THREE
The group stopped at tall plate-glass windows that at this moment were closed by blinds on the inside, and DeCamp glanced back to where the woman had been standing by the rail, but she was gone. It was the expression in her eyes, the way she had scrutinized everyone, frowning a little, clearly disturbed about something that had attracted her attention.
He hadn’t risked looking at her for more than a split second, nor had he taken the chance to read her name tag, but he was fairly certain she was security, possibly NNSA. And had she remained at the rail, watching them, it would have made things difficult. It would have been risky to slip away at this point, he would have had to wait until they were outside before he could change badges and go around to the back of the building. Every mission contained the possibility of the unexpected. It couldn’t be helped.
The tour guide pushed a button on a small remote control device and the blinds opened on a room below on the main floor about fifty feet wide and twice that long that looked like something out of science fiction. Rack-mounted equipment with dozens of monitors and controls covered the front wall, faced by a pair of horseshoe-shaped desks, each manned by two men dressed in spotless white coveralls. The desks were equipped with several computer monitors and keyboards that were used to control the reactors.
A supervisor dressed in a dark blue blazer stood near his own desk directly below the window and between the two control positions. He was talking on the telephone.
“This is the heart of our facility,” the tour guide began.
DeCamp had remained at the back of the group throughout the tour so far, and no one had paid much attention to him. Directly overhead, one of the closed-circuit television cameras, its red light illuminated, was angled toward the people standing in front of the viewing window. He turned his head as the camera panned from left to right so that whoever was watching would not get a good frontal image of his face.
“Both of our nuclear reactors are controlled by the four operators and one supervising engineer you see on duty below. The room is manned twenty-four/seven as you can imagine, and the primary purpose of most of what you’re seeing is safety.”
The camera panned back to the center of the group and came to rest, the red light still on. Someone was looking for something or someone, and DeCamp thought it might be at the orders of the woman at the rail. But if she’d become suspicious, even had a hunch, she would have either stopped the group and asked to see their IDs, or she would have turned everyone back. To do otherwise, especially in this building, would have been more than foolish.
“The panels on the back wall look complicated,” the tour guide was saying. “And they are, but put simply they’re each divided into three parts. The first controls the reactor itself, along with the coolant, in this case seawater, and the steam generator, which you will see a little later. The second is used to operate the steam lines that feed the turbine, which generates the electricity we produce. We’ll be going to the turbine room, and believe me, you’ll be impressed. And the third set of gauges and monitors is in many ways the most important, because they control the reactors’ emergency coolant systems.”
She turned to look at her group. “You’ve probably heard the term scram, or scraming a reactor. Well, that’s something called a backronym, which comes from the first nuclear reactor in 1942 in Chicago. In case there was a runaway nuclear reaction, which would have caused a meltdown, one man with an axe was ordered to cut the ropes that held the control rods in place. That would have immediately shut down the reactor. His job title was Safety Control Rod Axe Man — SCRAM. And of course every one of those systems has its own alarm in case anything goes wrong.”
“Has anything ever gone wrong?” one of the women in the group asked. She seemed nervous.
“Sure,” the guide said, smiling. “All the time, but that’s what the panels on the back wall take care of. If one of the reactors gets a little too frisky, a few control rods automatically drop into place.”
Another in the group started to speak, but the guide held him off.
“Nothing serious has ever happened in the more than thirty years we’ve been in business,” the guide said. “Let me put it this way. Back in 2003 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees our operations, extended our license on reactor one until 2036, and until 2043 for number two.” Her smile broadened. “Even I will be an old lady by then.”
A few of the guys chuckled, and DeCamp had to wonder if every American male thought through his dick, or was it just the men in this group?
In France it was different, subtler, but with an ever-present sexual tension that seemed to hang in the air. It was his world now, with Martine in their hillside home above Nice. Different than when he was growing up alone on the streets of Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town, places of stiff formalities among the whites and an almost feckless abandon among a lot of the blacks.
He was eight years old when a man shot his father to death in a waterfront bar over an argument about money. He could see his mother’s face after the cops had come to the door of their Durban apartment to tell her what had happened. She’d become instantly angry, not hysterical that her husband was dead, but mad that she was being stuck with the bills and the responsibility for raising her only child. She’d railed at the cops, who’d finally turned and walked away.
And DeCamp remembered the look on their faces as well; they’d been surprised at first, but that had changed to something else, that even an eight-year-old could clearly understand. It was disgust written in their eyes, on their mouths, and pity, too. Later, when he’d become streetwise enough to pick just the right mark to rob so that he could eat, he realized that the cops weren’t feeling any pity for his mother or for him, they had been feeling pity for the poor bastard of a husband who’d lived with a woman like that.
In the morning she was gone. No note, no money, just the furniture and dishes and a little food in the fridge and the cupboards. It took two days before the landlord realized what was happening, that the husband was dead and that the wife was gone, leaving an eight-year-old to fend for himself, and he called the authorities.
When DeCamp had spotted the cop car pulling up outside, he’d grabbed a jacket and ran out the back door into the alley and disappeared. His father had never trusted the coppers, and they were the ones who’d brought the news that he was dead, so he wasn’t going to let them take him to jail. They probably did things to little kids in those places.
The following months were a blur to him, though he had been raped by a gang of boys on his second night on the street, and he remembered being hungry all the time, and cold and afraid. But gradually he learned to take care of himself, to run if possible or to fight back if need be.
He was a street-hardened kid of eleven when he’d come to the attention of Jon Frazer, a retired SADF lieutenant colonel, whom he tried to rob at knifepoint early one evening. That had been in Cape Town, and before he knew what happened he was on the ground, his right arm dislocated at the shoulder, and the knife skittering away down the alley.
“Lad, before you go up against a bloke, the wise tactic would be to study him first,” the colonel told him.
“Fuck you,” DeCamp said.
“An interesting proposition,” Frazer, who as it turned out had been in charge of the school that trained special forces units, replied. “I’m in need of a batman, and you can have the job if you want it.”
DeCamp said nothing. He hadn’t known what a batman was, and lying there in the alley with the deceptively harmless old man who had disarmed him standing over him, he realized that there were a lot of other things he hadn’t learned. Living in one of the shantytowns for whites, and working the streets for his existence, left no time to do anything except survive.
“Either that or we’ll just pop round to the police barracks and let them take care of you.”
“What’s a batman?”
“What’s a batman, sir, ” the colonel said. “An officer’s
assistant, and you’ll fit the bill if you want. A place to live, three hots per day, and if you behave, a little money, and perhaps school.” The colonel shook his head. “On second thought you wouldn’t fit in. No, it’d be tutors.”
The next eight years had not been without trouble, but DeCamp had learned to keep his mouth shut, his inner thoughts to himself, and he’d learned languages, history, mathematics, physics, and chemistry from a series of tutors, as well as the basic principles of weapons, explosives, combat, and hand-to-hand techniques from the old man. But he’d never forgotten the lessons he’d learned on the streets, mostly self-reliance, nor did he ever learn why the colonel had taken him in like that, except the old man had never been married and never had children and he liked to have sex once a month with his batman.
The last two things the colonel had done before he’d died of a massive coronary were to enroll DeCamp in the South African Military Academy at the University of Stellenbosch in the West Coast town of Saldanha, and ask some of his friends still in the SADF to watch out for the kid. “He’ll make a hell of a fighter. Ruthless and smart.”
DeCamp had graduated at the top of his class with a bachelor’s in military science in the field of natural science, which was the most prestigious of studies.
The colonel’s friends made good on their promises, and he was sent to a series of specialist schools in various combat styles, weapons, explosives, field tactics, infiltration and exfiltration, and HALO parachute jumps in which the fully kitted-out soldier jumped from an airplane at a very high altitude, to escape detection from someone on the ground, and stayed in freefall almost all the way down until making a low opening.
It wasn’t long after that he was assigned to the Buffalo Battalion, and his real life had begun. For the first time he had a purpose, and he’d reveled in it.
The tour guide stood flat-footed with her silly grin. “Now if there are no other questions, we’ll head downstairs the back way and go over to the turbine building.”
No one said a thing.
“No questions? Good, then if you’ll follow me.”
DeCamp stepped aside as if he wanted to take a last look at the control room as the blinds closed, allowing the tour guide and her flock to pass him. He casually reached in his pocket and pressed 000* on his cell phone, which temporarily froze the closed-circuit camera just above the window, before he turned and fell in behind the last people in the group.
The corridor branched to the left past several offices, most of the doors closed, accessible only by key cards, to the stairwell and they headed back down to the ground floor, where DeCamp again used his cell phone to shut down the camera mounted high near the ceiling.
“You’ll be issued earmuffs before we go into the main turbine hall,” the tour guide was saying at the exit door. “It’s the loudest place anywhere in our facility. Even louder than the cafeteria on a Bucs game day.”
She went outside first, and before the last of the group was out, and before the closed-circuit camera came back to life, a door to the left opened and bin Helbawi was there.
“Everything set?” DeCamp asked, keeping his eye on the outside door as it swung closed.
“Yes.”
DeCamp slipped inside, the security door shutting behind him.
FOUR
The box lunches were tuna sandwiches on white bread or ham and cheese on rye, a small bag of potato chips, a pickle, and a bottle of Evian. The same sort of lunches Eve Larsen had been eating as she talked to scientists, energy people, and journalists around the country for the past fourteen months, trying to drum up acceptance if not support for her project. But it had become a tough sell once oil slid below the magic number of $70 per barrel, which is when interest in alternative energy sources began to fade.
It would be no different here today, she could see it in the bored faces of the eight men and one woman — all VIPs of one sort or another with Sunshine State Power & Light, which owned and operated this facility. But at least they’d been willing to listen, in a large measure because she’d promised to supply SSP&L with practically free electricity. An intriguing thought, even though most of them had heard of her and knew something about the experimental work she’d done just offshore last year. Work that had ended in one death and a near drowning, that Eve — though no one else — had claimed was sabotage. And in another measure SSP&L had agreed to let her speak here out of a certain amount of wishing to get to know a potential enemy sooner rather than later. Don had called her “The Queen of the High Seas.” The Fox crew had picked up on it that day aboard the Gordon Gunther , broadcast it as part of the mini-documentary, and it had stuck.
“Queen of the High Seas comes to the daring rescue of a crewman. Brains, beauty, and fearlessness. Who can say no?”
The nine people seated around the table in the spartan second-floor conference room in the Hutchinson Island South Service building that’s who, she thought, as Bob Townsend, the plant manager, got to his feet to introduce her to the eight others. He looked more like a roustabout than the guy in charge of a highly complex and potentially dangerous facility, but he’d been in the business in one way or another all his career, and had a solid reputation.
“Dr. Evelyn Larsen has come here today to tell us a little more about her intriguing project to not only help solve our energy problems, including the dangers of nuclear energy, as well as our continued dependence on foreign oil, but how she plans to modify the weather worldwide.” Townsend smiled. “For the better, we presume.”
Eve smiled faintly, not rising to the same bait that had been thrown at her from the beginning.
“By way of a very brief background, Dr. Larsen comes to us from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — funded Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton where she has been conducting her research into what she calls the World Energy Needs project.
“Her reputation and solid academic credentials of course have preceded her. I don’t think anyone missed the Time magazine article on her two years ago in which it was suggested that she was short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Physics. So it is a distinct honor to have her with us today.”
Everyone was looking at her as if she were a bug under a microscope. In some ways a dangerous, disagreeable bug, and it was the same look she’d gotten practically everywhere she’d given her presentation. She was getting tired of trying to explain herself, and of trying to raise awareness and therefore money.
“You’ve all received background information that Dr. Larsen was kind enough to send us in advance of her visit today, and if you’ve had a chance to look at the material you’ll have a better handle on what she has to say.”
Townsend was a nuclear engineer by training and Eve’s project, which threatened to make nuclear power plants obsolete, ran opposite of everything he’d worked for his entire career, and it showed in the tone of his voice, his demeanor, and his entire attitude, one of barely concealed contempt. And fear?
He continued. “From my left around the table are Sarah Mueller, Sunshine State Power and Light’s nuclear programs manager; Dan Seward, our vice president for environmental affairs; Thomas Differding, SSP and L’s top engineer and chief of operations; David Wren, the company’s assistant chief financial officer; Alan Rank, our vice president; Craig Frey, a member of SSP and L’s board of directors; Eric Utt, vice president in charge of new plant development, and our own Chris Strasser, whose job here at Hutchinson Island is chief engineer.”
Each of them nodded politely as they were introduced, but with no warmth, only a little curiosity that they were meeting the Queen of the High Seas.
“Dr. Larsen,” Townsend said, and he sat down at the opposite end of the mahogany table from her.
She kept a neutral expression on her face, and promised herself that she would not lecture, nor would she let her anger get out of hand like it had done before. “It’s counterproductive,” Don had warned her. “You’re the scientist — one of NOAA’s most respected, so that�
��s how you need to come across.”
“They don’t listen,” she’d responded, knowing Don was right.
“Hell, even Bob Krantz won’t listen and he’s seen the data, he understands the conclusions, and he knows that the science is sound.”
“It’s all politics,” Eve had said bitterly. Just as it was here in the Hutchinson Island boardroom.
“Damned right,” Don had said. “So you better start acting like a politician if you want funding.”
Eve got to her feet and managed to smile and actually mean it. These people weren’t her last hope, but without SSP&L’s cooperation she would have to move the first stage of her project elsewhere. But Hutchinson Island was ideal, and the experiment last year had proved it.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “And thank you for agreeing to hear me out. If you’ve read the material my lab e-mailed you two weeks ago, I won’t have to go over in any detail the science of my proposal, except to tell you some things that I’m sure you all know. By 2050 the world will need twice the energy we’re producing now. Which is why more than thirty permits will be granted for the construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. alone.”
“We’ve applied for several of those permits,” Sarah Mueller said. “And our funding is already coming together.”
“That’s good to know, because the need for new power is acute, and of course it will take two decades before any power from those new stations will hit the Eastern Interconnect. And that’s only one of the problems; there is a larger issue with using nuclear energy to generate electricity.”
“Spare us the dangers of the ten-thousand-year half-life of spent fuel rods,” Townsend said, obviously holding his anger in check. Without doubt he’d been hearing that argument for years, and was sick of it.
But Eve had known it would come up. “Not that at all,” she said. “The problem is the huge amount of cooling water you have to bring in from the sea. Nuclear reactors generate a bunch of heat, and a lot of that energy is lost. It’s the same with coal-fired plants where energy is lost up the stacks and into the atmosphere. Combine that loss, which is as much as fifty to fifty-five percent, with the ten percent loss from transmission lines made of aluminum wire, and more than half the energy you produce here is wasted.”
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