Quake (19 page)

Jasper Howard had never been inside the reactor building before, but he didn't need that experience to tell him that horrific things had happened here. No matter which way he faced in the oversized containment building, he was confronted with equipment and infrastructure that was knocked over and shattered. One end of a massive ceiling-mounted crane lay on the floor about twenty-five feet in front of him.

Blood stained the concrete around it.

The center of the high-ceilinged room was occupied by another square pool similar in appearance to the one for spent fuel, with the reactor itself suspended over that—a silver-colored cylinder ringed with gold-colored tubular rods. Jasper was relieved to note that the reactor at least superficially appeared to be in one piece. Peering high above his head, he could see sections of the catwalk system that Peterson had mentioned hanging askew. He was glad they'd found a way in on ground level.

Jasper was trying to guess what some of the other equipment throughout the room was when he saw Peterson waving at him to approach the fallen crane. Jasper ran to the dangling machinery, sickened by the sight of all the blood on the floor. He saw Peterson beckoning from the other side of the crane and he didn't want to go but forced himself to walk around the drying blood puddle to where Peterson stood, pointing at the floor.

As near as Jasper could tell, no less than four men had met their demise here, apparently crushed when tons of falling metal had impacted the cement floor. He looked up and saw Peterson rubbing his temple though his suit. He looked at Jasper and shook his head. None of these guys was alive. He pointed around the perimeter of the building as if to say, let's look around. Jasper nodded. He wished they could simply shout, “Hey, anybody in here!” but their suits prevented that. Speaking of radiation, Jasper thought, he wondered what Peterson's dosimeter read in here, right next to the reactor, but he focused on keeping his nerves about him while he walked with the security man through the reactor building.

There was no one at the reactor itself in the center of the room, so they hurried past it toward the opposite wall. So much debris littered the floor here that Jasper had to walk almost side by side with Peterson in order to have sufficient light to negotiate the wreckage. He couldn't even see what most of the stuff was, it was so dim. But it was clear to Jasper that this part of the plant had not been spared the brunt of the earthquake's wrath.

They reached the curved wall of the building and began to trace its path around. They found another hazmat-suited body buried beneath a colossal chunk of dislodged wall concrete—two legs protruding. Jasper bent down to make certain the person was dead. He and Peterson worked to pull off some of the more manageable cement chunks. Then Jasper pulled on the legs and was mortified to extract them without an attached torso. He spun and knelt, suppressing the urge to vomit in his suit because removing the headgear was not an option. Peterson could see him struggling and patted him on the back.

In a couple of minutes, they got underway again. Soon they found themselves traipsing across a strange rubber matted floor and then, after that, the low walls of some sort of workstation appeared in front of them. They walked around one end of the structure and stepped into a cubicle area, filled with computers that controlled various machinery and systems on the floor. They zigzagged through the mazelike work area, following the contours of the desk dividers. It would have been almost pitch-black in here were it not for the glowing LCD screens. Most of them appeared to be functioning, Jasper thought; some had actively scrolling streams of cryptic-looking data that made him think of the movie
The Matrix
.

They made a turn around an L-shaped corner and stood bolt still when they saw two men at workstations directly across from one another—one sitting and one standing. They stared intently at their screens. Peterson raised his pistol and assumed a two-armed firing stance, rapidly switching the barrel from one man to the other. Jasper didn't know if Peterson had seen into their faceplates and did not recognize them, or if he was merely being cautious. Couldn't blame him if he was, Jasper thought. If these were terrorists, though, he further supposed, they appeared awfully calm, pecking away at computer keyboards as if they might be at home composing an e-mail to a friend. Except for the level five radiation suits. If they were talking, it wasn't on their same radio channel because Jasper couldn't hear them.

First the man on the left slowly raised his hands. The one on the right kept typing, apparently oblivious to the gun trained on him. Could they be terrorists intent on issuing commands that would cause a meltdown? Peterson inched his way to the right until he was well within the man's peripheral vision. The man on the right looked up and jumped in his chair, startled, but put his hands up. Then he turned to look back at his colleague, confirming that he, too, had surrendered.

With the men facing them, Peterson handed the flashlight back to Jasper, who shined it directly into the faceplate of the man on the left. Peterson angled his head so as to see who it was. Apparently, he recognized him, for he lowered, but did not holster his gun. Jasper shined the light into the face of the other man, and Peterson had a brief look at him, too, before turning around to Jasper and giving him the “okay” sign, thumb and index finger in a circle. Peterson holstered his firearm. Jasper walked up to the man on the right and held his arm out.

Sam!

It seemed like eons ago that he'd spoken on his yard radio to the reactor tech while standing in the parking lot.
Probably should have listened to you, Sam, when you told me to leave.
But clearly the wide grin on Sam's face said that he was awfully glad Jasper had stayed behind. He shook Jasper's hand and pointed to an ear. Jasper shook his head. They were on different radio frequencies and Jasper didn't see how he could change his; he certainly couldn't take his suit off to fiddle with the radio. He opened up the logbook and showed Sam the pen. The tech understood immediately and started to write.

Jasper shook his head and passed the pad to Peterson, who promptly nodded and wrote down a number. He showed it to Sam, who turned back to his computer and tapped on the keyboard to bring up an application. Then he keyed in the number Peterson had written. He turned around to face them again and mouthed the words, “Hi, Jasper! Boy, am I ever glad to see you!”

And Jasper was surprised to actually hear Sam's voice.

Sam added, “Sorry, I'm glad to see you, too.” He turned to Peterson. “I've seen you around but I don't believe I know your name.”

“Call me Peterson. Listen, we were maintaining radio silence because this channel has been compromised. We think Stephen Jeffries was shot by unknown intruders who could be monitoring this frequency.”

Sam nodded and held up a finger.
Hold on a minute
. He turned back to his computer and tapped away for a couple of minutes. Then they heard his voice again.

“There. We're still on the same frequency, but I added a privacy tone—basically just a modified squelch control, but if both radios don't have it set exactly the same, they won't be able to hear each other.”

“So the four of us can all hear and talk to each other, but the terrorists up there can't?” Peterson clarified.

Sam nodded. “Unless they happen to hit on our same privacy codes, which is statistically about as probable as this place ever getting another operating permit,” he finished with a laugh, waving an arm about to indicate all the destruction on the other side of the workstation walls.

“Great, if and when we all make it out of this in one, non-radiated piece, we can look forward to finding another job,” the other tech said.

Jasper wondered how they could be so jovial in the face of such tragedy—surely they'd seen their dead and mutilated coworkers over by the reactor? But then he supposed that the levity was a coping mechanism of sorts. These guys were dealing with the highest potential for danger of just about anybody.

They heard Peterson sigh into his mic. “People, let's not forget that we've still got quite a situation here.” He looked over to Jasper as if for confirmation of this fact. “Mr. Howard here was in the process of fixing the spent fuel pool cooling system, under the direction of Stephen Jeffries, when Jeffries was shot by unknown intruders. With him gone, we figured our only hope was to see if any of you guys were still left in here.”

“Good to know that if the cooling system worked you'd have left us here,” Sam joked.

“Actually,” Jasper said, “even that's not an option.” He explained the broken catwalk and how his ladder had fallen.

“We better get to that cooling station,” Sam admitted after hearing the account. “The reactor core is under control, shut down with no residual problems. Unfortunately, all our technicians except for us either left before things got too rough or . . .” He jerked a thumb toward the reactor and choked up a bit. Jasper clapped him on the shoulder. “We'll get through this. Let's get some work done.”

Sam nodded and picked up a flashlight from his workstation. Jasper ditched the logbook. The four nuclear employees exited the cubby system and strode across the reactor housing floor until they reached the door.

“This was closed off earlier,” Sam said.

“We tried for an hour, couldn't budge all the crap that was piled up. How'd you get through?” the other technician asked.

“Heavy machinery,” Jasper answered, ducking through the opening. He emerged first and stood with a hand on his trusty forklift until Sam had made it through.

“Good thinking,” Sam said.

Sam led the way back across the fuel handling building to the cooling station. Peterson was glad to be back on true security detail, bringing up the rear while constantly looking around with his light beam for signs of trouble. And this time he knew they were out there.

They reached the walkway along the wall and climbed up. It appeared the same as before and they walked quickly along it to the cooling equipment station. Peterson shined his light first on the switchgear consoles and then out on the floor.

“That's the primary cooling loop Jeffries had Mr. Howard working on,” Peterson told the technicians.

Sam walked up to the switchboard controls while his colleague played his own flashlight over the instrumentation. After a couple of minutes of knob-turning and dial-setting, Sam told the other tech to go out on the floor to the cooling loop. He was there in short order, describing the technical settings to Sam, who would adjust the controls on the switchgear panel before asking him to do something else to the loop. After about fifteen minutes of this kind of back-and-forth, Sam told his co-worker to rejoin them on the walkway.

“Everything's optimal here,” Sam told the group, “but we're not finished yet. We need to go to the other cooling system station and make some crucial adjustments there. And we've got to hurry.”

“We do,” the other tech agreed.

Peterson shone his beam to the right along the catwalk. “Down this way, right?”

“Correct,” Sam said, already moving in that direction. After a few minutes, they came to a buckled section of walkway that was impassable, so they dropped to the work floor to skirt around it. Sam was leading the way across the floor in the direction they were traveling on the walkway when they heard him make a kind of coughing noise, followed by, “What's that?”

All of a sudden, he started backing up, flailing his arms, until he tripped over a small step in the concrete that differentiated two work areas.

“What is it?” Peterson demanded, starting to run from his place at the rear of the group. Jasper could hear his footfalls pounding the concrete though his suit.

“Something's coming out of the transfer canal!” Sam stammered.

“What's the transfer canal?” Jasper asked.

Sam's co-worker answered, speaking rapidly as they caught up to Sam. “It's a waterway that connects the spent fuel pool to the reactor pool, so that when the fuel rods from the reactor are no good anymore, they can stay underwater while they're moved over to the spent fuel pool. It's under the floor in some parts, and exposed in others like where Sam is now.”

“Two men—coming out of the canal!” Sam warned.

Jasper thought that maybe Sam was cracking from the stress, but as the other technician jogged left up ahead, he saw what looked to him like two Navy frogmen—deep sea divers with suits and tanks and masks on, shimmying out of the water onto the work floor on their knees, then pushing to their feet, standing there dripping for a split second while they slipped out of their dive gear.

Jasper watched in horror as one of them removed a pistol of some type from a sheath and leveled it right at Sam, while the other diver took aim with a similar weapon at Peterson, who was already firing at these new threats.

Thanks to Peterson's rapid response, the diver aiming at Sam went down clutching a knee in agony. He was still dangerous, though, firing off his gun largely at random while writhing around on the floor. The other nuclear technician dropped to the ground, flattening himself out while shining his flashlight into the eyes of the other diver. It was a poor tactic, since that diver whirled around and fired at the light source.

Jasper saw the tech's faceplate spiderweb into a maze of cracks as the bullet impacted it.

“Can't see, I can't see!” the tech shouted over the com line. Jasper wasn't sure if he meant he was literally blind from being shot or if he just couldn't see through the fractured faceplate. The tech began rolling on the floor away from the divers.

Peterson, meanwhile, was engaged in a full-out gun battle with the second diver. He was using a group of fifty-five-gallon drums as cover (God only knew what the hell was in them, Jasper thought), reaching his shooting arm only around the edge to return fire. Then they heard a grunt of pain over the radio and Jasper knew that one of them had been hit. He looked at the tech rolling across the floor and saw a fat smear of blood on the concrete in his wake. As he watched, he saw his roll slow until he lay facedown on the floor, unmoving.

It was then that Jasper realized he was just standing there out in the open—the only one who was not either taking cover or actively fighting. He was lucky to be alive, and now with the tech down, he knew the diver who had shot him would be seeking a new target.

Jasper dove headlong onto the floor to avoid the gunfire he was sure was coming. He landed beneath a large hook hanging from a suspended steel cable. He heard a splash and saw the diver Peterson had been shooting at land in the transfer canal from whence he came.

The second diver now turned his attention to the armed resistance. He dropped the pistol he'd been using—either out of ammunition or jammed from being in the water—and immediately drew another from a second sheath around his thigh and started triggering it off at Peterson.

Two of the metal drums on the top of the stack the security man hid behind were knocked over by clanging rounds, causing a brown viscous substance to drool onto Peterson's head. Jasper could see that the terrorist shooter had learned only Peterson had a firearm, for he allowed himself to be close to Sam without looking his way while shooting only at Peterson. But when Peterson ducked back behind the remaining upright barrels, the terrorist spun and took aim on Sam.

“I'm out of ammo!” Jasper heard Peterson say.

Jasper grabbed the hanging hook and pulled it back, lining it up with the remaining opponent, who now began to advance toward Sam, who had moved to the canal to check on the man who'd fallen in.

“The guy in the canal's dead,” Sam hollered.

“Sam, look out!” Jasper said as he swung the heavy hook toward the shooter. The jihadist was able to dodge it, but the act threw him off balance and at that moment Peterson took a chance. He rose from a crouch like a sprinter and charged at Alivi's man like a mad bull. When he was five feet from him, while the man was still recovering his balance, Peterson leapt.

He tackled the terrorist to the floor and they grappled, two men in different kinds of exposure protection suits each seeking to kill the other. To Jasper, it was a surreal moment but he also recognized that it was now three-on-one: himself, Peterson, and Sam versus the remaining aquatic gunman. The attacker was armed, however, while the three of them no longer were.

Jasper and Sam both moved toward the two ground fighters from different directions. Sam was closer, and he had almost reached the wrestlers when they heard a shot echo throughout the nuclear facility. The terrorist rolled out from under Peterson's body and pushed him toward the canal. He landed on his back, one leg dangling into the water, and Jasper sucked in his breath sharply as he saw the red circle in the blue suit over Peterson's belly. Gut shot. Sam flung himself atop Alivi's man, concentrating on the hand with the gun.

“I'm hit,” Peterson managed, but his voice was feeble.

Jasper saw the terrorist's gun clatter to the concrete and nearly bounce into the transfer canal. He scooped it up, spun around. Alivi's henchman slammed Sam's head into the floor and was pulling him up by the neck, preparing to do it again when Jasper shot the man in the chest with his own weapon. He heard a dull thud as the projectile impacted the neoprene wetsuit. The man dropped to his knees before collapsing forward onto his ditched scuba tanks.

At that moment an earsplitting alarm sounded, high-pitched and demanding attention.

“We've got to get to that second cooling station,” Sam warned.

Jasper ran to Peterson and looked into his eyes through their faceplates. They were closed. He appeared absolutely still. He shook the security man and yelled into his microphone. “Peterson, wake up! We need you!”

“He's gone, Jasper. And we are, too, if we don't fix this cooling system. This way.”

Jasper looked over at the dead terrorist on the floor, at the smoking gun in his own hand. What had he become? He'd come down here to try to help people, and now he was a . . .
a killer
? Even though it was an act of self-defense for him and others—potentially millions of others—the deed still didn't sit well with him. He had shown up to work today like any other, ready to do an honest job for fair pay. The situation in which he now found himself was so far beyond that....

“Jasper! Snap out of it, buddy. We can do this. C'mon!”

“On my way.” Sam was right. Standing around mourning their losses wasn't going to prevent the radioactive conflagration that was on its way if they couldn't fix that cooling water system. Jasper took one last look at Peterson and saw his flashlight lying on the floor beside his blue-suited corpse. He reached down and grabbed it, then hurried across the floor after Sam, who led the way with his own light.

Sam moved faster than Jasper was comfortable with, running across the compromised industrial workspace, relying on his flashlight to point out the innumerable tripping hazards and obstacles. But in minutes they had reached the cooling loop on the floor in front of the walkway.

“Up here!” Sam scrambled onto the walkway and ran to the left. Jasper followed suit and in another few minutes he saw Sam slow to a jog, then a walk, and then stop. Jasper caught up to him and saw another switchgear panel alongside a metal rack that housed a series of machines with LCD readouts. A thick cluster of PVC pipes ran from a suspended rack down into the floor.

“Hold this on the panel, here, will you?” Sam thrust his flashlight behind him. Jasper took it, now aiming two lights onto the switchgear station. Sam muttered to himself as he turned various knobs and flipped dense arrays of switches. Occasionally, he'd stoop to look at some numbers on an LCD, then go back to adjusting more controls. Jasper kept one eye on his light duty and the other on the dark work floor beyond, ready to trade one of his lights for the gun if necessary.

While Sam worked, Jasper thought about the terrorists. Who were they? Did the threatening voice he'd heard over Jeffries's radio belong to one of the two scuba instigators? If so, then they must have found a way down here, and not just any way but one that allowed them to transport the dive gear. He wasn't sure but doubted that this was possible. And if it wasn't possible, then it must also be true that whoever had spoken to them earlier from above was still there. And how much had Peterson and Jeffries known? Had they received a credible threat or were they simply on elevated watch status because of the disaster . . . ?

Suddenly the most frenetic-sounding of the cacophony of alarms stopped and Sam turned away from the cooling station controls.

“Fixed it?” Jasper's voice was edged with hope.

But Sam shook his head. “No, sorry. I've set the controls to where they need to be, which is what stopped the alarm— but these controls don't know yet that there's no water for them to deliver. The fact of the matter is that we're going to need to bring chilled water to the system and it's not coming from the river through the intake.”

“Can we fix the river intake?”

“No, sir. Believe me when I say that it's crushed beyond all hope and will never be operational again. Two of our men died trying to fix it earlier.”

“Then what's the next best thing? There must be something we can do.”

Sam threw his hands up. “Got any ideas?”

Jasper looked across the foreboding work floor, the dystopian symphony of systems alarms a fitting soundtrack for his apocalyptic thoughts.
Everyone warned me about the inevitable
. . .
New York City uninhabitable for decades, even centuries. . . . The water unsafe to drink . . . The water . . . water . . . Water!

“Sam! Can we get to a working radio that can contact the city?”