Garibaldi was already two body lengths above them. He kept ponderously climbing as he shouted down to them. “You’re right, it’s daylight. I can see ahead.”
Energized, Adonia climbed after him, feeling a desperate need to get out of the tunnel, to breathe fresh air, and be away from Hydra Mountain. The glimpse of sunshine above gave her a renewed sense of purpose.
The halo overhead grew brighter with every rung. Now that the fan’s roar had fallen silent, she could hear Garibaldi breathing hard with the effort, but the sunlight also illuminated more of the vertical shaft. Garibaldi stopped a few feet from the top. He lowered his head and called down. “The exit is blocked off, covered by a structure of some sort.”
Despite her discouragement, she realized it made sense. Hydra Mountain wouldn’t just vent out of an open chimney.
“It’s a cylindrical structure with slits on the sides,” Garibaldi reported. “Some kind of baffle to emit the exhaust air horizontally, rather than straight up into the atmosphere.”
“More difficult for overhead surveillance to detect any plume that way,” Shawn said. “And the layered slits in the baffle would reduce any temperature signature for infrared sensors.”
Thinking of the original Cold War — era construction, Adonia understood the measures installed to keep the site covert. “It probably also has filters or air scrubbers to make sure no chemical signatures from the vented air could be detected.” She climbed up next to the scientist, assessing the barricade. So close…
Garibaldi said, “Most important question is whether we can get through it.”
The cylindrical cap was no larger than a crawlspace, big enough for a worker to exit the shaft. The daylight filtering in through the baffle cast deeper shadows in the cramped space. She looked around for a lock or handle. “Workers would need to have an exit. There must be—”
Then she saw a crash bar, identical to the emergency device they had used to break out of the guard portal. “Three cheers for safety systems.” Her voice cracked with relief. “We can get out.”
Before she could push her way through, Garibaldi touched her arm to stop her. Wires led from a contact sensor embedded in the exit door, connected to the crash bar. “That’s an alarm. It probably signals Hydra Mountain’s operations center, maybe even DOE Protective Services. They would be monitoring site security.”
“Triggering another alarm doesn’t bother me,” Adonia said. “We’ve had enough of them today. Let them come rescue us at last.”
“Unless it sets off a defensive measure designed to stop a bad guy from exiting the Mountain,” Shawn said. “Or someone trying to get in.”
“That would be just our luck,” she said. “But we’ve got to get out of here. Dr. Garibaldi—”
“Yes. We do,” Garibaldi said. “And after surviving tear gas, sonic bombardments, avalanches of sticky foam, a flood of knockout gas, radioactive fuel rods, and a very inconveniently placed ventilation fan, I’m not about to throw in the towel. Let’s just go.”
Shawn said, “If it’s any consolation, an alarm probably already went off when we shut down the ventilation fan. What have we got to lose?”
With her hand on the crash bar, Adonia looked at them. “I’m ready if you both are.”
Garibaldi said, “I would really rather get out of here and have my feet on solid ground. But we also can’t let them silence us, whisk us into some secure facility where they can cover up what happened. We know Stanley’s alive, and we know he would do anything to cover his butt and spin what happened in there. Two people are already dead. We need to find a way to tell the story before he sanitizes the scene — and us.”
Adonia nodded. If van Dyckman had already put a gag on Rob Harris, he would likely do the same thing to them. “We’ll have to figure something out once we get into the open air. We’re deep inside a military base and behind several layers of security fences. We can’t just hold a news conference.”
Garibaldi was grim. “I do not intend to go quietly as part of a cover-up. I have a long list of things to do in whatever time I’ve got left.”
Adonia knew that van Dyckman was an expert politician, and he had railroaded Valiant Locksmith through when all public attempts to address the crisis had stalled for decades. But by circumventing the classified interagency review process, what he’d done was clearly illegal; probably just one of many other illegal actions. How far would he go to keep himself out of jail?
Bringing in multiple shipments of still-hot fuel rods and cramming them into a flimsy above-ground pool made things even more dangerous. If they turned themselves in, Adonia was sure he would find a way to detain Garibaldi until the radiation sickness killed him. She and Shawn would be put on ice until the problem was hushed up.
Adonia asked, “Even if we got the chance to expose this, who are we going to tell? And how?”
“Site security will round us up before we go very far,” Shawn said.
She heard the sound of Garibaldi’s wheezing breath as he struggled to find an answer, and she made up her mind. “Doesn’t matter. We’re getting out.” She placed a hand on the crash bar. “Ready for all hell to break loose?”
“It already has,” Garibaldi said, barely louder than a whisper. “What’s a little more going to hurt?”
Adonia slammed against the crash bar with a vengeance. With a crack, the exit swung open, and sunlight flooded the cramped crawlspace.
An alarm clanged far below, echoing up the shaft, but she didn’t care. She tumbled onto the rocky, scrub-covered ground on the rough summit of Hydra Mountain. Far in the distance, she heard sirens wail, and soon the three of them stood together in the hot desert air, outside at last.
46
Another alarm rang in the Eagle’s Nest and alerts lit up the ops center screens — but this was not the alarm van Dyckman was expecting. Not at all. This had nothing to do with the cleanup or the Special Response Team.
It was an exterior breach alarm! What the hell?
Light-headed and enraged at the same time, he rose from behind Harris’s desk. One of the few access points to Hydra Mountain had been compromised. How could anyone possibly break in with security teams everywhere? He felt a chill, suddenly wondering if that blundering small aircraft really had been part of some wild conspiracy, a distraction to drop in an intruder. Someone was using the chaos of the multiple lockdowns to break into the facility!
Frantically, he swept his eyes across the tall screens in the operations center below. Drexler and his tech teams scrambled to their stations in a sudden flurry, struggling to pinpoint the new alarm.
The young exec pointed at the upper right corner of the screen, which showed a schematic of Hydra Mountain’s two underground levels. A small, innocuous red square glowed at the top of a long narrow air duct that ran from the lower cavern through the rock ceiling to the outside. Somebody had compromised an emergency exit at the top of the shaft.
Van Dyckman felt sick, panicked. Did someone else know about Velvet Hammer and Victoria’s hidden warheads? There might be a full assault team trying to work their way in.
But he still couldn’t believe it. Four fences surrounded the Mountain. All were heavily alarmed and covered with sensors, ranging from motion detectors to thermal cameras, so sensitive that they were frequently triggered by prairie dogs and jackrabbits. The inner two fences were electrified.
That breach was on the very summit, and no person or team could have slipped so far inside the heavily fortified perimeter without being detected. And the outside of Hydra Mountain was swarming with security and safety personnel. No one could have climbed all the way up there unseen!