Kill Zone

23

The tunnel opened up like a giant window to reveal an enormous high-bay grotto with an arched ceiling stretching out to their right, as if the middle of the Mountain had been hollowed out. Shawn, Garibaldi, and Undersecretary Doyle crowded together at the mouth of the tunnel. As Adonia brought up the rear with the Senator and van Dyckman, she paused, impressed with the enormity of the underground cavern unfolding below them.

All the security and safety measures had herded them here, and they found themselves on a long ledge that extended two hundred yards directly in front of them. Fifty feet on the right, the ledge dropped off to a monstrous rectangular cavern, and she realized that what they had seen as they came down the incline wasn’t Hydra Mountain’s lower level at all. Rather, it was merely an upper platform that served as a holding area for materials brought down the tunnel, such as the large concrete waste casks. Once placed on the ledge, the cargo could be lifted by a crane and lowered to the floor of the cavern, far below on their right. Years ago the big grotto had been a temporary holding and assembly area for nuclear weapons. It looked big enough to hold a small town.

Running along the right side of the ledge, a painted red line on the concrete floor marked a crosshatched danger zone five feet from the abrupt edge. A chest-high yellow plastic chain draped from metal poles served as a flimsy barricade to prevent anyone from stepping close.

Two open-air hydraulic freight elevators were situated on either end of the ledge; a sign painted on the floor of each elevator read WARNING 250 TON LIMIT. From the ledge, two sets of portable metal stairs reached up to the catwalk network, far above the high bay.

On the other side of the plastic chain, the ledge dropped fifty feet down to the floor of the vast cavern. The opposite wall of the grotto was nearly a quarter mile away. Two hundred feet above, the ceiling was supported by giant steel beams at regular intervals.

“The size!” Garibaldi said in a hushed voice. “You could store a dozen aircraft hangars in here.”

Adonia drank it in, unable to think of any words. The sheer excavation job, presumably completed during Cold War days, dwarfed anything she’d seen before.

A gargantuan mobile crane was parked in the middle of the cavern — an old red Manitowoc MLC165-1 gantry, capable of lifting over 180 tons. Its 275-foot metal lattice boom was long enough to reach over the ledge where she and her companions stood, lift a load that had been delivered there, and lower it onto the floor of the cavern or deposit it into one of the freight elevators. Right now, the crane’s boom had been extended up in its safe position, stretching over several crisscrossed catwalks beneath the ceiling high above.

Oblivious to the other team members, van Dyckman was awed and delighted as they moved closer to the crosshatched warnings painted on the ledge. “No matter how many times I come here, I’m always blown away.” He grinned at them all, Adonia in particular. “See what I mean? This can solve the storage problem in one fell swoop. We can fit it all.”

Even Shawn seemed at a loss for words. He finally managed, “That crane — how did it get inside here?”

“Piece by piece, down the tunnel. Built like a model ship in a bottle,” van Dyckman said. “The old industrial overhead crane from DoD days was only rated to one hundred tons, and we needed more than that to move the dry casks from the ledge down to the lower floor. Structurally, we couldn’t retrofit the ceiling for a larger overhead crane, so we installed a high-capacity ventilation system to exhaust the diesel fumes.” He pointed to a vent shaft in the rock ceiling overhead.

Staying far from the edge, Adonia looked at the grotto floor as it spread out before her. The broad expanse was clearly still under construction; excavations for large, rectangular structures the size of Olympic swimming pools all being dug in the floor. Mountains of cement mix sacks were piled high in the far corners. She could see stacked construction materials, scaffolding components, piled rebar, copper plumbing pipes, wooden framework braces, and metal sheeting. At least four forklifts were parked against the walls, available to move the materials.

Everything was eerily silent in the gigantic chamber, since Rob Harris had sent away the construction crews on a Sunday. During the normal workweek this place must be a swarm of activity.

“When this was a DoD weapons site, the lower level housed all their equipment and maintenance shops.” Van Dyckman pointed to the far corner. “Down there they kept all their high-precision machinery so engineers could simply fabricate whatever parts they needed — except for plutonium, of course, which was done up at Los Alamos’s PF-4 facility in Tech Area 55.”

He turned to Shawn. “The military left everything in place when they decommissioned Hydra Mountain. Later, DOE had to clean up the mess, which meant covertly clearing everything out to give us space.” He grinned. “Our national labs got a windfall of old, unique equipment — it all just showed up on their doorsteps, but we couldn’t say where the items came from.” He shrugged, looking smug. “Fortunately, budget-tight DOE labs typically don’t question getting free stuff.”

Adonia struggled to comprehend the scope of Valiant Locksmith. “I had no clue there was so much classified space in the entire country, much less in one location underground.”

He nodded. “Between Hydra Mountain’s upper and lower levels, you can see why it’s a perfect solution for storing one hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste.”

“It was quite the political coup,” Senator Pulaski said. He sounded as if he had regained some of his confidence. “We can all take a victory lap.”

Garibaldi looked more disturbed. “Such an enormous classified construction project could only have been accomplished during the Cold War, when nobody questioned such things. Unlimited budgets, the nuclear arms race, Commies hiding under every bed.” He scanned the arched ceiling far above. “This looks bigger even than the interior of Cheyenne Mountain.”

Adonia had never been inside the old NORAD command post, but she had seen photographs.

Shawn’s expression remained troubled. “But everyone knew NORAD Headquarters was located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, and it was hardened to survive a direct nuclear strike. Until Hydra Mountain was decommissioned, nobody knew nuclear weapons were being stored here.”

“And that fact was never fully declassified or even acknowledged, despite all the rumors,” Pulaski said, leaning against the wall to take the weight off his sore foot. “The public doesn’t know much about this place at all, which makes it the ideal location for Valiant Locksmith.”

Shawn pointed out, “If our adversaries knew that warheads were stored here, the city of Albuquerque would have been a primary target in the event of a nuclear war.”

Adonia looked at the wide ledge in front of them. Giant concrete cylinders lined the granite wall, each one marked with the universal radiation symbol. At the end of the line of cement casks, a large seven-foot-diameter steel sphere was anchored in place and connected to piping that led up the inclined tunnel. Was that the halothane reservoir?

The concrete cylinders were much larger than the casks the two flatbed trucks had delivered earlier that morning. These were more than fifteen feet in diameter and nearly thirty feet tall. She couldn’t imagine moving something that large through the Mountain tunnels to this ledge. Clearly, the big crane would deliver them down to some holding area on the grotto floor.

She couldn’t figure out what kind of high-level nuclear waste would need such massive cylinders. She made out stainless-steel tubing running up their sides and a miniature power supply near the bottom of each cask, complete with backup battery. They looked like small, self-contained plumbing plants. Was this so liquid could circulate inside the casks? But why would dry nuclear waste need to be liquid cooled…?

Then it hit her.

Adonia shifted between disbelief and anger as she shot an astonished glare toward van Dyckman, who stood making grandiose gestures for the benefit of the others crowded next to him. She pushed her way forward. “Those aren’t dry-storage containers, Stanley. They’re liquid cooled! What are they doing here?”

She had heard of such experimental casks being developed for storing and transporting highly enriched fuel rods removed from a nuclear reactor — the very type of high-level waste that needed to cool in deep pools for up to five years until they could be safely handled in dry storage. But those experimental casks were only meant for limited, temporary storage, as they could be extremely dangerous if the heavy-water coolant ever leaked, stopped circulating, or even heated up.

Every nuclear power reactor produced spent fuel rods much faster than the rods could cool to manageable radiation levels, which meant that power plants like Granite Bay needed to build increasingly more temporary pools just to store the rods in the interim. And with no acceptable place to build more pools, rods were crammed more and more densely in the existing pools, packed closer and closer together — often to dangerous levels, where the radiation could build up to a deadly criticality.

She understood Stanley’s desperation, and Hydra Mountain might indeed be a pressure-release valve, but Adonia feared that Valiant Locksmith wasn’t qualified to handle still-hot spent fuel rods. Had Harris known about this? How in the world could “Regulation Rob” allow this to happen? Was there some reason why he hadn’t simply reported it up the chain?

A new thought occurred to her. Was that why he had wanted this inspection tour, so the broad-based, objective team of experts could see for themselves?

Victoria stood by the aluminum catwalk stairs with her hands on her hips in her familiar stern posture, showing clear astonishment. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Stanley? Ms. Rojas is quite right — if those are liquid-cooling containers, still-hot fuel rods do not belong here under any circumstances.”

“We interpreted NRC guidelines, and Senator Pulaski approved it.” Van Dyckman sounded defensive. “It is well within our funding mandate.”

The Senator looked embarrassed. Adonia knew full well Pulaski would have agreed to whatever Stanley suggested, since he understood little of the underlying science — or implications.

Garibaldi swallowed several times, struggling to breathe. “Have you lost your mind? This is insane. The risks in transporting such highly radioactive casks…”

Van Dyckman was annoyed, expecting to receive accolades rather than criticisms. “Nonsense. Safe Secure Transports carry nuclear warheads across the country, and this grotto was designed for storage and assembly of plutonium pits. Cooling fuel rods are far less problematic. Your concerns are baseless, just like Harris’s.”

Adonia motioned toward the casks behind her. “Don’t quote me studies saying these new storage containers are safe. The technology is too immature. The safest option is to keep the spent fuel rods in wet-storage pools near the power plant. You shouldn’t transport rods inside those containers, no matter how much coolant they have, or steel and concrete you wrap around them — much less store them here.”

Garibaldi gave a firm nod. “She’s right. I understand, and even guardedly approve, of the vaults in the upper level — provided poor Mrs. Garcia gets safely out. Those sealed chambers seem to be an adequate system for holding dry waste in isolation.” He shook his head. “But Hydra Mountain is no place to store still-hot fuel rods, especially after what we’ve been through today.”

Angry and sickened, Victoria Doyle stood back from the edge and stared across the giant grotto. “Those rods shouldn’t be in here at all.” She turned a heated glance toward van Dyckman. “At all, Stanley. You don’t know what you’re doing.” She insistently pointed across the cavern, where the far granite wall a quarter mile away had a row of embedded vault doors, their tops barely visible; the main lower floor sloped down to the vaults. “Do you even know what’s down here? What’s in those vaults?”

Van Dyckman lifted his chin. “Those are relics, owned by some other agency. I have plenty of space on the floor for our purposes, and I don’t go knocking on old, locked doors.”

Adonia turned around and suddenly caught a stronger smell, a sickly sweet odor. No denying it — the halothane was drifting toward them, getting stronger. “Do you smell that? The knockout gas is still coming toward us.”

Pulaski suddenly paled. “And we’re trapped on this ledge.”

“If the gas is still pumping out, it will keep drifting downhill,” Shawn said. “But look at all the volume in here. If we get down into the cavern, the gas should diffuse enough to be harmless.”

Garibaldi walked to the guard chain at the ledge, peering over the drop-off in search of a way down. He was startled by what he saw. “Oh. I didn’t expect that.”

When Victoria joined him, her expression turned ashen. “What the hell is this?”

Though van Dyckman stubbornly refused to step beyond the red safety line, Adonia hurried to join them and peered directly down at what had previously been out of view because of the sharp drop-off. Shawn stepped up next to her.

Now the pieces fit together — the thick black plastic panels piled on the tunnel floor, the rebar and concrete mix, and especially the large open excavations being dug in the middle of the grotto. Stanley wasn’t worried about keeping the highly radioactive fuel rods in the experimental concrete and steel casks for long.

“You see,” van Dyckman said smugly, finally joining them. His face was filled with pride as he looked down. “We have it all taken care of.”

Valiant Locksmith wasn’t just storing the safer, dry nuclear waste or a few liquid-cooled transportation containers. Not at all.

Van Dyckman’s plan was of a much greater scope.