I brought Ari back to the kitchen and introduced him to my crew, both two- and four-legged. There was a big table in the kitchen, so Pardee, Ari, and I plopped there. Tony went upstairs to get something. I offered coffee, but Ari declined when he saw Pardee’s spoon freestanding in his cup.
“So,” he asked, “what changed your mind?”
I told him about the visit from the Helios physical security posse. He frowned when I told him about Billy the Kid.
“Those guys are mostly ex-military,” he said. “Their boss is a retired Army colonel, name of Carl Trask. Nicknamed Snake. He was one of those beret guys-Ranger or Delta Force, something of that ilk. Has been hiring only former military men, and takes himself and his job very seriously.”
“As well he should,” I said. “Talk about a good terrorist target.”
“Not as good as the movies make out, Mr. Richter,” he said. “Still, yes, there is a threat, and when we hear submachine-gun fire in the swamps, Colonel Trask provides a measure of comfort.”
“Say what?” Pardee asked.
“The government runs intrusion drills on the protected area of the station. They’re called force-on-force exercises. The director’s office knows when one’s coming, but, supposedly, they don’t tell Trask. The NRC uses Navy SEALs, or people from the FBI’s hostage rescue team. The rule is, once physical security detects a possible intrusion, Trask alerts the station director, who gives him a code word that tells Trask it’s a drill. Then they hand out the blank ammo and go play cowboys and Indians with their buddies in the tall weeds.”
“What if real bad guys ever penetrated this intrusion exercise schedule?” Tony asked, coming into the kitchen. “Or had some help from the inside?”
I hadn’t realized he’d come back downstairs. Being quiet was one of Tony’s useful skills. He displayed other traits that were not useful but were always exciting.
“That could be very interesting, I suppose,” Ari said.
Tony put a finger to his lips and then spoke very softly. “As interesting as the fact that you were followed here? And that two guys in a PrimEnergy van are pretending to work on a telephone pole while they listen to what’s going on in here?”
There was a moment of silence around the table, and then we all got up to take a peek through the front window curtains. A white utility van was parked half a block away, with the PrimEnergy logo conspicuous on its side. The rear doors were open, and two men in coveralls were busy doing something at the base of a telephone pole. Their equipment and uniforms looked convincing, except for the cone of a distant sound concentrator propped inside the van and aimed at our front windows.
Tony stood next to one window, turned his back on the outside world, and pulled out a Glock. He nodded to Pardee and me, and we produced our own weapons. Then he racked his weapon right next to the glass and announced in a loud voice that none of us should shoot until he started it. We each racked our weapons and then watched the “utility” men scamper for cover behind their van. The concentrator seemed to be working very well.
“Okay, I’ll take care of this bullshit,” Ari said and went out the front door. We all followed him out onto the porch and stood there in plain view of the van, guns in hand just in case this wasn’t what it looked like. Ari went to his car, got something out of the glove compartment, and then hustled over to the van, where the two men were starting to stand up now that they realized they’d been had. I wondered if Ari had stopped off to get a weapon, but instead he walked up to them and began firing one of those disposable flash cameras in their faces. They tried to block their faces with their hands, then slammed the van’s back doors shut, hopped in, and drove off at a respectable clip.
“Goddamn Trask,” he muttered as he came back up the front steps, pocketing the camera.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think I recognized the one guy. We have a recording scanner at the Pass and ID Office that’ll confirm it.”
“Well, you’re obviously consorting with suspicious characters,” I said as we put away our weapons and went back into the kitchen. I was relieved that none of the neighbors, if indeed there were any, had been out on their porches.
“Did you tell this young man to check for someone following me?” he asked.
“Nope. He’s suspicious by nature and just chock-full of initiative.”
Ari grinned at Tony and thanked him for catching the tail. Tony said you’re welcome and then excused himself to go check for “smooth,” now that we had just chased “rough” away.
Ari blinked at that and then grinned again. “You guys are good,” he said.
Tony slipped out the back door while we resumed our conversation at the kitchen table. Quartermain explained what he wanted from us.
“Just as the federal government runs what we call force-on-force drills on the fences,” he began, “I have some budget money to run technical intrusion drills on my side of the perimeter.”
“Define your side of the perimeter,” I said.
“There are three security circles around a nuclear plant: the so-called corporate area, the protected area, and the vital area. Corporate means the public can be there-hunting, fishing, et cetera-if they abide by the company’s rules for the use of the land.”
“No fences?”
“Nope-the first fence defines the protected area. That takes pass and ID access to get in. That’s the area around the industrial plant and its buildings.”
“And the vital area?”
“That’s where the dragon lives-defined as the area where access makes the release of radiological materials possible.”
“That’s a little fuzzy, isn’t it?”
“By design-the vital area is what we nukes say it is. Think layers. Snake Trask and his people patrol the corporate area. They’ll protect the fenced perimeter; they’ll defend the vital area, with deadly force if necessary. The system works in reverse, too.”
“You mean protecting the rest of us from the reactor?”
“Exactly. The nuclear reaction happens inside a stainless steel reactor vessel. That vessel lives in a concrete, lead, and steel containment dome. The dome lives in a steel building. Trask keeps bad guys out; my people and I keep the dragon in.”
“Which puts you in charge.”
Ari smiled. “Like I said before, if my dragon gets loose, the security of the physical perimeter is no longer the issue.”
“Can it get loose?” Pardee asked.
“Yes, most likely through human error, compounded by an instrumentation failure,” Ari said. “The Russians hold the world records, plural. The Chernobyl melt was a classic example of unsafe design compounded by human error. The low-order detonation in the Chelyabinsk district back in 1957 was simple Communist stupidity.”
He went on to describe how the Russians had kept filling a radioactive waste tank until it overpressurized, started a partial reaction, and then literally exploded, contaminating a six-hundred-square-mile area. They then took to dumping their waste into a nearby lake. When the lake dried up in a drought and the radioactive sediments blew away in the wind, it created a no-man’s land the size of Maryland, which exists to this day.
“How about our own Three Mile Island?” I asked.
“The RCS, that’s the reactor control system, detected a problem and shut itself down. Should have been end of story. But then a valve opened and stayed open, while reporting to the control room that it was closed. That drained out all the cooling water.”
“If the reactor was shut down, why was that a problem?”
“Because even after the fission reaction shuts down, the residual heat of decay is still very high. Without cooling water, it can melt the core assembly. That’s what happened at TMI before they realized the instruments were lying. What’s forgotten is that it all stayed inside the containment structure, that movie not withstanding.”
“We’re not exactly qualified in nuclear engineering,” I pointed out.