I got in the rental car and headed to the plant. Despite the cool weather, I opened the window and turned on the heat. I enjoyed having fresh air but liked the warmth put out by the car’s heating system. Cranking up the radio volume, I thought through the drill again as I drove through the rolling countryside. My team’s assault was timed perfectly. Hector and his staff thought all they had to deal with was the ground force assault, because that was what they’d been taught to do. Stay within the design basis threat. As a result, they weren’t even looking for the helo. The station security force had at least a 3-to-1 advantage on my team, and they still lost. Not surprising, though. Their thinking was inside the box, which made it easy to predict what they were going to do.
This wasn’t even a full-scale workup. This was a teaser, for Prichard to see how capable I really was. If he liked what he saw, he’d probably offer me a contract to come in and do a more thorough review. What Prichard didn’t know was that I wouldn’t take it if offered. I didn’t like staying in one place for too long. I guess my personal demons wouldn’t allow it. I’d recommend some very capable people I worked with, but it wouldn’t be me.
CHAPTER 15
The road to the plant wound through some scenic areas of protected coastal lands. Nuclear power plants are typically located away from densely populated towns, mostly because local communities really don’t like having the plants in their back yards, out of the not so unreasonable fear of being enveloped in a radioactive cloud in the event of an accident. Because the plants need huge amounts of water for cooling systems, locating them on remote areas of the Pacific coast is ideal. However, there were always environmental concerns brought up in the licensing process before the huge corporations who own these plants could break ground and begin to build. This was never more evident than in California, where environmentalists and Hollywood money were abundant. Frequently, the corporations who owned the plants had to pay millions of dollars to set aside preserves or parks or nature walks, to placate the local townsfolk. And The Headlands did just that, so that driving up to the power plant had the feel of driving up to a resort.
When I got to the entrance to the owner-controlled area, I was still a couple miles from the plant site itself. The only evidence that there was a nuclear plant somewhere in the vicinity was the sign on the restricted road and what looked like a tollbooth or the entrance to a national park, with one security officer inside. To gain entry, I needed to have a ‘car pass’ that was issued to all employees, something all too easy to steal from the dashboard of someone’s car when it was parked in the Safeway parking lot in town. If I really wanted to get in and didn’t have a pass, it would also be easy enough to just shoot the guard, who was unarmed anyway, and race up the road. But I knew there was a camera high up on a nearby light pole, transmitting a picture of this access point to the Central Alarm Station; and that if I did try to crash the gate, the security force personnel had a couple of miles of isolated road on which they could intercept me. With ocean on one side, steep hills with rugged terrain on the other, and several miles off the main highway, this plant was hard to sneak up on. And that was in its favor. It should have been one of the easier plants to protect, but I knew how to find weaknesses. The Headlands had them, and I’d found them.
I chuckled to myself as I thought about shooting the guard and making a run for the plant. Instead, I put the pass I was issued on the dashboard so the guard could see it, and cruised through the access point slowly, allowing the guard to wave me through.
Driving up the road, I enjoyed the magnificent scenery as I wound around curves with mountains on one side and the Pacific coastline on the other. The speed limit on the road was a mere 40 mph, which I knew I could exceed if I had to. But even I would have to be careful because the road, as it turns out, is perfectly level, with no banking on the curves. It was built that way to allow large trucks to haul up massive plant components during the construction phase, without danger of the load rolling off the rig.
Some of the larger components were brought in by barge, to the intake area. For construction purposes, this all made sense. From a security perspective, I could envision various scenarios in which these design features could be exploited. I smiled to myself as I thought about this. Always working.
As I rounded the last bend in the road that dead-ends at the 200-acre plant site, the two massive concrete containment domes — so named because they ‘contain’ the nuclear reactors and were designed to contain the radiation released if there was some kind of accident — came into view. Seeing them for the first time in the midst of this peaceful seaside landscape was awe-inspiring. I’d driven this road several times now, but the sight of them still impressed me. Seven feet thick at the base, with two-inch rebar knitted within it, all lined by a stainless steel plate, they were an engineering marvel and made an imposing sight. Over two hundred and thirty feet tall, they also make for a very big target if someone wanted to attack from the air — something we learned in New York on what was known as ‘9/11.’ The difference between these domes and the Twin Towers was that these domes could withstand the impact of a huge jet airliner falling out of the sky. Such an event might obliterate other parts of the plant, but the containment domes were designed to withstand it, keeping the nuclear reactor safe from damage.
However, they were really built to withstand pressure from within. A catastrophic failure of the reactor coolant system piping inside the building would cause thirty-five thousand gallons of water, heated to 550 degrees Fahrenheit under 2,300 pounds of pressure per square inch, to flash instantly if something caused a leak in the system and this hot pressurized water was suddenly released to the atmosphere in containment. In theory, this could happen, though the probability of such an event was remotely small. But because it is a possibility, the containment dome was designed to contain just such an event. As a result, this made them impervious to outside attack as well. Still, as the drill I just did so aptly demonstrated, there were still some weak points that made them vulnerable — if you knew where they were and how to exploit them.
I pulled up to my reserved parking spot in front of the Security Building. Perks of the job. It was almost 8 a.m., and most of the plant personnel were already inside, at their desks working, so there was no line to get through the explosives and metal detectors. But I didn’t head for the search trains. I stepped up to the visitor counter and ask to see the sergeant in charge. A minute later, a uniformed security sergeant came out and grimaced when he saw it was me again.
“’Morning, Sergeant,” I said pleasantly and professionally. By the look on the man’s face, I knew I didn’t need to say any more.
The sergeant came over to the desk, looked at me without any acknowledgment or greeting, and said, “Picture ID.” By now, everyone in the Security Department knew of the drill last night and how it went, and I was probably less popular this morning than I was last night.
The sergeant looked at my ID for perhaps a moment longer than he needed to. Making me stand there while he held my ID was about the only measure of control he had over me. I let him have his moment. As he handed my ID back, he said loudly, “Fred, let this guy through… again!”
Fred, the armed officer on station just inside the search trains, came over and, with a scowl on his face, opened a pass-through gate reserved for members of the security staff who were armed responders. Armed responders obviously couldn’t make it through the search train with all the metal and ammunition they carried and so were exempted from the rules. But I was just a visitor and wasn’t supposed to be carrying any kind of firearm at all. Fred didn’t bother to ask why he was being instructed to give me access.