shooting someone, anyone, but if it came to a gun fight he wasn’t going to rely on his less than perfect aim using something like McGarvey’s seven-shot pistol. He wanted to pull off a lot of shots as quickly as possible without stopping to reload. And fifteen rounds beats seven, he’d argued.
McGarvey had never taken exception with Lundgren’s tradecraft. He’d never once faltered, no matter the job that was set before him, and in the time they had worked together they had not really become friends — that was still difficult for McGarvey — but they had become trusted allies. McGarvey could count on him, and he was pretty sure that Lundgren felt the same about him.
The two bridges from Hutchinson Island to the mainland just south of the power plant were starting to jam up, traffic nearly at a halt. Police units were converging on the problem, but it was going to take a fair amount of time to clear up the situation, and that, McGarvey figured, was exactly what a terrorist bent on causing the greatest loss of life would have wanted. They would have wanted to wait until after the plant was evacuated and people were stuck on the roads before blowing the place.
The problem was the geography. Hutchinson Island’s Nuclear Incident Evacuation Plan was the same as the county’s Hurricane Evacuation Plan; the only way off the island, other than by boat or helicopter, was A1A — the narrow highway, more like a neighborhood street actually — that ran north and south, with only three bridges to the mainland, two a few miles to the south, and one to the north. It was a two-headed bottleneck that was already clogging.
“It’s starting to get bad down there,” he told the pilot. “Can you transport people out, somewhere upwind?”
Henderson and his copilot, Lieutenant Jim Reilly, nodded. “If those are your orders, sir.”
“Good man, but I don’t know how long the situation is going to remain stable. This place could blow at any minute. So it’s your call if you come back for more.”
“We normally carry a crew, including gunners, of six, plus a dozen fully equipped troops and their gear,” Henderson said. “So we can probably manage twenty-five or thirty people each load.” He glanced at his pilot. “We’ll come back as many times as we’re needed, or until you wave us off.”
People were streaming out of the various buildings throughout the plant, including the visitors center and the South Service Building where there seemed to be some panic developing.
As the pilot flared over the middle of the big parking lot, several uniformed security people, realizing that the chopper was going to land, began herding people away as best they could. But it still took several long minutes before Henderson could set the Pave Hawk down.
As soon as they were grounded, McGarvey and Lundgren jumped down, and waved a pair of security people over, one of them a tall, black man who seemed completely unflustered despite all the chaos.
“Alex Freidland,” he said, shaking their hands. “I’m chief of South Service Security. You guys from the NNSA?”
McGarvey nodded. “The whole team should be here shortly. For now I want you to take charge here. We’re going to start moving people to high ground right now. Can you do that for me?”
They had to shout to be heard over the rising noise. People were still streaming out of the building and either racing to their cars and motorcycles or out the main gate to the highway where they hoped to catch one of the emergency buses that were supposed to be en route in this sort of situation.
“The bridges getting bad already?”
“It’s going to be a major mess shortly,” McGarvey said.
“Can do,” Freidland said. “And if you’re looking for Ms. Newby, she’s straight up the stairs.”
Some of the people were beginning to see the helicopter as a quicker way out and they started to storm it, but Freidland and several more of his officers held them back, picking out only those who had no transportation and were depending on the buses.
McGarvey and Lundgren fought their way through the crowd, roughly elbowing people out of the way, to South Service’s main entrance in time to see a slender, deeply tanned blond woman carrying an attache case struggle out the door. Before she could get five feet a half dozen or more people, men and women, burst out of the door, knocking her to the pavement, and raced past, even more people streaming out the building as the evacuation sirens began to wail.
Panic was nearly full-blown now. This was a nuclear plant and sirens were the last straw, and people crawled over each other to get as far away as fast as possible before the entire place went up in a pair of mushroom clouds. Only a handful of employees at any nuclear power plant were actually nuclear engineers. The vast majority were hourly workers from electricians and plumbers, to janitors and security officers and tour guides; these were people who were happy to have well-paying jobs, while at the same time believing in their heart-of- hearts that they were working under the threat of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki, especially after 9/11.
And now they wanted to be gone from this place as quickly as was humanly possible.
Another woman and a man were knocked off their feet just as McGarvey and Lundgren reached the blond woman.
McGarvey helped her to her feet as Lundgren was helping the other two, shielding them as best he could from the last of the employees leaving the building. And suddenly it was just the five of them at the entry.
“Get them out of here,” he told Lundgren. “I’m going to try to find Gail.”
“I have my own car,” the blond woman said.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Dr. Larsen, if your car isn’t glowing in the dark by tonight, I’ll make sure that you get back to fetch it. Right now I want you gone. Deal?”
Her mouth opened for just a moment, but then she nodded. “Deal,” she said.
McGarvey spun on his heel and headed into the building.
“What’s your name?” Eve called after him, but then he was inside, racing up the stairs.
FOURTEEN
The main entrance security officers were gone, presumably outside helping with the evacuation, so there was no one to stop McGarvey from going up to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. The building definitely had the air of not only desertion and emptiness, but of a dark, dangerous cloud hanging just overhead; a crisis was in full bloom here, and he could practically smell it in the air.
Gail was halfway down the corridor to the right with four men, one of them on his knees in front of a large plate-glass window.
A large man who looked to McGarvey like a roustabout in a business suit glanced over his shoulder as McGarvey came out. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
“Kirk McGarvey, NNSA. Who are you?”
“Bob Townsend. I’m the manager.”
Everyone turned around, and Gail’s face lit up. “My God, Kirk, I thought you were in Washington,” she cried.
“Miami. Gruen is getting his team together. What’s the situation?”
“Someone’s locked us out of the control room,” Gail said. “We’re going through the window with a remote head video camera to see what’s happening down there.”
“Why the evacuation?” McGarvey asked. “A lot of people are panicking, and someone’s bound to get hurt.”
“We tried to remotely scram the reactors, but those circuits were locked out as well.” She shrugged, almost like she was back in training with him and was waiting for his approval. “It was my call. Just to be on the safe side.”
“How many people are inside?”
“Five, a shift supervisor and four operators. But someone else could have gotten in. I don’t know how, and I’m not even sure it happened, but my gut is singing.” She explained about the man in one of the tour groups, who’d claimed he was sick and had left. “He was up here on this level, and his group went down the back stairs and down the north corridor to the rear door over to the turbine buildings. The control room entry is off that corridor. He would have passed right by it. Ten minutes later one of my security people at the visitors center said the guy dropped off
