Kill Zone Read online

  She signed the papers. “I guess it’s the government way.”

  “Especially the DOE way.” Morales handed her a red badge clipped to a radiation dosimeter on a plastic lanyard. “Now that you’ve signed in, I’ll notify Mr. Harris that everyone’s here. He’ll be taking you all inside the Mountain.”

  Adonia placed the lanyard around her neck as the name rang a bell. “Wait, you mean Rob Harris? He’s Regulation Rob? I used to work with him at Oakridge, but I haven’t seen him in years. A really good guy.”

  “But he is a stickler for the rules,” Morales said as he picked up the phone. “Everything by the book, chapter and verse.”

  Adonia smiled as she remembered. “Yes, that’s him.”

  Rob Harris had had a long career in DOE, and she knew him to be competent, detail-oriented to a fault, and generally well liked. Harris hadn’t been the most charismatic manager, but he was thorough, and he was a straight shooter. Morales was certainly correct—Regulation Rob had never seen a procedure he didn’t like.

  “I thought he’d retired, though.” She remembered talking to Harris at a DOE mixer in Oakridge five years ago, when he told her he intended to take advantage of a government golden parachute that year. He yearned to leave work behind in favor of a nice beach and a stack of novels.

  “The retirement didn’t last long.” Morales pressed the phone closer to his ear and spoke into it. “Yes, sir. Everyone is present. I’ll send in Ms. Rojas.”

  Even before he hung up, the conference room door opened, and Stanley van Dyckman emerged to meet her, all smiles. “Adonia! Glad you could make it.” As always, his brown hair was slicked back. He was nattily dressed even out in the New Mexico desert: blue pinstriped suit, white shirt, a maroon tie, brown wingtips.

  She adjusted her new badge and dosimeter, keeping her expression neutral. “Always glad to help.” He chuckled at her sarcasm, and she pressed harder: “Why exactly do you need me here, Stanley? And why in such a hurry to get me here on a Sunday morning? A little bit of warning would have been nice.”

  Van Dyckman often insincerely tried to play down his position as a DOE Assistant Secretary, but ever since he’d received his political advancement after the Granite Bay incident, Adonia had noticed something standoffish about him. “This inspection team had to be put together quickly, a pro forma review committee, and we’ve got a ticking clock here. The Senator has a big meeting in Washington on Wednesday, and he needs our blessing for the Hydra Mountain project.” Before she could ask any more questions, he cut her off, anxious to take her into the briefing room. “You’ll find out once we’re inside the facility. We can’t talk out here in the hall.” After glancing at the completed paperwork, van Dyckman ushered her into the room, eager to make introductions. “I think you’ll be impressed with what we’re doing here, Adonia. I really do. It solves a lot of crucial problems for the nation. You’ve been complaining about it yourself.”

  She had no intention of letting him sweep her along before she had a chance to speak candidly. She grabbed his arm, forcing him to stop just inside the door. “Just a minute, Stanley. First, you and I have to discuss my backlog of spent fuel rods. For some reason the NRC keeps deferring to you.”

  He brushed her off as his smile became more brittle. “We can talk at a break. The others have been waiting for you to arrive.”

  Translation: he intended to avoid her at every opportunity.

  Adonia insisted, “Stanley, you know we’ve exceeded capacity for wet storage, but the fuel rods keep piling up. My cooling pools are crammed, and I don’t have any additional space. No room at the inn! I simply can’t store any more spent rods unless we build larger permanent pools on site, not temporary ones. Immediately. And that takes money, as well as government approval. The NRC keeps booting the problem over to you, but your staff is sitting on my request. I don’t know why they’re stalling. This is not the sort of thing you can avoid—unless you want to shut down Granite Bay entirely.”

  “Permanent pools are a different line item in the budget, with additional regulations,” van Dyckman said. “I don’t have as much leeway as I do with temporary construction.” He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, leading her into the conference room. “Trust me, Adonia, I’m taking care of the problem. Just be patient and make the stopgap measure work for a little longer, as I suggested a few months ago—”

  She shook her head. “I won’t do that. The NRC is still looking for any reason to shut me down after the crash, and I won’t ask them for another waiver. I need funding for permanent pools, and I need it yesterday!” It seemed absurd to construct “permanent” temporary pools, as opposed to even worse “temporary” temporary pools, but she wouldn’t compromise safety. Granite Bay had enough of a black eye as it was, thanks to the attack by the antinuke fanatic.

  Stanley was clearly impatient with her interruption. “Just erect the temporary pools and let me worry about the NRC. That’ll give you breathing room and ease the crisis.”

  “It shouldn’t always be a crisis,” Adonia said.

  His expression looked strange. “I said I’d take care of it. I fixed the last problem after the attack, didn’t I? We stopped a radiation release that could have dwarfed Three Mile Island.”

  “Dodged is a better way of describing it.” Adonia’s eyes flashed. And “we” prevented it? He’d been busy preening before the press while she directed the emergency response, and the morning rainstorm had done as much to mitigate the radiation release as anything else. Talk about revisionist history!

  It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to take credit for other people’s actions. Three years ago when Adonia was still in the government and assigned to DOE Headquarters, right before his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary and while he was still Chief of Staff for a powerful senator, van Dyckman had refused to release funding unless the DOE packed additional fuel rods in their reactor’s cooling pools, crammed closer together than what the NRC had approved. He’d offered his own plans for yet another “temporary emergency solution,” but he had made a minor—and crucial—error in his calculations that would have resulted in a major criticality. It was only Adonia’s quick action countermanding his commands that had saved the day. Although van Dyckman happily took credit for preventing the “mishap,” they both knew who had stopped a possible catastrophe, and they both knew who was responsible for it in the first place.

  What mattered most to Adonia was that a disaster had been averted, but it made Stanley insufferable. She had felt great relief when she left government service to become the manager of Granite Bay.

  Later, his response to the plane crash, as well as the powerful senator’s backing, had somehow led to van Dyckman being appointed as Assistant Secretary of Energy, which placed him in charge of the nation’s nuclear waste. Yet he hadn’t done anything to solve the growing storage problem.

  At least he was so busy that he couldn’t micromanage her, and Adonia was able to do her work without being harassed. He knew that she could hold the truth over him if she wanted, revealing to the public how his botched calculations would have resulted in a disaster, but she had never threatened to do so. It was an uneasy truce between the two of them.

  Now, he tugged her toward the conference room. “Please just wait until we’ve finished this meeting. You’ll see what I’m doing, and believe me, you’ll thank me for it.” He seemed more intense than she had ever seen him.

  She lowered her voice. “One week, Stanley. I’ll take a tour of this place if it makes some senator happy, but you’ve got one week to hold off the NRC and come up with the funding for Granite Bay’s permanent wet storage. It can’t wait.”

  “After you enter the Mountain, I guarantee you’ll change your mind.” His smile brightened. “Now, ready to meet the rest of the committee?”

  Adonia held his gaze, but didn’t return the smile. “One week.”

  He took her elbow and finally steered her into the conference room.

  6

/>   Despite all the fences, gates, and guards on the outside, the bland conference room could have been in any government or military facility: outdated motivational posters and a picture of the President adorned the walls; workhorse plastic chairs with metal legs surrounded a faux-wood table with a laminate finish. A metal cylinder coffee dispenser sat on a blocky credenza in the corner.

  Two men and an older woman chatted as they clustered around picked-over pastries next to the coffee urn. The larger of the two men wore a light gray suit; he held himself erect and kept his chin raised, as though to elevate himself. The other man had wild gray hair and wore a black corduroy jacket, tan button-down shirt, and blue jeans. The woman was short and petite, and her brown pants suit with matching flats were in contrast to Adonia’s red power suit and heels. Again, she felt overdressed.

  The woman finished her cherry Danish and wiped her fingers on a napkin, and Adonia recognized her as the Undersecretary of Energy. Victoria Doyle was a powerful, no-nonsense woman in a very influential position in the DOE … but Doyle was responsible for nuclear weapons, not nuclear energy, which made her a square peg here. In the Department of Energy bureaucracy, Weapons and Energy were not only physically and administratively separated, but each area had its own culture, not to mention significant rivalry.

  Adonia whispered to Stanley, “What’s Undersecretary Doyle doing here? She isn’t even in your chain of command.” As soon as she asked, she remembered the rumors that Stanley had once had an affair with Victoria Doyle. Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned anything.…

  His voice held a touch of annoyance. “Good question. You’ll have to ask Rob Harris—he’s the one who assigned her to the committee, though this was supposed to be my show.”

  “Then how did her name get on the list? Why was she invited?”

  He tightened his jaw. “I asked Harris to pull together the best senior experts for this team, but I should have vetted it first. I thought I could trust my own site manager to make the call.”

  Your site manager? “I don’t understand what Rob is doing here. I know he retired—”

  Ignoring her, van Dyckman raised his voice to get the others’ attention. “Everyone! Ms. Rojas has arrived, and Mr. Harris is on his way in from the operations center, so let me introduce you all.” He rubbed his hands briskly together, more comfortable now that he had taken charge. “This is Adonia Rojas, site manager of the Granite Bay nuclear power plant in New York. I like to think of her as my protégée, especially after the unfortunate events of a year and a half ago. Her position at Granite Bay gives her a real hands-on, boots-on-the-ground perspective for our review. That’s why I wanted her here.”

  Though she bristled, Adonia forced herself to smile and nod at the other committee members as Stanley continued his introductions. “I’m sure you recognize my old boss, Senator Pulaski. He’s here in his official capacity as Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Senator Pulaski is the reason we called all of you together so quickly. On Wednesday back in Washington he has a vital meeting about the future of Hydra Mountain, and he needs us to conduct an objective and broad-based review.”

  The big man in the light gray suit vigorously shook Adonia’s hand. “Glad to meet you, young lady.” He held her hand for an uncomfortably long moment until she pulled away.

  Van Dyckman said in a stage whisper, “Be nice to him, Adonia—he still controls the purse strings to the entire nuclear complex.” He brightened and made his tone artificially upbeat as he turned to the man with the unruly hair. “If you watch the news or any of the talk shows, you’ve seen Dr. Simon Garibaldi, the ‘loyal opposition’ from Sanergy.”

  No one laughed, and Adonia felt her stomach sour. What the hell is he doing here? She knew the nutcase who had crashed the small plane into her site had been a fringe member—vehemently disavowed—of the Sanergy protest group.

  “More like devil’s advocate,” Senator Pulaski muttered, not afraid to show his dislike for the man.

  The tall, casually dressed Garibaldi responded with a distant smile. “Objective and open-minded. And willing to consider alternatives.” He sounded professorial.

  Because of his technical background and his quick wit, Simon Garibaldi was a favorite of talk-show hosts, an outspoken, erudite critic of nuclear power despite having previously worked for DOE. As a gadfly in the media, Garibaldi felt it was his mission to make nuclear power obsolete by transitioning to cleaner, sustainable options … none of which were sufficient in the near future, though. Nevertheless, Garibaldi wanted to stall plant operations, claiming that his actions were a catalyst to force a change.

  Coolly, she reached out to shake Garibaldi’s hand, in part to cover her uncomfortable reaction. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Doctor. You’re still President of Sanergy?”

  “Sane energy for the masses,” he said with a brief nod. “It’s not a radical group, as some try to paint us, especially after that obviously misguided man crashed his plane into your facility. He was clearly disturbed.” He glanced at the Senator. “Sanergy is a watchdog organization, that’s all. My chief role is to serve as spokesman for alternatives.”

  He looked from Victoria Doyle to Stanley van Dyckman, who stiffly exchanged glances. Garibaldi’s tone was biting as he added, “Who would have thought I’d finally meet DOE’s head of nuclear energy and the head of nuclear weapons together in the same room, along with the moneybags who funds them? And here we are, alone without any referees.” He chuckled with an icy humor. “This was worth all the cloak-and-dagger routine getting me here.”

  Pulaski growled, “We’re well aware of your antinuclear bias, Dr. Garibaldi. But I hope we can convince you differently. Your blessing on this project will go a long way with the Congressional Oversight Committee. We’re doing the right thing here for the nation, you’ll see.”

  Garibaldi seemed intrigued. “There’s a difference between wanting to do the right thing, and having a self-serving agenda, Senator.”

  Annoyed, Pulaski stiffened. Garibaldi was tall, over six feet, and his unruly hair stuck out in all directions. The Senator was even taller, and outweighed him by fifty or sixty pounds, but he seemed outmatched nevertheless.

  Van Dyckman glided between them. “Now, Senator, Mr. Harris specifically asked for Dr. Garibaldi because of his broad knowledge and unique perspective. I suppose he’ll keep us on our toes, and one can’t question his credentials.” He looked around the group. “I ask you all to keep an open mind. We’re doing great things here in Hydra Mountain, solving a national crisis. We’ve needed something like this for a very long time, and it’s finally operational.”

  “I can be objective, but not a patsy,” Garibaldi said. “If you can’t convince me about whatever it is you’re doing here, you’ll never convince the public at large.”

  Pulaski looked as if he had found a sour pickle inside his cheese Danish. “We aren’t ready to reveal this project to the public. That’s why you signed all those security forms.”

  Interrupting the conversation, the conference room door opened, and two men entered, one in a dark blue sport jacket and a white shirt open at the collar, the other dressed in Air Force battle fatigues with silver eagles on either lapel. Red access cards hung around their necks.

  Adonia caught her breath as she recognized them both. Rob Harris was a thin, mid-sixtyish African American with smoky gray hair and a bland expression. Early in her career she had worked with him for two years at Oakridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

  But her attention was immediately drawn to the handsome, smiling colonel, with his close-cropped sandy-brown hair and green-blue eyes. Ever since their bittersweet parting, she had spoken to Shawn Whalen only on the phone, and she certainly hadn’t expected to see him here. Their high-powered jobs had separated them, which made a long-distance relationship unsatisfying and impractical. Shawn had gone to Washington to work as the President’s military aide and special adviser. If he was here for this meeting, then Hydra Mountain
was indeed an important project.

  Spotting her, Shawn broke into a broad smile, but he turned his formal attention to the group, all business. Clasping his hands behind his back, he said, “Senator, Madam Undersecretary, Mr. Assistant Secretary, Ms. Rojas, and Dr. Garibaldi—on behalf of the President of the United States, let me welcome you to Hydra Mountain. Thank you for coming on such short notice. I’m Colonel Shawn Whalen, the President’s military aide. This is Rob Harris, site manager for the Mountain.”

  Garibaldi looked intrigued and suspicious. “I read up on Hydra Mountain before coming here. Why does a decommissioned Cold War military facility need a site manager?”

  Van Dyckman interjected, “Because we’ve found a viable new use for this complex.”

  When Rob Harris spoke, his voice was monotone, even plodding. “That’s why you’re all here for this vital review. Sorry for the inconvenience, but Senator Pulaski is on a time crunch to conduct his classified oversight hearing later this week.”

  “The Senator should look at his calendar ahead of time and plan better,” Garibaldi muttered. “A government meeting on a Sunday is a little unusual.”

  Harris seemed to know Garibaldi. “There’s a purpose to it, Simon. I arranged for us to meet on a Sunday morning so as not to interfere with normal weekday operations. Except for one delivery this morning, we have the facility to ourselves. I’ve canceled today’s shift, and we only have a skeleton crew in the operations center.”