Robert Smith - The Planner

“Yes, Most Worshipful Master. I… realise,” said Planner chagrined.

“Good. You’ve been doing an excellent job especially the effort in keeping our narrative unsullied. We know it is unfair on the good and blameless Americans caught up in the maelstrom. That is unfortunate; the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. In any case, for every martyr we create, I believe we will be creating ten heroes; that is the nature of crisis. We can discuss this further in the face-to-face meeting next week in Washington; the End Stage Review.”

“Indeed,” said Planner subdued.

“Now I can announce the proposed date of the event, weather permitting, that is. Since all operations are now reporting green, we have brought the date forward, to the date originally proposed by PNAC last year…”

Planner finished the sentence, “September the Eleventh!”

* * * *

Planner dreamed of a plane crashing into World Trade Center south tower; with plane parts raining down onto the streets below, aluminium foil fluttering down like a street parade; there was an open top presidential limousine driving down the road with crowds cheering. It was JFK! Planner woke up with a start.

An hour and half later, at 8.35am, Planner was back in WTC7. Unlike the offices with vistas of New York, the area he found himself in what felt like a warehouse even though it was just a room in the interior of the building. It was located just above the floor that housed the Mayor’s Emergency Management Office — a specially constructed bunker designed, apparently without irony, to manage crisis events in New York.

Planner was meeting a short and casually dressed man in his sixties with deeply tanned, crinkly skin, possessing a strong Irish accent. He greeted Planner and led him deeper into the room. “Pleased to meet you, Mr Planner, I’m sure. Call me Digger.”

“Hi, thanks for calling,” Planner said. “I appreciate we haven’t much time.”

“What would you like to see?” said Digger waving his arm at the surrounding shelves, which went from floor to ceiling, each loaded with small oblong boxes.

“Not too sure,” said Planner. “Perhaps you could tell me about those color-coded packets?”

“They’re the detonators. We need to label each one and then send them to our subcontractor to load the appropriate payload and then place them in the towers.”

“There must be thousands,” observed Planner.

“There probably about a thousand. Let me show how it’ll be done. It’s all in the planning for big jobs like this. And for that you’ll need a computer.” Digger walked to a bank of computer terminals.

“This is our 3D model of the world trade centre complex,” he said pointing to a workstation displaying a 3D wireframe model.

“Nastran software 90. Know it well,” said Planner.

“You do? That’s splendid. It’s been the devil’s own job to get it work,” confessed Digger.

“It’s quirky,” said Planner. “But pretty good Finite Element Analysis. I’ve used it for aircraft structure stress analysis but not for buildings.”

Planner bent down to look more closely at the screen. It showed the framework of an otherwise transparent twin tower 3D model.

“Well, you and me both,” said Digger. “I used to do planning for these sort of things on the back of an envelope. This is new fangled to me. Perhaps you can give us some tips then?”

“Sure, no problem. I’ll give it a review. So what have you modelled?”

“We had a contractor to build the model. I can run it though and show a simulation of what we expect. Let’s start with the buildings: bomb-proof 91, hurricane proof, earthquake-proof 92. And yet we have to knock these buildings down and make it look natural. So Stage 1,” said Digger, pressing a button, showed an aircraft entering the twin towers, similar to the presentation Planner had seen the previous day. “The aircraft damages the exterior columns and a few interior columns. There’ll be a fireball. So Stage 2 will be fires. We can control the extent of the fires by, oh, you’ll like this, by the extent of the fire-proofing that has been applied to the WTC in recent years. For the North Tower, it is nicely bunched together, the South tower, hmm, not so much! But as you know, the fire won’t damage the steel core but we have to start the deformation, cutting the outer walls from the floors and so forth. So finally, we need, Stage 3, progressive weakening with explosives, to bring the buildings down.”

“Wireless detonation 93?” asked Planner.

“Wireless throughout and fibre optic cabling where we can, for redundancy. Belt and braces. It’s kind of expensive,” joked Digger.

“I hope you don’t get a wrong number to any of the cell phones,” mused Planner.

“We have a way around that. It’s quite secure. The red blobs, here,” he said, pointing to the computer screen, “indicate the locations of the explosive charges; actually, sol-gel 94nanothermite charges, they’re new; which we release progressively to mimic a collapse process. First we weaken internally…” The computer screen showed animated explosions around the floors attached to tower core columns. “This is the stage 2, removing the lateral strength of the building but that won’t bring it down. We’re just cutting the outer edge sections. We have to cut and not explode this bit to keep the process hidden.” The computer showed cutting around the tower external columns. “Then soon after that, we blow the main columns from the impact point downwards to mimic a pile driver collapse.” The computer showed the blowing out the main internal columns and the 3D graphic structure tumbling down.

“That looks very convincing. What’s the time difference between the wall cutting and the column cutting?” asked Planner.

“Not long, we have to watch carefully and make sure the building does not start to warp. As soon as it loses shape, we lose control,” said Digger.

“Right. That’s great. But there’s a lot of new technology in there. Will it work?” said Planner.

Digger smiled. “We’ve tried it all out separately and together. It’ll work. The main problem we have… is the minimum amount of explosive to do the job. We have too much at the moment; the explosions could send debris over to New Jersey! But, of course too little explosives and the building may not come down at all.”

* * * *

Sometime later in his hotel room, Planner sat tinkering with the Nastran software on his laptop computer. He took a bite of a sandwich while running the simulation again. He had reduced the amount of explosives and only half of the building fell according to the simulation. Planner pulled an unhappy face.

A few days later, Turq entered Planner’s office, carrying, very gingerly in front of her, a brief case. Planner looked up from his charts.

“Fort Detrick have delivered,” she said.

“In there?” Planner said incredulous.

“Yes. It’s safe,” said Turq unconvincingly as she held the case away from her body. “A dozen doses ranging from inert, two types of non-lethal and then… er… upwards. I’ve been given instructions. Verbally.”

“Wow”

“So shall I pass them over to the Eagle Team? I don’t want this hanging around,” said Turq.

Planner said, “Sure. But er… wait. Can you open it up?”

Turq set it down on the desk and delicately opened case. It had two combination locks. Inside the brief case were ten vials strapped to the case interior, each containing a gray powder. Each vial had a sticker with a hand written number.

“Which are the non-lethal?” asked Planner.

“The ones marked zero.”

“And there’s a minus one?”