“Good.” She stopped herself from calling out further orders as she reached the last set of stairs. She wasn’t going to jump in and confuse an already chaotic situation. The best thing she could do was to let her people do what they had been trained to do, but she had to make sure they were following procedure. “Have you notified DOE?”
“We’re on the line now. The Department of Energy emergency operations center is trying to set up a call with Dr. van Dyckman, but he’s not in the headquarters building. They said they’d patch him through to you as soon as they find him.”
Good thing Stanley’s out of the loop, Adonia thought. Knowing van Dyckman, he might try to micromanage from Washington.
Stanley van Dyckman was the poster child for the Peter principle, promoted well beyond his level of competence, always taking credit for other people’s work. And now as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy, he wielded just enough clout to really screw things up. But as long as the bureaucrat was out of contact, he couldn’t do any damage.
Having taken care of her legal obligation to notify the Department of Energy, Adonia could focus on helping her team succeed.
The man from the ops desk kept talking as she reached the bottom of the stairs and the emergency exit door. “Ma’am, your phone ID has you calling from one of our Granite Bay cells. Can Dr. van Dyckman reach you on this number?”
“Yes, but if we drop coverage, try this.” She flipped over the emergency radio in her other hand and read out the serial number and contact frequency.
She slammed through the exit door and burst outside, then came to an abrupt halt. She stared at the soot and smoke, smelled burning fuel. Black columns roiled into the air not far from where she stood, but another building blocked her view of the actual burning wet-storage facility. Site alarms competed with loud sirens from emergency vehicles, making it difficult to hear. She felt drops of rain spitting down from the storm.
She pressed the cell closer to her ear as she jogged toward the smoke rising over the next building. “Any better idea what happened? I saw the plane come down — it wasn’t an accident.”
Rustling papers came over the speaker. “He must have been carrying an explosive payload to cause this much damage. Emergency response has detected above-ambient radiation levels, which are steadily rising. There’s still no fiber optic inside the burning facility to visually assess the damage, but it’s possible the cooling pools were breached, exposing the uranium rods to air. If so, there’s enough radiation bouncing around in there to fry anybody in seconds. And if the fire gets to the unshielded rods—”
Adonia knew full well that radioactive contaminants would be swept aloft by the smoke and fire. This was already an unprecedented disaster, and unless the incoming nor’easter dumped a downpour fast, a radioactive cloud of deadly debris could expand to the southwest — straight toward New York City.
More raindrops splattered the ground. She reached the corner of the building as two additional fire trucks rolled around the corner at top speed. But these weren’t her on-site ladders — these trucks were outside civilian firefighters.
And that meant they were untrained for this kind of disaster. They didn’t have the proper shielding or equipment! Local county units were on call in case of emergencies at Granite Bay, but this was not a typical fire. With the amount of radiation present, the first responders would be putting themselves in danger that they couldn’t even see.
Adonia shouted into her cell. “Ops! Who the hell authorized county ladders onto the site? They don’t belong here!”
A new voice came over her speaker. “Dr. van Dyckman ordered them, ma’am. We’re speaking to his staff now. He personally called all local fire districts and asked them to provide additional support to our Granite Bay engines—”
“Pull them back!” Adonia stopped running so she could shout directly into her phone as the rain increased. “Our people can commandeer their equipment, but those responders need to stay away from the crash site if they don’t have the proper decontamination gear. Do it, now!”
“Yes, ma’am. Stand by one.” The phone went silent for a moment. “Calls are going out canceling all off-site units, but van Dyckman’s Chief of Staff says the Deputy Assistant Secretary is now setting up a conference call with the news media, and he’d like you to participate. He wants you to tell the news media exactly what happened—”
Nobody knows what happened yet! She wanted to scream, but calmed herself, just barely. “Tell him I’m not able to participate in any media circus right now.” She hadn’t even seen the crash site. Furious at the meddling bureaucrat, Adonia thought quickly. “Has DOE notified the other sites across the country? This might be a coordinated attack on all nuclear plants. Think of nine-eleven.”
“Yes, ma’am, they’ve all been alerted.”
Adonia watched as her on-site emergency response crews garbed in yellow decontamination suits covered the gas fires with foam, while moving inside the breached wet-storage facility to contain any radiation release. The impermeable whole-body garments each had a self-contained breathing apparatus, protecting the workers from any hazardous materials.
The wind died down as the rain increased, gradually becoming a morning downpour. Hopefully, the heavy rain would wash the smoke out of the air and inhibit the dispersal of any radioactive cloud.
“Has radar detected any other planes approaching our airspace? Is this an outright attack?”
“No, ma’am, and the national command authorities haven’t detected anything abnormal over any of the other nuclear power plants, but they are all on high alert. The New Jersey Air National Guard established a combat air patrol to overfly our restricted airspace with two F-16s, just to be safe.”
She sighed. With the military involved, no other aircraft would get near Granite Bay, or any other power plant. “If anyone from the media wants to know what happened, tell them to contact DOE Headquarters. We’ll let them release details as they come out.”
She shifted the phone to her shoulder. “And tell Dr. van Dyckman’s office that I’ll be able to speak with him once my emergency response has the situation under control. But it may take a while. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am. Loud and clear.”
She knew the cleanup crews had their job cut out for them, mopping up any contaminants and repairing the cooling pools, but at least a near catastrophe had been contained — for now, helped by the rain.
The media catastrophe was about to begin.
3
The Oval Office was exactly what Stanley van Dyckman expected. He had seen it countless times on TV and the movies, but it was different to be here in person and on official business.
Throughout his career as a senator’s Chief of Staff and at DOE, van Dyckman had attended many high-level meetings, had rubbed shoulders with four-star generals and Nobel Prize — winning scientists — that was par for the course — but now he had the opportunity to meet with the President himself. And not merely for a photo op either; he would not be an anonymous person in a large crowd of officials and representatives. This was a real meeting, and the President genuinely wanted to hear what van Dyckman had to say.
The country was in crisis after the near disaster at Granite Bay, and van Dyckman held the solution the nation had desperately needed for more than half a century. Thank goodness the DOE Secretary was out of the country; otherwise, van Dyckman would have been relegated to holding the young Secretary’s briefcase while the neophyte political appointee was the center of attention and would probably take credit for the whole idea.