“Harris said he found a way to lift the lockdown and get a team in here,” van Dyckman said. “Rescuers are on the way. They’ll get to us soon, if we can just stay ahead of the halothane. We need to be ready for them.”
“As usual, you weren’t listening, Stanley,” Doyle said. “Harris warned us to shelter in place, inside the guard portal. But since the Senator breached the guard portal and set off the countermeasures, now Harris has to reboot the entire system again and start it all over from scratch.” She scowled at Pulaski. “That should have reset the clock to six hours again. The rescue teams can’t even get started yet.” She walked briskly ahead.
After they had gone another fifty feet down the tunnel, Adonia couldn’t smell the gas, although she still felt a little dizzy and disoriented, either from the effects of the halothane, or maybe just stress. “It’ll be fine,” she said, still trying to reassure herself as well as the others.
Garibaldi helped the Senator along, and Adonia thanked him. He lifted his bushy gray eyebrows at her. Now his unruly hair was flecked with small clumps of red sticky foam. “Why wouldn’t I? We’re all in this together.”
“Some people don’t feel the same way,” Adonia said.
Van Dyckman and Doyle led the group, as if each was eager to be the first to reach the main grotto. They walked close together, but not next to each other. They didn’t talk or otherwise interact. Adonia guessed their affair must have ended bitterly, competitively. She was glad she and Shawn still cared for each other; circumstances had pulled them apart, not their feelings.
Seeing the obvious tension between the two, Garibaldi let out a low chuckle. “That’s one of the reasons I left DOE. I got so sick of the infighting. Even in this crisis, when we’re fighting for our very survival, those two political appointees can’t stop bickering.”
“It’s all politics,” Pulaski retorted, still leaning on the older scientist for support. “Industries, careers, even the future of our nation’s energy grid are riding on the success of Valiant Locksmith. You know that, Ms. Rojas. Hydra Mountain is the only feasible, near-term way to ease the existing burden of nuclear waste. Would you rather keep it piled up at a hundred sites around the country, sites that were never intended to hold high-level waste?”
“I don’t dispute the problem, Senator, but I would rather have it stored transparently, with more oversight.” Adonia felt exasperated with the politics herself. “And as for you, Dr. Garibaldi, I would rather have protest groups like Sanergy work realistically to solve what is a significant problem, rather than simply attack any suggested cure. The political environment is so toxic, you would rather denounce a ticking time bomb than work together to defuse it.”
Pulaski snorted, and Adonia already knew what he was going to say. “That’s why we were forced to establish Valiant Locksmith as a classified SAP here on a military base. What’s the alternative? Spend another twenty years and another hundred billion dollars building a replacement for Yucca Mountain? And then that one would never be opened because of more red tape and environmental roadblocks!”
Helping Pulaski along, Garibaldi just smiled under the verbal barrage. “I’m not trying to block any solution, Senator. I just want it done right, so the public can be safe. And the best way is to keep it free of politics.”
Pulaski made a rude noise. “As if Sanergy is apolitical!”
Adonia sighed. “I try to stay clear of politics in my day-to-day operations at Granite Bay. I prefer to be out in the field, running my own site — which is why I left DOE Headquarters.”
Ahead, Doyle and van Dyckman reached the bottom of the incline and stopped just before the tunnel opened up to the lower grotto. Victoria stood with her hands on her small hips as she waited for the others to catch up.
Adonia looked back up the long passageway. “We should be far enough away now. The gas would have dropped in concentration.”
“Depends on the size of the halothane reservoir,” Garibaldi said. “If it was intended to incapacitate an enemy military force inside these tunnels…”
“Hopefully the nozzles have a cutoff switch to stop the flow,” Adonia said.
“Sensors should shut it off before the gas reached a lethal dose,” Garibaldi said. “And hopefully with halothane diffusing through the entire lower level, we may never reach that concentration. But with our luck the defense systems will probably keep pumping gas until the Mountain’s entire supply runs out.”
Shawn winced. “The military can be redundant to a fault.”
They caught up with Doyle and van Dyckman, who stood at the end of the incline, where the tunnel opened into a huge chamber below and ahead. As they approached Adonia called, “It’s your facility, Stanley. When was the last time the DoD countermeasures were certified? How much gas are we potentially dealing with?”
Van Dyckman glanced away. “I told you, I didn’t know about the sticky foam or this gas. That’s Harris’s responsibility. Everything should have been inspected when facility oversight was transferred from the military to the DOE.”
Adonia wondered what other responsibilities he had overlooked as he basked in his political appointment.
He continued, “But I’m sure all the systems were thoroughly checked before we received the first shipment. I relied on Harris before I authorized the movement of casks, and you know he’s a stickler for details.” Van Dyckman spoke faster, more insistently, as if to make his point, but Adonia could tell he was already working on diverting blame to the site manager. “We were racing against time — on the President’s direct orders.”
Sweat glistened on his forehead, and he used his palms to smooth back his dark hair. He looked at Adonia, seeking an ally. “You know the situation. We needed a pressure-release valve for the increasing backlog. Every single shipment we brought into Hydra Mountain reduced the chances of something bad happening on the outside, with the public.”
“So, something bad happens in here instead,” Garibaldi said. “With us.”
Shawn shook his head, unconvinced. “But a waste storage facility shouldn’t have any lethal countermeasures at all, no matter how secure it needs to be. Such measures were needed when real nukes were stored here. Why were so many legacy systems left in place after the military decommissioned the site? If the antiquated countermeasures were inspected, then why weren’t they deactivated?”
Doyle said slowly, “Probably because they were considered necessary.”
“To guard a bunch of dry waste casks? Not likely,” Garibaldi said.
“Don’t try to understand bureaucracy,” Adonia said. “For now, we need to find a functioning intercom so we can tell Rob what happened and explain why we’re no longer in the guard portal. We’re all flying blind here.”
“Everything’s just up ahead,” van Dyckman said, sounding eager. “You’ll see.”
They moved to where the tunnel opened up, and they looked out upon Hydra Mountain’s vast lower grotto.
22
A cold trickle of sweat ran down Rob Harris’s back as he hunched over his desk in the Eagle’s Nest. The IR sensors on the screen did not show good news. The team was on the move again after breaching both doors of the guard portal — exactly what he had told them not to do. Why was it so hard for them just to stay put? He found it maddening.
Forcing open the upper door of the portal would have released the sticky foam countermeasure, which would be a disaster in itself, but when they opened the opposite door and attempted to pass into the lower levels without authorization, then that would dump the deadly halothane into the tunnels. Those old, extreme measures had all been left in place to protect Victoria Doyle’s SAP. Now, the Undersecretary was seeing it all firsthand.