“Okay,” Dave said. “I’ll have to figure out something to tell the unit supervisor. He’s going to want to check with the auxiliary operator at the Intake. He’ll know we don’t have a problem with the screens.”
“Just get the thing shut down and do it quickly!” Prichard commanded.
“What about Kay and my kids?” he asked again, hoping for some kind of answer this time.
“Nick said to tell you he’ll take care of them. I don’t know how he intends to do that, but if Nick says he’ll take care of them, he will. As for the FBI, if we tell them the screen differential pressure is going up and we have to shut down a circ water pump, they have no choice but to believe us. We can make this happen.”
Prichard was getting nervous. They’d been talking for several minutes.
Just then the door to the room opened and an armed security officer entered.
“So, you’ll get that leak put in the corrective action system tonight?” Prichard said to Dave, in a voice loud enough for the security officer to hear.
Dave looked at Prichard and read the concern in his eyes. He looked over at the security officer who was approaching them in a deliberate, almost menacing way. Dave decided the best thing to do was to back up his boss.
“Yes, sir. I’ll do that right away.”
“Excellent. Then I think I may go home,” Prichard said, looking hard at Dave. He acknowledged the security officer with a nod, went out into the hallway and headed back to his office.
Dave followed him out, leaving the security officer in the room, looking around. Once in the hallway, Dave turned the opposite way from Prichard’s path and headed back to the elevator and the control room on the 140-foot elevation.
The security officer was told at the beginning of the shift to be on the lookout for anyone who might talk with the shift manager. The whole shift had been briefed on that. They were told that there was a ‘fitness-for-duty’ issue with the shift manager that couldn’t be discussed. They didn’t know if he’d been drinking, was on drugs, or if he was having a nervous breakdown. All they knew was that they’d been told to keep an eye on him. The security officer had been around the plant for years and knew Dave Street in passing. He thought he’d always seemed like a decent enough sort of guy, even for an operator. But orders were orders, even if they were a little goofy. Still, he didn’t think that applied to Street talking with the site vice president. He was due for a break in about twenty minutes. He’d go back to the break room in the security building and get his coffee and inform the watch commander then. He didn’t think the encounter with Street and Prichard was significant enough to call in immediately.
CHAPTER 39
On his way to the airport, Pete picked up his satellite phone and dialed a number. The signal bounced it off a satellite and back down to the team leader, somewhere in the hills behind the plant. “Red Two, this is Mother. Copy?”
Some static, then he heard a quiet voice say, “This is Red Two, Mother. On line and in position.”
“Red Two. Do you have eyes on the prize?”
“Copy that. Count six bad guys, weapons and gear. Looks well organized. Military gear. On the small ridge just northeast of the plant, as expected.”
Pete had his team deployed just above the position they thought the bad guys would opt for. If the bad guys had the report Nick had put together, it stood to reason Jansen had his guys there too. Nick and Pete assumed Jansen would have his boys begin their assault from close to the station. They had to assume Jansen had the means to divert security personnel’s attention away from his people at a specified time.
Pete had moved their guys into place earlier in the evening, just after the sun set, fast-roping down from a stealth helo a few klicks back and humping it in from there. It was a nasty trip with lots of thickets and steep hills. But it was the best way in if they wanted to remain undetected. Nick’s team members were all ex-SF; and while moving around in this dense underbrush wasn’t easy, it was achievable.
They were now dug in up hill and behind Jansen’s team. With night scopes, weapons, explosives, and flash-bangs, they were ready. Unlike Jansen’s team, they didn’t need to bring heavy explosives with them. They were a kill squad and were prepared to move fast and light.
“Red Two. Change of plans. Take your go order directly from Red One. Repeat, await go order from Red One, and then execute as arranged.” Pete was supposed to be the one controlling the team in the field, but he now had to get to Orange County. Nick was Red One and would have to give them the go order — if he survived what he was going to attempt to do.
“Copy that, Mother. Red Two out.” Then silence.
A marine layer was hanging just off the coast, coming in. Red Two knew fog would make the mission more hazardous. It’d be harder to see, and the cold, wet fog would make things slippery. He was hoping this would go down before that happened.
CHAPTER 40
Once back to the control room, Dave called the unit supervisor into his office.
“Bob, we need to shut down the 1–1 main circulating water pump. We’re having some problems with vibration on it, and the screens appear to be fouling.”
“That’s odd. We haven’t gotten any alarms either on vibration or differential pressure across the screens. Let me get in touch with Henry at the Intake and have him check it out.”
“I’m okay if you check with Henry later, but I want the pump off line now. We’ve been looking at this for the last few nights. I’m surprised you didn’t get a turnover on it,” he lied. “We need a rapid power reduction. I want that pump off-line in thirty minutes.”
“The Power Control guys in San Francisco aren’t going to like this. At least give me a few minutes to check out the pump and screens.” As the unit supervisor, Bob was responsible for Unit 1, and he prided himself on knowing the status of his plant. He had a hard time believing there was a problem of this magnitude that he didn’t know about.
Dave knew this was an improbable situation, but it was all he could think of in a short time. He recognized he’d have to pull rank to get Bob to do it.
“As I said, this is something we’ve been watching for the last few days. This is your first graveyard, but I’ve been here for a few nights now. Every minute we waste arguing about it is going to do damage to the pump. End of discussion. Take the unit to half load and secure that circulator.”
Bob wasn’t happy at all. He and Dave had always gotten along well. He could tell Dave wasn’t exactly thrilled to be there tonight and thought he was probably just tired, having already worked several night shifts. But Dave was the boss. Bob would have to discuss this with the guy he took the watch from and find out why he wasn’t told about a possible problem with that pump. That would come later.
“Okay, Dave. Do you want to be in on the briefing?” he asked as he normally would when conducting a briefing for his operators on a sudden change in plant status.
“No. I’ve got some phone calls to make. Just have that pump offline no later than thirty minutes from now.”
As Bob walked out into the control room to brief his team, Dave suddenly realized that Bob would want to make a plant-wide announcement to let all the watch-standers out in the plant know that the power level was going to be reduced. He felt his blood pressure go up immediately. That would give away their plans. Whoever was watching him would know. But it couldn’t be helped. A power plant is a complicated thing to run and run safely. No matter what he was doing for Prichard, he still had to do it with some measure of safety. Reluctantly, he had to let Bob do it the way he’d been trained to.