P Deutermann - The Moonpool

“Should we mask up?” I asked Ari, but he had drifted away again, his head lolling on his chin while he mumbled something incomprehensible.

We examined the main door, which indeed had no handles-but it did have hinges.

“I’ll get the masks,” I told Tony. “You’ve got two good arms: Take the axe to those hinges, see if you can get ’em off.”

Ari rolled over to the floor like a sinking ship while I went into the cabinet and pulled out four masks. They were attached to canisters, which were either oxygen generators or an air-mixture chemical, I couldn’t tell which. Tony was hacking away with the fire axe at the middle hinge with some effect. There were more red lights on the control panel, and I noticed one that was labeled STACK TEMP. Its needle was red-lined, and the indicated temperature was certainly high enough to boil water, which was probably why the windows were now totally obscured.

Tony had the middle hinge destroyed and was hacking away at the bottom one. The top one would be tough, as there was no room to get a proper swing at it. I donned one mask and adjusted the straps. Then I put another one on Ari. His eyes came back into focus and looked at me with a glare of apprehension. When I saw his cheeks puff out, I ripped the mask off and pointed his face into a trashcan as the ether displayed one of its more disgusting side effects. He puked his guts out for over a minute. I pulled the tab on my canister, and the air was suddenly much better. Then there was a serious bang from the door, and Tony stepped back away from it as a second bang hit the structure. Someone was hammering on it from the other side, and the bottom half of the door was slanting open from the top hinge.

“Here,” I yelled at Tony, pitching him a mask. As cops we were familiar with firefighting gear, and he knew how to don and activate the mask. The hammering on the main door continued, and we could see light from under the door.

“Gimme that axe,” I said.

Tony passed it over and asked what I was going to do.

“You stay here, handle the cavalry. I’m going after Trask.”

“Thanks a heap,” he said. “And what do I tell all those happy campers out there?”

“Tell ’em the moonpool’s boiling,” I said, standing back and taking a semi-mighty swing at the hatch handle. “Oh, and tell ’em Thomason’s still out there.”

I hit the hatch handle again, and this time I heard something metallic clanging down the ladder underneath. I tried the handle, and it rotated. I opened the hatch and snapped it back. The hole underneath revealed that the lights were still out, but I didn’t fear an ambush. Trask had done what he’d come to do: create pandemonium at the plant, and soon out in the civilian population if that big siren meant what I thought it did. His water-poisoning scheme might not work from an engineering point of view, but that had never been his objective. Breach plant security from the inside and cause a major radiation emergency in the moonpool. Create mass confusion, alarm the whole countryside with reports of radiation in the drinking water and a possible meltdown at the plant, and generate months’ worth of investigations and horrific publicity.

I went down the ladder, awkwardly because of the breathing mask, and pulled the hatch shut just as the main control room door came crashing down in a flood of white light and several figures in moonsuits came piling into the control room, all talking at once. I was relieved to see no one pointing guns. This was the technical staff.

I slipped down the ladder to the mezzanine level, went to the closed door, and listened. There was more activity out in the stairwell, but it still sounded more like technicians than cops. The emergency lighting was still on in the pump machinery room, even though the stairwell lights had been turned back on. I took down one of the lights and searched for the escape trunk, which I found at the back corner of the room. The hatch was open and waiting.

I turned around to go down and then hesitated. Trask would have been in a hurry, but would he have left the hatch open like this? I knelt down, shone the light beam down the ladder, and tried to see what was in the room below. The ladder went straight down at least fifteen feet onto a concrete floor.

The ladder.

I felt the top rung and tested the ladder’s strength. The top fixtures came right out of their sockets, and the whole thing began to lean backward into the room below. I had to pull hard just to hold on to it.

Nice try, Colonel, I thought. If I’d jumped onto that thing in a hurry, I’d have gone over backward onto the concrete and whatever else down there. I wedged the top of the ladder frame against the top sockets and went to look for some substitute pins. The best I could come up with was some pieces of electrical wire until I remembered the ladder coming down into the mezzanine room. It had pins securing the bottom fixtures. I removed these and set them into the next ladder, clambered aboard, and went down as fast as I could, my feet hitting every other rung. I was glad for the mask, because the oxygen-enriched atmosphere was giving me a real energy boost, which I sorely needed.

At the bottom I shone the emergency light around the darkened room, which had no battery-operated lights of its own. This room was much smaller than the equipment and machinery rooms above, and held nothing other than four steel clothes lockers. Three were locked; one was not. I opened that one and found four bags of dry cleaning hanging in clear plastic. Each bag contained a uniform, the same ones worn by all the contract cops. One looked big enough, so I went to the door, listened, and heard two men arguing out in the security anteroom about the best way to get more fire hoses up to the moonpool.

I shucked my wet clothes and put on the largest uniform, which fit well enough. I rolled my clothes into a wet ball and stuffed them behind the lockers. There was one well-used blue ball cap on top of the lockers marked with the word SECURITY. I retied my boots and went to the door.

What I needed now was to get out of this building and acquire a weapon on the way out. I tried the door handle from my side, twisting it in slow motion. It seemed to be working. I released it back to the neutral position and tried to think. One guy out there sounded like he was on a phone while the other was feeding him information. If I stepped out of here with the mask on, they’d assume I was one of them, at least for a moment. Then I heard a crowd of people come into the anteroom and lots of voices. The voices sounded muffled-were they in masks? I cracked the door and discovered an entire crew of suited-up technicians, all wearing masks similar to mine, and all carrying various pieces of handheld test equipment. Now was the moment.

I stepped through the door, behind most of the people crowding the anteroom. The two security guards, who were not wearing masks, were overwhelmed checking everyone in. I walked as casually as I could over to the front door and stepped out into the night air. Unfortunately, there was another security guard out there, incredibly, given all the alarms, smoking a cigarette, and he was one of the original two guards we’d chained up under the desk. He was wearing a Colt M4 strapped over his right shoulder now, and he blinked when I stepped out. I saw recognition flare into his eyes, so I didn’t hesitate-I stepped into him, punched him once in his overlarge gut, and then put him out with a medium-strength rabbit to the base of his neck. I let him down easily onto the concrete steps, dragged him around to some bushes by the door, took off the breathing rig, and very happily relieved him of that lovely Colt and the spare clip of ammo.

Then I began trotting down the walk toward the tailrace, suddenly very aware of that big-voiced siren blaring into the night air, telling the citizens of Brunswick County that there was trouble, big trouble, right here in River City. The good news was that I didn’t see anything, vaporous or otherwise, spewing out of the spent fuel storage building, even though there were now big red strobe lights going on all four corners. I hoped that calling it a containment building wasn’t just a PR expression.