“I have a question, Ms. Sheen.”
“You’re dealing with me, Sheffield, not her.”
Frank kept his eyes on the woman from the NRC. “I assume when Homeland Security’s whiz kids removed the ELF image from the servers, they also did a thorough housecleaning of the closed loop. Scrubbed any malware, infections, repaired any changes to the server root directory. If they didn’t do that, or didn’t do it thoroughly, the whole system is vulnerable to stack overflows, denial of service.”
There was silence. Claude glared across the table at Sheffield, and he could feel Nicole’s eyes on him, too.
Sheffield said, “Who’s your head computer guy? The one that sets the Group Policies? Rules for the level of encryption and security protocols.”
“We bring people in,” Claude said.
“You got temps running your system monitoring?”
“Computer experts, local geeks. They do excellent work.”
“That’s nuts,” Frank said to Sheen. “Hiring outside techies, who knows what they know or don’t know? The problem is, the closed loop is your buffer, it’s the one thing that keeps some teenager in his bedroom from taking over your reactor and blowing it sky-high. As it stands, the closed loop could be compromised and you wouldn’t know it.
“All it would take, somebody installs a network interface card in a single computer on the loop, then that machine communicates with a wireless access point, which could be something as simple as somebody’s smartphone. Bingo, the closed loop isn’t closed anymore. It’s wide open to the Internet.”
“I’m sure Homeland Security did everything possible,” Sheen said. “I have no doubt they combed the entire system. I’ll be happy to pass on the Post Attack Vector Analysis. All their findings.”
“Do that,” Sheffield said. “I want it tomorrow first thing. And I’m sending one of our cyberjocks out here to double-check.”
“Of course,” Sheen said. “I’m sure Mr. Sellers and his staff will have no objection.”
Claude rolled his eyes. “So we’re done here?”
Ignoring him, Frank went on, “What we’ve not considered is the fact that someone apparently spent a good deal of time probing the network. It appears that person had access to a power-plant computer for several hours, and that person is still unknown.”
“Whoever it was, we got it covered,” Claude said. “New protocols. You can’t throw a goddamn light switch in the plant without me knowing about it.”
Frank stood, stepped around Nicole, and reached a hand out to the reactor building. Twenty-five stories tall, it was about four inches high in the scale model. He touched a fingertip to the containment building. “Boiling water to keep the lights on.”
“It’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that,” said Claude.
“Sure, there’s the smashing-atoms part, but that’s just to make steam to spin a turbine to keep everybody’s iPods charged, right?”
“Nuclear energy is the cleanest source of fuel we have. Lowest carbon emissions per kilowatt.” Ms. Sheen was smiling brightly. No doubt she’d stood before hundreds of antinuke gatherings and had all the rejoinders to all the critiques.
Sheffield glanced down at the floor of the control room. He could spend a month out there, hire a personal tutor, and he still wouldn’t grasp what all that circuitry was for. He doubted anyone in ELF would have that kind of expertise either, meaning they weren’t planning on being surgical, but probably meant to execute some kind of blunt-force trauma.
Frank took out his silver keychain. One of two things he’d inherited from his old man. The Silver Sands Motel and a silver keychain with a small cigarette lighter attached. Sheffield didn’t smoke, but he kept the lighter operational. A corny nod to his dad. Keeping the Sheffield flame alive.
“So anyway I’m looking at this little three-story, square building. The one that’s half-buried in the coral rock.” Frank pointed at the grayish cube that was positioned dead center on the plywood board. “I don’t think that was on our tour, Claude.”
Claude gave him a sleepy look. “Couldn’t show you every damn thing. We’d still be out there.”
Sheffield came around the table. Claude watched him edge closer, stiffening in his chair.
“Last time I was out here,” Sheffield said, “doing force-on-force, our target of choice wasn’t the reactor or the diesel generators, or any red button in the control room. We weren’t trying to shut the place down. We were trying to blow it the hell up. We were doing a suicide run like the jihadists and true believers would try. Our target was the seventy-five thousand metric tons of spent fuel rods you people have been accumulating for the last thirty-five years.”