radioactive steam, but most of the outflow had blown directly out to sea.
Bob Townsend and Chris Strasser, dressed in spotless white coveralls, came out of the decontamination tent and walked over to the Command Post trailer, their hair wet and their faces red. Neither of them looked happy, but when they spotted McGarvey and Gail coming along the road they held up.
“What are you two doing here?” the plant manager asked, his mood and manner brusque. He had a lot on his mind; it was his power station on his watch that had been damaged. And it was obvious that he was placing a lot of the blame on Gail’s shoulders.
“We’d like to get up to security and pull out the digital records from the surveillance cameras,” she said.
“You can look at them, but nothing’s coming out of there until we’ve finished the decontamination process,” Strasser said. “We’ll have to tear down every piece of equipment, strip the ceilings and walls and floors, everything, before we can start to put the place back together and get reactor one online.”
“That’ll take at least a year,” Townsend said.
“How about the damaged reactor?” McGarvey asked.
“It’ll never come online,” Townsend said. “But it could have been a hell of a lot worse if you and your people hadn’t shown up. They were heroes. You were.”
“We were doing our jobs,” McGarvey said, his gut tightening. “But this scenario wasn’t in the playbook, so instead of beating up on anybody, we’ll find out who did it and why, so just maybe we’ll have a shot at preventing a next time.”
“Any ideas?”
“A few.”
“Is there electricity in the building?” Gail asked. “We’ll need it to power up one of the computers and send whatever images we come up with back to Washington.”
“Portable generators,” Strasser said disgustedly. “But the hard disks may have been fried, and even if they weren’t it’s possible that the digital records were corrupted.”
“How bad is it?”
“Better than we expected, less than one hundredth of a sievert per hour,” Strasser said. “Less inside the suits, of course, but we’re limiting exposure to four hours per shift just to be on the safe side. There was a pretty strong electromagnetic pulse — that was the blue tinge we saw from the air — which may have caused some damage to the data circuits. We just don’t know yet. Right now our primary concern is to clean up so that we can put our crews in there to rebuild everything.”
“Do we need to be briefed before we go inside?” McGarvey asked.
“Essentially it’s don’t take your suit off for any reason, don’t eat or drink anything inside the building, no souvenirs, stay no more than four hours, and if you tear a hole in your suit, no matter how small, get the hell out of there on the double. There’s a pretty good team of National Guard people helping ours in the tent, so just do what they tell you. Suits are inside.”
“What about the bodies?” Gail asked.
“They’ve been buried,” Townsend said, his jaw tight.
“Where?”
“Nevada.”
The hazmat suits were bright reflective silver, large clear Lexan faceplates giving them nearly unrestricted vision straight forward and ninety degrees to either side, but they were hot and the bottled air was so dry it parched their mouths and throats after the first five minutes.
They walked across the street through the main gate and into the parking lot. Several cars had been left behind, including, McGarvey presumed, the rental car Eve Larsen had used. He’d promised her that if it wasn’t glowing in the dark she could come back and get it, but all the cars here would be transported out and buried with the other nuclear waste.
Gail pointed to a Volvo convertible. “If I stop payments do you suppose the repo man will take it?” she shouted.
“Yours?”
“Yeah, I bought it two months ago. Hell of a waste.”
Two large semis were backed up to the front entrance, and workmen were trundling out irradiated material from inside the building: desks, chairs, lockers from the break area, coveralls and hardhats, doors, windows, light fixtures, and acoustical ceiling tiles, plus the monitors and panel electronics from the control room.
The cleanup crews hadn’t started on the second floor yet, but when they did the entire place would be stripped bare so the reconstruction could begin if the basic structure was radiation free. Otherwise the entire building would have to be razed.
Just inside the entry hall they stopped at the foot of the stairs, and Gail shook her head. “They’ll never put this place back together.”
“They’re trying to save money,” McGarvey told her.
“Shutting down has put a huge strain on the state’s energy needs.”
“It could have been worse.”
“You’ve already said so, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Gail said. “When they start to pass out the blame, a ton of it will come my way, which I don’t give a damn about. But what frosts me is that they’ll stay so shortsighted they won’t beef up security the way they know they should.”
And she was right, of course, McGarvey thought. Nothing much had been done so far to harden security procedures at the other 103 nuclear plants, except to temporarily cancel public tours. Homeland Security was still looking for attacks from the sky. Airliners were not allowed to fly through exclusion zones around any nuclear facility.
But increased security measures were expensive. And in these troubled times money was tight.
Upstairs they went down the corridor to the blasted-out observation window. The glass had been swept up and the blood cleaned from the floor and wall, nevertheless they walked with care lest they step on a stray shard and cut a hole in their booties.
The bodies had been removed from the corridor as well as from the control room below where workers were busy disassembling the control panels for both reactors and carting them away. The supervisor’s desk and the two control consoles had already been removed and Gail shivered.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“It never does from the outside looking in,” McGarvey told her, and she turned to look at him.
“It makes sense to someone?”
McGarvey nodded, the gesture mostly lost inside the hood. “It’s up to us to find out who,” he shouted.
“Does it always work that way for you?”
McGarvey felt a short, sharp stab of pain for what he had lost and how he had lost it. But in the end he had found the who and the why. “Yes,” he told her.
She read something of that from the expression on his face. “Let’s get on with it,” she said. She glanced down at the work being done in what was left of the control room and then headed back down the corridor to the security suite.
Nothing seemed to have been disturbed in Gail’s or Wager’s offices, her purse was where she had left it behind her desk and Wager’s jacket was still draped over his chair. Everything here would eventually wind up in a nuclear waste dump somewhere.
The light switches worked, and she powered up the computer in the monitoring room, but it wouldn’t boot up, and neither would any of the monitors that had displayed the closed-circuit television images from around the power plant.
“Your engineer was right, the computers are fried,” McGarvey said.
“It means even if the DVDs stayed intact we have no way of accessing any of them, unless we come back with a laptop,” Gail said bitterly. “This was a wasted effort.”
“It was worth the try,” McGarvey said, just as disappointed as she was.
Gail walked back out to her office and took a photograph out of the wallet in her purse.
