Kill Zone

47

After emerging from the shaft, Adonia, Shawn, and Garibaldi stood on a flat area with scattered boulders, low piñon pines, and clumps of sparse dry grass. The afternoon was warm, and heat shimmers rose from the ground. Adonia drew a deep breath, just tasting the dry, fresh air. It smelled wonderful.

Shielding her eyes from the bright sun, listening to the whistle of the desert wind, Adonia looked back at the camouflaged duct housing that stuck up from the ground. Light brown paint flaked off the metal surface, but the sculptured vents were nearly invisible against the backdrop of boulders and outcroppings. The flat area around the duct was obviously man-made, carved out to provide egress in an emergency.

Garibaldi bent over, coughing from the exertion. Adonia helped to steady him. “Are you all right?”

“Of course not.” He squinted up at her. “But you don’t look very pristine yourself. Your nose is bleeding again, and I didn’t even have to punch you this time.”

She touched her nose, felt the sticky blood at the base of her nostrils. “I’ll be fine.” They were all disheveled and filthy after their ordeal. “I just hope they don’t shoot us on sight.”

“They won’t,” Shawn said. “They’re professionals.” Around the facility, alarms kept ringing. He narrowed his eyes. “But they’ll be here soon enough. We have to decide what to do.”

“We’re out of that death trap, so I’ll count my little victories,” Adonia said.

Garibaldi sat down on a rock. “We cannot let them silence us. I’m going to die because of what happened today, and I insist that it mean something. Too much went wrong in there, a cascade of unintended consequences. Even if Hydra Mountain is an acceptable place to store nuclear waste, the way van Dyckman went about it is totally wrong. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing — or the left foot, or the chin. I admit the problems were caused by bureaucratic incompetence rather than the science, but if the government is going to store dangerous waste inside that facility, it cannot be under such conditions.” He looked up.

“If the lockdown is ended, the nuclear response team will already be deep inside the Mountain,” Shawn said. “By now they may have cleared the way to the lower level — and I hope they’ve sealed the warhead vault. That’s the most important thing.”

“And the leaking pool,” Adonia said. “We have to warn them, no matter what.”

“We can’t stop there,” Garibaldi insisted. “These complications, the bad decisions, the gaps in knowledge — no one has any clue about the big picture on high-level waste. Groups like Sanergy have to be involved, to make sure the right decision is made.”

“Some would say that groups like Sanergy made it politically impossible to do anything with all the nuclear waste, which led to our present problem,” Adonia said with a hint of bitterness. “Look what happened to Yucca Mountain. That stubbornness is what forced people like van Dyckman and Senator Pulaski to do a political end run like this. We need to solve the problem, not stonewall it.”

“Maybe there’s a middle ground,” Garibaldi admitted. “We have to make the public and Congress have serious, open discussions, not clouded by politics; and especially not on emotion. If I’m lucky, I’ll have two weeks to make my case — two exhausting weeks that’ll take a lot out of me. So I’d better make a difference.”

Adonia looked down the rocky incline, where a score of armed protective service officers in tan camouflage battle fatigues swarmed up the dirt road, converging toward their location. They were followed by six people dressed in yellow radiation gear.

Garibaldi shaded his eyes. “Looks like the welcome wagon is on its way.”

She was quiet for a moment. “If they take us into custody, you’ll never be able to speak your piece. We’ll fall into a black hole. You need to get the word out!”

From the high ridge, seeing the fences and the surrounding desert of the expansive Air Force base, Adonia could see no point in running. “Stanley muzzled Rob Harris already, and he’ll do the same to us. If we blow the whistle and call attention to what happened here, Rob would back us up. The deaths would not have been in vain. Stanley’s the one at fault here.”

Shawn squared his shoulders and stood with his arms at his sides, watching the guards approaching. “I count twenty of them, and they’re armed to the teeth. We have ten minutes.” He gave an odd smile. “Not much time to sound off, so we’d better speak our piece first. It’s our only chance to be heard.” He hesitated. “But how? We have to do it the right way. Ending our careers is the least that can happen if we reveal what’s in Stanley’s SAP. We’d be looking at jail.”

“So what’s more important?” Adonia said, having arrived at the conclusion hours before. “Following rules or saving lives? If only Rob Harris had made that decision a long time ago, we wouldn’t have this debacle now.”

Garibaldi drew himself up. “Colonel Whalen’s right.” He closed his eyes, his face twisted in pain. “We’d be breaking the law. Just because van Dyckman did it, doesn’t justify us doing it.”

“But you can’t just give up! We could go to the press.” Adonia felt exasperated, but then her heart sank. At first she’d naively hoped that the three of them would be hailed for their efforts, heroic whistle-blowers, but now she doubted they would have the chance to tell their side of the story. With the security team closing in, as well as the motion detectors, weight sensors, and thermal imagers planted all around them, they had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Garibaldi smiled sadly. “Only as a last resort. Imagine the outcry if it was made public — there are a few on the Sanergy fringe who might overact, do something as crazy as that suicidal pilot who attacked your site. And that would defeat everything we’re trying to do.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Adonia said. “This is too important. People have to know!”

“Yes, it does matter. You and Colonel Whalen can work from the inside to change things, but if your careers are ruined, you’d be on the outside, nothing more than a gadfly, like myself. And the system would plod on, undeterred, and things would never change.”

He coughed. “We were so close. We almost had the chance. If we could make just one call out of here, I could contact the Secretary of Energy directly. She knows me and I trust her. Give it one more try before going public. She’s a damned smart lawyer, and an ethical one as well; I was her first client out of law school, long before she entered the government. In less than a minute, I could connect the dots for her.”

“And you really think the government would follow through?” Adonia said. “Not bury it under a shroud of secrecy? Lost forever, like in that warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“The Secretary will do the right thing, I know. And in my last days, I can concentrate on the larger debate, demand public discussion about the nuclear waste problem with my dying breath. That’s what I’ll do, if we get out of here… but I can’t do that if the press is only screaming about the scandal.” He closed his eyes, as if driving back some inner pain. “But I’ll still give you something to hold over them, to force the government to really change. All I need is one call with Secretary Nitta. Alas, I see no convenient phone booths.”

From their position, Adonia could see the fences down below at the base of Hydra Mountain, as well as the guard shack just outside the main fence. “My cell phone is right down there, locked in a box a thousand feet away. Might as well be a thousand miles.”

Shawn responded with a widening smile, and he hugged Adonia hard. “Thanks for reminding me.” He rummaged in the pocket of his ABU uniform and pulled a blue waterproof pouch from his baggy pants. He ripped open the seal and took out a phone.

Senator Pulaski’s cell phone.

Shawn powered it up and turned to Garibaldi, but held the cell phone back. “What about Undersecretary Doyle’s SAP? This phone’s encrypted, but Nitta doesn’t know about the other SAP in the Mountain. She’s not allowed to know.”

Garibaldi shrugged. “I don’t agree with Velvet Hammer, but it’s a policy disagreement, not safety. And if it’s been in place since the Cold War, it must have bipartisan support.” He coughed. “My problem is how van Dyckman broke the law and common sense.” He let out a sigh. “But I won’t tell her about the Undersecretary’s SAP, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It will eventually come out,” Adonia said. “It has to.”

“But in the right place at the right time,” Shawn said.

Full signal reception showed on the face of the cell phone’s screen.

Shawn locked eyes with Adonia as he handed the phone to her. “You know the Secretary’s number?”

“Nuclear plant site managers have a direct line.” She looked at Garibaldi. “You said I could hold something over the government, ensure they’ll follow through. What did you have in mind?”

Garibaldi coughed. “Set the phone to record and encrypt this conversation. Then send the coded file to Sanergy… but you keep the password. If the government doesn’t come up with a realistic solution to this nuclear waste debacle, then this recording will be your ultimate ace in the hole to release the hounds of hell, bring in the press, whatever you think.” He hesitated. “I’ll tell that to the Secretary… and that she’s got only two weeks to get things rolling. I won’t be around any longer than that.”

Adonia drew in a breath. “And… she’ll believe you? Not take it as a threat?”

Garibaldi nodded. “She was the young lawyer who represented me at Oakridge after my accident there. She was rolled over by DOE once and swore she’d never let it happen again.” He smiled. “How do you think I really got on this review panel?”

Adonia quickly punched in the settings, then took a moment to enter a long password. She dialed the number. When it began to ring, she handed the phone to Garibaldi. “It’s recording now and will send the encrypted file to Sanergy as soon as you hang up.”

“Thank you.” Closing his eyes, he took the cell and held it tightly to his ear. After a long moment he said, “Madam Secretary, this is Simon Garibaldi. I may not have much time.” He caught a quick breath and his voice grew more somber. “Not much time at all.”

As he explained in a measured voice what had happened, Adonia wrapped her arms around Shawn, and he responded by folding her into an embrace. They watched a distant plane take off from the Albuquerque airport, miles to the northwest; below them, approaching guards jogged up the rocky path, closing in as they stood outside the shaft.

“With Garibaldi talking to the Secretary, I don’t think we’ll be in custody long, if at all. I’ll insist on speaking directly to the President, give him the whole story about what really happened,” Shawn said. “And the disaster Dr. Garibaldi prevented.”

“We’ll both add to Garibaldi’s testimony and explain the need for transparency. Stanley won’t be able to keep us quiet.”

“Now that I know Garibaldi’s past with the Energy Secretary, van Dyckman is toast,” Shawn said. “Garibaldi will get top medical care, but we both need to make sure whatever he has to say isn’t swept under the rug.”

She was silent for a moment, then whispered something to him under her breath.

Shawn glanced at her, not understanding. “Excuse me?”

“The password — just in case anything happens to me.” She turned to him. “You’ll recognize the line. ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

Shawn nodded and turned back to watch for the guards. “Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita. At Trinity Site, just after the first atomic bomb test.” He drew her close. “I’m confident we’ll never have to use it.”

“I hope you’re right — but I won’t hesitate.”

“Neither will I.”

Next to them, Garibaldi kept talking in a rush. He looked up as the security teams closed in. “Are you sure you’ve got the specifics, Madam Secretary? Everything? From now on, it’s up to you.” He nodded, and ended the connection.

As they watched the approaching guards, she whispered, “Actually, Dr. Garibaldi, after this, it’ll be up to us. All of us.”