Kill Zone

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Strut by strut, not looking down, she kept climbing until she was at least seventy feet above the floor.

  As the boom extended across the open cavern, she saw she had made her way to just above the above-ground pool. She looked up to see she had another fifty or sixty feet to reach the lowest catwalk, but knew she didn’t need to climb any farther, as she must be well above the gas. Still feeling uncoordinated, she rearranged her arms and legs to pull herself into a sitting position, curling an arm around a metal strut. Oddly, even in this precarious position, she felt more secure than she had in hours.

  Twenty feet below, Dr. Garibaldi kept making his way up the trestle, with Shawn behind him, offering encouragement. She smiled when she saw he had coiled the rope from the cab around his shoulder and carried it up.

  Before long, Garibaldi had reached the level of Adonia’s perch, out of breath but not complaining. “I believe Colonel Whalen is chasing me.”

  “I’m sure he calls it a motivational exercise,” she said. Now that they seemed to be safe, Adonia felt a warm glow. The air up at this level was cleaner, easier to breathe. “He is a good climber.”

  “And in better shape than I am.” Garibaldi twisted around to look at the ceiling of the cavern overhead, studying the catwalks that had retracted up to their lockdown position. “Not exactly what I’d call fresh air, but it’s an improvement.”

  Shawn joined them shortly. “That was easy enough, wasn’t it? We’re above most of the gas now, but if we keep climbing, we could reach one of those catwalks and make our way home free across the ceiling. Wherever we want to go.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Adonia said. “For someone else.”

  “Is that necessary?” Garibaldi asked. “We’ve triggered enough alarms already. Let’s just sit tight for a while.”

  Adonia looked at the nearest catwalk, which the end of the boom overshot. “If we climb all the way up, it’s still a ten-foot drop to the walkway.” Her feet were already sore, and she winced at the thought of slamming down on the metal grid of the catwalk.

  Shawn tapped the looped rope on his shoulder. “We can lower ourselves down. It’ll be easier on your feet.”

  “But why would we need to?” Adonia asked.

  As he hung balanced on the boom, Garibaldi extended a finger to follow the path of the catwalk around the ceiling, where it intersected with the supporting columns throughout the ceiling. “Look to the middle of the cavern ceiling. Do you see it?”

  Shawn pulled himself level with them and they all hung together on the grid structure. With his sharp eyesight, he spotted what the older scientist indicated. “There’s a panel in the ceiling above the main catwalk. And look at the cables going into it. I have a hunch that’s a communications conduit shared with an air vent.”

  “You mean a maintenance shaft?” Adonia said.

  Garibaldi pointed at an enclosed safety tube in the far corner of the grotto near the Velvet Hammer vaults, just above a stack of cement bags. “I’d expect that one over there is the maintenance shaft. More accessible. Probably just goes to the upper level inside the Mountain. Too bad we didn’t spot it before we made our way all the way over here.”

  The older scientist turned his attention back to the grotto ceiling. “Hydra Mountain would still need to run communications and control lines from down here up to the next level, maybe even to the outside. In the old days that shaft would be the only way to fix breaks or shorts in the transmission lines. It would need to be big enough to allow access for a worker attempting to make repairs.” He waited a beat, then smiled. “If we get up there, we can use that duct to reach the main level. We could bypass the reboot—and get out of here now, instead of hours from now.”

  Shawn said, “We’d risk triggering other alarms. Better part of valor would be to stay here and wait it out.”

  “Exactly as Rob Harris told us to do,” Adonia said.

  Garibaldi gave him a dubious frown. “And when Mr. Harris left us, he said the lockdown wouldn’t last more than a few minutes. Are you certain everything will continue to go smoothly?”

  Shawn lifted a brow. “Smoothly? We have three people dead already.”

  Adonia felt more urgency. “With the Velvet Hammer vault jammed open and the warheads exposed to increased radiation, I don’t think we can afford to wait three more hours. Harris needs to know what he’s dealing with, and he has to get a nuclear emergency response team ready to move immediately. Undersecretary Doyle was right to be panicked.”

  “I agree…” Garibaldi’s voice trailed off as he stared down at the concrete floor below, which was partially obscured by the swirling smoke markers of the halothane. He gripped the struts with both hands. “Well, that might not be the worst of it.” Anchoring himself with one hand, he leaned farther out. “Look over by the temporary cooling pool.”

  Adonia peered down to see what he had noticed. Squinting, she saw a wide and expanding puddle near the round pool. A foot above the floor, near the bottom of the metal-supported plastic walls, a thin spray of water spewed from a breach.

  “The pool is leaking!” Adonia cried.

  Shawn muttered a curse. “Van Dyckman swore those plastic sheets have more tensile strength than steel.”

  “When our dear Senator knocked over the fuel rods, one of them must have struck a cooling pipe or sensor embedded in the side of the pool wall with enough force to create a punching shear,” Garibaldi said.

  Adonia held on to the metal struts of the boom. “That’s a substantial leak, but at the rate water is spilling out, it’ll take days for the water level to drain completely. We’ll be out of here long before that.”

  “If it stays localized,” Garibaldi warned. “With the amount of water pressure inside the pool, that small punching shear can easily grow. It could cause a catastrophic failure of the plastic wall, completely collapsing the sides.” He paused. “And if that happens, the water will spill out and the entire array of fuel rods will be exposed within seconds. With nothing to moderate the radioactivity, the neutron levels in the grotto will increase exponentially.”

  Adonia felt her brief respite dissolve. “Catastrophic failure are my two least favorite words in the world.”

  Without emotion, Garibaldi continued his assessment. “In less than a minute the warheads in Victoria’s vault will be simultaneously flooded with water and neutrons. As I said before, it’ll be like playing Russian roulette, but now with a billion more bullets. Just how confident are you that something else won’t go wrong today?”

  Adonia suddenly felt ice in her veins. “Victoria said that if even one of the nukes goes critical, they’re close enough in proximity that cascading detonations of all the others would wipe out the city and most of the state.”

  “Oh, surely no more than a third of the state,” Garibaldi said with wry sarcasm. “Although the deadly fallout would certainly reach the East Coast. I would prefer to stop that before it happens.”

  36

  Climbing across the slippery mound of sticky foam, van Dyckman squirmed close to the top of the vault, pulling himself forward. The hard, uneven barrier nearly blocked him off, but he found just enough room to wiggle through, scraping his back against the granite ceiling. He hoped the massive vault door hadn’t completely closed, which would have allowed some of the thickening foam to spill outside rather than fill the entire chamber. That might have saved his life.

  Struggling for room to maneuver, he used the box cutter, along with adrenaline and desperation, to chip through the substance and pull forward. With each second, he felt increasing urgency to hack his way free.

  Like a spelunker squeezing through a tight passage, he crawled and followed the steel pipe that enclosed the wires to the inset lights, so he knew he was heading in the right direction. When he finally reached the inside wall above the chamber entrance, it would be a simple matter to dig and chop his way to the vault door. And out.

  His arms ached, his hands were bloody, and each gasping breath felt like razors
in his lungs. Somewhere beneath him, Victoria Doyle was dead, engulfed in a mass of hardened foam, like a fossil trapped in limestone.

  He remembered hearing her terrified scream cut off as the foam gushed in. Only by sheer luck had he stumbled into the warhead cubbyhole. As he worked his way over the barricade of sticky foam, he knew her entombed body was down there.…

  He remembered their relationship with only a brief fondness. The affair had seemed inevitable with their shared ambitions, their mutual traveling, the innumerable late-night planning sessions when he was Senator Pulaski’s Chief of Staff. But even the sex had evolved into more of a competition than a release. Objectively speaking, he was glad to have her gone, and now he could achieve his potential.

  His swift career advancement had been the death knell for romance, since Victoria couldn’t stand any scenario where he upstaged her. Even so, he had never imagined she would threaten to shut down his vital program just to keep her illicit warheads hidden here in Hydra Mountain. He had lost a lot of respect for her since they’d broken up, and these last few hours validated the reason why.

  Unlike Victoria, at least Stanley van Dyckman was still alive, and he could still escape.

  Nearing the jammed vault door, he dreaded that he would have to chop his way down through more hardened foam to reach the interior controls to let himself loose, but if the entrance was blocked open by the petrified foam, he’d only have to cut his way out.

  Working his way through the last gap in the hardened material, he felt a rush of excitement as a large block broke off to expose the outside grotto. He frantically chopped and tore away pieces of the foam, then rolled down a steep, bumpy slope. He sprawled out of the vault and onto the grotto floor, dropping to his hands and knees. Reeling, shaking, he sprang to his feet, holding his breath. Like a poisonous fog, the wispy yellow halothane swirled nearly at chest level.

  The gas was settling in the lower point of the cavern, driven downward to the Velvet Hammer vaults. Worse, as he moved, he stirred the deadly gas and swirled the sickening fumes up toward his face. Trying not to breathe, van Dyckman coughed and staggered away, knowing he had to get to higher ground.

  Though he had escaped from the vault filled with nukes, he still wasn’t safe.

  The box cutter in his hand was ruined, gummed up by remnants of sticky foam. He threw the tool to the side and heard it clatter along the cement floor, swallowed in the blanket of yellow gas.

  Pressing his mouth and nose against the crook of his elbow, he staggered up the incline to the main floor, gaining ground to where the level of gas dropped to just above his knees. But he could still smell it. Frantic, he debated with himself what to do and how to survive. He couldn’t go all the way back to the cooling pool, where the halothane continued to spill over the ledge and onto the main floor. He would collapse long before he made it.

  He turned toward the back of the cavern and saw the sacks of cement mix piled in the corner. Maybe if he climbed those, he would gain enough height, at least ten feet above the ground, above most of the halothane.

  He felt like a wreck, bleeding from his hands, but desperation gave him the energy he needed. He stumbled toward the corner, struggling to take only sips of air, but he couldn’t hold his breath much longer. Soon he was forced to gasp in a lungful, which stank of the sickly sweet halothane. He reeled, needing fresh air. He began to cough and almost passed out, but forced himself to stagger forward. Almost there.

  He couldn’t collapse, or he would die in this soup of deadly gas. Reaching the stack, he slumped against the pile of cement bags. He could find purchase for his feet, climb the sacks like a rock pile, get above the floor. He pulled himself higher, using his knees. One level. Then the next. His hands left bloody prints on the dusty sacks, but his arms and feet felt numb. He wanted to collapse.

  His feet ripped holes in the paper bags, spilling gray-white powder. His body was turning to jelly, pulling him back down. He would just slide over the side, fall asleep.… No! He slapped the hard cement mix bag, and the sharp pain roused him. He kept going. One more level.

  He clambered up, finally reaching the top of the pile, where he knelt and caught his balance, wheezing and shuddering. Then he forced himself to stand, gaining another few feet of height. Now he drew in a deep breath.

  The air was clearer here, and even though he felt ready to drop unconscious, so sleepy and so dizzy, he made himself stay upright. Heaving, he inhaled some of the stirred cement powder, which set him to coughing again. Even here, though, he could still smell the distinctive halothane.

  Panicked, he looked wildly around, sure that he was trapped. Wasn’t he high enough above the gas? This mound of concrete mix sacks was like an island in the swirling halothane, and he had no way to go anywhere else. He stretched upward, gaining just a few more inches.

  Swaying, he reached up to steady himself against the granite wall—and his hand hit something hard, metal. He squirmed around and saw a line of rungs set into the wall, painted gray so as to be nearly invisible against the rock.

  Rungs! He could keep climbing. There was a way up the wall!

  Spaced every eighteen inches, the horizontal iron bars ran up the corner and vanished into a metal mesh tube, also painted gray, five feet above his head. Some kind of maintenance tube or shaft, leading upward? If so, then it was the way out. He felt giddy with relief.

  Catching a whiff of halothane stirred up from below drove him into motion. Van Dyckman grabbed the rung just above his shoulders and found another one at the level of his right foot. He started to scale the rungs, feeling the layers of grime and crud against his palm. With all the collected grit, he wondered when was the last time any worker had used them. Maybe not since the 1960s.

  No matter. He was going to use the ladder now.

  He climbed to the next rung, pulling himself higher. Each step lifted him another foot and a half above the halothane … but he no longer just wanted to rise above the knockout gas and wait out the lockdown. No, he needed to get as far from those radioactive warheads as possible. This maintenance shaft should take him out of the cavern, lead him to safety, and get him out of here! He might be the only one to survive.

  In that case, it would be a lot easier to keep his story straight.

  Senator Pulaski and Victoria Doyle were already dead, but what about the others? Just before he climbed into the half-enclosed mesh tunnel, he scanned across the floor outside the vault, but he saw no sign of Adonia Rojas, Colonel Whalen, or Simon Garibaldi. He assumed their unconscious—or dead—bodies lay somewhere beneath the thickening yellow mist.

  He kept climbing, vanishing into the maintenance shaft with a renewed sense of vigor and optimism. He was the national program manager, the only man who could salvage Valiant Locksmith for the good of the country.

  Desperate times, desperate measures. He had to make damn sure Victoria’s illicit weapons stockpile was cleared out. An outrageous hazard! This was his Mountain, dammit—his and no one else’s!

  * * *

  His throat and lungs burned from the exertion, but as van Dyckman climbed higher, he stopped smelling any hint of halothane. Yes, he was going to make it.

  Next, he started planning how he could fix the administrative mess that would explode as soon as Rob Harris got the emergency team inside, which would start another cascade of political disasters. So many tangled moving parts!

  How was he going to manage the revelations of all the screwups that had happened today, especially the stockpile of State Department “devices” hidden in a clandestine DOE nuclear waste site? The unacknowledged nukes would have to be moved immediately, under special protection. Maybe behind the scenes there would be enough political will, and embarrassment, to keep Velvet Hammer quiet, have the incomplete warheads whisked away to some other classified location—somewhere he didn’t have to worry about.

  The only drawback would be if Adonia, Colonel Whalen, and Garibaldi had somehow survived. They had observed Victoria’s nukes, as well as all
the safety and security blunders, driven by the Mountain’s competing systems. But Valiant Locksmith had to remain intact, by any means necessary.

  Van Dyckman was confident enough in his political skills that he could manage Adonia and Whalen, if they were still alive. They were government employees, and as an Assistant Secretary, he could order them to keep quiet. And if they didn’t cooperate, he could torpedo their careers. They had signed the nondisclosure paperwork, and they knew they could go to jail if they revealed unauthorized information.

  But if Simon Garibaldi managed to blab to his Sanergy protesters, that would ruin everything. If not for the whining of such gadflies, the scientific community would have solved the nuclear waste problem decades ago. Yucca Mountain would be a successful, secure site to stockpile high-level waste. Nuclear energy would be clean and safe, and the United States’ power needs would be met inexpensively. The economy would be booming … and Garibaldi’s extremists would have to keep themselves busy saving chuckwallas or the pink fairy armadillo.

  Realistically, the best scenario would be if the old scientist had succumbed to a halothane overdose. That way, van Dyckman could properly focus the story, keep the narrative under tight control.

  Losing Colonel Whalen and Adonia saddened him, personally. Both were good people, though politically naïve. Years ago he had been Adonia’s mentor, and even after his so-called miscalculation about the Granite Bay storage arrays, when she could have humiliated him, she had been savvy enough to keep the misunderstanding—all on her part!—to herself.

  Even after the suicidal plane crash, when she accused him of nearly causing civilian first responders to be exposed to radiation, she could have used the incident to bootstrap her own career. In any case she hadn’t … and he’d never quite understood why. Did she have no ambitions of her own? He appreciated the courtesy, nevertheless.