Kill Zone

36

Climbing across the slippery mound of sticky foam, van Dyckman squirmed close to the top of the vault, pulling himself forward. The hard, uneven barrier nearly blocked him off, but he found just enough room to wiggle through, scraping his back against the granite ceiling. He hoped the massive vault door hadn’t completely closed, which would have allowed some of the thickening foam to spill outside rather than fill the entire chamber. That might have saved his life.

Struggling for room to maneuver, he used the box cutter, along with adrenaline and desperation, to chip through the substance and pull forward. With each second, he felt increasing urgency to hack his way free.

Like a spelunker squeezing through a tight passage, he crawled and followed the steel pipe that enclosed the wires to the inset lights, so he knew he was heading in the right direction. When he finally reached the inside wall above the chamber entrance, it would be a simple matter to dig and chop his way to the vault door. And out.

His arms ached, his hands were bloody, and each gasping breath felt like razors in his lungs. Somewhere beneath him, Victoria Doyle was dead, engulfed in a mass of hardened foam, like a fossil trapped in limestone.

He remembered hearing her terrified scream cut off as the foam gushed in. Only by sheer luck had he stumbled into the warhead cubbyhole. As he worked his way over the barricade of sticky foam, he knew her entombed body was down there.…

He remembered their relationship with only a brief fondness. The affair had seemed inevitable with their shared ambitions, their mutual traveling, the innumerable late-night planning sessions when he was Senator Pulaski’s Chief of Staff. But even the sex had evolved into more of a competition than a release. Objectively speaking, he was glad to have her gone, and now he could achieve his potential.

His swift career advancement had been the death knell for romance, since Victoria couldn’t stand any scenario where he upstaged her. Even so, he had never imagined she would threaten to shut down his vital program just to keep her illicit warheads hidden here in Hydra Mountain. He had lost a lot of respect for her since they’d broken up, and these last few hours validated the reason why.

Unlike Victoria, at least Stanley van Dyckman was still alive, and he could still escape.

Nearing the jammed vault door, he dreaded that he would have to chop his way down through more hardened foam to reach the interior controls to let himself loose, but if the entrance was blocked open by the petrified foam, he’d only have to cut his way out.

Working his way through the last gap in the hardened material, he felt a rush of excitement as a large block broke off to expose the outside grotto. He frantically chopped and tore away pieces of the foam, then rolled down a steep, bumpy slope. He sprawled out of the vault and onto the grotto floor, dropping to his hands and knees. Reeling, shaking, he sprang to his feet, holding his breath. Like a poisonous fog, the wispy yellow halothane swirled nearly at chest level.

The gas was settling in the lower point of the cavern, driven downward to the Velvet Hammer vaults. Worse, as he moved, he stirred the deadly gas and swirled the sickening fumes up toward his face. Trying not to breathe, van Dyckman coughed and staggered away, knowing he had to get to higher ground.

Though he had escaped from the vault filled with nukes, he still wasn’t safe.

The box cutter in his hand was ruined, gummed up by remnants of sticky foam. He threw the tool to the side and heard it clatter along the cement floor, swallowed in the blanket of yellow gas.

Pressing his mouth and nose against the crook of his elbow, he staggered up the incline to the main floor, gaining ground to where the level of gas dropped to just above his knees. But he could still smell it. Frantic, he debated with himself what to do and how to survive. He couldn’t go all the way back to the cooling pool, where the halothane continued to spill over the ledge and onto the main floor. He would collapse long before he made it.

He turned toward the back of the cavern and saw the sacks of cement mix piled in the corner. Maybe if he climbed those, he would gain enough height, at least ten feet above the ground, above most of the halothane.

He felt like a wreck, bleeding from his hands, but desperation gave him the energy he needed. He stumbled toward the corner, struggling to take only sips of air, but he couldn’t hold his breath much longer. Soon he was forced to gasp in a lungful, which stank of the sickly sweet halothane. He reeled, needing fresh air. He began to cough and almost passed out, but forced himself to stagger forward. Almost there.

He couldn’t collapse, or he would die in this soup of deadly gas. Reaching the stack, he slumped against the pile of cement bags. He could find purchase for his feet, climb the sacks like a rock pile, get above the floor. He pulled himself higher, using his knees. One level. Then the next. His hands left bloody prints on the dusty sacks, but his arms and feet felt numb. He wanted to collapse.

His feet ripped holes in the paper bags, spilling gray-white powder. His body was turning to jelly, pulling him back down. He would just slide over the side, fall asleep.… No! He slapped the hard cement mix bag, and the sharp pain roused him. He kept going. One more level.

He clambered up, finally reaching the top of the pile, where he knelt and caught his balance, wheezing and shuddering. Then he forced himself to stand, gaining another few feet of height. Now he drew in a deep breath.

The air was clearer here, and even though he felt ready to drop unconscious, so sleepy and so dizzy, he made himself stay upright. Heaving, he inhaled some of the stirred cement powder, which set him to coughing again. Even here, though, he could still smell the distinctive halothane.

Panicked, he looked wildly around, sure that he was trapped. Wasn’t he high enough above the gas? This mound of concrete mix sacks was like an island in the swirling halothane, and he had no way to go anywhere else. He stretched upward, gaining just a few more inches.

Swaying, he reached up to steady himself against the granite wall — and his hand hit something hard, metal. He squirmed around and saw a line of rungs set into the wall, painted gray so as to be nearly invisible against the rock.

Rungs! He could keep climbing. There was a way up the wall!

Spaced every eighteen inches, the horizontal iron bars ran up the corner and vanished into a metal mesh tube, also painted gray, five feet above his head. Some kind of maintenance tube or shaft, leading upward? If so, then it was the way out. He felt giddy with relief.

Catching a whiff of halothane stirred up from below drove him into motion. Van Dyckman grabbed the rung just above his shoulders and found another one at the level of his right foot. He started to scale the rungs, feeling the layers of grime and crud against his palm. With all the collected grit, he wondered when was the last time any worker had used them. Maybe not since the 1960s.

No matter. He was going to use the ladder now.

He climbed to the next rung, pulling himself higher. Each step lifted him another foot and a half above the halothane… but he no longer just wanted to rise above the knockout gas and wait out the lockdown. No, he needed to get as far from those radioactive warheads as possible. This maintenance shaft should take him out of the cavern, lead him to safety, and get him out of here! He might be the only one to survive.

In that case, it would be a lot easier to keep his story straight.

Senator Pulaski and Victoria Doyle were already dead, but what about the others? Just before he climbed into the half-enclosed mesh tunnel, he scanned across the floor outside the vault, but he saw no sign of Adonia Rojas, Colonel Whalen, or Simon Garibaldi. He assumed their unconscious — or dead — bodies lay somewhere beneath the thickening yellow mist.

He kept climbing, vanishing into the maintenance shaft with a renewed sense of vigor and optimism. He was the national program manager, the only man who could salvage Valiant Locksmith for the good of the country.

Desperate times, desperate measures. He had to make damn sure Victoria’s illicit weapons stockpile was cleared out. An outrageous hazard! This was his Mountain, dammit — his and no one else’s!

His throat and lungs burned from the exertion, but as van Dyckman climbed higher, he stopped smelling any hint of halothane. Yes, he was going to make it.

Next, he started planning how he could fix the administrative mess that would explode as soon as Rob Harris got the emergency team inside, which would start another cascade of political disasters. So many tangled moving parts!

How was he going to manage the revelations of all the screwups that had happened today, especially the stockpile of State Department “devices” hidden in a clandestine DOE nuclear waste site? The unacknowledged nukes would have to be moved immediately, under special protection. Maybe behind the scenes there would be enough political will, and embarrassment, to keep Velvet Hammer quiet, have the incomplete warheads whisked away to some other classified location — somewhere he didn’t have to worry about.

The only drawback would be if Adonia, Colonel Whalen, and Garibaldi had somehow survived. They had observed Victoria’s nukes, as well as all the safety and security blunders, driven by the Mountain’s competing systems. But Valiant Locksmith had to remain intact, by any means necessary.

Van Dyckman was confident enough in his political skills that he could manage Adonia and Whalen, if they were still alive. They were government employees, and as an Assistant Secretary, he could order them to keep quiet. And if they didn’t cooperate, he could torpedo their careers. They had signed the nondisclosure paperwork, and they knew they could go to jail if they revealed unauthorized information.

But if Simon Garibaldi managed to blab to his Sanergy protesters, that would ruin everything. If not for the whining of such gadflies, the scientific community would have solved the nuclear waste problem decades ago. Yucca Mountain would be a successful, secure site to stockpile high-level waste. Nuclear energy would be clean and safe, and the United States’ power needs would be met inexpensively. The economy would be booming… and Garibaldi’s extremists would have to keep themselves busy saving chuckwallas or the pink fairy armadillo.

Realistically, the best scenario would be if the old scientist had succumbed to a halothane overdose. That way, van Dyckman could properly focus the story, keep the narrative under tight control.

Losing Colonel Whalen and Adonia saddened him, personally. Both were good people, though politically naïve. Years ago he had been Adonia’s mentor, and even after his so-called miscalculation about the Granite Bay storage arrays, when she could have humiliated him, she had been savvy enough to keep the misunderstanding — all on her part! — to herself.

Even after the suicidal plane crash, when she accused him of nearly causing civilian first responders to be exposed to radiation, she could have used the incident to bootstrap her own career. In any case she hadn’t… and he’d never quite understood why. Did she have no ambitions of her own? He appreciated the courtesy, nevertheless.

He knew about Adonia’s relationship with Colonel Whalen from years earlier. Government employees fed on gossip. No matter how much sensitive data might be kept secret, personal news was fair game. Stanley’s own affair with Victoria had generated a lot of whispering, but Adonia’s romance with Colonel Whalen hadn’t caused much of a stir. No one gave a damn about two people much lower on the ladder. Adonia and that oversized Boy Scout were made for each other.

The loss of Senator Pulaski was a disaster to the industry, though. As an unwitting advocate, he was a cooperative and reliable funding source who knew when to listen to his scientific advisers, like van Dyckman, even if he didn’t understand the science himself.

It certainly was a bad day all around, no denying that.

As he climbed higher up the shaft, he felt a warm breeze flowing down from the top of the cavern. He heard a faint whistling sound, like wind moving from a vent in the ceiling, whispering through the outer safety mesh that wrapped around the metal ladder.

Several rungs higher, the rushing air strengthened, and he realized that the maintenance shaft must be connected to an air duct that pulled fresh, outside air down into Hydra Mountain. Maybe it would lead him out! He really needed to get to the operations center, since he had a lot of damage control to do.

Across the cavern, van Dyckman could see other ducts that must be carrying air up out of the Mountain, perhaps designed to vent diesel fumes from that gigantic crane. Eventually, the exhaust flow would draw out the halothane gas pooled down on the floor and make the lower level safe again.

He paused just long enough to feel his bloody hands throb on the dirt-encrusted rungs. He had no intention of waiting for the system reboot to finish.

The maintenance shaft extended up into the grotto ceiling above, and as he climbed higher, the wind rushed down from the opening. In the narrowing tunnel above, van Dyckman saw two lines of lights that led up into the solid rock, showing a clear path for him to climb. A way out.

As he ascended into the granite ceiling, he struggled against the increasing airstream. Rung after rung, he climbed straight up. He was well clear of the knockout gas, so his head was clear, but he still worried about falling. Once inside the ceiling, he felt much more claustrophobic than when he could see the expansive cavern.

The rock around him muffled the ambient noise, but he heard a rhythmic throbbing high overhead. The string of dim lights that ran up the shaft showed him a little detail, but the shaft looked the same, and endless. He moved on, rung after rung, deeper and deeper into the grotto’s ceiling.

Eventually, van Dyckman glimpsed light coming from the side — another tunnel, perpendicular to the vertical maintenance shaft. He reached a horizontal air vent that crossed into the shaft. Far above, he could definitely see rotating blades — a fan pulling outside air down into the cavern. That made sense, but it would block his way out from that direction if he climbed higher.

A constant, gentler stream of air flowed into the horizontal duct, and he considered what he knew of the ventilation channels inside the Mountain. He must have reached the upper level, where the storage tunnels and the operations center were located.

The choice was obvious. Van Dyckman could follow this horizontal vent until he found a place to get out. Now he was thankful for the health and safety regulations that required retrofitting this place under the new DOE stewardship.

Squirming, he pulled himself into the horizontal shaft, sliding against its cold metal surface. He crawled forward on his stomach, smearing a path through the accumulated dust. At last, he had an escape plan.