Hot Water (31 page)

All along, the other teams had been reporting in their failures and successes, transmitting through our headsets. Morris took it all in stride, occasionally contributing a new idea or alternative, but for the most part he trusted his people to get the job done. But knowing that he was about to go inside an area that the others clearly thought he wouldn’t emerge from alive, I felt the need to make absolutely sure.

Toggling my mike clumsily with my gloved finger, I broke in and said, “Morris is entering the containment facility. Do you guys have any reason why he shouldn’t go?”

Silence met me. Guess nuclear engineers aren’t really into chatter—or saying good-byes. Then an anonymous voice sounded. “Good luck” was all he said.

Morris didn’t even act like he’d heard. He was hunched over the door’s manual controls. It was designed like an air lock, but as soon as he opened the first door an alarm sounded and a red light began flashing through the darkness. He turned to close the door behind him, and our eyes met.

Mired in helplessness, all I could do was wave good-bye.

THIRTY-TWO

The radio chatter continued in my ears, frustrating me even more because I didn’t understand most of what was being said. Just as Morris entered the chamber through the second air-lock door, the lights came back on.

I got my first look at the heart of the plant. It was a large concrete-walled dome riddled with colored pipes headed in every direction. The actual reactors sat inside a second dome, this one made of stainless steel. It sat in the center of the room, the maze of pipes emerging from it.

“Status,” Morris’s voice cut through the others, interlaced with static.

“Generators online.”

“Control rods?”

“Still working on them. It’ll go a little faster now that we have juice.”

“Core temperature?”

A pause. “Rising fast. Do you have a count in there?”

“Low enough to give me a few minutes. Let’s make them count.” Morris began climbing the ladder. The platform he was aiming for was a good forty feet over his head.

I couldn’t resist, I had an idea and I figured it couldn’t hurt. “Couldn’t you release some of the pressure by having the robots open the isotope extraction chambers?”

A pause in the chatter. “Wait, she has a point. It could buy us some time.”

“We’d have to—” The conversation drifted back into technical jargon that I couldn’t interpret. But at least I’d contributed something.

Morris kept climbing. At one point he stopped and tapped the top of his head.

“Morris, can you hear me?”

No answer, but he nodded his head. “Can you hear the others?”

Now he shook his head. Great. It was up to me to relay the information that was bombarding me like waves in a hurricane.

“Guys,” I cut into the chatter once more. “Morris has lost you. I can’t repeat everything to him—there are too many conversations going on, so could you let me know when you have something he needs to hear?”

“Nothing good on this end,” a voice replied. “Coolant pumps still off-line. We’re trying to track the problem—our readings say they’re all open.”

That sounded familiar. I remembered reading—“Three Mile Island,” I interjected. “Didn’t they have the same problem?”

“You’re right. A false reading led them in the wrong direction. We’ll manually inspect and open each of them.”

“How long?” I asked, watching Morris’s slow progress. He still had ten feet to go before he even reached the platform.

“I’ve put everyone on the emergency coolant line, maybe four minutes if we don’t run into problems.”

“Is that enough time? Should I pull Morris out?”

He paused. “No. We’re past the point where the emergency coolant will stop things. It will only buy us time.”

“AJ?” came another voice, this one a woman’s—the health physicist. So she hadn’t abandoned us after all. “Are you at the observation window?”

“Yes.”

“Now that the power is back on, you should be able to see a monitor on the wall next to the air lock. It’s encased in a red box and has a color reading as well as a digital one.”

“I see it. It’s too far away from me to read the number, but the needle is just at the top of the yellow, verging on the red.” Even I could figure out that wasn’t good. “What is it measuring?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know but had to ask.

“The radiation inside the chamber.”

“So how long does Morris have?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, a man did. “Long enough to get the job done.”

His words were hopeful but his tone was anything but. I refocused on Morris—if he could still hear my end of the conversation he hadn’t shown any sign. “Morris, they say they’ll have the emergency coolant going soon. And that your radiation levels are okay, you should have time.”

He jerked his head in a nod, never pausing in his climb. He reached the top catwalk and hoisted his body up onto it. I could tell he was exhausted, but he hauled himself upright and, hanging onto the railing, stumbled across the catwalk to the first quench tank control.

It was a big metal wheel like what you see in submarine movies. There was a control panel beside it and Morris tried that first, then pounded his fist against it. Obviously despite the emergency power being back on, Paul’s sabotage of the electronics had done irreparable damage.

He leaned his body against the wheel and began to turn it to the left.

“The controls wouldn’t work. Morris is opening the first quench tank manually,” I reported to the others.

“We’re almost there on the emergency coolant,” someone piped in.

Whatever Morris was doing must have worked because suddenly someone shouted, “Reactor One down!” and there was a cheer.

Morris turned around, raising his hands questioningly.

“You did it!” I shouted. He made no sign that he could hear, so I gave him a thumbs up and he nodded. Then he shuffled to the next control area.

“He’s opening tank two,” I reported. Morris was struggling now, leaning hard against the wall, his grip slipping as he worked.

“Good. We just got emergency coolant and have most of the control rods down in Reactor Four.”

“Two’s down!” someone cut in.

Morris collapsed.

“Morris!” I shouted. “He’s not moving. What should I do?” There was no way I’d be able to go in and carry him down from the catwalk.

“We have control of Number Three!” a voice trampled my words. “We’ve done it! We’re clear!”

“Morris is down,” I cried into the radio, trying to break through the cacophony of jubilant noise. “Someone tell me how to help him!”

I pounded my fist against the window but the glass was so thick that I couldn’t even make a thud. Standing there, helpless, my mask fogged with tears of frustration and sorrow.

The red lights stopped flashing, cheers filled my helmet. But Morris never moved.

Hutton spent the night with the other refugees at the sheriff’s station. He wasn’t too surprised when the news came that not only had AJ survived but she’d also helped to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.

He wasn’t a religious man, but even he could see when the universe was aligned against him.

Masterson didn’t agree when Hutton called to cancel the job.

“I’m tired of your excuses. You need to stop her before she gets here.”

“Or what? You’ll tell my mommy?”

“Or recordings of your transactions will be forwarded to the FBI,” Masterson snapped.

“You can’t do that. You’d be implicating yourself.”

“I didn’t say ‘our’ transactions, I said ‘yours.’ I’ve kept tabs on you since you first got started in your new trade years ago. What? Did you think I was just going to trust you to vanish and not try to blackmail me?”

Silence.

“Okay. I’ll take care of Palladino. But then you and I are long past due for a face-to-face meeting.”

“Fine. As long as she doesn’t make that court hearing.” Masterson hung up.

The sun was coming up the next morning when I finally got a chance to see David again. Hermes hit just north of Colleton Landing, but inside the plant, we barely noticed. Everyone was too busy cleaning up the mess Paul’s sabotage had wrecked.

Everyone except me, that was. I had plenty of time to think about the damage I’d done—had I been too greedy, seeing Grandel’s job as an easy way out for my family? Too ready to quit because I wanted to go home? What should I have done differently?

Comfort came, of all places, from Yancey. He’d gotten left behind in the evacuation and had spent the night in one of the offices filming a self-documentary of surviving a possible nuclear disaster.

Once the crisis was over, he’d found me sitting on the stairs. I’d been pronounced “clean” of any contamination, but felt anything but.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” he said, sinking down beside me and offering me a Snapple left over from the refugees. “You can’t blame yourself for that, AJ.”

Easy to say. That’s the drawback of being a control freak—when things go wrong, you can’t help but blame yourself.

“At least your client will be happy,” he continued, holding his camera up for me to view his footage. “Give me an hour of editing time and I’ll have a piece that will make any investor leap at the opportunity to buy into this technology.”

“You mean Morris’s technology.” I choked a bit on Morris’s name. I’d only known him for a day, but his death was still painful. I couldn’t stop thinking about his smile—so innocent, all he’d wanted was to save his family. Just like me.

Yancey nodded, looking sad himself, and gave me a hug. Must have meant it, too, because he didn’t even try to cop a feel.

When Ty arrived at the plant with David just after sunrise, I was treated to a barrage of questions about the near-disaster, peppered with David’s account of what it had been like to ride out the storm at the sheriff’s station.

I barely got two words in—just kept hugging my son, embarrassing him in front of the plant workers who had gathered to pay their respects as the emergency crews were finally able to retrieve Morris’s body. Everyone stopped and bowed their heads as the metal container holding Morris—identical to the one used for the alligator a day earlier—was rolled out to a waiting van. Even the NRC guy had a tear in his eye.

“You know this would have been a real disaster in a conventional plant,” he told me as he followed the container out. “Morris’s design saved us all.”

“He was a true hero.” I shook his hand. He left, and I turned to see Yancey filming. Almost smacked him, but it wasn’t worth it.

Owen Grandel didn’t show up until Ty and I were transferring my stuff from the wrecked SUV into Ty’s Tahoe.

Grandel had brought a gaggle of media types with him. I ducked my head and jumped into the front seat, locking the door, before he could spot me. But that didn’t block out the sound of his speech from the front steps. A memorial tribute to his brother, he called it, but it really was a thinly veiled announcement of four new foreign joint venture partners investing in Grandel Reactor Technologies.

Ty loaded Nikki into the back, I checked to make sure David was secure, and we drove away before Grandel finished. The glass dome sparkled in the early morning sunlight, washed clean by the storm. As it flashed in my side view mirror I couldn’t help but think of the flash of Morris’s smile. That’s how I wanted to remember him.

I prayed that I wasn’t the only one.

THIRTY-THREE

David was so exhausted that he slept most of the drive home. But he’d wake every now and then to the warm voices of Ty and his mom talking. About him, about his dad, about when they were kids, about their work—even arguing about Ty bringing David to South Carolina, which started out with both of them talking in that rapid-fire muffled-loud whisper adults think kids can’t hear and ended with them holding hands over the center console.

He liked that. A lot.

Closing his eyes as the hum of the tires sang him back into slumber, he decided that sometimes grownups weren’t so very smart after all. Otherwise his mom and Ty would have figured things out a long time ago.