Kill Zone

26

His tense phone call with the DOE Secretary had yielded no solutions, only confusion and criticisms. Harris had looked to his superiors two thousand miles away in Washington for a bureaucratic safety net, but now it didn’t feel much more secure than spiderwebs. He was on his own.

Harris felt blind and hamstrung in his Eagle’s Nest office above the operations center. His techs still hadn’t been able to give him visuals in the lower level, so he couldn’t see Adonia and her companions, but sensors implied they had reached the high bay overlooking the wet-storage pools.

Had Undersecretary Doyle put the pieces together yet? She had to understand. But even if she did, and explained it to the others on the team, they still had to get out alive.

He pressed his hands down on the conference table so hard that his knuckles turned white. He chewed four more antacids. He fidgeted, longing to be down there on the ops center floor, discussing solutions with his engineers, meticulously reviewing every report as it came in. He wanted to be in on the brainstorming as his techs tried to think of ways to circumvent the lockdown.

But breathing down their necks wasn’t going to help anything. His people were self-motivated, bright, extremely creative, and his frantic impatience would only dampen their efforts. He was the site manager, and he had seen some eager techs bend over backward to agree with his suggestions, just because he was the boss. That wasn’t what Harris needed. No, he needed their imagination, their skills, and their solutions, not butt-kissing.

Stuck in his office, he waited… and waited. The original lockdown would have been long over, but the team had forced a reset. Now more than four hours remained for the system to finish rebooting. Worse, the aggressive DoD countermeasures were active, ready to protect Velvet Hammer.

Data from the facility sensors splashed on the oversized monitor outside his office. Halothane levels continued to build up in the inclined tunnel. Thanks to the tracer smoke, the team members would see the hazard approaching, and he hoped they would get out of the way in time.

He placed high confidence in Adonia Rojas, and he had done the right thing putting her in charge. Harris had mentored the bright young woman at Oakridge, and he knew she was a solid worker, a cool-headed thinker. Without a second thought he had given her the responsibility when Drexler called him away to respond to the small-plane incident.

He looked at the numbers on the screen, the rising levels of halothane in the air. Very shortly, the automated sensors in the bay would detect the gas and trigger yet another set of countermeasures. The catwalks and freight elevators would reset and strand the team members high on the ledge, with no place to go.