Besides, it was Joe’s birthday after all. He deserved a celebration — after he got the higher-ups at the plant to listen to him.
“Later, Dad!”
Ford sprinted past the family car on his way to the bus stop. Seated behind the wheel, Joe waved distractedly at the boy, while wrapping up his call.
“Good. Finally,” he said in Japanese. “Thank you.”
Sandra slid into the passenger seat beside him. She clipped a “Janjira Power” ID badge to the lapel of her jacket and handed a matching badge to Joe.
“He made you a sign, you know.”
A sign? A pang of guilt stabbed Joe as he realized what she meant, and that he had been utterly oblivious to whatever she and Ford had cooked up for his birthday. Contrite, he put down his phone and looked over at his wife. He’d had no idea …
“He worked so hard,” she said. “I think what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna come home early. I’ll take the car and pick him up and we can get a proper cake.”
Joe was grateful that she was on top of this — and letting him off so easily. “I’m gonna practice being surprised all day. I promise.”
To prove his sincerity, he generated his best “Holy Shit!” expression. His eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped as though he had just won the lottery. The effort teased a laugh from Sandra. He smirked back at her, enjoying the moment. Which couldn’t last, unfortunately. Not with the matter preying on his mind.
“Look,” he said, “I need to know it’s not the sensors. I can’t call this meeting and look like the American maniac. We get in, don’t even come upstairs, just grab a team and head down to Level 5—do 5 and the coolant cask — just check my sensors. Make sure they’re working.”
“You’re not a maniac,” she assured him. “I mean, you are, just not about this.”
He appreciated her effort to lighten the mood, but he had too much on his mind to joke around right now. “There’s got to be something we’re not thinking of.”
“Happy birthday,” she said stubbornly.
He turned toward her. An infectious smile penetrated the cloud hanging over him, and reminded him just how lucky he really was. The corners of his lips lifted.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied.
She leaned forward and kissed him warmly on the lips. Despite all his worries and frustration, he responded to the kiss, keeping it going even as he fired up the ignition. They reluctantly disengaged as he pulled away from the curb and headed towards the plant, which loomed prominently on the horizon.
His birthday would have to wait.
The Janjira Nuclear Power Plant perched above the coastline, dominating the skyline overlooking the Sea of Japan. Thick white plumes of steam vented from the plant’s cooling towers, while the reactors themselves were secured within three imposing structures of steel and concrete that had been built to withstand even a crashing 747. Adjoining buildings housed the turbines, generators, pumps, water tanks, storage units, machine shops, administrative offices, and other essentials. A row of transmission towers rose from the switchyard adjacent to the plant. High-voltage power lines transmitted freshly generated electricity to the nearby city and points beyond.
After parking the car in the lot, Joe and Sandra hurried off on their respective tasks. Within minutes, Joe was marching briskly down a corridor, trailed by Stan Walsh, his best friend and partner in crime. Another transplanted American, Stan was a few years older than Joe, who was counting on Stan to back him up when they met with Hayato and the others. Joe gulped down black coffee on the run. “#1 DAD” was emblazoned on his mug, a title Joe doubted he was entitled to this morning.
I’ll make it up to Ford later, he promised himself, after I get to the bottom of this.
A local engineer, Sachio Maki, hurried up to Joe with an anxious expression on his face. He nervously thrust a file of reports at Joe. Juggling his coffee cup, Joe flipped through the folder, which contained some seismographic readings he had never seen before. His eyes bugged out for real this time.
“Whoa.” He froze in his tracks, caught off-guard by the data. “What is that?”
“Yes,” Maki confirmed. “Seismic anomaly.”
The region had been experiencing a number of small underground tremors recently, but nothing this dramatic. “This is from when?” Joe asked urgently.
“Now,” Maki said. “This is now.”
Joe blinked, not quite grasping the truth. When Maki said “now” did he really mean…?
“This graph is minutes, not days,” Maki explained, spelling it out. “This is now.”
“What?”
“Wait,” Stan said, trying to keep up. “Seismic’ as in what? As in earthquakes?” He peered over Joe’s shoulders at the graphs. “Are those earthquakes?”
Joe shook his head. “Earthquakes are random, jagged. This is steady, increasing.” He flipped rapidly through the remainder of the report, his eyes tracing the steady upward path of the vibrations’ intensity over time. “This is a pattern.”
Just like the inexplicable signals he had been monitoring.
Following Joe’s instructions, Sandra headed straight for the sub-level corridors beneath the primary reactor building, pausing only briefly before a large open doorway. Warning signs, printed in Japanese, marked the boundary before them. This was where the buck stopped: the containment threshold where sturdy barriers could be deployed to seal off the area beyond in the event of a significant radiation leak. While the existence of the barriers should have been reassuring, the necessity of them was something she generally preferred not to think about. There hadn’t been a Chernobyl-type disaster since 1986, thirteen years ago, but nobody in the industry wanted to take any chances.
She had rounded up a four-person team to assist her in the inspection. They quickly climbed into full-body radiation suits, as required by the Level 5 safety protocols. Multiple layers of thick protective material, along with a self-contained breathing apparatus, made the uncomfortable suit both hot and heavy to work in. Internal helmet lights illuminated their faces. Sandra took pains to maintain a cool, confident expression on hers.
“Alright,” she said, leading the way. “Let’s make this quick.”
Caught up in the anomalous new seismic data, Joe moved more slowly down the hall toward his meeting. He barely registered Stan fretting beside him.
“Can I be your Rabbi here for a minute?” Stan pleaded, sounding like he was on the verge of another ulcer. He popped an antacid. “Before you go in there and pull some China Syndrome freakout on these guys, keep in mind that we are hired guns here, okay?”
Joe understood that Stan was worried about their contracts and careers, but there were bigger issues at stake here, like the safety of the plant and the surrounding community.
“I have operational authority in my contract, Stan.”
This didn’t seem to allay Stan’s anxieties. If anything, he sounded even more apprehensive. “You pull this off-line, it’ll be three months before we get back up.”
You think I don’t know that, Joe thought, but before he could reply the fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Joe glanced up in confusion. Now what?
A second later, a sudden rumble shook the entire building.
The tremor hit even harder down on Level 5. Sandra’s team froze in surprise. One of her team members, Toyoaki Yamato, looked at her in alarm. “What was that?”
The overhead lights flickered momentarily, but then the subterranean rumbling stopped. Sandra held her breath for a moment, waiting to see if the tremor had truly subsided, before taking charge again. She tried her best to keep her voice steady.