Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 16 HOURS AND 35 MINUTES

ETHAN ROSEN REACHED into the darkness around him, but his hands found only air.

He stood frozen in the pitch-black control room behind the wraparound desk, not wanting to move, afraid to take a step, his pulse pounding in his ears. Ethan knew the second the lights came back on, everyone would look to him —because he was it. He was the plant manager, the guy in charge. They would expect him to have answers.

But Ethan had no answers. He only had one question.

And it was the same question everyone in the control room had:

What just happened?

Then, just as quickly as his world went dark, it erupted into light.

Ethan’s hazel eyes squinted at the blinking red, orange, and white lights all around the R2 control room. An incessant, high-pitched ringing in his ears muffled the alarms that were blaring at an otherwise deafening level. Ethan struggled to focus as he gazed through the dust swirling in the air that fell from the swaying overhead lights onto his wavy brown hair and navy-blue sweater like an early winter snow. Looking down, he found shards of broken ceramic in a splatter of coffee at his feet, the mug’s Clover Hill logo now fractured and unrecognizable.

Dazed and in shock, Ethan felt removed from what was going on, like a movie was playing out before him. Everyone in the room was looking at him, up there on the elevated platform of the Reactor Two monitoring station, and they were nodding, responding to a loud voice that was bellowing over the sirens. With some surprise, Ethan realized it was his own voice.

He was asking them over and over: “Is everyone okay?”

They were all nodding: Yes.

The world around him began to speed up and come back into focus, and Ethan’s senses sharpened. Sound returned and he could hear the panic in the voices of his colleagues. Everyone spoke at once; his brain was only able to pick up isolated phrases that leaped out like the visible words in an otherwise redacted text.

“—don’t know—”

“—explosion? Attack—”

“—reactor open—”

“—earthquake. If not—”

“—loss of primary—”

It had been a normal day and then, in one violent moment, it wasn’t. A bomb? Equipment failure? An earthquake? Was it over or had it just begun? From their position in the windowless control room, they knew nothing. Absolutely nothing . And in the face of all the unknowns, they were spinning out.

Ethan punched a few buttons, and the droning alarms shut off. In the shock of the immediate silence, everyone stopped talking and turned to him.

“All right, listen up.”

Ethan’s voice, though calm, felt like a shout in the now quiet room, but his evenness was a stark reminder of where they were and, more importantly, what they should be doing . Panels covered with switches, gauges, readings, figures, flashing lights, and lit-up buttons filled every wall and every counter in the nine-hundred-square-foot room, each at the moment absolutely begging to be read and tended to.

“Stop. Right now. Take a breath,” Ethan said, mindful to speak in a slow, even cadence. His coworkers responded in a collective deep inhale. The warning lights kept flashing, the crisis roiled on, but for four seconds, everything stopped as Ethan brought them back to center.

“Our problem is, we don’t know what our problem is,” he said. “We can handle anything. But we need to know what we’re dealing with. Dwight, get me a radio. Vikram, begin mode-switch abnormal-procedures checklist. Maggie, call back.”

Dwight ran off, lanyard swinging, and disappeared out the door into the hall. Vikram grabbed a laminated page from a file divider but began the callout without having to look.

“Mode switch is in shutdown,” Vikram said, leaning into a panel, reading values. “APRMs are downscale. RPV pressure is nine-five-zero pounds, down slow.” Vikram checked the laminated page quickly, shifting to his right to read another gauge. “Gradual water level is minus-four-zero inches, up slow…”

While his staff worked, Ethan took a step back. Turning away, he discreetly grabbed his phone from his pocket. His hands shook as he typed the text:

Nice day for a drive east

Three dots appeared instantly. His wife’s response came just as fast.

I love you

Ethan pocketed his phone.

“… Entries on low RPV level and high dry wall pressure,” Vikram said.

“Mode switch is in shutdown,” Maggie said, standing by Vikram’s side, verbally and visually confirming the gauge readings herself. “APRMs are downscale. Reactor pressure nine-five-zero pounds, down slow. RPV level minus-two-five inches, up slow. EOP entry conditions on low RP level and high dry wall pressure,” she concluded.

Dwight ran back into the room and, tripping on the step up to the platform, passed the radio to Ethan.

“That’s all correct,” said Vikram. “All rods are in.”

“All rods are in,” confirmed Maggie, finishing the checklist.

The reactor had safely shut down, the control rods were in. The plant, at first assessment, was under control. But as everyone in the room took in Dwight’s shallow breathing and ghost-white face, they knew it wasn’t.

Ethan watched the young man trying to compose himself and realized that in order to get the radio, Dwight would have passed down the long glass corridor of the second-floor hallway that looked out onto the plant’s campus.

Dwight was the only one of them who’d seen what was going on out there.

“What happened?” Ethan asked him.

Dwight could only shake his head. “It’s… I… I can’t…”

“Steve,” Ethan said urgently into the radio. “Do you copy?”

Steve slipped his arms through the suspenders and hitched up the thick turnout pants before grabbing his bunker coat out of his locker and tossing a helmet on his head. Steve was chief, so his helmet was white, while the rest of the firefighters’ helmets were black. Sprinting for the waiting fire truck, he pressed the talk button on the radio and held it close to his mouth.

“We copy.”

“Steve, we’re having trouble making sense of these readings.” Ethan’s voice crackled over the speaker as Steve hopped up into the shotgun seat; the door was not even shut before the truck peeled out of the bay. “What are we looking at? Was this external? A mechanical failure? A fire?”

Steve pressed the talk button and answered, his stunned tone contrasting with Ethan’s panic:

“Yes.”

The light bar strobed and the sirens blared as the fire truck made its way through the aircraft debris scattered across the power plant’s campus, two wheels jumping the curb to navigate around a row of burning aircraft seats. Looking to his left, Steve was breathless at the sight of the detached nose of a plane. A searing-hot fire engulfed the cockpit, its flames pouring out the shattered windshields, leaving dense black smoke scars on the white exterior paint.

None of it felt real. It was too extreme, too big. Every man in the fire truck was speechless as they all took in the scene, their brains struggling to translate what they were seeing into something that made sense. Steve didn’t know how to explain.

“What—what does that mean?” Ethan’s voice was sharp, as if he were holding the radio close to his mouth. “We can’t see from in here. What happened?”

“A plane, Ethan,” Steve said flatly. “A plane happened.”

Ethan felt the blood drain from his face.

On September 11, 2001, he and his colleagues had watched the second plane hit the South Tower on the break-room TV just up the hall from where he now stood. He remembered distinctly how, in that moment, as they realized it was no accident, everything shifted.

The country was under attack.

His boss had run out of the break room, shoving the door open so hard it smacked against the wall. At the time, Ethan hadn’t understood his boss’s panic. Later that day, as they received security directives from a dozen government agencies, he did.

Whenever anyone asked Ethan if he had reservations about the safety of nuclear power, his answer was always the same: unequivocally, emphatically no. Yet if he was asked about fearing a 9/11-style attack on a nuclear power plant, he hesitated.

Truthfully, it terrified him. At times, kept him up at night. Because he knew what everyone who worked in nuclear power knew. The “tests” the government had run in the wake of September 11 that allegedly proved that American nuclear reactors were impervious to attacks on nuclear-power-containment structures were at best incomplete and at worst suspect. Officials had needed to reassure Americans that every U.S. nuclear power plant was indeed safe from attack, so they designed tests to deliver those results. Every model used small planes traveling only up to three hundred miles per hour. None of the tests approximated what had actually happened in New York or explored what could occur beyond those parameters.

The point of the tests wasn’t to learn the truth. It was to calm a worried public. Because officials knew the truth was too terrifying. No one had a clue what would happen if a large commercial airliner filled with fuel and traveling at hundreds of miles per hour crashed into a nuclear power plant.

“Get Red Top on the phone,” Ethan said to Dwight, meaning the Red Top nuclear power plant, 117 miles to the southeast. “Steve, what’s the visual on impact damage?”

“We got an extensive debris field,” Steve said. “It’s not just one area. Or one point of impact. The plane. It’s, it went—”

“Everywhere,” muttered George, Steve’s second-in-command, as he leaned over the truck’s steering wheel to look up at the damaged R1 cooling tower. Enormous, ragged-edged chunks of concrete lay all around the base.

“Debris from the plane, the plant. It’s all over the place, Ethan,” Steve said. “We’ve called for off-site support, but our comms were spotty. Waketa Township should be first response. Our boards showed automatic fire suppression activation in six buildings. Reactor Two’s auxiliaries seemed the most active, so we’re headed—whoa!”

Steve braced himself on the dash as George slammed down hard on the truck’s brakes.

“Hang on,” George said, reversing back around the curve. The road in front of them was impassable—twisted hunks of smoking metal blocked the way.

“Someone needs to run security footage and guide us,” Steve demanded. “Every way we go is blocked by debris. We have no access. We need to know what’s clear. Currently, we’re on the northeast corner of D block trying to get to R2.”

“Copy. Stand by. We’re getting video systems back online now,” Ethan said.

“That may be more of a challenge than he thinks,” George muttered as everyone in the truck gaped at the damaged distribution transformer on the right-hand side. The severed ends of a massive power line sputtered, the surging power audibly sizzling as the downed, ragged line shot out sparks. Now they understood why their communications systems were a mess.

“I’m no electrical engineer,” said George, “but having the power line connected to the power plant is important, right?”

Steve pressed the talk button. “Ethan. Primary distribution is severed.”

“How damaged? Is it a—”

“No. Not damaged. It’s severed.”

Everyone in the control room understood the implications of a severed distribution line. But instead of panicked screams, a soft murmur rippled through the room.

Ethan cursed under his breath before pressing the talk button. “That explains the loss of grid power. Okay. What does—”

“Stand by. We’re getting to R2 auxiliaries now and—”

The radio cut out for a moment. When Steve came back on, the pitch of his voice was elevated: “Cask breach. We’ve got at least one exposure.”

The soft murmur in the control room was replaced by a deafening silence. No one dared move as they waited for more.

“That’s one confirmed exposure,” Steve said a moment later. “And we got, ah—Ethan, we got significant structural damage to the south side of the building housing the R2 fuel pool.”

The words hung in the air.

Structural damage. Fuel pool.

“Steve. Confirm,” said Ethan as clearly as possible, practically kissing the radio. “Was that structural damage to the Reactor Two spent fuel pool?”

“That’s affirmative. And we’re wet. We got water leakage—”

“Where?” Ethan asked. “Where’s the leakage? How high up?”

“High. Fifty, fifty-five feet.”

At that, the staff in the control room sprang into action. Any damage to the plant was bad. But structural damage, no matter how minor, to the spent fuel pool wasn’t just bad—it was potentially catastrophic. For the first time since the crisis started, they heard palpable fear in Ethan’s voice: “Maggie, get me water levels. Dan, status on the coolant pumps. Vikram, monitor the ambient pressure in the building. Steve, can you gauge how much water we’ve lost? Steve? Steve, do you copy?”

A clipboard lay a short distance away from the man on the ground, the loose ends of the papers lifting in the breeze. Roused by the fire truck’s siren, the man tried to sit up, raising his head from a wide pool of blood on the concrete pad. Behind him lay the toppled remains of a dry cask nuclear-waste storage unit and the burning aircraft engine that had taken it out.

“Masks on,” Steve hollered to his crew. With thick fitted gloves covering their hands, the men in the truck pulled the masks of their self-contained breathing apparatus over their heads. As Steve adjusted his mask, he watched the man coming to, looking around, realizing where he was and what had happened.

Steve recognized the guy. He remembered sitting at a table behind him at lunch one day. His name was Vinny. He’d told this story about how his grandma got drunk one Christmas and launched the tree out into the front yard, ornaments and lights and all. He’d had the whole cafeteria in stitches, describing how all the grandkids had stood there with their jaws on the floor watching drunk Grandma, cigarette dangling from her lip, javelin the tree out of the house.

The dry cask—a seventeen-foot-tall, five-foot-wide oblong pillar of concrete—was on its side, shattered and cracked all the way through the outer cask, the inner cask, and the two inches of concrete between them. Exposed were its contents: a tightly packed bundle of 204 twelve-foot-by-one-foot radioactive fuel rods. Ignoring the still-bleeding gash on his forehead, Vinny stared in horror at the exposed nuclear fuel not two feet from where he lay. Without having to read his mind, Steve knew the crucial questions Vinny was asking himself.

How long have I been lying here? How much exposure did I get? How long until I die?

Steve flashed back to his first week of training at the plant. Their instructor had passed around pictures of the firefighters from Chernobyl. They were the first responders after the reactor blew, clueless as to what they were dealing with and what it would do to them.

Steve had never been able to get those images out of his head.

The Soviet firefighters, stretched out on hospital beds, had bright red burns covering their pale skin. Initially, acute radiation poisoning looks like nothing more serious than the result of an afternoon at the beach without sunscreen. But each picture became progressively harder to stomach as the radiation destroyed their bloating, disfigured bodies from inside and out with increasing speed.

Vomit-covered bedsheets next to swollen limbs, skin peeling away from muscle. The unfathomable pain brought them to tears, but they cried blood, relief coming only once they slipped into comas, after the swelling in their brains had rendered them unconscious. They gasped for air as they drowned in the radiated soup that had been their internal organs. And when death finally came, they weren’t surrounded by their loved ones. At that point, medical staff didn’t know what they know now. They didn’t know it couldn’t be passed through contact, so no one was allowed in. The men died alone, begging for death as they were burned alive in their personal living hell.

The sound of the truck doors opening snapped Steve out of his dark trance. To his left, near the back of Reactor Two’s auxiliary buildings, was a huge, still burning portion of the aircraft’s fuselage. Steve called out names; those men were to put out the burning aircraft. The rest of the men set off with Steve for the dry cask.

As they moved toward Vinny, Steve watched him stand up and stumble as he tried to strip off his clothes. Vinny saw them approaching.

“No!” he screamed. “Stay back!”

Steve kept moving forward. “Sir. You need—”

“Stay back !”

Steve stopped in his tracks. A few steps behind, his crew did the same.

Vinny’s eyes filled with tears as he looked at the firefighters—the first on-site, the first to help. His voice raw, he said, “It’s too late.”

Steve watched as Vinny took off his contaminated button-up and khakis and tossed them on top of his employee lanyard next to the broken dry cask. He knew Vinny was hoping this would help. Maybe if he shed the contaminated clothing, got it off his skin, and moved away from the source, maybe it would be enough.

They both knew it wouldn’t. This wasn’t a lightly radiated substance he’d briefly encountered. He’d been lying next to exposed fuel rods wearing no protection. He was already dead. The only question was how long until he died.

A utility truck driven by two plant employees in full hazmat gear came around the corner. They stopped a distance away, and Vinny—barefoot, in only his boxer briefs—jogged over to them and climbed into the bed of the truck. The driver backed up and drove off as Vinny gazed around at all the destruction, shivering in the spring air. He looked small and young and scared, like a little boy. And in an instant, before he could stop himself, Steve’s mind flashed to Matt.

Was his son scared? Had he seen the plane or heard the crash? Of course he had. Matt was so smart, he had to know something was very wrong. If Steve could get—

No.

Stop .

Steve forced himself to stop thinking about Matt. There was nothing he could do for his son right now. Steve had to do his job. His duty was to the people at the plant; his obligation was to try to limit the damage. Matt’s school had accident protocols. His son was with the teachers and they would know what to do. They would protect him. Steve had to trust them. He could not afford to worry about his son right now. He could not do that and do his job. He had to compartmentalize. He had to shut thoughts of Matt out.

The truck carrying Vinny disappeared around the corner. Steve turned to his men. “Let’s keep going.”

As they jogged back to the others, Steve heard a jarring, unfamiliar beep. Looking down, he saw the small digital screen of his dosimeter light up. The detection device measured ambient radiation dosage in real time. The higher the number, the more cancer-causing particulates of radioactive poison were in the air and on the wind.

Never, not once in Steve’s eighteen years at the plant, had the small yellow box affixed to the front of his uniform been activated.

But now, as he watched in horror, the numbers were slowly and steadily clicking up.