Through all of this, the computer-driven displays inside the control room showed no signs of trouble. Separate analog-driven contact alarms should have gone off as the reactor went haywire, lighting up in a dazzling cascade across control panels. Instead, these backup alerts fell prey to yet another weakness in Cernavodă’s automated systems.
Concerned that human operators could be overwhelmed by the hundreds of alarms that might be triggered in any real crisis, the plant’s designers had installed alarm prioritization software. In an emergency, this program deliberately suppressed all minor alarms. In theory, this allowed control room operators to focus on the most serious threats they faced. What its creators failed to anticipate was the unauthorized insertion of a single line of malicious code, one that automatically defined all alarms as minor.
And so Cernavodă Unit Two’s highly trained and dedicated control room personnel were left essentially blind, deaf, and dumb — with no way of knowing that their reactor was racing out of control, accelerating toward a catastrophic meltdown.
Marku Proca checked his watch and sighed. Half an hour left until he could reasonably take another coffee break. He stretched back in his chair, concentrating on keeping his eyes open. Sure, Diaconu and Ion Morar, the other operator, were both capable guys, but it wouldn’t do them any good to see him slacking off on shift.
His direct line to the turbine room buzzed.
“Proca here,” he said.
“What the hell’s going on down there, Marku?” a voice demanded, barely audible over the earsplitting whine of huge machinery spooling down. “We’re not getting near enough steam. Every goddamned turbine I’ve got is shutting down!”
Proca sat up straighter, suddenly wide-awake. “What?”
“We’re going dark, Marku! Your fucking reactor must be off-line. So why don’t I see any trip alarms?”
Proca stared at the displays showing Unit Two’s status. Everything on his board showed the reactor operating well within normal parameters. Nothing was wrong. Nothing could be wrong. In its essentials, nuclear power generation was a simple process. A fission reaction produced heat. Water circulating through the core to cool and control the reaction turned into steam. And that steam drove turbines, producing electricity.
He started to sweat. If one or more of Unit Two’s steam generators had blown out, that was bad. Very bad. But the only other possible explanation was even worse. What if they were facing a massive rupture in the reactor’s cooling system? A major loss-of-coolant accident, or LOCA, was the primary nightmare for any nuclear plant.
“Marku?”
“We’re checking,” Proca snapped, dropping the phone. He spun toward Diaconu. “There must be something wrong with the primary DCC. Switch control to the ‘Y’ computer. Now!” The younger man immediately obeyed.
His action set off two more pieces of malware buried in their computer system.
Immediately an alarm shrieked, accompanied by a flashing red icon on Diaconu’s display. “I’ve got a major fire warning in the secondary control area!” he yelled. “The SCA’s automated sprinklers are activating!”
“Oh, shit,” Proca said. Unit Two’s secondary control area was designed to maintain safe operation of the plant if an accident wrecked the main control room or otherwise rendered it uninhabitable. But now, triggered by the false fire alarm, torrents of high-pressure water sluiced across the SCA’s computers, equipment panels, and other electronics — setting off a destructive chain of short circuits and overloads.
Bad as that was, the complicated sequence of valve openings and closures set in motion by the second piece of malicious code was far more deadly.
In seconds, the superheated steam still boiling away from the reactor found itself funneled into just one section of pipe — a section that ran right over the main control room. Under computer control, another valve at the far end spun shut. As more and more steam forced its way into the bottlenecked pipe, its internal pressure climbed higher and higher. Forced far beyond its structural limits, the steam pipe suddenly ballooned, cracked, and then blew apart.
Jagged steel splinters sleeted outward from the burst pipe — shredding everything and everyone in their path. Marku Proca had just time enough to see Diaconu and Morar hurled aside in a spray of blood and bone. And then he broiled to death a fraction of a second later when the temperature hit more than six hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Safe in a shielded area behind the wrecked control room, Unit Two’s hijacked computers continued executing their carefully laid-out sabotage programs.
TWO
The Iron Wolf Squadron CID piloted by Brad McLanahan strode into a huge darkened hangar. Behind him, two big doors rolled shut and overhead lights snapped back on, revealing ultramodern aircraft of various makes parked across a vast concrete expanse.
The locals believed the old Romanian air base’s absentee foreigner owners were content to let it rot. That was exactly what Scion, the private military corporation run by former U.S president Kevin Martindale, wanted them to believe. The Scion and Iron Wolf personnel stationed here called it the Scrapheap — reflecting its decaying, disused external appearance. But behind the peeling paint, rust, and piled-up rubbish was a fully equipped operating base jam-packed with sophisticated aircraft, drones, combat vehicles, weapons, communications gear, and sensors.
Near the far wall, a second CID already stood motionless. Still wiry and lithe in her midthirties, Charlie Turlock, dwarfed by the twelve-foot-tall machine, had her strawberry-blond head inside an open panel on one of its spindly-looking legs. Two harassed-looking technicians stood next to her.
Brad moved up beside them and ordered the robot to crouch down. With the main hatch clear, he climbed out and dropped lightly to the concrete floor.
“I don’t care what you’ve been told before,” he heard Charlie tell the techs. “But in my book there is no excuse for sending one of these machines out into the field with systems operating below spec. And right now this leg’s main hydraulic assembly is pegging out at ninety-four percent of its rated efficiency. That is not acceptable.”
“Ms. Turlock,” one of the techs said stiffly. “With all due respect, Major Macomber says—”
Scowling, Charlie whipped her head out of the open panel and turned on the tech. “Do I look anything like Whack Macomber to you?”
“Nope,” Brad said, coming up beside her with a quick grin. “He’s at least twice as big and four times as ugly.”
Charlie laughed. “Flattery won’t get you anywhere, McLanahan.” Her eyes gleamed with amusement. “Besides, I hear you already have a serious flame back in Warsaw. Which would explain those Polish phrases I hear you trying to rattle off so nonchalantly all the time.”
Brad nodded, feeling his face turn just the slightest bit red.
He and Major Nadia Rozek had been thrown together last year, when the newly formed Iron Wolf Squadron helped fight off a determined Russian attack on Poland. Since then, he’d realized that the beautiful young Polish Special Forces officer was a force of nature — tough-minded, fearless, and intensely passionate. Her current duties as a military aide to Poland’s president, Piotr Wilk, tied her to the capital more than she would like, especially when Brad’s own assignments took him farther afield. But whenever they could, they spent every waking and sleeping moment in each other’s company. And a relationship he’d first imagined was just a whirlwind “girl in every foreign port” kind of fling now showed every sign of turning into something a heck of a lot more serious.