Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “You’re quoting Jeff Sachs now,” Seward, the VP for environmental affairs, said. “But he was talking about fossil fuel emissions. His implication was for more nuclear stations, not less.”

  Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, who ran Columbia University’s Earth Institute, was an economist who had argued in Scientific American that government-mandated cutbacks in carbon dioxide emissions from burning oil, natural gas, and especially coal, would create an economic blow to an expanding global economy so severe that billions of people would be adversely affected.

  “You’re right,” Eve agreed. “But he was also warning that cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions before we develop new, cleaner, renewable energy sources, and technologies is the real culprit that could send us into a worldwide depression and very possibly war.

  “Tom Wigley, who’s a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote a paper for Nature a couple of years ago along with a political scientist at the University of Colorado and Chris Green, a McGill economist. Those guys argued that instead of mandating tougher emissions standards, we need to mandate the development of new technologies.”

  “Clean technologies, which Fermi did with the first nuclear reactor in 1942 in Chicago,” Mueller, the company’s nuclear programs manager, said. “As a result we got the bomb, but we also got Hutchinson Island and the other hundred and three nuclear-powered generating stations in the country, which I might remind you supply twenty percent of this nation’s energy needs, do just that. Generate electricity cleanly.”

  “But not efficiently,” Eve shot back. “And the new generating stations won’t come online until it’s too late. Even you admit that much.”

  “We’ve looked over the material your lab sent us,” Utt, SSP&L’s new plant VP, said. “We understand what you’re trying to do, and your project is as intriguing as it is expensive, with no guarantees that it will work in the long run. Or, even if you do generate the power you say is possible from your water impellers without the wholesale killing of sea life or severe dangers to navigation, maybe the effects on the climate will be the opposite of what you expect.”

  “I’ll be happy to send you all the data we’ve collected, along with the mathematics supporting my work,” Eve said. “It’s compelling. From just one impeller three feet in diameter — which did absolutely no harm to sea life — trailed behind my research ship last year, we were able to generate all the power our research vessel needed not only for navigation and communications equipment, but for the scientific gear, the galley, the air-conditioning and lighting and the electric bow and stern thrusters, which kept us in one place over the bottom against the nearly four knot northward current of the Gulf Stream. And we had energy to spare.”

  “It didn’t work,” Seward pointed out. “You had an accident in the second week when your transmission line parted and there were casualties. And that was with a three-foot impeller. What you’re proposing is to place generators more than eight times that diameter, and hang them from oil platforms in the Gulf Stream. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, to a point, but—”

  Seward interrupted her. “If a cable large enough to support generators of that size should break, you’ll suffer more than a couple of deaths. And putting hundreds, or as you propose, even thousands of these rigs in the Gulf Stream, would pose more than a danger to navigation, they would be a blight on the horizon.”

  A number of the others around the table obviously agreed.

  Eve held her temper in check. “Only one oil rig out in the Gulf Stream, twenty-five miles from here, with four impeller-generator sets that would be built by GE. It would be merely the second stage of my experiment, and my calculations imply that the power generated would amount to a significant percentage of what one of your nuclear reactors produces. When the full project comes online the impellers would be anchored to the seabed, fifty feet below the surface, where they’d pose no hazards to navigation.”

  “You’re still left with a hell of a safety issue,” Strasser, the plant’s chief engineer pointed out, not unkindly. Of all those around the table he’d seemed the most interested, and the most sympathetic.

  Eve wanted to say that there were safety issues in any power-generating station, and that the mandatory wearing of hard hats here would not do much if one of their reactors had a meltdown. She nodded instead. “You’re absolutely correct, sir, but for two points. The first is that the safety issue would be ours, not SSP and L’s until the experiment succeeded. And, the incident aboard my research ship was not an accident. It was sabotage.”

  “That’s not been proven,” Alan Rank, the company VP, said.

  “You’re right, but if you’d like I’ll send you the lab findings, which show that a massive power spike melted the cable. But that would have been impossible with the safety features built into the design. The only explanation was that someone had sabotaged those features before the impeller-generator was sent overboard.”

  “Someone from your staff, or the crew of your research ship?” Rank asked.

  “It’s possible, but I suspect it happened before the set got to us.”

  “Didn’t you check it?” Strasser asked.

  “Of course,” Eve said, making sure that she was speaking in an even tone. “We think that one of the seals may have been tampered with. Everything worked within design specs for two weeks before the spike. Time for seawater to slowly breach the system until one or more of the safety checks were affected.”

  “You think,” Townsend said.

  “Yes, I think. In the meantime, the reason I’m here is to offer any power that we might generate to SSP and L essentially free of charge for the first year. We would be responsible not only for the generators, but for bringing the power ashore on undersea transmission lines. Your only expenditure would be building the connection point between our cable and your transformer yard, a cost that you would certainly recoup in the first month, selling free energy to your customers at the usual rate.”

  Sarah Mueller turned to the company VP. “We’d have to put this before the NNSA, to get their take.”

  “I’ve already approached them,” Eve said. “In principle they see no problem.”

  “Who’d you speak to?” Rank asked.

  “Deputy Secretary Caldwell.” The NNSA was a division of the U.S. Department of Energy that was headed by Joseph Caldwell. “In fact it was his people who suggested I come here to speak to you.”

  Still she wasn’t sure she had their interest even now, mentioning Caldwell and the DOE’s tacit approval, though it was a powerful gun. It had been Don who’d suggested that end run, and her relationship with him over the past couple of years had in some ways given her the strength to cope. He helped her to be herself, to be strong without the nuisance of being possessive or any sense of ownership.

  Their relationship was vastly different than the one she’d had, briefly, with her theoretical physicist husband, whom she’d married just after graduating with her second PhD.

  “Let’s think about starting a family,” he’d said out of left field one morning on their way into their offices at Princeton.

  She’d been surprised, though secretly pleased, but she’d turned him down. “Not yet, Sam. Maybe in a couple of years.”

  “It’s the climate thing of yours.”

  “I think I might be getting close.”

  He glanced over at her. “Your math is spot-on so far, but I don’t know if it supports the kind of conclusions that you’re suggesting. A little far-fetched.”

  Dr. Samuel Larsen’s doctoral thesis attempted to reconcile Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics using a modified form of string theory to bridge the gap. He had his sights on the holy grail of theoretical physics — the TOE or Theory of Everything — which would explain the workings of the entire universe, large and small.

  He was the only man she’d ever met who was smarter than her. But just then he’d pissed her off. “Far-fetched?”

  He’d shrugged
. “I didn’t mean to make you mad. It’s just that I’d like to start a family.”

  “Two years.”

  “Two wasted years.”

  Their marriage didn’t last that long, nor did his work pan out. Two many flaws in both, too many dead ends, and out of frustration he’d practically ordered her to drop what he called her “nonsensical” work, come back to dry land, and become the mother that a beautiful woman like her was destined to be.

  But for her, being a scientist was like being a Catholic nun; she was the bride not of Jesus Christ, but of her data and her concepts, stuff from which she could not simply walk away.

  She’d told him the same thing that was on the tip of her tongue at this moment in the Hutchinson Island boardroom: Go screw yourself. Thank the gods for Don, because with her husband gone, her parents and siblings all still back in Birmingham and lost to her, she had no one else to turn to.

  “We’d need more information, technical specifications, reliability predictions with the appropriate data sets, assuming you plan on first doing a test run for ninety days,” Strasser, possibly sensing something of her angst, suggested.

  “Six months, actually. We’ll have dummy loads, and we will have the capability of controlling the actual outputs of our generator sets.”

  “We’re interested in where your funding will come from,” David Wren, the company’s assistant CFO, said. He looked like a chief financial officer, his eye forever on the money trail. His implication being that if sponsors for the project were in any way competitors with SSP&L no deal with her would be possible.

  And she began to calm down. She had their interest after all. “It’s the second part of the project I wanted to discuss with you today.”

  FIVE

  By now DeCamp was dressed in white coveralls, an employee name tag around his neck, and he stood with bin Helbawi at the door from the engineers’ locker room to the corridor across from which was the door to the control room. At this time of the day, with lunch in full swing, those personnel not on duty were over at the cafeteria and wouldn’t be expected back here for another half hour. Plenty of time to get in, accomplish the mission, which was quite simple actually and would only take a couple of minutes, then get out.

  They were armed with 9mm Austrian Glock 17 pistols equipped with suppressors that bin Helbawi had smuggled in and hidden at the back of his locker. Each of them carried a spare nineteen-round magazine of ammunition in their pockets along with satchels that contained three one-kilo bricks of Semtex plus a half-dozen electronic detonators that had been modified so that once they were in place they could not be disarmed and if moved would automatically fire.

  DeCamp looked at him. “Are you clear?”

  “ Jie haan. ” Bin Helbawi said yes in his native Urdu with an almost dreamy expression in his wide, deep black eyes. His narrow, bony shoulders drooped and he stood as if he were in the beginning stages of some kind of a religious trance.

  DeCamp had seen the same look on a mission he’d carried out for a lieutenant general in the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence service, a few years ago in the Hindu Kush along the border with Afghanistan. His job had been to find a pair of CIA field officers quietly searching for bin Laden and kill them before they got to the ailing al-Quaeda leader and put a bullet in his brain. As long as bin Laden remained elusive, Pakistan’s government could maintain the illusion that it was a staunch U.S. ally and continue receiving American military aid.

  DeCamp had staged his push into the mountains from the city of Peshawar, which was the first decent-sized city on the east side of the Khyber Pass, with a pair of deep cover ISI field officers who knew the rugged tribal areas and who were smart but in the end expendable.

  The day before they were to leave, DeCamp had been coming out of the hotel when a young man — perhaps in his early twenties, only a couple of years younger than bin Helbawi — had come across the street, clutching at his padded jacket. He’d had the same look in his eyes as bin Helbawi did now; what amounted to the same religious fatalism in the set of his shoulders and his gait. At that moment DeCamp understood what was about to happen and he ran off in the opposite direction, managing to get fifty or sixty meters away where he ducked around the corner of a stone building when the massive explosion destroyed the entire front of the hotel.

  The young man had been a suicide bomber, willing to give his life for the cause. But whether or not DeCamp had been the target had been impossible to know, and after his successful mission, after he’d killed the two CIA officers as well as the two ISI agents assigned to him, and he’d returned to Nice one million dollars richer, he’d remembered the look in the young man’s eyes, and swore he’d never forget it, because recognizing it had saved his life.

  And now bin Helbawi, who’d been sent to him by the same ISI general, had the same look as if he were preparing his soul for paradise and not escape. It was a look that he’d carefully concealed during his training in Syria and evidently for the past ten months here, because in addition to being a dedicated missionary he was bright.

  He’d gotten his initial education, and militant Islamic radicalization, as bin Laden had, in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, at the King Abdul Aziz University where he’d studied physics and mathematics. Al-Quaeda, needing bright new minds for another spectacular push after 9/11, had brought him from Pakistan and had footed the bill for his BS. After graduation they’d sent him to Paris for eighteen months to learn French, and then to the International School of Nuclear Engineering at Saclay, and finally the Kestner Division of GEA Process Engineering in Montigny, which provided engineering solutions for nuclear power stations where he learned more engineering and perfected his French.

  By the time he reached New York, on a French passport under the name Forcier, with an impressive résumé, the first headhunter he’d approached got him the Hutchinson Island job in less than twenty-four hours. Nuclear engineers were in short supply.

  Such a waste, DeCamp thought. All that education would end in a couple of hours because bin Helbawi knew damned well that he’d never get out of the control room alive. Or, if by some miracle he managed to hold out until just before the explosives destroyed the scram panels for both reactors, and if he could get to his car and make it through the gate and drive away, he wouldn’t have the time to get outside the radiological damage path. He would take a heavy hit of rems that would sicken and eventually kill him.

  Either way, he would not survive this mission and he knew it; he’d probably known it from the beginning, as did his ISI general. His willingness to die for the cause — not such a rare trait among Islamic extremists — plus his intelligence were the very reasons he’d been selected.

  Afterwards, his mother, three sisters, and one brother in the tiny town of Sadda on the Afghan border would get some serious financial help, enough so that his brother could be sent to a real school in Islamabad, or perhaps even Jidda. A way out for them.

  All that had passed through DeCamp’s head in the blink of an eye, and he simply didn’t care about any of it. He was here to do a job and then go home. There were no other considerations.

  DeCamp keyed his cell phone, temporarily freezing the camera in the hall and, making sure that no one was coming, let bin Helbawi cross the corridor first and use his key card to unlock the control room door.

  DeCamp had spent thirty days with him at an al-Quaeda camp in the desert outside of Damascus where they’d gone over, in detail, every step of the mission. Bin Helbawi was a lot brighter than the average terrorist, even brighter than most of the upper-level planners who’d worked with bin Laden and knew what they were doing, so he’d caught on very quickly.

  The door opened and bin Helbawi hesitated for a moment, then they both went inside. There were no cameras in the control room.

  Before Stan Kubansky, the supervisor, leaning up against his desk, realized that someone had come through the door, bin Helbawi disabled the card reader so that no one could get in, and DeCamp pulled out his silenced pist
ol and marched all the way into the room.

  One of the operators glanced up and started to say something, but DeCamp put one round into his head, the force shoving him against the man seated next to him at the first console.

  Kubansky turned, his eyes wide, his mouth half opened, and reached for the telephone, but bin Helbawi fired three times, one round hitting the engineer in the neck just below his jaw, and he lurched sideways, his hand going to his destroyed neck, blood pumping out in long arterial spurts.

  “The blinds,” DeCamp said, his blood singing again like it had in the old Angola days, and he shot the engineer in the head.

  “Son of a bitch!” one of the operators shouted, and he reached for his keyboard, but DeCamp shot him in the head.

  Still moving toward the two consoles, he shot the remaining two men, one round in each man’s head, and the control room was suddenly silent.

  Bin Helbawi was standing behind one of the consoles, a lot of blood on the computer monitor and keyboard and splattered across the desk, not moving as if he were in a trance.

  “The blinds?” DeCamp prompted.

  Bin Helbawi glanced at him. “Locked.”

  At the training camp in Syria, bin Helbawi showed DeCamp photographs and diagrams of how most nuclear power station control rooms were configured — the monitors, the safety devices, and their controls and most important the scram panels. Hutchinson Island was similar, but last week bin Helbawi had faxed several sketches, which showed the differences and exact layout, and DeCamp had committed them to memory while he waited in Miami.

  The plan was simple. First they would destroy the panels that controlled the coolant systems, which would cause each reactor to overheat. Next they would destroy both scram panels, which would have sensed the overheat and automatically shut down the reactors. Once the Semtex was in place and fused, the only way to prevent a catastrophic meltdown would be to pull the panels apart and rewire them so the coolant and scram controls could be manipulated manually.