When she tore her hands from her ears, she realized that trying to muffle the noise had not worked at all. The harsh dissonance hammered through her palms as if they were tissue paper. Maybe her eardrums had already burst, but with the incredible sonic pain, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
She collided with van Dyckman and Garibaldi, pushing them to hurry. Her ex-boss tripped and stumbled to the concrete floor, but the older scientist grabbed him, helped him forward.
As they moved farther from the main vault door, Adonia thought the insane noise decreased, at least marginally. Positive reinforcement? Slowly, step after step as they careened down the tunnel away from the main corridor, the hammering pulses abated. For some reason they were being herded away from the vault door, by countermeasures that must have been designed to drive intruders to a holding area or interception point. Maybe that was where they were headed. She didn’t care. She just needed to get away from the barrage, to find some shelter, some respite from the attack. She and her fellow team members weren’t aggressors or intruders, but the system couldn’t differentiate among its targets.
Ahead, Senator Pulaski crumpled to the floor, and Shawn bent to help him up, even though the big man outweighed him by fifty pounds. Pulaski resisted, kicking out with his feet, as if he just wanted to curl up and die.
Barely able to see, Adonia shoved van Dyckman and Garibaldi forward to join Victoria. Helping Shawn with the Senator, she yelled in his ear. “Keep moving! The noise will grow louder unless we keep going forward.” The countermeasures would ratchet up until they went in the desired direction. The intent of the system was clear.
Together, they grabbed the squirming Senator. Shawn worked his hands under Pulaski’s shoulders, and he and Adonia strained to lift the big man up. They staggered forward.
As the merciless sonic barrage continued, they worked their way down the tunnel. Van Dyckman, Doyle, and Garibaldi all stumbled forward, not knowing where they were going, just heading away from the gas and the infernal noise.
Shawn and Adonia plodded along with the Senator in tow. She suspected the man would have died there if they’d left him. Old military countermeasures didn’t have much of a humanitarian bent.
Even with the sheer reactive need to escape the hammering pain, Adonia felt increasing panic. This couldn’t possibly be a test, or even a routine lockdown. She feared that Pulaski’s cell phone signal had caused a catastrophic overload while the Mountain was in lockdown.
But what if there was some real outside emergency, like the extremist attack on Granite Bay? A significant threat to Hydra Mountain, and they just happened to be caught in the middle? What was Rob Harris responding to?
In their frantic escape, they passed numerous oval vault doors of sealed dry-storage chambers on alternating sides of the tunnel. Adonia didn’t know how far they had run from the noise or where they were supposed to go.
Almost imperceptibly, the alarms decreased in intensity. When the haggard group slowed to a stop, pausing and panting, the sound naggingly increased again, spiraling up in volume, driving them onward again. “Must be motion sensors embedded in the walls,” Adonia shouted. “We have to keep going.”
The main tunnel door—supposedly their way out of the Mountain—was now far behind them. She tried to recall the diagram they had briefly seen in the Eagle’s Nest. She thought this storage chamber tunnel ran parallel to the main corridor, separated by at least a hundred feet of granite. And Harris had said this tunnel intersected with another one they could use in case of an emergency. She hoped the security systems were at least driving them toward safety, that this wasn’t just another glitch in the facility systems.
After they had gone another hundred yards and the mind-shattering racket diminished again, she spotted a vault door directly ahead, sealed tight. If she was right, this would be a second interior tunnel, the incline to the lower level. Harris had said it would also lead back to the main corridor.
As they approached, the thick metal door slowly opened, as if beckoning them inside.
15
With the screeching, painful noise driving them, everyone rushed to the obvious escape offered by the opening vault door.
“That way!” Doyle yelled. “Straight ahead!”
Van Dyckman was right behind her. “We’ll be protected in there.”
The group stampeded forward, and as they approached the door, the maddening sound dopplered down in intensity, as if to reward them for their cooperation.
From the other side of the metal door, Adonia could see another tunnel perpendicular to the one they were in. This really was like some dungeon role-playing game. The cross passage looked identical to the previous interior tunnel, which was now nearly a half mile behind them.
Shawn pulled the disoriented Senator along. He didn’t seem to realize the noise was abating. They slowed, and suddenly Pulaski straightened and brushed the help aside, embarrassed at having to be carried.
The group stumbled to a halt at the open vault door; Adonia was reluctant to enter what might be a trap. By now the din had decreased to the level of a loud rock concert, and she could start collecting her thoughts.
Peering past the vault door, she spotted construction supplies, tools, and debris piled along the new passage. Apparently this area was still being reconfigured for Hydra Mountain’s new mission. In the wide tunnel, massive sheets of one-inch-thick plastic panels, bags of cement, and disassembled metal scaffolding were stacked among caterpillar-like swaths of foil-backed pink fiberglass insulation that had been removed from the Cold War–era facility construction. Adonia recognized the thick black polymer panels as fiber-reinforced plastic, which were usually associated with … lining water tanks? She frowned. Surely not in these tunnels. The debris and construction material were stacked against the sloping granite walls, leaving a path along the center just wide enough for carts and forklifts.
Holding up a hand to stop anyone else from following him, Shawn stuck his head into the connecting tunnel. Garibaldi frowned. “Checking to make sure there’s no trapdoor into an alligator pit, Colonel?”
Shawn didn’t laugh at the joke. “I don’t want to trigger any more countermeasures. Maybe I should go ahead alone, cautiously.”
“The vault door’s open—that’s obviously where we’re supposed to go,” van Dyckman interrupted. “With the motion sensors, it’s more likely we’ll trigger countermeasures if we stop moving.” He pointed to the left. “Look, this way leads back to the main corridor. We can get out of here.”
Adonia supported Shawn’s decision. “Harris charged me with ensuring our safety, Stanley. It’s my call, and I agree with Colonel Whalen.”
Van Dyckman scowled at her, taken aback. “And I’m the program manager. I don’t need anyone’s approval to head for safety. I’ve been inside the Mountain hundreds of times.”
Shawn blocked the way and refused to move. Adonia knew he always had her back; she’d never doubted that. Shawn was fast on his feet, and he kept himself in great shape, while Stanley was the epitome of an Ivy Leaguer from Brown; his main “athletic” effort was arguing before Senate budget committees.
After seeing the expression on Shawn’s face, van Dyckman backed down. He mumbled, “I wouldn’t want to countermand your authority, Ms. Rojas.”
Garibaldi said, “I don’t suggest we agonize over the decision.”
Senator Pulaski called out, “Somebody better lead the way before those sonic countermeasures start blaring again. Let’s get out of this place!”
Doyle shuddered. “I don’t want to experience anything like that noise again in my life. Lesser of two evils—let’s go forward before the Mountain forces us to move.”
Adonia made up her mind, knowing they couldn’t wait much longer even if they set off more sensors. “All right then, let’s head through. We’ve got to find an intercom so we can let Rob know where we are. I want to find out what triggered those countermeasures.”
Doyle cast a sour glance at Pulaski. �
�We all know exactly what got us into this mess. His damned phone crashed the systems—which are clearly unstable for such an important facility.”
“Unstable?” van Dyckman piped up. “These are sensitive and thorough security measures, and the systems are working exactly as designed in response to a severe anomaly.” He pointed to the left, through the newly opened vault door. “The main corridor is less than a hundred feet over there. I’m sure of it. If we go the other direction, we’ll walk down a decline to the lower level and the high bay. We were supposed to tour there this afternoon, according to Harris’s schedule.”
In a sharp voice, Pulaski said, “We can finish the review later, after we’re safe.”
Garibaldi muttered, “I don’t think this is what they really wanted us to see. Not getting good marks so far.”
Adonia stepped next to Shawn so she could study the control panel set into the granite just outside the open vault door. The panel looked identical to the other one outside the dry-storage chambers, with the same LED screen and old-fashioned intercom. She pushed the Talk button and leaned closer to the speaker. “Ops center? Are you there?”
Nothing happened. The intercom didn’t function.
While the others watched in consternation, Garibaldi raised his voice to be heard above the continuing racket. “Van Dyckman may be correct in his assessment. If his new and improved defensive systems are working as advertised, we’ve been herded this way for a reason.”
Adonia again visualized the set of tunnels in her head from the diagram, but something about the electronic systems didn’t feel right. Perhaps their safety and security measures, new and old, were working at cross-purposes, thanks to the sequence of errors. The Class A event, the small plane crash, might have stressed the complicated system to its limits, and then Pulaski’s cell phone signal had been the tipping point that caused the logic chain to break down. Back at Granite Bay, her experts would have called it a non-reproducible bifurcation, a manager’s worst fear: different results for identical situations.
Harris had said that Hydra Mountain’s safety and security interfaces had not been tested in all possible permutations before the facility was rushed into operation. Yet Yucca Mountain had endured more than three decades of excruciating design assessments and reviews, and it had still been mothballed. In addition, the Nevada desert facility had been designed to store high-level nuclear waste in the first place. By contrast, reopening Hydra Mountain was a rushed, classified stopgap solution, using antiquated systems appropriate for nuclear weapons in combination with state-of-the-art, digital devices jury-rigged for storing nuclear waste.
What could possibly go wrong?
Adonia would have felt much better right now if at least the old-fashioned push-button intercom worked. Something had to be stable in this topsy-turvy underground site.
She turned away from the wire mesh speaker. “We’re on our own. Everybody, through the door and to the left—as fast as we can. Watch out for all that construction material. Shawn, take the rear and make sure no one falls behind.”
“Copy that.”
She looked at Pulaski. “Need any help, Senator?”
“I’m fine, as long as I can get out of here.” Senator Pulaski took a few uncertain steps and then pushed forward, walking by himself now. The others followed.
Adonia called, “Stay together. Once the sensors detect that we’ve entered this connecting tunnel, we don’t know how long the vault door will stay open.”
“Be prepared to cover your ears,” Shawn added. “We may set off additional sonic countermeasures.”
“I can’t wait,” Garibaldi said.
The Senator stepped ahead, and Adonia heaved a sigh of relief when his footsteps triggered no further alarms. “See? Home free.” She motioned for the rest of them. “All right, let’s go!”
Ahead down the long tunnel, a bright light shone at them like an oncoming freight train. She guessed that from there another vault door should lead back to the main corridor, offering them a way out, but the powerful beam didn’t look like a welcoming light. The beacon grew brighter and brighter as they hurried toward it, like a wall of intense glare.
A dark silhouette in front of her, Pulaski shielded his eyes against the brightness. Behind him, Doyle paused, placing her hands on her narrow hips as she squinted ahead, wary. The light began to pulse, each time growing brighter … and brighter, burning their eyes as if the glare itself intended to push them backward.
Garibaldi said, “Well, what surprise do you have for us now, van Dyckman?”
“These aren’t my security systems.” He sounded rattled. “I’ve never seen this before.”
Shawn came up behind Adonia, peering down the tunnel with its intense throbbing lights. “That looks like a warning to me. I don’t think that’s the way to go.”
“Of course it is!” van Dyckman insisted. “That’s the way out. The exit door can’t be more than twenty or thirty more yards straight ahead. I’ve used that entrance dozens of times. Valiant Locksmith transports high-level waste down to the lower level through this very passageway.”
Adonia’s ears were still ringing from the sonic alarms, and she shook her head. “Common sense tells us to go that direction, but it’s also clear the countermeasures are trying to push us away. It’s another deterrent.” She turned around, dreading what she had to do. “We have to go the opposite direction, or it’ll just get worse.”
16
The wall of blinding light down the tunnel was not only intense, but it had grown more ominous. The others grew uneasy, too, even van Dyckman. The throbbing accelerated from a slow, rhythmic pulse to a jerky, random staccato, as if it was designed to disorient and confuse.
Adonia covered her eyes, flinching. Shawn said, “I’ve heard of this, I think. It’s an optical deterrent, just like the sonic one. The system is trying to herd us in the opposite direction, down the tunnel incline.”
“But that’s not the way out!” van Dyckman insisted. “We can’t go backward. We need to get out of here.”
Garibaldi sounded pensive rather than frantic. “Hydra Mountain must have multiple layers of independent, active defensive systems. They’re targeting our senses, first assaulting us by smell with that noxious tear gas, then by sound, and now with white light.” He paused for a beat. “I bet this isn’t the only countermeasure. Other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum could be far worse.”
Shawn nodded. “It would stop an intruder cold. Anything to protect the nuclear warheads that used to be stored here.”
“But we’re not intruders!” Pulaski snapped. “This is my own damned program!”
Garibaldi looked down his nose. “Apparently, the automated countermeasures are not convinced of your wholesome intentions.”
“Maybe the Senator should make another phone call and file a complaint,” Doyle said with clear sarcasm.
“Let’s not wait around to find out,” Adonia said.
“But we know we don’t want to go in the direction the active measures are pushing us! This is the way out. The system works!” Steeling himself, van Dyckman put his head down and stubbornly marched toward the bank of pulsing, intense lights. “Just close your eyes! It’ll be fine.”
He pushed past the Senator in his haste to prove his assertion, knocking the disoriented man out of the way. In the cycling, random lights, Pulaski stumbled against the pipes of a disassembled scaffold, lost his footing. He cried out in pain and held on to the granite wall for balance. “Damn it!”
Shawn ducked his head and refused to let the changing lights confuse him. He made his way to the Senator and stabilized Pulaski, taking some of the big man’s weight as he brought him back toward Adonia.
“It hurts!” Pulaski said. “I twisted my ankle.”
Garibaldi looked at him with a withering expression. “Don’t expect me to carry you.”
“That’s enough. He’ll make it, and we’ll all pitch in when necessary.” Adonia could feel growing antagonism among t
he others, as if they considered Pulaski too high maintenance for the crisis, and Garibaldi’s sarcastic edge didn’t help. She turned to the Senator. “Try not to put much weight on it, sir.”
Still pushing toward the bright pulsing light like a man trudging against a driving storm, van Dyckman approached the end of the tunnel. The glare shimmered and throbbed like a fusillade of bright flashes. He seemed determined to defy the countermeasure and bulldoze his way to the exit. But as he grew closer, he must have triggered another sensor, as a succession of bright circles of light shot down the tunnel wall from rings of high-power strobes embedded in the walls.
Dazzling waves hurtled toward him as if converging on his head. The glowing circles dissipated once they flew past, but they shot out faster and faster, brighter than sunlight. Van Dyckman ducked his head and covered his face in the crook of his arm. Off balance, he veered away from the center of the passageway, lurching toward the left wall, but he kept going, fighting against an imaginary headwind.
As the Senator leaned against the wall, keeping one foot off the floor, Adonia watched the strange bombardment surrounding her boss.
“Now what are they throwing at us?” Doyle asked. “Some sort of … optical special effect?”
Doggedly plodding toward the exit door, van Dyckman reeled. The throbbing rings of light in the walls changed color, melting from white to violet, circle after circle, cycling down the spectrum from blue to green to yellow to orange, and even deeper, until it became a dark red so intense that it was almost impossible to see.
Garibaldi straightened, his eyes wide. He shouted, “Van Dyckman—turn around, now! Or you’ll be fried.”
Pulaski looked down the tunnel. “The bright light is fading. Does that mean it’s safe?”
“It hasn’t faded, just shifted down in frequency,” Garibaldi said. “And if it’s dropping to the infrared, our eyes won’t be able to see it anymore. But he’s about to experience it as heat—big time.”
It was the next phase of the active defense, Adonia realized. “Like being in the middle of a giant convection oven.” She bolted after her former boss, calling back to Shawn, “Stay with the Senator. I’ll bring him back.” She ran barefoot toward van Dyckman, and the pulsing rings of white light swept past her as well, wave after wave, increasing in intensity. “Stanley! Come back.”
Kill Zone Page 11