“No, sir,” Bennet said, still not looking away from what he was doing. “Whoever did it knew what he was doing, and probably did the thing right in front of one of the shift supervisors.”
“We’re talking about someone on the inside. One of our employees.”
“Yes, sir, a real pro.”
A sudden strangely bleak expression came into Gail’s face as if she’d just thought of something completely disagreeable, even horrible, and she looked at Townsend and Wager behind him.
“What?” Townsend asked.
“I think we need to start the evacuation right now,” Gail said. “Immediately. Get everybody the hell away.”
“I thought you wanted to wait to see what’s going on down there first,” Wager said.
“They’re all dead, that’s why they haven’t responded.”
Townsend had the feeling that someone or something was walking over his grave, but he also had the hollow feeling that she might be right, and he hated her with everything in his being for just that instant, until he came to his senses and knew that it wasn’t her who had stabbed him in the heart, it was she who was trying to stop what was happening.
“I’ll start it,” Wager said, and he turned and rushed back to security where the code red would be broadcast everywhere throughout the facility, as well as to every law enforcement and emergency response agency within twenty-five miles.
“Get your people out of here, Bob,” Gail said. “And make it quick, because once the sirens blow there will probably be a fair amount of panic.”
“What about you?”
“We’ll know the situation in a few minutes. Just get the hell away.”
“I’ll be back,” Townsend promised, and he went to the conference room.
Everyone looked up when he came in, and most of them could see that something was wrong, and it showed in their faces.
“Ladies and gentlemen, a situation with one of our reactors is developing and merely as a precaution we’re evacuating all nonessential personnel,” he told them
“My God,” Sarah Mueller, SSP&L’s nuclear programs manager, said, getting to her feet. “Are you scramming the reactor?”
“Not yet,” Townsend said. “But that may be next. For now I’d like everyone to get out of here.”
“Where are you sending your people?” Differding, the company’s chief of operations, asked.
“As far away from here as possible, Tom.”
Everyone except for Eve Larsen was on their feet, and heading for the door. She was calmly putting the material she’d been using for her presentation into her attaché case.
“You too, Doctor,” Townsend said.
“Are you in trouble here?” she asked.
He started to tell her no, that everything would be fine, but he couldn’t lie to her. She was too bright, and she didn’t seem the type to panic. He nodded. “Could be serious, we just don’t know yet. Get away from here.”
“Preferably upwind?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Good luck,” she said, and walked out.
Leaving Townsend listening to his own inner voices that ever since he’d gotten into nukes had been speaking to him about the inevitability of an accident. Three Mile Island had been bad, and Chernobyl much worse. This today could be catastrophic. And there would be others, because no matter how safe they engineered and built these things, they were nuclear engines after all. Not quite bombs, but damned close.
He picked up the conference room phone and called his wife. Their home was on Jupiter Island, just a few miles away.
THIRTEEN
Air National Guard left seat pilot, Captain Frank Henderson, flew the Pave Hawk helicopter low and at maximum throttle, generally following I-95 north along Florida’s coastline that bulged a little bit to the east, out into the Atlantic, before turning due north and then northwest. Lundgren had gotten on his laptop and pulled up a site map of the nuclear plant, and showed it to McGarvey.
“The control room is on the ground floor in the South Service Building,” Lundgren pointed it out.
“How about security?”
“Same building, second floor. I’m sure that Gail is right in the thick of it.”
“No doubt,” McGarvey said, and he glanced out the window at the interstate highway. Traffic was heavy, as it usually was on a weekday, but twenty miles from St. Lucie there still was no noticeable difference southbound than there was north. If a full-scale evacuation had been ordered the first ripples had not reached this far yet. But when it did, he figured it was going to get messy down there.
Since they’d gotten the call from the hotline he had gone over in his head the possible scenarios they would be walking into, none of which seemed the least bit attractive. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear reactors were not inherently unstable or even dangerous. Crashing airliners into the containment domes would probably cause a lot of damage, but not enough to guarantee a release of nuclear materials into the atmosphere. But the right team in the control room, willing to give their lives in exchange, could cause a great deal of harm, a catastrophic meltdown if the reactors were not allowed to be scrammed and the cooling pumps shut down or sabotaged. It would be many magnitudes worse than Chernobyl.
And Lundgren was correct, Gail would be right in the middle of it, chastising herself for allowing the incursion to get this far. It’s one of the first principles he’d drummed into her head last year: prevention came first. Stop the guys from getting in the four airliners in the first place before they killed the crews and took over the flight controls. By then very little could have been done in the very short time once it was realized what was about to happen.
She’d allowed someone into the control room of her nuclear plant and she would be raving mad, beside herself, seething with a rage that she would not allow to show up on her face, in her actions, in her voice. She was the Ice Maiden on the outside, but still a lonely woman from Minnesota who in many ways was still mad at her father for getting himself killed, and therefore angry with just about every man she’d ever met.
Save one.
And there was a time when he’d been even more vulnerable than her. His wife, daughter, and son-in-law were all killed, leaving him to take a horrible revenge, and in the end he was a damaged, haunted man who had been open to the loving kindness of a woman. But almost immediately he began beating himself up for his weakness, and he still did for that weakness and his sometimes barely controlled anger. He didn’t know how or where it would end for him. Or when, if ever.
The tops of the Hutchinson Island power station’s containment domes appeared on the horizon right on their nose. And traffic on the interstate was beginning to pick up, most of it heading south.
McGarvey was wearing a headset. “Find a place to set us down inside the fence,” he told the pilot.
“Their heliport is just off A1A north of the visitors’ center,” the pilot said.
“Inside the fence, Captain.”
“Someone might take exception, sir.”
“I don’t care.”
Lundgren showed the pilot the site layout on his laptop. “Get us as close to the South Service Building as you can,” he said, pointing out the building that sat in front of and between the containment domes. “Looks like a staff parking lot.”
“Whatever you say,” the pilot said and he banked the helicopter off toward the island.
Lundgren shut down his computer and set it aside, then pulled out his pistol, a fifteen-round 9mm SIG-Sauer P226, and checked the load, before reholstering it high on his waist on the right side.
He caught McGarvey watching him and shrugged. Early on he’d admitted that he didn’t like the idea of shooting someone, anyone, but if it came to a gun fight he wasn’t going to rely on his less than perfect aim using something like McGarvey’s seven-shot pistol. He wanted to pull off a lot of shots as quickly as possible without stopping to reload. And fifteen rounds beats seven, he’d argued.
McGarvey had never taken exception with Lundgren’s tradecraft. He’d never once faltered, no matter the job that was set before him, and in the time they had worked together they had not really become friends — that was still difficult for McGarvey — but they had become trusted allies. McGarvey could count on him, and he was pretty sure that Lundgren felt the same about him.
The two bridges from Hutchinson Island to the mainland just south of the power plant were starting to jam up, traffic nearly at a halt. Police units were converging on the problem, but it was going to take a fair amount of time to clear up the situation, and that, McGarvey figured, was exactly what a terrorist bent on causing the greatest loss of life would have wanted. They would have wanted to wait until after the plant was evacuated and people were stuck on the roads before blowing the place.
The problem was the geography. Hutchinson Island’s Nuclear Incident Evacuation Plan was the same as the county’s Hurricane Evacuation Plan; the only way off the island, other than by boat or helicopter, was A1A — the narrow highway, more like a neighborhood street actually — that ran north and south, with only three bridges to the mainland, two a few miles to the south, and one to the north. It was a two-headed bottleneck that was already clogging.
“It’s starting to get bad down there,” he told the pilot. “Can you transport people out, somewhere upwind?”
Henderson and his copilot, Lieutenant Jim Reilly, nodded. “If those are your orders, sir.”
“Good man, but I don’t know how long the situation is going to remain stable. This place could blow at any minute. So it’s your call if you come back for more.”
“We normally carry a crew, including gunners, of six, plus a dozen fully equipped troops and their gear,” Henderson said. “So we can probably manage twenty-five or thirty people each load.” He glanced at his pilot. “We’ll come back as many times as we’re needed, or until you wave us off.”
People were streaming out of the various buildings throughout the plant, including the visitors center and the South Service Building where there seemed to be some panic developing.
As the pilot flared over the middle of the big parking lot, several uniformed security people, realizing that the chopper was going to land, began herding people away as best they could. But it still took several long minutes before Henderson could set the Pave Hawk down.
As soon as they were grounded, McGarvey and Lundgren jumped down, and waved a pair of security people over, one of them a tall, black man who seemed completely unflustered despite all the chaos.
“Alex Freidland,” he said, shaking their hands. “I’m chief of South Service Security. You guys from the NNSA?”
McGarvey nodded. “The whole team should be here shortly. For now I want you to take charge here. We’re going to start moving people to high ground right now. Can you do that for me?”
They had to shout to be heard over the rising noise. People were still streaming out of the building and either racing to their cars and motorcycles or out the main gate to the highway where they hoped to catch one of the emergency buses that were supposed to be en route in this sort of situation.
“The bridges getting bad already?”
“It’s going to be a major mess shortly,” McGarvey said.
“Can do,” Freidland said. “And if you’re looking for Ms. Newby, she’s straight up the stairs.”
Some of the people were beginning to see the helicopter as a quicker way out and they started to storm it, but Freidland and several more of his officers held them back, picking out only those who had no transportation and were depending on the buses.
McGarvey and Lundgren fought their way through the crowd, roughly elbowing people out of the way, to South Service’s main entrance in time to see a slender, deeply tanned blond woman carrying an attaché case struggle out the door. Before she could get five feet a half dozen or more people, men and women, burst out of the door, knocking her to the pavement, and raced past, even more people streaming out the building as the evacuation sirens began to wail.
Panic was nearly full-blown now. This was a nuclear plant and sirens were the last straw, and people crawled over each other to get as far away as fast as possible before the entire place went up in a pair of mushroom clouds. Only a handful of employees at any nuclear power plant were actually nuclear engineers. The vast majority were hourly workers from electricians and plumbers, to janitors and security officers and tour guides; these were people who were happy to have well-paying jobs, while at the same time believing in their heart-of-hearts that they were working under the threat of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki, especially after 9/11.
And now they wanted to be gone from this place as quickly as was humanly possible.
Another woman and a man were knocked off their feet just as McGarvey and Lundgren reached the blond woman.
McGarvey helped her to her feet as Lundgren was helping the other two, shielding them as best he could from the last of the employees leaving the building. And suddenly it was just the five of them at the entry.
“Get them out of here,” he told Lundgren. “I’m going to try to find Gail.”
“I have my own car,” the blond woman said.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Dr. Larsen, if your car isn’t glowing in the dark by tonight, I’ll make sure that you get back to fetch it. Right now I want you gone. Deal?”
Her mouth opened for just a moment, but then she nodded. “Deal,” she said.
McGarvey spun on his heel and headed into the building.
“What’s your name?” Eve called after him, but then he was inside, racing up the stairs.
FOURTEEN
The main entrance security officers were gone, presumably outside helping with the evacuation, so there was no one to stop McGarvey from going up to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. The building definitely had the air of not only desertion and emptiness, but of a dark, dangerous cloud hanging just overhead; a crisis was in full bloom here, and he could practically smell it in the air.
Gail was halfway down the corridor to the right with four men, one of them on his knees in front of a large plate-glass window.
A large man who looked to McGarvey like a roustabout in a business suit glanced over his shoulder as McGarvey came out. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“Kirk McGarvey, NNSA. Who are you?”
“Bob Townsend. I’m the manager.”
Everyone turned around, and Gail’s face lit up. “My God, Kirk, I thought you were in Washington,” she cried.
“Miami. Gruen is getting his team together. What’s the situation?”
“Someone’s locked us out of the control room,” Gail said. “We’re going through the window with a remote head video camera to see what’s happening down there.”
“Why the evacuation?” McGarvey asked. “A lot of people are panicking, and someone’s bound to get hurt.”
“We tried to remotely scram the reactors, but those circuits were locked out as well.” She shrugged, almost like she was back in training with him and was waiting for his approval. “It was my call. Just to be on the safe side.”
“How many people are inside?”
“Five, a shift supervisor and four operators. But someone else could have gotten in. I don’t know how, and I’m not even sure it happened, but my gut is singing.” She explained about the man in one of the tour groups, who’d claimed he was sick and had left. “He was up here on this level, and his group went down the back stairs and down the north corridor to the rear door over to the turbine buildings. The control room entry is off that corridor. He would have passed right by it. Ten minutes later one of my security people at the visitors center said the guy dropped off his pass and hard hat and left. When I brought up the camera in the parking lot he was just getting in his car, and when he got to A1A he turned right, to the south. But he told the people at the visitors center that he had an appointment in Jacksonville. To the north.”
“Good call,” McGarvey
said. “How soon before you get through the glass?”
“Almost there,” Bennet said.
Wager had set up a laptop computer and plugged the remote camera into it. The sharply defined image, displayed in color on the monitor showed the corridor they were standing in. The camera head itself, about the size of a pencil eraser, was at the end of a five-foot flex cable that could be controlled, left to right and up and down from the laptop’s keyboard.
Bennet’s diamond-tipped glass-cutting drill bit made very little noise. “It’s not likely anyone inside will have heard anything,” Gail said, watching.
McGarvey studied her profile, everything about her at this moment intent and tightly focused. She was doing her job the way she’d been trained by the NNSA, in part by him, and so far as he could tell she’d made all the right moves and for all the right reasons. She wasn’t relying on happenstance. But he wondered if she still had a chip on her narrow shoulders for most men because of her father. When she’d turned around and saw him standing there, she’d seemed genuinely pleased, and not ashamed to let that emotion show for just second or two. And for just those seconds he was forced to reexamine his feelings about her, only he hadn’t come to any conclusions. The situation was developing too fast for that sort of thinking, and anyway he wasn’t ready. Later.
“Does anyone know who’s supposed to be on duty down there?” he asked.
“Stan Kubansky is the shift super,” Strasser said. “And if there really is a problem, it sure as hell wasn’t him that caused it. I know the man personally.”
“For how long?”
“Ever since I hired him five years ago.”
“What’s your position here?”
“Chief engineer.”
“Good,” McGarvey said. “You’re just the man we’ll need to evaluate the situation.”
“We’re in,” Bennet said. He withdrew the drill and moved aside to let Gail insert the camera head, which she did with great care so as not to ruffle the blinds.
McGarvey and the others watched the computer monitor as the camera lens slowly cleared the blinds, the first images of the ceiling and light fixtures, until Wager flexed the cable to slowly pan the camera down.
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