Adonia peered down to see what he had noticed. Squinting, she saw a wide and expanding puddle near the round pool. A foot above the floor, near the bottom of the metal-supported plastic walls, a thin spray of water spewed from a breach.
“The pool is leaking!” Adonia cried.
Shawn muttered a curse. “Van Dyckman swore those plastic sheets have more tensile strength than steel.”
“When our dear Senator knocked over the fuel rods, one of them must have struck a cooling pipe or sensor embedded in the side of the pool wall with enough force to create a punching shear,” Garibaldi said.
Adonia held on to the metal struts of the boom. “That’s a substantial leak, but at the rate water is spilling out, it’ll take days for the water level to drain completely. We’ll be out of here long before that.”
“If it stays localized,” Garibaldi warned. “With the amount of water pressure inside the pool, that small punching shear can easily grow. It could cause a catastrophic failure of the plastic wall, completely collapsing the sides.” He paused. “And if that happens, the water will spill out and the entire array of fuel rods will be exposed within seconds. With nothing to moderate the radioactivity, the neutron levels in the grotto will increase exponentially.”
Adonia felt her brief respite dissolve. “Catastrophic failure are my two least favorite words in the world.”
Without emotion, Garibaldi continued his assessment. “In less than a minute the warheads in Victoria’s vault will be simultaneously flooded with water and neutrons. As I said before, it’ll be like playing Russian roulette, but now with a billion more bullets. Just how confident are you that something else won’t go wrong today?”
Adonia suddenly felt ice in her veins. “Victoria said that if even one of the nukes goes critical, they’re close enough in proximity that cascading detonations of all the others would wipe out the city and most of the state.”
“Oh, surely no more than a third of the state,” Garibaldi said with wry sarcasm. “Although the deadly fallout would certainly reach the East Coast. I would prefer to stop that before it happens.”
36
Climbing across the slippery mound of sticky foam, van Dyckman squirmed close to the top of the vault, pulling himself forward. The hard, uneven barrier nearly blocked him off, but he found just enough room to wiggle through, scraping his back against the granite ceiling. He hoped the massive vault door hadn’t completely closed, which would have allowed some of the thickening foam to spill outside rather than fill the entire chamber. That might have saved his life.
Struggling for room to maneuver, he used the box cutter, along with adrenaline and desperation, to chip through the substance and pull forward. With each second, he felt increasing urgency to hack his way free.
Like a spelunker squeezing through a tight passage, he crawled and followed the steel pipe that enclosed the wires to the inset lights, so he knew he was heading in the right direction. When he finally reached the inside wall above the chamber entrance, it would be a simple matter to dig and chop his way to the vault door. And out.
His arms ached, his hands were bloody, and each gasping breath felt like razors in his lungs. Somewhere beneath him, Victoria Doyle was dead, engulfed in a mass of hardened foam, like a fossil trapped in limestone.
He remembered hearing her terrified scream cut off as the foam gushed in. Only by sheer luck had he stumbled into the warhead cubbyhole. As he worked his way over the barricade of sticky foam, he knew her entombed body was down there.…
He remembered their relationship with only a brief fondness. The affair had seemed inevitable with their shared ambitions, their mutual traveling, the innumerable late-night planning sessions when he was Senator Pulaski’s Chief of Staff. But even the sex had evolved into more of a competition than a release. Objectively speaking, he was glad to have her gone, and now he could achieve his potential.
His swift career advancement had been the death knell for romance, since Victoria couldn’t stand any scenario where he upstaged her. Even so, he had never imagined she would threaten to shut down his vital program just to keep her illicit warheads hidden here in Hydra Mountain. He had lost a lot of respect for her since they’d broken up, and these last few hours validated the reason why.
Unlike Victoria, at least Stanley van Dyckman was still alive, and he could still escape.
Nearing the jammed vault door, he dreaded that he would have to chop his way down through more hardened foam to reach the interior controls to let himself loose, but if the entrance was blocked open by the petrified foam, he’d only have to cut his way out.
Working his way through the last gap in the hardened material, he felt a rush of excitement as a large block broke off to expose the outside grotto. He frantically chopped and tore away pieces of the foam, then rolled down a steep, bumpy slope. He sprawled out of the vault and onto the grotto floor, dropping to his hands and knees. Reeling, shaking, he sprang to his feet, holding his breath. Like a poisonous fog, the wispy yellow halothane swirled nearly at chest level.
The gas was settling in the lower point of the cavern, driven downward to the Velvet Hammer vaults. Worse, as he moved, he stirred the deadly gas and swirled the sickening fumes up toward his face. Trying not to breathe, van Dyckman coughed and staggered away, knowing he had to get to higher ground.
Though he had escaped from the vault filled with nukes, he still wasn’t safe.
The box cutter in his hand was ruined, gummed up by remnants of sticky foam. He threw the tool to the side and heard it clatter along the cement floor, swallowed in the blanket of yellow gas.
Pressing his mouth and nose against the crook of his elbow, he staggered up the incline to the main floor, gaining ground to where the level of gas dropped to just above his knees. But he could still smell it. Frantic, he debated with himself what to do and how to survive. He couldn’t go all the way back to the cooling pool, where the halothane continued to spill over the ledge and onto the main floor. He would collapse long before he made it.
He turned toward the back of the cavern and saw the sacks of cement mix piled in the corner. Maybe if he climbed those, he would gain enough height, at least ten feet above the ground, above most of the halothane.
He felt like a wreck, bleeding from his hands, but desperation gave him the energy he needed. He stumbled toward the corner, struggling to take only sips of air, but he couldn’t hold his breath much longer. Soon he was forced to gasp in a lungful, which stank of the sickly sweet halothane. He reeled, needing fresh air. He began to cough and almost passed out, but forced himself to stagger forward. Almost there.
He couldn’t collapse, or he would die in this soup of deadly gas. Reaching the stack, he slumped against the pile of cement bags. He could find purchase for his feet, climb the sacks like a rock pile, get above the floor. He pulled himself higher, using his knees. One level. Then the next. His hands left bloody prints on the dusty sacks, but his arms and feet felt numb. He wanted to collapse.
His feet ripped holes in the paper bags, spilling gray-white powder. His body was turning to jelly, pulling him back down. He would just slide over the side, fall asleep.… No! He slapped the hard cement mix bag, and the sharp pain roused him. He kept going. One more level.
He clambered up, finally reaching the top of the pile, where he knelt and caught his balance, wheezing and shuddering. Then he forced himself to stand, gaining another few feet of height. Now he drew in a deep breath.