Shawn was confused. “Why would you be involved in Hydra Mountain at all, Ms. Doyle?”
“All that matters is that Stanley did this without coordination, bypassing even the interagency SAP process. He prevented others from reviewing all possible negative interactions.” Her expression soured. “Stanley and Senator Pulaski managed to pull this off, but they didn’t go through the proper classified interagency checks and balances, which violates Federal law. Without those reviews, this problem could quickly escalate.” She was seething. “Secretary Nitta is an outstanding person, but she was out of the loop, not fully aware of what was happening here or the unintended consequences that could occur. She does not have all the information.”
“Once we reestablish contact with the operations center, Rob Harris can patch in a call to the DOE Secretary’s office,” Adonia said. “But we’ve got to get out of here first.”
“I’m sure he’s been in contact already,” Shawn said. “Harris would get all the help available.”
By the time they moved past the two finished and filled permanent cooling pools, they were well ahead of the creeping halothane. The floor sloped down at an angle toward the widely spaced metal vault doors in the far wall of granite. To Adonia, the positioning suggested they blocked access to large chambers—and something important. Set a level below where they stood, the doors loomed twenty feet high and just as wide, large enough that even the biggest forklifts could drive in and out of the chambers.
“They look like the world’s largest bank vaults,” Garibaldi said.
“What are they?” Adonia asked.
“Probably designed to store the bigger warheads during the early Cold War days,” Shawn said. “They called them ‘crowd-pleasers.’ The first hydrogen bombs were as big as a bus and needed cryogenic cooling, so they probably tunneled into the granite and built these vaults below ground level to contain any spills.”
With increasing agitation, Victoria pointed to another old-style intercom panel set next to the nearest vault door. “Look, down there! We can contact Harris. We’re in a secure area, so he should be able to patch me through to the DOE Secretary. This can’t wait.”
Adonia remembered Regulation Rob’s obsessive penchant for following rules to the letter. He would never let anyone call Washington from a nonsecure line, especially not over an intercom. “My priority is to get us to safety,” she said. “Senator Pulaski is already dead, and I don’t intend to lose anyone else.”
“Your priority is to keep this entire facility safe—not to mention the city of Albuquerque.” Victoria’s face reddened. “Hell, even the southwestern United States!” Hurrying down the slope, she tried to work the intercom panel.
Adonia was surprised by the Undersecretary’s vehemence. Van Dyckman spoke conspiratorially but loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Victoria’s prone to hyperbole.”
Shawn was firm. “If it’s such an important crisis, then Harris can call in a nuclear emergency team, once he knows about it. And I can call the President myself.”
“We still have to wait until the system reboots, regardless,” Adonia said.
“Harris needs to get a nuclear emergency team in place now,” Victoria said, “ready to move the instant the lockdown is lifted. Every minute counts.”
Adonia doubted the site manager would take preemptive action without full approval, no matter how much Undersecretary Doyle harangued him over the intercom.
The rest of the team crowded around as Victoria pressed the button and shouted into the speaker. “Rob Harris! Answer me, dammit!”
“It’s not working,” Garibaldi said simply. “What a surprise.”
“But we need to get out of here!” van Dyckman said. “Can he even hear us?”
Adonia tried to intercede. “We probably have more than three hours left.”
Garibaldi gazed back across the great cavern. “We’ll never last that long unless we get inside some kind of shelter. The halothane is spilling across the floor, and it’ll pool down here. That’s how you would incapacitate an armed force of intruders. Worst-case scenario.” Even though they had outrun the gas, they found themselves at a dead end. “We may be incapacitated very shortly, unless Stanley can use his magic decoder ring to open these vaults.”
“Well, we can’t just stand here and die.” Van Dyckman’s face was flushed as he pushed past the others to a more modern control panel next to the first towering vault door, which had obviously been upgraded since the Cold War era. His fingers danced across the LED screen. “We need to get into the vault.”
Victoria grabbed his shoulder, pulling him away. “Stop it, Stanley!” He knocked her back.
Adonia darted forward and held the man’s arm, trying to calm them both. “Enough! We’ve got to work together to get out of here.”
Van Dyckman yanked his arm free. “If Mrs. Garcia is safe in her vault, this will solve our problem, an absolutely secure bolt-hole.” Not listening to the shouts, he keyed in his code to open the vault door.
31
The controls on the big vault panel looked much newer than the one outside the guard portal where they had previously tried to shelter in place. Adonia thought the pad resembled a reconfigurable airline cockpit console more than the typical controls for a storage vault.
Doggedly, van Dyckman went to work on the panel despite Victoria’s increasing agitation. “Okay, this is a standard, upgraded port found in all the new DOE restricted areas,” he muttered to himself. “It’s software driven, and my access should let me open any vault in the Mountain.”
“Then why didn’t you free Mrs. Garcia?” Garibaldi demanded.
“Because he’s a jerk,” Adonia said under her breath.
Van Dyckman reddened as he worked. “Quiet. It’s hard enough when my own life is in danger, much less a mere technician’s.”
Victoria still tried to block him. “Stanley, dammit—Stop!”
Shawn held her back. “We need to keep ourselves safe for at least three more hours, ma’am. With the halothane flowing toward us, that vault may be the only place that can keep us alive.”
“It’s not safe. You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“We’ll all die if we don’t get inside.” Van Dyckman punched in a code, which failed, and he tried again. “Keep quiet. I’m trying to remember the mnemonic! It’s thirty-two characters, after all.”
Victoria grew more frantic. “You have to stop—that vault … it’s Velvet Hammer!”
Garibaldi rolled his eyes. “Velvet Hammer? Valiant Locksmith? Do you all get drunk and just make up strange-sounding names?”
“It’s … it’s a Special Access Program. State Department, not DOE. We’re all in danger—”
A chill went down Adonia’s back. “Another SAP?”
Victoria pulled free of Shawn’s grip. “None of you have the proper clearance. Why do you think so many extreme security measures are down here? Certainly not for Stanley’s cooling pools! I didn’t even know they were here.”
“What in the world did you store in there?” Garibaldi asked, looking at the huge vault.
Adonia demanded to know, “Undersecretary Doyle, what exactly is Velvet Hammer?”
“This is my Mountain. Your SAP has no business being here.” Van Dyckman finished entering the characters and he grinned, surprised at his own accomplishment. “There! Got it.” He pressed Enter, and a whirring noise hummed through the heavy door.
Adonia expected the release would trigger another round of screeching alarms, but van Dyckman’s master override code was apparently accepted, and with clicking and humming hydraulic mechanisms, the massive door swung open from the wall, groaning under its weight.
The widening gap revealed a dark enclosure lit only by the light from the grotto while old tungsten halogen bulbs struggled to flicker on, blinking, clicking. Adonia could see little more than a row of shadowy granite cubicles inside a large space.
With a vehement lunge, Victoria threw herself in front of the doorw
ay, spreading her arms out to either side to prevent anyone from entering. “Stanley, dammit, shut the vault door—now! Thanks to your fuel rods, there’s far too much stray radiation down here.” Her petite figure looked laughably small in front of the twenty-foot-wide vault opening.
“All the more reason for us to get inside the shelter,” Shawn said. Yellow vapors continued to curl along the grotto floor, adding to the hazard.
Additional banks of lights flickered on inside the vault, revealing more of the interior. Van Dyckman turned and stared inside. “What the hell?”
A row of dark granite cubbyholes lined the inner walls of the vault, and a barrier chain hung across each opening. Each alcove held a squat polished object on a sturdy, raised platform that was bolted to the rock floor.
Her face now ashen, Victoria stood before them. Her voice quavered. “Ms. Rojas, we all know Harris put you in charge. I order you to close this door immediately. Our lives are in danger.”
Shawn peered into the garish light and the abrupt shadows in each of the cubbyholes. “I recognize those from my B-2 days—we called them Unscheduled Sunrises: thermonuclear bombs!”
Adonia felt a chill. “What are nuclear weapons doing in this facility?”
“Close the vault door!” Victoria shouted. “They’re … they’re devices, not warheads. Not technically, and not legally. They have everything but the software, and they aren’t recognized by treaty as actual weapons—”
Van Dyckman stared at Victoria. “Hydra Mountain was decommissioned! The DoD handed over the keys, and I supervised it. They relinquished all authority. This facility is supposed to be for storing waste only! How dare you store warheads—”
Victoria’s voice was like a hard mallet. “Close the damned vault door, Stanley! The radiation is already a high risk, and now it’s far worse because that fool Senator knocked down part of the array of fuel rods.” She had gone white with both rage and fear. “And if enough water floods down here, the devices could go critical! I swear, Stanley, I will bring charges against you for exposing my SAP. I warned you—”
Garibaldi suddenly understood what she meant. “Yes, she’s right. Shut the vault—now! I don’t care what you call them, if stray neutrons interact with those nuclear cores … that’s the real danger. And it’s increasing every second that vault door stays open.”
“You heard him,” Shawn said in his sharp command voice. He pulled van Dyckman back to the control panel. “Close it.”
“Do it!” Victoria sounded hysterical. “If one warhead is triggered, they’ll all detonate.”
“She’s right,” Adonia said, feeling dizzy. “They’re close enough together there might be a sympathetic detonation that might take out Hydra Mountain along with half of New Mexico.” She tried to imagine how many millions of people would die. “And the kill zone would cover the entire Southwest.”
Still holding van Dyckman, Shawn looked behind them down into the grotto with the curling gas spilling across the floor. “After we close the vault, we’ll have to climb the crane instead. That’s our best hope now.”
Van Dyckman was too rattled to work the control panel. “But it’ll be safe if we get inside and seal the door, even with the warheads! We’ll be away from the halothane, and we can last for a few hours next to the shielded cores. We’ll die if we stay out here.” He seemed most concerned with defying Victoria and asserting his power over Hydra Mountain.
“Stanley, you always were an idiot.” Victoria rushed to the panel. “Always needing to be in control—”
Van Dyckman shoved Victoria away, thrusting her backward toward the vault. He scrambled past her. “Everyone, quick! I’ll close it once we’re inside.”
Victoria grabbed the door and caught her balance as he pushed into the large, shielded vault. She yelled, “Wait, you didn’t bypass the defensive mechanisms. You initiated the sensors by opening up the—”
Magenta warning lights spun into full alert inside and outside the vault. A new siren blasted up and down, and a threatening recorded voice began a countdown that reverberated from speakers inside the vault.
“Unauthorized breach. Exit immediately. Countermeasures in ten … nine…”
Reacting without thinking, van Dyckman backed farther inside, and Victoria lunged after him. “Stanley, get out of there!”
“Exit immediately.” The countdown continued.
Adonia shouted for the two to run from the vault.
Victoria caught van Dyckman by the arm, but he shook her off. “Let go of me, you bitch!”
“Four … three…”
Outside the vault at the control panel, Adonia ran her fingers over the LED pad, looking for any kind of emergency override. There had to be a fail-safe button to close the vault.
Victoria spun and lunged toward the big vault door as she raced back out, trying to beat the last second on the countdown.
Adonia must have hit some kind of reset, and she was astonished to see the massive barrier begin to grind closed on powerful hydraulics.
Shawn waved toward Victoria, who was running toward them. “Hurry!”
“Breach neutralized.” The voice sounded like an executioner.
An incredible burst of air gushed from the vault. A deluge of red sticky foam erupted from the inner ceiling. Unlike the foam that had swelled and oozed into the guard portal in the tunnel up above, this defense spurted down in a wall that expanded swiftly like glutinous, soapy foam. The substance rapidly filled the warhead vault, trapping everything inside like flies in amber.
The burst of escaping air knocked Shawn backward into Adonia. He hit the floor and rolled away from the solidifying foam that gushed out of the Velvet Hammer vault. The fast-hardening substance mushroomed through the gap, boiling up as it expanded, then froze in place.
Adonia had never seen such a swift and vigorous countermeasure. This was a last line intended to stop an intruder and secure the exposed warheads so that no one could remove them, even if the vault door were breached. The previous sticky foam in the guard portal had been meant to impede or confine the bad guys, but this hardening froth was a lethal measure to protect the stored nuclear weapons.
“Victoria! Stanley!” Adonia had to scramble out of the way as the foam swelled and thickened like a petrified tidal wave. “They’re trapped in there.”
The vault door groaned and screeched as the heavy hydraulics tried to close, but the movement slowed. The large pistons could not force the door shut with the solidified sticky foam. With a loud straining sound, the door ground to a stop, leaving a gap at least four feet wide.
In closing, the door had pushed a weirdly contoured path through the petrified matrix of rigid material.
Adonia could only hear the muffled wail of the warning siren from inside the vault, now muted through a dozen feet of hardened foam. Everything inside would have been swallowed up, buried—including Victoria and Stanley.
“No refuge for us inside the vault anymore,” Garibaldi said, sounding oddly disconnected. “We’d better find another alternative.”
All around their feet, the smoky halothane continued to swirl and build.
32
Up in the Eagle’s Nest, Rob Harris struggled to breathe. He knew exactly what the latest alarm on his status screen meant.
They had found, and opened, the Velvet Hammer vault.
The main screen above the operations floor gave an urgent alert that one of the ultra-secure doors had been opened—the very scenario that had given him nightmares. To make things worse, minutes before, radiation detectors from the lower cavern showed a dramatic increase in the already-high ambient levels, as if something had interfered with the precarious wet-storage pools.
What were they doing down there?
Worse yet, after opening one of the secure Velvet Hammer vaults, someone must have entered and triggered the most dangerous countermeasures, designed to protect the nuclear devices. He felt the blood drain from his face. The avalanche of sticky foam would have engulfed and ki
lled anyone in its way. This couldn’t be happening!
He’d never intended for the team to actually gain entry to the vault. Undersecretary Doyle should have seen the fuel rods, the temporary cooling pool, and recognized the danger. Velvet Hammer was her SAP, but she would never have opened the vault, knowing full well what the sealed chambers contained.
It had to be van Dyckman. He must have used the override code, which was valid for all systems throughout the facility.
Velvet Hammer was a separate, waived and unacknowledged Special Access Program, the sole purview of Undersecretary Doyle in her classified work for the State Department. Two years ago when she had last inspected her SAP, the Mountain was still under DoD control, and the near-finished warheads fit perfectly into the operations, a highly classified State Department program that exploited treaty loopholes and allowed the U.S. to hold a clandestine nuclear trump card.
He knew what the State Department had done: the numbers of nuclear warheads in the nation’s stockpile were strictly regulated by international agreement. Each year the U.S. routinely pulled five or ten weapons out of inventory for testing before returning them to the military. While those warheads were out of service, the Department of Defense needed to ensure that its arsenal remained at proper levels in the event of a national crisis. An entirely legal way to ensure that a warhead could be moved rapidly into the active inventory was to stockpile nuclear “devices” that weren’t really weapons.
The Velvet Hammer devices stored in the lower vault had everything a nuclear weapon needed to function—a plutonium pit, electronics, fuses—except for one critical, technical detail, an easy-to-install final piece, such as the software. Because the devices were incomplete, those “almost but not quite” weapons could not be legally counted as part of the nation’s strategic stockpile.
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