“Your priority is to keep this entire facility safe — not to mention the city of Albuquerque.” Victoria’s face reddened. “Hell, even the southwestern United States!” Hurrying down the slope, she tried to work the intercom panel.
Adonia was surprised by the Undersecretary’s vehemence. Van Dyckman spoke conspiratorially but loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Victoria’s prone to hyperbole.”
Shawn was firm. “If it’s such an important crisis, then Harris can call in a nuclear emergency team, once he knows about it. And I can call the President myself.”
“We still have to wait until the system reboots, regardless,” Adonia said.
“Harris needs to get a nuclear emergency team in place now,” Victoria said, “ready to move the instant the lockdown is lifted. Every minute counts.”
Adonia doubted the site manager would take preemptive action without full approval, no matter how much Undersecretary Doyle harangued him over the intercom.
The rest of the team crowded around as Victoria pressed the button and shouted into the speaker. “Rob Harris! Answer me, dammit!”
“It’s not working,” Garibaldi said simply. “What a surprise.”
“But we need to get out of here!” van Dyckman said. “Can he even hear us?”
Adonia tried to intercede. “We probably have more than three hours left.”
Garibaldi gazed back across the great cavern. “We’ll never last that long unless we get inside some kind of shelter. The halothane is spilling across the floor, and it’ll pool down here. That’s how you would incapacitate an armed force of intruders. Worst-case scenario.” Even though they had outrun the gas, they found themselves at a dead end. “We may be incapacitated very shortly, unless Stanley can use his magic decoder ring to open these vaults.”
“Well, we can’t just stand here and die.” Van Dyckman’s face was flushed as he pushed past the others to a more modern control panel next to the first towering vault door, which had obviously been upgraded since the Cold War era. His fingers danced across the LED screen. “We need to get into the vault.”
Victoria grabbed his shoulder, pulling him away. “Stop it, Stanley!” He knocked her back.
Adonia darted forward and held the man’s arm, trying to calm them both. “Enough! We’ve got to work together to get out of here.”
Van Dyckman yanked his arm free. “If Mrs. Garcia is safe in her vault, this will solve our problem, an absolutely secure bolt-hole.” Not listening to the shouts, he keyed in his code to open the vault door.
31
The controls on the big vault panel looked much newer than the one outside the guard portal where they had previously tried to shelter in place. Adonia thought the pad resembled a reconfigurable airline cockpit console more than the typical controls for a storage vault.
Doggedly, van Dyckman went to work on the panel despite Victoria’s increasing agitation. “Okay, this is a standard, upgraded port found in all the new DOE restricted areas,” he muttered to himself. “It’s software driven, and my access should let me open any vault in the Mountain.”
“Then why didn’t you free Mrs. Garcia?” Garibaldi demanded.
“Because he’s a jerk,” Adonia said under her breath.
Van Dyckman reddened as he worked. “Quiet. It’s hard enough when my own life is in danger, much less a mere technician’s.”
Victoria still tried to block him. “Stanley, dammit — Stop!”
Shawn held her back. “We need to keep ourselves safe for at least three more hours, ma’am. With the halothane flowing toward us, that vault may be the only place that can keep us alive.”
“It’s not safe. You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“We’ll all die if we don’t get inside.” Van Dyckman punched in a code, which failed, and he tried again. “Keep quiet. I’m trying to remember the mnemonic! It’s thirty-two characters, after all.”
Victoria grew more frantic. “You have to stop — that vault… it’s Velvet Hammer!”
Garibaldi rolled his eyes. “Velvet Hammer? Valiant Locksmith? Do you all get drunk and just make up strange-sounding names?”
“It’s… it’s a Special Access Program. State Department, not DOE. We’re all in danger—”
A chill went down Adonia’s back. “Another SAP?”
Victoria pulled free of Shawn’s grip. “None of you have the proper clearance. Why do you think so many extreme security measures are down here? Certainly not for Stanley’s cooling pools! I didn’t even know they were here.”
“What in the world did you store in there?” Garibaldi asked, looking at the huge vault.
Adonia demanded to know, “Undersecretary Doyle, what exactly is Velvet Hammer?”
“This is my Mountain. Your SAP has no business being here.” Van Dyckman finished entering the characters and he grinned, surprised at his own accomplishment. “There! Got it.” He pressed Enter, and a whirring noise hummed through the heavy door.
Adonia expected the release would trigger another round of screeching alarms, but van Dyckman’s master override code was apparently accepted, and with clicking and humming hydraulic mechanisms, the massive door swung open from the wall, groaning under its weight.
The widening gap revealed a dark enclosure lit only by the light from the grotto while old tungsten halogen bulbs struggled to flicker on, blinking, clicking. Adonia could see little more than a row of shadowy granite cubicles inside a large space.
With a vehement lunge, Victoria threw herself in front of the doorway, spreading her arms out to either side to prevent anyone from entering. “Stanley, dammit, shut the vault door—now! Thanks to your fuel rods, there’s far too much stray radiation down here.” Her petite figure looked laughably small in front of the twenty-foot-wide vault opening.
“All the more reason for us to get inside the shelter,” Shawn said. Yellow vapors continued to curl along the grotto floor, adding to the hazard.
Additional banks of lights flickered on inside the vault, revealing more of the interior. Van Dyckman turned and stared inside. “What the hell?”
A row of dark granite cubbyholes lined the inner walls of the vault, and a barrier chain hung across each opening. Each alcove held a squat polished object on a sturdy, raised platform that was bolted to the rock floor.
Her face now ashen, Victoria stood before them. Her voice quavered. “Ms. Rojas, we all know Harris put you in charge. I order you to close this door immediately. Our lives are in danger.”
Shawn peered into the garish light and the abrupt shadows in each of the cubbyholes. “I recognize those from my B-2 days — we called them Unscheduled Sunrises: thermonuclear bombs!”
Adonia felt a chill. “What are nuclear weapons doing in this facility?”
“Close the vault door!” Victoria shouted. “They’re… they’re devices, not warheads. Not technically, and not legally. They have everything but the software, and they aren’t recognized by treaty as actual weapons—”
Van Dyckman stared at Victoria. “Hydra Mountain was decommissioned! The DoD handed over the keys, and I supervised it. They relinquished all authority. This facility is supposed to be for storing waste only! How dare you store warheads—”
Victoria’s voice was like a hard mallet. “Close the damned vault door, Stanley! The radiation is already a high risk, and now it’s far worse because that fool Senator knocked down part of the array of fuel rods.” She had gone white with both rage and fear. “And if enough water floods down here, the devices could go critical! I swear, Stanley, I will bring charges against you for exposing my SAP. I warned you—”