May 1
Motiva Port Arthur Refinery
Port Arthur, Texas
2:09 P.M. CDT
Shane Yerkey was a worried man.
It was a chronic condition for him, though Shane took great pains to conceal that malady under a carefully constructed façade—one that he was convinced comingled good-ol’-boy bonhomie with the precise, professional eye-to-detail instilled by an engineering degree from UT’s Austin campus.
Both attributes, Shane believed, were suitably reinforced by the “Hook ’Em, Horns!” tattoo on a beefy bicep, only partially concealed by the short-sleeved, pristine-white, medium-starched shirts that were his unofficial uniform at work.
Nonetheless, his unconscious reflex of unbuttoning the collar and yanking loose his tie, inevitably seen during the not-infrequent moments of mini-crisis on this job, was well-marked by his staff as a storm warning—even if it was a “tell” completely lost on Shane, who also considered himself an adept, if often inexplicably unlucky, poker player.
Still, it would have taken a blithe spirit indeed not to be worried in the role Shane played, as manager of Engineering Control at the largest petroleum refinery in the United States. The fact that the Motiva refinery was co-owned by two of the most powerful corporate entities in the world—Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco, the latter an unofficial nation-within-a-nation-state and the former, for most intents and purposes, nearly so itself—only underscored the weight of his responsibilities.
Shane surveyed his realm, a deceptively calm expanse that belied its essential, even irreplaceable, niche in a yet-more-essential infrastructure. Without understatement, the enormous facility—much of it visible as a panorama of industrial bustle through the building’s glass walls—was a critical linchpin of the economy … certainly that of the U.S., and arguably of the whole world.
One little mistake, Shane reminded himself, one overlooked blip on one freakin’ little screen, one inattentive moment by an overworked computer tech—that’s all it would take. Pressure? Yeah, a bit. How about every freakin’ second of every freakin’ day. Even more so today, on the day after terrorists had shattered the confidence, pissed on the illusion of security, for the whole freakin’ country.
This was the nerve center, the “brain” for a four-thousand-acre, overwhelmingly complex, multi-billion-dollar metropolis of steel and concrete, of cracking towers and hydrotreaters that soared like skyscrapers, of searing production fire and numbing cryogenic ice. It was the nexus of a vast web of pumps and pipelines and supertankers that carried the crude from around the world. Daily—when running as it was today, at full capacity—thousands of workers painstakingly processed more than six hundred thousand barrels of oil into the fuels that, literally, powered Shane’s nation.
And it was all controlled by powerful computers that were themselves—if also only arguably—“controlled” here. More accurately, the facility was controlled by electronic brains monitored by mere humans who sat under the stoic, unblinking, glowing eyes of a hundred-plus computer screens.
Shane walked down the central aisle, paused next to a young woman half-slumped in one of the modernistic chairs: Carol Golembiewski, age twenty-three and proud possessor of a dual master’s in engineering and computer science from Stanford.
“We still makin’ gasoline, Carol?”
She looked up at Shane and smiled.
“Everything’s copasetic, boss—green-on-green,” Carol replied. She tucked a wayward comma of auburn hair behind her ear, an unconsciously imperious gesture. “Had a call from Unit 8. The usual sort’a crap, routine. One of the pipe monkeys thought he was hearing some kind of unusual vibration.”
She noticed Shane’s expression and raised a placating hand.
“Computer says he needs his hearing checked,” she said, lip curled slightly. “But I queued a request for a ‘maintenance inspect’ anyway. They’ll do a hands-on before end of shift.”
Shane nodded; his chronic concerns notwithstanding. Well, had it been anything serious, or potentially so, the word would have rung to my smartphone, pronto. My folks have that little standing order engraved on their souls, for damn sure.
He barely stopped himself from clapping her on the shoulder before moving down the line. These days, bonhomie or not, even the most innocent of physical gestures could run afoul of company anti-harassment protocols.
Normal, normal, normal.
At each station, each screen, each of the random technicians with whom he paused to exchange a word, everything was running within parameters; everything was normal.
Even that fact worried Shane, if slightly.
Is anything ever “all normal”? he asked himself, then amended his thought. Unless “normal” means “constantly teetering at the edge of a massive cluster-fuck.” Guess that’s one way to say “normal,” right?
Shane tried to chuckle at his own woe-begotten obsession, and failed utterly.
• • •
At precisely that moment, fully a mile from where Shane Yerkey stood, Unit 8 exploded.
The concussion, the shrapnel of torn steel, and the roiling fireball from sixty thousand gallons of high-octane gasoline pulped, ripped, or incinerated all fourteen workers at the site instantly. Within an eighty-yard radius, fabric and flesh spontaneously ignited from the sudden radiant heat; the blast ring surfed outward, faster even than the roar of the explosion itself, killing and maiming more; and then, wider still, the lethal cloudburst—massive chunks of jagged metal, much of it red-hot—began its barrage.
The fireball that had been Unit 8 clawed skyward, its cloud-summit clenching into a horrific orange-black mushroom, growing in malice and fury even as it rose high into the clear-blue sky.
To any on the ground still surviving, it looked like something alive.
• • •
The blast shook the building, imploding several of the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows and turning others into translucent spider webs. It sent Shane lurching into one of the consoles, then to the floor, where he found himself staring into the equally wide eyes of one of his workers.
The technician pointed, wordless and with a shaking arm, behind Shane.
Even through the ruined windows, Shane could see the enormous fireball; immediately, he knew from where it came.
Without realizing he had moved, Shane found himself on his feet, sprinting past dazed staffers, skidding to a stop, ignoring any anti-harassment guidelines to haul one figure bodily to her feet.
“Carol! That was Unit 8! I need data, now!”
The tech stared at Shane for a moment, blinking. Then she bit her lip, nodded, and squatted before her monitor screen.
“All … all normal?” Carol murmured. “Boss, according to the computer, Unit 8 is up and running, all systems ‘go.’”
“No. No! That isn’t … that can’t be right,” Shane shouted. “Reboot the … what the hell is—”
His right hand fumbled open his shirt collar, groped toward his necktie knot.
At that instant, from a corner of the refinery complex far from the stricken Unit 8, a second explosion shook the building again.
In series, spaced an eye-blink apart, came a third blast. And a fourth.
Then another, from a different direction, and yet another still.
Even as he stood frozen in shock, Shane could see the displays of other monitors along the length of the corridor.
All were reading green-on-green. All were reading “normal.”