P Deutermann - The Moonpool

“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.

“I know,” he said, “but I’m talking about helping me with a different problem.”

“Somebody who is technically qualified, and who might be screwing around?” I said.

“Exactly.” He sipped some coffee and made a face. “Like what happened to Ms. Gardner.”

“So you do think that came from your plant?”

“Officially? That would be an unequivocal no. And I’ll defend that position for as long as I want to keep my job.”

“But.”

“Yeah. But. Fortunately for PrimEnergy and Helios, the feds are focusing elsewhere. There’s apparently been intel that the Islamists have given up the idea of smuggling in a nuclear bomb in favor of trying something with nuclear waste.”

“A dirty bomb instead of a Hiroshima bomb.”

“Yeah. A plutonium or a highly enriched uranium bomb has a very distinctive signature, and the ports-airports, seaports-are pretty much wired for that. Nuclear waste products, by definition, come in radiation-tight containers. No signature.”

“And Wilmington has a big container port,” Pardee said.

“Big enough. Not as big as Long Beach or L.A., but big enough, and about to double in size. A radioactive DOA in Wilmington set off all sorts of alarms. They’re going through the motions at Helios, but officially no one really believes that’s where this stuff came from. It would, simply stated, be much too hard.”

“But not impossible?” I asked.

He stood with his back to the sink and shrugged. “Actually, as an engineer, I’d think it would be very difficult, but, no, not impossible. And as the security officer it’s my job to exercise a little paranoia here.”

“You have somebody in mind?” I asked.

“It’s not so much one individual,” he said. “Look-technical security depends on three things in our industry: rigid adherence to approved engineering practices, a personnel reliability program, and the power industry’s version of what the military calls the two-man rule.”

“I believe,” I said, and he smiled.

“Okay. Briefly, here’s the idea. The two-man rule means no one individual is ever left in a situation where he could put the atomic reaction process at risk. Personnel reliability, or what we call fitness to serve, means that a guy who gets a DUI or gropes an undercover cop in a public men’s room gets looked at to see if he should keep his ticket as a plant or reactor operator. And procedure means just that: line-by-line read-back procedures for everything that happens in the control room or in the plant itself. One guy reads the operating procedure, say, for lining up the steam system, and a second guy reads it back to him before actually doing it.”

“That must be really slow.”

“It’s tedious, but reliable. It also requires a certain degree of technical openness. Nothing happens behind closed doors.”

“So?”

“So, if somebody tapped a source of radioactive water in the Helios plant, he would have to have violated all three wedges of technical security.”

I thought about the appearance of a tail on Quartermain’s visit out here today. “Would he need some help from the physical security department?”

He nodded. “Yes, I’d think so, and that’s the one division at Helios which is comparatively opaque. There’s a cast of dozens involved in bringing a reactor online and feeding the grid. But most of the time, nobody knows what the hell Trask’s people are doing.”

“Except following you around and breaking into my hotel room, presumably just because you and I met.”

“Well, there is that.”

“But I thought Trask worked for you-why not just fire his ass?”

“Truth?”

“Please.”

“My theory is that he’s got something on the director, because every time I’ve voiced my ‘concerns’ up the line, I get shut down. Can’t prove that, of course, but that’s what I’m beginning to think.”

“So you want us to take a look at them? Trask, his people, and any possible ties to the director?”

“Yeah.”

Before Quartermain could elaborate, Tony Martinelli came back into the kitchen from outside. He looked pleased with himself, which worried me a little bit. He saw the expression on my face and waved me off.

“It’s cool,” he said. “But not what I expected.”

“Ree-port.”

He looked at Quartermain and raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, Okay for him to hear this? I motioned for him to continue.

“Okay, so I go around the block, walk towards downtown for five minutes, turn around, and come back towards the house on the beachfront street. Just another tourist, out for some fresh salt air and a cigarette. And one block away, parked on the beach side of the street, I come upon a Bureau ride, complete with two specials sitting in the front seat trying to look inconspicuous.”

“In their suits and ties. At the beach.”

“But they were such inconspicuous suits.”

“Can you describe the agents-a man and a woman, perhaps?”

“Negative. Just the usual Buroids with the usual sunglasses and happy faces. They looked bored.”