Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Perhaps you should,” he said. “Because federal money brings federal oversight, and your Bureau is reasonably competent in the oversight department.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, tiring of the games. “We know the rules, Special Agent. I told Quartermain that if we stumble onto anything that faintly resembles evidence of a real security problem, we’re obligated to take it to you guys. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “We certainly shall do just that,” he declared. “Allow me to be frank: What happened to Ms. Gardner might be a one-off, or it might be the first indication of a much more serious problem, one we’ve actually been anticipating, and with no little trepidation, I might add.”

  I recalled what Ari had said. “You think someone’s finally managed to get something nasty through that big-ass container port upriver?”

  That surprised him, and people didn’t surprise Brother Creeps that often. He wagged a long, bony finger at me. “You be very careful talking about that little theory,” he said. “You people intrude into anything along those lines, and you might find yourself languishing on a certain Caribbean island.”

  I put up my hands in mock surrender. “Got it, okay? As I’ve said, we’re not quite sure what Mr. Quartermain has in mind for us.”

  “For what it’s worth, Mr. Richter, we think he wants to use you, as a genuine outsider, to demonstrate that his technical security system is intact, and that, ipso facto, no radiological release ever occurred at Helios.”

  “I thought the NRC was going to do some kind of isotope analysis. What happened to that?”

  He thought about that for a moment, obviously trying to decide if it was prudent to tell us anything at all. Then he nodded. “Yes. Well. The initial analysis was inconclusive. The residual radiation in Ms. Gardner’s tissue has decayed along with the tissue.”

  “Was that the only way they could prove the stuff came out of Helios?”

  “The only technically conclusive proof, yes.”

  It was my turn to think. It seemed to me that Quartermain was basically going on the offensive by bringing us in; the NRC wouldn’t be able to tag Helios with a radiological release. If we couldn’t find a hole in their security, then he’d done what the company wanted him to do—cover their corporate asses.

  “What would be the consequences if someone were to discover, inadvertently, of course, that it did come out of there?” I asked.

  “The NRC would shut them down, and then the real fun would begin, Mr. Richter. So take some care, and remember whose side you’re on when it comes to national security versus corporate liability. If there’s a dangerous hole in the plant’s security, and you spot it, I’d better know about it before Mr. Quartermain does, understood?”

  I told him it was, and he levered himself out of the creaking wicker chair. He stared down at the floor for a moment, as if making sure it was going to hold him. Then he looked back at me. “We’re operating under different rules these days, Mr. Richter. The war against terror has seen federal law enforcement crossing some lines which we used to hold fairly sacred.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, these days, if you interfere, you can disappear.”

  Then he left us.

  I breathed a sigh of relief after letting him out the front door.

  “Now that’s a weird m-f,” Tony said. “Does he always speak in code like that?”

  I went back into the kitchen and sat down. “That wasn’t code, guys. There’s something seriously amiss down here, and this time, I think we’re going to have to play by their rules. If it weren’t for Allie’s involvement, I’d back us out of this right now.”

  “Allie’s beyond caring, boss,” Pardee pointed out, “and we don’t know squat about a nuclear power plant. What exactly is it this guy wants us to do?”

  I still wasn’t quite sure myself, so I went sideways. “Why don’t you bring up the site and see if we’ve got mail?”

  He did and we did. One message from Ari. He told us to report to the Helios administration building to begin processing for vehicle passes and ID cards.

  We took two vehicles. The shepherds and I went in my Suburban; Tony and Pardee went in Pardee’s black Crown Vic. My Suburban was a plain vanilla 2500 series with the rear seats flattened to accommodate the mutts. Pardee’s ride was every inch the cop car—tinted windows, souped-up mill, several antennas, and those all-rubber semi-slick tires engineered for extreme road-handling. I think he missed being in Major Crimes. Also he liked to speed, and that getup plus a few other secret signs and totems pretty much guaranteed a pass from the state police.

  We took Highway 133 up to the plant’s main entrance and turned in. It was a beautifully landscaped entrance that gave onto a four-lane, undivided parkway. As we turned in we heard a low siren wail in the distance. It sounded like the shift-change whistle at a manufacturing plant. The road made a broad S-turn once we got past the main entrance, and then a second one lined us up with the main gates. Somewhat to our surprise, we found a squad of armed and flak-jacketed men arrayed across the gate area as we approached. I slowed the Suburban and lowered my driver’s side window. Tony pulled in right behind me. One of the guards stepped forward, while the others spread out their line, keeping what looked like Colt M4s at a loose port arms.

  “Yes, sir, can we help you?” the guard asked, eyeing the two big dogs behind me. He was courteous, but warily so. I realized then that the siren had gone off when some invisible sensor detected unauthorized vehicles approaching the main gates. I explained that we were guests of Dr. Quartermain and that we were supposed to meet him at the pass office. The guard nodded and told us that this was the plant entrance and that the admin office was another half mile down the road. We’d apparently driven right by it. He showed us where we could U-turn and wished us a nice day. The line of armed guards had relaxed fractionally, but they were still in position to shoot the two vehicles to pieces if that need were to arise.

  The admin building looked like every other admin building I’d been in. I told the guys to leave their weapons in their vehicle. I unstrapped my own .45 and jammed it down between the seat and the center console. I set Frick up in a harness and leash rig and took her into the building with me. I lowered the windows and instructed Frack to guard the Suburban with his life. He promptly lay down for a nap.

  Once inside, we were taken to Quartermain’s office, where we were met by a thirty-something brunette hottie who’d obviously been told to expect us. If she was impressed by the sight of two large and one medium-sized, very fit men, one of them being attached to an equally fit German shepherd, she gave no sign of it. She eyed Frick and said that the dog might present a problem. I told her that the dog was a service dog and that federal law required admission of such dogs if they were harnessed, leashed, and suitably trained.

  She bent forward to address Frick. “Are you suitably trained?” she asked. Tony made a small noise in his throat when she bent forward, but Frick merely looked at her for a second and then just barely wrinkled her lip.

  “Why yes you are,” the young woman said, straightening up. “We won’t mess with your dog.”

  I had to admit that it had been fun watching her straighten up, and she also was no dummy. “The dog is just part of the act,” I said. “But: There is another one out front.”

  “Then we’ll need two dog passes, won’t we,” she said and went to get the paperwork. Watching her walk away continued to be fun. I asked her where Mr. Quartermain was. “In a meeting,” she called over her shoulder. I asked if Mr. Trask was in the building.

  “You mean Colonel Trask?” she asked, just to make sure we knew how to address His Lordship.

  “Older guy, reddish gray hair, face like a hatchet? Really pleased with himself?”

  She turned her face away for a moment, trying to control a smile. The nameplate on her desk read SAMANTHA YOUNG, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT. Tony was still standing in the doorway, the veritable picture of a man fallen deeply in lust. Tony did th
at often.

  “Did you really want to see the colonel?” she asked.

  “Actually? No. You see one colonel, you’ve kind of seen them all.”

  She nodded. “I asked,” she said, “because he’s supposed to sign your security passes. Is that possibly going to be a problem?”

  “Why don’t you get Dr. Quartermain to handle that,” I suggested. “Probably save everybody a lot of time.”

  At that moment, Aristotle Quartermain came into the office through a second door. “Handle what, Sam?” he asked. She explained the problem, and he waved it off. “I’ll sign these passes,” he said. “Give all your info to Sam here, and then let’s talk. I need them to have vehicle passes and smart-tags, too, Sam, okay?”

  We did the paper drill, took mug shots and thumbprints, and then sat down with Quartermain in his inner office while young Samantha went down the hall to emboss and laminate our ID cards. I parked Frick over in one corner, where she decided to stare at our host. He thought that was pretty cool. Pardee had to snatch Tony by the collar to keep him from following Samantha. Quartermain had noticed.

  “Ain’t she something?” he said admiringly. “Hired her about a year ago when my original assistant up and moved to Florida for some strange reason. She goes for her noonday run in this little gold spandex outfit? Now half the guys at the station are out exercising. And she can shoot, too. That’s a great dog you got there. He’ll need a pass, too, though.”

  “It’s a she, and Samantha is getting the passes.”

  Tony had closed his eyes, probably trying to visualize the spandex outfit. Tony’s idea of exercise was to stow two cases of beer in his fridge, not just one, but that might change. Pardee helpfully told him to stop drooling.

  I told Quartermain about Special Agent Caswell’s visit, noting that that was the second time we’d had an “exchange of views,” and that between Trask and the FBI, the hospitality angle for H&S Investigations was disappointing.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m not too surprised. Let me bring you up to speed.”

  He told us that the first attempt to retrieve radioactive particles from Allie’s body had been a bust, which corroborated what Creeps had told us. The docs were pretty sure that whatever it was, water had been the medium and alpha particles the radiation vector. Then he took us all over to the visitors’ center, which had been closed to the public in the wake of the 9/11 disaster. There he showed us a diorama of the power station, a mockup of the control room, and some animated flowcharts that showed how the reactor system worked.

  “As you can see, the nuclear reaction provides the heat. Some of the water that cools that reaction boils into steam and goes over here to the power plant, where the steam spins a turbine, which spins a generator, which makes big-time juice. The spent steam goes down here to a condenser, where cooling water from the river turns it from vapor to liquid water, and then it’s pumped back into the reactor vessel, where the whole cycle is repeated.”

  “And that water is radioactive?” Pardee asked.

  “The whole reactor vessel and everything in it is highly radioactive, but only because it’s an integral part of an ongoing nuclear fission reaction. It’s also pressurized—it’s a boiler, after all. So between the heat, the radiation, and the steam, it’s not something you can just reach into and get yourself a container of water. You’d be dead in about an hour if you tried.”

  “So where’s this moonpool you talked about?” I asked.

  He took us to another wall chart diagram, which was titled THE REFUELING SYSTEM. “The technical name is the spent fuel storage pool. As fuel elements outlive their usefulness, they’re taken down from the reactor core and transferred underneath the reactor building to an adjacent building, which contains the storage pool. There they stay until the government gets a permanent storage site up and running.”

  “And that area’s radioactive?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s a lot like the reactor vessel itself, except the fuel elements aren’t bundled close together because we no longer want them to create a fission reaction. But the more recently they’ve been put into the moonpool, the hotter they are.”

  “So what killed Allie could have come from there, as opposed to the main reactor itself?”

  He paused for a moment. “If the stuff came from a power plant, it is much more likely to have come out of a moonpool than the reactor vessel, for the basic reason that the moonpool is not pressurized. As I said, the reactor vessel is a closed, very hot, radioactive, and pressurized system. The pool’s a pool—atmospheric pressure, forty-five, fifty feet deep, a little scary-looking, but it’s just a pool.”

  “Can we see it?” I asked.

  “Gonna show you the whole shebang, Mr. Investigator, soon as those ID cards are ready.”

  Three hours later, we returned to the admin building, following an extensive tour of the power plant. Quartermain himself conducted the tour, and it was obvious he knew his stuff as a nuclear engineer. We’d hit that I-believe button several times in the course of the tour. The shepherd attracted lots of stares, but most people in the plant seemed to be paying close attention to business, which was comforting.

  We hadn’t actually seen either reactor—there were two at Helios, Unit One and Unit Two—and, as Ari pointed out, one never did want to actually see the reactor, because that would mean that its containment had been breached. The last persons to have seen an operating reactor had been at Chernobyl, and they were all very dead.

  “You see one when it’s being built and installed, and you see it again when the plant gets decommissioned. Otherwise, you don’t want to see it.”

  “Why do power plants get decommissioned?” I’d asked.

  “Metallurgy,” he’d responded. “After twenty, twenty-five years of living in the energy flux of a uranium fission reaction, metal alloys can change state. The piping, the valves, the pumps, the fuel control mechanisms, even the instrumentation sensors become embrittled or otherwise metallurgically altered, sometimes to the point where the materials they were made out of no longer have the strength characteristics they had when they were brand-new.”

  “So they shut ’em down, permanently? As opposed to replacing all that stuff?”

  “Cheapest option,” he said. “The military does the same thing—they refuel their ship plants once, maybe twice, but when a warship’s reactor systems wear out, they scrap the whole boat. I’ve seen satellite shots of the Soviet naval bases with entire submarines rusting in the mudflats because the reactors gave out. Two, three billion dollars a copy. Talk about nuclear waste. Incredible.”

  The moonpool had looked just the way Ari had described it: a large, deep concrete structure filled with ethereal blue-green water. There were detachable glass partition walls along the sides, and steel railings at the base of those walls. The dim shapes glimmering down at the bottom were the spent fuel, encased in gleaming metal tubes and arranged in a geometric shape that prevented fission from restarting in the pool.

  “This is the area that worries Snake Trask,” Ari had told us. “In the other type of power plant, the pools are below-ground. As you can see, this one is mostly aboveground. A commercial airplane crash here could theoretically split the walls and dump the water.”

  “And that would be bad?”

  “Yes, because we’d probably get a fire or a hydrogen explosion and a big radiation release. There are systems in place to refill the pool; that’s one of the reasons these BWR plants are positioned near big bodies of water. But still, the moonpool is probably the most fragile part of a boiling water reactor plant.”

  It was Colonel Trask himself who was waiting for us, or rather Ari, when we got back to Ari’s office following our atomic walkabout. He did not appear to be a happy camper. He demanded to speak to Dr. Quartermain in private, but the closed door didn’t afford them much privacy. As we stood around in the reception area trying not to stare at the lovely Samantha, we could hear Trask detonating on the subject of issuing cl
earance and physical access to people like us. I couldn’t hear what Ari was saying in reply, but, whatever it was, it wasn’t mollifying Trask very much. It was also clear from all the racket that the security chief and his people intended to make our stay on the plant grounds difficult.

  I quietly told Pardee and Tony to go on back to the beach house and wait for me there, and meanwhile to see what they could do about getting us a boat.

  “What kind of boat?” Tony asked.

  “Twenty-footer or thereabouts, shallow draft, inboard engine, with a radar set if possible. Not for the open ocean. Strictly for river work. Try the marinas around Southport, or maybe Oak Island.”

  “We drive, or they drive?” Pardee asked.

  “We drive,” I said.

  It sounded like the choleric colonel was winding down in there, so I asked Samantha if she could escort my people to the egress. I sat down in one corner of the reception area with Frick parked next to me on her leash. Trask glared at the two of us as he stalked out of Quartermain’s office. He was wearing green Army utilities this time and a large sidearm. A moment later, Ari appeared in his doorway and motioned for me to come in.

  “Was that fun?” I asked, shutting his door behind me. If he was perturbed, he didn’t show it. He waved me to a chair.

  “It’s all he knows how to do,” he said. “Shout and bluster. You know, asses will be kicked, hides flayed, things will be turned every which way but loose—all the standard Army bullshit.”

  “He works for you—why don’t you indulge in some of the standard bullshit right back at him?”

  “Because he’s useful,” he said. “He’s got a perpetual red-ass, and he is completely unpredictable. Since nobody knows where he’s going to turn up next, he tends to keep his and my people on their toes.”

  “I can’t imagine nuclear engineers putting up with verbal abuse like that,” I said.

  “Yeah, the hoo-ah stuff doesn’t play in technical security, because the assumption there is that we’re all focused on the same thing: keeping the dragon in its cave. Physical security assumes the good guys are in here, while everyone out there is a bad guy until proven otherwise.”