She needed life-saving equipment, but this was not a recreational pool. It was a plastic-walled tank for storing spent fuel rods. There would be no buoy, life ring, or other rescue device on the platform that encircled the pool.
Pulaski seemed to stabilize himself, gaining purchase, upright in the water with his head tilted back. She knew his foot was balanced on the fuel rod six feet down, probably pushing on it with his tiptoes or the balls of his feet. Although he was terrified about the radioactivity, his instinctive dread about drowning superseded that. He gaped at the ceiling, the retracted catwalks, and the boom of the giant crane, all of which were far out of reach.
Adonia made her move, lunging in to grab him around the neck and wrap her arm under his chin. She tightened her grip and kept her body far from his as she began stroking with her free arm and kicking for the side of the pool.
With both hands, Pulaski clawed at her forearm. “Stop — I’m… drowning!” He writhed in the water and slipped down in her grip. She fought to pull him back up, but he bit her arm.
She cried out as shards of pain sliced along her forearm. She yanked her arm back, releasing him. His teeth had broken her skin, and blood oozed up.
As soon as she let him go, the Senator sank again, kicking down, as if trying to stand on the fuel rods just out of reach underwater. His head went under, and a gush of air bubbles flooded to the surface.
Adonia ignored the pain in her arm as she dove after him. Shawn swam toward her to help, squeezing his swollen eye shut.
She opened her eyes beneath the surface to find the sinking Senator, and to her horror saw that several of the fuel rods were tilted, bumped off-kilter like dominoes about to fall. Two of the rods closest to the side had rotated out of their cradles and slowly toppled underwater against the thick, fiber-reinforced plastic wall.
As he sank, the bottom of Pulaski’s pant leg had caught on the top of one of the heavy rods. Struggling, he dislodged that rod as well. The heavy metal-clad cylinder began to fall, pulling him down in a gradual collapse, deeper and deeper. In the rippling pool, he looked like a marionette at the end of a stick.
Adonia swam down, trying to reach him as the heavy rod dragged him toward the bottom. The Senator’s struggles weakened as he sank, trapped. A last gush of air bubbles spewed from his mouth. He twitched and jerked convulsively.
Adonia swam harder, knowing that if she could somehow disentangle him, then lift him to the surface, she would still have to pull him out of the pool and perform CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She might be able to save him—
A hand grabbed her shoulder and yanked her up. She twisted wildly to see who was trying to stop her. She was still far from the fallen rod, and now the Senator’s motionless body was lodged against the side of the pool at an angle, deep under water.
Shawn was dragging her back up. He shook his head and mouthed No!, pointing with his free hand to the surface.
She tried jerking away, but Shawn gripped her with both hands and hauled them both upward with powerful kicks. She resisted, still desperate to get to the Senator, to rescue him before it was too late, but the toppled fuel rod had pinned him down to the bottom of the twenty-foot pool.
Pulaski no longer moved, no longer showed any sign of life. She knew it was already too late.
29
Splashing and gasping, Adonia and Shawn broke the surface of the hot water. She pulled in deep breaths of air and felt the sharp sting of pain from where Pulaski had bit her arm, but the sick sadness inside ran deeper. The two of them swam in grim, exhausted silence to the side wall where Stanley, Victoria, and Garibaldi waited, still clinging to the mesh of the metal walkway. Adonia could not shake the image of the Senator pinned underwater, trapped by the fallen fuel rods he himself had dislodged. “He’s gone,” she said.
Victoria looked stunned and disgusted at what she had seen. “Why didn’t he tell us he couldn’t swim? How much more could he screw things up?” She did not sound sympathetic.
Holding the wall, van Dyckman stared in disbelief. “And… and he dislodged part of the array! Those rods were widely separated.”
“Obviously not widely enough.” Garibaldi’s face was gray. “We can mourn the Senator later, but it would be a very good idea for us to get out of this pool. Now that some of the rods have toppled out of their support structure, possibly with damaged zirconium alloy cladding, I have no idea how close to critical they are.”
Victoria struggled to get on the metal grid platform that encircled the pool, but it was too high above the water for her to pull herself out. Moving behind her, Shawn grasped her waist and helped boost her up. The older woman hauled herself onto the top, then turned to help the others. One by one they scrambled up onto the platform, dripping and gasping, relieved to be out of the unnaturally hot water.
The last one still in the pool, Shawn looked grim and hardened, ready to do what was necessary. “I can swim down there and try to push the rods back upright by brute force.” He squinted up at Adonia, favoring his injured eye. “Put them back in their support structure.”
She reacted with alarm. “No! If you touched the rods with your bare hands, you’d be giving yourself a death sentence. You’d need gloves, protective clothing. And you’d still get a near-lethal dose.” Though she was still sickened from being unable to rescue Pulaski, she realized that from his direct exposure to the rods during his struggles, he had probably received a deadly exposure even if he did get out of the water. The Senator would have perished in weeks anyway, a long, slow, painful decline from radiation poisoning. “He’s already dead. We’re not.”
“Unless we stay here,” Garibaldi said. Crawling to the edge, he stuck his hand over the side, reaching down for Shawn, who grasped his arm. He pulled him up onto the platform with the others.
From above, wispy tendrils of yellow-marked gas continued pouring over the high ledge, but Victoria looked across to the far end of the cavern, seemingly more concerned about some other danger. “We have to get in touch with Harris. Forget the alarms and the lockdown. He needs to send a nuclear response team in here as soon as possible. We have to remove these rods from the grotto and dismantle this pool.”
“Damn right he does,” Garibaldi said, dripping as he stood on the metal grid platform above the pool. “But if he could get here, then all our problems would have been solved from the beginning.”
Van Dyckman looked at Adonia with bloodshot eyes, defeated. “So what now?”
Adonia was surprised that he would even ask such a question. “We find a way to stay safe until the lockdown is over. No more disasters.”
Van Dyckman shook his head. “The Senator’s dead. Shouldn’t we stay here until we’re rescued?”
Sitting on the metal grid platform with her knees drawn up to her chest, Adonia pointed up at the ledge above and the turbulent, falling gas. “Can’t stay here, Stanley. The gas is still coming, and the system was designed to flood the entire grotto floor. We have to keep moving.”
Even here, Adonia could smell the sickly sweet halothane and felt an even heavier dread in her heart. The edge of the pool was several feet from where the smoky waterfall flowed over the ledge, but wisps of the knockout gas tumbled down onto the surface of the water and started to spread out over the pool.
“We’ll have to keep above it, or we’ll succumb,” Shawn said.
“But we’re high enough here, and if the water is moderating the fuel rods, we’re reasonably protected from the radiation.” Van Dyckman wanted just to huddle in place and not move.