his pass and hard hat and left. When I brought up the camera in the parking lot he was just getting in his car, and when he got to A1A he turned right, to the south. But he told the people at the visitors center that he had an appointment in Jacksonville. To the north.”
“Good call,” McGarvey said. “How soon before you get through the glass?”
“Almost there,” Bennet said.
Wager had set up a laptop computer and plugged the remote camera into it. The sharply defined image, displayed in color on the monitor showed the corridor they were standing in. The camera head itself, about the size of a pencil eraser, was at the end of a five-foot flex cable that could be controlled, left to right and up and down from the laptop’s keyboard.
Bennet’s diamond-tipped glass-cutting drill bit made very little noise. “It’s not likely anyone inside will have heard anything,” Gail said, watching.
McGarvey studied her profile, everything about her at this moment intent and tightly focused. She was doing her job the way she’d been trained by the NNSA, in part by him, and so far as he could tell she’d made all the right moves and for all the right reasons. She wasn’t relying on happenstance. But he wondered if she still had a chip on her narrow shoulders for most men because of her father. When she’d turned around and saw him standing there, she’d seemed genuinely pleased, and not ashamed to let that emotion show for just second or two. And for just those seconds he was forced to reexamine his feelings about her, only he hadn’t come to any conclusions. The situation was developing too fast for that sort of thinking, and anyway he wasn’t ready. Later.
“Does anyone know who’s supposed to be on duty down there?” he asked.
“Stan Kubansky is the shift super,” Strasser said. “And if there really is a problem, it sure as hell wasn’t him that caused it. I know the man personally.”
“For how long?”
“Ever since I hired him five years ago.”
“What’s your position here?”
“Chief engineer.”
“Good,” McGarvey said. “You’re just the man we’ll need to evaluate the situation.”
“We’re in,” Bennet said. He withdrew the drill and moved aside to let Gail insert the camera head, which she did with great care so as not to ruffle the blinds.
McGarvey and the others watched the computer monitor as the camera lens slowly cleared the blinds, the first images of the ceiling and light fixtures, until Wager flexed the cable to slowly pan the camera down.
Blood was splashed on one of the control panels along the back wall, and Townsend glanced at the observation window as if he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing on the monitor was actually the control room.
“What is it?” Gail asked, sensing the reactions behind her.
“It’s blood on the secondary cycle systems board for number two,” Strasser said.
“I don’t see any damage,” Townsend said.
Leaving the camera cable in position, Gail came around to the monitor. “That’s a lot of blood.”
“Pan farther down,” McGarvey told Wager.
The image on the screen slid down the panel to the edge of one of the horseshoe-shaped desks.
“Left.”
Wager moved the camera head to the left until he stopped it on the image of the two technicians obviously shot to death, one of them slumped over his position, the other sprawled on the floor.
“Jesus,” Wager said softly.
McGarvey looked closer. Both men had been taken out by a professional, a single shot to the head, but the backs of their white coveralls were splattered with blood. Someone else’s.
“Any damage to the equipment at that position?” he asked.
“Not that I can see,” Strasser said, his voice shaky.
“Left.”
Wager panned left, and stopped a few feet away at the body of a man in a blue blazer. He’d been shot in the neck, the bullet probably severing a carotid artery that had pumped out a lot of blood. But he’d also been shot in the head. Two shooters, McGarvey figured. First the neck wound by an amateur then the head shot by the pro.
“Mother of God, it’s Stan,” Strasser said.
“Left,” McGarvey said.
Kubansky’s body crumpled on the tile floor in front of his desk, his right hand outstretched as if he were signaling for help or trying to reach for something, slid to the right of the screen, the image shifting now to the two technicians at the reactor one control position. Like the others, they’d been shot in the head and died before they could sound the alarm.
“They’re all dead,” Townsend said.
The shooter had to have been first class, McGarvey figured, but he also had to be well under Homeland Security’s radar, otherwise he would not have been able to get inside, even with a false ID. Most hit men that good were on a lot of international watch lists, usually with fairly accurate descriptions, and in many cases fingerprints and even DNA on file, so the kinds of jobs they took required stealth, not openly walking into a secured facility somewhere.
But there was more. He was sure of it. If it was the guy who’d gotten sick in the middle of a tour, the one Gail had spotted driving away, but in the wrong direction, he would have done more than just somehow get into the control room, gun down the supervisor and four technicians, and leave. He had a plan and help.
“Any damage to that control position?” he asked Strasser.
But the engineer shook his head. “Move the camera up,” he said and Wager panned up, the image of the control panels along the back wall coming into view.
“Shit,” Gail said, and everyone saw it.
A lump of plastic explosives, probably one kilo, was molded to one of the panels. Wires coming from a detonator were connected to a small device, about the size of a cell phone, with a LED counter.
“Is that an explosive device?” Townsend asked.
“Plastic, probably Semtex,” McGarvey said.
“Well, if it explodes we can kiss all of this goodbye,” Strasser said. “That’s the primary control unit for all the reactor coolant systems. It monitors everything from the steam generator to the reactor coolant pumps and even the control rod indicators.”
“Tighten the focus,” McGarvey said, and Wager adjusted a control so the LED counter filled half the screen. It had just passed the sixty-minute mark, the numbers decreasing from 59:59.
“We have one hour to figure out how to get in and stop this from happening,” Townsend said, when a blurred image passed on the monitor, momentarily blocking the LED counter.
Everybody had seen it.
“Someone’s still alive down there,” Wager said.
“Pull back,” McGarvey told him.
The image broadened to include the entire control panel, but no one was in the frame.
“Left,” McGarvey said.
The image of the LED slid to the right to another panel with another LED device. Wager tightened the focus. This counter was at 59:42.
“That’s the scram panel for reactor two,” Strasser told them. “With the coolant controls gone, and our ability to scram destroyed we’ll go into a massive meltdown.”
“How soon?” McGarvey asked.
“It’ll start to happen within minutes once the coolant pumps stop functioning.”
“Pull back again and go left,” McGarvey said.
Almost immediately a man’s image in profile filled the screen, and Wager pulled back a little farther.
“That’s Thomas Forcier,” Strasser said in wonder. “He’s one of our engineers. Worked for Stan when he first got here.”
But his words were choked off when the man they knew as Forcier turned directly toward the camera, and they could see that he was just finishing strapping two blocks of Semtex to his chest. He inserted detonators into
