Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  At the top she glanced toward the windows that looked down on the control room, the blinds closed now, as they usually were, then turned left and hurried down the corridor to the security offices at the opposite end of the corridor.

  Alex Freidland, chief of South Service security, was just coming out of the monitoring center where all the images from the closed-circuit television cameras around the power plant were fed, watched, and recorded by a pair of operators 24/7.

  He was a local from Port St. Lucie, and one of the few black men Gail had ever supervised. Except for his attitude of expect no evil, see no evil, which was sometimes frustrating, he was a damn fine officer, dedicated and bright, and a real pleasure to work with. He was one of the very few men Gail had ever met who could make her laugh, and that was saying something.

  “Still no word from the control room?” Gail demanded.

  “They’ve probably got their hands full with something,” Freidland said. “Happened before.”

  “Bullshit,” Wager said, coming out of the monitoring center. “At least three of the cameras in this building were on what looks like a sixty-second loop. Frozen. I didn’t have time to check the others, but the first is up here in front of the observation window and the other two lead right to the control room door.”

  “The guy who got sick in the middle of the tour,” Gail said. This wasn’t about a control room crew too busy to answer the damn phones; this was the big one. “Has anyone tried to override the control for the blinds?”

  “Dave Bennet’s on his way over,” Wager said. Bennet was the plant’s chief electrical and electronics facilities manager.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That the blinds don’t work and we need them up and running before the next tour group.”

  Gail suddenly remembered the school group over at the visitors center. “There are a bunch of kids waiting to take the one o’clock tour. Get them out of here,” she told Freidland. “And there’s another group in mid-tour wandering around somewhere, get them back on the bus right now, and then close the visitors center, and send all those people home.”

  Freidland hesitated for just a moment, but then headed down the corridor as he got on his walkie-talkie to start issuing orders.

  “Get someone on the front gate,” Gail called after him. “No one gets in without my clearance.”

  Freidland stopped and turned back to her, his eyes wide. “Are you going to evacuate the plant?”

  “I’ll know in the next five minutes.”

  “I’m on it,” Freidland said and he hurried away.

  Gail turned back to Wager. “Where’s Chris?” Chris Strasser was the facility’s chief engineer.

  “He’s at the meeting in the boardroom.”

  “Get him, but let’s do this low-key for the time being,” Gail said. “In the meantime has anyone tried to get inside the control room from downstairs?”

  “The card reader has been locked from inside.”

  “Shit,” Gail said. “I’m calling the hotline, see if they can send us a team. Soon as you get Chris back here, dig out the remote camera, and call Bennet and have him bring a drill with a diamond bit. We’re going through the observation window, I want to see what the hell is going on down there.”

  Like Freidland, Wager hesitated for just a beat, apparently unwilling to take the situation to the next step, admit that they were probably in the middle of a terrorist attack on the plant. “Do you think this is it?”

  “We’ll see as soon as we get through the window,” Gail said, and she went into her office where she speed-dialed the NNSA’s hotline in Washington. The one man she wanted with her at this moment was somewhere out in the field, and even if she knew how to reach him, she didn’t know if she wanted to admit she needed help. It was that stubborn streak that her father had once warned would get her into a peck of trouble.

  “It’s okay to hold out your hand for a lift now and then,” he told her, Minnesota thick in his voice. She could hear him at this moment, and her stomach knotted. The two most important men in her life; one got himself killed in the line of duty, and the other had always been, at least by reputation, a dangerous man. And eighteen months ago he’d become a damaged man, volatile in the extreme, yet thoughtful, kind, sometimes patient, and above every other trait, he was steady. He was a man who could be counted on in an emergency, like now.

  “Hotline.”

  Gail turned back to the phone. “This is Gail Newby, Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station. We have trouble of an unknown nature developing. We haven’t been able to raise our control room crew for the past twenty minutes, nor has an attempt to override the security lock on the access door been successful.”

  The rapid response team concept had been developed to counter the threat of a nuclear attack by terrorists, by detecting the arrival of nuclear materials and/or complete weapon assemblies primarily by ship, but also by airplane, by car or truck, or even by foot or horseback across the Mexican border, or by snowmobile across the nearly three thousand mile, mostly unguarded border with Canada. It had not been designed to counter an attack on a civilian nuclear facility. After 9/11 the thinking had always been that such threats would come from the air.

  “Are you under attack at this moment?”

  “All I know is that our control room crew does not respond.”

  “Can you shut down the reactors from elsewhere?”

  Gail could see the man sitting at a desk in Washington, the Situation Book open in front of him. But so far as she knew this scenario wasn’t there. “I think so. But if the reactors go critical a lot of people will get hurt. A lot of civilians downwind.”

  “Stand by,” the hotline supervisor said, and the line went dead.

  “Come on,” Gail muttered impatiently. Two security technicians monitoring the closed-circuit television monitors were looking at her. They hadn’t been told exactly what was going on yet, but they had eyes and they could see that the Ice Maiden was agitated about something.

  The hotline super was back. “I’m dispatching our team from Miami. They should be with you shortly. In the meantime contact your local authorities, and prepare to evacuate the facility.”

  “What about the FBI?” Gail asked, allowing herself a small bit of relief. Something was being done.

  “I’m on it.”

  Gail broke the connection and speed-dialed Larry Haggerty, who headed up the small unit within the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department that was tasked to protect the plant in case of an emergency, but mostly to coordinate the evacuation. Like the NNSA, everyone had expected an attack to come by air.

  “We have a possible situation developing here.”

  “Okay,” Haggerty said, and she could see him suddenly sit up. They’d worked together since Gail had been assigned to plant security, and although his persona and drawl were of the southern cop, he was sharp. “You have my attention.”

  “We’ve been locked out of our control room, and there’s been no response so far. One of our rapid response teams is coming up from Miami, but I’d like you to stand by in case we have to bug out of here.”

  “I’m on it. What else?”

  “If there’s an actual problem, I might have a suspect for you.”

  Wager came back with Strasser.

  “On site now?”

  “No, but I’ll get back to you with a license number as soon as I can. But first we’re going to try to take a look at what’s happening down there.”

  “Talk to me, darlin’,” Haggerty said. “What’s your gut telling you?”

  “I’m worried, Larry.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Will do,” Gail said and she broke the connection.

  “What’s going on?” Strasser asked.

  TEN

  McGarvey said the same words he’d been saying for the past eighteen months. It was as if he were in a tightly scripted play that was so well rehearsed he wasn’t listening to himself, not even gauging the react
ion of the seven rapid response team recruits standing around the suitcase nuke.

  The picture of his wife’s tearful face as she said goodbye to him at Arlington National Cemetery after their son-in-law’s funeral was permanently etched in his brain. She had been just perfect to him at that moment, her eyes red and moist but still expressive and beautiful, clear windows into her sweet heart.

  Less than five minutes later she and their daughter, Elizabeth, were dead, and the following weeks in which he went berserk, in which he’d become a killing machine — something he still was — had passed in a blur. But he’d extracted his revenge, and it was enough; it had to be enough because he was alone more completely, at a much deeper level than he’d ever been alone. And now this work with the NNSA was something like a balm to his spirit, so that at times like this he could switch to autopilot and simply cruise.

  “But what you’re talking about is racial profiling,” Ainsle protested and he glanced at the others to back him up.

  “You’re damned right he is,” Lundgren said. “Little old ladies with white hair usually aren’t the ones who go around blowing up airplanes or smuggling nuclear materials into the country. It’s why we take a closer look at men in their early twenties to mid-forties, heavy five o’clock shadows, maybe Muslims, maybe not, because chances are if you’re looking for a terrorist he’ll be in that group.”

  “Okay, how do we stop a nuclear attack?” McGarvey asked.

  “By disarming nuclear devices. We have some pretty neat gadgets that can interfere with firing mechanisms. Shut the weapon down even if it’s gone into countdown mode.”

  “But first you have to find it.”

  “We work with customs and with air marshals and the Coast Guard,” Ainsle said, a little more sure now that his argument was the correct one. “It’s not perfect, but we can put detectors aboard airplanes that will pick up radiation signatures from a couple thousand feet up.”

  “You have to have to have a reasonably good suspicion that there might be a nuclear device let’s say in Boston’s south side, or maybe somewhere in the Mall in Washington. You can’t simply fly over every part of every city twenty-four/seven,” McGarvey said, trying to keep a reasonable tone. But it had been the same with just about every group he and Lundgren had trained. Scientists were bright, a lot of them so bright they were starry-eyed idealists.

  “That’s the job of the CIA overseas, and the FBI’s counterterrorism people here in country.”

  “So you’re saying that your only job is to detect and disarm nuclear devices that someone else will tell you are here and point you in the right direction,” Lundgren said.

  “What are we doing here today?” McGarvey asked. “What can we say that will make your jobs a little easier, make you a little more effective as a team?”

  Ainsle shrugged. “I don’t have the faintest idea, none of us do, except that we were ordered to meet with you if we want to be on one of the teams.”

  “Fair enough,” Lundgren said. “So listen to the man. We’ve already established that he’s faced this sort of a thing before in such a way that none of you read about it in the newspapers. If you open your minds you might learn something that’ll save a lot of lives, possibly your own.”

  It was busywork, McGarvey had to keep reminding himself. The Company shrinks said that he needed to keep his mind occupied if there was to be hope he wouldn’t go around shooting people. But all the bad guys weren’t dead. There would always be a never-ending supply trying to knock down our gates.

  “We’re here to sell you on a mind-set,” McGarvey said. “A way of looking at your environment — your entire environment, not just your electronic equipment — while you’re on assignment in the field where the opposition might not play by the book, or by any rules of engagement that make any sense to you at that moment.”

  “You’re telling us to stay loose, stay flexible,” Ainsle said. “And you’re right, we saw that when you showed up out of nowhere and pointed a gun at us. Won’t happen again. We’ve learned that lesson.”

  Christ, McGarvey thought. They all came from the same mold. “Four points not negotiable,” McGarvey said. “These are the new rules. One: in the field you most definitely will use profiling as one of your most important tools. Not only racial profiling, but profiling of the kind that will make you notice the one person in a crowd who seems nervous, the one wearing a bulky jacket on a mild day, the one who won’t look you in the eye, the van with heavily tinted windows coming around the block for a second time apparently looking for a parking spot when several are available, the one person who doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “Paranoia,” one of the young scientists muttered.

  “Right,” McGarvey replied. “Two: you’re bright people, and very often you have hunches, in the lab, at home in the middle of the night, driving to or from work. The eureka moments when you suddenly have an insight. Gut instincts. Trust them in the field. If something doesn’t seem right to you, it probably isn’t.”

  “We’re scientists, not trained FBI agents,” Ainsle said. “We don’t think that way.”

  “You will after we’re finished here,” Lundgren told them.

  “Three: you will be issued weapons and will be given the training to use them,” McGarvey said. “In the field you will shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “I won’t—” Ainsle started, but McGarvey cut him off.

  “If you want to be on a team, you will be armed. Four: give no quarter. Which means if you draw your weapon, you will keep firing until the suspect is down and unable to shoot back or trigger any device he may have intended to detonate. Center mass.”

  “I could kill him doing that,” Ainsle said.

  “That’s his problem, not yours.”

  “Or her problem,” Lundgren added.

  All of them looked a little green around the gills, but some of them were beginning to see the light, McGarvey could read it in their faces. It was a tough world out there, and no one had asked permission if they could fly airliners into buildings, and no one apologized afterwards. The only way in which they could have been stopped would have been to profile them and shoot them dead before they got aboard the airplanes.

  McGarvey’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. The NNSA’s hotline came up on the caller ID. Lundgren was getting the same call, and McGarvey felt the instant stirring that something was happening or about to do so.

  “Excuse me,” he told the group and he answered the call. “McGarvey.”

  “This is the hotline OD, we have a potential class one situation at the Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station.”

  “What’s the nature of the problem?”

  “A possible incursion, by a person or persons unknown. Security gets no response from the control room.”

  “Has Gruen been notified?” McGarvey asked. Carlos Gruen was Team Miami’s leader, and one of the fair-haired boys with the program manager, Howard Haggerty, up in Washington. He did everything by the book — exactly by the book — which meant that he had his nose so far up Haggerty’s ass that it would probably take him all afternoon to extract it, gather his team, and actually make the decision to head up to Hutchinson Island.

  “He’s in the process of getting his people and equipment together.”

  “Stand by,” McGarvey told the OD, and he turned to Lundgren, and nodded toward the Pave Hawk helicopter. “Round up the pilot, we need a ride.”

  “I’m on it,” Lundgren said, and he broke the connection with the hotline and headed over to the ready phone by the door.

  “Have the local authorities been notified?”

  “In the process.”

  “The Bureau?”

  “They’re sending teams from Orlando and Jacksonville, but you’ll probably be first on site.”

  “We’ll take it,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection.

  The scientists were watching him. “What sort of a problem?” Ainsle asked.

  “Someone may have
taken over the control room at the Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station.”

  A minute later a pickup truck came through the doorway and screeched to a halt near the helicopter. A pair of ground crewmen jumped out and started prepping the bird; removing the rotor tie-downs, disengaging the safety locks on the tail rotor, racing through their engine checks and walk around.

  Lundgren came over. “The flight crew’ll be here in three minutes. Have you called Gail?”

  “Not yet,” McGarvey said. “She’ll have her hands full at the moment.”

  A squat tow truck came into the hangar, hooked up to the chopper, and once the wheel chocks were removed towed the machine outside.

  “This scenario isn’t in the book,” Ainsle said.

  “It will be tomorrow,” McGarvey said, and he and Lundgren followed the helicopter out the door.

  ELEVEN

  “Break down the control room door, now,” Strasser demanded. He was primarily a nuclear engineer used to tidy, if sometimes complex, solutions.

  “Not until we find out what’s going on,” Gail told him. At this moment the safety and security of the facility were in her hands, and she still didn’t know what was happening. Time had seemed to slip into slow motion. “I need you to tell me if the reactors can be scrammed from somewhere other than the control room.”

  “Yes, but it would cause a very large disruption on the grid, and we wouldn’t be able to get back up into full operations for a considerable amount of time. Damage would be done.”

  “I’ll take the responsibility,” Gail said sharply.

  “The company could lose a serious amount of money.” Strasser was a large, shambling bear of a man with a heavy German accent. He was from Leipzig in the former East Germany, and had escaped over the wall with his parents when he was a teenager. He’d got his schooling in nuclear engineering at the Polytechnic in Berlin and then at the Julich Division of the Fachhochschule at Aachen, before coming to the U.S. to work at Los Alamos. He was a very bright man, but he had never outgrown his stiff-necked German precision.