“I’m getting nowhere with this,” he said, frustrated and just a little frightened. “Whoever did this was damned good.”
“What about the control panels themselves? Can we take them apart and rewire the circuits so that those functions can be accessed away from here?” McGarvey said. He wanted to light a fire under the engineer’s ass; the man knew his stuff, but he was ponderous
“It’s possible. But it’d take time.”
Lundgren showed up at the door and pulled up short. “Jesus Christ, what a mess,” he said, but then he spotted the Semtex and LED counters and went to the first panel.
“What are they?” McGarvey said, starting around the console.
“Stay the hell away,” Lundgren said, his nose an inch from the LED counter. “This is practically a cell phone,” he muttered. “Dual purpose. A timed trigger, but it looks like it’ll accept a signal input. The antenna is built-in. Definitely cell phone frequencies.”
“No time to get a bomb disposal squad here,” McGarvey said.
“I can see that, so we’ll have to do it ourselves,” Lundgren said. He looked over his shoulder at Strasser. “Are you the chief engineer?”
“Yes,” Strasser said, getting to his feet. He was in some pain and it showed on his face.
“What are we dealing with here? What’ll happen if these panels are destroyed?”
“The nuclear reactors will overheat and there will be a catastrophic meltdown that the containment vessel might not be able to completely handle.”
“Will there be a radiation release?”
“Potentially massive,” Strasser said.
“Carlos and his people just showed up,” Lundgren told McGarvey. “From what I saw he only brought two of his team along. But Marsha is one of them, and she has her tool kit. If they’ll just stop talking to the plant manager.”
It was a bit of good news. While Carlos Gruen and his Miami NNSA team were highly trained to disarm nuclear weapons, Marsha Littlejohn was their expert on all kinds of explosive devices and detonators, easily on par with Lundgren. And although her personality was irrelevant at this moment, McGarvey remembered her as a cheerful optimist, the exact opposite of Gruen who found fault with everything and everyone. In advanced training, which McGarvey and Lundgren conducted at a weeklong workshop at Quantico, the team had been faced with a series of increasingly difficult tasks — everything from finding and disarming a nuclear device, to dealing with as many as ten armed and highly motivated FBI instructors playing the role of al-Quaeda fanatics — during which Gruen grumped his way, giving up when it became obvious the team was meant to fail. But Marsha never quit trying, always with a smile on her petite round face.
Lundgren pulled out a Swiss Army penknife, unfolded the one-and-a-half-inch blade, and probed one corner of the Semtex, digging out a tiny piece of it, and smelled it. “Good stuff,” he said absently, turning his attention back to the LED timer, which was passing 27:00.
“I suggest trying to open the panels and rewire them,” McGarvey said.
“We don’t want to do that,” Lundgren said. “Not until we know what we’re dealing with. Could be motion sensitive, among other things. Might even react to body heat it someone touches it.” He was studying the three wires leading out of the counter and up to the fuses. “Two of them complete the circuit, but I don’t know about the third.” He looked up. “But we caught a break. We’re between the morning and evening land and sea breezes. Nothing’s moving out there right now. So if this thing pops any radiation leaks should stay fairly close to home.”
McGarvey’s sat phone vibrated. It was Rencke.
“The LED units are almost certainly comms devices. Most likely on cell phone frequencies.”
“We got that much, what else?”
“Is Lundgren there?”
“Yeah, and Marsha Littlejohn will be here soon.”
“You’ve got good people with you, but make damned sure they understand that the detonation signal could come at any time.”
“Stand by,” McGarvey said. “Otto’s on the line, and I sent him pictures of the detonators,” he told Lundgren. “The Company’s science and technology directorate is helping out. Anything you need to know?”
“What the hell’s the third wire for?”
McGarvey relayed the question.
“The best guess here is a seismic sensory circuit,” Rencke said. “Depending on what kind of a reading the unit receives from elsewhere that particular explosion will go off in a timed sequence with others. Jared thinks it’s the kind of setup sometimes used to hunt for dinosaur bones buried too deeply for other means, and for oil exploration. The detonator reads the seismic returns from other explosions in the chain and decides what to do next.”
“Why here?”
“Move anything in the wrong way, and the detonators will fire.”
“You mean like another panel?”
“Yeah, and probably the control units that could maybe reroute cooling water. Just take it easy, Mac. Janet says your best bet will be disabling the LED counters.”
“Alan thinks they could be heat sensitive,” McGarvey said.
“Hang on,” Rencke said. He was back almost immediately. “Probably not. But go tenderly.”
“Will do,” McGarvey said. He broke the connection and explained what Otto and the Company’s S&T directorate had come up with.
“That’s just fine,” Lundgren said, disgusted.
“We can’t touch anything in here?” Strasser demanded.
“No.”
They all looked at the counters, which were just passing 23:20.
“What can we do?” the engineer asked.
“You’ve done all you can, it’s up to us now. Get out,” Lundgren told him. He glanced up at McGarvey. “Go pull Gruen’s head out of his ass and get his team in here ASAP. Marsha’s got the equipment we need.”
“We’re here,” Gruen said from the doorway. “And I’m taking over this case as of now.”
EIGHTEEN
Carlos Gruen was a roly-poly man, with a round, perpetually red face and the defensive attitude that many men who stood barely five feet two seemed to wear like a suit of armor. He was considered the fair-haired boy up in Washington, and his goal was to one day take over the entire NNSA, which was not out of the question. He had the credentials for the job: a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from M.I.T., an MBA from Harvard, and a lot of friends in the Department of Energy.
He carried two aluminum cases, each about the size of a medium-sized overnight bag, his glasses on top of his head, the collar of his powder blue coveralls properly buttoned up. He stopped all of a sudden when he saw the bodies and the gore, and the blown-out observation window above.
This was exactly the sort of situation McGarvey had been trying to drum into the heads of all the Rapid Response team personnel, but he’d suspected all along that no one actually believed they’d ever encounter something like this. They were scientists and technicians, not combat troops, and he could see dawning realization of what had happened, was happening here, in the momentarily sick expression in Gruen’s pale eyes.
Marsha Littlejohn, tall, whip-thin, pale blond, a leather satchel slung over her narrow shoulders, stepped around Gruen, her expression tightening when she saw the bodies and the blood. But then she spotted Lundgren at the scram panel, and went directly over to him, ignoring McGarvey and Strasser for the moment.
“What’s the situation?” she asked, and Lundgren explained what they up against, including the CIA’s opinion.
Gruen’s second team member stopped just inside the doorway. He was young, probably in his twenties, with
