Kill Zone

21

The noxious vapors curled around the top of the tunnel, then started sinking toward the floor — and them.

“Not tear gas again!” Adonia groaned, hurrying them away down the tunnel. “We have to move.” They stumbled along, all of them spattered and coated with remnants of the hardening sticky foam.

“It isn’t tear gas.” Victoria sounded beaten. “That’s halothane — an old, potent knockout gas. A big enough whiff, and it’ll drop you in your tracks.”

“Going to sleep sounds better than getting fried by a wall of microwaves,” Pulaski said. “Kinder and gentler.”

“If you don’t get taken out of the gas quickly enough, you might never wake up,” Victoria said.

Victoria continued as they backed away, looking at the gas swirling down from the ceiling, “Halothane gas is one of the final-tier military systems to stop any intruders who might manage to get past the guard portal. I think the designers assumed that only a full-fledged enemy force could possibly get this far in, so these nozzles are spraying enough gas to diffuse down the tunnels and knock out an army before they got to the plutonium pits that were stored in the lower assembly area.”

“Then we have to keep ahead of it,” Shawn said. “Get moving.”

Garibaldi pointed back at the nozzles, frowning and preoccupied. “Halothane is colorless, an invisible old-style anesthetic, been around for years — and it’s deadly in large concentrations. But that gas is clearly visible. Are you sure it’s halothane, Ms. Doyle?”

“It’s mixed with a smoke marker so it can be seen, a psychological edge to scare the hell out of intruders,” Victoria said. “Like I said, it was DoD’s last line of defense inside the Mountain.”

“I… I didn’t know about this!” van Dyckman said, looking from person to person. “Or about the sticky foam either. I swear.” He shook his head. “And this is my Mountain!”

“Have your arguments later,” Adonia said. “Since we can see the gas coming, let’s avoid it.”

The vapor wafted down from the nozzles, spreading out as it diffused to the floor. Adonia had no intention of dropping unconscious where she would lie for hours, breathing more and more of the dangerous gas. No rescue team could get to them in time.

Tear gas was a standard deterrent with no lingering effects, good for crowd control; her own site at Granite Bay kept it on hand as a nonlethal defense in case a protest got out of hand. But since Hydra Mountain was designed to store nuclear weapons, its security systems would be much more aggressive against any intruder who managed to penetrate this far inside. She supposed it made sense, on paper.

She caught a whiff of an unusual, almost pleasant smell — which meant they were all inhaling it. “Hurry, before it starts to affect us.”

Van Dyckman said, “Keep moving down to where the tunnel widens. We’ll be on a high bay above the lower grotto. The farther we go, the more the gas will spread out and diffuse.”

“But halothane is heavier than air, and the vapor is rolling downhill, so don’t underestimate the concentration,” Garibaldi said. “We’ll eventually need to get well above it.”

Stumbling along, Pulaski glanced at the roiling plumes of gas curling after them. “My God, doesn’t this ever stop?” He began coughing as he hobbled forward in his stocking feet.

“Storing nuclear weapons requires many security layers, Senator,” Doyle said. “And sometimes they’re inconvenient to the good guys.”

Van Dyckman persisted, “And look, it’s working! This is what Hydra Mountain was originally designed to do. We aren’t supposed to be down here. No one should be able to break into Valiant Locksmith and steal the nuclear waste.”

“Not even those of us who were sent here to inspect it?” Garibaldi asked.

The cloyingly sweet odor thickened in the air. “We can’t afford to have anyone pass out.” Adonia breathed shallowly, but she was starting to feel dizzy. “We’ve got enough troubles without having to carry anyone.”

“And once the first person falls, we’re all going to follow in quick succession,” Shawn said. “Keep moving. We can outrun it.”

The tunnel was a wide thoroughfare, built to accommodate transport vehicles hauling twenty-foot-high waste containers, so there were no sharp corners or abrupt inclines. The gradual slope headed ever downhill and deeper into the Mountain.

Garibaldi kept talking as if it helped him to stay calm. “Harris did say the countermeasures would be more severe on this side of the guard portal. Halothane is nasty stuff. Even at less than fatal doses, it can trigger cardiac arrhythmia and cause liver damage. I wouldn’t recommend we breathe too much of it.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” Doyle said with an edge in her voice. “I’d prefer to stay awake, and alive.”

They finally outpaced the dissipating gas, and after they had gone well beyond the yellowish mist, they paused to pluck at their foam-encrusted clothes. The Senator, Garibaldi, and van Dyckman had already discarded their suit jackets, and now Adonia and Undersecretary Doyle peeled off their blazers. With an expression of disgust, Pulaski removed his socks, holding on to van Dyckman’s shoulder for balance. His limp was more pronounced as he moved again, barefoot on the concrete floor.

They couldn’t rest for long, though. Adonia saw the first forerunner wisps of halothane drift like fog, fading as it spread out. “It’ll keep rolling downhill. I don’t know how potent the gas is now, but we shouldn’t just stay here. It’ll pool as it reaches a low point, and we want to be above it.”

“We shouldn’t have left the door open behind us,” Doyle said. “The gas keeps coming.”

“You’re welcome to go back and close it,” van Dyckman retorted, and she scowled at him.

“Let’s just get to the lower level,” Shawn said in a weary voice. “There should be enough room that we won’t have to worry about the gas.”

Van Dyckman looked inappropriately pleased. “Once we’re down in the lower grotto, I can finish showing you the operations. That’s why we brought the team here in the first place.”

Garibaldi gave him a disbelieving look. “That’s your priority?”

He shrugged. “We have to wait for the lockdown to end anyway, and this is important.”

Adonia sniffed the air, caught a hint of the sickly sweet aroma. “Let’s go.” She set off in the lead.

Garibaldi offered his arm to support the tall Senator. “You’ve already had your turn, Colonel Whalen. I’ll help him now.” Though Pulaski looked embarrassed, he grudgingly accepted the assistance.

Adonia used the older scientist’s gesture to boost their morale. “We’ll reach the lower level soon, and be safe while we wait for Rob Harris’s people to show up.”

Victoria Doyle looked uncertain. “How exactly is a team supposed to reach us now? That guard portal was an intentional bottleneck, a single point of entry as a defense against intrusion. The tunnel is now filled with sticky foam. They’ll have to clear that away just to get to us. It’ll take even more time.”

“Harris said he found a way to lift the lockdown and get a team in here,” van Dyckman said. “Rescuers are on the way. They’ll get to us soon, if we can just stay ahead of the halothane. We need to be ready for them.”

“As usual, you weren’t listening, Stanley,” Doyle said. “Harris warned us to shelter in place, inside the guard portal. But since the Senator breached the guard portal and set off the countermeasures, now Harris has to reboot the entire system again and start it all over from scratch.” She scowled at Pulaski. “That should have reset the clock to six hours again. The rescue teams can’t even get started yet.” She walked briskly ahead.

After they had gone another fifty feet down the tunnel, Adonia couldn’t smell the gas, although she still felt a little dizzy and disoriented, either from the effects of the halothane, or maybe just stress. “It’ll be fine,” she said, still trying to reassure herself as well as the others.

Garibaldi helped the Senator along, and Adonia thanked him. He lifted his bushy gray eyebrows at her. Now his unruly hair was flecked with small clumps of red sticky foam. “Why wouldn’t I? We’re all in this together.”

“Some people don’t feel the same way,” Adonia said.

Van Dyckman and Doyle led the group, as if each was eager to be the first to reach the main grotto. They walked close together, but not next to each other. They didn’t talk or otherwise interact. Adonia guessed their affair must have ended bitterly, competitively. She was glad she and Shawn still cared for each other; circumstances had pulled them apart, not their feelings.

Seeing the obvious tension between the two, Garibaldi let out a low chuckle. “That’s one of the reasons I left DOE. I got so sick of the infighting. Even in this crisis, when we’re fighting for our very survival, those two political appointees can’t stop bickering.”

“It’s all politics,” Pulaski retorted, still leaning on the older scientist for support. “Industries, careers, even the future of our nation’s energy grid are riding on the success of Valiant Locksmith. You know that, Ms. Rojas. Hydra Mountain is the only feasible, near-term way to ease the existing burden of nuclear waste. Would you rather keep it piled up at a hundred sites around the country, sites that were never intended to hold high-level waste?”

“I don’t dispute the problem, Senator, but I would rather have it stored transparently, with more oversight.” Adonia felt exasperated with the politics herself. “And as for you, Dr. Garibaldi, I would rather have protest groups like Sanergy work realistically to solve what is a significant problem, rather than simply attack any suggested cure. The political environment is so toxic, you would rather denounce a ticking time bomb than work together to defuse it.”

Pulaski snorted, and Adonia already knew what he was going to say. “That’s why we were forced to establish Valiant Locksmith as a classified SAP here on a military base. What’s the alternative? Spend another twenty years and another hundred billion dollars building a replacement for Yucca Mountain? And then that one would never be opened because of more red tape and environmental roadblocks!”

Helping Pulaski along, Garibaldi just smiled under the verbal barrage. “I’m not trying to block any solution, Senator. I just want it done right, so the public can be safe. And the best way is to keep it free of politics.”

Pulaski made a rude noise. “As if Sanergy is apolitical!”

Adonia sighed. “I try to stay clear of politics in my day-to-day operations at Granite Bay. I prefer to be out in the field, running my own site — which is why I left DOE Headquarters.”

Ahead, Doyle and van Dyckman reached the bottom of the incline and stopped just before the tunnel opened up to the lower grotto. Victoria stood with her hands on her small hips as she waited for the others to catch up.

Adonia looked back up the long passageway. “We should be far enough away now. The gas would have dropped in concentration.”

“Depends on the size of the halothane reservoir,” Garibaldi said. “If it was intended to incapacitate an enemy military force inside these tunnels…”

“Hopefully the nozzles have a cutoff switch to stop the flow,” Adonia said.

“Sensors should shut it off before the gas reached a lethal dose,” Garibaldi said. “And hopefully with halothane diffusing through the entire lower level, we may never reach that concentration. But with our luck the defense systems will probably keep pumping gas until the Mountain’s entire supply runs out.”

Shawn winced. “The military can be redundant to a fault.”

They caught up with Doyle and van Dyckman, who stood at the end of the incline, where the tunnel opened into a huge chamber below and ahead. As they approached Adonia called, “It’s your facility, Stanley. When was the last time the DoD countermeasures were certified? How much gas are we potentially dealing with?”

Van Dyckman glanced away. “I told you, I didn’t know about the sticky foam or this gas. That’s Harris’s responsibility. Everything should have been inspected when facility oversight was transferred from the military to the DOE.”

Adonia wondered what other responsibilities he had overlooked as he basked in his political appointment.

He continued, “But I’m sure all the systems were thoroughly checked before we received the first shipment. I relied on Harris before I authorized the movement of casks, and you know he’s a stickler for details.” Van Dyckman spoke faster, more insistently, as if to make his point, but Adonia could tell he was already working on diverting blame to the site manager. “We were racing against time — on the President’s direct orders.”

Sweat glistened on his forehead, and he used his palms to smooth back his dark hair. He looked at Adonia, seeking an ally. “You know the situation. We needed a pressure-release valve for the increasing backlog. Every single shipment we brought into Hydra Mountain reduced the chances of something bad happening on the outside, with the public.”

“So, something bad happens in here instead,” Garibaldi said. “With us.”

Shawn shook his head, unconvinced. “But a waste storage facility shouldn’t have any lethal countermeasures at all, no matter how secure it needs to be. Such measures were needed when real nukes were stored here. Why were so many legacy systems left in place after the military decommissioned the site? If the antiquated countermeasures were inspected, then why weren’t they deactivated?”

Doyle said slowly, “Probably because they were considered necessary.”

“To guard a bunch of dry waste casks? Not likely,” Garibaldi said.

“Don’t try to understand bureaucracy,” Adonia said. “For now, we need to find a functioning intercom so we can tell Rob what happened and explain why we’re no longer in the guard portal. We’re all flying blind here.”

“Everything’s just up ahead,” van Dyckman said, sounding eager. “You’ll see.”

They moved to where the tunnel opened up, and they looked out upon Hydra Mountain’s vast lower grotto.