“I’ve got a team on the ground just in case. I got Pete heading them up and doing some intel.”
“Ah, Pete. How’s he doing these days?” The Old Man knew a lot about NeXus and the team.
“He’s good. He said to tell you hello.”
The Old Man nodded his head. He had a great deal of respect for my guys.
“Anyway, we just don’t have all the pieces yet,” I continued. “Thought you might have some insights on all this. A cold read and all. I figure we don’t have much time now since the dead woman was found. I’m thinking that’s going to force their hand. I don’t think having her wash up on the beach was part of their plan.”
“You’re probably right about that,” agreed the Old Man.
“So this all means they’re probably well entrenched and have a plan that’s already in the works. That leaves us behind the power curve on this.”
The Old Man just listened.
“I figure it’s too late to try to stop them from getting in. And we don’t know what they’re doing or who they are. My thinking is that we need to start working on a take-back strategy. I’m not sure we can stop them from doing what they plan to do, but we can take the plant back from them. They won’t expect that from anyone other than the FBI. But I could use your help with it. If this thing goes down, and if it involves someone within the plant security department, there aren’t a lot of folks left to rely on.”
The Old Man got up to get the coffee pot. As he poured us some more coffee, he asked, “How you doing these days?”
I knew he was referring to my time on the teams and the injuries I’d sustained, both mental and physical, that resulted in the Medal of Honor. He wasn’t supposed to know about it, and for the benefit of everyone else, he pretended not to know. But he did. He also knew it was one of the reasons I got out of Special Forces. At the time, I was stressed out, and being distracted while deployed down range was something that you didn’t want. So for my sake, and the sake of my team, I opted to go into the private sector where I could slow down a bit and sort things out. And while that was all true, that was the cover story. As in many areas of Special Forces, things weren’t always what they seemed. And the fewer people who knew, the better.
“I’m okay. I try not to think about it too much.” I actually still didn’t feel like talking about it but appreciated that the Old Man asked anyway. Still, I wanted to change the subject. “We can have that discussion some other time. Right now, we have business to attend to.”
The Old Man let it go for the time being. “Okay. Let’s talk this through.” He appeared now to be moving into his analytical mode. “As you know, to really compromise the safety of one of these big nuc plants, you need a few things. Let’s look at what we’ve got here. From what you’ve said, we can assume they have someone in security on their side. That’s not a really big deal unless the person is well placed on the inside and has the knowledge and ability to muck up the works. We don’t know yet if that’s true or not, so let’s just table that one for now.”
I was petting the beast under the table and processing information as the Old Man continued.
“They’re quite possibly trying to subvert the husband of the dead woman. You said he was a containment ventilation engineer? Let’s assume that’s a key piece of this puzzle. That would suggest that they probably have a few assets in place already. And if that’s true, the fact that they do and we don’t puts us at a disadvantage.” The Old Man leaned back in his chair and looked pensive for a moment. “It’s February. I’ll bet they got an outage coming up soon, right?”
I saw where he was going with this. “As a matter of fact, they do. It’s in about two weeks.”
“Outages have always been weak spots as far as security goes. So they may have additional outside help that’s somehow gotten on the inside.”
“It’s a vulnerability that I noted in my report.”
“I thought you would.” The Old Man leaned forward. “The third leg of this stool is the control room. To do really significant damage to the station they need someone actually in the control room. And this is the piece we’re missing right now. If they can corrupt a key player in there, we have a big problem.”
He let that hang in the air for a moment.
“This is all a stretch, you know. It’s improbable to get that many assets in place without someone finding out. Nonetheless, my suggestion is you call Prichard and see if there’s been anything unusual happen to the crews. See who called in sick recently, or who might be vulnerable.”
I looked at my watch. It was approaching 9 p.m. “I’ll call him in a bit. So what do you think? How do you see this playing out?”
The Old Man got up and grabbed a double-stuffed Oreo cookie. He must have loved those things because he had them every time I visited.
“As I said, nuc plants are hard to seriously screw up, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. For the sake of argument we’ll assume the improbable has happened, so they have means and opportunity. That’s one. Two is that we know they’re serious, because they’ve already murdered one person. This takes it out of corporate espionage and puts it more in the terrorism arena. Not good for us.”
He dipped his cookie in his coffee.
“But if Jansen is around, that means they have mercenaries involved, which means they’re in it for money. Money is no good to them if they don’t come out alive. So that means they have an exit strategy. They want to be around to spend their ill-gotten booty. And that can work to our advantage.”
That’s what I liked about the Old Man. He didn’t get too emotional about these things. He thought things through.
“That exit strategy is going to be their weak point. If we can figure that out, we’ll know where to look for them and how to stop them. For example, if they get into containment and damage it enough to cause a problem, they’ll never get out alive themselves. As they aren’t patriots, I think we can rule that out.”
I thought about that for a minute. “But if they can get into containment, don’t we have to assume that they have already defeated the security staff? And wouldn’t that mean that they could place delayed charges and still get out again?”
“Good point. That’s possible. But there are three barriers between the nuclear fuel and the outside world: the fuel cladding, the reactor coolant system, and containment itself. You tell me — can they carry enough explosives to damage all three systems?”
I shook my head slowly. “Based on what you’ve told me before about the components in containment, I’d say that’s unlikely. Even with military-grade explosives, it’d be hard to carry enough to damage all three, unless you had a lot of guys humping a lot of C-4, timers, and detonators. That’s a lot of gear.”
The Old Man dunked another cookie, having devoured the first in a single bite.
“So what do you see as the weak link in all this?” I asked him.
“Well, it’s possible their goal is not to kill a lot of people by releasing massive amounts of radiation. Maybe they just want to gum things up a bit. You know, do enough damage to the plant that it’s economically unfeasible to fix it and start it back up. This kind of scenario could cause the plant to go bankrupt. If they do that, they’ll show all nuclear plants to be vulnerable to attack. Pro-safety folks would have a field day.”
“Who’d stand to gain from that?”
“The anti-nukes, for one. They’re all over the place and remarkably well organized, but this looks too detailed and well funded for them to be involved. They’re serious about their cause, but generally aren’t this militant.”
He gobbled down another cookie, which where starting to look pretty good to me, too. I hadn’t eaten in awhile.