Free The Grid by Harry Hunsicker Page A

her when time permitted, using the resources available to a county sheriff. But my efforts to date were futile, as Piper was a master at staying out of sight. She knew how to reach me, though, and I felt fairly certain she’d return in due time. Fairly.
    I missed my daughter, though, missed her more than words could express.
    No one spoke for a few hundred yards.
    Then: “Sorry,” Whitney said. “The life of a cop isn’t very good for relationships, is it?”
    More silence. We passed a series of ball-shaped storage tanks about twenty feet in diameter, and then several massive mounds of coal, each as tall as a two-story house.
    “The actual attack occurred at a substation just outside the plant,” she said. “Whoever was responsible knew exactly what to hit.”
    “You mean like taking out the telco boxes?” I said.
    “That, and more.” She stopped at the rear gate.
    “How big is Black Valley?” I asked. “Electricity-wise.”
    “Both boilers going, the plant generates fourteen hundred megawatts, enough to power about a half-million homes.”
    “That’s a lot of juice,” I said. “Considering I saw only two security guards.”
    “A single plant is not that important to the grid. Sudamento has nineteen more in Texas alone. Plus the other providers. All of whom are feeding into the grid.”
    She picked up a remote control from the console, clicked a button. The gate swung open.
    “You take one plant out,” she said, “even a big one, and the others pick up the slack.”
    “So why did half of Central Texas go dark today?”
    The gate led to a dirt road that cut through a pasture that was not part of Black Valley, outside the chain-link fence. A series of high-voltage transmission lines ran on a parallel course with the dirt road, leaving the plant.
    Whitney drove through the gate. In the distance, another facility appeared.
    This one was smaller, maybe an acre, white gravel surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence.
    “That’s a substation,” Whitney said. “Electricity from several different plants goes there and is increased to seventy-two hundred volts so it can be transmitted for a long distance.”
    The substation had no buildings for use by humans, just rows and rows of metal structures, beige, each about the size of refrigerators, and an equal number or more of gray canisters. The canisters looked like two smooth fifty-five-gallon drums stacked on each other. Ceramic insulators and large-gauge wires sprouted from everything.
    I sniffed as a foul odor filled the interior of the SUV.
    “Five plants total send their juice here,” she said. “Then the power is dispersed to population centers.”
    The smell got worse, the acrid stench of a house fire, things that weren’t meant to be burned. Combusted insulation, scorched metal, burnt plastic. Noxious, poisonous smelling.
    “Those are transformers.” Whitney pointed to the gray canisters. “They increase the voltage. There’s another series of substations at the end of the line that steps the volts back down so the power is useable.”
    On one side of the substation, about a half-dozen utility trucks were parked. Men in hard hats and work boots scurried around one of the larger transformers. The trucks all had the Sudamento logo on their doors.
    “If a substation goes down,” she said, “especially one like this where several streams meet, then you cut the power to a lot of people.”
    I got out of the Suburban, walked to the edge of the fence, ignoring the heat. Whitney followed.
    The gravel around the transformers closest to the edge of the property line was stained a dark brown. The stench of burnt chemicals was overpowering.
    “The transformers are oil-cooled,” she said. “That’s what you’re smelling.”
    “So what exactly happened?”
    “They knew which ones to take out—the units that serviced the entire substation.”
    “Just like the telco boxes,” I said. “Destroy the right transformers and everything downstream goes