Kill Zone

by Kevin J. Anderson

  She caught a whiff of an unusual, almost pleasant smell—which meant they were all inhaling it. “Hurry, before it starts to affect us.”

  Van Dyckman said, “Keep moving down to where the tunnel widens. We’ll be on a high bay above the lower grotto. The farther we go, the more the gas will spread out and diffuse.”

  “But halothane is heavier than air, and the vapor is rolling downhill, so don’t underestimate the concentration,” Garibaldi said. “We’ll eventually need to get well above it.”

  Stumbling along, Pulaski glanced at the roiling plumes of gas curling after them. “My God, doesn’t this ever stop?” He began coughing as he hobbled forward in his stocking feet.

  “Storing nuclear weapons requires many security layers, Senator,” Doyle said. “And sometimes they’re inconvenient to the good guys.”

  Van Dyckman persisted, “And look, it’s working! This is what Hydra Mountain was originally designed to do. We aren’t supposed to be down here. No one should be able to break into Valiant Locksmith and steal the nuclear waste.”

  “Not even those of us who were sent here to inspect it?” Garibaldi asked.

  The cloyingly sweet odor thickened in the air. “We can’t afford to have anyone pass out.” Adonia breathed shallowly, but she was starting to feel dizzy. “We’ve got enough troubles without having to carry anyone.”

  “And once the first person falls, we’re all going to follow in quick succession,” Shawn said. “Keep moving. We can outrun it.”

  The tunnel was a wide thoroughfare, built to accommodate transport vehicles hauling twenty-foot-high waste containers, so there were no sharp corners or abrupt inclines. The gradual slope headed ever downhill and deeper into the Mountain.

  Garibaldi kept talking as if it helped him to stay calm. “Harris did say the countermeasures would be more severe on this side of the guard portal. Halothane is nasty stuff. Even at less than fatal doses, it can trigger cardiac arrhythmia and cause liver damage. I wouldn’t recommend we breathe too much of it.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind,” Doyle said with an edge in her voice. “I’d prefer to stay awake, and alive.”

  They finally outpaced the dissipating gas, and after they had gone well beyond the yellowish mist, they paused to pluck at their foam-encrusted clothes. The Senator, Garibaldi, and van Dyckman had already discarded their suit jackets, and now Adonia and Undersecretary Doyle peeled off their blazers. With an expression of disgust, Pulaski removed his socks, holding on to van Dyckman’s shoulder for balance. His limp was more pronounced as he moved again, barefoot on the concrete floor.

  They couldn’t rest for long, though. Adonia saw the first forerunner wisps of halothane drift like fog, fading as it spread out. “It’ll keep rolling downhill. I don’t know how potent the gas is now, but we shouldn’t just stay here. It’ll pool as it reaches a low point, and we want to be above it.”

  “We shouldn’t have left the door open behind us,” Doyle said. “The gas keeps coming.”

  “You’re welcome to go back and close it,” van Dyckman retorted, and she scowled at him.

  “Let’s just get to the lower level,” Shawn said in a weary voice. “There should be enough room that we won’t have to worry about the gas.”

  Van Dyckman looked inappropriately pleased. “Once we’re down in the lower grotto, I can finish showing you the operations. That’s why we brought the team here in the first place.”

  Garibaldi gave him a disbelieving look. “That’s your priority?”

  He shrugged. “We have to wait for the lockdown to end anyway, and this is important.”

  Adonia sniffed the air, caught a hint of the sickly sweet aroma. “Let’s go.” She set off in the lead.

  Garibaldi offered his arm to support the tall Senator. “You’ve already had your turn, Colonel Whalen. I’ll help him now.” Though Pulaski looked embarrassed, he grudgingly accepted the assistance.

  Adonia used the older scientist’s gesture to boost their morale. “We’ll reach the lower level soon, and be safe while we wait for Rob Harris’s people to show up.”

  Victoria Doyle looked uncertain. “How exactly is a team supposed to reach us now? That guard portal was an intentional bottleneck, a single point of entry as a defense against intrusion. The tunnel is now filled with sticky foam. They’ll have to clear that away just to get to us. It’ll take even more time.”

  “Harris said he found a way to lift the lockdown and get a team in here,” van Dyckman said. “Rescuers are on the way. They’ll get to us soon, if we can just stay ahead of the halothane. We need to be ready for them.”

  “As usual, you weren’t listening, Stanley,” Doyle said. “Harris warned us to shelter in place, inside the guard portal. But since the Senator breached the guard portal and set off the countermeasures, now Harris has to reboot the entire system again and start it all over from scratch.” She scowled at Pulaski. “That should have reset the clock to six hours again. The rescue teams can’t even get started yet.” She walked briskly ahead.

  After they had gone another fifty feet down the tunnel, Adonia couldn’t smell the gas, although she still felt a little dizzy and disoriented, either from the effects of the halothane, or maybe just stress. “It’ll be fine,” she said, still trying to reassure herself as well as the others.

  Garibaldi helped the Senator along, and Adonia thanked him. He lifted his bushy gray eyebrows at her. Now his unruly hair was flecked with small clumps of red sticky foam. “Why wouldn’t I? We’re all in this together.”

  “Some people don’t feel the same way,” Adonia said.

  Van Dyckman and Doyle led the group, as if each was eager to be the first to reach the main grotto. They walked close together, but not next to each other. They didn’t talk or otherwise interact. Adonia guessed their affair must have ended bitterly, competitively. She was glad she and Shawn still cared for each other; circumstances had pulled them apart, not their feelings.

  Seeing the obvious tension between the two, Garibaldi let out a low chuckle. “That’s one of the reasons I left DOE. I got so sick of the infighting. Even in this crisis, when we’re fighting for our very survival, those two political appointees can’t stop bickering.”

  “It’s all politics,” Pulaski retorted, still leaning on the older scientist for support. “Industries, careers, even the future of our nation’s energy grid are riding on the success of Valiant Locksmith. You know that, Ms. Rojas. Hydra Mountain is the only feasible, near-term way to ease the existing burden of nuclear waste. Would you rather keep it piled up at a hundred sites around the country, sites that were never intended to hold high-level waste?”

  “I don’t dispute the problem, Senator, but I would rather have it stored transparently, with more oversight.” Adonia felt exasperated with the politics herself. “And as for you, Dr. Garibaldi, I would rather have protest groups like Sanergy work realistically to solve what is a significant problem, rather than simply attack any suggested cure. The political environment is so toxic, you would rather denounce a ticking time bomb than work together to defuse it.”

  Pulaski snorted, and Adonia already knew what he was going to say. “That’s why we were forced to establish Valiant Locksmith as a classified SAP here on a military base. What’s the alternative? Spend another twenty years and another hundred billion dollars building a replacement for Yucca Mountain? And then that one would never be opened because of more red tape and environmental roadblocks!”

  Helping Pulaski along, Garibaldi just smiled under the verbal barrage. “I’m not trying to block any solution, Senator. I just want it done right, so the public can be safe. And the best way is to keep it free of politics.”

  Pulaski made a rude noise. “As if Sanergy is apolitical!”

  Adonia sighed. “I try to stay clear of politics in my day-to-day operations at Granite Bay. I prefer to be out in the field, running my own site—which is why I left DOE Headquarters.”

  Ahead, Doyle and van Dyckman reached the bottom
of the incline and stopped just before the tunnel opened up to the lower grotto. Victoria stood with her hands on her small hips as she waited for the others to catch up.

  Adonia looked back up the long passageway. “We should be far enough away now. The gas would have dropped in concentration.”

  “Depends on the size of the halothane reservoir,” Garibaldi said. “If it was intended to incapacitate an enemy military force inside these tunnels…”

  “Hopefully the nozzles have a cutoff switch to stop the flow,” Adonia said.

  “Sensors should shut it off before the gas reached a lethal dose,” Garibaldi said. “And hopefully with halothane diffusing through the entire lower level, we may never reach that concentration. But with our luck the defense systems will probably keep pumping gas until the Mountain’s entire supply runs out.”

  Shawn winced. “The military can be redundant to a fault.”

  They caught up with Doyle and van Dyckman, who stood at the end of the incline, where the tunnel opened into a huge chamber below and ahead. As they approached Adonia called, “It’s your facility, Stanley. When was the last time the DoD countermeasures were certified? How much gas are we potentially dealing with?”

  Van Dyckman glanced away. “I told you, I didn’t know about the sticky foam or this gas. That’s Harris’s responsibility. Everything should have been inspected when facility oversight was transferred from the military to the DOE.”

  Adonia wondered what other responsibilities he had overlooked as he basked in his political appointment.

  He continued, “But I’m sure all the systems were thoroughly checked before we received the first shipment. I relied on Harris before I authorized the movement of casks, and you know he’s a stickler for details.” Van Dyckman spoke faster, more insistently, as if to make his point, but Adonia could tell he was already working on diverting blame to the site manager. “We were racing against time—on the President’s direct orders.”

  Sweat glistened on his forehead, and he used his palms to smooth back his dark hair. He looked at Adonia, seeking an ally. “You know the situation. We needed a pressure-release valve for the increasing backlog. Every single shipment we brought into Hydra Mountain reduced the chances of something bad happening on the outside, with the public.”

  “So, something bad happens in here instead,” Garibaldi said. “With us.”

  Shawn shook his head, unconvinced. “But a waste storage facility shouldn’t have any lethal countermeasures at all, no matter how secure it needs to be. Such measures were needed when real nukes were stored here. Why were so many legacy systems left in place after the military decommissioned the site? If the antiquated countermeasures were inspected, then why weren’t they deactivated?”

  Doyle said slowly, “Probably because they were considered necessary.”

  “To guard a bunch of dry waste casks? Not likely,” Garibaldi said.

  “Don’t try to understand bureaucracy,” Adonia said. “For now, we need to find a functioning intercom so we can tell Rob what happened and explain why we’re no longer in the guard portal. We’re all flying blind here.”

  “Everything’s just up ahead,” van Dyckman said, sounding eager. “You’ll see.”

  They moved to where the tunnel opened up, and they looked out upon Hydra Mountain’s vast lower grotto.

  22

  A cold trickle of sweat ran down Rob Harris’s back as he hunched over his desk in the Eagle’s Nest. The IR sensors on the screen did not show good news. The team was on the move again after breaching both doors of the guard portal—exactly what he had told them not to do. Why was it so hard for them just to stay put? He found it maddening.

  Forcing open the upper door of the portal would have released the sticky foam countermeasure, which would be a disaster in itself, but when they opened the opposite door and attempted to pass into the lower levels without authorization, then that would dump the deadly halothane into the tunnels. Those old, extreme measures had all been left in place to protect Victoria Doyle’s SAP. Now, the Undersecretary was seeing it all firsthand.

  He couldn’t understand why they would make the situation worse. Adonia Rojas or Colonel Whalen knew the importance of following strict instructions, Stanley van Dyckman would not have wanted anything else to go wrong, and Undersecretary Doyle certainly understood the dangerous countermeasures deep inside the Mountain. But the Senator and Dr. Garibaldi were both loose cannons.

  In the operations center, his techs had just figured out how to deactivate the newly installed nonlethal defenses in the upper level, as required by the DOE. But now the whole countdown had reset to zero and started over again, thanks to the breach in the guard portal. The old, lethal DoD countermeasures were decoupled from the modern DOE systems, and there was no way he could shut them off.

  Another six hours before he could do anything!

  Harris could only guess what the team was doing deep inside the Mountain. He punched the intercom and called down to his harried-looking ops crew. “I really need to see them. Why aren’t my optical sensors working yet?”

  Drexler said, “Blame it on the sub-terahertz sources driving the active-denial millimeter waves, sir. They fried the tunnel’s new camera circuitry.”

  Harris couldn’t believe it. “Those cameras were just installed. The new electrical components weren’t EMP certified?”

  It took a moment for his exec to answer. “No reason for that, sir. That requirement was dropped after the Cold War ended.”

  Harris slumped back into his chair, rubbing his temples. A few months ago, while attending a cocktail party in Albuquerque, he’d spoken to a young Sandia Labs engineer. She explained the work she was doing with high-power microwave weapons, which were similar to Hydra Mountain’s active-denial systems. “The smarter you think you are by using sophisticated electronic components, the dumber I can make you by overpowering the circuits. Every increase in complexity offers ten new ways to take you down.”

  And now, one state-of-the-art security component had tangled with another, perhaps taking more than one down.

  Ironically, if they’d kept the old 1950s-vintage circuitry and the legacy cameras, rather than replacing them with higher-resolution and more sensitive optical systems, he might have been able to keep visual tabs on the committee. The original Cold War–era conduits had been certified to survive electromagnetic pulses from atmospheric nuclear detonations. When the DOE converted the Mountain to a waste storage facility, van Dyckman had authorized cheaper electronic solid-state devices rather than using more robust systems, such as enhanced fiber optics that were immune to EMP radiation. Since the purpose of Valiant Locksmith was to store nuclear waste, that shouldn’t have been an issue.

  And Hydra Mountain possessed far more aggressive countermeasures, old systems that remained in place for the other SAPs inside the facility. Another unintended consequence. Because of the firewalls between the classified SAPs, the interactions of the countermeasures couldn’t be fully vetted under all possible circumstances.

  Most DOE nuclear sites had been built decades ago, and their operational technology was constantly being upgraded. Under normal circumstances, such upgrades were done in a rigorous, methodical fashion, according to set safety and security procedures. They were monitored by oversight agencies, such as the Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as the nuclear power industry, and in some cases, even nuclear protest watchdogs, like Dr. Garibaldi’s Sanergy group. Rob Harris liked it that way, safety net after safety net, a clear set of rules to follow.

  But when the President had signed the classified Executive Order to begin moving nuclear waste into Hydra Mountain, van Dyckman rushed the operation, not daring to let anything delay Valiant Locksmith. Once a big government program was operational, the mere inertia of bureaucratic red tape would keep it going, but the tiniest glitch could shut everything down before it got started.

  Harris didn’t let himself forget that Yucca Mount
ain had never even opened its doors, killed by politics before it could receive a single spent fuel rod or cask of dry high-level waste. And that boondoggle had cost five times as much as the Apollo program! Van Dyckman had taken emergency measures to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to Hydra Mountain … and those measures had backfired on the review team.

  Drexler adjusted his sweaty shirt collar. “At least the nontraditional sensors still function in the tunnels, sir. We can’t see or hear the six team members, but we can track them using infrared and gas sensors that detect their body heat and carbon dioxide emissions.” He gave a weary, small smile. “Or, we can always monitor their progress by watching which countermeasures they trigger.”

  Now that the sticky foam had driven them through the guard portal, he hoped Adonia could find another intercom and report in. But the systems were widely separated and they functioned intermittently. If she and the others were running for their lives from the flood of halothane, their first priority wouldn’t be to phone home.

  He sagged in his chair, rested his elbows on the desk. He had planned for this to be an important day, resulting in a great administrative upheaval, but he had never expected this. The small plane’s hard landing inside the security fence had triggered the high-level security systems, but some members of the inspection team were like bulls in a china shop, and they had caused even worse problems. Someone must have tried to go back up the tunnel, and the motion sensors would have interpreted the movement as an intruder trying to escape.

  He suspected Senator Pulaski was responsible. Though the Senator wanted this review to go off without a hitch so he could deliver a positive report to the oversight committee, he was his own worst enemy. Pulaski was just a politician who had risen to a position of importance based solely on his seniority in government, not any expertise. He had received his committee position and financial power thanks to his tenure and influence, not through any particular knowledge about the nuclear industry—like a political donor being named the ambassador to France, whether or not he even spoke French. Pulaski had no business making decisions about the complex problem of high-level waste storage, but that’s the nature of politics.