“Release it right after the rope catches. The rotation will pull it in, snag the line, and clog the fan.”
Adonia glanced back up at the old machinery, then worked her way up until she hung only a few feet below the spinning blades. She removed one end of the rope from her shoulder, tied a small loop, then let a few feet of rope drop. She twirled the line. “I feel like a rodeo cowboy.”
“With the grime smeared over you, you look more like a coal miner,” Shawn said.
“I’ll take a shower when we’re out of here. Right now, you’ll have to put up with me.” She twirled the rope faster, then jerked it up toward the blades. The small lasso caught in the fan with a loud clang, spun around as the blades rotated, whipping it, tangling it. The rope swiftly snaked up, and Adonia played it out for a few seconds, then let go of the line.
She ducked. The other end of the rope snapped around, just missing her head as it shot into the fan blades like a spaghetti noodle being slurped up by a child. The fan’s drive motor made an increasingly loud whine, accompanied by a sharp rhythmic banging that echoed throughout the shaft. Adonia pressed herself flat against the rungs and the granite wall, afraid the entire old fan system might break from its moorings and collapse on top of them.
The wide metal blades slowed, strained, and then ground to a halt. The fan thrummed with leftover vibrations, and the roaring air current quieted to a barely perceptible breeze. The halothane’s distinct odor was replaced by the smell of smoke and burning wire.
The LED lights in the walls blinked out, plunging the shaft into darkness, but now Adonia could make out a faint halo of light between the motionless fan blades.
It was light from outside.
“I can see daylight up there!”
They waited, making sure that the motor had really burned out, and then they cheered simultaneously. Garibaldi sounded breathless and weary as he urged Adonia upward. “We can celebrate later, but I’d just as soon get into the open with all due haste. I … I am anxious to see the sky again.”
Adonia worked her way up into the enclosure that held the fan in place, where she could smell the hot oil and burning grease from the wrecked motor. Around the shaft and blades, the mangled rope looked like a noose. “Climb on up. It’s safe—this fan is never turning again. We can squeeze between the blades.”
Adonia clambered into the motionless turbine, squirming her way between the flat metal vanes. She cautiously raised her head above the frozen blade. “I feel like I’m sticking my head into a guillotine.” Briefly stuck, she grunted and pushed the fan through part of its rotation to widen the gap for the two men to climb through.
A faint curl of greasy white smoke still drifted from the direct-drive motor, but the mechanism made no more straining sounds. She silently told herself she would be fine and squirmed through, finally climbing up to reach the rungs above the ominous blockage. “It’s a little tight, but we’ll make it to the top.”
Bending down, she extended her arm through the motionless blades to help Garibaldi, who wheezed as he wormed his way up to join her. His shoulders barely fit through the gap.
Adonia worked her way around the framework and found a secure position so she could help Garibaldi climb past her. “Go on, lead the way to the top. I’m right behind you.”
The scientist started up the rungs without a word. His face wore a perpetual wince from the pain in his hands.
Shawn squeezed through the fan blades until he emerged next to Adonia. Without a word, he reached out to touch her face. Soot, dust, and grime smeared his cheeks, and his uniform was in a frightful state. Adonia knew she must look worse. “You can’t report to the President looking like that. I better hose you off when we get outside.”
“And I would be honored to do the same for you,” he said. “That’s what friends are for.”
Garibaldi was already two body lengths above them. He kept ponderously climbing as he shouted down to them. “You’re right, it’s daylight. I can see ahead.”
Energized, Adonia climbed after him, feeling a desperate need to get out of the tunnel, to breathe fresh air, and be away from Hydra Mountain. The glimpse of sunshine above gave her a renewed sense of purpose.
The halo overhead grew brighter with every rung. Now that the fan’s roar had fallen silent, she could hear Garibaldi breathing hard with the effort, but the sunlight also illuminated more of the vertical shaft. Garibaldi stopped a few feet from the top. He lowered his head and called down. “The exit is blocked off, covered by a structure of some sort.”
Despite her discouragement, she realized it made sense. Hydra Mountain wouldn’t just vent out of an open chimney.
“It’s a cylindrical structure with slits on the sides,” Garibaldi reported. “Some kind of baffle to emit the exhaust air horizontally, rather than straight up into the atmosphere.”
“More difficult for overhead surveillance to detect any plume that way,” Shawn said. “And the layered slits in the baffle would reduce any temperature signature for infrared sensors.”
Thinking of the original Cold War–era construction, Adonia understood the measures installed to keep the site covert. “It probably also has filters or air scrubbers to make sure no chemical signatures from the vented air could be detected.” She climbed up next to the scientist, assessing the barricade. So close …
Garibaldi said, “Most important question is whether we can get through it.”
The cylindrical cap was no larger than a crawlspace, big enough for a worker to exit the shaft. The daylight filtering in through the baffle cast deeper shadows in the cramped space. She looked around for a lock or handle. “Workers would need to have an exit. There must be—”
Then she saw a crash bar, identical to the emergency device they had used to break out of the guard portal. “Three cheers for safety systems.” Her voice cracked with relief. “We can get out.”
Before she could push her way through, Garibaldi touched her arm to stop her. Wires led from a contact sensor embedded in the exit door, connected to the crash bar. “That’s an alarm. It probably signals Hydra Mountain’s operations center, maybe even DOE Protective Services. They would be monitoring site security.”
“Triggering another alarm doesn’t bother me,” Adonia said. “We’ve had enough of them today. Let them come rescue us at last.”
“Unless it sets off a defensive measure designed to stop a bad guy from exiting the Mountain,” Shawn said. “Or someone trying to get in.”
“That would be just our luck,” she said. “But we’ve got to get out of here. Dr. Garibaldi—”
“Yes. We do,” Garibaldi said. “And after surviving tear gas, sonic bombardments, avalanches of sticky foam, a flood of knockout gas, radioactive fuel rods, and a very inconveniently placed ventilation fan, I’m not about to throw in the towel. Let’s just go.”
Shawn said, “If it’s any consolation, an alarm probably already went off when we shut down the ventilation fan. What have we got to lose?”
With her hand on the crash bar, Adonia looked at them. “I’m ready if you both are.”
Garibaldi said, “I would really rather get out of here and have my feet on solid ground. But we also can’t let them silence us, whisk us into some secure facility where they can cover up what happened. We know Stanley’s alive, and we know he would do anything to cover his butt and spin what happened in there. Two people are already dead. We need to find a way to tell the story before he sanitizes the scene—and us.”
Adonia nodded. If van Dyckman had already put a gag on Rob Harris, he would likely do the same thing to them. “We’ll have to figure something out once we get into the open air. We’re deep inside a military base and behind several layers of security fences. We can’t just hold a news conference.”
Garibaldi was grim. “I do not intend to go quietly as part of a cover-up. I have a long list of things to do in whatever time I’ve got left.”
Adonia knew that van Dyckman was an expert politician, and he had rail
roaded Valiant Locksmith through when all public attempts to address the crisis had stalled for decades. But by circumventing the classified interagency review process, what he’d done was clearly illegal; probably just one of many other illegal actions. How far would he go to keep himself out of jail?
Bringing in multiple shipments of still-hot fuel rods and cramming them into a flimsy above-ground pool made things even more dangerous. If they turned themselves in, Adonia was sure he would find a way to detain Garibaldi until the radiation sickness killed him. She and Shawn would be put on ice until the problem was hushed up.
Adonia asked, “Even if we got the chance to expose this, who are we going to tell? And how?”
“Site security will round us up before we go very far,” Shawn said.
She heard the sound of Garibaldi’s wheezing breath as he struggled to find an answer, and she made up her mind. “Doesn’t matter. We’re getting out.” She placed a hand on the crash bar. “Ready for all hell to break loose?”
“It already has,” Garibaldi said, barely louder than a whisper. “What’s a little more going to hurt?”
Adonia slammed against the crash bar with a vengeance. With a crack, the exit swung open, and sunlight flooded the cramped crawlspace.
An alarm clanged far below, echoing up the shaft, but she didn’t care. She tumbled onto the rocky, scrub-covered ground on the rough summit of Hydra Mountain. Far in the distance, she heard sirens wail, and soon the three of them stood together in the hot desert air, outside at last.
46
Another alarm rang in the Eagle’s Nest and alerts lit up the ops center screens—but this was not the alarm van Dyckman was expecting. Not at all. This had nothing to do with the cleanup or the Special Response Team.
It was an exterior breach alarm! What the hell?
Light-headed and enraged at the same time, he rose from behind Harris’s desk. One of the few access points to Hydra Mountain had been compromised. How could anyone possibly break in with security teams everywhere? He felt a chill, suddenly wondering if that blundering small aircraft really had been part of some wild conspiracy, a distraction to drop in an intruder. Someone was using the chaos of the multiple lockdowns to break into the facility!
Frantically, he swept his eyes across the tall screens in the operations center below. Drexler and his tech teams scrambled to their stations in a sudden flurry, struggling to pinpoint the new alarm.
The young exec pointed at the upper right corner of the screen, which showed a schematic of Hydra Mountain’s two underground levels. A small, innocuous red square glowed at the top of a long narrow air duct that ran from the lower cavern through the rock ceiling to the outside. Somebody had compromised an emergency exit at the top of the shaft.
Van Dyckman felt sick, panicked. Did someone else know about Velvet Hammer and Victoria’s hidden warheads? There might be a full assault team trying to work their way in.
But he still couldn’t believe it. Four fences surrounded the Mountain. All were heavily alarmed and covered with sensors, ranging from motion detectors to thermal cameras, so sensitive that they were frequently triggered by prairie dogs and jackrabbits. The inner two fences were electrified.
That breach was on the very summit, and no person or team could have slipped so far inside the heavily fortified perimeter without being detected. And the outside of Hydra Mountain was swarming with security and safety personnel. No one could have climbed all the way up there unseen!
According to the schematics he was studying, the only mechanism to open the vent was a crash bar, accessible only from the inside.
Then he actually gasped as he realized someone wasn’t attempting to break in. Someone was trying to get out!
Van Dyckman found it hard to breathe, and his stomach twisted. The red encrypted phone on Harris’s desk started ringing, and the small screen identified the caller as Secretary Nitta, but he let it ring. The bitch was probably in micromanagement mode, and she would only screw things up.
This couldn’t be a coincidence. Impossible as it seemed, someone from the inside was still alive. The SRT had not found the bodies of Colonel Whalen, Dr. Garibaldi, or Adonia Rojas. Fifteen minutes earlier, circuit breakers in the ventilation system had been tripped, signaling that an old piece of equipment had burned out, but he’d assumed that the nuclear response team or the cleanup team had overloaded the antique grid. Pumps and some lighting on the lower floor near the temporary storage pools had gone down.
Now he knew otherwise.
The phone fell silent, then instantly started to ring once more. This time it was someone from security, but he ignored it again.
Studying the diagram of the Mountain, looking at the location of the compromised access, he confirmed his suspicions. An old ventilation duct led directly up from the catwalks, and if the three survivors had somehow climbed the crane, gotten above the halothane mists, made their way to the catwalks … they could have worked their way out, just as he had. He had called out to them through the loudspeaker, but he’d never believed they were listening. That was all just for show, so he could demonstrate his concern in full view of everyone in the ops center.
But they were really still alive, and now they had gotten out. This was turning out to be his worst nightmare.
He had to develop yet another emergency plan to bottle up those three before they compromised Valiant Locksmith. Who knew what they might say? He had already neatly taken care of Rob Harris, and now he had to keep these three from talking. He would order Incident Commander Jennings and her team to round them up before they got any farther. Surely they would want to be rescued, and then he could deal with them.
He forced himself to be calm, slowing his breathing. Van Dyckman would quickly put a lid on this, snuff out any problem. Yes, it could still be done.
The office door burst open, and Drexler ran into the room, frantically pointing at the phone on the desk. “Sir, both the Secretary and the DOE Incident Commander have been trying to reach you. Commander Jennings says it’s urgent and she is still on the line.”
Jumpy, he punched at the encrypted phone, listened as Jennings spoke in a rush. “Mr. van Dyckman, there’s been a breach at the top of the Mountain—”
“I know. I know!” He squeezed his eyes tight. “Get your people there as soon as possible. We may have some intruders trying to get away. Intercept them, take them into custody, and don’t let them talk to anyone. I’ll debrief them myself.”
“Already taken care of, sir. Our air surveillance has spotted three individuals outside of an emergency egress hatch near the summit. They appear to be unarmed. But it may be good news, sir—they’re quite likely the missing team members. They survived somehow.”
He could not let her treat this lightly. “Exercise extreme caution until you’re sure, and even then don’t let down your guard. It’s quite possible that one or more of those people intentionally caused the lockdown inside the facility and may even be attempting sabotage. Take them into custody.” His thoughts raced. He had to keep them quiet, at least until he could make Adonia and Colonel Whalen see reason. With their high-level connections to the President, the military, and the Department of Energy, those two might be manageable. They might do what was best for the program, if he could explain the dire consequences facing them if they didn’t.
But if Simon Garibaldi got word out to his large network of protesters at Sanergy, that would be a public relations disaster. They might even close Hydra Mountain and send all the high-level waste back to dangerous temporary storage areas across the country. Worse yet, the public outcry might force the closure of all nuclear plants—it had happened in Japan after Fukushima. Could it happen here?
Sick to his stomach, van Dyckman knew he couldn’t afford to take any chances. “We have to … contain this.”
The Incident Commander was in her element now, reacting swiftly and professionally. “Don’t worry, sir. Even with the rugged terrain, I estimate my team arriving on scene in less than
fifteen minutes. Backup air support can be called, if needed.”
Van Dyckman found himself nodding. “They must be held and questioned. After everything that’s happened today, we can’t be too careful.”
“Maybe we should call in medical rescue, too,” she suggested.
He had to say it. “As a precaution, yes.” Another thought struck him, and he quickly smiled with relief. “But operate under the assumption that these people may be contaminated. It’s possible they may have radioactive material in their possession.” That’s it! “For safety’s sake, treat them as dangerous. Keep them away from as many people as possible.”
He would have to start making calls to the DOE, the Department of Defense, the State Department. Everyone had a stake here. They all had a common goal to keep the waived, unacknowledged programs under wraps at any cost. All three departments would support him and take whatever actions were necessary.
“Yes, sir, I understand. My team is prepared to deal with any possibility. Our decontamination procedures are quite effective—”
“And they may also have possession of highly classified material, which if revealed, could cause grave and permanent danger to national security.” Van Dyckman could feel the pieces fall into place.
Jennings responded, although she didn’t sound pleased with his directive. “Yes, sir. I … understand completely. We’ll take care of it.”
Van Dyckman hung up, relieved that he had a little bit of breathing room.
Fortunately, the three escapees were still deep inside the security fences, so they would not be seen in public. They had no way to communicate with the outside, and Jennings would keep them contained, at least for now.
He slumped into the site manager’s chair and leaned back, considering his next step.
That was the beauty of operating under an unacknowledged program. As the national program manager, he controlled all access and information. With the loss of Senator Pulaski, Valiant Locksmith no longer had its most important advocate or political high cover. The man’s death would bring down far more scrutiny than van Dyckman would have liked, but congressional oversight would be temporarily absent.
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