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Chapter One: "The oldie, Help Me, Rhonda, by the Beach Boys played from the open window of the pickup truck as it pulled into a parking spot. Brian Sing slowly rolled up the truck’s windows and shut off the engine as the song ended. He stepped out of his pickup truck, turned to face the open truck door, and took a deep breath. The air was cool. He liked the springtime scent of the barrel cactus flowers carried by the late night desert air. It was 11:45PM. He was in the employee parking lot at the back of the Desert Canyons Nuclear Power Station in Southern California. He had already passed through the vehicle security gate at the front of the facility. He was inside the facility security fence. This was, for Brian, a conscious moment of transition. This was the moment when he put the rest of the world out of his mind, put on his hardhat, and started his workday. Brian was one of the Operations Shift Supervisors at Desert Canyons Nuclear Power Station. He loved this moment because it was the start of his workday at one of the most technically demanding and interesting professions on earth.
As he turned to face the facility, he began to look at the indicators of the operating conditions at the plant, taking in information. To his left, none of the cars in the parking lot belonged to upper management. To his right were the twin four hundred and ninety-nine foot water cooling towers. These towers were used to transfer waste heat from the power plant into the water in the towers and ultimately into the air above the plant. The waste heat was harmlessly carried away with the breeze as opposed to overheating the water in the nearby river. The amount of steam, coupled with the current temperature and dew point, told Sing that the power station was operating close to the full capacity of the main generator. These were both good omens for a nice, quiet shift. In a week, on May 1, the Refueling Outage would start. For weeks thereafter, there would be no ‘quiet’ shifts.
As Brian turned to open the door to the Turbine Building, a movement further down the building caught his eye. Someone was coming out the Maintenance Building emergency exit. While the various buildings were technically separate buildings, they were built connected to each other. The several buildings of Desert Canyons were more like several wings of one big building.There was no alarm at the emergency exit, therefore, whoever that was, had used a key card and had computer authority to open the door.
Brian stepped inside the turbine building and let the door close behind him. At the same moment, at the maintenance shop emergency exit, Alex James, alias Adawi Aimur-Noor Kuzbari (translated as the Son of the Lion) took a quick, nervous glance back at Sing. Alex was not a member of the permanent plant staff. He definitely did not belong here, especially since he was using someone else’s access badge. Good, the man at the transformer yard went inside. Praise be to Allah, his luck held. It took a long moment for Alex to calm himself, to calm his fluttering heart, to clear his vision. After a few seconds he continued his walk, not to the parking lot, but to the River Water Pump House, a little more than two hundred yards away. He started his stopwatch and continued to take notes. It was fifty-five steps and thirty seconds to where the semiautomatic pistol in its vacuum-sealed, plastic bag was hidden in the rocks at the side of the road. No, Alex didn’t belong here."
I based the story line for The Defect on my years of experience building, testing, starting up, and operating nuclear power plants for the U.S. Army, private utilities, and in research. I also derived elements of the story from the true events surrounding the meltdown of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Station in Pennsylvania and the assault by a hooded gunman on the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Station in Tennessee.
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