Then I pressed the switch hook down, detached the handset, and crunched it under my foot. I pointed to the access door, and Tony nodded.
“You wait here and watch these two,” I said in a loud voice while we both went to the door. “They start some shit, you finish it, okay?”
“Got it,” Tony said in the same stage tone, giving the desk a kick and racking the slide on his Glock.
“And Sergeant?” I said. “Deadly force is authorized.”
“Yes, sir,” Tony replied dutifully.
The term “deadly force is authorized” was something both guards, even civilian rent-a-cops, would recognize. It might give us a few more minutes before they figured it out. Tony tried the door handle. The door opened. We went through and softly shut the door. A video camera looked right at us as we stepped through the door-but, once again, no red light. Mad Moira was good, really good.
The spent fuel storage building was built like a two-layered Chinese box, a building within a building. The inner box was the moonpool, surrounded by its really thick concrete walls. It was four and a half stories from top to bottom. The outer box contained the support systems for the moonpool on three levels: ground floor, mezzanine, and top floor. The bottom level was concerned with access and maintenance spaces, surrounding the inner box on four sides. The mezzanine contained pumping and handling machinery, and the top level gave access to the surface of the moonpool and the control room. One main stairwell gave access to all three levels via separately locked vestibules, supervised by access card readers and video surveillance systems. There were four flights of steel stairs between each two levels. We were standing on the bottom, looking up, when all the fluorescent lights went out.
The first thing that happened was that the emergency battery-powered lights came on, providing at least some illumination in the concrete stairwell. I tried the door marked EQUIPMENT ROOM NO. 7, but it was locked. Tony tried to pry open the door back into the guards’ anteroom without making any noise, but it, too, was locked. We had our borrowed guns out now, and we each put an ear to the anteroom door to see if we could hear the guards moving around in there, but it was all quiet on that front.
“Up?” Tony whispered.
“Can’t dance,” I muttered, so we started up the steel stairs. We could see between the flights all the way to the top of the stairwell, but the higher we looked, the darker it got. Four flights later we arrived at the mezzanine level. There was one door that led into the moonpool’s section, marked TRANSFER amp; HANDLING MACHINERY, and three unmarked doors leading out into the exterior ring of the building. The three exterior doors were locked; the machinery room was not.
This door opened out into the landing area. We looked inside, but saw nothing but large pumps, switchboards, a maze of piping, and what looked like the top section of an elevator hoisting cable assembly. We couldn’t figure out how all this tied into the pool’s access, although I caught a glimpse of a wall ladder leading up to the next level all the way at the back. The emergency lights didn’t reveal how high it went.
“Next level’s the pool deck and control rooms,” I said. “There’s another security force anteroom up there.”
“So why didn’t they react to the ruckus down below?” Tony asked while he made sure no one was lurking behind the big pumps.
I patted the wall, which Ari had said was ten feet thick. If the slabs between floors were anywhere near that thick, no sounds would penetrate. Large radiation warning triangles were painted all along the back wall of the pump room.
“Let’s see where that ladder goes,” I said and worked my way through all the machinery to the back wall. The emergency lights barely shone back here, and the ceiling of the room, some fifteen or even eighteen feet above us, was dark. Tony went to one of the emergency lights and took it down off its mounting so he could point it upward. At the top of the ladder we saw a steel scuttle hatch, complete with a circular operating ring on the underside.
“Emergency escape hatch?” Tony said.
“From here or from the moonpool?” I wondered. Since we hadn’t seen any control consoles in here, all of this machinery was probably remotely operated, which meant that this was an unmanned space. So the hatch had to be a way out for someone on the moonpool deck itself. The big question now was where it came out-in a separate airlock, or right out in the open?
Then from down the stairwell we heard the bang of the door being opened back against the wall and voices. The guards had figured out they were alone and had finally summoned some backup. Tony closed the machinery room door and looked for some way to wedge it shut. There was nothing in the room that would help us.
“Up the ladder,” I said. “Gimme that light.”
Tony started up while I broke the light’s bulb and lens and put it back on the wall. There were two other lights still going in the room, but they didn’t illuminate the top of the ladder. I started up as the noise from the stairwell grew louder. Several guards were out there, but they were being really careful because they knew we had the anteroom guards’ weapons. A gunfight in a concrete and steel stairwell is a scary thing, as I knew from personal experience. If the shooter didn’t get you, the ricochets might.
Tony climbed as high as he could and then swung to one side of the ladder so I could get as high as he was. We hung there, listening to the people out in the stairwell.
“They come in here, see us, point weapons, we give it up, right?” Tony asked quietly.
I nodded. I wasn’t going to shoot it out with cops who were just doing their duty, even if they were rent-a-cops. While we waited, Tony tried the operating ring. It was really stiff, but it did move, and he began to turn it counterclockwise. There were steel lugs embedded in the rim of the hatch, and we could see them begin to retract as he turned the wheel, degree by degree, slowly in case the hatch was visible to someone up above us. I tried to remember the layout of the pool deck, and whether or not there’d been a round, steel escape hatch in the floor anywhere.
The door below us banged open, and a voice yelled for us to throw down our weapons and come out with our hands in sight. There was still only emergency lighting out in the stairwell, so there was no blaze of light when they opened the door. Tony kept working the wheel in tiny increments, stopping every time one of the lugs made a noise. I watched as one of the cops stuck his head through the door behind his gun and then jerked it back. A moment later, three cops swept into the room below us and made a quick search of all the machinery. No one had a flashlight, thank God.
“Clear,” one of them announced, and a voice outside swore. They withdrew from the machinery room as a discussion ensued out in the stairwell. One of them said that we had to be up on the pool level, but another argued that there was no way we could have gained access because all the vital area readers were locked up. More back-and-forth like that as they tried to decide what to do, and it was clear that they did not fancy climbing the next four flights of stairs with two armed bad guys up there. Tony nudged me-the hatch was unlocked.
He pressed his forehead up into the dome of the hatch and signaled for me to push up on the operating ring. He looked like a submarine skipper raising the periscope to take a look. A thin line of white light appeared around the rim of the hatch, and I wished those cops had closed the machinery room door when they withdrew. Anyone looking in right now would see us, and they were still all standing around down there arguing about what to do next. Tony dropped the hatch quietly back into place.
“Control room, I think,” he whispered. “I could see chair legs, consoles, a trashcan, and a coffeepot.”
“People?”
“Not where I could see ’em,” he said, “but there’s a chair damn near on top of the hatch. All the lights are on up there.”
This all made sense: If there was some kind of problem out there on the moonpool deck, the technicians would run for the safety of the control room, which had glass walls and sealing doors. From there they could go out via one of the security doors. If things really got out of hand, like a fire in the stairwell, they still had a way out-down the escape hatch. There was probably a second hatch embedded in the floor of the pump machinery room that we hadn’t seen.