Kill Zone

32

Up in the Eagle’s Nest, Rob Harris struggled to breathe. He knew exactly what the latest alarm on his status screen meant.

They had found, and opened, the Velvet Hammer vault.

The main screen above the operations floor gave an urgent alert that one of the ultra-secure doors had been opened — the very scenario that had given him nightmares. To make things worse, minutes before, radiation detectors from the lower cavern showed a dramatic increase in the already-high ambient levels, as if something had interfered with the precarious wet-storage pools.

What were they doing down there?

Worse yet, after opening one of the secure Velvet Hammer vaults, someone must have entered and triggered the most dangerous countermeasures, designed to protect the nuclear devices. He felt the blood drain from his face. The avalanche of sticky foam would have engulfed and killed anyone in its way. This couldn’t be happening!

He’d never intended for the team to actually gain entry to the vault. Undersecretary Doyle should have seen the fuel rods, the temporary cooling pool, and recognized the danger. Velvet Hammer was her SAP, but she would never have opened the vault, knowing full well what the sealed chambers contained.

It had to be van Dyckman. He must have used the override code, which was valid for all systems throughout the facility.

Velvet Hammer was a separate, waived and unacknowledged Special Access Program, the sole purview of Undersecretary Doyle in her classified work for the State Department. Two years ago when she had last inspected her SAP, the Mountain was still under DoD control, and the near-finished warheads fit perfectly into the operations, a highly classified State Department program that exploited treaty loopholes and allowed the U.S. to hold a clandestine nuclear trump card.

He knew what the State Department had done: the numbers of nuclear warheads in the nation’s stockpile were strictly regulated by international agreement. Each year the U.S. routinely pulled five or ten weapons out of inventory for testing before returning them to the military. While those warheads were out of service, the Department of Defense needed to ensure that its arsenal remained at proper levels in the event of a national crisis. An entirely legal way to ensure that a warhead could be moved rapidly into the active inventory was to stockpile nuclear “devices” that weren’t really weapons.

The Velvet Hammer devices stored in the lower vault had everything a nuclear weapon needed to function — a plutonium pit, electronics, fuses — except for one critical, technical detail, an easy-to-install final piece, such as the software. Because the devices were incomplete, those “almost but not quite” weapons could not be legally counted as part of the nation’s strategic stockpile.

The Department of State used that subtle distinction to hold an ace in the hole. Since the end of the Cold War, the highest government officials insisted on maintaining this card up their sleeve in case of an international catastrophe.

Thanks to the impenetrable secrecy, the State Department wasn’t required to inform the Department of Energy of their classified SAPs. Up until now, however, Stanley van Dyckman’s own unacknowledged Valiant Locksmith had created a potential doomsday condition that Rob Harris could not reveal to anyone. His hands were tied, and neither the DOE Inspector General nor his counterpart in the Department of State had the authority to know about the other’s highly classified program.

When the facility transitioned to the DOE, the Velvet Hammer vault override codes must not have been changed. Yet another unintended consequence contributing to this mindless cascade of disasters.…

The only other place where all that knowledge came together was with the President and the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee. But a formerly retired site manager had no direct access to the President, and Senator Pulaski — the man responsible for funding Hydra Mountain — had dismissed Harris’s concerns, unable to appreciate the technical details of the risk.

Now, Harris dropped into his seat. He had dreaded exactly this scenario. If he had revealed the existence of Undersecretary Doyle’s program to anyone involved with Valiant Locksmith, Harris would go to jail for the rest of his life. That was why he had pulled strings to get the right people here, to see the hazard with their own eyes. This review had been his only chance to make someone realize the potential disaster of housing these two SAPs together.

Well, they were all fully aware of the danger now.

Now that the stored warheads were exposed to stray neutrons — the levels of which were significantly increased because of all the fuel rods in the pools — the risk of an accidental detonation was no longer vanishingly small. And if the temporary cooling pool ever leaked and the warheads were submerged in water, then the probability of disaster would increase exponentially.

If a single device went critical, sympathetic detonations might trigger them all. Then it would be good-bye, New Mexico. And more.

By sending the review team in there, he may have set his own nightmare scenario in motion.