Kill Zone

45

The giant rotating fan overhead was like a twirling executioner’s ax, blocking their way. The whooshing hum grew louder, nearly overwhelming as the blades spun, pulling a river of air that flowed past them to vent somewhere high above. Adonia knew the shaft led to outside and freedom — if they could just get past this obstacle.

On the ladder just below, Garibaldi hung exhausted and dejected. Until now, he had focused on the climb, one rung at a time, almost in a trance. Now he just stared without hope at the revolving blades.

Just beneath him, Shawn clung to the wall, shaking his head in grim frustration. “Can you see any controls, Adonia? Is there some way to shut it down?”

“You know that would be too easy.” She doggedly climbed closer to the impregnable barrier. Directly above, the giant fan looked ancient. “Must be part of the 1950s vintage ventilation system.”

Garibaldi seemed to be pondering an engineering problem. “How… many blades?”

She didn’t know what that had to do with anything. “Four, like propeller vanes. They’re moving pretty fast, and completely blocking our way.”

Sagging on the rung, Garibaldi nodded. “Good. At least… it’s not a new industrial fan, a centrifugal type. Otherwise we’d never be able to get through.”

Shawn called up, his voice sounding urgent. “Do you smell that?”

Adonia drew in a deep breath as she looked down at Shawn’s worried face. The faint sweet odor was unmistakable, and she knew what it meant. “If the lockdown finally ended, they’re purging the cavern, venting the gas to the outside — and it will flow right past us. All of it.”

“Which means we can’t go back down,” Shawn said. “The halothane would overwhelm us as we descend.”

Garibaldi looked up. “The quickest way to slow the gas — and for us to escape, of course — is to stop that fan.”

“An excellent suggestion, but how do we do that?” Adonia asked. “I don’t even see any power lines to cut.”

With a raw, radiation-burned hand, Garibaldi patted one of the LED lights that illuminated the shaft. A small dull-colored conduit ran up the granite wall. “This must cover a power line. It looks plastic instead of metal.”

Adonia struck it with her knuckles. “We still don’t have any way to cut it.”

“You don’t need to — there’s another way to stop the power. Quickly now, climb closer to the rotating blades. I’ll follow you so I can inspect the apparatus.” As they hung twenty feet below the spinning blades, the old scientist now seemed stronger, energized. “Good. There’s no grill or grating on either side.”

“It’s not a tourist attraction,” Adonia said. “There shouldn’t be anyone up here except for maintenance crews, and they would have to get through any safety barriers.”

“If the blades weren’t moving, there’d be plenty of room for us to squeeze between them,” Shawn said.

Garibaldi tightened his grip on the rungs. “Colonel, if you would please untie the rope around my waist? I’d do it myself, but I would rather save my strength—”

Shawn shook his head. “You’re too unsteady, sir. And the halothane fumes aren’t helping.”

Garibaldi continued lecturing, undeterred. “We’ll just have to risk it. Untie yours as well, Colonel. Then Ms. Rojas can climb right up and feed the loose line into the rotating blades. That should make a thorough mess of things.”

Adonia grinned as she understood. “The rope will jam it up in no time, burn out the rotor.”

After Shawn untied the rope from himself and from the older man’s waist, Garibaldi handed the end up to Adonia. “This will require some skill, and maybe luck. If you toss it in too quickly, the blades will kick the rope straight up and eject it, without ruining the motor. If you feed in the line too slowly, the blades will whip the rope around and it will flail us like a bullwhip.”

“Sure, no pressure.” Adonia was quiet for a moment, studying the fan as she pulled up the rope. The cloying smell of rising halothane grew stronger, and she started to feel light-headed. But they were so close to the outside she could taste it, and if they jammed the fan, it would stop drawing the fumes up the shaft. “So I get one chance. I feed the rope into the blades, and release it right away?”

“Release it right after the rope catches. The rotation will pull it in, snag the line, and clog the fan.”

Adonia glanced back up at the old machinery, then worked her way up until she hung only a few feet below the spinning blades. She removed one end of the rope from her shoulder, tied a small loop, then let a few feet of rope drop. She twirled the line. “I feel like a rodeo cowboy.”

“With the grime smeared over you, you look more like a coal miner,” Shawn said.

“I’ll take a shower when we’re out of here. Right now, you’ll have to put up with me.” She twirled the rope faster, then jerked it up toward the blades. The small lasso caught in the fan with a loud clang, spun around as the blades rotated, whipping it, tangling it. The rope swiftly snaked up, and Adonia played it out for a few seconds, then let go of the line.

She ducked. The other end of the rope snapped around, just missing her head as it shot into the fan blades like a spaghetti noodle being slurped up by a child. The fan’s drive motor made an increasingly loud whine, accompanied by a sharp rhythmic banging that echoed throughout the shaft. Adonia pressed herself flat against the rungs and the granite wall, afraid the entire old fan system might break from its moorings and collapse on top of them.

The wide metal blades slowed, strained, and then ground to a halt. The fan thrummed with leftover vibrations, and the roaring air current quieted to a barely perceptible breeze. The halothane’s distinct odor was replaced by the smell of smoke and burning wire.

The LED lights in the walls blinked out, plunging the shaft into darkness, but now Adonia could make out a faint halo of light between the motionless fan blades.

It was light from outside.

“I can see daylight up there!”

They waited, making sure that the motor had really burned out, and then they cheered simultaneously. Garibaldi sounded breathless and weary as he urged Adonia upward. “We can celebrate later, but I’d just as soon get into the open with all due haste. I… I am anxious to see the sky again.”

Adonia worked her way up into the enclosure that held the fan in place, where she could smell the hot oil and burning grease from the wrecked motor. Around the shaft and blades, the mangled rope looked like a noose. “Climb on up. It’s safe — this fan is never turning again. We can squeeze between the blades.”

Adonia clambered into the motionless turbine, squirming her way between the flat metal vanes. She cautiously raised her head above the frozen blade. “I feel like I’m sticking my head into a guillotine.” Briefly stuck, she grunted and pushed the fan through part of its rotation to widen the gap for the two men to climb through.

A faint curl of greasy white smoke still drifted from the direct-drive motor, but the mechanism made no more straining sounds. She silently told herself she would be fine and squirmed through, finally climbing up to reach the rungs above the ominous blockage. “It’s a little tight, but we’ll make it to the top.”

Bending down, she extended her arm through the motionless blades to help Garibaldi, who wheezed as he wormed his way up to join her. His shoulders barely fit through the gap.

Adonia worked her way around the framework and found a secure position so she could help Garibaldi climb past her. “Go on, lead the way to the top. I’m right behind you.”

The scientist started up the rungs without a word. His face wore a perpetual wince from the pain in his hands.

Shawn squeezed through the fan blades until he emerged next to Adonia. Without a word, he reached out to touch her face. Soot, dust, and grime smeared his cheeks, and his uniform was in a frightful state. Adonia knew she must look worse. “You can’t report to the President looking like that. I better hose you off when we get outside.”

“And I would be honored to do the same for you,” he said. “That’s what friends are for.”

Garibaldi was already two body lengths above them. He kept ponderously climbing as he shouted down to them. “You’re right, it’s daylight. I can see ahead.”

Energized, Adonia climbed after him, feeling a desperate need to get out of the tunnel, to breathe fresh air, and be away from Hydra Mountain. The glimpse of sunshine above gave her a renewed sense of purpose.

The halo overhead grew brighter with every rung. Now that the fan’s roar had fallen silent, she could hear Garibaldi breathing hard with the effort, but the sunlight also illuminated more of the vertical shaft. Garibaldi stopped a few feet from the top. He lowered his head and called down. “The exit is blocked off, covered by a structure of some sort.”

Despite her discouragement, she realized it made sense. Hydra Mountain wouldn’t just vent out of an open chimney.

“It’s a cylindrical structure with slits on the sides,” Garibaldi reported. “Some kind of baffle to emit the exhaust air horizontally, rather than straight up into the atmosphere.”

“More difficult for overhead surveillance to detect any plume that way,” Shawn said. “And the layered slits in the baffle would reduce any temperature signature for infrared sensors.”

Thinking of the original Cold War — era construction, Adonia understood the measures installed to keep the site covert. “It probably also has filters or air scrubbers to make sure no chemical signatures from the vented air could be detected.” She climbed up next to the scientist, assessing the barricade. So close…

Garibaldi said, “Most important question is whether we can get through it.”

The cylindrical cap was no larger than a crawlspace, big enough for a worker to exit the shaft. The daylight filtering in through the baffle cast deeper shadows in the cramped space. She looked around for a lock or handle. “Workers would need to have an exit. There must be—”

Then she saw a crash bar, identical to the emergency device they had used to break out of the guard portal. “Three cheers for safety systems.” Her voice cracked with relief. “We can get out.”

Before she could push her way through, Garibaldi touched her arm to stop her. Wires led from a contact sensor embedded in the exit door, connected to the crash bar. “That’s an alarm. It probably signals Hydra Mountain’s operations center, maybe even DOE Protective Services. They would be monitoring site security.”

“Triggering another alarm doesn’t bother me,” Adonia said. “We’ve had enough of them today. Let them come rescue us at last.”

“Unless it sets off a defensive measure designed to stop a bad guy from exiting the Mountain,” Shawn said. “Or someone trying to get in.”

“That would be just our luck,” she said. “But we’ve got to get out of here. Dr. Garibaldi—”

“Yes. We do,” Garibaldi said. “And after surviving tear gas, sonic bombardments, avalanches of sticky foam, a flood of knockout gas, radioactive fuel rods, and a very inconveniently placed ventilation fan, I’m not about to throw in the towel. Let’s just go.”

Shawn said, “If it’s any consolation, an alarm probably already went off when we shut down the ventilation fan. What have we got to lose?”

With her hand on the crash bar, Adonia looked at them. “I’m ready if you both are.”

Garibaldi said, “I would really rather get out of here and have my feet on solid ground. But we also can’t let them silence us, whisk us into some secure facility where they can cover up what happened. We know Stanley’s alive, and we know he would do anything to cover his butt and spin what happened in there. Two people are already dead. We need to find a way to tell the story before he sanitizes the scene — and us.”

Adonia nodded. If van Dyckman had already put a gag on Rob Harris, he would likely do the same thing to them. “We’ll have to figure something out once we get into the open air. We’re deep inside a military base and behind several layers of security fences. We can’t just hold a news conference.”

Garibaldi was grim. “I do not intend to go quietly as part of a cover-up. I have a long list of things to do in whatever time I’ve got left.”

Adonia knew that van Dyckman was an expert politician, and he had railroaded Valiant Locksmith through when all public attempts to address the crisis had stalled for decades. But by circumventing the classified interagency review process, what he’d done was clearly illegal; probably just one of many other illegal actions. How far would he go to keep himself out of jail?

Bringing in multiple shipments of still-hot fuel rods and cramming them into a flimsy above-ground pool made things even more dangerous. If they turned themselves in, Adonia was sure he would find a way to detain Garibaldi until the radiation sickness killed him. She and Shawn would be put on ice until the problem was hushed up.

Adonia asked, “Even if we got the chance to expose this, who are we going to tell? And how?”

“Site security will round us up before we go very far,” Shawn said.

She heard the sound of Garibaldi’s wheezing breath as he struggled to find an answer, and she made up her mind. “Doesn’t matter. We’re getting out.” She placed a hand on the crash bar. “Ready for all hell to break loose?”

“It already has,” Garibaldi said, barely louder than a whisper. “What’s a little more going to hurt?”

Adonia slammed against the crash bar with a vengeance. With a crack, the exit swung open, and sunlight flooded the cramped crawlspace.

An alarm clanged far below, echoing up the shaft, but she didn’t care. She tumbled onto the rocky, scrub-covered ground on the rough summit of Hydra Mountain. Far in the distance, she heard sirens wail, and soon the three of them stood together in the hot desert air, outside at last.