The guards on the gate never saw it coming. One moment they were chatting with the driver of the catering truck as they walked round to the back of it. He was a friendly man they saw every day, known him for months, liked his football. Suddenly all the lights went black, and the next second they were both dead, each with a bullet in the brain.
The killer dragged the guards’ bodies back into the guardhouse and then went back to manually open the gates.
Another second and the perimeter lights came on again. (Just a glitch, if anyone was looking. Happens all the time.) And the van drove to the main building as normal. Although the area lights were on, security found out later that the surveillance cameras were still dark. The driver then got out, opened the rear doors of the truck and went inside it.
All the lights outside the building suddenly went off again and eight men jumped out of the van. They were in black night-fighting clothes and they had matt-black globes completely covering their heads. They were carrying assault weapons.
The doors to the building opened by themselves and the assault team went in. The lights inside were low as normal for an office building at night where few staff work late. The surveillance cameras would later show that all the security doors opened at the approach of the men. “Like kings and queens,” said one. The men made no sound.
They waited outside the main control room for a few seconds, readying their weapons. The leader tapped his wrist and suddenly all the lights went out. They burst in the room with flash-bang grenades. The intense white light blinds the eyes for at least five seconds, and the bang hits the ears and the chest at the same instant. It’s a blow to the body and the brain and many are never right again.
There were four armed men defending the room, and they all died. Only one of them had drawn his weapon when the lights went out, and he was able to get off a lucky shot before the flash-bangs paralysed him. He hit an attacker in the heart. All the armed resistance in the station was in the main control room and they were all dead.
In the ringing dark, the technicians could see nothing. They were in shock, half blind from the flash and with their bodies shaking. The attackers walked around with the black globes over their heads, looking like spacemen at night. One of them went up to a technician and shot him point blank between the eyes. He walked around slowly, selected another and shot him the same way.
They stepped back from the technicians and the lights came back on to show seven dead men in the room. Blood everywhere. The floor was wet and sticky with blood. The only woman in the room was standing in it with a face full of horror.
One of the attackers spoke. He spoke with a synthetic electronic voice that came from a loudspeaker in his chest. The matt-black globes absorbed all light. They were impossible to see into.
“Put your chairs in a circle,” he said. “Facing each other. You’re going to have a seance, talk to the dead. Do it wrong, and you’ll join them.”
Two of them were a little slow so he went up to one of them and stuck his rifle in the man’s face.
“You do what I tell you.”
He waited.
“Or we kill you. We like killing. And we’re happy to die.”
The man joined the others.
“Now sit down. That’s nice. Open your legs wide. You, too, lady.”
He placed a small metal cylinder on the floor at the centre of the circle. It was dark green and had a circle of lenses around it.
“This is your new friend,” he said. “He’s a nice fellow but he’s very sensitive. Very very sensitive and if you hurt his feelings he might blow up.”
He touched it with his foot. They flinched.
“Not to worry. He’s asleep right now. But when that little red light comes on, you better pay attention.”
He walked around the circle behind the technicians.
“This guy is what is called an anti-personnel bomb. And you’re the personnel. As I said, he’s very sensitive. Sensitive to vibration. So if you stamp your little foot, lady, he goes off. If you cough, he might go off. Want to try?”
He stuck his rifle in someone’s ear.
“He can also see when you move. If you’re stupid and move, he goes off. If you want to piss, you piss right there. He’s not going anywhere.”
He kept walking round.
“Oh, he’s not made to kill. He’s made to maim. If you upset him, white-hot bits of metal will burn through your legs. Aren’t you glad you’ve got your legs open? Guess what else he’ll burn through. You will probably live long enough to kill yourself later.”
He paused.
“Nothing left down below.”
He pointed his gun at all of them in turn.
“Piss and shit in plastic bags.”
He turned back to the box.
“I saw it happen to a guy. Friend of mine. He was screaming so we shot him in the head.”
Back to the technicians.
“That’s what he wanted.”
He waited for a long time.
“We’re going out now. Once we’re out of here, I will arm this thing remotely. You’ll see a red light on it. You understand, everyone?”
He aimed his gun again at each technician.
“You get it?”
He waited.
“If any one of you even thinks of moving, my friend’ll go off. Goodbye, legs. Goodbye, sex.”
He moved off.
“So stop shaking.”
The attackers left, their boots making sticky sounds, leaving bloody footprints. And the red light came on.
The spent fuel pool was some two hundred feet away from the reactor and was shielded by a foot-thick concrete wall six feet away from the reinforced concrete walls of the pool itself. The pool was about the same size as a big swimming pool but over forty feet deep.
From above it looked like a swimming pool for monsters, with hundreds of metal cylinders carefully stacked deep underwater. This was where the highly dangerous spent-fuel rods spend years in constantly moving water to keep them cool, surrounded by zirconium cladding. Spent-fuel pools hold about twenty times more long-lived radioactivity than a reactor core. If the wall of the pool is breached enough for the water to escape, it would take maybe half an hour for the spent-fuel rods to get hot enough to ignite the zirconium metal. This fire would be impossible to put out, the radiation levels around the dry pool would kill a human in less than a minute, and clouds of radioactive caesium would float up in the air to poison the land around.
It would waste an area the size of Ireland or Portugal. No one could live there, eat food or drink water from there for hundreds of years, which is forever.
Four of the men stood before the shielding wall and took off their backpacks. They started placing soft bricks of explosives which stuck to the wall. Once all twenty bricks were in a rough circle, they connected them all with a fine wire, and then rolled out a long wire and moved over a hundred metres away around a corner. They all lay flat on the ground.
The explosion shook the whole building and the technicians watching the red light felt their hearts stop for a second. They looked at each other a moment later, faces frozen in shock.
The shielding wall was breached. There was a jagged hole about three feet across that gave a clear view of the concrete wall of the pool itself.
One the men walked up to the hole and put his head through. Nothing happened. He turned back to the others and gave a thumbs up before walking back. Another two of them took off their backpacks and began to assemble a couple of anti-tank launchers. They looked like heavy drain pipes with handles.
They fired. One. Two. The rockets whooshed. Then heavy explosions shook the ground more than before. And the technicians sitting round the bomb felt their hearts stop again.
Then the men left.
The seven survivors ran back out to the catering van and drove away without lights into the night.
Out of sight of the burning power station, the van stopped and the driver carefully took off his matt-black globe. He was a friendly man, liked his football.
A few miles further, the van drove into a tunnel and stopped. A man in police uniform got out of the back and erected a barrier across the road. Police. Do Not Pass. There was another barrier at the other end of the tunnel. Further in, there were three cars waiting and the men, now wearing civilian clothes, got in them. As they drove away, the van started burning with a brilliant white light.
