The river jostled the boat, slapping at its chine. Nick blinked spray from his eyes, then opened them wide as the river yawned before him and flashed its teeth of white.
The boat pitched down, and Nick dropped abruptly into his seat. The propeller shrieked as the stern flew up into the air. Nick could feel himself flying. Ahead he could see nothing but a wall of foaming water. By his side, he heard Jason give a surprised yelp.
The boat smashed into the water, and the impact threw Nick forward onto the wheel. The boat buried its foredeck in the Mississippi, then surged sluggishly upward as water poured aft. A wave climbed the windscreen and hit Nick full in the face. The propeller dropped into water, caught, and threw the boat forward as water sloshed toward the stern.
Something smashed against the stern of the boat, and without even looking Nick knew what it was.
“Untie the bass boat!” he shouted. He didn’t want it climbing in the cockpit with him. Nick caught a glimpse of a tangled thorn-hedge of foaming tree roots ahead, and calmer water to the right: he spun the wheel, threw the throttle forward. The boat slewed, banged on hard water as if it were a brick wall, then surged past the slashing roots with room to spare. Something bright and metallic loomed ahead—it might have been a grain silo that had lost its roof, or a gasoline storage tank—and Nick cranked the wheel in the other direction.
“Bass boat’s untied!” Jason yelled.
American Dream smashed into the metal obstruction broadside, and then the propeller dug in and the speedboat leaped ahead. The sound of rushing water was loud, but not as loud as the pulse that beat in Nick’s ears. Through the gleaming diamonds of spray on the windscreen, Nick saw another obstruction ahead—he cranked the wheel, felt the boat respond. A tree-root tangle swept past, then another. Then Nick was weightless again as the boat launched itself over a waterfall before pancaking onto the water with a hollow boom.
The timber dam hadn’t just broken open, it had scattered bits of itself downstream, obstacles like tiger teeth waiting to impale the unwary. The water didn’t pour through in a stream, it leaped down in stages, like a rapid.
Nick slalomed through the obstacles, his confidence growing as the boat responded to his commands. And then he was clear, the Mississippi opening up before him, choked with floating wreckage but still perfectly navigable. He laughed, turned to Jason.
The boy looked at him, eyes wide. “My God, Nick!” he said.
Nick grinned at him. “Glad we waited till it was safe, huh?” he said. He pointed. “And look there!” The bass boat bobbed in the current, scarred and glittering with spray but still defiantly afloat. Nick pulled the speedboat alongside, and Jason caught the bass boat’s trailing towline with a boathook and then tied it astern of American Dream.
Nick looked out at the river through the spray-bedecked windscreen. He reached for the throttle and pushed it forward. The boat’s bow rose high as the Evinrude bellowed. Arlette, he thought, I’m on my way.
Larry stood above the holding pond in the auxiliary building. His boots were planted on the fuel handling machine that was used to shift fuel assemblies within the holding pond—in essence a giant overhead crane that ran on tracks, like the one in the reactor containment building but less robust. The machine had suffered considerable damage when the roof had fallen on it during M1, and putting it into working order had been one of Larry’s greatest priorities.
Replacement parts had been a problem. Machines of this sort were intended to last decades, longer than the nuclear facility itself, and for that reason spare parts were not readily available, and such as had been available were stored in buildings destroyed by the quake and then flooded. Larry missed Poinsett Landing’s huge machine shops, which could probably have scratch-built a Saturn V moon rocket, let alone parts for a big crane. In the end the parts were scavenged from other nuclear facilities and installed by Larry, Jameel, and Meg Tarlton. Power was provided to the system by a generator warped alongside the auxiliary building in a barge. Now the three of them stood on the machine’s control platform, looking at the kludged-together control panel—part of which consisted of switches set into a raw-looking piece of plywood—and were ready to give the system its first test.
Larry raised his walkie-talkie to his lips, then paused while a helicopter thundered overhead. He caught a glimpse, through the open roof of the auxiliary building, of an Army Super Jolly helicopter with a load of earthquake debris.
The island that Larry had recommended be built around Poinsett Landing was rapidly taking shape, a steel, stone, and concrete ship’s prow pointing upstream into the river. After the helicopter crews had a chance to practice their aim, and demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction that they weren’t about to drop a ten-ton load on plant workers, Larry and his people had been allowed back into the building. Larry waited for the helicopter sound to recede, then pressed the handset trigger. “Power up!”
“Power up, Mr. Hallock,” the answer fizzed out of the speakers.
Elsewhere in the building, huge circuit-breakers were thrown. Lights gleamed on the control panel. Larry felt himself tense, waiting for the short, the pop of a fuse, the fizz of a misinstalled control system. Dim pain throbbed in his broken collarbone, and he rubbed the broken bone absently. It almost never bothered him unless he was under physical tension.
Nothing. No disaster. Larry’s breathing eased.
“Just take her forward and back,” he said.
Jameel approached the control panel, flicked switches, pressed a lever. With a hum of electric motors, the crane began smoothly moving forward along its tracks. He braked, then moved the crane back the way it had come.
“Nice,” Larry said. “Now traverse the turret.”
Larry leaned over the rail to peer at what he could see of the turret on the bottom of the crane, which was intended to traverse left and right so as to be able to drop the grab into any of the fuel storage racks in the storage pond. Another set of electric motors hummed. He saw the turret rotate, the grab on the end of its distended snout tracking past his field of view.
“Works fine,” he said. “Swing it t’other way.”
He waited for the snout to traverse into his field of vision, then called to Jameel to halt.
“Drop the grab,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to stop.”
The grab was like a metal claw on the end of the machine’s double chain. It was spring-activated so as to snatch a fuel assembly from its rack on contact, and would not disengage as long as the weight of a fuel assembly was detected at the end of the chain.
Jameel took hold of a lever screwed to the plywood control board and gave it a nudge. The bright stainless steel double chain clanked as it rolled out of the turret, the heavy grab swaying only slightly as it dropped to the water below. The Mississippi water in the holding pond lacked the brilliant clarity of the demineralized water that normally filled this space—the mud had mostly settled to the bottom, but its dark presence reflected little light and made it difficult to see into the water. We’re going to have to put a lot of floodlights down there, Larry thought. Otherwise we won’t be able to see a dang thing. The grab smoothly entered the water, the chain unrolling above it. “Stop!” Larry called. He didn’t want to grab a fuel assembly by accident. He didn’t have anyplace to put it. There was a tremor, a rattle of roof panels, and Larry realized an aftershock was hammering the building. Larry’s heart kicked into a higher rhythm as he felt the crane sway on its tall platform, and he backed hastily away from the rail he’d been hanging over.