Quake (7 page)

As they walked north along Sixth Avenue, what little remaining sun there was gradually dipped behind crumbling skyscrapers and collapsed buildings until it was finally full dark. Nick and Mendoza knew it had been roughly seven hours since the first tremor but, otherwise, their timeline was a complete blur. They encountered a number of survivors as they headed uptown. A young Korean artist who'd narrowly escaped from her loft in SoHo. A bankruptcy lawyer begging each passerby for a look at his or her phone, convinced that service had returned on at least one cellular network. “Please,” he'd said, “I just need to contact my mom, let her know I'm all right.”

Nick and Mendoza exchanged information with everyone they met. Most people were anxious for news about lower Manhattan. Nick was cautious in what he said; he kept the conversations general. He didn't know which of these people might have had a brother arguing a motion before Judge Hobbs at 60 Centre Street, which might have had an aunt who worked as a court officer in the criminal courts building down the street at 100 Centre.

No one they met had received news from a credible source outside Manhattan. It was all secondhand information and much of it was terrifying. The Brooklyn Bridge collapsed, a couple told them. Gridlock at the Lincoln Tunnel had forced people to abandon their cars and move forward on foot, only to find that the egress on the New Jersey side had caved in, forcing them back to Manhattan. The Holland Tunnel, an NYU student assured them, was much worse. The tunnel was packed with pedestrians when the last tremor hit, and its structure cracked and it flooded with water from the Hudson River killing everyone inside.

“Hear anything about Indian Point?” Nick had asked every person who'd stopped to talk to them. Some didn't know what he was referring to; others shrugged it off as though a leak at the nuclear plant was the least of their worries.

The owner of a small shoe store was passing out small bottled waters as survivors walked by. He was an Eastern European man (Romanian, Nick thought), with a thick accent and kind eyes. “I have heard that no hospitals on the island are functioning,” he said. “They have all collapsed. Yankee Stadium in the Bronx has been turned into an open-air infirmary, but from what I understand it is already full.”

Nick watched Mendoza's face drop at the news about the hospitals. But the agent quickly recovered once they walked away from the shoemaker.

“He doesn't know any more than anyone else,” Mendoza said. “He's listening to rumors, just like us.”

Nick agreed; he had purposefully refrained from asking anyone about Columbia University for exactly that reason.

What truly bothered Nick was that the farther north they walked, there was no less devastation. Buildings had toppled, cars had been crushed. Streets were torn to shreds and the dead lay all around. Looting had clearly been rampant. Every bodega they passed, the windows had been shattered, the shelves and coolers emptied and trashed.

“Where are all the cops?” Nick said at one point.

Mendoza shrugged. “They probably have no way to communicate with each other. They're probably helping or fending for themselves just like everyone else. Don't need to put on a uniform to do that.”

“We're approaching West Fourth Street,” Nick said a few minutes later.

“When's the last time you were in the Village?” Mendoza replied.

Nick thought about it. Early in his career, he'd spent a lot of time in Greenwich Village. He'd loved the restaurants and dive bars in the area, especially those on West Fourth between Sixth and Seventh Avenue. That was when the West Village still had character. Before
Friends
. Before the area turned mainstream and became expensive. The East Village, too, was presently trendy but no longer cheap. Hell, even the Meatpacking District was now considered a hot spot.

Nick saw a number of flashlight beams turn on suddenly in the area of Washington Square Park. These days, Washington Square Park was overrun with NYU students. You could still pick up a dime bag if you so desired, but you also risked getting caught in a verbal headlock with a freshman film student.

Several of the beams of light turned in their direction and began an approach. Nick squinted, held his hands in front of his eyes to block out some of the light. These young men didn't look like NYU film students. They wore big, bulky North Face winter jackets despite the warm autumn temperatures. Their jeans sagged almost to their knees. Two of the five wore hoods and kept their heads down so that Nick couldn't see their faces. The young men swaggered toward them the way many of the men he prosecuted swaggered toward the defense table during their initial arraignment. As the cases wore on, however, most of the defendants eventually lost that swagger, and Nick typically took that as a sign that they were finally resigning themselves to their fate. That was the point when Nick could call the defendant's lawyer and get serious about plea bargaining.

The young man in the lead shined his beam first in Mendoza's face, then Nick's. “Wallets, watches, money clips, phones, whatever you got on you. Turn out your pockets, now.”

Nick stuffed his hand into right pants pocket. They could have his thin money clip, they could have his wallet. Hell, they could have his father's broken Rolex. None of it was going to help Nick locate his daughter.

But from his periphery, Nick could see that Mendoza hadn't moved. Nick thought of the Glock in Mendoza's jacket and sighed inwardly, wondering whether these young men were armed, too. Their swagger said yes, but young men with gang experience were often superb at bluffing.

“What kind of shit is this, huh?” Mendoza said to the leader. “What the fuck do you guys think you're doing? The city is burning. People are dying all around us. And you're out here robbing? What kind of person does that make you?”

“It's gonna make me a rich motherfucker, old man, that's what it's gonna make me.”

The others laughed with him.

Then he turned serious again. “So, you two Wall Street chumps better start digging in your pockets and coughing up the cash before you're just another statistic of this apocalypse, you feel me?”

Mendoza stared into the leader's eyes. “Do I look Wall Street to you?” he said in a low, gravelly voice. “Because I'm not Wall Street, you piece of shit. I grew up on the South Side of the Bronx. I was putting caps in punk asses like you since you were in diapers. So I'm going to give you five seconds to back the fuck off or I'm going to kill two of you and let the other three run off. Do
you
feel
me?
”

The leader turned to his crew with a wide smile. “You hear this suit? Thinks he's a fucking outlaw and shi—”

Mendoza reached into his jacket and pulled out his Glock and smashed the leader in the nose with its butt before he could turn back around. The teenager's nose cracked under the blow and bright red blood spewed from both nostrils as though a dam had broken. He immediately dropped to his knees and pitched forward.

Mendoza turned the gun on the others. “Which one of you badasses is next, huh? Which one of you really wants what we've got in our pockets? Wants it so bad that he's willing to die for it?”

Jasper Howard, maintenance supervisor for the Indian Point Energy Center, a name that conveniently left out the word “nuclear,” covered one ear against the blare of sirens meant to warn people up to ten miles away while holding a two-way radio up to his other.

“Say again, Control. Open which gate?” Jasper shook his head while he waited for a reply.

Oh, boy. It finally happened.
He glanced up at a long section of the perimeter chain-link, razor-topped fence that had been twisted to the dirt during the quake.

And today of all days.

Less than four hours ago, the power facility's management had welcomed an inspection team from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Committee. Constructed in the mid-1970s to service New York City and surrounding communities, Indian Point's reactors had reached the end of their original operating licenses. Opposition to the plant's continued operation ran high, including from the governor of New York himself. Safety violations in the previous decades were numerous, after all, and in fact the installation was once bestowed the dubious distinction of “America's Worst Nuclear Power Plant” by a national magazine. Furthermore, New York City needed another potential terrorist target like it needed a hole in its collective head. But with profits to be generated and a power-hungry metropolis to feed at the same time as public sentiment turned against CO
₂
-generating fossil fuels, the facility's owners had filed for a controversial license extension that would permit it to operate for the next twenty years.

Today's NRC team had come with an eye toward granting that extension, protestors be damned, provided The Point could pass a newer, more rigorous inspection.

“—said Gate Five damn it, now!”

Jasper shook himself from his reverie. The nagging fear he'd endured throughout his seventeen-year career at the plant—
earthquake
!—had finally reared its dreadful, shaky head. How many times had he fielded the same basic question from loved ones, friends, even strangers? He flashed on the day seventeen years ago when he told his parents he'd gotten a job as a maintenance worker at Indian Point. The opportunity had come to him following a long stretch of unemployment, and he'd jumped at the chance, crossing his fingers that the pot he'd smoked five months before wouldn't be revealed in some fancy new drug screening, or that any one of an assortment of youthful lapses of judgment wouldn't make themselves known to the background checkers. But a few weeks after he'd applied, the call came. A bored-sounding HR person informed him that he was being offered the position and if he still wanted it he'd need to come to the office headquarters in White Plains for processing. He'd told no one about any of it until he actually started working the job, out of fear of jinxing his luck or being told he was wasting his time even to bother, or that a call would come any day to say, “We're sorry, Mr. Howard, but an item in your background screen . . .”

And after all that, when he'd finally told his parents, they responded with,
Jasper, that's . . . It's great, but is it safe? What if there's an earthquake?

And so began a conversation he would have in one form or another every few months with somebody or another for the next seventeen years. Jasper:
It's New York, there aren't a lot of earthquakes here, but they build to code for up to a 6.1 anyway. . . .
Them:
But they do happen, right?
Jasper:
The last significant one was in 1884.
Them:
Oh, well, then we're due for another!

If that wasn't enough, after only a few years on the job he began to encounter a new, more bitter flavor of The Conversation, one that to him seemed pretty much the same, but with a trendier buzzword:
Terrorism.
Them:
Don't you worry about working at a terrorist target?
Jasper:
Sure, it's a concern, but we're prepared. There's a National Guard station a mile from us. Other security measures I can't tell you about.
Them:
They tried to fly one of the 9/11 planes into Indian Point.
Jasper:
It flew nearby but at no time did it actually approach. We're just one of many possible targets....

But truth be told, in the dark of night, in his private thoughts, there were things that most people didn't know and would rather not know that gave him pause. Things like the fact that an East Coast earthquake affects a wider area more intensely than does one of equal magnitude in the west. He certainly wasn't a scientist, but knew it had something to do with how the fault lines connected with one another and how deep they ran. Not to mention, this wasn't the West with its vast expanses of open desert. Los Angeles County had, what—eight million people? The Point serviced more than twenty-two million souls less than an hour's drive away. These were the kinds of tidbits Jasper did his best to keep out of The Conversation.

But they were on his mind now. The Point, with its redundant systems and elaborate safety nets, had access to a better flow of information than did the average New Yorker. They had satellite phone links, even ham radio if those failed. So they knew within a few (terrifying, to be sure) seconds that this was an earthquake, and not a terror attack. He hadn't heard a Richter number yet. He knew that 5.0 was the largest recorded earthquake in history for the New York region. What was this—a 5.0? 5.5? The shaking had been petrifying, throwing him to the ground. Higher than the plant's rating of 6.1? From what little he'd been able to get out of the reactor techs so far, the damage was containable; they'd shut down the reactors according to protocol and managed to extinguish a number of spot fires. But what had this latest aftershock done? Would there be more?

Looking down to the Hudson River, the view looked pretty much the same to Jasper. But there were a few trees toppled on the far bank, and . . . what was that? He squinted through a haze of light smoke. An eighteen-wheel tractor trailer that had nearly slid into the water. And on the grounds of The Point, while there were no deaths yet that he knew of, there had been more than a few broken bones and gashes requiring stitches. Most of the buildings were still standing, but they were definitely compromised. Procedures called for a strict facility lockdown to prevent breaches of access pending evaluation.

And now they wanted him to
open
a gate? But orders were orders, and as soon as he pressed Talk on his radio to say the words, “Copy that, opening five,” he thought he understood. He trotted to the perimeter fence, past two of his workers already on scene at the tangle of toppled razor wire, and when he saw the black SUV driving up to Gate 5, he was sure he understood.

The NRC people wanted out. Or at least some of them did. With the tinted windows he couldn't see how many people were inside, not that it was any of his official business. Though he had a nice title, in reality he wasn't much more than a glorified groundskeeper. He was the facilities guy. He was the guy in charge of fixing anything that wasn't related to the actual power-generation equipment like the reactors. The eggheads handled that stuff while he dealt with routine things like maintaining the vehicle fleet, tree trimming, fixing water pipes in the kitchens, repairing broken windows, and scheduling everybody to get all that done. After this, he'd be assigning overtime shifts for months.

Jasper punched a keypad on the gate post and frowned when the backlit buttons remained dark. Of course, power was out but they had backup generators. If those were also down . . . well, he didn't know exactly what that meant but in all his years here he'd never seen it happen before so it couldn't be good. He searched through his hefty ring of keys and found the one that opened a lockbox on the gate so that it could be opened manually. One of his guys came over to help him push it aside, and they forced it open while the SUV idled. No sooner did it open the width of the SUV, then the government vehicle shot through the opening, tires spitting gravel as they departed.

“Leaving so soon?” Jasper joked to his employee. But the man wasn't laughing as he slipped through the gate on foot.

“Hey, where are you going?”

“Sorry, Jasper. I hope it's okay, but . . . I gotta go, man.” He spun on a heel and ran.

Jasper let go of the gate and breathed a heavy sigh. Could he blame him? Could an hourly worker be expected to risk his life? He wondered how many others had jumped ship while he was working. He looked around the grounds and saw a few men—mostly his, which wasn't all that unusual. Most of the scientists and engineers would be inside the reactor control buildings.

Just how bad were things? The sirens still blared, alerting nearby residents that they should evacuate. But that was just a precaution.
Right?
A mandatory goodwill action to placate the NRC and not-in-my-backyard neighbors alike. If he was in danger here at the plant, reactor management would tell him.
Right?
He knew that the shutdown procedure was complex and sometimes failed in drills, that the plant had suffered incidents and accidents related to it in the past. Had it not gone smoothly now?

He switched radio channels and keyed the transmitter. “Reactor Two, this is Perimeter, requesting status, copy?” He repeated himself two more times before a gruff male voice answered.

“What is it, Jasper?”

“Give it to me straight. This earthquake. How bad was it?”

A lengthy pause while Jasper heard the sound of breaking glass in the distance, followed by radio static. Then the reply.

“Good news is we got through on the sat-phone half an hour ago and Caltech is saying we had a
seven-point-one
shaker, only six miles deep in the Ramapo fault not ten miles from here.”

“So we're near the epicenter?”

“We damn near
are
the epicenter. We fared pretty well if you ask me. Still got four walls around us down here. I heard the city's in pretty awful shape.”

Jasper swallowed hard. “And the bad news?”

“The spent fuel pools are heating up because the cooling units were damaged. Short version: If the water boils away, the fuel rods are exposed to air and can set on fire. Besides that, there are some cracks in the pool structures—we're not sure how extensive those are yet.”

“Jesus.” Jasper closed his eyes as he pictured the concrete containment structures closer to the river's edge that held the highly radioactive cooling water after it passed through the reactors. The monumental gravity of the situation took hold for him. If this ultra-toxic wastewater was to be released into the Hudson, or into the air, or both . . . He didn't even want to think about it.

“The situation is holding for now, Jasper. Don't repeat any of this to anyone. But just between you and me, I'm not sure we can handle another aftershock.”

Jasper thought about his wife, his parents, his grown kids, one of whom lived in the city.

“Sam, be straight with me. Should I get out of here?” He knew Sam was a reactor tech—an engineer, basically, with a degree in physics, though not one of the superstar geeks who designed this place. Still, he knew what was happening with the radioactivity, and he was over there in close proximity to it. Except he was also wearing all kinds of protective gear. He'd seen him once or twice in there and could picture him now, in one of those funny blue suits with the face shield and the gloves, behind the yard-thick lead walls.

Sam lowered his voice, even though Jasper could hear chaos emanating from his end—some shouting, maybe an argument—a weird klaxon alarm, different from the evac sirens. “I would if I were you, Jasper. We're only still here because we can stop a meltdown, save millions of people's lives. But if we do melt down, unless you're more than a hundred miles away, it's not going to matter. And from what little news reports I've had a chance to hear, driving a hundred miles away right now may not even be an option.”