Rules of Vengeance

“Even with the codes, it’s impossible to precipitate an accident. Those plants are staffed with the best-trained engineers in the world. The moment they noticed something awry they would take manual control of the plant. The final say will always remain in the control room. With men and women. Not with machines.”

Graves pushed back his chair and stood. He helped Mischa Dibner with her coat and showed her to the door. Kate accompanied her down the hall. “Mrs. Dibner, why do you think someone would go to such an effort to get the codes if they really can’t do any harm once they have them?”

“In this game, knowledge is everything,” replied the director of Nuclear Safety and Security at the IAEA. “Maybe by stealing the codes, these people hope to gain an insight into current safety measures. Perhaps they just wanted to make us feel vulnerable.”

The trio paused at the elevator bank. The doors slid open and Mischa Dibner stepped inside. “Remember this-if you want to hijack a nuclear plant, you can’t do it from outside. You have to put someone on the inside. In the control room. And that, of course, is impossible.”

42

Emma Ransom lay flat on her belly in the tall coastal heather, a pair of Zeiss night-vision binoculars to her eyes. Perched on the cusp of a sandstone bluff, she stared down at a complex of large buildings fronting the ocean some 800 meters away. There were three sets of buildings separated by intervals of 50 meters. From the exterior, each was identical to the next, so much so that it appeared that they were exact copies of one another. Each comprised two principal structures: a rectangular four-story building built of black steel set closest to the ocean, and, abutting it to the rear, a massive concrete block topped with a stout domed cylinder and a slim smokestack.

The complex was named La Reine. The Queen.

In technical jargon, La Reine was an EPR (evolutionary power reactor) or pressurized water reactor, capable of generating 1600 megawatts of electricity. In simpler terms, it was the world’s most advanced nuclear power plant, a marvel of modern science able to provide energy to over 4 million inhabitants twenty-four hours a day.

To Emma, it was “the target.” And nothing more.

Exchanging her night-vision binoculars for a camera equipped with a 1000-millimeter telephoto lens, she snapped off a dozen pictures. She was not interested in the buildings per se. She could download a hundred pictures of the plant from Électricité de France’s website anytime she cared to. Instead she aimed her camera at the fences surrounding the complex. There were no pictures of these on the Internet. Set concentrically with 20 meters separating them, the fences were electrified and topped with razor wire. A stainless steel box was welded to every third fencepost. These, she knew, were self-powered security relays monitoring the hundreds of pressure sensors set in the ground at regular intervals around the plant’s 3-kilometer perimeter. There was no way over or under them.

Replacing the camera in its bag, she traced the perimeter of the complex. She was dressed in black from head to toe. A microfiber cap concealed her hair. Nonreflective camouflage paint covered her face. Careful to maintain a distance of 100 meters from the outer fence, she reached the road that led into the plant. She knelt to listen for traffic. The air was still, the night frantic with the sawing of crickets. In the distance she heard an engine start up. A truck, she guessed, as the vehicle lurched through its gears. A Klaxon shattered the calm, and she heard the clatter of a gate sliding on its track. A moment later the truck drove past. It was a large flatbed rig, the kind used to deliver the uranium fuel rods that powered the reactors. Emma waited until its taillights had disappeared, checked back in the direction of the plant, then stepped forward. Just then a motorcycle rounded a curve, coming from the opposite direction. She threw herself into the grass, landing hard on her belly.

“Damn it,” she cursed.

Like all nuclear plants, La Reine operated at full staffing and full capacity twenty-four hours a day. There were five teams in all. At any one time, two were on call and one was in training. The clock was divided into two shifts. The “front end” ran from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The “back end” ran from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Day or night, the plant was humming with activity. She could not afford to be careless.

When her heart had slowed, she peeked from the grass and looked in both directions. Certain that no traffic was approaching, she dashed across the asphalt and disappeared into the clumps of sea grass on the other side. Bent low, she continued moving for several minutes, raising her head every few steps to monitor her position.

It was not long before she spotted a low-slung building within its own fencing. Several jeeps painted olive green sat parked in front of it. This was the barracks. Every nuclear power plant maintained a paramilitary force of between seven and fifteen men. Most were former military perso

Emma continued past the barracks, too. They were not part of her tactical considerations, and thus held no interest for her. She had no intention of waging a pitched battle against a superior force.

Reaching the far side of the perimeter, she was afforded her best view of the complex yet. In the moonlight, the domes atop the containment buildings glimmered like ancient temples. La Reine was a post-9/11 plant, meaning it had been built to the most stringent security specifications. The domes were actually two hulls of one-meter-thick steel-reinforced concrete-one inside the other, designed to withstand the direct impact of a fully fueled passenger jet traveling at over 700 miles per hour. Inside these domes was the reactor vessel, molded from a single slab of the strongest reinforced stainless steel in the world. Only one company in the world was able to manufacture steel of this strength: the Japan Steel Company of Hokkaido, formerly makers of the world’s finest samurai swords. For all intents and purposes, the plant was indestructible.

At least from the outside.

Nuclear power plants operated on a simple proposition. Steam turned turbines and turbines powered generators. All you needed was lots of steam. That’s where the nuclear part came in. The fuel needed to make the steam was uranium 235, and this isotope of uranium was fissile, meaning it emitted blazingly hot, lightning-fast atoms if given the correct environment to create a nuclear chain reaction. Put uranium in water, and pretty soon the water would start boiling like crazy and producing all kinds of steam. The steam then drove the turbine generator, which generated electricity.

It was as easy, or as monstrously complex, as that.

Uranium 235 was therefore the counterpart of coal, gas, or oil-fired boilers used to power the traditional smoke-belching fossil-fueled plants. And these days uranium was in large supply, and therefore cheap. Far cheaper than oil. That’s why so many nuclear power plants were suddenly being built all over the world.

Not everyone thought that was a good idea.

In fact, there were some who would kill to prevent it.

From her pocket Emma pulled a handheld instrument-metal, heavy, colored yellow, with a viewfinder on one side and a lens on the other. The instrument was a portable theodolite, and it measured a chosen object’s relative height above sea level. Putting the viewfinder to her eye, she focused on two separate points, one at the far side of the reactor building and the other at a point on the spent-fuel building approximately 15 meters away from it.