Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “Down!” he shouted, and he turned and shoved Gail to the floor as a tremendous explosion blew out the observation window, cutting Wager to pieces and throwing Strasser back off his feet.

  The tinkling of the falling glass raining down on them seemed to last forever, and McGarvey had been in this sort of a situation before so that he knew to keep his head down, his face shielded until it stopped.

  “No one move!” he shouted.

  Someone was swearing and McGarvey thought it was Townsend, the plant manager, and then it was over, and he looked up.

  Strasser was sitting down against the opposite wall, a thin trickle of blood oozing from a cut on his chin. He seemed dazed, but his face and especially his eyes seemed to be okay.

  “See to your engineer,” he told Gail, and he went to Wager, but it was no use. The man was lying on his back a few feet from Strasser, his left foot folded under his right leg, the entire front half of his face and skull missing, splattered against the wall behind him. The force of the blast had driven the bullhorn into his head, followed by glass shrapnel. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.

  McGarvey turned to Bennet who was down on his knees, blood streaming from dozens of wounds on his face, neck, and chest, fragments of glass sticking out of his eyes. “Can you move?”

  “Yes. How bad is it?”

  “You’re not going to die,” McGarvey said. “No arteries were hit.”

  “What about my eyes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Townsend wasn’t hurt, but he was so angry he was clenching and unclenching his fists, and he was shaking, muttering something under his breath.

  “Get out of here,” McGarvey told him, helping Bennet to his feet. “And take him with you.”

  Townsend came out of his daze. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You’ll be needed to get this place put back together and organized. We’re expendable, you’re not. Now, get the fuck out of here. Out of the damage path as fast as you can.”

  Gail had helped Strasser to his feet, and she was staring at Wager’s devastated body, her mouth tight, a hard look in her eyes.

  “He’s right, Bob,” Strasser said. He was a little shaky on his feet.

  McGarvey handed Bennet to Gail, and went to the blasted open window, not bothering to see if Townsend would really leave because he didn’t give a damn.

  The control room was in better shape than he expected it would be. Most of the force of the blast had been directed outward and upward. The son of a bitch had aimed his chest at the observation window meaning to kill at least the one trying to talk to him. As a result, his body, parts of which were splattered across the control desk for reactor one, had partially shielded the control panels behind him. The Semtex and LED counters were still in place, counting past 54:30.

  Strasser joined him.

  “Do you see anything obviously unfixable?” McGarvey asked the engineer.

  “Just the explosives on the coolant and scram panels.”

  “I’ll get you inside so you can take a closer look. Maybe he forgot something.”

  “How?” Strasser asked.

  But McGarvey had already stepped up on the sill, and balancing for just a second leaped up catching one of the open aluminum trusses that held up the low ceiling. It bent slightly under his weight, but he hand-walked out to the middle of the control room, away from the pools of blood, and dropped the ten or twelve feet to the floor, rolling with the hit.

  He had banged up his knees in the fall, and he had to hobble over to the door, but the electronic locking mechanism had been disabled so it wouldn’t open. No time.

  He pulled out his pistol and fired two shots into the back of the card reader, which sparked and the door lock cycled.

  Gail was there with Strasser, her pistol out, but when she saw it was McGarvey she lowered her weapon. “We heard the shots, and I didn’t know what the hell was happening.”

  He turned and went back to the control panels on the back wall and took a closer look at the LED counters, which had counted down to 50:00.

  “My God, we need to call an ambulance,” Strasser said.

  “They’re dead,” McGarvey replied sharply. He understood the detonators that looked like pencil stubs stuck into the Semtex, but the LED counters were out of place. There was no need for them, or at least not something as big and as complicated as they seemed.

  “Do you recognize the setup?” Gail asked at his shoulder.

  “No,” McGarvey said. He knew a fair bit about explosive devices and the means with which to detonate them, but this was something he’d never seen before.

  “Can you disconnect the damned things?”

  “I don’t know. This is probably some sort of a fail-safe. Tamper with them and they’ll blow.” McGarvey looked up as Strasser eased one of the bodies away from the computer monitor for reactor two.

  “Cutting out the ability for us to remotely scram the reactors was probably done here,” the engineer said. “Maybe he rewrote the code. I need to get into the system to see what he did.” He sat down, squeamish at first because of all the blood, but then he took out a handkerchief and wiped off the keyboard and pulled up the master program, which was a directory of all the control documents that were used to operate the reactors, the coolant and steam generators and condensers, the turbines and scram functions.

  McGarvey glanced at the LED, which had passed 45:00. “You have about thirty minutes before we’ll need to think about getting out of here.”

  “What can I do?” Gail demanded. “Goddamnit, I feel so fucking helpless, and guilty.”

  McGarvey thought that in a large measure it was her fault for not running a tighter security setup, even though this scenario wasn’t in the playbook, but it wouldn’t help to say it. The exact details of 9/11 had faded from the collective consciousness and a lot of people were walking around with blinders on. “You remember Alan Lundgren, from Washington.”

  “He’s working with you now. Former Bureau counterterrorism man.”

  “An Air National Guard chopper brought us up from Miami, Alan’s outside helping organize the evacuation, so he’ll be nearby. But he’s the explosives expert, I need him in here. You can take his place.”

  “At the heliport?”

  “No, right outside in the parking lot.”

  It was obvious that she wanted to stay, torn between following McGarvey’s orders, and wanting to help fix this problem. But she nodded grimly. “I might be able to retrieve an image of the guy who left the tour. The monitoring station is upstairs, just down the hall from the observation window.”

  “Later,” McGarvey said.

  Gail looked over at Strasser, whose fingers were flying over the keyboard. “Good luck,” she said, and she left.

  “Are you coming up with anything?” McGarvey asked the engineer.

  “Nothing so far,” Strasser said without looking away from the screen. “The remote scram control seems to be functional from here.”

  “Keep digging,” McGarvey said, and he took a closer look at the explosives molded to the other three panels. Nothing complicated, in each case just a one kilo brick of Semtex molded between an in-the-wall-mounted unit about the size of a fifteen- or sixteen-inch flat-panel television set and a smaller panel of brightly lit push buttons beneath it. If the plastic went off, it would take out both panels and probably do a lot of damage to some of the other controls and indicators within a eight- or ten-foot radius, and then they would be in deep shit.

  Like Gail, he was beginning to feel helpless. As the counters passed 40:00, he took out his cell phone and took several close-up photos of the LED devices then speed-dialed Otto Rencke’s number at Langley.

  Rencke was the CIA’s oddest duck genius, on a campus filled with such people, and was in charge of Special Operations, which meant he thought about things that no one else had dreamed up. And whenever he came up with something, perhaps something new the Chinese were doing, or defeating a new computer su
pervirus, or predicting a likely military or terrorist operation aimed at us somewhere in the world — and he was never wrong — the director and everyone else on the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building sat up and took notice.

  He and McGarvey had worked together for years, and over that time Otto and his wife, Louise, who worked at the National Security Agency, had become family to Mac and his wife. When their daughter and son-in-law were assassinated, leaving behind a three-year-old daughter, Otto and Louise took the child in as their own; no hesitation, no questions asked; it’s what family did for each other.

  Rencke answered on the first ring. “Oh, wow, Mac, is it you?”

  “I have a problem I need your help with.”

  Rencke always wanted to talk about what was going on in McGarvey’s life, about Audie, about Company gossip, and McGarvey almost always went along. But this time was different. “What do you have, kemo sabe?”

  “I’m sending you some photographs,” McGarvey said and he hit the Send button, as the LED timers passed 38:00.

  “Okay, got ’em,” Rencke said. “Oh, wow, you’re in the control room of a nuclear power station, and you’re in trouble.”

  “Hutchinson Island, Florida,” McGarvey said. “It’s Semtex and an electric fuse, but I’ve never seen timers like these.”

  “Not just timers. Probably remote controls too, maybe even monitors listening in to what’s going on,” Rencke said. He sounded out of breath as he usually did when he was excited or worried. “Who’s with you?”

  “For now, Chris Strasser, the chief engineer, and Alan Lundgren, who’s been working with me at the NNSA.”

  “Okay, I’ll run these downstairs to Jared, get his take. In the meantime I wouldn’t screw around. That shit could blow at any minute and when it does it’ll take out more than a couple of control panels, it’ll take out whoever’s standing in the way.”

  “One of those panels initiates a scram if something goes wrong.”

  “I see that,” Rencke said. “And I think the other panel looks like coolant controls, and if these people were any good they would have screwed with the remote scram capabilities.”

  “Probably from the computer at the monitoring positions. Can you hack into them?”

  “Nada. It’s a closed system, they’re not online,” Rencke said. “I’ll get back to you in the next couple of minutes.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “I see that,” Rencke said, and the connection was cut.

  SEVENTEEN

  The LED counters passed 33:00.

  McGarvey went around the control console for reactor two and watched over Strasser’s shoulder as the engineer tried to figure out what had been done to his system. But he was a nuclear engineer, not a computer systems or programs expert.

  “We’re running out of time,” McGarvey said, and Strasser looked up at him and shook his head.

  “I’m getting nowhere with this,” he said, frustrated and just a little frightened. “Whoever did this was damned good.”

  “What about the control panels themselves? Can we take them apart and rewire the circuits so that those functions can be accessed away from here?” McGarvey said. He wanted to light a fire under the engineer’s ass; the man knew his stuff, but he was ponderous

  “It’s possible. But it’d take time.”

  Lundgren showed up at the door and pulled up short. “Jesus Christ, what a mess,” he said, but then he spotted the Semtex and LED counters and went to the first panel.

  “What are they?” McGarvey said, starting around the console.

  “Stay the hell away,” Lundgren said, his nose an inch from the LED counter. “This is practically a cell phone,” he muttered. “Dual purpose. A timed trigger, but it looks like it’ll accept a signal input. The antenna is built-in. Definitely cell phone frequencies.”

  “No time to get a bomb disposal squad here,” McGarvey said.

  “I can see that, so we’ll have to do it ourselves,” Lundgren said. He looked over his shoulder at Strasser. “Are you the chief engineer?”

  “Yes,” Strasser said, getting to his feet. He was in some pain and it showed on his face.

  “What are we dealing with here? What’ll happen if these panels are destroyed?”

  “The nuclear reactors will overheat and there will be a catastrophic meltdown that the containment vessel might not be able to completely handle.”

  “Will there be a radiation release?”

  “Potentially massive,” Strasser said.

  “Carlos and his people just showed up,” Lundgren told McGarvey. “From what I saw he only brought two of his team along. But Marsha is one of them, and she has her tool kit. If they’ll just stop talking to the plant manager.”

  It was a bit of good news. While Carlos Gruen and his Miami NNSA team were highly trained to disarm nuclear weapons, Marsha Littlejohn was their expert on all kinds of explosive devices and detonators, easily on par with Lundgren. And although her personality was irrelevant at this moment, McGarvey remembered her as a cheerful optimist, the exact opposite of Gruen who found fault with everything and everyone. In advanced training, which McGarvey and Lundgren conducted at a weeklong workshop at Quantico, the team had been faced with a series of increasingly difficult tasks — everything from finding and disarming a nuclear device, to dealing with as many as ten armed and highly motivated FBI instructors playing the role of al-Quaeda fanatics — during which Gruen grumped his way, giving up when it became obvious the team was meant to fail. But Marsha never quit trying, always with a smile on her petite round face.

  Lundgren pulled out a Swiss Army penknife, unfolded the one-and-a-half-inch blade, and probed one corner of the Semtex, digging out a tiny piece of it, and smelled it. “Good stuff,” he said absently, turning his attention back to the LED timer, which was passing 27:00.

  “I suggest trying to open the panels and rewire them,” McGarvey said.

  “We don’t want to do that,” Lundgren said. “Not until we know what we’re dealing with. Could be motion sensitive, among other things. Might even react to body heat it someone touches it.” He was studying the three wires leading out of the counter and up to the fuses. “Two of them complete the circuit, but I don’t know about the third.” He looked up. “But we caught a break. We’re between the morning and evening land and sea breezes. Nothing’s moving out there right now. So if this thing pops any radiation leaks should stay fairly close to home.”

  McGarvey’s sat phone vibrated. It was Rencke.

  “The LED units are almost certainly comms devices. Most likely on cell phone frequencies.”

  “We got that much, what else?”

  “Is Lundgren there?”

  “Yeah, and Marsha Littlejohn will be here soon.”

  “You’ve got good people with you, but make damned sure they understand that the detonation signal could come at any time.”

  “Stand by,” McGarvey said. “Otto’s on the line, and I sent him pictures of the detonators,” he told Lundgren. “The Company’s science and technology directorate is helping out. Anything you need to know?”

  “What the hell’s the third wire for?”

  McGarvey relayed the question.

  “The best guess here is a seismic sensory circuit,” Rencke said. “Depending on what kind of a reading the unit receives from elsewhere that particular explosion will go off in a timed sequence with others. Jared thinks it’s the kind of setup sometimes used to hunt for dinosaur bones buried too deeply for other means, and for oil exploration. The detonator reads the seismic returns from other explosions in the chain and decides what to do next.”

  “Why here?”

  “Move anything in the wrong way, and the detonators will fire.”

  “You mean like another panel?”

  “Yeah, and probably the control units that could maybe reroute cooling water. Just take it easy, Mac. Janet says your best bet will be disabling the LED counters.”

  “Alan thin
ks they could be heat sensitive,” McGarvey said.

  “Hang on,” Rencke said. He was back almost immediately. “Probably not. But go tenderly.”

  “Will do,” McGarvey said. He broke the connection and explained what Otto and the Company’s S&T directorate had come up with.

  “That’s just fine,” Lundgren said, disgusted.

  “We can’t touch anything in here?” Strasser demanded.

  “No.”

  They all looked at the counters, which were just passing 23:20.

  “What can we do?” the engineer asked.

  “You’ve done all you can, it’s up to us now. Get out,” Lundgren told him. He glanced up at McGarvey. “Go pull Gruen’s head out of his ass and get his team in here ASAP. Marsha’s got the equipment we need.”

  “We’re here,” Gruen said from the doorway. “And I’m taking over this case as of now.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Carlos Gruen was a roly-poly man, with a round, perpetually red face and the defensive attitude that many men who stood barely five feet two seemed to wear like a suit of armor. He was considered the fair-haired boy up in Washington, and his goal was to one day take over the entire NNSA, which was not out of the question. He had the credentials for the job: a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from M.I.T., an MBA from Harvard, and a lot of friends in the Department of Energy.

  He carried two aluminum cases, each about the size of a medium-sized overnight bag, his glasses on top of his head, the collar of his powder blue coveralls properly buttoned up. He stopped all of a sudden when he saw the bodies and the gore, and the blown-out observation window above.

  This was exactly the sort of situation McGarvey had been trying to drum into the heads of all the Rapid Response team personnel, but he’d suspected all along that no one actually believed they’d ever encounter something like this. They were scientists and technicians, not combat troops, and he could see dawning realization of what had happened, was happening here, in the momentarily sick expression in Gruen’s pale eyes.