“We’ll get you out of here, Simon,” Adonia said. Although she knew his dream was not realistic, she really meant it.
Shawn agreed. “That’s why we have to stick together. Valiant Locksmith may have been a viable solution for a long-standing problem, but a mismanaged mess like this won’t accomplish anything. It wasn’t what the President signed up for. I know — I was there when Dr. van Dyckman presented his idea for Hydra Mountain. We’ll get out, and then he won’t be able to keep us all quiet.”
Garibaldi summoned his energy. “Let’s get going. We’re wasting time.”
They climbed higher into the Mountain, far out of range of the loudspeakers, so they would not have been able to hear van Dyckman if he’d made more pronouncements. When the lockdown ended, the NEST teams and emergency responders would break through the sticky foam that blocked the guard portal and arrive in the lower level wearing full respirators and decontamination suits, but she didn’t think they expected to find anyone alive.
Adonia knew they had to get out of the Mountain.
As they climbed higher, she heard a muted roar far overhead. The air currents whistled past them, sucked up from below to be exhausted outside. Adonia occasionally caught a cloying whiff, and she knew that halothane was being drawn up the shaft in the turnover of the huge volume of air exchanged from the massive underground cavern. If enough knockout gas swirled up past them, rendering them unconscious, the three of them would slip from the rungs and fall all the way down.
No! They were going to make it.
Shawn brought up the rear. Adonia knew a five-hundred-foot climb would have been an exhilarating exercise for him, but she worried most about Garibaldi. He kept doggedly ascending, holding the rungs with his raw and blistered hands.
“We’ll be out of here in another fifteen, twenty minutes at the most,” she said. It was entirely a guess, and she didn’t know what they would find when they did reach the top of the shaft. Could they even get out? If air vented from the Mountain, there had to be some sort of opening up there for the flow to escape. But she wouldn’t be surprised if they encountered an impenetrable barricade of filters for scrubbing the air.
The roar above them increased, as did the wind streaming past them. She could feel the metal rungs vibrating in her hands. Considering the size of the huge mountain complex, all the air needed to recirculate, and such a significant volume had to exit somewhere.
She craned her neck upward to see how far they still had to go, then reeled in shock, letting her grip momentarily slip. Her other arm wrapped around the bar, catching her before she could fall.
A hundred feet above them was a giant, rotating fan, turning furiously to pull the air out. The blades extended across the shaft, blocking where they needed to go.
44
Settling into the Eagle’s Nest office, van Dyckman felt a knot in his stomach as he surveyed the operations center below. On the big wall screens, he watched the DOE’s Special Response Teams gather just outside Hydra Mountain’s massive exterior doors. Incident Commander Jennings had relayed that the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, the Accident Response Group, and personnel from the Radiological Assistance Program were all in place to assist as soon as the lockdown ended. They had already entered through the multiple chain-link and razor-wire fences, guard gate after guard gate, and were now positioned just outside the vehicle entrance.
Due to the uncertain nature of the initial lockdown and the subsequent systems reboot, the SRT weapons were hot-cocked and ready, including a deadly Dillon M134 7.62 mm Minigun. The team members had been hand-selected from DOE’s Protective Services for the elite team, and they had trained for years to protect nuclear weapons and material. Additional SRT members had already been placed at strategic locations around the Mountain in full-bore support, but they kept a low profile so that the outside world, including satellite surveillance, would see only minimal activity.
As the reboot timer finally counted down, emergency nuclear cleanup teams from both Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories joined the team. Wearing yellow protective clothing complete with self-contained breathing supplies, they carried a range of equipment from radiation detectors to solvent sprayers. The trained scientists would follow the Special Response Team inside, prepared for the worst.
But they couldn’t get inside. Not yet.
The DOE Incident Commander worked with her military counterpart in a command post two hundred yards upwind from where the team would enter. Although this emergency was in a DOE facility, Kirtland Air Force Base provided critical infrastructure support; even so, Kirtland personnel remained in the dark about the real nature of the problem inside Hydra Mountain — van Dyckman had made sure of that, now that Rob Harris was sequestered. From now on, all information had to come and go through him.
Van Dyckman maintained contact from the Eagle’s Nest and watched via an encrypted link that the Nuclear Incident Command System had set up. But he had put his foot down with Jennings, refusing to let the video feed go directly to DOE Headquarters. Not now. He didn’t dare let outside officials monitor his operations in real time. The Incident Commander protested, but he overruled her.
As Valiant Locksmith’s national program manager — and now Hydra Mountain’s acting site manager — Stanley van Dyckman had absolute control over the flow of information. By the time the neophyte Secretary of Energy learned details about the incident, he would have cleaned up any nasty contradictions that might implicate him.
Except for Incident Commander Jennings herself, the response teams weren’t at all cognizant of the SAPs inside the Mountain; the people did not know about the nuclear waste stored there, or the cooling pools in the lower level — and most especially they didn’t know about Victoria’s covert stockpile of nuclear devices. The teams received only basic information couched in vague terms about a possible spill of high-level nuclear waste inside and that nuclear weapon components might be involved.
No explanations, no details. No need to know.
But every team member understood that the SRT would never have been activated if this weren’t a real-world event. They knew this was not a training exercise. Waiting outside in the relentless New Mexico afternoon heat and blustery desert winds, the SRT and cleanup teams remained on high alert, ready to engage as soon as the lockdown lifted. By now, everyone was getting edgy.
Van Dyckman watched the countdown finally reach zero with a sense of both relief and trepidation. Time to go!
A warning horn blared outside the Mountain. The massive outer steel vault doors began to crawl open, not for a truck delivery this time but to allow access to the Special Response Team. Simultaneously, the large wall monitors in the operations center below blinked as their systems came fully back online, restoring normal routines.
“We are open for business!” van Dyckman shouted aloud, realizing his enthusiasm might seem inappropriate. No one could hear him anyway.
Jennings barked her orders, and the Special Response Team readied their weapons. As soon as the heavy door had opened far enough, the team sprinted through the gap and into Hydra Mountain. The first man slid through the widening door and hustled ahead to set up a security perimeter.
The SRT split into two subteams, the first covering the door to the inner storage area, and the second team jogging down the tunnels to the portal at the incline that led to the lower cavern. As Jennings took point, they would sweep the entire upper and lower levels, making sure they overlooked no potential intruder. But van Dyckman had given them clear instructions: their primary focus was to secure the Velvet Hammer vault, to seal the clogged door and block off the devices from dangerous stray radiation.