Kill Zone

35

Staggering, helping each other as they reeled from the effects of the spreading knockout gas, Adonia and her two companions reached the base of the enormous crane. Large letters, MLC165-1, were painted on the side of the red cab, which rode high on six-foot-tall crawler treads.

“All we have to do is climb above the gas.” Adonia felt dizzy as she broke into a fit of coughing. The deadly gas swirled higher and higher on the stone floor at their feet. “No problem.”

Shawn trudged around to the opposite side of the crane, looking for a way to climb the high treads to reach the cab. “This way! I can boost you up, Adonia.”

When she looked up from below, the towering boom looked much larger than it had seemed from across the cavern. Although the crawler footprint was only twenty-five square feet or so, the crane’s swollen main body allowed a clearance of less than five feet from the ground. Even Adonia had to duck as they circled the crane.

Shawn pointed her to the end of the crawler. “You first. I can hoist you onto the tread, but you’ll have to get up onto the cab yourself and start climbing the boom to get high enough.” He glanced at her bare feet. “Are you up to it?”

Out of breath, woozy from the gas, Adonia nodded. “I can climb. I’ll just have to live with sore feet.” From here, the crane looked enormous, but she couldn’t let it bother her. “As long as I’m alive, I can deal with it.”

“We’re not going for a speed record,” Shawn said. “Take your time.”

She saw how high the operator’s cab stood above the cavern floor. “Maybe the cab will be high enough. We’ll be safe.”

“No, get as high as you can,” Garibaldi coughed. “We don’t know how much halothane is in that reservoir, and air currents will stir the gas higher.”

Shawn put his hands around her waist in a firm grip. “Here you go, get to the top!” He boosted her up, and she grabbed with her hands and pulled herself onto the giant tread, scrambling for footing. When she caught her balance, she called down, “You’ll look less graceful when you hoist Dr. Garibaldi.”

Taller than Shawn, the older scientist responded with a skeptical look. “Frankly, I don’t care how graceful he looks. Boost me up, Colonel.”

On her hands and knees, Adonia crawled across the giant treads, once again wishing she had worn jeans instead of a stylish business dress. Not her only miscalculation of the day. When she reached up to grab the side of the crane’s cab, she pulled herself up, balanced on tiptoes so she could glance inside the compartment. In addition to the controls and a seat for the operator, the cab held several manuals in plastic binders, a metal toolbox, and a long yellow rope curled in a loop. She couldn’t carry the heavy toolbox with her as she climbed, but she thought the rope might come in handy for securing themselves to the lattice.

Grasping the cab’s flimsy metal door, she stretched her other arm up and tried to pull herself into the compartment, but she slipped, barely caught herself on the edge of the door before falling off the tread. The halothane fumes were making her dizzy, even this high above the floor. “Now who’s being graceful?” she muttered.

“Adonia, what are you doing?” Shawn called up. “You have to gain more height. Start climbing the boom!”

“I was trying to fetch a rope in the operator’s compartment. We can use it for a safety line.” She thought it sounded like a good idea.

“I’ll get it when I come up,” he called. “You just keep moving, so I don’t have to worry about you. We’re right behind you.” He and Garibaldi were both coughing. He helped the older scientist up onto the big tread, who then reached down to give him a hand up.

Adonia held on to the edge of the cab for balance, then worked her way around the base. She reached the metal lattice of the boom and put her bare foot on the lowest horizontal strut. Each lattice element consisted of an open box, the edges made of thick horizontal and vertical steel rods, or struts. Diagonal rods alternated direction on each face of the box; the lattice of struts continued up the length of the boom.

Fortunately, the struts were thick enough that their rounded surfaces didn’t cut her skin, though she knew she’d be hobbling around for a week on bruised feet. That was a problem she could live with. Reaching up, she grabbed the next horizontal strut and pulled herself up. She looked down at the other two as they climbed to the cab.

She slowly scaled the trestle one horizontal strut after another, methodically moving higher each time, as the boom extended up at a steep angle. “Just like an inclined ladder,” she muttered to herself. “Not a problem.” She made sure her foot was well positioned and her hands had a solid grip on the cold metal before she boosted herself to the next lattice element.

If the lockdown lasted another three hours, plus even more time for the emergency crews to break through to the lower cavern, she wanted more than enough margin of safety above the gas. Falling unconscious and plummeting to the concrete floor far below would probably be fatal.

Strut by strut, not looking down, she kept climbing until she was at least seventy feet above the floor.

As the boom extended across the open cavern, she saw she had made her way to just above the above-ground pool. She looked up to see she had another fifty or sixty feet to reach the lowest catwalk, but knew she didn’t need to climb any farther, as she must be well above the gas. Still feeling uncoordinated, she rearranged her arms and legs to pull herself into a sitting position, curling an arm around a metal strut. Oddly, even in this precarious position, she felt more secure than she had in hours.

Twenty feet below, Dr. Garibaldi kept making his way up the trestle, with Shawn behind him, offering encouragement. She smiled when she saw he had coiled the rope from the cab around his shoulder and carried it up.

Before long, Garibaldi had reached the level of Adonia’s perch, out of breath but not complaining. “I believe Colonel Whalen is chasing me.”

“I’m sure he calls it a motivational exercise,” she said. Now that they seemed to be safe, Adonia felt a warm glow. The air up at this level was cleaner, easier to breathe. “He is a good climber.”

“And in better shape than I am.” Garibaldi twisted around to look at the ceiling of the cavern overhead, studying the catwalks that had retracted up to their lockdown position. “Not exactly what I’d call fresh air, but it’s an improvement.”

Shawn joined them shortly. “That was easy enough, wasn’t it? We’re above most of the gas now, but if we keep climbing, we could reach one of those catwalks and make our way home free across the ceiling. Wherever we want to go.”

“Sounds like fun,” Adonia said. “For someone else.”

“Is that necessary?” Garibaldi asked. “We’ve triggered enough alarms already. Let’s just sit tight for a while.”

Adonia looked at the nearest catwalk, which the end of the boom overshot. “If we climb all the way up, it’s still a ten-foot drop to the walkway.” Her feet were already sore, and she winced at the thought of slamming down on the metal grid of the catwalk.

Shawn tapped the looped rope on his shoulder. “We can lower ourselves down. It’ll be easier on your feet.”

“But why would we need to?” Adonia asked.

As he hung balanced on the boom, Garibaldi extended a finger to follow the path of the catwalk around the ceiling, where it intersected with the supporting columns throughout the ceiling. “Look to the middle of the cavern ceiling. Do you see it?”

Shawn pulled himself level with them and they all hung together on the grid structure. With his sharp eyesight, he spotted what the older scientist indicated. “There’s a panel in the ceiling above the main catwalk. And look at the cables going into it. I have a hunch that’s a communications conduit shared with an air vent.”

“You mean a maintenance shaft?” Adonia said.

Garibaldi pointed at an enclosed safety tube in the far corner of the grotto near the Velvet Hammer vaults, just above a stack of cement bags. “I’d expect that one over there is the maintenance shaft. More accessible. Probably just goes to the upper level inside the Mountain. Too bad we didn’t spot it before we made our way all the way over here.”

The older scientist turned his attention back to the grotto ceiling. “Hydra Mountain would still need to run communications and control lines from down here up to the next level, maybe even to the outside. In the old days that shaft would be the only way to fix breaks or shorts in the transmission lines. It would need to be big enough to allow access for a worker attempting to make repairs.” He waited a beat, then smiled. “If we get up there, we can use that duct to reach the main level. We could bypass the reboot — and get out of here now, instead of hours from now.”

Shawn said, “We’d risk triggering other alarms. Better part of valor would be to stay here and wait it out.”

“Exactly as Rob Harris told us to do,” Adonia said.

Garibaldi gave him a dubious frown. “And when Mr. Harris left us, he said the lockdown wouldn’t last more than a few minutes. Are you certain everything will continue to go smoothly?”

Shawn lifted a brow. “Smoothly? We have three people dead already.”

Adonia felt more urgency. “With the Velvet Hammer vault jammed open and the warheads exposed to increased radiation, I don’t think we can afford to wait three more hours. Harris needs to know what he’s dealing with, and he has to get a nuclear emergency response team ready to move immediately. Undersecretary Doyle was right to be panicked.”

“I agree…” Garibaldi’s voice trailed off as he stared down at the concrete floor below, which was partially obscured by the swirling smoke markers of the halothane. He gripped the struts with both hands. “Well, that might not be the worst of it.” Anchoring himself with one hand, he leaned farther out. “Look over by the temporary cooling pool.”

Adonia peered down to see what he had noticed. Squinting, she saw a wide and expanding puddle near the round pool. A foot above the floor, near the bottom of the metal-supported plastic walls, a thin spray of water spewed from a breach.

“The pool is leaking!” Adonia cried.

Shawn muttered a curse. “Van Dyckman swore those plastic sheets have more tensile strength than steel.”

“When our dear Senator knocked over the fuel rods, one of them must have struck a cooling pipe or sensor embedded in the side of the pool wall with enough force to create a punching shear,” Garibaldi said.

Adonia held on to the metal struts of the boom. “That’s a substantial leak, but at the rate water is spilling out, it’ll take days for the water level to drain completely. We’ll be out of here long before that.”

“If it stays localized,” Garibaldi warned. “With the amount of water pressure inside the pool, that small punching shear can easily grow. It could cause a catastrophic failure of the plastic wall, completely collapsing the sides.” He paused. “And if that happens, the water will spill out and the entire array of fuel rods will be exposed within seconds. With nothing to moderate the radioactivity, the neutron levels in the grotto will increase exponentially.”

Adonia felt her brief respite dissolve. “Catastrophic failure are my two least favorite words in the world.”

Without emotion, Garibaldi continued his assessment. “In less than a minute the warheads in Victoria’s vault will be simultaneously flooded with water and neutrons. As I said before, it’ll be like playing Russian roulette, but now with a billion more bullets. Just how confident are you that something else won’t go wrong today?”

Adonia suddenly felt ice in her veins. “Victoria said that if even one of the nukes goes critical, they’re close enough in proximity that cascading detonations of all the others would wipe out the city and most of the state.”

“Oh, surely no more than a third of the state,” Garibaldi said with wry sarcasm. “Although the deadly fallout would certainly reach the East Coast. I would prefer to stop that before it happens.”