Garibaldi suddenly understood what she meant. “Yes, she’s right. Shut the vault — now! I don’t care what you call them, if stray neutrons interact with those nuclear cores… that’s the real danger. And it’s increasing every second that vault door stays open.”
“You heard him,” Shawn said in his sharp command voice. He pulled van Dyckman back to the control panel. “Close it.”
“Do it!” Victoria sounded hysterical. “If one warhead is triggered, they’ll all detonate.”
“She’s right,” Adonia said, feeling dizzy. “They’re close enough together there might be a sympathetic detonation that might take out Hydra Mountain along with half of New Mexico.” She tried to imagine how many millions of people would die. “And the kill zone would cover the entire Southwest.”
Still holding van Dyckman, Shawn looked behind them down into the grotto with the curling gas spilling across the floor. “After we close the vault, we’ll have to climb the crane instead. That’s our best hope now.”
Van Dyckman was too rattled to work the control panel. “But it’ll be safe if we get inside and seal the door, even with the warheads! We’ll be away from the halothane, and we can last for a few hours next to the shielded cores. We’ll die if we stay out here.” He seemed most concerned with defying Victoria and asserting his power over Hydra Mountain.
“Stanley, you always were an idiot.” Victoria rushed to the panel. “Always needing to be in control—”
Van Dyckman shoved Victoria away, thrusting her backward toward the vault. He scrambled past her. “Everyone, quick! I’ll close it once we’re inside.”
Victoria grabbed the door and caught her balance as he pushed into the large, shielded vault. She yelled, “Wait, you didn’t bypass the defensive mechanisms. You initiated the sensors by opening up the—”
Magenta warning lights spun into full alert inside and outside the vault. A new siren blasted up and down, and a threatening recorded voice began a countdown that reverberated from speakers inside the vault.
“Unauthorized breach. Exit immediately. Countermeasures in ten… nine…”
Reacting without thinking, van Dyckman backed farther inside, and Victoria lunged after him. “Stanley, get out of there!”
“Exit immediately.” The countdown continued.
Adonia shouted for the two to run from the vault.
Victoria caught van Dyckman by the arm, but he shook her off. “Let go of me, you bitch!”
“Four… three…”
Outside the vault at the control panel, Adonia ran her fingers over the LED pad, looking for any kind of emergency override. There had to be a fail-safe button to close the vault.
Victoria spun and lunged toward the big vault door as she raced back out, trying to beat the last second on the countdown.
Adonia must have hit some kind of reset, and she was astonished to see the massive barrier begin to grind closed on powerful hydraulics.
Shawn waved toward Victoria, who was running toward them. “Hurry!”
“Breach neutralized.” The voice sounded like an executioner.
An incredible burst of air gushed from the vault. A deluge of red sticky foam erupted from the inner ceiling. Unlike the foam that had swelled and oozed into the guard portal in the tunnel up above, this defense spurted down in a wall that expanded swiftly like glutinous, soapy foam. The substance rapidly filled the warhead vault, trapping everything inside like flies in amber.
The burst of escaping air knocked Shawn backward into Adonia. He hit the floor and rolled away from the solidifying foam that gushed out of the Velvet Hammer vault. The fast-hardening substance mushroomed through the gap, boiling up as it expanded, then froze in place.
Adonia had never seen such a swift and vigorous countermeasure. This was a last line intended to stop an intruder and secure the exposed warheads so that no one could remove them, even if the vault door were breached. The previous sticky foam in the guard portal had been meant to impede or confine the bad guys, but this hardening froth was a lethal measure to protect the stored nuclear weapons.
“Victoria! Stanley!” Adonia had to scramble out of the way as the foam swelled and thickened like a petrified tidal wave. “They’re trapped in there.”
The vault door groaned and screeched as the heavy hydraulics tried to close, but the movement slowed. The large pistons could not force the door shut with the solidified sticky foam. With a loud straining sound, the door ground to a stop, leaving a gap at least four feet wide.
In closing, the door had pushed a weirdly contoured path through the petrified matrix of rigid material.
Adonia could only hear the muffled wail of the warning siren from inside the vault, now muted through a dozen feet of hardened foam. Everything inside would have been swallowed up, buried — including Victoria and Stanley.
“No refuge for us inside the vault anymore,” Garibaldi said, sounding oddly disconnected. “We’d better find another alternative.”
All around their feet, the smoky halothane continued to swirl and build.
32
Up in the Eagle’s Nest, Rob Harris struggled to breathe. He knew exactly what the latest alarm on his status screen meant.
They had found, and opened, the Velvet Hammer vault.
The main screen above the operations floor gave an urgent alert that one of the ultra-secure doors had been opened — the very scenario that had given him nightmares. To make things worse, minutes before, radiation detectors from the lower cavern showed a dramatic increase in the already-high ambient levels, as if something had interfered with the precarious wet-storage pools.
What were they doing down there?
Worse yet, after opening one of the secure Velvet Hammer vaults, someone must have entered and triggered the most dangerous countermeasures, designed to protect the nuclear devices. He felt the blood drain from his face. The avalanche of sticky foam would have engulfed and killed anyone in its way. This couldn’t be happening!
He’d never intended for the team to actually gain entry to the vault. Undersecretary Doyle should have seen the fuel rods, the temporary cooling pool, and recognized the danger. Velvet Hammer was her SAP, but she would never have opened the vault, knowing full well what the sealed chambers contained.
It had to be van Dyckman. He must have used the override code, which was valid for all systems throughout the facility.
Velvet Hammer was a separate, waived and unacknowledged Special Access Program, the sole purview of Undersecretary Doyle in her classified work for the State Department. Two years ago when she had last inspected her SAP, the Mountain was still under DoD control, and the near-finished warheads fit perfectly into the operations, a highly classified State Department program that exploited treaty loopholes and allowed the U.S. to hold a clandestine nuclear trump card.
He knew what the State Department had done: the numbers of nuclear warheads in the nation’s stockpile were strictly regulated by international agreement. Each year the U.S. routinely pulled five or ten weapons out of inventory for testing before returning them to the military. While those warheads were out of service, the Department of Defense needed to ensure that its arsenal remained at proper levels in the event of a national crisis. An entirely legal way to ensure that a warhead could be moved rapidly into the active inventory was to stockpile nuclear “devices” that weren’t really weapons.
The Velvet Hammer devices stored in the lower vault had everything a nuclear weapon needed to function — a plutonium pit, electronics, fuses — except for one critical, technical detail, an easy-to-install final piece, such as the software. Because the devices were incomplete, those “almost but not quite” weapons could not be legally counted as part of the nation’s strategic stockpile.