Going Dark(106)

“The pool?”

Thorn nodded, coming closer to the man, holding both palms up. Stay calm, stay calm, don’t bolt.

“Oh, fuck. Not the fuel rods.”

“Where?” Thorn said quietly. “Which way?”

The man turned and pointed toward the domed building where the nuclear reactors turned water to steam to spin the turbines.

“South of the containment building.” The man started away, then stopped. “That can’t happen. A bomb, something that big in the pool, no, it would be…”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Is it just you? You’re here alone?”

“I can manage.”

“Oh, holy Christ.” The man dropped his briefcase and sprinted off toward the distant parking area.

At the entrance door to the one-story building, Thorn stopped and listened. Inside he made out the grind of machinery, big gears meshing, and a rhythmic clank like a tire jack lifting an enormous weight notch by notch. The door was ajar.

Behind him the networks of roads and cart paths were filled with people and vehicles, alarms sounding and distant sirens.

The lights faded, then died out completely.

The mechanical clamor inside the structure ceased. Across the grounds a scattering of battery-powered emergency lights were still glowing, and a few vehicle headlamps swept their beams along the sides of buildings, but most of the vast industrial park had fallen into shadows.

Off to the north across the bay, the rosy haze that floated above Miami had vanished, and the bright feast of stars and galaxies and distant suns that was lost every night behind the shield of artificial light had reappeared.

Thorn slipped into the building. A metal ramp underfoot, pebbled to prevent slippage. A glow in the air. Blue and green light, the soft turquoise of a bonefish flat covered by a sheet of crystal salt water on a summer’s afternoon.

Before him on the ramp a man in a white jumpsuit and white hard hat and orange rubber boots and gloves was sprawled with one arm slung out to his side like a drowning man stretching for a lifeline. Thorn knelt and felt for a pulse. Blood everywhere. No heartbeat. Two gunshot wounds that he could see.

Thorn rose and inched forward along the ramp. His damaged leg was throbbing and that knee felt spongy. But it still worked, still kept him upright.

Tubular rails ran along either side of the ramp. The exposed ducts of an air-conditioning system wrapped around the giant room. Plastic barrels and heavily insulated wires and cables were strung along the framework of the machinery.

All the girders and the ramp itself and the steel beams that supported the walls and the roof as well as the lifters and cranes of every size were painted a brash yellow, made even more garish by the tint of the blue glow that filled the room. An unnatural light, Thorn realized. Not the saltwater flats at all. In fact, their opposite.

This was the eerie radiance of enriched uranium-235 pellets inserted into rods, those rods extracted fresh from the reactor’s core, packed tightly into bundles, then stored in racks and crammed into the refrigerated water where they would stay for decades until their radioactivity subsided enough for them to be transferred to dry casks somewhere else on the property. All in all hundreds of tons of uranium still hot from the reactor made the water glow as blue and unearthly as glacier ice.

His long-ago science teacher had explained it all in that mousetrap lecture, and in the last few days Flynn and Leslie had briefed him again. For decades they’d used the same primitive system. An indoor Olympic pool, the uranium sunk below forty feet of water to buffer the radioactivity and slowly, slowly cool the elements. Now with the main power off and the backup diesels disabled, the neutron absorber and circulating water system were both shut down. In only minutes this water would boil, turn to steam, and then those solid materials would catch fire. Wally had done his job, now Pauly was trying to do the unimaginable. Set off one giant, dirty bomb.

The ramp where Thorn stood seemed to be an observation deck. Running directly below him was an identical ramp where workers operated the spent-fuel machinery, adding or subtracting more bundles.

A few feet ahead, lying across his path, were two more white-suited workers, their uniforms blotted with red. Chest wounds. Two stories below he saw their automatic weapons lying on the lip of the pool.

Feeling the tremor of footsteps on the ramp below him, Thorn leaned over the railing and saw Pauly Chee inching up behind another white-suited security man, who was armed with an automatic pistol.

Thorn turned away and tried to project his voice out into the big room.

“FBI! Stop where you are. Thrown down your weapons.”

While Thorn mounted the railing, both men halted. Pauly looking behind him, the security guy swinging around, shocked to find Pauly so close.