Going Dark(39)
“In an abundance of caution—” Ms. Sheen began, but Frank raised his hand and cut her short.
“What you want is for the FBI to give you cover, then if something bad happens, we get the blame.”
“You’re misreading our intentions,” she said. “A drill is simply a motivational tool. We want everyone at Turkey Point working at their highest level of efficiency, and we believe this is one way to accomplish that goal.”
“Might take a little more than a drill,” Frank said.
“That’s a laugh,” Claude said. “The feds lecturing us about efficiency.”
Claude pushed his chair back, stood, and looked for a moment as if he were about to leap across the table and try to bite off some of Frank’s soft tissue. Then Claude produced that slimy smile and left the room.
“He’s getting the scale model,” Sheen explained with a vacant smile.
While they waited, Nicole small-talked with Sheen, playing the geography game: Where’ve you been based, where’d you grow up?
Frank looked out the window, watching the steam swirl from the cooling towers, disappearing into an achingly blue sky. Watching birds change course around the monster vent stacks, thinking about the plant, the three thousand acres, how hard it would be to defend this place against a determined enemy.
The way force-on-force worked, an attack team was chosen by the NRC to go up against the plant’s privately trained security force. Before the drill took place, both sides gathered around a tabletop mock-up of the plant or ran computer simulations. The feds proposed assault scenarios, the plant security team offered responses, the feds coming back with countermeasures to those responses, brainstorming back and forth for a day or two, war games meant to tighten security protocols.
Tabletop drills preceded the actual force-on-force exercise by a few weeks. Enough time for the plant security team to fix the flaws discovered in the mock-ups. And to tweak operational procedures, harden their perimeters, add personnel, repair any weak links in their communications network.
Thirty years back, Sheffield, a youngster, was assigned to his first force-on-force team. Gung ho going in. But by the end of the drill, he saw the whole deal was about as rigorous as a neighborhood game of capture the flag. Guys firing blanks at other guys firing blanks. Clunky, inefficient, and silly. Evaluators were posted throughout the area with binoculars and clipboards. Hard to score, hard to get a real feel for the vulnerability of the plant or the skill of the defense team.
Tedious, too. Because of the FBI’s high standard for safety, before the drill even started, Frank and the rest of the team had to spend hours checking every round to be sure no live ammo inadvertently slipped into the mix.
These days it was laser tag. Light-sensitive vests worn by all participants, weapons that projected red laser dots. Easier to track and quantify after the drill was done: plug everyone’s equipment into the computer, get a printout of exactly who shot whom and where and when. But to Frank it still felt like capture the flag, the video version. A fucking joke.
The NRC ran computer simulations of various aircraft crashing into the containment structures, and they developed strategies to combat overwhelming force—sheer numbers of attackers coming from multiple directions. According to the computer models, the steel-reinforced concrete structures could withstand the crash of a passenger jet without catastrophic damage to the reactor, and there were workable ways to call in reinforcements from local law enforcement agencies in time to counter a large-scale assault. But Frank had serious doubts about those working in the real world.
Somehow, after all these years, force-on-force continued to be the gold standard for judging the security of nuke plants. To make matters even more Mickey Mouse, the NRC limited the drill to six on six. Six on the assault team going up against six plant-security guys. The drill happening in a previously agreed-upon window of three days.
Not once had Sheffield seen them game out the use of insiders. All it took was one guy behind the scenes toggling the right switch, or sabotaging a circuit board, and the best security plan was worthless.
That first time, when he’d seen how shabby the force-on-force drill was, Frank protested. Wrote memos, even took a meeting in DC, flying up on his own dime. All the congressional aides were respectful, scribbling notes, listening, asking a few questions, but nothing came of it.
And why not? Because the system was fucked. Same revolving door that operated throughout Washington. People like Emily Sheen put in a few years with the NRC, then left for cushy lobbying jobs with the power companies they used to regulate. And guys from power companies in a fit of public-spiritedness filled Emily’s position for a while, policing their old pals. An endless daisy chain of collusion and back-scratching. Everybody giving everybody else a big benefit of the doubt.