Kill Zone

30

Once they all climbed down the side of the pool to the floor, the five surviving team members appeared shaken. Sodden, Adonia breathed hard, exhausted from swimming and struggling in the water. But she couldn’t rest, not now.

“When will the lockdown be over?” van Dyckman asked. He sounded lost. “How much more time do we have to wait?”

“Whenever the system is finished rebooting,” Adonia said, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “Probably several more hours. We have to wait it out.”

“At least Pulaski’s done causing us problems,” Victoria grumbled. Still shaken by the Senator’s death, Adonia was shocked by her glib comment.

Shawn was more businesslike as he got them moving. “We’d know for sure if we had some way to contact Rob Harris. Maybe there’s another intercom down in the lower level.”

“Or even a working hardline phone,” Garibaldi said.

“No landlines,” Victoria said. “Only intercoms — they were scared telephone lines might mistakenly be connected to the outside, and then they could be tapped. This was built in the fifties, remember?”

Adonia rallied the people to move. The expansive floor of the cavern seemed to go on forever. “Let’s make our way to those vaults. Come on, the smell is getting stronger.”

Holding her breath against the drifting tendrils of gas, Victoria paused next to a pile of leftover construction material. She rubbed a thick slab of black carbon fiber reinforced plastic between her fingers. When she glanced up, Adonia saw that the Undersecretary seemed more frightened than at any other point since the first lockdown. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

Without a word, the Undersecretary straightened primly and hurried to join the rest of the group. Because of her petite size, Victoria would probably be the first one affected by the gas. “None of us is all right, Ms. Rojas. And it’s still a mistake to go to those vaults.”

Staying ahead of the creeping gas, they hurried across the open floor toward the holes still under excavation, then past the looming crane. In the crane cab high above the monstrous treads, the door to the operator’s console was open, even though the work crew would not be in for their shift until Monday.

Tracer smoke swirled across the floor like a poisonous mist. Even though they made good time, Adonia smelled the sweet scent that followed them. In the far corner, bags of cement, bundles of metal rebar, and piles of steel beams to support the large pools were stacked high. Shovels and brooms rested against the wall near a parked yellow forklift.

Adonia winced as her bare foot stepped on a chunk of concrete debris among the mess strewn around the construction area. She watched her step more carefully, afraid she would step on a nail or cut her foot on broken cement as they reached the uncompleted in-ground pools. She already had enough problems.

Seeing the empty holes dug in the floor and the rebar set in the wooden frames, Garibaldi remarked, “These pools are months away from being finished, Stanley! If you keep receiving shipments, your plastic tank will be at capacity long before the in-ground ones are completed and ready. It’s mostly at capacity right now!”

Van Dyckman’s expression soured. “Construction delays and red tape. Not my fault. The contractor has been fined for not meeting the schedule. What else do you want me to do?”

Adonia thought his comment was absurd. “What else do we want you to do? Stop bringing in more radioactive rods until you have a safe, permanent place to store them!”

“After we get out of this place, I will personally ensure that no water or rods are stored down here,” Victoria said. “Ever.”

Adonia knew that after all the disasters they had encountered today, especially the death of a powerful senator, Valiant Locksmith would surely be put on hold, if not shut down. Undersecretary Doyle might even have enough clout to ensure that Hydra Mountain never stored any more radioactive waste. There would be classified reviews, programmatic shutdowns, and intensive investigations. It would go on forever. When called on the carpet, van Dyckman would vehemently insist that he was only doing what he was ordered to do. He would argue that the problems could be fixed — but Pulaski’s death could never be covered up.

Which meant the real problem would remain unsolved. Because of van Dyckman’s cutting corners and missteps, this relatively viable solution for storing nuclear waste would probably be shelved. And there would be no hope in sight.

Van Dyckman had already shipped large amounts of waste into the Mountain. The plastic-walled cooling pool was an unwise idea on basic principles, and if the concrete pools remained unfinished, what would happen to the submerged fuel rods already in their support structure? Pulaski had dislodged and possibly damaged several of them in his frantic struggles. If the above-ground pool sprang a leak, the cavern floor would be flooded with a few million gallons of water, and the standing fuel rods would be exposed to the air and release radiation throughout the facility.

The Fukushima Daiichi reactor cores in Japan had been in a similar situation. When the devastating tsunami damaged the containment and allowed the coolant to drain away, the rods in the reactor core melted, with disastrous consequences. Although the spent fuel rods in Stanley’s temporary pool weren’t nearly as enriched or as closely packed as the active Fukushima reactor cores had been, that catastrophe had shut down every nuclear facility in Japan.…

Victoria spoke through clenched teeth as they hurried to the far vaults. “I will demand that all rods are moved out of here immediately, back to their original site — every one of them, even the rods in the concrete pools. It’s not safe to store them down here. The stray radiation… the consequences!”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Adonia said. “Whenever we can reestablish communication, we’ll inform not only Rob Harris of the situation but also the DOE Secretary.”

“What?” Victoria stopped. The team formed an uneasy semicircle around her. “You don’t think Secretary Nitta knows about this already? She approved the SAP, so she has to know about the fuel rods. Right, Stanley?” Victoria glared, but van Dyckman only reddened.

Victoria pulled up. “Wait, you… didn’t tell her about the fuel rods and the cooling pools down here?” She looked around. “Does anyone else know?”

“I’m not sure about the President,” Shawn said.

“You were there at the meeting, Colonel!” van Dyckman snapped. “Of course he knows!”

“Not about these pools!”

Van Dyckman looked around the group, but no one offered support. He took a few quick breaths. “Okay… I didn’t tell him every detail. Would you want to tell him to be patient, take it slow?”

Still wet from the pool, Victoria looked even more shaken. “You’re all missing the point! The Department of Energy isn’t the only agency using the Mountain. We have to get the rods out, the pools drained. Immediately!”

Adonia urged them to keep moving toward the vaults in the back. “I’ll back you up in our report, ma’am. But if these cooling pools have been here for months, no outside facility is going to accept the spent fuel back into their holding areas. If you pull them out of the Mountain, where will they go?”

Van Dyckman strode off ahead, and Victoria bustled after him. “I may not have been inside the Mountain in over two years, Stanley, but I didn’t expect such an idiotic change. Long-term, stable programs tend to remain safe, so there was no need for me to babysit every month. But your grandiose program screwed up everything.”

Shawn was confused. “Why would you be involved in Hydra Mountain at all, Ms. Doyle?”

“All that matters is that Stanley did this without coordination, bypassing even the interagency SAP process. He prevented others from reviewing all possible negative interactions.” Her expression soured. “Stanley and Senator Pulaski managed to pull this off, but they didn’t go through the proper classified interagency checks and balances, which violates Federal law. Without those reviews, this problem could quickly escalate.” She was seething. “Secretary Nitta is an outstanding person, but she was out of the loop, not fully aware of what was happening here or the unintended consequences that could occur. She does not have all the information.”

“Once we reestablish contact with the operations center, Rob Harris can patch in a call to the DOE Secretary’s office,” Adonia said. “But we’ve got to get out of here first.”

“I’m sure he’s been in contact already,” Shawn said. “Harris would get all the help available.”

By the time they moved past the two finished and filled permanent cooling pools, they were well ahead of the creeping halothane. The floor sloped down at an angle toward the widely spaced metal vault doors in the far wall of granite. To Adonia, the positioning suggested they blocked access to large chambers — and something important. Set a level below where they stood, the doors loomed twenty feet high and just as wide, large enough that even the biggest forklifts could drive in and out of the chambers.

“They look like the world’s largest bank vaults,” Garibaldi said.

“What are they?” Adonia asked.

“Probably designed to store the bigger warheads during the early Cold War days,” Shawn said. “They called them ‘crowd-pleasers.’ The first hydrogen bombs were as big as a bus and needed cryogenic cooling, so they probably tunneled into the granite and built these vaults below ground level to contain any spills.”

With increasing agitation, Victoria pointed to another old-style intercom panel set next to the nearest vault door. “Look, down there! We can contact Harris. We’re in a secure area, so he should be able to patch me through to the DOE Secretary. This can’t wait.”

Adonia remembered Regulation Rob’s obsessive penchant for following rules to the letter. He would never let anyone call Washington from a nonsecure line, especially not over an intercom. “My priority is to get us to safety,” she said. “Senator Pulaski is already dead, and I don’t intend to lose anyone else.”

“Your priority is to keep this entire facility safe — not to mention the city of Albuquerque.” Victoria’s face reddened. “Hell, even the southwestern United States!” Hurrying down the slope, she tried to work the intercom panel.

Adonia was surprised by the Undersecretary’s vehemence. Van Dyckman spoke conspiratorially but loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Victoria’s prone to hyperbole.”

Shawn was firm. “If it’s such an important crisis, then Harris can call in a nuclear emergency team, once he knows about it. And I can call the President myself.”

“We still have to wait until the system reboots, regardless,” Adonia said.

“Harris needs to get a nuclear emergency team in place now,” Victoria said, “ready to move the instant the lockdown is lifted. Every minute counts.”

Adonia doubted the site manager would take preemptive action without full approval, no matter how much Undersecretary Doyle harangued him over the intercom.

The rest of the team crowded around as Victoria pressed the button and shouted into the speaker. “Rob Harris! Answer me, dammit!”

“It’s not working,” Garibaldi said simply. “What a surprise.”

“But we need to get out of here!” van Dyckman said. “Can he even hear us?”

Adonia tried to intercede. “We probably have more than three hours left.”

Garibaldi gazed back across the great cavern. “We’ll never last that long unless we get inside some kind of shelter. The halothane is spilling across the floor, and it’ll pool down here. That’s how you would incapacitate an armed force of intruders. Worst-case scenario.” Even though they had outrun the gas, they found themselves at a dead end. “We may be incapacitated very shortly, unless Stanley can use his magic decoder ring to open these vaults.”

“Well, we can’t just stand here and die.” Van Dyckman’s face was flushed as he pushed past the others to a more modern control panel next to the first towering vault door, which had obviously been upgraded since the Cold War era. His fingers danced across the LED screen. “We need to get into the vault.”

Victoria grabbed his shoulder, pulling him away. “Stop it, Stanley!” He knocked her back.

Adonia darted forward and held the man’s arm, trying to calm them both. “Enough! We’ve got to work together to get out of here.”

Van Dyckman yanked his arm free. “If Mrs. Garcia is safe in her vault, this will solve our problem, an absolutely secure bolt-hole.” Not listening to the shouts, he keyed in his code to open the vault door.