Kill Zone

29

Splashing and gasping, Adonia and Shawn broke the surface of the hot water. She pulled in deep breaths of air and felt the sharp sting of pain from where Pulaski had bit her arm, but the sick sadness inside ran deeper. The two of them swam in grim, exhausted silence to the side wall where Stanley, Victoria, and Garibaldi waited, still clinging to the mesh of the metal walkway. Adonia could not shake the image of the Senator pinned underwater, trapped by the fallen fuel rods he himself had dislodged. “He’s gone,” she said.

Victoria looked stunned and disgusted at what she had seen. “Why didn’t he tell us he couldn’t swim? How much more could he screw things up?” She did not sound sympathetic.

Holding the wall, van Dyckman stared in disbelief. “And… and he dislodged part of the array! Those rods were widely separated.”

“Obviously not widely enough.” Garibaldi’s face was gray. “We can mourn the Senator later, but it would be a very good idea for us to get out of this pool. Now that some of the rods have toppled out of their support structure, possibly with damaged zirconium alloy cladding, I have no idea how close to critical they are.”

Victoria struggled to get on the metal grid platform that encircled the pool, but it was too high above the water for her to pull herself out. Moving behind her, Shawn grasped her waist and helped boost her up. The older woman hauled herself onto the top, then turned to help the others. One by one they scrambled up onto the platform, dripping and gasping, relieved to be out of the unnaturally hot water.

The last one still in the pool, Shawn looked grim and hardened, ready to do what was necessary. “I can swim down there and try to push the rods back upright by brute force.” He squinted up at Adonia, favoring his injured eye. “Put them back in their support structure.”

She reacted with alarm. “No! If you touched the rods with your bare hands, you’d be giving yourself a death sentence. You’d need gloves, protective clothing. And you’d still get a near-lethal dose.” Though she was still sickened from being unable to rescue Pulaski, she realized that from his direct exposure to the rods during his struggles, he had probably received a deadly exposure even if he did get out of the water. The Senator would have perished in weeks anyway, a long, slow, painful decline from radiation poisoning. “He’s already dead. We’re not.”

“Unless we stay here,” Garibaldi said. Crawling to the edge, he stuck his hand over the side, reaching down for Shawn, who grasped his arm. He pulled him up onto the platform with the others.

From above, wispy tendrils of yellow-marked gas continued pouring over the high ledge, but Victoria looked across to the far end of the cavern, seemingly more concerned about some other danger. “We have to get in touch with Harris. Forget the alarms and the lockdown. He needs to send a nuclear response team in here as soon as possible. We have to remove these rods from the grotto and dismantle this pool.”

“Damn right he does,” Garibaldi said, dripping as he stood on the metal grid platform above the pool. “But if he could get here, then all our problems would have been solved from the beginning.”

Van Dyckman looked at Adonia with bloodshot eyes, defeated. “So what now?”

Adonia was surprised that he would even ask such a question. “We find a way to stay safe until the lockdown is over. No more disasters.”

Van Dyckman shook his head. “The Senator’s dead. Shouldn’t we stay here until we’re rescued?”

Sitting on the metal grid platform with her knees drawn up to her chest, Adonia pointed up at the ledge above and the turbulent, falling gas. “Can’t stay here, Stanley. The gas is still coming, and the system was designed to flood the entire grotto floor. We have to keep moving.”

Even here, Adonia could smell the sickly sweet halothane and felt an even heavier dread in her heart. The edge of the pool was several feet from where the smoky waterfall flowed over the ledge, but wisps of the knockout gas tumbled down onto the surface of the water and started to spread out over the pool.

“We’ll have to keep above it, or we’ll succumb,” Shawn said.

“But we’re high enough here, and if the water is moderating the fuel rods, we’re reasonably protected from the radiation.” Van Dyckman wanted just to huddle in place and not move.

“Some of the fallen rods are touching,” Garibaldi explained. “No telling how much radiation we’ve already received. We should get as far away as possible.”

Adonia said, “The gas is building up, so we’ve got to find some way to stay above it while we wait out the lockdown.”

Shawn stared at the huge crane in the middle of the cavern. Its boom extended far above the temporary pool and reached nearly to the rock ceiling. “We could get to the crane, lower the trestle, and lift ourselves up to the catwalk.”

“Does anyone have experience operating a large crane?” Garibaldi said. “We know rocket science and nuclear physics, but this is heavy machinery.”

A pall of silence dropped over the group. Adonia had depended on numerous technical experts to run operations at Granite Bay, from radiation workers to health and safety professionals, and she’d always made an effort to understand the basics of their jobs. But running the large Manitowoc crane? She had taken the blue-collar construction jobs for granted, not thinking about the skills of crane operators who were just as important to the success of her nuclear site. She doubted anyone in the review team had that basic expertise.

She turned hopefully to Shawn, but he shook his head. “I can figure out the controls of any kind of aircraft, but running a big crane is out of my wheelhouse. One mistake, and I could send the boom crashing into a catwalk, and then who knows what debris would tumble into the pools.”

“We’ve had enough disasters for one day,” Victoria said.

Garibaldi stood on the narrow platform that ringed the pool. “Let’s run through the options, then, shall we? We have to get far from this pool, but we can’t stay on the cavern floor for long, because the gas is building up. Even though we can’t operate the crane, we can climb up the boom, hand over hand, and get ourselves high above the floor, and wait out the lockdown.”

Adonia peered up to the cavern ceiling high overhead where the air ducts converged. “Worst case, if the gas doesn’t stop rising, we could always climb through those air shafts, where the catwalks intersect. They must vent the crane’s diesel fumes outside.”

Victoria said slowly, “That would be one way out of Hydra Mountain, but it seems awfully risky.”

Van Dyckman pointed well past the crane to the far wall of the grotto. “Even at a walk, we can still move faster than the gas, but the cavern floor is a dead end. What about those vaults? Harris kept saying how safe Mrs. Garcia is in her chamber in the upper level. Why can’t we hide out in one of those? They’re old relics.”

Adonia looked to the row of large metal doors embedded in the distant granite wall. “We could shelter in place, like we should have done in the guard portal.”

As a pilot, Shawn had the best eyesight of all of them. “They do look like the sealed storage vaults in the upper level. Dr. van Dyckman’s right. Typical vaults are airtight and have their own environmental controls with constantly monitored conditions.”

Adonia nodded. “It would be a lot safer than climbing up the crane’s boom. But how would we even get inside the vault?”

Van Dyckman had a smug smile on his face. “With my override code. I control the Mountain, remember. I can use it one time. We’ll hide out until the danger’s passed.”

Looking like a bedraggled cat, Victoria gaped at the group in disbelief. “You’re all insane! We need to move higher, get above the gas, not lock ourselves in some chamber. You don’t even know what’s in there.”

“Hiding there is a hell of a lot easier than climbing up an airshaft,” van Dyckman said. “Even if it means being confined in a chamber with you.”

Catching a whiff of the sweet-smelling gas wafting over the pool, Adonia made up her mind. “If Stanley’s override code can get us inside there, we’ll hole up.”

From the narrow platform, Shawn looked down to the concrete floor more than twenty feet below. “There’s a set of portable stairs over by that pile of construction material. I’ll climb down and push the stairs here so everyone can get down.”

But the curling strands of gas were pooling higher on the cavern floor, and Adonia knew they wouldn’t have much time to cross the quarter mile to the far wall. “That’ll take too long, Shawn. We can shimmy down these metal struts and get moving. Go ahead, lead the way.” Though she was still sickened by the Senator’s death, she realized the big man would not have been able to make the climb, which would have forced them into another ordeal to save him. “Once we reach the floor, we’ll have to run to stay ahead of the halothane.”

Shawn walked gingerly along the narrow metal mesh to where one of the metal cross pipes intersected with the base of the platform. Swinging his legs over the side, he found a footing and lowered himself. Besides being in the best physical shape of anyone in the group, Shawn had done enough rock climbing that he could show them the way.

Holding the metal edge, he lowered his body and extended his leg until he found a foothold on a crossbar. Before he dropped out of sight, he looked up at the rest of them. “Everyone, get on your butts so we can do this quickly. Slide over. There are plenty of footholds.”

He clambered down the metal scaffolding and quickly reached the floor, where he looked in dismay at the yellow smoke that had begun to swirl around his feet. “Hurry up. The gas is still faint, but it’s building. We’ve got to move.”