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JEREMY ISsharp enough to keep his mouth shut at my contradiction. “You ever see the casks the DOE uses to transport nuclear waste?” I ask him. “Have you? They’re friggin’ concrete-and-steel vaults. They are designed to withstand the most violent railroad accident, explosions, crashes, burning jet fuel, and anything else you can throw at them. Save for using a tactical nuke to break open those containers, there’s no way Rashad is using that waste as a weapon. Jesus, there has to be something else!”
Gus goes back to his screen and again starts reading off what each train is carrying. Then: “That’s strange.”
“Quick,” I say. “What’s strange?”
“These freight trains,” says Gus. “They have only a crew of two running the engine: engineer and conductor. Cheaper labor costs, but the railways try to balance it out by limiting how many cars they’re hauling. With that type of GE diesel and a dual connected to it, you’d figure the northbound and southbound would be hauling about a hundred cars each. But they’re both hauling 160. Strange.”
As Gus and Jeremy examine each train’s manifest, I look at the other monitor—the schematic of the Hudson Valley Railroad and its twin tracks, one going north and the other south.
Dual tracks.
Two tracks.
Binary.
Dual.
Dual-use chemicals.
Holy God.
That’s it.
Jeremy and Gus are still talking amongthemselves, and I’m ignoring them as lots of memories from old training sessions flood my mind. I squeeze Gus’s shoulder so hard he yelps. “Jeremy, quick: what’s a binary nerve-gas agent?”
“Binary? Uh, well, pretty basic: you have a mortar shell or an artillery shell that has two containers inside. Each container has a chemical. By themselves, relatively harmless. But when you mix the two…you make a weapon.”
“Gus, go back to the manifests. You saidchemicalsa lot. What kind of chemicals?”
“Standard chemicals,” he says. “Nothing unusual, nothing out of place.”
“Please,” I say, fighting to keep my voice calm. “Defineusual.”
“Well, let’s see. On the southbound train from Albany, you’ve got sodium chloride—lots of sodium chloride. It’s a dry chemical, so it’d be stored in regular casks. And northbound…hunh.Liquid hydrochloric acid—nasty stuff. Kept in pressurized tanker cars.”
I hear a sudden intake of breath from Jeremy. “What would happen if there was an accident, or an explosion, on those cars?”
Gus says, “The liquid hydrochloric acid…oh, that’d vent out. Again, nasty stuff, but if you were to set up a far enough perimeter, not that dangerous.”
Jeremy says, “And the other chemical? The sodium chloride?”
“Even less of a problem,” says Gus. “You could just shovel it into a dump truck, haul it away to a landfill or to be reclaimed.”
My turn now. Even though I’m asking a question, I already know the catastrophic answer.
“Gus, suppose both of those chemicals, on separate trains, were to explode when they were passing each other, so that there was a massive collision. What then?”
Gus stares at the manifest, whispers, “Oh, sweet Jesus,” then frantically digs through his papers. He pulls out an odd and complicated-looking calculator and starts punching its keys. Jeremy is about to say something, but I shake my head. Gus looks up and says, “You…you’ve got to stop it. You’ve got to stop this, right now!”
“What will happen?” I ask. “Gus, what’s going to happen?”
He shakes his head, whispers, “No, no, no,” and looks to us both, tears in his eyes.
“That amount of chemicals violently reacting—the dry sodium chloride and the liquid hydrochloric acid mixing like that—you’ll create an enormous, hazardous chemical cloud,” says Gus, nearly stammering. “As bad as anything used in the trenches in World War I. You’ll have clouds of chlorine gas and hydrogen chloride gas, both fatal, and with the prevailing winds…and the explosions taking place when both trains are near each other…”
Jeremy demands, “How many dead? How many?”
Gus’s eyes well up. “A hundred thousand dead. If not more. And hundreds of thousands more coughing their burned lungs out.”
