I nodded back and gave his hand a firm shake, which were all the pleasantries I had time for. ‘Tsenong and Whalley,’ I said, ‘where are they?’
‘Why, what’s up?’
‘Do you know where they are?’
‘Sure I do. They’re at the number three reactor face.’
‘At the reactor face?’
‘Carrying out support point inspections.’
‘Is there a problem with your support points?’
‘No, not that I know of.’
‘Whalley’s meant to be on holiday in the Seychelles. What’s so special about your support points that he left his wife, without taking the time to tell her, and flew straight back to England to come and have a look at them?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean?’
We walked inside, past the security desk. I stopped and turned to him. ‘I’ll tell you what I mean. They’re about to blow your fucking power station up, that’s what I mean.’
Tenney led, I sprinted behind him, and Quoit did his best to keep up. We ran through several doors, past a massive tank of water, past stacks of barrels, radiation warning signs, vending machines, men in overalls, and then came up to a door with a large sign: Danger. Authorized personnel only. Protective clothing must be worn beyond this point.
Tenney opened a cupboard door, and pulled out a handful of clothing. ‘Got to put these on – none of us would last thirty seconds without them.’ It took several minutes for us to get dressed: first, black knee-high boots, then a white one-piece suit, complete with hood, visor and breathing apparatus. We stepped into these, and zipped them up; even the gloves were part of the suit.
‘Same material as they use for astronauts’ suits, for when they go out of their spacecraft – that’s what they were developed for originally, the moon landing,’ said Quoit, shouting through his visor at me.
‘I think the moon’s a lot more hospitable place than where we’re going now,’ shouted Tenney.
‘I wouldn’t disagree with you,’ said Quoit.
I was busy trying to get my gloved trigger finger in through the trigger guard. Tenney eyed the gun with a frown. ‘Don’t forget to wash that when you come back out – it’ll be contaminated.’
‘I think it already is,’ said Quoit distastefully.
Tenney strapped large watches onto our wrists. ‘We have one hour’s supply of oxygen. The buzzer will go in fifty-five minutes and if you hear it, just get the hell out. But we shouldn’t be in there anywhere near that long. Okay?’ I nodded through the visor and gripped the Beretta tightly. We walked through the door and Tenney shut it firmly behind us. We were in a small room with a massively thick porthole window. I looked through the porthole, expecting to see Dante’s Inferno, or worse. Instead, I saw a vast cavern, dome-shaped ceiling all around, and a massive blue steel structure, looking like a giant windowless space capsule, in the middle. This was the pressure vessel, inside which was the core. A mass of thick pipes ran from the side of it into a much smaller capsule, and from that into a tall, thin cylinder, about twenty-five feet high. The core itself was about thirty feet high, and sat on four massive hydraulically sprung struts.
A short way to the right was a massive steel robot arm with a giant pincer hand. The controls for this arm were underneath the porthole. It was used to carry out dismantling work on the core for refuelling, maintenance and for inspection purposes; this had to be done by remote control – no suit would protect a human being from an open core.
At the top of one of the metal struts was a figure in a white suit; even from here one could see clearly what he was doing: he was taping something to the strut. We went through a steel door and into the decontamination room which contained an enormous and powerful shower, followed by an air-drying chamber. We went through another steel door, closing that behind us, and into the pressurization chamber. We went through into another chamber, and finally came to the door into the reactor face. Tenney led the way in, and Quoit followed. I hung back some way behind him. Something was bothering me, bothering me a lot more than Whalley and Tsenong, and I wasn’t sure what it was.
I went through, and if the place hadn’t looked like the Inferno, it certainly felt like it. There was a heat stronger than I had ever felt before – intense, claustrophobic; I felt as though I had entered a microwave oven. I looked around for some solid object; just to my right was an enormous valve fixed to the floor. Quoit pointed at the figure up on the support strut; I could see from where I was standing that whatever he was taping to the strut, he had already taped the same to one other strut, and to several of the pipes at the point of connection to the core.
The figure turned his head and looked at us for a moment, before turning back to his work. I saw his face clearly through his visor; it was Whalley.
Quoit started to run over to the core. I hung back. I couldn’t see Tsenong, and I was looking around for him. Quoit reached the base of the strut and was about to start climbing up to Whalley, when two black holes appeared in the back of his suit. He shook violently twice, threw his arms out, and fell over sideways, I flattened myself behind the valve, my eyes doing the best they could, despite the restrictions of the visor, to scan the full three hundred and sixty degrees around me. I saw a flash of white behind a cluster of monitoring gauges, and I fired a burst of three bullets. A figure in white stood up, clutching his arm, and through his visor I could see clearly the face of Ben Tsenong. He had one arm clamped over the other, and he started to run for the door. I swivelled my gun round at him and was about to pull the trigger again when a bullet smacked off the handle of the valve right beside me, ripping a chunk out of the enamel paint; it was then that I knew what had been bothering me.
The voice of the man that Horace Whalley had met in the field, the voice that I had heard before and couldn’t place – it was here that I had heard it before, when I had come down on the day of the press conference and Ron Tenney had shown me around. Ron Tenney with that soft voice, that hint of an Irish brogue: Ron Tenney was Patrick Cleary. He had come around and was right behind me and I fired off three bullets without even aiming, just to scare; another bullet smacked the floor beside me. I saw the bastard, saw him grin, I was sure, as he stepped behind an air-vent housing. I sprawled myself flat on my stomach. There was a flash of white, and I fired another burst, then cursed myself; the white had vanished long before I pulled the trigger. I waited. I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, something moving. It was the pincer hand of the robot and it was moving over towards me, and it was moving damn quickly. I had fifteen rounds in the gun, nine had gone. I had to get the bastard fast.
There was a flash of white. I sprang onto my knees, fired another burst and sprinted madly forward, if the lumbering motion that is all one is able to perform in these suits could be called sprinting. I reached the other side of the housing. Cleary would be wondering where the hell I was. He might know how to pull a trigger, but he sure hadn’t been taught much about gun-fighting.
I sat, knowing he was over the far side, and the pincers still moved steadily and swiftly towards me. I hoped it would bring Cleary out in curiosity; it did. He stood up behind the housing, I sprang my arms up and fired a burst of three bullets straight through his neck.
I leapt up, ran around the back of the housing and grabbed his gun, a Walther automatic. I gripped the gun firmly in both hands and aimed at Whalley. A crashing blow hit me in the side of my shoulder, flinging me over onto the ground. I got to my knees and the shadow of the robot arm, pincer jaw wide open and coming down at my head was right over me. I rolled out of the way, making a grab for the gun and getting it, but the arm followed; I ran back several steps, but the arm ran back; any move I made, it could make too, and almost as quickly. It made a dive at me, and I sidestepped just as the jaws clamped shut.
I sprinted for the door; half-way there, the jaws knocked me to the ground. I rolled over, got up again, the jaws smashed me down again, then came back down towards my face. I
don’t know where the effort came from, but somehow I managed to fling myself sideways. I grabbed the door-handle, turned, pulled, and fell through the doorway. The arm smashed into the doorway, the pincers closed over the door, then pulled back. The door must have weighed the best part of five hundred pounds, and the pincer pulled it straight back, ripping it from its hinges, and lifting it up in the air.
I ran through the chambers, not stopping at the shower room, but carrying straight through: Tsenong was there, by the porthole, but semi-slumped, one hand on the robot controls, one hand holding an automatic. He was looking very ill, whether from loss of blood or from radiation poisoning through the massive rip in his suit along his arm, I did not know. Through his glass visor I could see his eyes; they were burning with hate, and I remembered what I had read in the psychologist’s report. He deliberately and slowly brought his gun up towards me. I pulled the Walther’s trigger twice. He jerked back sharply against the wall. The hatred in his eyes seemed to vanish, and was replaced with an expression of surprise; his eyes stayed open and he did not move.
I grabbed the controls of the robot. They were simple. I swung the arm over towards where Whalley was still feverishly working. He didn’t notice anything. I brought the pincer right up behind him, then grabbed him just below the shoulders, pinning his arms to his side. I plucked him up and carried him through the air over towards where the door had been. His legs were kicking frantically. I put the pressure on a little harder, just to make sure he couldn’t escape, then left him, about four feet in the air, and ran back through the chambers to him.
His face was a picture of terror. ‘Where is the detonator?’ I yelled.
‘Individual, on each charge,’ he screamed. ‘Two minutes, they’re all going off in two minutes, you’ll never stop them, never be able to stop them in time. Get me down, get me down!’
‘You’d better stop them.’
‘I can’t, I can’t, I just finished the last one, I can’t stop anything. Please put me down, put me down quickly.’ He was screaming hysterically.
‘It’s your firework party, you get the front row seat!’
‘No, help, please, I’ll tell you anything you want!’
‘Which other power stations?’
‘None, this only!’
‘How can you stop those charges?’
‘I can’t, really can’t, we must get out, we’re all going to go up, oh please, oh please!’
I turned and left the bleating creature, and ran back to the controls. If he was telling the truth, then the only chance was if he did the defusing while I carried him to the charges. No other way would give us enough time. I started the arm moving and swung him back over to the last charge he had attached. His legs were kicking like a rabbit’s. Long before he reached it, the charge blew. Then the one on the other strut also blew. The struts disappeared and the whole core tilted crazily to one side, held from falling only by the battery of piping. Whalley’s legs were bicycling crazily. I hoped he was enjoying his seat in the Royal box. Then, in rapid succession, three charges attached to the pipes blew, the core, in a cloud of steam, crashed upside down to the ground, and part of its steel casing fell away.
The room began to get brighter and brighter, a strange, creamy-white light, that just kept on brightening, even though steam poured everywhere from a hundred directions, the light just kept getting brighter. I rushed out into the corridor, looking desperately for someone to tell. I had the choice of about five hundred different people. All hell had broken loose, and a klaxon started, wailing and stopping, wailing and stopping. I stood in the middle of it all, feeling like a prize lemon, wondering if I ought to go and take a shower.
27
The day Huntspill Head blew its top was a day the locals would remember for a long time to come. The town was five miles from the power station, but the Shockwave rippled through like an earthquake. People fell over in the streets and in their houses. According to official records, four hundred and twelve claims were received for new window panes, as buildings contorted slightly and glass dropped out. The tremor lasted no more than ten seconds, and then it was over. It happened three hours and ten minutes after I had left.
Almost everyone in the town looked westwards, towards the nuclear power station which they had fought so hard to stop being built, convinced that finally their fears had come true. They saw first a small plume of smoke rise; it rose for several seconds and then curved over westwards; then the containment building of reactor number three ceased to exist. It turned into a brown, grey and blue cloud, billowing out for several minutes in all directions, and then the billowing stopped and nothing more came out of the blackened crater in the ground.
The cloud rose, and spread out, until it was vaguely the shape of a fat cigar; it was four miles wide and fifteen miles long, and expanding quite quickly. It moved swiftly, blown by the fifteen-mile-an-hour wind westwards, straight down the Bristol Channel and out towards the Atlantic Ocean.
Only four people died as a result of the explosion and the subsequent lethal cloud; shipping in the Channel and out in the Atlantic was warned of the cloud’s size and direction, and was able to steer clear – all shipping, that was, except for an expensive cabin cruiser which had broken down in the mouth of the Channel. The cabin cruiser had sailed only a few hours before from a tiny marina near Huntspill, and was bound for Kinsale. On board the cabin cruiser were the skipper and three technicians from Huntspill Head; one was an electrical inspector, one a computer programmer and one a hydraulics engineer. There were three empty seats on the boat: these should have been filled by Patrick Cleary, Horace Whalley and Ben Tsenong. The centre of the cloud travelled straight across the boat, and although the four men went below, the polished teak decking offered them little protection. By the time the cloud had passed by, neither the men nor the boat were very nice to look at. Within half an hour, the last of the four men had died.
I had flown from Huntspill Head straight back to Strategic Headquarters in Shropshire; the reactor was still intact, and the southwesterly was blowing strongly.
‘It’s out of control,’ said Fifeshire. ‘The technical expression for it is a “power excursion accident” – except it’s not an accident.’ Surprisingly, he did not look as grim as he might have done; something was up, but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t think that anything, right now, could be anything but bad. I thought about Gelignite again. I had tried three times to get her on the phone to tell her to head north and keep going north as far as she could go. I nodded at Fifeshire.
‘The way I understand it,’ he continued, ‘is that two of the four struts on which the pressure vessel containing the core sits, have been blown away; the coolant pipes have also all been fractured. The core has fallen upside down, breaking its outer pressure vessel, and therefore losing all of its coolant.
‘Being upside down has caused the control rods to fall out. They are situated at the top of the core, and normally in an emergency, if all other precautions and systems fail, would drop straight down into the core, under the force of gravity, and the reaction would stop. Being upside down has of course stopped this, and in fact, the reverse had happened: the rods having fallen out completely means that the temperature of the core is rising at a fantastic rate – no one ever figured that the control rods might be removed altogether.
‘The net result is that the containment of reactor number three is filling with steam, and the core is expanding this steam fast. All the escape valves and filtration systems have been jammed by Whalley, Tsenong and their chums, so the pressure is building up, and any moment there is going to be an almighty bang. Apparently, a very big bang is preferable to a small one. The boffins believe that if the bang is sufficiently big, it will blow the core to pieces rather than let it continue to heat and have a situation that Isaac Quoit described as – what was it … an Australia … no, a China Syndrome. If the core is blown to pieces, there will be a short emission of radioactivity, making a cloud that will be large, but
which will be a once-only cloud. If the core stays intact, there will be stuff pouring out of the ground for days.’
‘Is there anything anyone can do to make sure it does blow to pieces?’
‘Yes. By just leaving everything as it is and not attempting to open any valves, or anything. They are ninety-nine per cent sure that the bang will be big enough.’ Fifeshire smiled broadly, and pulled a cigar from the box. ‘Mind you, if you think we’ve got a few problems, you want to thank your lucky stars you’re not in America: they’ve got five reactors down the West Coast doing exactly the same as this.’
‘What about the Canadians?’
‘They’ve caught them. The French, as you know, they caught last night, and the Spaniards have somehow managed to shut down.’
‘So it’s just us and the Americans in the soup?’
Fifeshire’s smile turned to a large grin. I decided he was definitely cracking up. He started shaking a piece of paper at me. ‘Volcanoes!’ he said. ‘Volcanoes!’
I wondered if there was anybody here who could certify him.
‘Coguana des Tyq, Mount St Helens,’ he said. ‘Look at this weather report!’ He thrust the sheet of paper at me. I read it. It was an emergency weather report, put out to all shipping at half past twelve. It stated that the wind would be starting to veer and that easterly gales were imminent.
‘What do you mean, “Coguana des Tyq”?’ I said.
‘Haven’t you read your newspapers?’
‘I’ve had quite a busy schedule lately, in case you hadn’t noticed, sir.’
‘Volcanoes – two erupting at the same time.’
‘I was aware,’ I said.
‘Well, it often happens, apparently, when there’s a volcanic eruption, that the world’s weather pattern gets disrupted. This is precisely what has happened – only with two, it’s even worse. There’s some vortex or something they’ve created, I don’t quite understand it all, but the point is that it’s causing our winds to veer to the east. All the stuff from Huntspill is going to go straight out into the middle of the Atlantic, and then probably get blown north up into the Arctic. It’ll have dispersed almost completely by the time it gets up there.’