Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (45 page)

“Oka-a-y,” I said. “I follow all that. But why would we want to do bad shit to a nuclear power plant? Are we supposed to be agents of a foreign power? Do we make money out of this? Where’s our motive, Colonel?”

“Ah, motive,” he said. “Yes, what was your motive? Well, remember why Dr. Quartermain hired you? Remember all that Red Team stuff? You were simply doing your jobs, and you succeeded beyond Quartermain’s wildest expectations. Things simply got out of hand, that’s all. You know, like most of the government’s ‘good ideas’? Occupying Iraq, for instance? Most of government’s good ideas usually do turn to shit.”

“So you’re going to what—kill all of us?” I asked. “You’ll be the last guy standing, so you get to tell the tale?”

“Oh, hell, no,” he said, staring at Tony. “Not unless your twitchy buddy there makes me do it. Calm down, you.” Then
he turned back to me. “No, actually, I need you alive and intact. I need a couple of guilty bastards in cuffs when the mother of all investigations gets going. I’ve got a story, you’ll have a story, Control will have a story, hell, even Mad Moira, if she gets caught, she’ll have a story. Talk about a federal goat-grab.”

There was a rumbling noise below our feet. Trask blinked and then said, “Whoops.”

“What the fuck was that?” Tony said.

“Baby is having gas pains, I do believe,” Trask said. “A bit early, but better late than never. Now, you two: Get your asses out there on the pool deck.”

“And if we don’t?” I said, with more bravado than I really felt.

“If you don’t, I’ll pull these triggers. Then, of course, I’ll have to change my story, but, hey, I can do that. You can just bleed out. Move your interfering asses. Now.”

We moved our interfering asses to the door and went through. Outside the control room there was a distinct smell of ozone and something else, something metallic. To my very great dismay, the water level in the moonpool had shrunk by about a quarter, and the formerly indistinct fuel bundles were no longer indistinct at all. Trask waved at us through the glass door, then threw a switch, which plunged the entire area into darkness. We heard the hatch cover clank shut as he went below. The only light now was that glow from the spent fuel assemblies, and it seemed to be a lot stronger. As we watched, another giant gas bubble rose from the bottom of the pool and lazily floated to the surface, where it popped right under the inert forms on the bridge.

I finally recognized the other smell—I remembered it from high school chemistry, one of those experiments where we made hydrogen. It was more of an acidic sensation on the palate than a real smell, but I recognized it. The pile of spent fuel at the bottom was beginning to outgas. Next would come the fire to end all fires.

We went out onto the bridge across the pool and pulled the two unconscious men back to the pool deck. Both of them smelled of the same ether that Trask had used to put Pardee Bell under, but neither seemed to be so profoundly drugged as Pardee had been. I thought I heard noises from behind the airlock into the control room, so I went back in there. I tried the escape hatch, but it wouldn’t budge now. I went into the airlock and banged on the exterior door. Someone outside immediately yelled for me to open the door and come out, hands up, et cetera, et cetera.

“I can’t open the goddamned door, you idiot,” I yelled back. “There’s no handle, and the card readers are dead.”

That led to some consultation outside.

“Hey?” I said to the steel door.

“What?”

“Your buddy Carl Trask has turned on the pumps to drain the moonpool. The water’s at about sixty percent, and there’s hydrogen coming up.”

This produced a couple of oh-my-Gods outside and lots more consultation.

“Can you shut the drain pumps down?” my interlocutor called.

“Negative, the consoles are all locked up. You need to get someone on the pumps themselves before you get a goddamned meltdown.”

More excited conversation outside, and then the sound of feet on stairs.
Oh, shit
, I thought.
Trask was right. They’re bailing out
.

I checked the consoles again to see if I could find anything that might kill power to all the pumping systems, but I couldn’t understand the control instrumentation. The consoles appeared to be locked up in some kind of hold mode, with none of the knobs or switches doing anything when moved. Tony called from inside the pool deck area. I ran back out to find Ari sitting up and looking around like a drunk.

“He’s conscious but not all there,” Tony said, holding on to Quartermain’s shoulder to keep him upright. Ari’s face was splotchy, and his eyes were coming in and out of focus.
There was a bright red welt running centerline from his forehead to the back of his skull. I knelt down on the concrete beside him.

“Ari?” I said. “The moonpool’s losing cooling water. What do we do?”

“Run,” he croaked.

Tony snorted. Great advice.

I repeated the problem, and this time Ari seemed to focus a little better. “Water,” he mumbled. I thought he wanted water, but then realized he was looking over my shoulder, so I turned around and saw the fire hose folded up on a rack. There was the water we needed.

Tony got up and started pulling the hose off the rack while I held on to Ari, who was still very wobbly. Thomason was unconscious next to him. Tony threw the entire length of the hose into the pool and then opened up the red valve wheel. The hose made crackling noises as firemain pressure came on, and then the end of the hose popped out of the pool like an angry snake and began blasting a jet of water all over the place. Tony frantically cranked back down on the valve while I tried to capture the hose without getting bashed in the face. I then jammed the head of it into the bridge decking, and he turned it back on. This time the stream of water blasted straight down into the pool, creating a maelstrom of bubbles, and lots more of that metallic smell.

“Out,” Ari said weakly. “Radiation. Control room. Now.”

I helped him to his feet, but his legs gave out, so we ended up dragging him by his armpits and legs back into the control room. My injured arm gave way halfway there. Tony moved to go back out for Thomason.

“No,” Ari said, pointing at the radiation meters above the door. Both were visibly moving into the red zone. “Too late. Don’t go out there. Need suits.”

Somewhere outside the control room, perhaps even outside the building, a large, deep-throated siren started up. I found one instrument that appeared to display water depth in the moonpool. It read thirty-one feet. I watched it for a moment to see if the fire hose was going to help. The needle didn’t move.
Either it was locked up, or the fire hose was just holding its own against the pumps. Two more instruments began to flash red lights; both were radiation meters. My ears popped as an automatic pressurization system came on in the control room. The big siren outside had gone to a steady wail, and I wondered if the surrounding population knew what that meant.

“We can’t just leave that guy out there,” Tony said.

“Must,” Ari said promptly. “That gas is radioactive. Atmosphere out there much too hot. Gotta get out of here.”

Better said than done, I thought, as I tried that hatch wheel again. Trask must have wedged something in there.

“Fire axe,” Tony said, pointing to the other end of the room. There was another hose reel down there, this one for CO
₂
, and right next to it was an old-fashioned fire axe. There was also a glass-fronted locker with what looked like firemen’s oxygen breathing apparatus hanging inside. The windows of the control room were beginning to fog up outside from all the heat and humidity being stirred up by that stream of water blasting down into the moonpool. I looked at the depth gauge again: just under thirty-one feet. Baby was losing ground.

“Should we mask up?” I asked Ari, but he had drifted away again, his head lolling on his chin while he mumbled something incomprehensible.

We examined the main door, which indeed had no handles—but it did have hinges.

“I’ll get the masks,” I told Tony. “You’ve got two good arms: Take the axe to those hinges, see if you can get ’em off.”

Ari rolled over to the floor like a sinking ship while I went into the cabinet and pulled out four masks. They were attached to canisters, which were either oxygen generators or an air-mixture chemical, I couldn’t tell which. Tony was hacking away with the fire axe at the middle hinge with some effect. There were more red lights on the control panel, and I noticed one that was labeled
STACK TEMP
. Its needle was red-lined, and the indicated temperature was certainly high enough to boil water, which was probably why the windows were now totally obscured.

Tony had the middle hinge destroyed and was hacking away at the bottom one. The top one would be tough, as there was no room to get a proper swing at it. I donned one mask and adjusted the straps. Then I put another one on Ari. His eyes came back into focus and looked at me with a glare of apprehension. When I saw his cheeks puff out, I ripped the mask off and pointed his face into a trashcan as the ether displayed one of its more disgusting side effects. He puked his guts out for over a minute. I pulled the tab on my canister, and the air was suddenly much better. Then there was a serious bang from the door, and Tony stepped back away from it as a second bang hit the structure. Someone was hammering on it from the other side, and the bottom half of the door was slanting open from the top hinge.

“Here,” I yelled at Tony, pitching him a mask. As cops we were familiar with firefighting gear, and he knew how to don and activate the mask. The hammering on the main door continued, and we could see light from under the door.

“Gimme that axe,” I said.

Tony passed it over and asked what I was going to do.

“You stay here, handle the cavalry. I’m going after Trask.”

“Thanks a heap,” he said. “And what do I tell all those happy campers out there?”

“Tell ’em the moonpool’s boiling,” I said, standing back and taking a semi-mighty swing at the hatch handle. “Oh, and tell ’em Thomason’s still out there.”

I hit the hatch handle again, and this time I heard something metallic clanging down the ladder underneath. I tried the handle, and it rotated. I opened the hatch and snapped it back. The hole underneath revealed that the lights were still out, but I didn’t fear an ambush. Trask had done what he’d come to do: create pandemonium at the plant, and soon out in the civilian population if that big siren meant what I thought it did. His water-poisoning scheme might not work from an engineering point of view, but that had never been his objective. Breach plant security from the inside and cause a major radiation emergency in the moonpool. Create mass confusion, alarm the whole countryside with reports of radiation in the
drinking water and a possible meltdown at the plant, and generate months’ worth of investigations and horrific publicity.

I went down the ladder, awkwardly because of the breathing mask, and pulled the hatch shut just as the main control room door came crashing down in a flood of white light and several figures in moonsuits came piling into the control room, all talking at once. I was relieved to see no one pointing guns. This was the technical staff.

I slipped down the ladder to the mezzanine level, went to the closed door, and listened. There was more activity out in the stairwell, but it still sounded more like technicians than cops. The emergency lighting was still on in the pump machinery room, even though the stairwell lights had been turned back on. I took down one of the lights and searched for the escape trunk, which I found at the back corner of the room. The hatch was open and waiting.

I turned around to go down and then hesitated. Trask would have been in a hurry, but would he have left the hatch open like this? I knelt down, shone the light beam down the ladder, and tried to see what was in the room below. The ladder went straight down at least fifteen feet onto a concrete floor.

The ladder.

I felt the top rung and tested the ladder’s strength. The top fixtures came right out of their sockets, and the whole thing began to lean backward into the room below. I had to pull hard just to hold on to it.

Nice try, Colonel
, I thought. If I’d jumped onto that thing in a hurry, I’d have gone over backward onto the concrete and whatever else down there. I wedged the top of the ladder frame against the top sockets and went to look for some substitute pins. The best I could come up with was some pieces of electrical wire until I remembered the ladder coming down into the mezzanine room. It had pins securing the bottom fixtures. I removed these and set them into the next ladder, clambered aboard, and went down as fast as I could, my feet hitting every other rung. I was glad for the mask, because
the oxygen-enriched atmosphere was giving me a real energy boost, which I sorely needed.