This, she knew, was unrealistically wishful thinking, but it seemed to set the others at ease. In point of fact, the helicopter crews dispatched to Chernobyl to dump yard after yard of sand onto the atomic inferno had received massive doses of gamma radiation, shot directly through the bottom of their aircraft.
The fiery pit below them only consumed more liberating more heat, more radiation, more misery. The facility burned so hot that water sprayed onto the flames was actually split into its explosive constituents of hydrogen and oxygen. Eventually the pit had been sealed with a massive dome unimaginatively known as “the cover.” The lives lost in the building of this sarcophagus, the ongoing flaking and cracking of the poor, hastily prepared material shielding the buried monster, were not discussed in the headlines. As one Soviet author had observed, the sarcophagus at Chernobyl would need to last longer than the Egyptian pyramids in order to survive the devil it contained. Because of the building materials used and the slipshod engineering, however, it was beginning to crumble in less than two decades — a severe thunderstorm could split it open.
Meanwhile, human nature declared that the calamity was over and returned to its daily life, while the heroes were never spoken of again. All for the sake of a clean, economical way to satisfy humankind’s rampant desire for electricity.
Junko shivered in her seat and stared out at the vast miles of ice.
Einstein was right, she mused. Nuclear energy is a hell of a way to boil water.
13
Eleven men crowded into the small, nondescript meeting room built above the process module of Global B-82. The enclosure, referred to by those who knew about it as “the tank” — in homage to a more sophisticated room of similar intent in the Pentagon — measured barely three hundred square feet. Most of this meager space was occupied by a single conference table. A secured-line speakerphone sat on the table and a combination white board and projection screen was mounted on one wall. A yellowed coffeemaker looked much more thoroughly used than any of the audiovisual equipment.
The tank was soundproof and structurally isolated from the rest of the rig’s topsides. A self-contained computer system logged data about the rig’s surveillance activities from a hidden alcove. Inside each wall was a quarter inch of lead sheeting, enough to confound the most sophisticated listening devices. Similarly, once the access hatch was closed, there was no audible evidence of the factory’s worth of industrial equipment that labored endlessly just outside or the two hundred Global Oil employees carrying out their duties.
A casual glance around the table revealed two different factions. On one side sat Charon, his right-arm Stimson, and four other officers — Wigner, Rieger, Duncan, and Teller — who acted as either shift supervisors or foremen on B-82.
All of them were former U.S. Navy or Marines, charged with directing both the rig’s civilian and military operations. Krail’s contingent had less brawn but possessed puffed-out chests sporting enough ribbons to launch a parade. Present were Ed Snow, the commander of the Hawkbill, and Frank Groves, his executive officer. Two others, Navy lieutenants, represented the sonar crews on the submarine. Evidently, mused Charon, they thought they were impressing someone.
Charon had handpicked every single man aboard B-82 for this assignment, just as Charon himself had been handpicked to lead them. During the entire process, Charon had not seen a single uniform or consulted one printed resume. Now the very presence of the contingent from the Hawkbill, these men in their dress uniforms, implied a disdain for Charon and his crew, men of grit and substance who could actually be relied upon to conduct delicate operations. Charon was hardly intimidated by the younger officer, but Krail’s constant movement annoyed him. The little pissant was too uptight for this kind of work, and the last thing Charon wanted was to set this terrier yapping any more than need be. Let him say his piece and go away, preferably sooner rather than later.
“With the introductions made all around, I guess we’ll get started,” Krail began. Stimson rolled his eyes, making certain that Charon caught the gesture.
Krail’s toast mastering made it sound as if some personal allegiance, not implicit duty, was responsible for their attendance.
“I’ll try to make it brief,” he said.
“So far you’re not trying very hard,” Wigner muttered from the other end of the table. Krail shot him a sharp look, then glanced at Charon as if to say please curb your pet. Charon found that funny. His men had earned the right to piss wherever, and on whomever, they chose.
Krail would be well out of his ballpark to challenge them on the basis of any standard-operating-procedure indiscretion, by Washington standards or otherwise.
“As you know,” Krail continued, “we’ve been patrolling the area for the past two days, looking for radionuclide debris. In addition to her existing array, the Hawkbill has been fitted with submersible gamma spectrometers in order to detect the presence and location of possible leakage from the plug. In short, we’ve got a helluva set of ears and eyes tuned into this, but so far they’re not revealing anything.”
“The plug” was a manmade containment hatch that sat at the bottom of Thebes Deep, approximately three hundred meters below B-82’s main deck.
Constructed to facilitate the passing of nuclear waste materials into a natural storage chamber in the bedrock below, the plug was actually a capped tube that extended down through the seafloor nearly an eighth of a mile before opening into a larger opening called simply “the pit.”
Fifty feet in diameter and constructed from steel-reinforced concrete, lead, and boron carbide, the plug was the only portal to the cavernous natural storage facility and its troublesome cache, a fortified rock sarcophagus designed to last ten thousand years.
Then, in the winter of 1985, the Russian submarine Scorpion had penetrated Thebes Deep and located the plug with its sonar. Soon after that, according to the Arctic segment of the SOSUS surveillance system, there was an explosion and Scorpion had been crushed by the resulting collapse of the canyon wall. The landslides continued for days, burying not only the submarine but the plug itself under millions of tons of basalt. In the weeks and months following the incident, the Navy mapped the devastation at the bottom of the canyon with unmanned, remotely operated vehicles ROVS packed with cameras and radiometers to establish whether the waste cribs had been breached. Later, as more funds and resources were given to the operation. Scorpion’s debris field had been salvaged, and controlled detonations supervised by Charon himself were used to set off even more landslides to bury the evidence. A crisis had been avoided, but as the political embarrassment detonated behind closed doors in both Moscow and Washington, the possibility that foreign powers possessed the stealth technology to leave such expensive calling cards around U.S. military installations suddenly loomed large.
Global B-82 was one outcome of such concerns. The costs associated with the operation of ongoing submarine, surface, or satellite sentries were weighed against the placement of a permanent guard post. The idea of combining a listening post with a drilling platform operating in the private sector had been proposed as almost a lark. Decades earlier, USGS surveyors had speculated on the potential for crude oil along the lip of Thebes Deep. The same geological processes that had carved large, natural vacuoles such as the pit might also have provided natural reservoirs and sand lenses thick with fossil fuel, but the technology of that era had yet to make ocean drilling in the high Arctic a cost-effective enterprise. By the late 1990s, the Hibernia project off the Canadian Maritimes and others like it in the North Sea had advanced the technology of oil drilling in harsh environments far enough to overcome such obstacles. Now the problem was finding a suitable sponsor from the private sector to justify and offset the cost of setting up such a facility. Eventually, Global Oil put up $5.2 billion in construction costs in exchange for unconditional mineral rights to the area within a hundred miles of Thebes Deep and a host of generous tax subsidies.