He took a quick look at the bank of warning lights. They were all dark. The readings on all the other gauges were ordinary.
The temperature needle jumped again. This time it stayed against the right-hand peg. Something sure as hell was going on. Steinberg punched into the main PA and called his supervisor. While he waited for Mike Orlando, he watched the needle. It was starting to fall back toward the normal range. For a second he thought he'd call Orlando back and tell him to forget it. When the needle jumped a third time, he knew something was wrong.
The main control room door hissed open, and Orlando slipped in. "What's up?" he asked.
"Look at the temperature on sixteen."
"It's a little high. So what?"
"So it buried the needle twice. There's something wrong on that line. No way the temperature should skip around like that. Keep an eye on it."
Steinberg got up, and Orlando slid into the empty chair. He watched the gauge for several minutes without speaking.
"It still seems okay to me. A little skittish maybe, but..."
The bank of warning lights exploded into color. At the same time, the needle went off the high end.
"That's it, Davey. Hit the alarm. And check the cameras. Make sure there's nobody down there. Where's Patty?"
"She was going to check out Tower 3," Steinberg said, punching up the monitor for her location. A small figure in a bulky radiation suit appeared on the screen. "Christ, Mike. She's still down there."
As the men watched, a cloud of steam came into view at the bottom of the screen. It billowed like the fog in a monster movie, rising a foot or two, falling back halfway, then climbing again.
"Get on the radio, Davey. She doesn't see it."
Steinberg tried to raise her. It took him a few seconds. Finally he heard her voice.
"Hi, guys. What's happening?"
"Patty, don't panic. Just look behind you and tell me what you see."
"Quit clowning around, David."
"I'm not clowning, Patty. Do it. Now!"
Steinberg could see the figure on the screen halt. It bent to the side and down. "Holy shit! What's going on? Where the hell did all that steam come from?"
"How bad is it, Patty?"
"I don't know. The whole bottom of the tower is full of it. Is it hot?"
"I'm getting eighty rems per, Patty. You have to get the hell out of there. Now."
"What's happening, David?" Her voice began to break. She had been with them only six months. She'd never seen anything like this. Hell, none of them had. And if she didn't get out of the tower, she'd never see anything like it again.
"I got another needle hopping here, Davey. It's on the same line." Orlando was yelling to make himself heard over the klaxons blaring throughout the power station. "She has to get out of there."
The steam was growing as if it were alive. It followed Patty as she clambered up the ladder. The woman turned again to check her location. As Steinberg watched, the steam mushroomed upward, and Patty was obscured from view for a moment. The steam thinned a bit, and Steinberg could see her struggling to keep her grip. By now she was probably hysterical. He never should have told her how hot the steam was.
The ladder would get tougher and tougher to hold on to. It would get slippery with condensation. Then, in one breathtaking moment, it happened. The woman's left foot slipped off the ladder as she put her weight on it. She hung suspended by both arms.
Her feet whirled helplessly in the air as she sought to regain the ladder. Then she was gone from the screen.
"Oh, God," Orlando groaned. "Oh, my God."
"Patty," Steinberg screamed. "Patty." He clicked the mike on and off, trying to raise her again. But he knew there was no way.
No one could survive the steam, never mind the fall.
And who knew what was at the bottom of that infernal cloud. The klaxons continued to blare. The lights flashed like a Christmas tree. One by one, the needles on the Tower 3 cooling lines began to waver, then to climb.
"Attention, all personnel," Orlando roared into the PA mike. "We have an event in progress. Repeat, event in progress. L.o.c.a. in progress."
Steinberg stared at the empty monitor, now completely engulfed in steam. "It all sounds so routine, Mike. Loss of coolant accident. L.o.c.a., my ass. What the hell are we doing here?"
The huge flatbed trailer rumbled up Third Avenue, bouncing over every pothole. The deadweight strapped to its middle rocked precariously. Every bounce threatened to sever the heavy steel bands that clamped the load in place. There was little traffic, other than the trailer and its two escort vehicles. A police cruiser was in the lead and another followed the truck at a respectable distance.
The patrolmen in the rear had been given the standard briefing. They knew the lead-lined steel canister was supposed to be tightly sealed and accident proof. They didn't believe it, but not because they were in the habit of mistrusting their superiors.
They didn't believe it for a far simpler reason: if the official version was incorrect, they were dead men. The canister contained plutonium so radioactive that a single speck lodged in a lung would mean certain death.
Among them the four patrolmen had thirty-seven years of experience on the streets of New York.
They had seen death in all of its urban forms.
Blood was just a color to them now. Brighter than some perhaps, but not unusual. But this time they were scared stiff. The transport of this cargo had been on again, off again for years. Enough people had had enough reasons to delay the passage of radioactive material through inhabited areas so that the case had been tied up in the courts for years. It had finally been approved, but the losers died hard. Each of the cops knew there were dozens of groups who had their own reasons for wanting an accident in the city.
Some because of the warning it would represent, others for the havoc it would wreak. Some even wanted, hoped, to get their hands on some of the deadly metal.
There was enough fissionable material on the tail of the truck to make a halfdozen small tactical nuclear weapons. Everybody knew there were people dying to get their hands on it. The Libyans wanted it, and the Israelis thought they needed it. A dozen countries would love to have it, and twenty terror groups would kill to get it. Yeah, the cops were scared.
At Fifty-third Street, a white van ran a red light, narrowly missing the tractor, and just squeezing between it and the lead car. The backup car peeled out and slid sideways across the avenue.
Buck Foster was out of the cruiser and on the divider, pumping a shell into his shotgun before the car stopped rocking. He sighed when the van kept moving. He didn't know whether he was relieved or disappointed.
Probably both, he thought, knowing that he couldn't take much more tension. He hopped back into the patrol car, and Dan McGuire gunned it into a roar, caught up with the caravan and punched his horn twice. The driver honked the truck's horn in acknowledgment.
"Buck, I don't know about you, man. But the sooner we turn this baby over to some other jurisdiction, the happier I'll be," McGuire said.
"Hell, yes, Danny. It's enough to make a no-nuker out of you. The crap in that truck scares me shitless."
Neither man really felt like talking, but neither one could help doing it. At Sixty-sixth street, McGuire shot ahead of the truck, and the lead car fell back. The men weren't supposed to rotate their positions, but everybody agreed it would help cut the tension. At 10th Street it started to rain. And by 125th Street it was impossible to see more than twenty yards ahead. The wipers clacked, and the wheels hissed on the slick pavement.
McGuire was getting edgy as he slid to the right-hand lane to wait for the backup car to rotate forward.
Three blocks later, he was still waiting.
"Something's wrong, Bucko. Where's Rodriguez? He should have made it up here by now."
Foster craned his neck to see past the rear of the flatbed. There was nothing but wet pavement.