Kill Zone

27

Adonia took a step back from the sheer drop-off, baffled by Victoria’s sudden anger. The Undersecretary retreated back up the tunnel, her fists clenched so tight her arms shook.

Alarmed, Adonia called after her, “Wait — it may not be safe to go back up there.”

Victoria spoke over her shoulder. “You don’t have a clue how dangerous it is down here. I’ll take my chances.”

With a snort, van Dyckman spoke loudly enough that she could hear him. “I expected a little more professional behavior from someone of her rank.”

“What does she mean that you don’t know about everything inside the Mountain?” Shawn asked him.

“I thought you were the national program manager, Stanley,” Garibaldi said. “Aren’t you the big cheese here?”

Van Dyckman dismissed the comment. “Victoria’s a weapons person, and some people are still fighting the Cold War. She resents the fact that her program is winding down, but that’s ancient history.”

Adonia looked across the huge underground grotto, her attention drawn to the distant vault doors embedded in the far wall, below the main floor level. Van Dyckman admitted he had no idea what was stored there. Some old program, he had said.…

Adonia narrowed her eyes, trying to make out details a quarter mile away. The vaults! Did the Undersecretary know about some other program that was being kept secret from van Dyckman? Even the Valiant Locksmith program manager might have been kept in the dark about another SAP that was outside of his clearance. Often hugely important programs were classified from each other, and if the other SAP was also unacknowledged, van Dyckman wouldn’t even know another program existed, much less what it was about.

Only Rob Harris, as site manager, would know everything that took place inside the Mountain, but he would have been straitjacketed by bureaucratic secrecy and tangled restrictions. Adonia knew Regulation Rob would never budge from the rules, refusing to state the obvious because of immutable security prohibitions.

With growing hesitation, Adonia looked at Undersecretary Doyle as she marched up the tunnel, then she glanced at Garibaldi, thinking again how odd those two were as choices to be part of this inspection team. But Harris had personally selected everyone for a specific reason.

Senator Pulaski was the quintessential politician, and van Dyckman had blinders on. Garibaldi was a skeptic, though he had a detailed engineering background and he retained his security clearance. He was also a whistle-blower. Undersecretary Doyle worked for the DOE, but on the nuclear weapons side, so she should have nothing to do with nuclear power operations.

Unless Doyle knew something the others didn’t? Was that why she had been invited? Did Rob Harris want the rest of them to see something?

Trying to understand the scattered pieces, Adonia looked at the liquid-cooled transportation casks next to the large metal sphere, and the pipes strung along the walls. Sitting on the lower floor, the thick, plastic-walled pool held rows and rows of submerged spent fuel rods held upright by metal cradles, the tops of the rods covered by only six feet of water. As she pondered, Adonia caught a sudden whiff of the sickly sweet smell, and turned to see the wisps of yellow gas creeping down toward them.

Victoria had paused on her way to the tunnel, looking at the faint curls of tracer smoke at her feet. “It’s… still coming. How much of that gas is there?”

“Won’t it ever stop?” van Dyckman groaned. “Shouldn’t it have dissipated by now?”

Adonia did mental calculations, guessing that at a quarter mile long and two hundred feet high, the grotto had a volume of around 160 million cubic feet. The halothane reservoirs couldn’t possibly hold that much, but since the knockout gas was heavier than air, it didn’t need to fill the entire chamber, only to six feet or so above the sprawling floor, which would incapacitate any intruders. A tank the size of that giant metal sphere on the ledge filled with liquid halothane could hold enough gas to expand into an enormous volume, and these were old military defensive systems.…

Eventually, gas from the guard portal jets would flow down the tunnel and spill over the ledge onto the grotto floor fifty feet below like a vaporous waterfall. The flowing halothane would slowly diffuse, but it would still be toxic — and it kept rolling down toward them. If it continued flowing forward, the gas would overwhelm them if they stayed on the ledge.

Victoria began to cough. She took a few uncertain steps, then stopped and bent over. Turning, she covered her face and staggered back toward the group on the ledge, reconsidering her retreat.

Adonia grabbed the Undersecretary by the arm and pulled her away from the flowing gas. They didn’t have much room to maneuver with the sheer drop-off.

Shawn searched for a ladder or a walkway down, then considered the freight elevators. Instead, he looked up toward the ceiling. “We need to head up, not down, get above the gas. Quick, everyone — up on the catwalk. Climb as high as you can!”

Senator Pulaski frowned at the precarious metal latticework that extended out above the high bay. “On that rickety thing?”

Garibaldi agreed. “Colonel Whalen’s right. Halothane is heavier than air, so we have to climb above it. The gas will pour over the ledge to the lower floor, but we’ll be safe up there.”

Adonia pulled Victoria toward the aluminum stairs leading up to the catwalk. The Undersecretary still coughed, wiping at her eyes. Van Dyckman hurried to join them, with Garibaldi following. Shawn took the hesitant Senator’s arm, urging him to move. “Come on, sir. We can’t stay here — up the stairs! We’ve got to get to those catwalks.”

Pulaski shrugged him off. “I heard you. I’m going.”

Just when Adonia and Victoria reached the base of the stairs, a new whistling siren wailed throughout the cavern, echoing off the walls. The din was deafening, as though all the military’s stockpiled old sirens had gone off at once.

“Now what?” the Senator cried. “I didn’t trigger anything!”

A waist-high metal gate at the base of the catwalk stairs swung shut like a guillotine blade. Adonia yanked the Undersecretary away as the gate slammed, cutting them off from the metal steps.

With a sudden mechanical jerk, the catwalk rotated up away from the access stairs with a creaking, clanking sound that was loud even above the alarms.

“Sensors must have detected the halothane,” Shawn said, looking at the tendrils of gas rolling toward them. “The release of the gas would signal the other countermeasures and isolate anyone down in the grotto.”

“This is insane!” Garibaldi exclaimed.

Simultaneously, the two freight elevators on either side of the ledge whirred into motion and dropped to the lower floor in their safe position, further isolating the team members above the high bay. The opposite catwalk rotated up into the arched ceiling as well and locked in place, just missing the extended metal boom of the massive crane, completely inaccessible.

“We’re trapped!” van Dyckman said.

The metal staircase that had connected with the catwalk still extended up, but stopped at a blind end, disconnected. The last step hung over the precipitous drop down to the grotto floor.

Adonia felt as if someone had just kicked the wind out of her. The alarm siren continued to wail.

As the yellow tracer smoke crawled closer, the Senator showed panic, waiting for someone to save him. Van Dyckman moaned in sick dismay. “The catwalks were our only way to get above the gas!”

Victoria Doyle had managed to get her coughing under control, and glared at him. “Another thing you didn’t count on, Stanley? How do we get out of here?”

“On the metal stairs, everybody,” Adonia said, helping Victoria back to her feet. It was the only option she could see. “Climb while we can.”

“But they don’t go anywhere!” Garibaldi said. “They just dangle out in open air.”

“We might still get high enough to be safe.” She swung one leg over the metal half gate and climbed over. Wasting no time, she stepped onto the now-disengaged aluminum ladder, which wobbled, unstable without the connecting catwalk to hold it in place. Once she balanced on the metal stairs, she grabbed the railing and helped Victoria climb over to join her. The others covered their faces with their hands, hoping to block the halothane as they swung themselves over the gate.

Victoria ascended the steps, holding the metal rails to keep her balance as Adonia helped van Dyckman get to the stairs. But as Victoria climbed higher, the unstable staircase creaked from the weight. If she went much higher, the unsupported metal structure would bend.

The remaining steps telescoped up at an angle, wavering free. Adonia realized that was why the gates had swung shut, to prevent anyone from climbing the stairs without the supporting catwalk in place.

While the Undersecretary held on to the swaying staircase, Adonia shouted over the alarm noise, “Wait! It’s not stable enough to hold us.”

Victoria stopped where she was, and the wobbly stairs stopped swaying, but when she gingerly tried to climb one step higher, the metal frame creaked and swung to the left, then back in a pendulum-like motion. She looked down at the others, her face ashen. “This is as high as I can go. I don’t think more than a few of us will be able to get up here. It won’t hold our weight.”

Adonia knew it would never support all six of them. On the far side of the ledge, the second staircase also extended to nowhere. The disconnected steps might support two people high enough above the encroaching gas, but a third person would certainly overstress the metal.

The air currents in the grotto would stir the gas, waft some of it up, maybe enough to incapacitate them high on the rickety steps. And they would fall to their deaths.…

Adonia was already dizzy, and the relentless sirens disoriented her even more. “Dead end.” Breathing hard, she caught more of the halothane scent, growing stronger. Her world focused into nothing but survival. She searched for another way to climb higher, but the catwalks were now far out of reach.

Shawn called to her from below. “We have to go down instead — get out on the cavern floor, keep far enough ahead of the gas until it’s diluted.”

Looking down from her perch on the detached aluminum steps, Adonia saw the piles of construction material, mounds of cement bags, even the crane itself. Once out in the lower cavern, they could reach the far end and climb above the gas.

“One small problem, Colonel Whalen,” Garibaldi said. “We have no way to get down there.”

Close to the plastic safety chain, Adonia peered over the drop-off to see the stone floor impossibly far below.

The original emergency stairs that led from the ledge to the grotto floor had been disengaged and pushed to the other side of the construction material to make room for the temporary pool. She looked up and saw that the crane boom was out of reach high overhead, extending from the huge Manitowoc cab anchored in the middle of the cavern.

Both freight elevators were now locked and secured down on the floor. “Stanley!” Adonia said. “Where are the controls to the freight elevator?”

Van Dyckman lifted a shaky arm and pointed back toward the tunnel, where the ominous wave of gas continued to boil out. “The override is up in the guard portal.”

“No good,” Shawn said.

Adonia looked down, saw the surface of the cooling pool only thirty feet below, the entire structure encircled by the metal mesh observation platform. And it was clear what they had to do.

“Good news,” she said, turning to face them as the alarms continued to clamor. “We have two choices. Stay here on the ledge and hope we don’t die from the halothane.” She calmed herself, then said the unthinkable alternative. “Or we jump into the pool of radioactive fuel rods and climb down to the floor.”