“Fifty seconds,” Lundgren said.
“You’re running out of time,” McGarvey prompted.
“I’ll get it,” one of the team members said, but before he could move, McGarvey pulled out his pistol and pointed at him.
“Holy shit, that’s loaded!”
“Yes, it is,” McGarvey replied reasonably.
“Forty-five seconds!” Lundgren suddenly screamed.
The mechanics working on the jet fighter glanced over, but then went back to what they were doing. They had been briefed.
“
Ainsle made to move toward the suitcase nuke but stopped short when Lundgren aimed the AK at his chest.
“Are you willing to die for your country, Dr. Ainsle?” Lundgren asked. “Thirty seconds.”
“Are any of you?” McGarvey demanded.
No one moved. No one said a thing. And it struck McGarvey that they were like sheep being led to the slaughter, or more like rabbits who froze rather than ran when they knew they were about to be spotted by the hunter and killed.
“Fifteen seconds,” Lundgren announced.
“Anyone?” McGarvey prompted.
“Ten seconds,” Lundgren said. “Nine … eight…”
At 00 the red light stopped flashing and the LED went blank.
“What happened?” McGarvey asked, but it was a rhetorical question and Ainsle and the others knew it. “You didn’t expect the unexpected and none of you were willing to give your life to try to stop the bomb from detonating.”
“We would have given our lives for nothing,” Ainsle said.
“In this case you would have been right. But you didn’t come here prepared to win.”
“All well and good for you to say with blanks in the rifle, and with a device that was a dud,” Ainsle said. “In the field, facing an actual nuclear threat, it’d be a little different.”
“He knows from firsthand experience,” Lundgren said. “Believe me the man knows.”
A look of recognition came into one of the team member’s face. “Holy shit, you were the guy in San Francisco. I was in grad school and my dad who’s FBI told me about it. Not the whole thing, but some of it.”
“What’s he talking about?” Ainsle demanded, though he was clearly impressed.
“Later,” McGarvey said. “Right now we’re going to take this scenario step-by-step so that you can save your own lives long enough to save everyone else’s. Are you on board?”
“Yes, sir,” Ainsle replied sincerely and without hesitation.
NINE
Gail took the stairs up to the second floor of the South Service Building two at a time, her heart racing as fast as the thoughts in her head. On the way across from the visitors center her imagination had jumped all over the place, out of control for the most part, but now that she was here, at the scene of the possible trouble, she was calming down. It was almost liberating. Now she could get on with doing the job she’d been hired to do. Accidents and terrorism were on the minds of everyone who worked in or near nuclear power stations. Since 9/11 those kinds of fears had become deeply embedded in everyone’s subconscious, hers included.
She’d said nothing to the pair of security officers at the front entrance. Wager hadn’t spread the word yet, but they knew something had to be going on; the Ice Maiden never ran around like this unless something was in the wind. And she could feel their eyes on her back.
At the top she glanced toward the windows that looked down on the control room, the blinds closed now, as they usually were, then turned left and hurried down the corridor to the security offices at the opposite end of the corridor.
Alex Freidland, chief of South Service security, was just coming out of the monitoring center where all the images from the closed-circuit television cameras around the power plant were fed, watched, and recorded by a pair of operators 24/7.
He was a local from Port St. Lucie, and one of the few black men Gail had ever supervised. Except for his attitude of expect no evil, see no evil, which was sometimes frustrating, he was a damn fine officer, dedicated and bright, and a real pleasure to work with. He was one of the very few men Gail had ever met who could make her laugh, and that was saying something.
“Still no word from the control room?” Gail demanded.
“They’ve probably got their hands full with something,” Freidland said. “Happened before.”
“Bullshit,” Wager said, coming out of the monitoring center. “At least three of the cameras in this building were on what looks like a sixty-second loop. Frozen. I didn’t have time to check the others, but the first is up here in front of the observation window and the other two lead right to the control room door.”
“The guy who got sick in the middle of the tour,” Gail said. This wasn’t about a control room crew too busy to answer the damn phones; this was the big one. “Has anyone tried to override the control for the blinds?”
“Dave Bennet’s on his way over,” Wager said. Bennet was the plant’s chief electrical and electronics facilities manager.
“What did you tell him?”
“That the blinds don’t work and we need them up and running before the next tour group.”
Gail suddenly remembered the school group over at the visitors center. “There are a bunch of kids waiting to take the one o’clock tour. Get them out of here,” she told Freidland. “And there’s another group in mid-tour wandering around somewhere, get them back on the bus right now, and then close the visitors center, and send all those people home.”
Freidland hesitated for just a moment, but then headed down the corridor as he got on his walkie-talkie to start issuing orders.
“Get someone on the front gate,” Gail called after him. “No one gets in without my clearance.”
Freidland stopped and turned back to her, his eyes wide. “Are you going to evacuate the plant?”
“I’ll know in the next five minutes.”
“I’m on it,” Freidland said and he hurried away.
Gail turned back to Wager. “Where’s Chris?” Chris Strasser was the facility’s chief engineer.
“He’s at the meeting in the boardroom.”
“Get him, but let’s do this low-key for the time being,” Gail said. “In the meantime has anyone tried to get inside the control room from downstairs?”
“The card reader has been locked from inside.”
“Shit,” Gail said. “I’m calling the hotline, see if they can send us a team. Soon as you get Chris back here, dig out the remote camera, and call Bennet and have him bring a drill with a diamond bit. We’re going through the observation window, I want to see what the hell is going on down there.”
Like Freidland, Wager hesitated for just a beat, apparently unwilling to take the situation to the next step, admit that they were probably in the middle of a terrorist attack on the plant. “Do you think this is it?”
“We’ll see as soon as we get through the window,” Gail said, and she went into her office where she speed-dialed the NNSA’s hotline in Washington. The one man she wanted with her at this moment was somewhere out in the field, and even if she knew how to reach him, she didn’t know if she wanted to admit she needed help. It was that stubborn streak that her father had once warned would get her into a peck of trouble.
“It’s okay to hold out your hand for a lift now and then,” he told her, Minnesota thick in his voice. She could hear him at this moment, and her stomach knotted. The two most important men in her life; one got himself killed in the line of duty, and the other had always been, at least by reputation, a dangerous man. And eighteen months ago he’d become a damaged man, volatile in the extreme, yet thoughtful, kind, sometimes patient, and above every
