Had Undersecretary Doyle put the pieces together yet? She had to understand. But even if she did, and explained it to the others on the team, they still had to get out alive.
He pressed his hands down on the conference table so hard that his knuckles turned white. He chewed four more antacids. He fidgeted, longing to be down there on the ops center floor, discussing solutions with his engineers, meticulously reviewing every report as it came in. He wanted to be in on the brainstorming as his techs tried to think of ways to circumvent the lockdown.
But breathing down their necks wasn’t going to help anything. His people were self-motivated, bright, extremely creative, and his frantic impatience would only dampen their efforts. He was the site manager, and he had seen some eager techs bend over backward to agree with his suggestions, just because he was the boss. That wasn’t what Harris needed. No, he needed their imagination, their skills, and their solutions, not butt-kissing.
Stuck in his office, he waited… and waited. The original lockdown would have been long over, but the team had forced a reset. Now more than four hours remained for the system to finish rebooting. Worse, the aggressive DoD countermeasures were active, ready to protect Velvet Hammer.
Data from the facility sensors splashed on the oversized monitor outside his office. Halothane levels continued to build up in the inclined tunnel. Thanks to the tracer smoke, the team members would see the hazard approaching, and he hoped they would get out of the way in time.
He placed high confidence in Adonia Rojas, and he had done the right thing putting her in charge. Harris had mentored the bright young woman at Oakridge, and he knew she was a solid worker, a cool-headed thinker. Without a second thought he had given her the responsibility when Drexler called him away to respond to the small-plane incident.
He looked at the numbers on the screen, the rising levels of halothane in the air. Very shortly, the automated sensors in the bay would detect the gas and trigger yet another set of countermeasures. The catwalks and freight elevators would reset and strand the team members high on the ledge, with no place to go.
27
Adonia took a step back from the sheer drop-off, baffled by Victoria’s sudden anger. The Undersecretary retreated back up the tunnel, her fists clenched so tight her arms shook.
Alarmed, Adonia called after her, “Wait — it may not be safe to go back up there.”
Victoria spoke over her shoulder. “You don’t have a clue how dangerous it is down here. I’ll take my chances.”
With a snort, van Dyckman spoke loudly enough that she could hear him. “I expected a little more professional behavior from someone of her rank.”
“What does she mean that you don’t know about everything inside the Mountain?” Shawn asked him.
“I thought you were the national program manager, Stanley,” Garibaldi said. “Aren’t you the big cheese here?”
Van Dyckman dismissed the comment. “Victoria’s a weapons person, and some people are still fighting the Cold War. She resents the fact that her program is winding down, but that’s ancient history.”
Adonia looked across the huge underground grotto, her attention drawn to the distant vault doors embedded in the far wall, below the main floor level. Van Dyckman admitted he had no idea what was stored there. Some old program, he had said.…
Adonia narrowed her eyes, trying to make out details a quarter mile away. The vaults! Did the Undersecretary know about some other program that was being kept secret from van Dyckman? Even the Valiant Locksmith program manager might have been kept in the dark about another SAP that was outside of his clearance. Often hugely important programs were classified from each other, and if the other SAP was also unacknowledged, van Dyckman wouldn’t even know another program existed, much less what it was about.
Only Rob Harris, as site manager, would know everything that took place inside the Mountain, but he would have been straitjacketed by bureaucratic secrecy and tangled restrictions. Adonia knew Regulation Rob would never budge from the rules, refusing to state the obvious because of immutable security prohibitions.
With growing hesitation, Adonia looked at Undersecretary Doyle as she marched up the tunnel, then she glanced at Garibaldi, thinking again how odd those two were as choices to be part of this inspection team. But Harris had personally selected everyone for a specific reason.
Senator Pulaski was the quintessential politician, and van Dyckman had blinders on. Garibaldi was a skeptic, though he had a detailed engineering background and he retained his security clearance. He was also a whistle-blower. Undersecretary Doyle worked for the DOE, but on the nuclear weapons side, so she should have nothing to do with nuclear power operations.
Unless Doyle knew something the others didn’t? Was that why she had been invited? Did Rob Harris want the rest of them to see something?
Trying to understand the scattered pieces, Adonia looked at the liquid-cooled transportation casks next to the large metal sphere, and the pipes strung along the walls. Sitting on the lower floor, the thick, plastic-walled pool held rows and rows of submerged spent fuel rods held upright by metal cradles, the tops of the rods covered by only six feet of water. As she pondered, Adonia caught a sudden whiff of the sickly sweet smell, and turned to see the wisps of yellow gas creeping down toward them.
Victoria had paused on her way to the tunnel, looking at the faint curls of tracer smoke at her feet. “It’s… still coming. How much of that gas is there?”
“Won’t it ever stop?” van Dyckman groaned. “Shouldn’t it have dissipated by now?”
Adonia did mental calculations, guessing that at a quarter mile long and two hundred feet high, the grotto had a volume of around 160 million cubic feet. The halothane reservoirs couldn’t possibly hold that much, but since the knockout gas was heavier than air, it didn’t need to fill the entire chamber, only to six feet or so above the sprawling floor, which would incapacitate any intruders. A tank the size of that giant metal sphere on the ledge filled with liquid halothane could hold enough gas to expand into an enormous volume, and these were old military defensive systems.…
Eventually, gas from the guard portal jets would flow down the tunnel and spill over the ledge onto the grotto floor fifty feet below like a vaporous waterfall. The flowing halothane would slowly diffuse, but it would still be toxic — and it kept rolling down toward them. If it continued flowing forward, the gas would overwhelm them if they stayed on the ledge.
Victoria began to cough. She took a few uncertain steps, then stopped and bent over. Turning, she covered her face and staggered back toward the group on the ledge, reconsidering her retreat.
Adonia grabbed the Undersecretary by the arm and pulled her away from the flowing gas. They didn’t have much room to maneuver with the sheer drop-off.
Shawn searched for a ladder or a walkway down, then considered the freight elevators. Instead, he looked up toward the ceiling. “We need to head up, not down, get above the gas. Quick, everyone — up on the catwalk. Climb as high as you can!”
Senator Pulaski frowned at the precarious metal latticework that extended out above the high bay. “On that rickety thing?”
Garibaldi agreed. “Colonel Whalen’s right. Halothane is heavier than air, so we have to climb above it. The gas will pour over the ledge to the lower floor, but we’ll be safe up there.”