Total Power by Kyle Mills

Governments are supposed to watch over the people. Make sure that bad things don’t happen. So they try to envision what could go wrong and plan how to keep such things from actually happening. Probably all the main offices of government are dreaming up how to bring down the country so it can be stopped before it happens. Or if it does happen, what can be done to protect the people.

The Department of Energy is doing just that. One of their doomsday scenarios is having the electrical grid go down. Not just a city or a region. The whole dang country. A Senate select committee has paraded dozens of electric company CEOs to testify. They all say it’s impossible. The DOE head of cybersecurity brings in a consultant (that’s what governments do . . . they hire consultants). John Alton, an MIT-educated genius in electrical engineering and computer networking, runs a utility security company and has gotten stinking rich in the process. In his thousand-page report, he tells Congress how easy it would be. Take out nine specific substations and the lower 48 is suddenly back in 18^th century. Projections of the carnage are in the 10s of millions. The economy? Gone. Not simply stunted. Gone. And with a little extra help, the American electrical grid could be down for as long as a year before those industry would even figure out what’s wrong. Those fat-cat senators dismiss Alton’s conclusions as unnecessarily hysterical.

Mitch Rapp is in Spain on the trail of the top cybermind in ISIS. Guy says he is going on holiday to tour NYC and DC. But computer nerds, be they Arab or American, aren’t trained to resist interrogation much less torture. With a little nudge, the guy divulges that he’s on the way to meet a contact known only as PowerStation.

Apparently, PowerStation also knows what Alton has predicted. But he needs some help to pull off the scheme. A sleeper Russian agent is sent to meet PowerStation to gauge his capabilities. She reports back that he seems credible, but she also thinks that he is unstable and untrustworthy. Russia isn’t interested out of concern for the eventual American retaliation. That doesn’t concern ISIS.

The sleeper agent becomes borderline obsessed with the American power grid, reading all she can about it. A few weeks later, she sees an internet article about substation security and with it, a photo with PowerStation in the background. Now she’s got a name, then soon an address. She plans to approach him about his intents and maybe even stop him, but instead ends up breaking in his home and cloning some of a laptop’s hard drive.

On a cold Christmas morning, PowerStation throws the electronic switch plunging the US into an electrical black hole. Within days, anarchy ensues. Food, medical care, dwindling water supplies, transportation, communication ceases to exist. Without electricity, nothing works. The government is hiding in a West Virginia bunker with no clue about what to do. During the shutdown, our Russian tries to get to the FBI but rioting mobs in DC prevent her getting in.

Rapp, his boss (Irene Kennedy) and Rapp’s crew of operatives work to piece together seemingly disconnected clues about what they can do about the power loss and the only real conclusion is that the person with the best information is PowerStation. Clues have them hopping from Idaho to western VA, the mountains of West Virginia, backwoods KY.

They come up with a risky plan with minimal chance of success to get PowerStation to come to them rather than try to keep chasing their own tails looking for him. 

And it’s a helluva plan.

This is #19 in Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series. As you might know, Flynn died in 2013. His publishers, Emily Bestler Books (a Simon & Schuster imprint – and I’ve said it here before and will again. Pay attention to who publishes a book. I’ve never read anything from Emily Bester Books that wasn’t first rate) enlisted Kyle Mills, already an accomplished thriller writer, to pick up Flynn’s mantle and continue the Mitch Rapp saga. This is the 6^th Mitch Rapp book by Kyle Mills.

And it’s a whopper. Not Rapp crawling around some shithole for a dirtbag terrorist bent on bringing down the Great Satan. Rapp is fully engaged on American soil to prevent the US from plunging into a bottomless hole from which it could well not recover. If you weren't already a prepper, the thought of this scenario actually happening just might convince you to start looking at mountain property for your own bunker against anarchy.