“These are the new rules. One: in the field you most definitely will use profiling as one of your most important tools. Not only racial profiling, but profiling of the kind that will make you notice the one person in a crowd who seems nervous, the one wearing a bulky jacket on a mild day, the one who won’t look you in the eye, the van with heavily tinted windows coming around the block for a second time apparently looking for a parking spot when several are available, the one person who doesn’t seem to fit.”
“Paranoia,” one of the young scientists muttered.
“Right,” McGarvey replied. “Two: you’re bright people, and very often you have hunches, in the lab, at home in the middle of the night, driving to or from work. The eureka moments when you suddenly have an insight. Gut instincts. Trust them in the field. If something doesn’t seem right to you, it probably isn’t.”
“We’re scientists, not trained FBI agents,” Ainsle said. “We don’t think that way.”
“You will after we’re finished here,” Lundgren told them.
“Three: you will be issued weapons and will be given the training to use them,” McGarvey said. “In the field you will shoot first and ask questions later.”
“I won’t—” Ainsle started, but McGarvey cut him off.
“If you want to be on a team, you will be armed. Four: give no quarter. Which means if you draw your weapon, you will keep firing until the suspect is down and unable to shoot back or trigger any device he may have intended to detonate. Center mass.”
“I could kill him doing that,” Ainsle said.
“That’s his problem, not yours.”
“Or
All of them looked a little green around the gills, but some of them were beginning to see the light, McGarvey could read it in their faces. It was a tough world out there, and no one had asked permission if they could fly airliners into buildings, and no one apologized afterwards. The only way in which they could have been stopped would have been to profile them and shoot them dead before they got aboard the airplanes.
McGarvey’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. The NNSA’s hotline came up on the caller ID. Lundgren was getting the same call, and McGarvey felt the instant stirring that something was happening or about to do so.
“Excuse me,” he told the group and he answered the call. “McGarvey.”
“This is the hotline OD, we have a potential class one situation at the Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station.”
“What’s the nature of the problem?”
“A possible incursion, by a person or persons unknown. Security gets no response from the control room.”
“Has Gruen been notified?” McGarvey asked. Carlos Gruen was Team Miami’s leader, and one of the fair- haired boys with the program manager, Howard Haggerty, up in Washington. He did everything by the book — exactly by the book — which meant that he had his nose so far up Haggerty’s ass that it would probably take him all afternoon to extract it, gather his team, and actually make the decision to head up to Hutchinson Island.
“He’s in the process of getting his people and equipment together.”
“Stand by,” McGarvey told the OD, and he turned to Lundgren, and nodded toward the Pave Hawk helicopter. “Round up the pilot, we need a ride.”
“I’m on it,” Lundgren said, and he broke the connection with the hotline and headed over to the ready phone by the door.
“Have the local authorities been notified?”
“In the process.”
“The Bureau?”
“They’re sending teams from Orlando and Jacksonville, but you’ll probably be first on site.”
“We’ll take it,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection.
The scientists were watching him. “What sort of a problem?” Ainsle asked.
“Someone may have taken over the control room at the Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station.”
A minute later a pickup truck came through the doorway and screeched to a halt near the helicopter. A pair of ground crewmen jumped out and started prepping the bird; removing the rotor tie-downs, disengaging the safety locks on the tail rotor, racing through their engine checks and walk around.
Lundgren came over. “The flight crew’ll be here in three minutes. Have you called Gail?”
“Not yet,” McGarvey said. “She’ll have her hands full at the moment.”
A squat tow truck came into the hangar, hooked up to the chopper, and once the wheel chocks were removed towed the machine outside.
“This scenario isn’t in the book,” Ainsle said.
“It will be tomorrow,” McGarvey said, and he and Lundgren followed the helicopter out the door.
ELEVEN
“Break down the control room door, now,” Strasser demanded. He was primarily a nuclear engineer used to tidy, if sometimes complex, solutions.
“Not until we find out what’s going on,” Gail told him. At this moment the safety and security of the facility were in her hands, and she still didn’t know what was happening. Time had seemed to slip into slow motion. “I need you to tell me if the reactors can be scrammed from somewhere other than the control room.”
“Yes, but it would cause a very large disruption on the grid, and we wouldn’t be able to get back up into full operations for a considerable amount of time. Damage would be done.”
“I’ll take the responsibility,” Gail said sharply.
“The company could lose a serious amount of money.” Strasser was a large, shambling bear of a man with a heavy German accent. He was from Leipzig in the former East Germany, and had escaped over the wall with his parents when he was a teenager. He’d got his schooling in nuclear engineering at the Polytechnic in Berlin and then at the Julich Division of the Fachhochschule at Aachen, before coming to the U.S. to work at Los Alamos. He was a very bright man, but he had never outgrown his stiff-necked German precision.
They were standing in her office, the doors to the monitoring room and the corridor open. So far there was no panic because very few people inside the plant knew that anything was wrong, but that wasn’t going to last much longer. In the meantime she felt like a small child being admonished by her elder.
“Do it,” she told him.
Strasser glanced toward the corridor door. “Townsend should be informed.”
“Just how much damage could a terrorist do in the control room?”
Strassser’s eyes widened, and Gail saw that she had gotten to him. “More than you want to imagine.” He picked up the phone and called Bob Holiman, the day shift chief operating engineer who at the moment was working on something in turbine building two. “Strasser. I want you to initiate an emergency shutdown on number two.”
Gail could hear Holiman shouting something.
“On my authority,” Strasser said. “But it has to be done on site, there is a problem in the control room. Cut the power to the control rod HMs.”
Control rods suspended above a reactor’s core would drop down, once a signal that something was going wrong was transmitted to the HMs, or holding magnets, that kept the rods in place, immediately shutting down the nuclear reaction by absorbing massive amounts of neutrons. That was a function operated from the control room where computers monitored everything from the state of the reactor to the coolant systems and even the electrical power output. If anything went wrong in the system the signal would be sent and the reactor would be scrammed. In this case, where the control room was apparently out of the loop, power could be cut manually, shutting down the HMs, which would allow the weight of the control rods themselves, aided by powerful springs, to do the job. Shutting down the reactor would theoretically take four seconds or less.
Gail used her cell phone to find Wager who answered on the first ring. “I have the camera and I’m on the way up. Is Bennet there with the drill yet?”
“No. Call him again and tell him to get his ass over here right now!”
