Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (8 page)

“As well he should,” I said. “Talk about a good terrorist target.”

“Not as good as the movies make out, Mr. Richter,” he said. “Still, yes, there is a threat, and when we hear submachine-gun fire in the swamps, Colonel Trask provides a measure of comfort.”

“Say what?” Pardee asked.

“The government runs intrusion drills on the protected area of the station. They’re called force-on-force exercises. The director’s office knows when one’s coming, but, supposedly, they don’t tell Trask. The NRC uses Navy SEALs, or people from the FBI’s hostage rescue team. The rule is, once physical security detects a possible intrusion, Trask alerts the station director, who gives him a code word that tells Trask it’s a drill. Then they hand out the blank ammo and go play cowboys and Indians with their buddies in the tall weeds.”

“What if real bad guys ever penetrated this intrusion exercise schedule?” Tony asked, coming into the kitchen. “Or had some help from the inside?”

I hadn’t realized he’d come back downstairs. Being quiet was one of Tony’s useful skills. He displayed other traits that were not useful but were always exciting.

“That could be very interesting, I suppose,” Ari said.

Tony put a finger to his lips and then spoke very softly. “As interesting as the fact that you were followed here? And that two guys in a PrimEnergy van are pretending to work on a telephone pole while they listen to what’s going on in here?”

There was a moment of silence around the table, and then we all got up to take a peek through the front window curtains. A white utility van was parked half a block away, with the PrimEnergy logo conspicuous on its side. The rear doors were open, and two men in coveralls were busy doing something at the base of a telephone pole. Their equipment and uniforms looked convincing, except for the cone of a distant sound concentrator propped inside the van and aimed at our front windows.

Tony stood next to one window, turned his back on the outside world, and pulled out a Glock. He nodded to Pardee
and me, and we produced our own weapons. Then he racked his weapon right next to the glass and announced in a loud voice that none of us should shoot until he started it. We each racked our weapons and then watched the “utility” men scamper for cover behind their van. The concentrator seemed to be working very well.

“Okay, I’ll take care of this bullshit,” Ari said and went out the front door. We all followed him out onto the porch and stood there in plain view of the van, guns in hand just in case this wasn’t what it looked like. Ari went to his car, got something out of the glove compartment, and then hustled over to the van, where the two men were starting to stand up now that they realized they’d been had. I wondered if Ari had stopped off to get a weapon, but instead he walked up to them and began firing one of those disposable flash cameras in their faces. They tried to block their faces with their hands, then slammed the van’s back doors shut, hopped in, and drove off at a respectable clip.

“Goddamn Trask,” he muttered as he came back up the front steps, pocketing the camera.

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think I recognized the one guy. We have a recording scanner at the Pass and ID Office that’ll confirm it.”

“Well, you’re obviously consorting with suspicious characters,” I said as we put away our weapons and went back into the kitchen. I was relieved that none of the neighbors, if indeed there were any, had been out on their porches.

“Did you tell this young man to check for someone following me?” he asked.

“Nope. He’s suspicious by nature and just chock-full of initiative.”

Ari grinned at Tony and thanked him for catching the tail. Tony said you’re welcome and then excused himself to go check for “smooth,” now that we had just chased “rough” away.

Ari blinked at that and then grinned again. “You guys are good,” he said.

Tony slipped out the back door while we resumed our conversation at the kitchen table. Quartermain explained what he wanted from us.

“Just as the federal government runs what we call force-on-force drills on the fences,” he began, “I have some budget money to run technical intrusion drills on my side of the perimeter.”

“Define your side of the perimeter,” I said.

“There are three security circles around a nuclear plant: the so-called corporate area, the protected area, and the vital area. Corporate means the public can be there—hunting, fishing, et cetera—if they abide by the company’s rules for the use of the land.”

“No fences?”

“Nope—the first fence defines the protected area. That takes pass and ID access to get in. That’s the area around the industrial plant and its buildings.”

“And the vital area?”

“That’s where the dragon lives—defined as the area where access makes the release of radiological materials possible.”

“That’s a little fuzzy, isn’t it?”

“By design—the vital area is what we nukes say it is. Think layers. Snake Trask and his people
patrol
the corporate area. They’ll
protect
the fenced perimeter; they’ll
defend
the vital area, with deadly force if necessary. The system works in reverse, too.”

“You mean protecting the rest of us from the reactor?”

“Exactly. The nuclear reaction happens inside a stainless steel reactor vessel. That vessel lives in a concrete, lead, and steel containment dome. The dome lives in a steel building. Trask keeps bad guys out; my people and I keep the dragon in.”

“Which puts you in charge.”

Ari smiled. “Like I said before, if
my
dragon gets loose, the security of the physical perimeter is no longer the issue.”

“Can it get loose?” Pardee asked.

“Yes, most likely through human error, compounded by an instrumentation failure,” Ari said. “The Russians hold the
world records, plural. The Chernobyl melt was a classic example of unsafe design compounded by human error. The low-order detonation in the Chelyabinsk district back in 1957 was simple Communist stupidity.”

He went on to describe how the Russians had kept filling a radioactive waste tank until it overpressurized, started a partial reaction, and then literally exploded, contaminating a six-hundred-square-mile area. They then took to dumping their waste into a nearby lake. When the lake dried up in a drought and the radioactive sediments blew away in the wind, it created a no-man’s land the size of Maryland, which exists to this day.

“How about our own Three Mile Island?” I asked.

“The RCS, that’s the reactor control system, detected a problem and shut itself down. Should have been end of story. But then a valve opened and stayed open, while reporting to the control room that it was closed. That drained out all the cooling water.”

“If the reactor was shut down, why was that a problem?”

“Because even after the fission reaction shuts down, the residual heat of decay is still very high. Without cooling water, it can melt the core assembly. That’s what happened at TMI before they realized the instruments were lying. What’s forgotten is that it all stayed inside the containment structure, that movie not withstanding.”

“We’re not exactly qualified in nuclear engineering,” I pointed out.

“I know,” he said, “but I’m talking about helping me with a different problem.”

“Somebody who
is
technically qualified, and who might be screwing around?” I said.

“Exactly.” He sipped some coffee and made a face. “Like what happened to Ms. Gardner.”

“So you
do
think that came from your plant?”

“Officially? That would be an unequivocal no. And I’ll defend that position for as long as I want to keep my job.”

“But.”

“Yeah. But. Fortunately for PrimEnergy and Helios, the
feds are focusing elsewhere. There’s apparently been intel that the Islamists have given up the idea of smuggling in a nuclear bomb in favor of trying something with nuclear waste.”

“A dirty bomb instead of a Hiroshima bomb.”

“Yeah. A plutonium or a highly enriched uranium bomb has a very distinctive signature, and the ports—airports, seaports—are pretty much wired for that. Nuclear waste products, by definition, come in radiation-tight containers. No signature.”

“And Wilmington has a big container port,” Pardee said.

“Big enough. Not as big as Long Beach or L.A., but big enough, and about to double in size. A radioactive DOA in Wilmington set off all sorts of alarms. They’re going through the motions at Helios, but officially no one really believes that’s where this stuff came from. It would, simply stated, be much too hard.”

“But not impossible?” I asked.

He stood with his back to the sink and shrugged. “Actually, as an engineer, I’d think it would be very difficult, but, no, not impossible. And as the security officer it’s my job to exercise a little paranoia here.”

“You have somebody in mind?” I asked.

“It’s not so much one individual,” he said. “Look—technical security depends on three things in our industry: rigid adherence to approved engineering practices, a personnel reliability program, and the power industry’s version of what the military calls the two-man rule.”

“I believe,” I said, and he smiled.

“Okay. Briefly, here’s the idea. The two-man rule means no one individual is ever left in a situation where he could put the atomic reaction process at risk. Personnel reliability, or what we call fitness to serve, means that a guy who gets a DUI or gropes an undercover cop in a public men’s room gets looked at to see if he should keep his ticket as a plant or reactor operator. And procedure means just that: line-by-line read-back procedures for everything that happens in the control room or in the plant itself. One guy reads the operating
procedure, say, for lining up the steam system, and a second guy reads it back to him before actually doing it.”

“That must be really slow.”

“It’s tedious, but reliable. It also requires a certain degree of technical openness. Nothing happens behind closed doors.”

“So?”

“So, if somebody tapped a source of radioactive water in the Helios plant, he would have to have violated all three wedges of technical security.”

I thought about the appearance of a tail on Quartermain’s visit out here today. “Would he need some help from the physical security department?”

He nodded. “Yes, I’d think so, and that’s the one division at Helios which is comparatively opaque. There’s a cast of dozens involved in bringing a reactor online and feeding the grid. But most of the time, nobody knows what the hell Trask’s people are doing.”

“Except following you around and breaking into my hotel room, presumably just because you and I met.”

“Well, there is that.”

“But I thought Trask worked for you—why not just fire his ass?”

“Truth?”

“Please.”

“My theory is that he’s got something on the director, because every time I’ve voiced my ‘concerns’ up the line, I get shut down. Can’t prove that, of course, but that’s what I’m beginning to think.”

“So you want us to take a look at them? Trask, his people, and any possible ties to the director?”

“Yeah.”

Before Quartermain could elaborate, Tony Martinelli came back into the kitchen from outside. He looked pleased with himself, which worried me a little bit. He saw the expression on my face and waved me off.

“It’s cool,” he said. “But not what I expected.”

“Ree-port.”

He looked at Quartermain and raised his eyebrows, as if to ask,
Okay for him to hear this?
I motioned for him to continue.

“Okay, so I go around the block, walk towards downtown for five minutes, turn around, and come back towards the house on the beachfront street. Just another tourist, out for some fresh salt air and a cigarette. And one block away, parked on the beach side of the street, I come upon a Bureau ride, complete with two specials sitting in the front seat trying to look inconspicuous.”

“In their suits and ties. At the beach.”

“But they were such inconspicuous suits.”

“Can you describe the agents—a man and a woman, perhaps?”

“Negative. Just the usual Buroids with the usual sunglasses and happy faces. They looked bored.”

“So lemme guess: You stopped, stared, waved, said hi-there, peed on their tires, and then took their pictures?”

Tony feigned profound disappointment. “Absolutely not, boss,” he said. “I never said hi-there. However, I did notice their parking meter was expired, so I sicced a meter maid on them.”

I had to grin. “And then watched them flash some creds.”

“Aren’t you proud of me?” As in, lots of other options had come to mind.

“I am, Tony, I am,” I said, counting myself lucky that he hadn’t crawled under some cars and attached a towing chain from their rear axle to a tree. He’d seen that in a movie and often said he’d like to try it.

“So, the question is: Who’re they watching?” Pardee asked, sticking as always to business.

“Great question,” I said, turning to Ari. “You, us, Trask’s snoops, or all of the above?”

“I have no idea,” he said.