emergency responders rolling. NNSA would have already alerted the FBI and as soon as she knew the exact situation she would be calling the governor in Tallahassee for help from the National Guard. It was a mess and for the first time in her life since her father’s death she was frightened to the core.
TWELVE
The conference was beginning to wind down, and Townsend had managed to get beyond his prejudices and really see that Eve Larsen’s project did have merit, even if it seemed far-fetched, especially the bit about modifying the weather. Yet that was the part that most intrigued him.
He’d worked the big coal-fired stations out in Nebraska and Montana and for a time in West Virginia and he’d seen firsthand the effects the emissions had on the air quality, even with the new electrostatic precipitators to take out the flue ash, and in some places stack gas scrubbers, which used a pulverized limestone wet slurry to clean up the exit gas pollutants. To this day, electrical generating stations were responsible for more than 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.
Just eliminating the coal-fired plants, which supplied half of all the electricity in the U.S. would have a massive impact on the weather, even on a global scale.
He wanted to believe in her science, and the impact it could have, and he could see that a few of the others around the table were beginning to get what she’d been driving at here.
The major stumbling block, of course, would be funding the next stage of her project, and David Wren, SSP&L’s tightfisted CFO had suggested going to the oil companies themselves and ask them to give or sell her an abandoned Gulf oil drilling platform. At first she’d been startled, but Townsend had seen the glint in her eyes and the glimmerings of a plan as that notion began to strike her. The fact that Wren was only half serious meant nothing to the woman, and Townsend was damned thankful that she wasn’t into nukes and working for him. She would definitely be a handful. Brilliant, yes, but almost certainly difficult.
Someone knocked at the conference room door and Townsend looked up, irritated as Wager came in. Eve Larsen was in mid-sentence and she stopped talking.
“Sorry to bother your meeting again, but could I have a word with you, Mr. Townsend?”
Townsend had been only mildly interested when Chris had been called out a few minutes earlier; they were generating electricity here and the chief engineer was always on call. But this interruption now, and the look on Wager’s face, was troublesome.
“Excuse me, Dr. Larsen,” he said, getting to his feet.
The others, especially Tom Differding, the company’s chief of operations, gave him questioning looks, but there was nothing he could say, because he didn’t know if there was any trouble, or what it might be, though he had a feeling whatever Wager wanted was serious.
“Please continue with your presentation, I’ll just be a minute,” he said, and he stepped out into the corridor with Wager, but waited until the door was closed before he asked what the hell was going on.
“Gail wanted me to call you out of your meeting,” Wager said. “We have a developing situation that might mean evacuating the facility.”
Townsend glanced down the corridor toward the security offices and beyond to where Chris Strasser and Gail were watching someone doing something to the observation window, and a little shiver of anticipation made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Tell me.”
“We’ve had no answer from the control room supervisor or crew in nearly a half hour, and Gail thinks that it’s a real possibility someone has taken over down there. The card reader on the door has been blocked, and when Chris had Bob Holiman try for a remote scram on two it couldn’t be done.”
“Scram?” Townsend said and he was suddenly more frightened than he’d ever been in his life.
“Gail wanted to give you the heads-up, and she suggested that you finish up the meeting and get those people out of here. We’re already evacuating nonessential personnel, and it’s beginning to get ugly outside.”
Townsend brushed past him and went down to the observation window. It was Dave Bennet on a knee drilling a hole through the glass, but slowly, making almost no noise, and just that fact was ominous.
Gail and Chris looked up, and he could see the concern and fear on their faces, even though Gail was trying to hide it.
“Okay, what’s the situation? Larry told me something about it, but fill me in. You tried to scram two remotely?”
“It was locked out from inside the control room,” Strasser said. “That’s not supposed to happen, but somehow they tampered with the HM circuitry.”
“I asked Chris to order it as a precaution,” Gail explained. “It would have caused damage and cost the company a lot of money. But the alternative could be much worse.”
“I understand that,” Townsend replied curtly, his anger in part because of his fear but also in part that he’d not been informed until now. His input had not been asked for something so massively important not only to the well-being of the facility, but to its employees. “But what brought you to make such a unilateral decision?”
“No one answers from inside,” Gail said, and he could see that she was getting angry as well.
“That’s happened before. They may have their hands full.”
“But they wouldn’t have blocked the door lock, nor would they have tampered with the remote scramming mechanism.”
“Has there been any changes on the status boards?” Townsend asked his chief engineer.
Strasser shook his head. “Everything’s within the proper parameters.”
“I didn’t want to bother you until we had more information,” Gail said. “Once Holiman told us that number two couldn’t be shut down, I had Larry call you out of the meeting. I’ve already notified the NNSA hotline, and they’re sending a team up from Miami. They’ve contacted the FBI by now and I gave the heads-up to St. Lucie County’s emergency response people.”
Townsend couldn’t believe this was happening, didn’t want to believe it. Troubles with coal-fired plants could and sometimes were bad, but nukes were the worst, because when they went bad a lot of civilians within the damage path could be hurt, the effects serious for the remainder of their lives; leukemia as well as a dozen other cancers could show up anytime, even as long as twenty years after an accident. The Russians knew all about that kind of a horror.
But he calmed down. “I assume you have a good reason for drilling a hole through the window.”
“We want to thread a remote camera head inside past the blinds and take a look at what’s happening down there.”
“And?”
“We’ll know when we get though,” Gail said. “Dave?”
“Ten minutes, maybe less,” Bennet said without looking up.
Townsend had developed a grudging respect for his chief of security in the year or so she’d been here. Although technically she was employed by the NNSA, and not Barker Security and therefore not for him, this was his facility, and in her first few months here he had come close to sending her packing. Generally she had been a pain in the ass — just the same as he imagined Eve Larsen would be, and for about the same reasons; they were both highly intelligent and independent women, nothing at all like his wife of twenty-seven years who was strong when strength was called for, and compliant when that was needed. His life was neat, private, and above all orderly.
The shades covering the observation window were closed, and he was about to ask why she just didn’t open them, when he realized that function had probably been blocked from inside. The conclusion he was coming to was the same as Gail’s, and he had to admit to himself that were he in her shoes he would have taken the same steps.
“We can’t reverse engineer this thing?” he asked Strasser.
“The circuitry has been blocked from inside.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Nevertheless that’s the situation. Someone has managed somehow either to rewire the scram override panels, or rewrite some of the computer code.”
“I understand,” Townsend said. “But that couldn’t have been accomplished in a half hour, could it?”
