Kill Zone

24

Hot with nervous sweat, Harris shifted the classified STE phone against his right shoulder, fighting a cramp as he waited on hold for the Secretary of Energy. Again. His hand was slick around the red handset, but he squeezed harder. His neck ached; his head pounded. Too much tension.

Too many disasters.

With these crises at hand, he would have preferred to use the speakerphone so he could multitask and watch his crew inside the ops center, but speakerphones were strictly prohibited for SAP conversations. It didn’t matter that his office, the operations center, and the entire interior of Hydra Mountain were cleared for Valiant Locksmith. DOE SAP regulations and policy covered by U.S. Code Title 50 were not suggestions.

He was horrified by cocky administrators who didn’t adhere to procedures, glibly claiming it was better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. Harris had worked for years at Oakridge in Tennessee, and DOE Headquarters in Washington, earning a solid, reliable reputation. He was not going to throw his career out the window.

He couldn’t help but worry about team members cut off from communication, stranded even longer because of yet another systems reboot, with all safety and security systems activated, especially the extreme countermeasures in the lower levels.

And he couldn’t help them at all.

The secure line remained quiet for an impossibly long time, and Harris felt a bead of sweat run down his temple. His last report to Secretary Nitta had not been particularly well received, and she had left him waiting, stewing, pacing. Now he had to tell her even more bad news.

Even as the youngest Cabinet official, the DOE Secretary wasn’t used to anyone disobeying hard-and-fast regulations, and especially not her specific directives. But someone on the review team had violated the shelter-in-place orders, blundered back up the tunnel, and triggered the sticky foam defense. Now the rest of the team members had breached the other side of the portal, which had dumped enough knockout gas to flood the lower cavern and incapacitate a hostile commando team. The gas reservoir tank was two meters in diameter and filled with cooled liquid halothane ready to be volatilized into a truly significant volume of the anesthetic gas.

Harris chewed four orange-flavored antacid tablets from his desk drawer as he waited. Still silence on the phone. Nothing, no answer, no help.

The line clicked, and a hollow, tinny sound came over the already distorted digitally encrypted link, as if the Secretary had put her own STE phone on speaker. “Rob, I understand we’re looking at another five hours.” The Secretary’s voice sounded deeply frustrated.

“A little longer than that, ma’am, and it’s more than enough time for the halothane to fill the lower level to a height of six feet, which should incapacitate all of them even if they get down to the grotto.”

An unidentified male voice spoke over the line, not the Secretary of Energy. “Mr. Harris, if the team is overcome and you can’t get to them for more than five hours, the gas will almost certainly kill them. Isn’t there some brute-force way for a rescue team to break in?”

Although the DOE Secretary may have brought in some sort of adviser, Harris hoped this man had been read into the SAP, per regulations. “I’m afraid not, sir.” He cleared his throat. “My operations center has no access to the Mountain’s interior during a lockdown. That’s the whole purpose of this place. Hydra Mountain is absolutely impregnable, even to a concerted military effort from an adversary.”

“But once you do have access to the interior, the crisis will be over,” Secretary Nitta said. “Correct?”

The stranger’s voice broke in again. “Why weren’t these malfunctions caught before, and why didn’t van Dyckman inform the Secretary there might be problems? Weren’t there test runs? A full-up facility dry run before launching Valiant Locksmith? You’ve been operational for a year.”

“Numerous test runs, sir, but we couldn’t foresee every conceivable scenario. Even though this facility is equipped with modern digital systems, we’re limited by 1950s analog circuitry, legacy DoD systems. And we didn’t expect a civilian aircraft being forced down on the side of the Mountain during the inspection.” He sighed, gritted his teeth. “Or one of the team members smuggling in a cell phone and making an unauthorized transmission when the systems were already on sensitive lockdown.” He heard muted discussion over the secure line. He tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. “We just have to wait this out.”

The male voice interrupted, sounding bitter. “So the halothane is still pumping out, and the committee is being forced to the lowest level of the grotto. I’m looking at a diagram now.”

Harris pressed ahead, talking faster. “Yes, sir. When nuclear warheads were stored here, the lethal countermeasures were the last line of defense down where the devices were assembled. If any intruder managed to penetrate that deep into our nuclear arsenal, they would need to be stopped at all costs.”

“But that was back during the Cold War!” Secretary Nitta said in a harder voice. “In converting Hydra Mountain, van Dyckman should have dismantled the old military security systems and supplemented them with new, nonlethal systems developed to incapacitate rather than kill. And now you’ve got a U.S. Senator and several high-ranking political appointees trapped in there. Those people are not terrorists, and they are not expendable!”

Harris struggled to control his breathing. Words caught in his throat like barbed wire. He would be unable to help the trapped team even if he could reveal why the Mountain still required the lethal countermeasures, no matter what this stranger or even the DOE Secretary thought.

“All procedures were followed,” he insisted. “Over twelve months ago, when Hydra Mountain opened its doors, each decision was approved by the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee, as clearly recorded in the authorization of Valiant Locksmith.”

He had done all the paperwork properly, followed every regulation, even though he suspected van Dyckman had circumvented the classified interagency approvals in his rush to impress the President. It was a technicality, but a legal one that could come back to haunt the Assistant Secretary.

Secretary Nitta sounded somewhat cowed when Harris refused to back down. “Due to the urgency of the waste storage problem, I did approve an accelerated process to make the program operational as soon as possible, at the President’s insistence — but I insisted that we follow all SAP procedures. Stanley must have pulled some strings, and apparently he cut a few corners as well.”

Harris didn’t want to cast blame, but the finger-pointing had already begun. Damn the straitjacket of regulations and political blinders that kept one SAP from knowing what the other was doing! “And there were other, uh, security considerations,” he said. “As I said before, a cascade of unintended interactions occurred between the legacy and modern systems. We expected to have time to work out the wrinkles, but Senator Pulaski’s oversight hearing forced us to move up the timetable.”

He heard muffled whispering over the secure comm link. The Secretary seemed to be arguing with the other person in her office. She came back on the line. “We can address this later, Rob. For now, do you know what’ll happen next?”

Holding the red phone, Harris stared through the Eagle’s Nest window at the operations board on the far wall below. The interior tunnel cameras were still fried, and he had no visual contact with the stranded team. Nevertheless, the heat, oxygen, carbon dioxide, halothane, and other biosensors showed that Adonia and her companions had reached the upper ledge of the high bay above the lower cavern, and that pained him.

Halothane was still flowing down the tunnel, and soon the gas would pool around them and spill over the ledge. They had to get to higher ground before the knockout gas rendered them unconscious. If only he had a way to warn them!

Forcing calm, he spoke to the DOE Secretary. “The team’s best bet would be to head up onto the catwalks and climb as high as possible. Again, they’d have a chance to sit tight.”

“At least they won’t be able to trigger any more countermeasures from up there,” said the Secretary. “Simon Garibaldi should come to that conclusion, if no one else does. Can you tell them that?”

“No! They’re not near any intercoms, and the loudspeakers are down!” He calmed himself, heaved in a deep breath again. “Once the cavern sensors detect the halothane, the catwalks will retract up into their lockdown position. If the team members can climb up and out of the way before that happens, they will be safe near the grotto ceiling.”

The man’s voice asked, “And what if they don’t think to get onto the catwalks in time?”

Harris longed for another antacid. “Then once they fall unconscious, the system reset time will pass very quickly for them.” He hesitated. “Unless the halothane increases to a lethal concentration.”

“Why can’t they just get out onto the open floor of the lower cavern? Won’t the space be large enough to dilute the gas?” Nitta asked.

“For a time,” Harris said. “The reservoir was designed to hold enough halothane to cover that lower floor before any adversary could steal the active plutonium pits. The freight elevators are the main means of transporting personnel and equipment down to the cavern, but they’ll be locked down as well, retracted to their safe position and out of reach from the upper ledge.”

It took a moment for the Secretary to answer. “Considering how persistent the team has been against your countermeasures so far, Rob, and with Garibaldi’s presence, I wouldn’t underestimate them.”