CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

 

THE DOOR WOULDN’T open. Jack almost wanted to laugh. He and Jane tried again, smacking and battering the cold metal surface to no avail.

“Makes sense though,” he said at length. “They wouldn’t just let you wander into a nuclear reactor.”

“What are we going to do?” said Jane. Behind them, beyond the broken down fence, a crowd continued to watch them.

“We could go round the building,” said Jack. “See if there’s another way in. You know, a main reception with big displays about how completely safe this place is.”

“Maybe,” said Jane, then ran back the way they’d come. People jeered, disappointed that she’d given up so soon, but Jane clearly had no intention of abandoning the mission. She searched the mud around the fallen fence and retrieved one of the assault rifles.

“Right,” she said, hurrying back. “Improvised skeleton key.”

Jack got quickly out of the way as she unleashed a deafening torrent against the metal surface. The door buckled under the onslaught. Jane stopped firing and replaced the clip on her gun while Jack inspected the damage. The door steamed and hissed, so he didn’t dare touch it. But the shooting had exposed a square shape just under the metal on the right hand side. He was looking at the mechanism for a swipe card.

Jack pulled off his jacket and wrapped it round one hand. Suitably protected, he bashed at the square mechanism until it popped out and fell to the ground. He grasped the torn metal of the door and pulled—and, with effort, it creaked open.

They stared in amazement at the corridor within, bright with electric strip lights.

“The power’s on!” said Jack.

“Well duh, it’s a power station,” said Jane.

“It’s working!”

“That’s not a good thing. Means they didn’t shut it all down.”

“But we might be able to, I don’t know, just push the right buttons,” he said. “We just have to track down the control room.” So saying, he stepped into the corridor. “In and out quickly, minimum of exposure.”

“We want to decommission it, not just shut it down.”

“Okay, but maybe it means there’s been no damage to the cooling system yet, and we can take our time. I’m trying to keep positive.”

The corridor smelled stale and damp. Water dripped from the ceiling and pooled on the smooth concrete floor, and mould dappled the walls. The strip lights buzzed as if they would explode at any moment. Jack’s footsteps echoed eerily as he made his way forward.

“What are you afraid of?” said Jane, making him jump. “It’s not like there’ll be anyone here.”

“Yeah, all right. It’s just weird.”

“Well, no shit. Come on. Talk me through the reactor core controls we expect to find here.”

“Um, yeah. Coarse shut-down controls are boron control rods, with fine control from stainless steel rods.”

“Which means?”

“Basically, we insert any rods that haven’t been already. Then we look for what safety manuals or procedures they’ve got for us to follow.”

They continued to test themselves as they made their way through the building. The vestiges of decoration were prehistoric—from perhaps as far back as the 1970s. But over-written on this were signs of life from the time of The Cull. Notes on a notice board advised on handwashing and reporting symptoms, invited staff to join a pub quiz league with a cash prize of £100, and said there’d be a collection for Muneet’s baby. Jack and Jane moved on.

At the far end of the building, they found a cutaway diagram of the site, detailing escape routes in case of a fire. It was a very old diagram, from when the complex had been built. The spacious car park contained just three pictured vehicles, all from the 1960s, including an open-topped sports car. The sun was shining and behind the complex of buildings families played on the beach. Nuclear power, it seemed to suggest, was more than just safe—it was fun.

“Okay, we’re here,” said Jane. “Administration block. We carry on this way to reach Dungeness A.” That was the first of the two reactors on the site, with—remembering from Nina’s notes—four turbo-generators housed in the turbine hall.

“We could split up, do one each,” he suggested.

“Might take longer,” said Jane. “We figure out the first one together, then the second one is just doing the same.”

“Dungeness B is different,” said Jack, piously. “The reactors there are 545 rather than 225 megawatts, and have advanced gas-cooled systems.”

“Bet the off-switches look the same.”

“Fine.” Jack traced his finger over the diagram working out the route to the main station control room. “We want to avoid the big machines if we can—there’s a higher risk of contamination. So we head for the services unit and then up this staircase to the viewing balcony. Should be simple enough.”

They left the administration block and stepped out into darkness, just able to discern a path through the overgrowth to the huge reactor block. A vast cylinder towered overhead, the concrete weathered and cracked from years of neglect. The path took them to a wooden door with a window, but the view inside was obscured by drapes. Jane tried the handle and the door opened easily. They ducked under the curtain of black felt.

“I guess that’s to keep the radiation from escaping,” said Jack. “We must be in a hot part of the site.”

“Oh, good,” said Jane.

There wasn’t the same stale smell as in the accommodation block. Jack tried the light switch and the lights blinked on. There were more details to be gleaned about the staff who’d worked in the place before The Cull—a politely furious note about putting money in the tin for the coffee pods. All the windows they passed had been covered in black felt.

They made their way towards the services unit, continuing to test each other on physics. Suddenly Jane stopped, grabbing Jack’s arm and dragging him through a side door. They hid in an abandoned office, the computers buried under dust and cobwebs. Jane flattened herself against the wall. Jack followed her lead, and they remained perfectly motionless.

Nothing happened.

“Now who’s jumpy?” said Jack. Jane flinched at the loudness of his voice, watching through the crack in the door—but watching what? Gingerly, he edged round the door to look.

The corridor stretched off ahead of them, ending in double doors inset with windows, reflecting the lights he’d turned on back at him.

Then he saw something move. A shape, far down the end of the corridor, slowly coming towards them. He ducked back into the office, then dared to peep again. Definitely something approaching, a blobby, roughly human shape.

Jack watched in wonder as the figure came slowly nearer. The double doors creaked open, revealing a person in a faded yellow radiation suit. He or she—there was no way to tell in the suit—looked left and right, as if lost.

“Anyone there?” the suited stranger called, a man’s voice. “Hello?” He had an accent—German, maybe.

Jack didn’t dare to answer. What the fuck was going on? Beside him, Jane raised her rifle.

The man took a few steps forward, and called out again. “Hello? Someone there?”

“What is it?” called a woman’s voice from behind the man. She, too, had an accent. In the darkness up the corridor, Jack saw another blobby shape, a figure in a protective suit.

“Lights are on down here,” said the man.

“Ack,” said the woman. “Then turn them off.”

The man reached out a gloved hand to the wall, and the lights went out. Again he twisted round, left and right, scanning the now dim corridor. Then he shrugged and lumbered back through the double doors after his friend.

“What,” said Jane after a moment, “the actual fuck?”

“Just what I was thinking,” said Jack. “The felt on the window: it’s to hide the lights when they’re on, so no one knows those two are here. This could be good: they’ve got the right kit, so they must know what they’re doing.”

“We don’t know anything of the sort. How did they get in here? They can’t have come through the community—they’d have been strung up.”

“There must be another route in. Do you think it’s just the two of them? Or are there more people here?”

“Fuck,” said Jane. “What do we do?”

Jack considered. “We can’t just walk away. We find out who they are and what’s they’re up to, and whether there’s anyone else.” He smiled. “They might be friendly, and on top of things here. This might turn out okay.”

“Oh, yes,” said Jane. “And we’ll all get to have cake and a sing-song.”

 

 

THEY CHECKED EACH doorway as they made their way down the murky corridor—but there was no sign of the man and woman in protective suits. According to the cutaway diagram they’d seen before, they would soon reach the turbine hall, where they were likely to be exposed to a huge dose of radiation. Jack felt tired and itchy already.

Jane skidded to a halt, pointing ahead to a line of light, blinding in the darkness. They crept closer: the light emerged from the gap under a door. They could hear rumbling through the wall, like some kind of machinery. There was no sign or marking on the door to tell them what lay beyond. Jane raised her gun—she would cover Jack as he went inside. There was no handle, he just had to push the door inwards. Gingerly, he did so.

A cloud of smoke erupted from the doorway. Jack fell back, clamping his hands over his mouth and nose so he’d not breathe in the toxic fumes. The door swung shut again, cutting off the steam. Jane grinned at him.

“Know what this is?” she whispered. Jack shook his head. “Shower rooms. Decontamination.”

“So?”

“So, they’re knocking off work for the day. Which means they’ll be off guard. We can handle two of them. And then we can ask them what they think they’re playing at.”

“If there’s only two of them in there,” said Jack. But he pushed the door anyway and stepped through the wall of steam.

He found himself in a square-tiled room, dazzling white in the glare of electric lighting. The air was hot and moist. Steam curled thickly from a doorway in the far wall, through which he could hear running water.

Jane followed him, gun on the doorway. With Jane covering him, Jack made his way over for a better look. His clothes stuck to him as he moved, soggy in the heat. Now, under the sound of running water, he could just hear the man and woman, calling out to one another as they washed. A tiled wall cut off his view of the washing facilities—he couldn’t tell if the man and woman were alone.

Beside the doorway stood a plastic bin with a lid. A handwritten sign pointed down to the bin with the words Kern Strahlenschutz Anzug, and a pretty good sketch of a radiation suit. A box on the wall bore a green cross symbol, and beneath it—reachable from the floor—was a red emergency button. There was nothing else.

Jack mouthed “Okay?” at Jane and she nodded. He took a step towards the shower room and the merry chatter of the two Germans. Then he stopped, glancing back round the room. Jane met him with a look of puzzlement, and he held up a finger: they couldn’t make a sound. She nodded her understanding, so he moved to the plastic bin and removed the lid.

The visor of a radiation suit stared sightlessly up at him. Carefully, quietly, Jack extracted the suit from the bin. It was surprisingly heavy, especially the visor and the mask that fitted beneath it. He tried to hand the suit to Jane, but she still held her rifle. So, to her surprise, Jack started to pull on the suit.

It was warm and damp, with a strong whiff of its previous occupant. The face mask fitted tightly round Jack’s eyes and nose and mouth, the thick plastic making him gag. Jane had to help him with the zip that reached up the side of the suit and then over, across the top the visor. His breathing echoed around him, he felt hot and trapped and dizzy. But there was also a heart-racing excitement. They had a protective suit! There might yet be a chance of surviving.

He nodded his head towards the door out of the room, but Jane shook her head and handed him the gun. Jack couldn’t argue without making noise, so could only watch as she clambered into the second protective suit, pulling on the mask with more skill than he had shown. The mask obscured her features, and reflected his own anonymous visor back at him.

He pointed back to the door they’d come in by. Jane nodded, took the machine gun from his hands and they lumbered stiffly back out into the corridor.

“Go on, then,” said Jane, her voice muffled by the suit. “Why didn’t we question those two in the shower?”

“There can’t just be two of them here,” said Jack. “The lights are working, they’ve got showers. This is a big operation.”

“We’d know for sure if we asked them.”

“Did you see the alarm button on the wall? What if there was one in the shower room, too? They’d have called for help before we got to them.”

“You don’t know that. And they might still call for help when they miss the suits.”

“They don’t come back that way. There were no towels, no clothes to change into. You must go out a different way.”

“They’ll notice eventually.”

“Then we’ll have to be quick. But wearing this, we can have a good look round and no one will challenge us.”

“And we might just get away.”

“There’s a chance, isn’t there? Come on.”

They wanted to see the main reactor, and there were two options. They could head through the turbine room and round, a long and circuitous route where they would potentially meet lots more people working on the site, or they could duck outside and cut across to that part of the building.

The cold night air pinched at their suits. It was difficult to see much more than straight ahead in the suits; Jack had to twist his whole body left and right to get his bearings. A path led across a strip of roadway to the Reactor B building, another huge fat cylinder on top of a cube-shaped block. The windows above them looked dark, but they could feel the thrum of huge machinery inside.

A series of concrete blocks and low walls in the road had, Jack assumed, been put there to prevent vehicles getting too close to the reactor buildings. He’d seen similar defences outside the Parliament building in London.

They crossed the road, heading for a pair of doors. Suddenly, the doors burst open in a blaze of light. Jack shielded his eyes. People emerged from the glare, at least ten of them in protective suits. Light glinted on their visors, and on the assault rifles in their gloved hands.

“Play it cool,” said Jane under her breath and continued to lumber onwards.

Jack kept by her side. The armed personnel spreading out in a line to block their path. Jack and Jane had no option to stop as well, just a few metres in front of what looked very much like a firing squad.

“Excuse us, please,” said Jane, mildly.

There was no response—the armed personnel might not have understood. Or they understood too well. They were raising their guns…

Jack grabbed Jane’s arm and dragged her away down the road as the shooting began.