His last contract gave Claude access to an administrative locker room. He stashed a razor there, deodorant, change of clothes, so he could go right from work and meet the ladies, if there were any ladies to be met. Didn’t want the stink of radioactivity on him while he was courting.
Down the hall from the conference room, he stood before the mirror and touched up his Fu Manchu, using his Remington to buzz a few hairs at the tips. Then he ran the razor over his slick scalp, nipped some hairs spiking up. You never knew what would show up in flash photography. Didn’t want to spoil his front-page appearance with a few wild hairs making him look like a damn porcupine.
Claude got his bolo squared off, going with the dressy blue-agate tonight, goddamn stone big as a silver dollar, popping nicely against his canary-yellow shirt. He stepped back for the full view, front and side. Claude looking sharp, ready for his close-up.
And ready to unload on this gang of fucking ecoterrorists, bring on the heavy weapons, set his men loose, and if a special agent in charge and a bitch from the infrastructure police got caught in the crossfire, so much the better.
As he was turning from the mirror, he spotted a hair on his forehead, a photo spoiler if there was one, and he leaned close to his reflection and tried to pluck it with his thumb and first finger, getting his fingernails around it, giving it a little tug before he popped it loose. That’s when the lights went out.
Inside the plant, the big, deep hum of the turbines and the nuclear fission and the steam generators and the million volts of current droning through the walls, all those noises that got into your bones and rumbled all shift long until Claude and everybody else at Turkey Point was vibrating for hours after they got home—all that stopped.
Claude was in the dark. A goddamn lone straggler hair on his scalp.
He waited half a minute till the diesels kicked in and the emergency lighting fluttered on. Dim but functional. And the rumble in the walls started up again, right back where it was.
He plucked the sucker, then walked out into the hall, where workers in their hard hats were in low-volume panic mode, hustling here and there, asking each other what was going on, was this a drill, what about the reactor, and the hubbub grew as Claude walked down the hallway to the security office, where his men, his twelve best, had assembled outside the door as he’d told them to do if anything happened tonight the least bit hinky, such as if the lights went off, or the reactor alarm beeped, which had just begun.
Yes, sir, look what we had here, the biggest nuke plant in Florida with a Class One Crisis. And who would be called on to bring it to a successful conclusion? Why, none other than Claude Sellers.
* * *
They cruised into the center of the plant without a problem. Saw no sign of security, just workers bustling about in golf carts fitted with toolboxes.
Halfway to the reactor building, the overhead lights went dark, the jangle and roar of the plant ceased.
No one in the car spoke, Pauly driving on.
A half minute later, maybe a third of the lights brightened and the plant’s drone and vibration returned. There were shadows now, pockets of darkness around the grounds, near buildings, not the false noontime of before.
“The diesels,” Prince said. “Five minutes, Wally’s virus shuts them off.”
They drove past the southern cooling tower. Around sixty stories high, gigantic, a cement hourglass with a thick middle, a steady stream of bright condensation rolling into the black sky.
Off in the distance, thirty miles north across Biscayne Bay, Thorn could make out the ruby glow of Miami and the beach. A hazy mist of light that hugged the city like cheery smog. They continued to roll deeper into the plant, past the second cooling tower.
“This doesn’t strike you as too easy?” said Thorn.
“‘Come into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly.” Frank looked at Thorn, shook his head. Bad shit coming.
“Do we need this government asshole anymore?” Pauly said.
“No more killing,” Leslie said. “That’s not what we’re about.”
“It is now,” Sheffield said. “You’re officially in the murder business.”
“Sheffield’s right,” Thorn said. “This smells like a trap.”
Leslie was silent as they crept toward the office complex. Two or three hundred yards away, she told Pauly to stop.
“What?”
“Right here,” she said. “They may be right. Time to change things up. Set the first charge. Base of the cooling tower. No one gets hurt, giant distraction.”
“He’s going off on his own?” Prince said.
“Cooling tower, maintenance shed. When you’ve set those two, meet us at the biology lab. From there we take the airboat to the skiff.”
“What about the cage?” Cameron said. “We need Pauly’s muscle.”
“We’ll take the critters inside one by one. Do it, Pauly. I’ll drive the rest of the way.”
Pauly held her eyes for a second, grunted, then got out, went back to the hatch, pulled out the suitcases and slammed the door, and headed off across an empty plaza.
“I don’t trust that guy,” Thorn said.
“You damn well shouldn’t,” said Frank.
Leslie settled into the driver’s seat and moved the shifter into gear.
As the car began to move, Thorn swung open his door and jumped out. Pitched sideways, his left leg numb, almost went down, but caught himself.
“Get back in here, goddamn it, Thorn.”
Thorn stood at the open door and watched as a golf cart rolled toward them, two security guys giving them a close look.
“Strong and decisive,” Thorn said. “Never knuckle under.”
“But always the knucklehead,” Sheffield said.
“Take this.” Cameron held out the revolver.
Thorn waved it off. “You guys are going to need it.”
Sheffield bent forward at the waist, straining against the plastic cuffs. “At least take this.” Frank motioned with his chin toward his utility belt.
Thorn reached behind Frank and drew the flashlight from its holster. A foot long, heavy enough it could double as a billy club. “Now this I like.”
Thorn slammed the door, watched the security guys rolling down the asphalt toward the domed reactor building, a couple of other golf carts with uniformed men converging on the same location.
He saluted Leslie with the flashlight and limped into the dark.
FORTY-ONE
WITH ITS CROWN RIMMED BY hundreds of lights, the northern cooling tower loomed ahead like some vast pyramid the ancients built to celebrate the invincibility of their deities. Plumes of steam rose from its stack and were caught and shredded by the ocean breeze.
Thorn couldn’t see Pauly anymore. Lost in the shadows of adjacent buildings. Thorn hobbled to the base of the tower, up onto the concrete walkway circling it. Powerful fans were roaring inside the structure, and he could feel the suck of air drawn through the intake openings at the base of the tower. Crosshatched steel trusses framed the bottom, raising the tower one story off the ground and allowing for the huge rush of incoming air.
Halfway around its base, he found Pauly on the bay side with one of the suitcases open on the walkway beside him. He was positioning a device the size of a tackle box inside the intake gap.
When he sensed Thorn standing close, his hand flicked out, snatched the pistol from the cement wall. He swung around, saw it was Thorn and held his aim a few uncomfortable seconds, then lowered the pistol and set it aside.
Pauly went back to work, wedging the container into a triangular joint between two of the steel columns and the cement retaining wall. “She send you to supervise?”
“I’m here to help.”
“Don’t need any help.”
Though Thorn had no experience with demolition, it seemed clear that even a minor blast at that structural point would splinter the concrete shell of the tower. How bad the damage would be he couldn’t guess, but he imagin
ed it would be sufficient to put a lot of engineers and construction workers on overtime for weeks.
He stood silently in the glow of the overhead spotlights while Pauly finished setting the charge.
When he was finished, Pauly rose, picked up the second case, and came over to Thorn. “It blows in three minutes. Let’s move. This will be ugly.”
Pauly headed at a trot in the direction of the southern tower. Thorn tried to keep up, shuffling double-time, flashlight in one hand, hauling along his lame leg with the other. From their current position on the eastern edge of the property, the bay was only a half mile off. The loading docks were visible, a small cargo ship moored alongside a couple of patrol boats, and to the north across the shimmering expanse of Biscayne Bay, the ruddy false dawn that hovered over Miami seemed brighter than before, as if the entire city were smoldering.
When he turned back, Pauly was out of sight. Thorn looked up at the sliver of moon, heavy clouds building in the east, closing his eyes, trying to recall the layout Leslie had used to coach them. Thorn believed the maintenance shed that was Pauly’s next target was off to the northeast about two or three hundred feet. Not more than a minute or two away.
As he was heading off, Pauly’s device at the base of the north cooling tower exploded, and the concussion jolted Thorn sideways into the wall of the building he was passing, flattened him there for several seconds, face pressed to a steel security door. An earthquake rumbling underfoot, shock waves radiating from the blast, blowing out windows, knocking over benches and storage bins and sending them flying. The gusts, full of debris, threw open the heavy lid of a Dumpster and sent it rolling across a grassy, open courtyard.
Thorn hugged the wall and edged around the corner, watching as the sixty-story cement hourglass disintegrated in a tornado of dust and bits of flaming rubble. Not like any explosion he’d ever seen. So shattering, and earsplitting, Thorn’s vision was dancing and he struggled to breathe as chips and pebbles of the demolished structure rained down.
Sirens sounded across the grounds, men’s voices barking orders. Dark figures sprinted across the roadway and people stepped outside various offices and prefab structures, stumbling into the dusty air, dazed, wiping away blood, the injured with their arms slung over the shoulders of their comrades.
Thorn struggled on toward the maintenance shed. Reeling out of a doorway, a woman with blood streaming from her right ear grabbed his arm.
“Oh, my God, you’re FBI,” she said. “Are these terrorists?”
“Yes,” Thorn said. “Yes, they are.”
“Is it over?”
“Not yet. Take cover.”
The door of the maintenance shed was locked, but the windows facing the destroyed cooling tower were shattered. Thorn shined the flashlight inside and saw only a row of sit-down mowers and light power tools.
A thickset man in suit and tie carrying a heavy briefcase came around the corner of the maintenance shed breathing hard, saw Thorn, and stopped.
“Are they around here?” the man whispered. “Somewhere nearby?”
“No. I need to know where the spent fuel rods are.”
“The pool?”
Thorn nodded, coming closer to the man, holding both palms up. Stay calm, stay calm, don’t bolt.
“Oh, fuck. Not the fuel rods.”
“Where?” Thorn said quietly. “Which way?”
The man turned and pointed toward the domed building where the nuclear reactors turned water to steam to spin the turbines.
“South of the containment building.” The man started away, then stopped. “That can’t happen. A bomb, something that big in the pool, no, it would be…”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Is it just you? You’re here alone?”
“I can manage.”
“Oh, holy Christ.” The man dropped his briefcase and sprinted off toward the distant parking area.
At the entrance door to the one-story building, Thorn stopped and listened. Inside he made out the grind of machinery, big gears meshing, and a rhythmic clank like a tire jack lifting an enormous weight notch by notch. The door was ajar.
Behind him the networks of roads and cart paths were filled with people and vehicles, alarms sounding and distant sirens.
The lights faded, then died out completely.
The mechanical clamor inside the structure ceased. Across the grounds a scattering of battery-powered emergency lights were still glowing, and a few vehicle headlamps swept their beams along the sides of buildings, but most of the vast industrial park had fallen into shadows.
Off to the north across the bay, the rosy haze that floated above Miami had vanished, and the bright feast of stars and galaxies and distant suns that was lost every night behind the shield of artificial light had reappeared.
Thorn slipped into the building. A metal ramp underfoot, pebbled to prevent slippage. A glow in the air. Blue and green light, the soft turquoise of a bonefish flat covered by a sheet of crystal salt water on a summer’s afternoon.
Before him on the ramp a man in a white jumpsuit and white hard hat and orange rubber boots and gloves was sprawled with one arm slung out to his side like a drowning man stretching for a lifeline. Thorn knelt and felt for a pulse. Blood everywhere. No heartbeat. Two gunshot wounds that he could see.
Thorn rose and inched forward along the ramp. His damaged leg was throbbing and that knee felt spongy. But it still worked, still kept him upright.
Tubular rails ran along either side of the ramp. The exposed ducts of an air-conditioning system wrapped around the giant room. Plastic barrels and heavily insulated wires and cables were strung along the framework of the machinery.
All the girders and the ramp itself and the steel beams that supported the walls and the roof as well as the lifters and cranes of every size were painted a brash yellow, made even more garish by the tint of the blue glow that filled the room. An unnatural light, Thorn realized. Not the saltwater flats at all. In fact, their opposite.
This was the eerie radiance of enriched uranium-235 pellets inserted into rods, those rods extracted fresh from the reactor’s core, packed tightly into bundles, then stored in racks and crammed into the refrigerated water where they would stay for decades until their radioactivity subsided enough for them to be transferred to dry casks somewhere else on the property. All in all hundreds of tons of uranium still hot from the reactor made the water glow as blue and unearthly as glacier ice.
His long-ago science teacher had explained it all in that mousetrap lecture, and in the last few days Flynn and Leslie had briefed him again. For decades they’d used the same primitive system. An indoor Olympic pool, the uranium sunk below forty feet of water to buffer the radioactivity and slowly, slowly cool the elements. Now with the main power off and the backup diesels disabled, the neutron absorber and circulating water system were both shut down. In only minutes this water would boil, turn to steam, and then those solid materials would catch fire. Wally had done his job, now Pauly was trying to do the unimaginable. Set off one giant, dirty bomb.
The ramp where Thorn stood seemed to be an observation deck. Running directly below him was an identical ramp where workers operated the spent-fuel machinery, adding or subtracting more bundles.
A few feet ahead, lying across his path, were two more white-suited workers, their uniforms blotted with red. Chest wounds. Two stories below he saw their automatic weapons lying on the lip of the pool.
Feeling the tremor of footsteps on the ramp below him, Thorn leaned over the railing and saw Pauly Chee inching up behind another white-suited security man, who was armed with an automatic pistol.
Thorn turned away and tried to project his voice out into the big room.
“FBI! Stop where you are. Thrown down your weapons.”
While Thorn mounted the railing, both men halted. Pauly looking behind him, the security guy swinging around, shocked to find Pauly so close.
Thorn tucked his flashlight in his waistband, took a grip on
the lower rail, and kicked out over the blue water, swinging like one of those high-bar gymnasts working up to a full three-sixty, only Thorn was a long way past his prime and had only the smallest of windows to sail through. Splashing into that pool was not an option.
His hands held firm as he kicked out parallel to the water, then gravity swung him down and he timed his release, dismounting the rail and flying feetfirst through the space between the two ramps, a crazy Tarzan yell breaking from his lungs.
Aiming for Pauly’s head, but mistiming and sideswiping the guard instead. Thorn knocked the man’s weapon loose, sent him sprawling backward into the rail, and Thorn thudded down against the steel ramp hard on his rump.
Quick-stepping to the guard, Pauly kicked his machine pistol over the side, and it splashed into the turquoise water. Pauly aimed his pistol at the security man’s face, but Thorn scooted in front of the guy and struggled to his feet.
“Let him go. He’s no threat.”
Pauly blinked at Thorn and aimed past him at the man.
Thorn dodged to his left and blocked him again. “This isn’t what he meant.”
“What?”
“Putting the genie back in the bottle.”
“I should never have told you about that.”
“He didn’t mean to send you off killing people.”
“How do you know what he meant?”
“You know he didn’t. He meant the opposite.”
The security guy had gotten to his feet. A man in his thirties, face shiny with sweat. “Hey, look. I got three kids, a new puppy for godsakes.”
Pauly aimed the pistol at him again and told him to shut up and turn around and walk the fuck out of here, then run as far away as he could get.
“Thanks,” the man said. “Thanks to both of you.”
When he was gone, Thorn held out his hand, palm up. “Give me the gun.”
“Yeah, right.”
Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) Page 28
