“No, sir,” Bennet said, still not looking away from what he was doing. “Whoever did it knew what he was doing, and probably did the thing right in front of one of the shift supervisors.”
“We’re talking about someone on the inside. One of our employees.”
“Yes, sir, a real pro.”
A sudden strangely bleak expression came into Gail’s face as if she’d just thought of something completely disagreeable, even horrible, and she looked at Townsend and Wager behind him.
“What?” Townsend asked.
“I think we need to start the evacuation right now,” Gail said. “Immediately. Get everybody the hell away.”
“I thought you wanted to wait to see what’s going on down there first,” Wager said.
“They’re all dead, that’s why they haven’t responded.”
Townsend had the feeling that someone or something was walking over his grave, but he also had the hollow feeling that she might be right, and he hated her with everything in his being for just that instant, until he came to his senses and knew that it wasn’t her who had stabbed him in the heart, it was she who was trying to stop what was happening.
“I’ll start it,” Wager said, and he turned and rushed back to security where the code red would be broadcast everywhere throughout the facility, as well as to every law enforcement and emergency response agency within twenty-five miles.
“Get your people out of here, Bob,” Gail said. “And make it quick, because once the sirens blow there will probably be a fair amount of panic.”
“What about you?”
“We’ll know the situation in a few minutes. Just get the hell away.”
“I’ll be back,” Townsend promised, and he went to the conference room.
Everyone looked up when he came in, and most of them could see that something was wrong, and it showed in their faces.
“Ladies and gentlemen, a situation with one of our reactors is developing and merely as a precaution we’re evacuating all nonessential personnel,” he told them
“My God,” Sarah Mueller, SSP&L’s nuclear programs manager, said, getting to her feet. “Are you scramming the reactor?”
“Not yet,” Townsend said. “But that may be next. For now I’d like everyone to get out of here.”
“Where are you sending your people?” Differding, the company’s chief of operations, asked.
“As far away from here as possible, Tom.”
Everyone except for Eve Larsen was on their feet, and heading for the door. She was calmly putting the material she’d been using for her presentation into her attache case.
“You too, Doctor,” Townsend said.
“Are you in trouble here?” she asked.
He started to tell her no, that everything would be fine, but he couldn’t lie to her. She was too bright, and she didn’t seem the type to panic. He nodded. “Could be serious, we just don’t know yet. Get away from here.”
“Preferably upwind?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Good luck,” she said, and walked out.
Leaving Townsend listening to his own inner voices that ever since he’d gotten into nukes had been speaking to him about the inevitability of an accident. Three Mile Island had been bad, and Chernobyl much worse. This today could be catastrophic. And there would be others, because no matter how safe they engineered and built these things, they were nuclear engines after all. Not quite bombs, but damned close.
He picked up the conference room phone and called his wife. Their home was on Jupiter Island, just a few miles away.
THIRTEEN
Air National Guard left seat pilot, Captain Frank Henderson, flew the Pave Hawk helicopter low and at maximum throttle, generally following I-95 north along Florida’s coastline that bulged a little bit to the east, out into the Atlantic, before turning due north and then northwest. Lundgren had gotten on his laptop and pulled up a site map of the nuclear plant, and showed it to McGarvey.
“The control room is on the ground floor in the South Service Building,” Lundgren pointed it out.
“How about security?”
“Same building, second floor. I’m sure that Gail is right in the thick of it.”
“No doubt,” McGarvey said, and he glanced out the window at the interstate highway. Traffic was heavy, as it usually was on a weekday, but twenty miles from St. Lucie there still was no noticeable difference southbound than there was north. If a full-scale evacuation had been ordered the first ripples had not reached this far yet. But when it did, he figured it was going to get messy down there.
Since they’d gotten the call from the hotline he had gone over in his head the possible scenarios they would be walking into, none of which seemed the least bit attractive. Contrary to popular belief, nuclear reactors were not inherently unstable or even dangerous. Crashing airliners into the containment domes would probably cause a lot of damage, but not enough to guarantee a release of nuclear materials into the atmosphere. But the right team in the control room, willing to give their lives in exchange, could cause a great deal of harm, a catastrophic meltdown if the reactors were not allowed to be scrammed and the cooling pumps shut down or sabotaged. It would be many magnitudes worse than Chernobyl.
And Lundgren was correct, Gail would be right in the middle of it, chastising herself for allowing the incursion to get this far. It’s one of the first principles he’d drummed into her head last year: prevention came first. Stop the guys from getting in the four airliners in the first place before they killed the crews and took over the flight controls. By then very little could have been done in the very short time once it was realized what was about to happen.
She’d allowed someone into the control room of her nuclear plant and she would be raving mad, beside herself, seething with a rage that she would not allow to show up on her face, in her actions, in her voice. She was the Ice Maiden on the outside, but still a lonely woman from Minnesota who in many ways was still mad at her father for getting himself killed, and therefore angry with just about every man she’d ever met.
Save one.
And there was a time when he’d been even more vulnerable than her. His wife, daughter, and son-in-law were all killed, leaving him to take a horrible revenge, and in the end he was a damaged, haunted man who had been open to the loving kindness of a woman. But almost immediately he began beating himself up for his weakness, and he still did for that weakness and his sometimes barely controlled anger. He didn’t know how or where it would end for him. Or when, if ever.
The tops of the Hutchinson Island power station’s containment domes appeared on the horizon right on their nose. And traffic on the interstate was beginning to pick up, most of it heading south.
McGarvey was wearing a headset. “Find a place to set us down inside the fence,” he told the pilot.
“Their heliport is just off A1A north of the visitors’ center,” the pilot said.
“Inside the fence, Captain.”
“Someone might take exception, sir.”
“I don’t care.”
Lundgren showed the pilot the site layout on his laptop. “Get us as close to the South Service Building as you can,” he said, pointing out the building that sat in front of and between the containment domes. “Looks like a staff parking lot.”
“Whatever you say,” the pilot said and he banked the helicopter off toward the island.
Lundgren shut down his computer and set it aside, then pulled out his pistol, a fifteen-round 9mm SIG-Sauer P226, and checked the load, before reholstering it high on his waist on the right side.
He caught McGarvey watching him and shrugged. Early on he’d admitted that he didn’t like the idea of
