” Steve said. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“So is Jan wrong? Are you telling me nobody at that place worries about this stuff?”
“Of course we do. It’s serious business. We all know that. The DOE has-”
“The what?”
“Department of Energy. It’s done years of research on this. Spent tens of millions just on feasibility studies alone.”
“But that documentary-it kept talking about these rifts in the ground. Weak spots.”
Steve hesitated. “Ally, I can’t really talk about-”
“Fine, forget it. I’ll just stop worrying. How’s that?”
Allison could feel him standing there, staring at the back of her head. He would be wearing that scolded-puppy-dog look and have his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. She let the silence hang in the air. After thirty seconds, he said, “Okay, if it’s that important to you-”
“It’s not that that’s important to me. It’s you.”
Arms still folded, she turned to face him. She forced some tears into her eyes. He held out his hand to her. “Come here.”
“Why?”
“Just come here.”
She stepped over to him, to his hand. He said, “Just don’t tell anybody I talked about this stuff, okay? They’d throw me in jail.”
She smiled and wiped a tear from her cheek. “Promise.”
The Panamax cargo ship Losan was three days from its destination, having made the bulk of the Atlantic crossing on calm seas and under clear skies. Losan’s captain, a forty-seven-year-old German named Hans Groder, had been the box ship’s master for eight years, having spent ten months out of every one of those years at sea. A tougher schedule than his previous job-captain of a German Navy Type 702 Berlin-class replenishment oiler-but the pay was much better and the stresses much fewer. Better still, Losan was a blue-water ship, a nice change for Groder after twenty-two years of navigating the labyrinthian waters around Eckendorf and Kiel Naval Bases. Such a pleasure to simply point one’s bow into the Atlantic and steam away with hundreds and thousands of feet beneath your keel and not a speck of land on your radar. Of course, on his more introspective days Groder indulged that sense of melancholy all sailors and soldiers felt once they’ve left military life behind, but on balance he enjoyed his life and the autonomy it allowed. He answered to only one man, the owner, not a chain of stuffed-shirt flag officers who wouldn’t know the difference between a chock and a cleat.
Groder strolled across the bridge and glanced at the radar. There wasn’t another vessel within twenty miles. Their nav radar wasn’t the most powerful in the world but was sufficient for their purposes. For a watchful captain and crew, twenty miles was plenty of time to adjust course and give fellow travelers a wide berth. Groder walked to the windows and stared out across the foredeck, going through his instinctive scan of the stacked bulktainers. They’d experienced some shifting, most of the time due to those damned propane tanks. Packed four to a container, they were secure enough, but their shape lacked the user-friendly geometry of crates and pallets. It could be worse, Groder knew. At least the damned things were empty.