They were standing in her office, the doors to the monitoring room and the corridor open. So far there was no panic because very few people inside the plant knew that anything was wrong, but that wasn’t going to last much longer. In the meantime she felt like a small child being admonished by her elder.
“Do it,” she told him.
Strasser glanced toward the corridor door. “Townsend should be informed.”
“Just how much damage could a terrorist do in the control room?”
Strassser’s eyes widened, and Gail saw that she had gotten to him. “More than you want to imagine.” He picked up the phone and called Bob Holiman, the day shift chief operating engineer who at the moment was working on something in turbine building two. “Strasser. I want you to initiate an emergency shutdown on number two.”
Gail could hear Holiman shouting something.
“On my authority,” Strasser said. “But it has to be done on site, there is a problem in the control room. Cut the power to the control rod HMs.”
Control rods suspended above a reactor’s core would drop down, once a signal that something was going wrong was transmitted to the HMs, or holding magnets, that kept the rods in place, immediately shutting down the nuclear reaction by absorbing massive amounts of neutrons. That was a function operated from the control room where computers monitored everything from the state of the reactor to the coolant systems and even the electrical power output. If anything went wrong in the system the signal would be sent and the reactor would be scrammed. In this case, where the control room was apparently out of the loop, power could be cut manually, shutting down the HMs, which would allow the weight of the control rods themselves, aided by powerful springs, to do the job. Shutting down the reactor would theoretically take four seconds or less.
Gail used her cell phone to find Wager who answered on the first ring. “I have the camera and I’m on the way up. Is Bennet there with the drill yet?”
“No. Call him again and tell him to get his ass over here right now!”
“I’m on it.”
“I’ll hold,” Strasser said, and he put a hand over the phone. “It’ll take a minute or two to start the procedure.”
“What about reactor one?”
“Let’s try this first, and see what damage is done.”
“Specifically what trouble can we get into from the control room?” Gail asked, even though she knew something of it, if not the exact extent.
Strasser glared at her, not in the least bit comfortable with even thinking about it; his lips tightened. “Much trouble.”
“Come on, Chris, I need to know what we’re facing.”
“It could be as bad, maybe even worse than Chernobyl.”
“An explosion?”
Strasser shook his head. “That’s not possible, but the reactors could go into a catastrophic meltdown if the cooling controls were disabled and the scram panels damaged. A great amount of nuclear material would be released into the atmosphere.”
“Everyone in the plant would be in serious trouble.”
“Yes,” Strasser said heavily, as if he regretted his own assessment.
Wager came down the corridor on the run, with the remote camera bag slung over his shoulder while speaking on his cell phone, presumably to Bennet, and Gail stepped out of her office to meet him as he broke the connection.
“Where the hell is he?” she demanded.
“He’s on his way,” Wager said. “He didn’t know the situation so he wasn’t in any hurry. He knows now.”
“Ms. Newby,” Strasser called from her office and Gail went back inside to him and her stomach flopped when she saw the expression on his face. He looked frightened.
“What?”
“We cannot scram from outside the control room. The circuitry has been blocked.”
“Can’t the power be cut?” Gail asked.
“No. But he’s on his way over to reactor one to see if it’s the same.”
“It will be,” Gail said, no longer any doubt in her mind that the man who’d dropped out of the tour, claiming to be sick, was somehow involved in what was developing. “Has anything else been affected yet?”
“Everything appears to be operating within normal limits,” Strasser said.
“Can we monitor what’s happening to the reactors from outside the control room?”
“We can watch our power outputs, and watch that the flow of cooling water isn’t interrupted. But once that happens it will be only a matter of minutes before the situation would start to become unstable.”
Wager had come into the office. “Look, how about if we cut off electricity to the control room. The lights will go out and their computers will go down.”
Strasser started to object, but Gail held him off. “They could have rigged explosives to some of the panels that might react to a power failure. We just don’t know.”
“Wouldn’t work anyway,” Strasser said. “For obvious reasons all the key equipment in there is on a self-contained backup power system.”
Make a decision and stick with it, McGarvey had told her during her training last year. But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. If a situation arises, react to it immediately.
“Even before you have all the facts?” she’d asked.
“As you’re gathering the facts.” He’d smiled wistfully in that sad way of his, which she had found bittersweet and immensely appealing at the time. Still did. “Most of the time you won’t get all the details until later when everything is over and done with.”
“Until Bennet gets here, I want you to alert all the section heads to start moving out their nonessential personnel,” she told Wager. “No panic, no sirens.”
“What about Townsend at the rest of the brass in the boardroom?”
“Them, too. I want everybody to get as far away from here as possible.”
“What do I tell them?”
“Anything you want. It’s just a precautionary measure. But not a word about the actual situation to anyone other than Townsend. Clear?”
Wager nodded, handed her the camera bag, and went into his office to make the calls.
Gail turned to Strasser. “Stick with me, if you would, Chris. Once we get through the window and get a look at what’s happening inside, you’ll be a better judge than me what condition the computers and panels are in.”
Bennet showed up with his tool bag, all out of breath and red in the face. The stocky fifty-one-year-old electrical and electronics technician had retired from the Air Force after a thirty-year career dealing with and eventually supervising the same sort of work around nuclear weapons storage and maintenance depots, including a stint at Pantex in Texas where nukes were constructed. In the time Gail had worked here she’d never seen the man in a hurry, or flustered, and who could blame him for keeping calm? After working around nuclear weapons, some of them hydrogen bombs, a nuclear-powered electrical generating facility was tame. But right now he was agitated.
“Why not use the card reader?” he asked. “I can bypass the lockout.”
“Because we don’t know what’s going on down there,” Gail told him. “I want you to put a hole in the lower corner of the window, the farthest away from the control consoles, and with as little noise as possible. I want to thread the camera inside. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” Bennet said. “But it’ll have to be slow.”
“How slow?”
“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”
“All right, get to it,” Gail told him and when he left she stepped around the corner to the monitoring room where the two on-duty security officers had been listening to what was going on. “You spot anything usual, and I mean anything , feed it to me,” she told them. “But I don’t think this situation is going to last much longer before I order the evacuation.” She started to turn away, but had another thought. “Look, guys, if you want to bug out I won’t blame you, or order you to stay. Okay?”
“We’re staying,” one of them said, and the
other nodded.
They were both so young that Gail almost told them to get out, but she nodded. “Good show.”
Back out in the corridor Strasser had followed Bennet to the observation window, where the technician was setting up his drill. Satisfied that they were working that particular problem, she called Freidland on her FM radio. “Alex, copy?”
“Yes, ma’am.
“Where are you?”
“Just heading to the visitors center to make sure everybody got out. Has the situation changed?”
“I want you to round up as many security people as you can find and standby for a full evacuation. I don’t want any panic. But if it happens everyone’ll have to get as far away as quickly as possible. Haggerty will be sending his people as soon as I know exactly what we’re in the middle of. But I expect we’ll know within the next fifteen minutes. Stay loose.”
“Are you aware that people are already heading out?” Freidland asked.
“Right. Nonessential personnel.”
“Well, a lot of those nonessential folks don’t look too happy. Matter of fact they’re scared.”
“We’ll have to deal with whatever comes our way.”
“I hear you,” Freidland replied.
Wager came out of his office. “The word’s gone out.”
“Alex says the exodus has already started, and so has the panic,” Gail told him. “Bennet says it might take as long as fifteen minutes to get through the glass. Go let Townsend know what’s going on, and it’s his call but he might think about getting those people out of here. In the meantime I’ll get Haggerty in gear.”
Wager glanced down the corridor toward the observation window. “I never really thought it would happen this way, you know.”
“Nobody did, Larry,” she said, and went back into her office to call Haggerty again to get the local cops and emergency responders rolling. NNSA would have already alerted the FBI and as soon as she knew the exact situation she would be calling the governor in Tallahassee for help from the National Guard. It was a mess and for the first time in her life since her father’s death she was frightened to the core.
TWELVE
The conference was beginning to wind down, and Townsend had managed to get beyond his prejudices and really see that Eve Larsen’s project did have merit, even if it seemed far-fetched, especially the bit about modifying the weather. Yet that was the part that most intrigued him.
He’d worked the big coal-fired stations out in Nebraska and Montana and for a time in West Virginia and he’d seen firsthand the effects the emissions had on the air quality, even with the new electrostatic precipitators to take out the flue ash, and in some places stack gas scrubbers, which used a pulverized limestone wet slurry to clean up the exit gas pollutants. To this day, electrical generating stations were responsible for more than 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.
Just eliminating the coal-fired plants, which supplied half of all the electricity in the U.S. would have a massive impact on the weather, even on a global scale.
He wanted to believe in her science, and the impact it could have, and he could see that a few of the others around the table were beginning to get what she’d been driving at here.
The major stumbling block, of course, would be funding the next stage of her project, and David Wren, SSP&L’s tightfisted CFO had suggested going to the oil companies themselves and ask them to give or sell her an abandoned Gulf oil drilling platform. At first she’d been startled, but Townsend had seen the glint in her eyes and the glimmerings of a plan as that notion began to strike her. The fact that Wren was only half serious meant nothing to the woman, and Townsend was damned thankful that she wasn’t into nukes and working for him. She would definitely be a handful. Brilliant, yes, but almost certainly difficult.
Someone knocked at the conference room door and Townsend looked up, irritated as Wager came in. Eve Larsen was in mid-sentence and she stopped talking.
“Sorry to bother your meeting again, but could I have a word with you, Mr. Townsend?”
Townsend had been only mildly interested when Chris had been called out a few minutes earlier; they were generating electricity here and the chief engineer was always on call. But this interruption now, and the look on Wager’s face, was troublesome.
“Excuse me, Dr. Larsen,” he said, getting to his feet.
The others, especially Tom Differding, the company’s chief of operations, gave him questioning looks, but there was nothing he could say, because he didn’t know if there was any trouble, or what it might be, though he had a feeling whatever Wager wanted was serious.
“Please continue with your presentation, I’ll just be a minute,” he said, and he stepped out into the corridor with Wager, but waited until the door was closed before he asked what the hell was going on.
“Gail wanted me to call you out of your meeting,” Wager said. “We have a developing situation that might mean evacuating the facility.”
Townsend glanced down the corridor toward the security offices and beyond to where Chris Strasser and Gail were watching someone doing something to the observation window, and a little shiver of anticipation made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Tell me.”
“We’ve had no answer from the control room supervisor or crew in nearly a half hour, and Gail thinks that it’s a real possibility someone has taken over down there. The card reader on the door has been blocked, and when Chris had Bob Holiman try for a remote scram on two it couldn’t be done.”
“Scram?” Townsend said and he was suddenly more frightened than he’d ever been in his life.
“Gail wanted to give you the heads-up, and she suggested that you finish up the meeting and get those people out of here. We’re already evacuating nonessential personnel, and it’s beginning to get ugly outside.”
Townsend brushed past him and went down to the observation window. It was Dave Bennet on a knee drilling a hole through the glass, but slowly, making almost no noise, and just that fact was ominous.
Gail and Chris looked up, and he could see the concern and fear on their faces, even though Gail was trying to hide it.
“Okay, what’s the situation? Larry told me something about it, but fill me in. You tried to scram two remotely?”
“It was locked out from inside the control room,” Strasser said. “That’s not supposed to happen, but somehow they tampered with the HM circuitry.”
“I asked Chris to order it as a precaution,” Gail explained. “It would have caused damage and cost the company a lot of money. But the alternative could be much worse.”
“I understand that,” Townsend replied curtly, his anger in part because of his fear but also in part that he’d not been informed until now. His input had not been asked for something so massively important not only to the well-being of the facility, but to its employees. “But what brought you to make such a unilateral decision?”
“No one answers from inside,” Gail said, and he could see that she was getting angry as well.
“That’s happened before. They may have their hands full.”
“But they wouldn’t have blocked the door lock, nor would they have tampered with the remote scramming mechanism.”
“Has there been any changes on the status boards?” Townsend asked his chief engineer.
Strasser shook his head. “Everything’s within the proper parameters.”
“I didn’t want to bother you until we had more information,” Gail said. “Once Holiman told us that number two couldn’t be shut down, I had Larry call you out of the meeting. I’ve already notified the NNSA hotline, and they’re sending a team up from Miami. They’ve contacted the FBI by now and I gave the heads-up to St. Lucie County’s emergency response people.”
Townsend couldn’t believe this was happening, didn’t want to believe it. Troubles with coal-fired plants could and sometimes were bad, but nukes were the worst, because when they went bad a lot of civilians within the damage path could be hurt, the effects se
rious for the remainder of their lives; leukemia as well as a dozen other cancers could show up anytime, even as long as twenty years after an accident. The Russians knew all about that kind of a horror.
But he calmed down. “I assume you have a good reason for drilling a hole through the window.”
“We want to thread a remote camera head inside past the blinds and take a look at what’s happening down there.”
“And?”
“We’ll know when we get though,” Gail said. “Dave?”
“Ten minutes, maybe less,” Bennet said without looking up.
Townsend had developed a grudging respect for his chief of security in the year or so she’d been here. Although technically she was employed by the NNSA, and not Barker Security and therefore not for him, this was his facility, and in her first few months here he had come close to sending her packing. Generally she had been a pain in the ass — just the same as he imagined Eve Larsen would be, and for about the same reasons; they were both highly intelligent and independent women, nothing at all like his wife of twenty-seven years who was strong when strength was called for, and compliant when that was needed. His life was neat, private, and above all orderly.
The shades covering the observation window were closed, and he was about to ask why she just didn’t open them, when he realized that function had probably been blocked from inside. The conclusion he was coming to was the same as Gail’s, and he had to admit to himself that were he in her shoes he would have taken the same steps.
“We can’t reverse engineer this thing?” he asked Strasser.
“The circuitry has been blocked from inside.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Nevertheless that’s the situation. Someone has managed somehow either to rewire the scram override panels, or rewrite some of the computer code.”
“I understand,” Townsend said. “But that couldn’t have been accomplished in a half hour, could it?”
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