“From here or from the moonpool?” I wondered. Since we hadn’t seen any control consoles in here, all of this machinery was probably remotely operated, which meant that this was an unmanned space. So the hatch had to be a way out for someone on the moonpool deck itself. The big question now was where it came out-in a separate airlock, or right out in the open?
Then from down the stairwell we heard the bang of the door being opened back against the wall and voices. The guards had figured out they were alone and had finally summoned some backup. Tony closed the machinery room door and looked for some way to wedge it shut. There was nothing in the room that would help us.
“Up the ladder,” I said. “Gimme that light.”
Tony started up while I broke the light’s bulb and lens and put it back on the wall. There were two other lights still going in the room, but they didn’t illuminate the top of the ladder. I started up as the noise from the stairwell grew louder. Several guards were out there, but they were being really careful because they knew we had the anteroom guards’ weapons. A gunfight in a concrete and steel stairwell is a scary thing, as I knew from personal experience. If the shooter didn’t get you, the ricochets might.
Tony climbed as high as he could and then swung to one side of the ladder so I could get as high as he was. We hung there, listening to the people out in the stairwell.
“They come in here, see us, point weapons, we give it up, right?” Tony asked quietly.
I nodded. I wasn’t going to shoot it out with cops who were just doing their duty, even if they were rent-a-cops. While we waited, Tony tried the operating ring. It was really stiff, but it did move, and he began to turn it counterclockwise. There were steel lugs embedded in the rim of the hatch, and we could see them begin to retract as he turned the wheel, degree by degree, slowly in case the hatch was visible to someone up above us. I tried to remember the layout of the pool deck, and whether or not there’d been a round, steel escape hatch in the floor anywhere.
The door below us banged open, and a voice yelled for us to throw down our weapons and come out with our hands in sight. There was still only emergency lighting out in the stairwell, so there was no blaze of light when they opened the door. Tony kept working the wheel in tiny increments, stopping every time one of the lugs made a noise. I watched as one of the cops stuck his head through the door behind his gun and then jerked it back. A moment later, three cops swept into the room below us and made a quick search of all the machinery. No one had a flashlight, thank God.
“Clear,” one of them announced, and a voice outside swore. They withdrew from the machinery room as a discussion ensued out in the stairwell. One of them said that we had to be up on the pool level, but another argued that there was no way we could have gained access because all the vital area readers were locked up. More back-and-forth like that as they tried to decide what to do, and it was clear that they did not fancy climbing the next four flights of stairs with two armed bad guys up there. Tony nudged me-the hatch was unlocked.
He pressed his forehead up into the dome of the hatch and signaled for me to push up on the operating ring. He looked like a submarine skipper raising the periscope to take a look. A thin line of white light appeared around the rim of the hatch, and I wished those cops had closed the machinery room door when they withdrew. Anyone looking in right now would see us, and they were still all standing around down there arguing about what to do next. Tony dropped the hatch quietly back into place.
“Control room, I think,” he whispered. “I could see chair legs, consoles, a trashcan, and a coffeepot.”
“People?”
“Not where I could see ’em,” he said, “but there’s a chair damn near on top of the hatch. All the lights are on up there.”
This all made sense: If there was some kind of problem out there on the moonpool deck, the technicians would run for the safety of the control room, which had glass walls and sealing doors. From there they could go out via one of the security doors. If things really got out of hand, like a fire in the stairwell, they still had a way out-down the escape hatch. There was probably a second hatch embedded in the floor of the pump machinery room that we hadn’t seen.
It sounded like they’d made some sort of decision down there, because it got quiet again. We had two choices: go back down the ladder and see if we could escape behind them, or go up into the control room. I could see that Tony had come to the same conclusion and was waiting for me.
“We came here to stop Trask,” I said. “Whatever he’s going to do has to happen up there. I say we go on.”
Tony turned around and began to lift the hatch. There shouldn’t be anyone up there at the control level at this hour of the night, except possibly Trask and Ari Quartermain-and his mysterious inside man, I reminded myself, he of the hearts and minds.
White light spilled down into the pump room as Tony fully raised the hatch, which he pushed until we heard a lock-back latch snap into place. Then he went through the hatch, up into the control room, and out of sight. I followed when I saw his hand wave me up.
The control room ran the full width of the moonpool’s open deck level. There were several consoles and instrument banks, and a rank of locking file cabinets all along the back wall. A window wall overlooked the surface of the moonpool, but we were crawling on the floor on our hands and knees. We needed to get a look out into the deck area, but not at the expense of being discovered.
There was one door from the control room out to the catwalks on the sides of the pool. It had a glass window in the top half, which was covered with notices taped to the glass. I pointed at it, and Tony understood. We crawled over to the door, and he slowly rose up to peek through the glass beneath the pieces of paper. He dropped back down immediately and raised two fingers.
“Quartermain and one other guy,” he whispered. We could hear sounds from outside the access door, but they were indistinct because of the airlock. “They’re lying on the bridge leading out over the pool.”
“Trask?”
“No see’um.”
“Are they alive?”
He shrugged. “No blood, but they’re not moving. And: I can’t see any water.”
“That’s because it’s all going somewhere else right now,” a voice said from behind us. My heart sank. It was Trask, standing head and shoulders out of the hatch on the same ladder we’d come up, pointing Tony’s shotgun at us. He’d been hiding down in the pump room all along.
He waved the muzzle of the shotgun in a clear signal for us to shed our own weapons, which we did. Then he stepped up off the ladder and told us to get up. As we stood up, he picked up our weapons, stepped to the door leading out to the moonpool deck, and pitched them into the water.
“I was right behind you, the whole time,” he said. “There’s another escape trunk from the ground floor to the mezzanine level. And I am so glad you made it. I actually thought you might. You look a bit damp, though.”
“You kill those guys out there?” I asked, indicating the two motionless forms on the bridge.
“Not exactly,” he said. “The radiation might, once the water gets below a certain level.”
“You are one sick puppy, Colonel,” I said. “Where’s Billy the Kid?”
“Busy, Lieutenant, busy.” He laid the shotgun into the crook of his arm while flipping open a cell phone and hitting the speed dial. I was surprised that the phone would work in here with all the shielding; they must have an inside repeater antenna somewhere.
“How’s the feed?” he asked, then listened. He was watching us, but not focused on us, and I felt Tony change his position fractionally. The two muzzles of the shotgun lifted an equal fraction, and I heard Tony exhale. No chance of rushing that thing.
“Okay,” he said. “Another ten minutes and you can take it down.” He closed the phone and went to the door to listen. Then he nodded, as if very satisfied with himself.
“Those guys can’t figure out what to do,” he said. “I’ve killed the card
readers, and Moira made the physical locks shut down. And I’ll bet their radios just stopped working.”
If your cell phone works, I thought, then one of them is going to figure that out, too. I hoped.
“I love it,” he said, easing himself into a chair at one of the consoles. “I’m using their own machinery to do this. They have tanks under this building where they can dump the water. If the level drops unexpectedly, makeup water from the city system comes on automatically to restore the level. That gave me the pump I needed. Then all we had to do was defeat some check-valves.”
“What’s a check-valve?”
“A valve that allows the water to go only in one direction. Pressure on one side of the valve pushes open a flap. Pressure on the other side seats the flap against a steel ring so no fluid can go the other way. We just removed the flaps.”
“We?”
He pointed at the two forms lying facedown on the bridge. “Dr. Thomason did the valve work; Dr. Quartermain got us in here. And the lovely Miss Moira is feeding the video and instrumentation system an enormous crock of digitized bullshit.”
“Control doesn’t know the water level is dropping?”
“Control knows there’s something going on because of all those rent-a-cops outside. But radiation-wise, Control is seeing exactly what I want them to see. They think they’re dealing with a break-in. You tell those guards why you were here?”
I nodded.
“Well, they’ll have reported that. More confusion in Control. When she switches the instrumentation systems back to normal, they’ll have a level-one radiation emergency in this building, and they’ll forget all about the intruders.”
“Why?”
“Because all those guards out there are going to leave the building as fast as their shiny black combat boots can carry them. Then Control will override the automatic refill plumbing and push huge amounts of water into the pool, with even bigger pumps. Only it won’t stay in the pool-it’s all going downtown, at least until they discover the problem.”
I wondered if McMichaels had taken my warning seriously; I sure hoped so. Then a chilling thought hit me: If the water department turned off their pumps, there’d be zero resistance to the slug of radioactive water Trask was going to send back up the system.
Trask looked at his watch again. “Wondering how this is all going to come out, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“You bet,” I said. Tony was clenching and unclenching his fists, but that shotgun wasn’t moving. I thought the reflection of blue light from the moonpool was getting brighter.
“Mass confusion,” he said. “Terror in the streets. And somehow, it’s going to be all your fault.”
“Hunh?”
“Well, look at it this way: I belong in here, as do Drs. Quartermain and Thomason. We work here. We have access. You don’t. You climbed a fence. You assaulted guards. You broke in here. It was only my extreme vigilance that kept you from doing bad shit.” He was laughing now, sounding crazier than a loon.
“Oka-a-y,” I said. “I follow all that. But why would we want to do bad shit to a nuclear power plant? Are we supposed to be agents of a foreign power? Do we make money out of this? Where’s our motive, Colonel?”
“Ah, motive,” he said. “Yes, what was your motive? Well, remember why Dr. Quartermain hired you? Remember all that Red Team stuff? You were simply doing your jobs, and you succeeded beyond Quartermain’s wildest expectations. Things simply got out of hand, that’s all. You know, like most of the government’s ‘good ideas’? Occupying Iraq, for instance? Most of government’s good ideas usually do turn to shit.”
“So you’re going to what-kill all of us?” I asked. “You’ll be the last guy standing, so you get to tell the tale?”
“Oh, hell, no,” he said, staring at Tony. “Not unless your twitchy buddy there makes me do it. Calm down, you.” Then he turned back to me. “No, actually, I need you alive and intact. I need a couple of guilty bastards in cuffs when the mother of all investigations gets going. I’ve got a story, you’ll have a story, Control will have a story, hell, even Mad Moira, if she gets caught, she’ll have a story. Talk about a federal goat-grab.”
There was a rumbling noise below our feet. Trask blinked and then said, “Whoops.”
“What the fuck was that?” Tony said.
“Baby is having gas pains, I do believe,” Trask said. “A bit early, but better late than never. Now, you two: Get your asses out there on the pool deck.”
“And if we don’t?” I said, with more bravado than I really felt.
“If you don’t, I’ll pull these triggers. Then, of course, I’ll have to change my story, but, hey, I can do that. You can just bleed out. Move your interfering asses. Now.”
We moved our interfering asses to the door and went through. Outside the control room there was a distinct smell of ozone and something else, something metallic. To my very great dismay, the water level in the moonpool had shrunk by about a quarter, and the formerly indistinct fuel bundles were no longer indistinct at all. Trask waved at us through the glass door, then threw a switch, which plunged the entire area into darkness. We heard the hatch cover clank shut as he went below. The only light now was that glow from the spent fuel assemblies, and it seemed to be a lot stronger. As we watched, another giant gas bubble rose from the bottom of the pool and lazily floated to the surface, where it popped right under the inert forms on the bridge.
I finally recognized the other smell-I remembered it from high school chemistry, one of those experiments where we made hydrogen. It was more of an acidic sensation on the palate than a real smell, but I recognized it. The pile of spent fuel at the bottom was beginning to outgas. Next would come the fire to end all fires.
We went out onto the bridge across the pool and pulled the two unconscious men back to the pool deck. Both of them smelled of the same ether that Trask had used to put Pardee Bell under, but neither seemed to be so profoundly drugged as Pardee had been. I thought I heard noises from behind the airlock into the control room, so I went back in there. I tried the escape hatch, but it wouldn’t budge now. I went into the airlock and banged on the exterior door. Someone outside immediately yelled for me to open the door and come out, hands up, et cetera, et cetera.
“I can’t open the goddamned door, you idiot,” I yelled back. “There’s no handle, and the card readers are dead.”
That led to some consultation outside.
“Hey?” I said to the steel door.
“What?”
“Your buddy Carl Trask has turned on the pumps to drain the moonpool. The water’s at about sixty percent, and there’s hydrogen coming up.”
This produced a couple of oh-my-Gods outside and lots more consultation.
“Can you shut the drain pumps down?” my interlocutor called.
“Negative, the consoles are all locked up. You need to get someone on the pumps themselves before you get a goddamned meltdown.”
More excited conversation outside, and then the sound of feet on stairs. Oh, shit, I thought. Trask was right. They’re bailing out.
I checked the consoles again to see if I could find anything that might kill power to all the pumping systems, but I couldn’t understand the control instrumentation. The consoles appeared to be locked up in some kind of hold mode, with none of the knobs or switches doing anything when moved. Tony called from inside the pool deck area. I ran back out to find Ari sitting up and looking around like a drunk.
“He’s conscious but not all there,” Tony said, holding on to Quartermain’s shoulder to keep him upright. Ari’s face was splotchy, and his eyes were coming in and out of focus. There was a bright red welt running centerline from his forehead to the back of his skull. I knelt down on the concrete beside him.
“Ari?” I said. “The moonpool’s losing cooling water. What do we do?”
“Run,” he croaked.
Tony snorted. Great advice.
I repeated the problem, and this time Ari seemed to focus a little
better. “Water,” he mumbled. I thought he wanted water, but then realized he was looking over my shoulder, so I turned around and saw the fire hose folded up on a rack. There was the water we needed.
Tony got up and started pulling the hose off the rack while I held on to Ari, who was still very wobbly. Thomason was unconscious next to him. Tony threw the entire length of the hose into the pool and then opened up the red valve wheel. The hose made crackling noises as firemain pressure came on, and then the end of the hose popped out of the pool like an angry snake and began blasting a jet of water all over the place. Tony frantically cranked back down on the valve while I tried to capture the hose without getting bashed in the face. I then jammed the head of it into the bridge decking, and he turned it back on. This time the stream of water blasted straight down into the pool, creating a maelstrom of bubbles, and lots more of that metallic smell.
“Out,” Ari said weakly. “Radiation. Control room. Now.”
I helped him to his feet, but his legs gave out, so we ended up dragging him by his armpits and legs back into the control room. My injured arm gave way halfway there. Tony moved to go back out for Thomason.
“No,” Ari said, pointing at the radiation meters above the door. Both were visibly moving into the red zone. “Too late. Don’t go out there. Need suits.”
Somewhere outside the control room, perhaps even outside the building, a large, deep-throated siren started up. I found one instrument that appeared to display water depth in the moonpool. It read thirty-one feet. I watched it for a moment to see if the fire hose was going to help. The needle didn’t move. Either it was locked up, or the fire hose was just holding its own against the pumps. Two more instruments began to flash red lights; both were radiation meters. My ears popped as an automatic pressurization system came on in the control room. The big siren outside had gone to a steady wail, and I wondered if the surrounding population knew what that meant.
“We can’t just leave that guy out there,” Tony said.
“Must,” Ari said promptly. “That gas is radioactive. Atmosphere out there much too hot. Gotta get out of here.”
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