Marsha Littlejohn, tall, whip-thin, pale blond, a leather satchel slung over her narrow shoulders, stepped around Gruen, her expression tightening when she saw the bodies and the blood. But then she spotted Lundgren at the scram panel, and went directly over to him, ignoring McGarvey and Strasser for the moment.
“What’s the situation?” she asked, and Lundgren explained what they up against, including the CIA’s opinion.
Gruen’s second team member stopped just inside the doorway. He was young, probably in his twenties, with the physique of a college football player, and like his boss he carried two aluminum cases that contained the equipment for detecting nuclear weapons, and for electronically interfering with the weapons’ firing systems.
“This looks like your sort of work,” Gruen said to McGarvey. “But since the shooting seems to be done with, why don’t you get the fuck out of my incident scene.”
“Nice to see you too, Carlos,” McGarvey said. “Well equipped for the job at hand, and on time as usual.”
Marsha had set her satchel on the floor and was pulling out some tools, and other equipment including a stethoscope and several small electronic devices each about the size of a pack of cigarettes or cell phone.
She looked up. “Oh, hi, Mac,” she said pleasantly, a little smile on her full lips. If she was feeling any tension it wasn’t showing. “You guys might want to get out of here, because we could screw this up.”
“She’s right,” Lundgren said, and he too was calm. Behind him the LED counter was passing 22:00. “We’re going to attempt to take the detonator circuit apart and disable the power supply, and it’s going to get a little dicey. Somebody accidentally bumps into something and we could be in trouble.”
Strasser was looking helpless, confused, and angry. This was his facility; he was responsible for the operation of the reactors and everything else of a nonbusiness and nonadministrative nature, and a dagger had been stabbed into his heart. Men he knew and trusted were dead, one of them the killer, the saboteur, and it was all too much for him.
“Leave now,” McGarvey told him. “Find your plant manager and figure out what you’ll have to do if we disarm the explosives, but more important what you’ll need to do if we fail.”
Marsha looked over her shoulder. “Everybody out. Now,” she said.
Strasser left, but Gruen with his second team member remained at the door, just as frustrated as the chief engineer was. But this situation was out of his hands. Nothing he could say or do was going to help, and he knew it, and it made him angry. He needed to be in the center of things, he needed to be in control, and his attitude had always been the same: The road to the directorship was paved with good field decisions, good management of his resources, and innovative solutions, and he wasn’t afraid to tell anyone who would listen.
“Do you need anything for backup?” he asked.
But Marsha didn’t respond. She turned the LED counter on the coolant control panel over on its back, her movements slow, careful, precise, and she began to hum a tune from the back of her throat. She’d once explained that she was always frightened practically out her mind — spitless, as she put it — and humming distracted that automatic part of her fight-or-flight instinct so that she could do her work with a steady hand.
Lundgren was paying close attention to what she was doing, and copying each of her moves, his hands just as steady as hers, as he worked on the LED counter attached to the scram panel for number two.
The counters passed 20:00.
“I’ll be right back,” McGarvey said. He glanced at his wristwatch; it was a few minutes before 1:40 P.M. By 2:00 P.M. the situation would be resolved one way or the other, and for the moment it was just as much out of his hands as it was out of Gruen’s.
“Doug and I will be out in the corridor,” Gruen said. “If you need anything I’ll be within earshot.”
They went outside and McGarvey followed after them. Gruen badly wanted to say something, take a parting shot, but he just shook his head.
“They don’t have a lot of time,” McGarvey said. “So it’s just a suggestion, but you might want to stay out of their way. Cut them a little slack.”
“Get out of here,” Gruen said.
McGarvey hurried down the hall and took the stairs to the second floor, past the blown-out observation window and Wager’s body, and back to the security suite, deserted now, as he hoped the entire facility was.
A pair of offices — Gail’s and Wager’s — were down a short corridor from the reception area, and across from a small room with banks of closed-circuit television monitors built into a long horseshoe-shaped console with positions for two operators. Behind them, another door opened to a room filled with a dozen or more racks of digital recording units.
Mac took a few precious minutes figuring out the system so that he could access the camera watching the visitors center. He brought the image up on one of the monitors. The lot was deserted of civilian personnel, and only a single St. Lucie County sheriff’s unit was parked diagonally across A1A. The legend at the bottom of the screen showed a camera number and a date-time block.
Some of the other cameras showed various places within the facility, all of them deserted except for the parking lot directly outside, where the Air National Guard helicopter was just setting down. Strasser emerged from the building and headed over to a knot of a half dozen people, one of whom McGarvey recognized as Bob Townsend, the plant manager, getting ready to board the chopper.
McGarvey went into the recording room, where it took another minute or two to locate the unit that corresponded to the visitors center parking lot camera, pop the disk out, and pocket it.
Back out in the corridor across from Gail’s office, he hesitated for a brief moment, wondering what he would find inside, what new measure of her he might discover, and in the next moment he wondered why he cared.
The answer came to him reluctantly as he hurried out into the main corridor and headed toward the observation window, Wager’s blood splattered against the opposite wall, and pooled up under his body. He’d cared for someone all of his life, and those kinds of feelings were like unbreakable habits reinforced each time he entered a relationship. At this stage with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law dead, the habit was still alive and active inside of him, perhaps stronger than ever, and he couldn’t help from wondering about Gail; couldn’t help wondering about himself.
He glanced at his wristwatch, it was coming up on 1:50 P.M., as he reached the observation window. Still moving, he glanced down. Lundgren and Marsha had shifted over to the rigged panels for reactor one, and were hunched over their work. Both LED counters on reactor two lay on a tray beneath the panels, their batteries disconnected, as was one of the counters for reactor one, and for the first time since he’d arrived he had genuine hope that they’d come on time because there was still ten minutes left on the last LED counter.
He was just past the window when a bright flash caught the corner of his eye, and he turned his head as the explosion disintegrated Marsha’s and Alan’s upper torsos and heads in a single haze of blood, and metal parts, and dust from somewhere.
It was so fast that McGarvery had no time to react, no time to move a muscle, no time even to stop in his tracks, or to feel anything beyond surprise.
Gruen was shouting something that McGarvey couldn’t make out over the ringing in his ears, and in the next second or two with the sounds of metal and bits of glass falling around the control room, he ran for the stairs to the back corridor and control room door.
“Get out of there!” he shouted, taking the stairs down two at a time, nearly stumbling and pitching headfirst, the images of his wife’s and daughter’s bodies destroyed beyond all hope of salvation, beyond even recognition, rising up in his eyes like a bitter gorge choking his breath.
Gruen, standing at the open door with his other team member, Douglas Vigliaturo, looked around, his movements in slow motion, as McGarvey hit the first floor running. “There was s
till ten minutes on the counters!” he shouted. “You saw it, too.”
“It was a trap,” McGarvey said. “Whoever set this up meant to kill anyone trying to disarm the explosives. We have to leave now.”
“I need to recall our transportation,” Gruen said, still shouting, panic showing in his eyes. “It’ll take too much time.”
“You can ride with me, but we have to get out of here.”
Gruen looked inside the control room, uncertain what to do next. “What do I tell Marsha’s husband?”
“Christ,” McGarvey said. “Stay if you want, but I suggest you move your ass.” He headed the rest of the way down the corridor, out the back door, and around to the front of the building, sirens wailing everywhere throughout the nearly deserted facility.
NINETEEN
They were the last to head away from facility. As soon as McGarvey came around the corner, Gail didn’t need to be warned, she knew what had happened. She got on the radio and began notifying Haggerty, who was on site, along with all the other emergency responders what was about to happen, and to get away — and far away — as quickly as possible.
She, Townsend, Strasser, Bennet, and a number of other station personnel were already climbing aboard the Air National Guard chopper when McGarvey reached them.
“Both reactors?” Gail asked.
“Just number two,” McGarvey said, not too gently hustling her aboard.
Gruen and Vigliaturo came across the parking lot in a dead run, and Gail exchanged a glance with McGarvey.
“No one else?”
“That’s it.”
“You say they were unsuccessful to stop the explosions on one?” Strasser shouted over the roar of the chopper’s engines and the heavy thump of its main rotor.
“That’s right, but I think only one of the panels was destroyed,” McGarvey told him, and Townsend looked mad enough to kill someone.
Police and fire units started to pull away from the station, some heading south, but most heading north on A1A by the time Gruen and his team member reached the chopper and climbed aboard. They’d left their antinuclear device equipment behind.
A St. Lucie County EMS tech was in the back of the chopper with Bennet, cradling the electrician’s head, and he looked up. “I’ve called an ophthalmic specialist at Miami General. He’s standing by. We need to get this man down there as soon as possible.”
McGarvey waited a full minute to make sure that no one else was coming, and he turned to the pilot and pumped his fist, and motioned out to sea. The helicopter lifted off, made a sharp dipping turn to the left, and headed directly east away from the power plant.
“Have a Dade County medevac chopper head north up the coast. When we can set down we’ll radio our position,” McGarvey shouted.
Gruen started to object but McGarvey just glared at him, and he sat back. He was still deeply shaken by the death of one of his team members, which was obvious from his expression, and yet it was equally obvious that he was working out a way in which he could somehow either blame the situation on someone — almost certainly McGarvey — and/or turn it to his advantage.
“We need to go now—” the medic insisted, but Strasser overrode him.
“It’s starting,” he said. He was looking out the window on the opposite side from the still open hatch.
Townsend was crouched next to him. “Mother of God,” he said. But the angle was wrong. The helicopter had already crossed A1A and was out over the water, the facility almost directly behind them.
McGarvey had to shout twice to get the pilot’s attention and he motioned for him to turn the helicopter broadside to the coast, while still heading away. The helicopter banked a little to port, then slewed left, almost skidding, the coast sliding into view from the open hatch and then the facility dominated by the twin containment domes.
Gail was right there with McGarvey at the hatch, and Townsend, Strasser, and the others crowded around, looking over his shoulder. At first nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except for the traffic. The facility was deserted, and from their altitude of about five hundred feet they could see a long way up and down the coast and across the Intracoastal Waterway on the west side of the island to the mainland and down toward the town of Stuart, civilian cars and a lot of police and emergency responder vehicles streaming away.
Massive traffic jams blocked the bridges off the island, one to the north and two to the south, and it would be hours before they were cleared. Farther inland the turnpike and I-95, which ran parallel within sight of each other, were packed with wall-to-wall traffic both ways. The warning had gone out on radio and television and the public’s remembrance of 9/11 spiked and with it the mindless, absolute terror of nuclear power and they were running. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl — Hiroshima and Nagasaki in some people’s minds — conjured up visions of mushroom clouds hanging over Hutchinson Island.
Then McGarvey and the others saw what Strasser had already seen; a slight shimmer was causing the air over the containment dome for reactor one to waver and rise like summer heat from a black-topped road in the distance; like a halo of death hanging over the domed cap, it came to McGarvey. The bodies of Wager and Marsha and Alan were down there, and it was possible that the South Service Building would become their mausoleum for a very long time.
“There!” Strasser shouted over the noise, and the chopper slowed and stopped, hovering where it was a mile or so offshore.
A dark line seemed to crawl from about halfway up the side of the dome, widening as it accelerated, and steam, white by contrast, began to leak from the crack, a little at first but then more of it, rising up into the cloudless blue Florida sky.
“Is it radioactive?” McGarvey asked, without looking over his shoulder, his eyes glued to the dome, and the plume rising above it.
“Probably not,” Strasser said. “It’s coming from the steam generator, or the loop. As long as the reactor core container doesn’t breach, we’ll be okay.”
“What are the chances of that not happening?”
“Depends on which panel they saved.”
A geyser of water shot from near the bottom of the crack, slamming into the South Service Building like a stream from a fire hose.
“The primary coolant loop just opened,” Strasser said.
“Goddamnit, Chris, what about the emergency diesel?” Townsend demanded. “It should have been pumping water into the core by now.”
“I don’t know,” Strasser admitted. “More sabotage?” The remorse was thick in his voice. It was sabotage, and not only in the control room. His nuclear power generating station had been mortally tampered with, and it had taken months to do it, and it had happened on his watch, right under his nose. He should have seen it.
Gruen pushed forward so he was right on McGarvey’s shoulder. “Christ,” he muttered, but everyone heard him.
A second crack, this one wider and moving faster, branched off from the first, and headed at a wide angle from the top third of the dome, like a broad slice of pie, and the concrete began to take on a rosy glow, hard to see in the bright daylight, but growing.
“The core is overheating now,” Gruen said in awe.
“He’s right,” Strasser said.
“Any possibility of an explosion?” McGarvey asked. “Even remotely?”
“No—” Gruen said, but Strasser cut him off.
“Not a nuclear explosion.”
The massive piece of concrete pie began to glow brighter now, moving up the scale from a rose to a deep red and it began to slump toward the right, in slow motion, opening a big hole in the side of the dome. Suddenly another geyser of water and steam burst straight out of the breach, heaving pieces of concrete and other debris out into the open air, the heavier materials raining out as far as the shore and the lighter stuff roiling upwards.
“We’d better back off,” Gail said.
No one could take their eyes off the terrible sight, and McGarvey remembered the pictures of Chernobyl right after it happened
in 1986, but something else began to dawn on him as he watched the steam plume rise over the dome — the wind had shifted from the west. The radioactive release was heading out to sea. They had caught a break.
“It’s coming this way,” Gruen said.
And Townsend and the others saw what was happening. “Thank God,” the plant manager said.
“Don’t you think we should get the hell out of here?” Gruen asked.
The side of the containment dome slumped even farther, but the damage seemed to be slowing down.
“The reactor is finally scramming,” Strasser said. “Your people saved that panel. Thank God.”
McGarvey motioned for the pilot to get them out of there, and the chopper began a wide, swinging arc off to the south, away from the plume, as Gail got on her cell phone to contact the authorities on the ground, and Gruen got on his own phone to the NNSA hotline.
“You guys are going to have to deal with that,” McGarvey told Townsend and Strasser. “Will it be impossible?”
“It’s no Chernobyl,” Strasser said. “But it’ll take the better part of a year or more to get back online.”
“If ever,” Townsend said bitterly. “We’re going to be faced with public opinion. Especially if any civilians get hurt.” He looked away, overwhelmed for just that moment by the enormity of what had just happened, what was happening. He’d worked with nukes for the better part of his career, and this was in lieu of his gold watch and twenty-five-year service pin. He and Strasser would not be remembered so much for leading the cleanup efforts, but for the fact such efforts had been needed in the first place.
Nuclear power was unsafe, the headlines would blare. Worldwide.
If not for Lundgren and Marsha it would have been much worse, but McGarvey had the unsettling feeling that this incident was just the beginning. Hutchinson Island had been sabotaged, and he knew in his gut that this incident was only one part of something much larger.
TWENTY
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