Kill Zone

5

When the opposite gate swung open and granted them access to the squat admin building, Adonia felt a welcome blast of air-conditioning. The building held only a few small offices, a closed conference room, and, at the end of the hall, a large vault door that led into the Mountain. Just outside the conference room, an older Hispanic man sat behind a table covered with neatly stacked government forms. He gave Adonia a smile that seemed full of anticipation.

A different kind of gauntlet, she thought. Red tape instead of barbed wire.

Lieutenant Peters bowed out. “That’s all I can do for you, ma’am. Out of my jurisdiction. Once you enter Hydra Mountain, you aren’t officially on a military base anymore, so I’ll hand you over to Mr. Morales.”

The man at the table picked up a stack of forms and gestured her to the seat in front of him. “Good morning, and welcome to the Mountain. Prior to receiving any programmatic information in the conference room, you need to sign these required security documents and waivers.”

She looked at the size of the stack. “Looks like I’m refinancing a house.”

Adonia knew that the military and DOE each had convoluted and mutually exclusive administrative protocols, which doubled the red tape. Morales asked for her ID — again — and Adonia dug out her white government common access card. She was accustomed to having her ID verified at every turn, although back at Granite Bay or in NRC meetings, her colleagues recognized her on sight. But she had never been inside Hydra Mountain, and she didn’t even know the names of the other review committee members who were already inside the conference room.

What a fine Sunday outing. She picked up the top form and scanned it. Stanley van Dyckman certainly had some explaining to do.

While the clerk accessed a security database with his laptop, Adonia could hear voices in muted conversation from behind the closed door. After Morales verified her clearances, he pushed another set of forms across the desk. “Please acknowledge and sign these security statements before you enter the conference room.”

Reading the documents in detail would have taken her hours, but Adonia already knew the standard DOE security forms; she’d left the government only two years ago to run Granite Bay. She flipped through the form, spotting the clear and explicit warnings, then noticed that the terms were more draconian than usual: divulging any information about any Hydra Mountain program constituted a felony offense, punishable by what looked to be an infinite number of years in Federal prison. Somewhere in the fine print she was probably also offering up her firstborn if she ever had children, or her left kidney if she didn’t.

Adonia grimaced. “This makes me accountable for something I don’t even know about yet. Why am I signing these?”

Morales smiled at her again. “I can’t tell you, ma’am, because I really don’t know.” He nodded toward the large vault door at the end of the corridor. “I’m not allowed inside the Mountain. Although this perimeter facility qualifies as a SCIF, a Special Compartmented Information Facility, you’ll have to wait until you actually go inside before you can discuss any program-specific material. At that point, someone will explain everything.” He nudged the pen closer to her and lowered his voice. “At least according to Regulation Rob.”

That again. Adonia grunted and picked up the pen. “I wouldn’t want to miss out on all the fun. After all, this is my day off.”

In the past, some national security programs had been so hush-hush that their very existence was highly classified. Even Vice President Harry Truman had never heard of the Manhattan Project until he was sworn in after the death of Franklin Roosevelt. That had been a crash program to develop an atomic bomb at the height of World War II, though, and this place was just an old, mothballed nuclear weapon storage site. Maybe in Stanley’s mind the two programs were equivalent. It was the sort of melodramatic maneuver her former boss loved, since it made him seem important. Another Stanley-ism.

She signed the papers. “I guess it’s the government way.”

“Especially the DOE way.” Morales handed her a red badge clipped to a radiation dosimeter on a plastic lanyard. “Now that you’ve signed in, I’ll notify Mr. Harris that everyone’s here. He’ll be taking you all inside the Mountain.”

Adonia placed the lanyard around her neck as the name rang a bell. “Wait, you mean Rob Harris? He’s Regulation Rob? I used to work with him at Oakridge, but I haven’t seen him in years. A really good guy.”

“But he is a stickler for the rules,” Morales said as he picked up the phone. “Everything by the book, chapter and verse.”

Adonia smiled as she remembered. “Yes, that’s him.”

Rob Harris had had a long career in DOE, and she knew him to be competent, detail-oriented to a fault, and generally well liked. Harris hadn’t been the most charismatic manager, but he was thorough, and he was a straight shooter. Morales was certainly correct — Regulation Rob had never seen a procedure he didn’t like.

“I thought he’d retired, though.” She remembered talking to Harris at a DOE mixer in Oakridge five years ago, when he told her he intended to take advantage of a government golden parachute that year. He yearned to leave work behind in favor of a nice beach and a stack of novels.

“The retirement didn’t last long.” Morales pressed the phone closer to his ear and spoke into it. “Yes, sir. Everyone is present. I’ll send in Ms. Rojas.”

Even before he hung up, the conference room door opened, and Stanley van Dyckman emerged to meet her, all smiles. “Adonia! Glad you could make it.” As always, his brown hair was slicked back. He was nattily dressed even out in the New Mexico desert: blue pinstriped suit, white shirt, a maroon tie, brown wingtips.

She adjusted her new badge and dosimeter, keeping her expression neutral. “Always glad to help.” He chuckled at her sarcasm, and she pressed harder: “Why exactly do you need me here, Stanley? And why in such a hurry to get me here on a Sunday morning? A little bit of warning would have been nice.”

Van Dyckman often insincerely tried to play down his position as a DOE Assistant Secretary, but ever since he’d received his political advancement after the Granite Bay incident, Adonia had noticed something standoffish about him. “This inspection team had to be put together quickly, a pro forma review committee, and we’ve got a ticking clock here. The Senator has a big meeting in Washington on Wednesday, and he needs our blessing for the Hydra Mountain project.” Before she could ask any more questions, he cut her off, anxious to take her into the briefing room. “You’ll find out once we’re inside the facility. We can’t talk out here in the hall.” After glancing at the completed paperwork, van Dyckman ushered her into the room, eager to make introductions. “I think you’ll be impressed with what we’re doing here, Adonia. I really do. It solves a lot of crucial problems for the nation. You’ve been complaining about it yourself.”

She had no intention of letting him sweep her along before she had a chance to speak candidly. She grabbed his arm, forcing him to stop just inside the door. “Just a minute, Stanley. First, you and I have to discuss my backlog of spent fuel rods. For some reason the NRC keeps deferring to you.”

He brushed her off as his smile became more brittle. “We can talk at a break. The others have been waiting for you to arrive.”

Translation: he intended to avoid her at every opportunity.

Adonia insisted, “Stanley, you know we’ve exceeded capacity for wet storage, but the fuel rods keep piling up. My cooling pools are crammed, and I don’t have any additional space. No room at the inn! I simply can’t store any more spent rods unless we build larger permanent pools on site, not temporary ones. Immediately. And that takes money, as well as government approval. The NRC keeps booting the problem over to you, but your staff is sitting on my request. I don’t know why they’re stalling. This is not the sort of thing you can avoid — unless you want to shut down Granite Bay entirely.”

“Permanent pools are a different line item in the budget, with additional regulations,” van Dyckman said. “I don’t have as much leeway as I do with temporary construction.” He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, leading her into the conference room. “Trust me, Adonia, I’m taking care of the problem. Just be patient and make the stopgap measure work for a little longer, as I suggested a few months ago—”

She shook her head. “I won’t do that. The NRC is still looking for any reason to shut me down after the crash, and I won’t ask them for another waiver. I need funding for permanent pools, and I need it yesterday!” It seemed absurd to construct “permanent” temporary pools, as opposed to even worse “temporary” temporary pools, but she wouldn’t compromise safety. Granite Bay had enough of a black eye as it was, thanks to the attack by the antinuke fanatic.

Stanley was clearly impatient with her interruption. “Just erect the temporary pools and let me worry about the NRC. That’ll give you breathing room and ease the crisis.”

“It shouldn’t always be a crisis,” Adonia said.

His expression looked strange. “I said I’d take care of it. I fixed the last problem after the attack, didn’t I? We stopped a radiation release that could have dwarfed Three Mile Island.”

“Dodged is a better way of describing it.” Adonia’s eyes flashed. And “we” prevented it? He’d been busy preening before the press while she directed the emergency response, and the morning rainstorm had done as much to mitigate the radiation release as anything else. Talk about revisionist history!

It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to take credit for other people’s actions. Three years ago when Adonia was still in the government and assigned to DOE Headquarters, right before his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary and while he was still Chief of Staff for a powerful senator, van Dyckman had refused to release funding unless the DOE packed additional fuel rods in their reactor’s cooling pools, crammed closer together than what the NRC had approved. He’d offered his own plans for yet another “temporary emergency solution,” but he had made a minor — and crucial — error in his calculations that would have resulted in a major criticality. It was only Adonia’s quick action countermanding his commands that had saved the day. Although van Dyckman happily took credit for preventing the “mishap,” they both knew who had stopped a possible catastrophe, and they both knew who was responsible for it in the first place.

What mattered most to Adonia was that a disaster had been averted, but it made Stanley insufferable. She had felt great relief when she left government service to become the manager of Granite Bay.

Later, his response to the plane crash, as well as the powerful senator’s backing, had somehow led to van Dyckman being appointed as Assistant Secretary of Energy, which placed him in charge of the nation’s nuclear waste. Yet he hadn’t done anything to solve the growing storage problem.

At least he was so busy that he couldn’t micromanage her, and Adonia was able to do her work without being harassed. He knew that she could hold the truth over him if she wanted, revealing to the public how his botched calculations would have resulted in a disaster, but she had never threatened to do so. It was an uneasy truce between the two of them.

Now, he tugged her toward the conference room. “Please just wait until we’ve finished this meeting. You’ll see what I’m doing, and believe me, you’ll thank me for it.” He seemed more intense than she had ever seen him.

She lowered her voice. “One week, Stanley. I’ll take a tour of this place if it makes some senator happy, but you’ve got one week to hold off the NRC and come up with the funding for Granite Bay’s permanent wet storage. It can’t wait.”

“After you enter the Mountain, I guarantee you’ll change your mind.” His smile brightened. “Now, ready to meet the rest of the committee?”

Adonia held his gaze, but didn’t return the smile. “One week.”

He took her elbow and finally steered her into the conference room.