Deep Fire Rising - v4 (6 page)

“Nuclear physicist,” she replied in a remarkably deep voice.

The answer surprised Mercer. He looked to Ira.

“A lot more than testing aircraft takes place here,” the admiral explained. “All of it under complete compartmentalization. Hell, I only know a few things under development and I’m on the president’s staff.”

“A case of the right hand not knowing what the left is up to?” Mercer joked.

“The personnel here don’t even know there is a left hand,” Dr. Marie deadpanned.

“Even with your top secret clearance,” Ira went on, “I had to pull some strings so you’d know the details of this operation. The men you’ll be working with have no idea.”

Mercer got a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the weather. He’d spent enough time with Ira to fairly judge his moods. The stress lines around his eyes and on his forehead hadn’t been there the last time they’d shared a drink at Tiny’s. And his pallor went far beyond a normal end-of-winter hue. “What’s going on here, Ira?”

Briana Marie answered, “There’s been an accident. People are dead. We need you to carry on with their work.”

The whistle of wind beyond the hangar doors sounded like a mourning dirge.

Mercer learned he’d be spending the night at the main complex. Tomorrow he’d be taken to an even more secret base on the Area 51 grounds, a place Ira called DS-Two. Ira asked Captain Sykes to show him to his billet in a building behind the hangar. A metal roof covered the walkway, presumably to hide foot traffic from orbital observation.

The room was like any hotel Mercer had ever stayed at, only the door locked from the outside. To leave, he had to buzz a uniformed staffer seated in the barracks’ reception area. He took his first shower since Canada, thirty-six hours and roughly five thousand air miles ago. Returning west had fortunately nullified his jet lag. As the scalding water sluiced across his body, he thought of the old joke about a harried tourist on a package tour. “Oh, it’s Monday. Then this must be Rome.”

By the time he’d toweled dry, he’d figured out what Dr. Marie was working on. With Yucca Mountain only a short distance away, the answer was obvious.

Sykes was waiting for him at the reception desk when the corporal on duty allowed him out of his room.

“Is this your regular posting?” Mercer asked as Sykes led him across the facility.

“Nah,” Sykes drawled. “Me and my team have been here a month.”

“Team?”

“Delta Force.” This was the army’s elite hostage rescue team. “If you don’t mind a little free advice, Doc, I’ve learned you get along better out here if you don’t ask too many questions.”

Despite their awkward introduction, Mercer found he liked the soldier. He’d already realized his slow demeanor wasn’t laziness. Rather, Sykes possessed a cool deliberation, as if he knew when he woke each morning every action his body would take and every word he’d need to speak. It was only a matter of doling them out at the right time.

“And let me guess,” Mercer commented, “one question is too many?”

Sykes grinned. “You’re catching on.”

Sykes led him to a nondescript building, a slab-sided office cube with the architectural flair of a Soviet apartment house. Most of the base had been built in the 1960s and substantially expanded in the ’80s, yet it retained the Cold War sterility of its roots. The buildings Mercer could see were laid out in geometric blocs. There was no ornamentation, no landscaping and certainly no streetlights.

Nor, he noticed, were there any people. It was like walking around a postapocalyptic ghost town.

“Kinda creepy, huh?” Sykes seemed to be reading Mercer’s thoughts as they reached the building’s door. “I guess the isolation really gets to some of the people out here, having to live under cover all the time. A couple days after I got here, a bunch of the younger soldiers were given permission to put on a show for a Chinese spy satellite.”

“What’d they do?” Mercer followed Sykes to a flight of stairs. The building’s interior was as drab as the outside.

“They laid themselves out on the runway in nothing but their birthday suits. They used their bodies to spell out ‘Up yours, Mao.’ ”

Mercer laughed. “Would the Chinese be able to see it?”

“Shit, they’ve stolen enough of our technology to be able to tell which ones were circumcised.”

At the head of the stairs, Sykes opened a paneled door into a conference room, then told Mercer that Ira would escort him back to his room. The two men shook hands at their parting.

Heavy drapes were drawn over the room’s picture window, and banker’s lamps reflected puddles of cherry light off the burnished table. Along one wall were photographs of the U-2 spy plane. Ira sat at the head of the table, his jacket draped over his chair. He’d had the foresight to bring a bottle of his favorite Scotch and a bucket of ice.

Mercer accepted a glass gratefully. Though not a Scotch drinker, this had shaped up to be one of those days. Dr. Marie, on Ira’s left, drank from a bottle of water.

Sitting opposite the physicist, Mercer saluted them both with his drink, knocked it back in two quick swallows then shredded their veil of secrecy with his accurate hypothesis. “You’re building a subterranean repository for undocumented nuclear waste, like what the Department of Energy is constructing at Yucca Mountain.”

The silence had the weight of lead.

Dr. Marie finally managed to stammer, “How did you…,” before her voice failed her.

Ira merely laughed.

For half a century America’s nuclear power plants had been splitting untold tons of radioactive material to extract its energy. The result was a vastly more concentrated product than what went into the reactors, a deadly waste that wouldn’t lose its lethality for millennia. The short-term solution had been to store this waste in cooling pools at the plants. The only viable long-term disposal method was to find a suitable place to bury it and hope to God that they could put a heavy enough cork on it to keep the nuclear genie in its bottle.

Work was currently under way to construct a pair of fourteen-mile tunnels a thousand feet below Yucca Mountain. The waste would be stored in rooms excavated off these tunnels. Even with the water table lying a further thousand feet below the repository, extraordinary measures were to be taken to prevent seepage from coming into contact with the impenetrable casks that would contain the radioactive materials.

The forty thousand tons of nuclear waste currently stockpiled would be moved to the facility over the next two decades. When the repository reached its seventy-seven-thousand-ton capacity, there would be a century of additional monitoring before the complex was completely sealed in 2116.

Mercer gave Dr. Marie an ironic smile. “To answer your almost asked question, it’s the only thing that makes sense. We’re maybe forty miles from Yucca Mountain, you’re a nuclear engineer and my principal job is digging tunnels. That adds up to only one thing. Throwing Ira’s presence into the mix just gives this situation the right touch of subterfuge.”

“I resent that defamation of my character,” Ira grumbled without malice. “And your assessment is a bit off. The waste we plan to store here is documented. What we want to do is bring in most of the really nasty stuff before anyone knows it’s on the move.”

“By nasty you mean the waste left over from our weapons program and by anyone you mean terrorists?”

“Exactly.” Ira recharged Mercer’s glass. “We want to do the same thing they did when they transported the Hope Diamond.”

Mercer knew that story well. The last time the fabled diamond was moved from its home at the Smithsonian to New York City for a thorough examination and cleaning the security had been unprecedented — armored cars, police escorts and a large contingent of guards. Yet when they arrived at Harry Winston’s Jewelers in Manhattan, the box containing the fabulous gem was empty. What no one knew, not the guards, not the media or the public, was that the security entourage had been a ruse to throw off potential thieves. The stone had actually been sent in a nondescript package through the regular mail.

Dr. Marie leaned forward in her chair. “We’ll use standard shipping casks and all the regular safety devices, but we want to avoid the media attention that would tip off terrorists or anyone else who wants to derail the operation. By shipping material in secret, we eliminate the temptation.”

“How long do you plan to keep the waste here?” Mercer asked.

“It’ll be moved into the permanent repository over time. Because of the heat generated by the material we’ll be storing here, it has to be spread out all through the Yucca Mountain facility.”

“What we’re looking to build,” Ira interrupted, “is a temporary holding area away from media attention and out of reach of terrorists. Nothing will remain here by the time the main site is sealed.”

Leaning back, Mercer digested what he’d learned. He grasped the need for what Ira wanted to do. He knew that a great deal of nuclear policy was based on emotion rather than science, although he didn’t discount the horror if there ever was a major catastrophe, or even a minor one. By moving the worst of the waste before anyone knew it was happening, Dr. Marie felt she could cut the nation’s anxiety levels as well as better protect the shipments. It made sense because one way or the other the material
would
be transported.

He understood the need for secrecy. What they hadn’t explained is the urgency, and he was willing to wait for hours before asking that question. While it was Ira’s nature not to divulge any more than necessary, Mercer wouldn’t agree to help until he knew the whole truth. He didn’t take it personally. It was the price he paid for his friendship with a professional spy.

Neither Ira nor Mercer showed the least discomfort sitting next to each other in silence. Dr. Marie, however, felt the urge to fill the lull. “We had an accident two days ago. A cave-in. We’ve been running twenty-four hours a day in three shifts, ten men per shift. The collapse occurred during a shift change. Fifteen men, including two shift supervisors, were killed.”

“The other five?” Mercer asked.

“Escaped unharmed,” she replied. “For security reasons, we don’t want to bring in any more miners. However, we all felt that we needed a second engineer. When our request reached Admiral Lasko, he said he had the right person. You’re a mine engineer who already has a high enough security clearance to work here.”

Again, Mercer noticed, nothing was said about the urgency.

“Listen, Mercer.” Ira’s voice deepened. “We’re already two months behind schedule. The tunnels should already be done and contractors brought in to handle water seepage problems. The first load of waste will be arriving in one hundred twenty-one days.”

“Why so precise?”

“Because a storage pool at Oak Ridge won’t be able to take any more spent fuel rods and they’re scheduled to replace the current fuel assemblies in an experimental fast-breeder reactor in a hundred twenty-one days. We want to bring what’s in the pool here rather than shuffle it to another facility.”

Satisfied with the answer, Mercer asked the next question that was bothering him. “I was told I’d be here for a week. Obviously that’s bull. I’m in the middle of a contract with De Beers. How long do I have to put them off? Am I here for the two months you said you’re behind?”

Marie shook her head. “Our remaining shift boss says we’re no more than two weeks from breaking into the subterranean chamber we’re planning on using. It’s a natural pocket in the rock. Our original geologic survey said it’s a hollow space left behind after an intrusive magma dike subsided.”

That’s where the seepage Ira mentioned came into play, Mercer thought. Though not common, such a dike — basically a tongue of molten rock injected into the surrounding strata — can drain back into the central magma chamber that spawned it. In this situation, it leaves an empty cavity in the earth that often fills with water. Once they got the hydrology handled, it made sense to use this natural chamber for their short-term repository.

“Who did the original survey?” he asked, doubting they’d found a drained dike. It was more likely a sill or laccolith, which ran with the grain of sedimentary layering rather than against it.

“Gregor Hood.”

Mercer nodded. “I know him. He takes a while, but he’s good. What about the other shift supervisor? Who have you got?”

“Donald Randall, he’s a professional miner from Kentucky.”

It took a moment for the name to sink in. “Donny Randall?”

“He prefers Donald,” Dr. Marie said primly, as if maintaining such niceties could somehow lessen the feeling of loathing Randall created.

Mercer’s eyes bored into Ira’s. His voice went flint-hard and accusatory. “You hired Randall the Handle? Do you know what an effing psychopath he is?”

Ira looked away. “We’ve had some complaints about him, but it’s too late. He’s already here and we can’t bring in anyone else.”

Donny Randall, Randall the Handle, got his nickname in South Africa before the end of apartheid. He’d gone there because his reputation for quick violence had gotten him booted from the United Mine Workers and blackballed from every mine in the States. South Africa became a perfect place for him. It wasn’t so much that he was racist, he was simply sadistic. Back then the black miners had no way to redress labor issues so he could be as brutal as he wanted without fear of retribution.

Standing six feet six, with a build to match, Randall delighted in fighting any man who challenged him, though he preferred to use the handle of a pickax rather than his fists, thus his moniker. Mercer had heard that he’d killed at least six men in the mines around Johannesburg and had beaten dozens more. It was also in South Africa that Randall had found another application for his two-inch-diameter piece of hardened hickory. He’d use it to sodomize workers too young or too small to defend themselves. Because of the permissive attitude of the courts, he hadn’t been tried for any of his acts. He’d left the country when Nelson Mandela assumed the presidency. Some said he was asked to go, but Mercer believed the story that he’d fled from a mob of black miners who’d wanted to give him a Soweto necklace — a burning tire around his neck.