Abyss

“I’m on it.”

“I’ll hold,” Strasser said, and he put a hand over the phone. “It’ll take a minute or two to start the procedure.”

“What about reactor one?”

“Let’s try this first, and see what damage is done.”

“Specifically what trouble can we get into from the control room?” Gail asked, even though she knew something of it, if not the exact extent.

Strasser glared at her, not in the least bit comfortable with even thinking about it; his lips tightened. “Much trouble.”

“Come on, Chris, I need to know what we’re facing.”

“It could be as bad, maybe even worse than Chernobyl.”

“An explosion?”

Strasser shook his head. “That’s not possible, but the reactors could go into a catastrophic meltdown if the cooling controls were disabled and the scram panels damaged. A great amount of nuclear material would be released into the atmosphere.”

“Everyone in the plant would be in serious trouble.”

“Yes,” Strasser said heavily, as if he regretted his own assessment.

Wager came down the corridor on the run, with the remote camera bag slung over his shoulder while speaking on his cell phone, presumably to Bennet, and Gail stepped out of her office to meet him as he broke the connection.

“Where the hell is he?” she demanded.

“He’s on his way,” Wager said. “He didn’t know the situation so he wasn’t in any hurry. He knows now.”

“Ms. Newby,” Strasser called from her office and Gail went back inside to him and her stomach flopped when she saw the expression on his face. He looked frightened.

“What?”

“We cannot scram from outside the control room. The circuitry has been blocked.”

“Can’t the power be cut?” Gail asked.

“No. But he’s on his way over to reactor one to see if it’s the same.”

“It will be,” Gail said, no longer any doubt in her mind that the man who’d dropped out of the tour, claiming to be sick, was somehow involved in what was developing. “Has anything else been affected yet?”

“Everything appears to be operating within normal limits,” Strasser said.

“Can we monitor what’s happening to the reactors from outside the control room?”

“We can watch our power outputs, and watch that the flow of cooling water isn’t interrupted. But once that happens it will be only a matter of minutes before the situation would start to become unstable.”

Wager had come into the office. “Look, how about if we cut off electricity to the control room. The lights will go out and their computers will go down.”

Strasser started to object, but Gail held him off. “They could have rigged explosives to some of the panels that might react to a power failure. We just don’t know.”

“Wouldn’t work anyway,” Strasser said. “For obvious reasons all the key equipment in there is on a self- contained backup power system.”

Make a decision and stick with it, McGarvey had told her during her training last year. But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. If a situation arises, react to it immediately.

“Even before you have all the facts?” she’d asked.

“As you’re gathering the facts.” He’d smiled wistfully in that sad way of his, which she had found bittersweet and immensely appealing at the time. Still did. “Most of the time you won’t get all the details until later when everything is over and done with.”

“Until Bennet gets here, I want you to alert all the section heads to start moving out their nonessential personnel,” she told Wager. “No panic, no sirens.”

“What about Townsend at the rest of the brass in the boardroom?”

“Them, too. I want everybody to get as far away from here as possible.”

“What do I tell them?”

“Anything you want. It’s just a precautionary measure. But not a word about the actual situation to anyone other than Townsend. Clear?”

Wager nodded, handed her the camera bag, and went into his office to make the calls.

Gail turned to Strasser. “Stick with me, if you would, Chris. Once we get through the window and get a look at what’s happening inside, you’ll be a better judge than me what condition the computers and panels are in.”

Bennet showed up with his tool bag, all out of breath and red in the face. The stocky fifty-one-year-old electrical and electronics technician had retired from the Air Force after a thirty-year career dealing with and eventually supervising the same sort of work around nuclear weapons storage and maintenance depots, including a stint at Pantex in Texas where nukes were constructed. In the time Gail had worked here she’d never seen the man in a hurry, or flustered, and who could blame him for keeping calm? After working around nuclear weapons, some of them hydrogen bombs, a nuclear-powered electrical generating facility was tame. But right now he was agitated.

“Why not use the card reader?” he asked. “I can bypass the lockout.”

“Because we don’t know what’s going on down there,” Gail told him. “I want you to put a hole in the lower corner of the window, the farthest away from the control consoles, and with as little noise as possible. I want to thread the camera inside. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” Bennet said. “But it’ll have to be slow.”

“How slow?”

“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

“All right, get to it,” Gail told him and when he left she stepped around the corner to the monitoring room where the two on-duty security officers had been listening to what was going on. “You spot anything usual, and I mean anything , feed it to me,” she told them. “But I don’t think this situation is going to last much longer before I order the evacuation.” She started to turn away, but had another thought. “Look, guys, if you want to bug out I won’t blame you, or order you to stay. Okay?”

“We’re staying,” one of them said, and the other nodded.

They were both so young that Gail almost told them to get out, but she nodded. “Good show.”

Back out in the corridor Strasser had followed Bennet to the observation window, where the technician was setting up his drill. Satisfied that they were working that particular problem, she called Freidland on her FM radio. “Alex, copy?”

“Yes, ma’am.

“Where are you?”

“Just heading to the visitors center to make sure everybody got out. Has the situation changed?”

“I want you to round up as many security people as you can find and standby for a full evacuation. I don’t want any panic. But if it happens everyone’ll have to get as far away as quickly as possible. Haggerty will be sending his people as soon as I know exactly what we’re in the middle of. But I expect we’ll know within the next fifteen minutes. Stay loose.”

“Are you aware that people are already heading out?” Freidland asked.

“Right. Nonessential personnel.”

“Well, a lot of those nonessential folks don’t look too happy. Matter of fact they’re scared.”

“We’ll have to deal with whatever comes our way.”

“I hear you,” Freidland replied.

Wager came out of his office. “The word’s gone out.”

“Alex says the exodus has already started, and so has the panic,” Gail told him. “Bennet says it might take as long as fifteen minutes to get through the glass. Go let Townsend know what’s going on, and it’s his call but he might think about getting those people out of here. In the meantime I’ll get Haggerty in gear.”

Wager glanced down the corridor toward the observation window. “I never really thought it would happen this way, you know.”

“Nobody did, Larry,” she said, and went back into her office to call Haggerty again to get the local cops and