P Deutermann - The Moonpool

I was about to expand on these sentiments when I realized that one of the white-suited techs was standing behind me. He took off his headgear. Her headgear. I’d formed a mental image of a fullback-shouldered Madame Khrushchev when Ari had told me about Comrade Dr. Martin, but this was most definitely not the case.

“Did I hear my homeland being mentioned?” she said, shaking out a wave of platinum-blond hair. She was one of those chiseled Slavic beauties, with pronounced cheekbones, bright ice-blue eyes, and a challenging mouth. I could hear the Eastern European accent, but she’d obviously been in the States for some time. I’d paid no attention to the “guys” in the baggy white suits, or I would have noticed that one suit wouldn’t necessarily be called baggy.

Ari introduced us, explaining that I was a professional investigator, and that I’d been contracted to help him with an internal problem. She gave him a quizzical look, and me a condescending smile. Then recognition dawned in those polar eyes.

“Ah, yes, the policeman with the Alsatian dogs,” she said, extending a gloved hand.

We shook hands clumsily through all the protective gear. Her grip was firm, and, based on the mildly amused look on her face, she’d overheard my sentiments regarding the presence of a Russian on the staff in the vital area of the plant. I mumbled something polite, which she ignored. She turned back to Ari to ask what more he had heard about the incident last night. He demurred and said he hadn’t any further data at the moment. She smoothed her hair one more time and then looked back at me.

“Are you a technical person, Mr. Richter?” she asked. “An engineer, perhaps?”

“Afraid not,” I said. “Just run-of-the-mill police.”

“Oh,” she said with a distinctly dismissive smile. “And you don’t care much for Russians, do you?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I think they belong in Russia.”

“But America is the land of opportunity, yes?”

“As a policeman, all the Russians I’ve ever met were savages, whose idea of opportunity in America was to rape, maim, steal, and kill. Seeing as you’re a Ph. D. and working here, I guess I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“Well, my goodness,” she exclaimed, stepping back away from me. “You are beginning to remind me of the police back in my birth country. I thought your job as a policeman was to protect and defend.”

“To protect and defend Americans,” I said.

“I’m an American citizen, you ignorant oaf!”

“Anna,” Ari said.

She glared at me again, relayed some technical information in nuke-speak to Ari, and then stomped off to rejoin her team. Or tried to-it’s hard to stomp in paper boots.

Ari was grinning at me. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “She has a temper, and you did step on her toes just a wee bit.”

“Do I look sad?” I asked.

“You look like every other normal male who meets her for the first time,” he said, still smiling. “She’s hardcore about her job and her science, though. She just fired one of her senior techs for breaking protocol on an emergency procedure exercise. When it comes to the moonpool, she’s serious as a heart attack.”

“Then how did some of this evil shit get loose?” I asked, pointing with my chin at the glowing pool.

“Good question, Mr. Investigator,” he replied evenly.

In other words, There’s your mission impossible, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it. I told him about my guys’ reservations after last night’s circus on the pier, and that I’d told them they could back out if they wanted to. He actually thought that might simplify things. One stranger wandering around the complex ought to attract less attention than three.

“I’ll need their badges back,” he reminded me.

“Does Comrade Martin know that the stuff on the truck might have come from here?” I asked.

“She will as soon as I file the NRC report,” he said. “She will feature prominently in the resulting internal investigation.”

“Is that control room over there manned 24/7?”

“No,” he said. “Just when they’re running tests or some other evolution. Otherwise, there’s no one up here.”

I hesitated before asking the next question, but there was no way around it. “If the NRC is going to investigate this from the outside, and the company’s going to be turning over rocks from the inside, and the Bureau is going to be watching both, tell me again what you want me to do?”

He glanced around the steel deck once more. Dr. Martin and her techs had disappeared, and we were alone with the moonpool and its unearthly glow. It looked like some Northern Lights had drowned down there.

“Do you know what a Red Team is?” he asked.

I did not.

“It’s a government expression, normally used in war gaming. When the government conducts a war game, it postulates a hypothetical crisis scenario, and then pits a group of actual government officials against the crisis. These are real officials, but they’re role-playing. Someone from the White House staff will play the president. Another person, say from the Defense Department, will play the role of secretary of defense.”

“Yeah, I’ve read about those.”

“Right. The game directors gather them into a room and throw a tabletop crisis situation at them. They work the problem until they either solve it or it beats them. The good guys are called the Blue Team.”

“I believe.”

“Good. The Red Team sits in another room and reacts to what the Blue Team does, typically by throwing complications into the game. The idea is to make the war game truly dynamic, and to test how well the Blue Team can handle an evolving crisis situation when all their nicely preplanned contingency plans go off the tracks. Plus, the Red Team is privy to the Blue Team’s assumptions and contingency plans before the game starts. They hit those assumptions, and the Blue Team now has to deal with a changing crisis situation.”

“So the Red Team people are the bad guys.”

“Exactly. The Blue Team assumes their simulated Katrina relief convoys can get to New Orleans on the interstates. The Red Team knocks out all the bridges.”

“So you want me to act like a bad guy? See if I can get through the perimeter, break in here and swipe some radioactive water or some spent fuel rods, then go package it and, what? Sell it?”

“Not exactly,” he said patiently. “Unless you have a death wish. But here’s the problem: The NRC’s going to come in here this time and try to prove that radioactive water got loose from Helios, either from the moonpool or somewhere else in the reactor system.”

“Reasonable reaction,” I said.

“PrimEnergy has to defend itself, and the company is going to take the position that it not only didn’t happen but couldn’t happen. Now: Unless some unhappy camper stands up and confesses to a crime that would jail him for about ten successive life sentences, it’s going to end in a Mexican standoff.”

“Which would suit the company, right?”

“Frankly, I think that would suit the government, as well. They don’t even want to hear that there’s been a clandestine radiological release from an operating plant, because that would probably lead to an industry-wide shutdown of this type of nuclear power plant.”

“Why all of them?”

“Because the security system here is common to all of them. It would be a very big deal. Nobody at the NRC or in the industry wants to do that.”

“You’re telling me the NRC would cover it up?”

“No, no, not if they find something concrete, some glowing gun, so to speak. But if it turns into a stone-cold mystery, they’ll ‘study’ it. They might keep probing, but, basically, they’ll keep all the BWR plants turning and burning.”