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Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 15 HOURS AND 57 MINUTES

AS THE COUNTRY was facing the worst nuclear disaster any nation had faced since Fukushima, Joss was staring down the barrel of a gun.

She tapped her finger on the steering wheel, alternating glances between the white smoke rising from the plant and the potbellied man in the security shed studying her credentials. The gangly young man standing next to him was the one pointing the gun into the car, and as she waited, she imagined the firearm’s recoil knocking him off his skinny little feet.

Joss was the kind of woman people described with words like strongheaded, clever, fiery, determined . Adjectives that were up for interpretation, depending on whether Joss was working for or against you. Safe to say, the men in the security shed wouldn’t mean them as compliments. But ask anyone in Waketa, questionable bedside manner aside, they’d say they’d consider themselves damn lucky to have Joss Vance in their corner.

Joss ran her hands through her hair with a pointed sigh. She’d tried all the standard approaches: Asking nicely, politely correcting, firmly demanding, although not necessarily in that order. But nothing had gotten her past security, so now Joss was attempting her least favorite tactic: Shutting the fuck up while they worked it out on their own only to come to the exact same conclusion she’d told them at the start.

“Ma’am,” the older guard said, hitching up his pants. “I’ve never heard of this NEST.”

“Yes, sir. A lot of people haven’t,” Joss said, smiling as sweetly as she could manage. “But I assure you, it’s real. You can see there, I have clearance.”

“You have research clearance. Not operational clearance.”

“That should be enough for that bar to go up and my car to go through.”

“Not today, it’s not.”

Joss bit the inside of her cheek to keep from saying what she wanted to say. Instead, she said, “Sir, I deeply respect what you do, and I am grateful for the thoroughness with which you’re doing it. You and I, we both know nothing is more important than maintaining a secure facility.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The wrong person gets through? We’re talking big potentials for big problems.”

“I’m glad you understand, ma’am,” he said.

Joss pointed across the way, and both security guards turned to look at the felled tree and the shredded chunk of metal lying next to it that displayed the bright blue C of the Coastal Airways logo.

“Pretty sure the big problems already got through,” she said.

“Well—”

“Look, I realize that every five minutes you’re getting some new security mandate and protocol and lockdown procedure you didn’t even know existed. And I get that you want to exercise caution. You don’t care who I am or what I do; you just want to do your job right. And any other day, that’s exactly what should be happening.”

Her voice was rising, despite her best efforts, but Joss knew every second wasted out here was a second closer to the worst case scenario.

“But today?” she said. “You really should care who I am and what I do because I know why you’ve got a metallic taste in your mouth. And I know why that little device up there is clicking every so often,” she said, pointing at the wall-mounted pressurized ionization chamber inside the booth measuring ambient radiation levels. “I too just want to do my job right, but I can’t if you won’t let me. And my job is to know what the fuck is going on and figure out what the fuck to do about it. So either lift the gate or get Ethan Rosen on the fucking phone and tell him Joss Vance stopped by just to let him know that Reactor fucking Two is venting white fucking smoke!”

The man stared. “And I suppose, ma’am, you know why it is?”

“Well, either we got a new pope or the building’s about to blow.”

A beat passed before the guards exchanged a look. Finally, the older man nodded toward the panel. The kid with the gun pushed a button, and the security gate rose.

Joss reached into her go-bag in the passenger seat, grabbed a bottle, shook several pills into her hand, and held them out to the men.

“These are potassium iodide pills. They’ll keep your thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine. Take one now, take another in twenty-four hours until they’re gone.”

The men hesitated, then took the pills.

“By the way, that gun can’t protect you now,” Joss said. She glanced into the security booth. “But that can.”

As she drove off, in the rearview, she saw the men gaze into the booth at the pile of protective hazmat gear.

The radio beeped.

“Understood,” Ethan said to Steve through the radio. “Let us know when you’re set up.” Leaning on the desk, he turned to Vikram. “Once they get in, we’re—”

The door to the control room burst open.

“Are you aware you’re releasing white smoke?” Joss said.

Ethan straightened with an already exhausted sigh. “Hello, Jocelyn.”

“Is it burn-off steam?”

“We don’t know.”

“Hydrogen buildup?”

“We don’t know.”

“Fuck, Ethan! Then what are your pool levels? If the temperature—”

“No shit!” Ethan hollered.

The other controllers in the room watched the two like it was a tennis match. Ethan never raised his voice. Or swore. This was new.

Vikram leaned over to Maggie and Dwight. “I can’t tell if they want to kill each other or fuck each other,” he whispered.

“Both,” they replied in unison.

“But if the reactor—” Joss started.

“Joss, we know it’s not the reactor,” Ethan said, cutting her off. “It’s the pool.”

Joss’s face went white.

“Building power is limited to critical load,” Steve reported into the radio, breathing heavily, as he and his crew turned the corner and started up the next flight of stairs.

The interior stairwell was dark, lit only with the ghostly fluorescent glow of emergency lighting. The only sounds beyond the clomping of their heavy boots on the concrete stairs were the occasional beeps from the dosimeters fixed to their turnout jackets. Steve glanced at the large placard next to the door as they passed.

“Fourth floor,” he said.

“Okay, fifth floor is your entry point,” Ethan said over the radio.

Joss stepped up onto the platform to check the levels and gauges as Ethan went to grab a readout from the printer. The two bumped into each other and both immediately stepped back, avoiding eye contact. Ethan felt his face flush. It was the closest they’d been in fifteen years; at the handful of regional meetings they’d both attended over the past nine months, she’d always positioned herself on the opposite side of the room from him.

“But you’re not in station blackout,” Joss said, noting the zeros in every digital value. “Why are you dark?”

“When we lost grid power, all values went into question,” Ethan said. “We had no clue if the numbers we were getting were live or frozen from the point of impact. Without accurate numbers, we weren’t confident making any decisions. The security cameras went out when we lost power too, so there went any chance for visual confirmation. We had no choice. We recorded what the panels said, then did a hard system reboot.”

“Which is why you didn’t have any information when I came in,” Joss said. “You’re in the middle of the five-minute reboot.”

“It’s also why we sent the fire brigade to get a visual on the pool,” he said. “We need to know if we can trust the numbers.” He looked over at her. “Congratulations. You’re caught up. And no, no need to apologize.”

She ignored him. “And the reboot is over in—”

“Back online in ten,” Dwight said.

“In ten seconds,” Ethan said.

“Fifth floor.” Steve’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Stand by.”

Steve paused at the door to make sure his crew was ready.

“Look for anyone injured. Look for damage. Get in, get out,” he said.

He opened the door, and they started to pile into the spent fuel pool containment room. As they passed him, Steve heard the cadence of the clicking dosimeters pick up.

The cavernous warehouse had flat concrete walls, thirty feet from floor to ceiling. Everything in the space was industrial and utilitarian: Pipes. Concrete. Metal. Raised platforms and catwalks. A huge, adjustable crane. But no one who ever set foot in the room mentioned that stuff.

The only thing they talked about was the pool.

Crystal clear, sparkling blue water. The kind you’d kill to get into on a hot afternoon. But appearances could be deceiving, and Steve knew that lying at the bottom of the rippling oasis was something sinister.

Steve was the last one in, following his crew as they did a sweep of the area. He planned to head straight for the hose attachments to ensure they were still viable for refilling the pool if needed, but the second he got a good look at the room, he stopped in his tracks.

“We’re up,” said Vikram, wheeling his chair to the console as the displays blinked to life.

“Cross-check everything with the initial figures,” Ethan called out as the control room’s personnel sprang into action. They wrote down figures, calculated differences, referred to checklists. Joss looked over their shoulders as they worked, occasionally reading a figure aloud or passing papers between staff.

Dwight tapped a keyboard. “Hang on, I think we might…” he muttered. “Hey, guys. Guys! We got feed.”

He made a few more keystrokes, and a monitor at the front of the room brought up security feeds of the plant. The screen was sectioned into four boxes, each showing a live shot of a different angle of the campus. Everyone in the room stopped. Maggie gasped. Ethan interlaced his fingers over the top of his head. Joss watched their reactions, realizing that none of them had been outside the windowless room since the accident. This was the first time any of them had seen what it looked like out there.

It was carnage.

Each monitor quadrant displayed crumbled concrete, deformed rebar, and shredded metal. One showed a burning section of aircraft fuselage. The carcass of a crushed truck filled another. The quadrant next to that had firefighters battling a blaze in what little remained of some building they could no longer identify. Only hours ago, they had entered a peaceful campus, coffee cups in hand, carrying bagged lunches. And now, a good portion of that campus had been laid to waste.

“Run it back to the crash,” Joss said.

Dwight tapped on the keyboard. The images on the screen froze, then rewound. The flames danced at four times normal speed. A fire truck zoomed in and out of frame. The dry cask was broken on the ground. And then, without a hint of what was about to happen, the screens showed the indecipherable chaos as the cameras captured the plane’s exact moment of impact—and then it was calm. The cask was upright and whole, the smoke had disappeared, the flames had gone. There was nothing above but the quiet blue sky of a beautiful spring day.

“There! Stop,” Joss said.

Dwight cued it up and pressed Play. They all watched the silent video of tree branches moving gently in a breeze as Vinny bent over to check a gauge—and then out of nowhere, a flaming aircraft engine hurtled into the cask, toppling it onto its side.

In another screen quadrant, chunks of concrete rained down. In the adjacent quadrant, the windshield of a utility truck shattered as jagged slabs crushed it from above.

“Go back,” Ethan said. “Change the angle. I want to see impact at the main transformer station.”

Dwight punched buttons; the tape rewound, the carnage went away, and the angle changed to a heavily wooded area beyond a tall, razor wire fence. Inside the perimeter, the transformer box had stacked coils piled high enough to reach the thick transmission cables stretching out of the frame. The sky was blue; there was nothing there.

Then the plane appeared.

Flying relatively level at first, the gargantuan aircraft suddenly banked left, then nosed down and plummeted. The left wing snagged the distribution line, slicing through it with ease. As the line snapped, sparks shot off in every direction as the remnants of attached cable danced with electricity. The jet cartwheeled, plowing into the ground nose first as the tail shot up, flipping it end over end. Tons of jet fuel sprayed the area, atomizing instantly. An explosion was inevitable: Bang . A fireball and a cloud of flames and black smoke rose into the sky.

“The pool—”

“Show the impact at the pool—”

Joss and Ethan spoke over each other, but Dwight was already typing. He rewound and changed angles, and the image of the building that housed the R2 spent fuel pool appeared, still intact. Suddenly, the image on the screen began to shake, a result of the plane’s impact on the other side of the campus.

“It’s… it’s bad,” Steve said over the radio, his voice startling them.

He was talking to them live from the very building they were watching the taped footage of. On the screen, the first parts of the aircraft began falling from the sky like meteors dropping into the atmosphere. Debris of all sizes pounded the ground, the sidewalk, the roof… and the side of the spent fuel pool building.

“Confirmed,” Steve reported. “We have major structural damage to the pool itself.”

He stood at the edge, looking down into the water. Undulating beams of sunlight streaked in through cracks, fissures, and holes caused by the plane’s impact. Chunks of concrete rubble lay in heaps atop the fuel assemblies at the bottom of the pool as little bubbles rose to the surface from the chemical reactions. Against the pool’s wall, under the damage, shredded sections of the stainless-steel liner clung to the sides like loose teeth.

Steve looked at the sunlight cutting through the water, knowing that where the light was coming in, the water was going out. The pool was leaking.

“The water we saw outside,” Steve said. “It’s from the pool.”

Just as he finished his assessment, his dosimeter let out a loud, steady alert.

“Is that your reader?” Ethan asked, hearing the alarm. “Get out. Get out now.”

“All right, every—” Steve’s voice cut out as he gathered his men.

Joss was scribbling furiously on a piece of paper. “Clover Hill uses high-density closed-cell racks, correct?” she asked.

“Correct,” said Ethan.

“When was your latest load discharged from the reactor into the pool?”

“Five weeks ago.”

Joss cursed under her breath. That recently. “What was the loading pattern? Please, God, say one-by-eight.” She looked up when Ethan didn’t respond. “One-by-four?”

“Adjacent.”

“Jesus, Ethan.”

“You think I don’t know that? With what secondary storage am I doing one-by-eight? The casks are full. There’s no budget for more. We’re out of room. This isn’t news. You know that better than anyone.”

“Okay, okay,” Joss said, continuing to write. A few moments later, she stood up straight. “Check my math,” she said, turning the paper toward Vikram and Maggie.

As they worked, scribbling figures on their own papers, Joss frowned at the sheet, her mouth moving silently as she reran the math in her head, calculating how long they had before the spent fuel heated to ignition temperatures, starting a catastrophic and uncontrollable fire that would create an environmental disaster the likes of which had never been seen. In the background, the footage of the plane’s impact played on a loop.

Maggie finished first, setting her pencil down and looking from Joss to Ethan. She nodded. Moments later, Vikram leaned back in his chair and said, “That’s what I got too.”

Ethan knew Joss loved to be right. But the dread on her face told him that today, she wished she hadn’t been.

“How many days do we have?” Ethan asked.

“With rods that fresh, packed that tight,” Joss said. “If we keep losing water at the current rate, we’ve got less than sixteen hours.”

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