Kill Zone

22

A cold trickle of sweat ran down Rob Harris’s back as he hunched over his desk in the Eagle’s Nest. The IR sensors on the screen did not show good news. The team was on the move again after breaching both doors of the guard portal — exactly what he had told them not to do. Why was it so hard for them just to stay put? He found it maddening.

Forcing open the upper door of the portal would have released the sticky foam countermeasure, which would be a disaster in itself, but when they opened the opposite door and attempted to pass into the lower levels without authorization, then that would dump the deadly halothane into the tunnels. Those old, extreme measures had all been left in place to protect Victoria Doyle’s SAP. Now, the Undersecretary was seeing it all firsthand.

He couldn’t understand why they would make the situation worse. Adonia Rojas or Colonel Whalen knew the importance of following strict instructions, Stanley van Dyckman would not have wanted anything else to go wrong, and Undersecretary Doyle certainly understood the dangerous countermeasures deep inside the Mountain. But the Senator and Dr. Garibaldi were both loose cannons.

In the operations center, his techs had just figured out how to deactivate the newly installed nonlethal defenses in the upper level, as required by the DOE. But now the whole countdown had reset to zero and started over again, thanks to the breach in the guard portal. The old, lethal DoD countermeasures were decoupled from the modern DOE systems, and there was no way he could shut them off.

Another six hours before he could do anything!

Harris could only guess what the team was doing deep inside the Mountain. He punched the intercom and called down to his harried-looking ops crew. “I really need to see them. Why aren’t my optical sensors working yet?”

Drexler said, “Blame it on the sub-terahertz sources driving the active-denial millimeter waves, sir. They fried the tunnel’s new camera circuitry.”

Harris couldn’t believe it. “Those cameras were just installed. The new electrical components weren’t EMP certified?”

It took a moment for his exec to answer. “No reason for that, sir. That requirement was dropped after the Cold War ended.”

Harris slumped back into his chair, rubbing his temples. A few months ago, while attending a cocktail party in Albuquerque, he’d spoken to a young Sandia Labs engineer. She explained the work she was doing with high-power microwave weapons, which were similar to Hydra Mountain’s active-denial systems. “The smarter you think you are by using sophisticated electronic components, the dumber I can make you by overpowering the circuits. Every increase in complexity offers ten new ways to take you down.”

And now, one state-of-the-art security component had tangled with another, perhaps taking more than one down.

Ironically, if they’d kept the old 1950s-vintage circuitry and the legacy cameras, rather than replacing them with higher-resolution and more sensitive optical systems, he might have been able to keep visual tabs on the committee. The original Cold War — era conduits had been certified to survive electromagnetic pulses from atmospheric nuclear detonations. When the DOE converted the Mountain to a waste storage facility, van Dyckman had authorized cheaper electronic solid-state devices rather than using more robust systems, such as enhanced fiber optics that were immune to EMP radiation. Since the purpose of Valiant Locksmith was to store nuclear waste, that shouldn’t have been an issue.

And Hydra Mountain possessed far more aggressive countermeasures, old systems that remained in place for the other SAPs inside the facility. Another unintended consequence. Because of the firewalls between the classified SAPs, the interactions of the countermeasures couldn’t be fully vetted under all possible circumstances.

Most DOE nuclear sites had been built decades ago, and their operational technology was constantly being upgraded. Under normal circumstances, such upgrades were done in a rigorous, methodical fashion, according to set safety and security procedures. They were monitored by oversight agencies, such as the Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as the nuclear power industry, and in some cases, even nuclear protest watchdogs, like Dr. Garibaldi’s Sanergy group. Rob Harris liked it that way, safety net after safety net, a clear set of rules to follow.

But when the President had signed the classified Executive Order to begin moving nuclear waste into Hydra Mountain, van Dyckman rushed the operation, not daring to let anything delay Valiant Locksmith. Once a big government program was operational, the mere inertia of bureaucratic red tape would keep it going, but the tiniest glitch could shut everything down before it got started.

Harris didn’t let himself forget that Yucca Mountain had never even opened its doors, killed by politics before it could receive a single spent fuel rod or cask of dry high-level waste. And that boondoggle had cost five times as much as the Apollo program! Van Dyckman had taken emergency measures to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to Hydra Mountain… and those measures had backfired on the review team.

Drexler adjusted his sweaty shirt collar. “At least the nontraditional sensors still function in the tunnels, sir. We can’t see or hear the six team members, but we can track them using infrared and gas sensors that detect their body heat and carbon dioxide emissions.” He gave a weary, small smile. “Or, we can always monitor their progress by watching which countermeasures they trigger.”

Now that the sticky foam had driven them through the guard portal, he hoped Adonia could find another intercom and report in. But the systems were widely separated and they functioned intermittently. If she and the others were running for their lives from the flood of halothane, their first priority wouldn’t be to phone home.

He sagged in his chair, rested his elbows on the desk. He had planned for this to be an important day, resulting in a great administrative upheaval, but he had never expected this. The small plane’s hard landing inside the security fence had triggered the high-level security systems, but some members of the inspection team were like bulls in a china shop, and they had caused even worse problems. Someone must have tried to go back up the tunnel, and the motion sensors would have interpreted the movement as an intruder trying to escape.

He suspected Senator Pulaski was responsible. Though the Senator wanted this review to go off without a hitch so he could deliver a positive report to the oversight committee, he was his own worst enemy. Pulaski was just a politician who had risen to a position of importance based solely on his seniority in government, not any expertise. He had received his committee position and financial power thanks to his tenure and influence, not through any particular knowledge about the nuclear industry — like a political donor being named the ambassador to France, whether or not he even spoke French. Pulaski had no business making decisions about the complex problem of high-level waste storage, but that’s the nature of politics.

Harris paced in his office, gazing out the big windows, feeling isolated. He had to get those people out of there alive.

He had alerted emergency services, and they were standing by just outside the main entrance to the Mountain, ready to rush in as soon as the lockdown recycled. Now, the rescue team would also have to cut their way through the sticky foam barricade just to get down the tunnel.

He glanced at the clock. Time crawled by. Five hours and eight minutes left before the reboot was complete.

He needed to call Secretary Nitta with the news. He knew she wouldn’t take it well.

The team members were fighting for their lives in there. The only silver lining was that once the group reached the lower level, they would see the impending problem that had caused him to bring those specific people here in the first place. Then they would understand the real danger at the heart of Hydra Mountain.

And then the shit would really hit the fan.