Kill Zone
By Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason (Forge/Macmillan Publishing, 2019
Genre: Fiction/thriller
Pages: 318
Via: Library
Following a suicide plane crash by an anti-nuke activist into a supposedly hardened nuclear waste site that’s running at way over-capacity, a scheming and conniving Department of Energy Assistant Secretary puts his career aspirations above public safety and common sense in this “high-tech thriller.”
Main Characters:
- Adonia Rojas, site manager for Granite Bay nuclear waste storage facility. (Mom: I’m seeing’ Zoe Saldana.)
- Senator Pulaski, a pompous, egotistical dimwit who controls the purse strings for just about every DOE and/or nuclear waste facility. (Mom: I’m seeing’ Charles Durning here.)
- Dr. Simon Garibaldi, Ex-DOE employee turned-whistleblower. He’s now an environmental activist and head honcho at Sanenergy. (Is George Clooney busy?)
- Dr. Stanley Van Dyckman, DOE Assistant Secretary who has a habit of stealing credit from others’ successes and making himself scarce when something goes sideways on his watch. This guy gives pond scum a bad name. (Mom’s seein’ Peewee Hermon. And that ain’t good.)
- “Regulation Rob” Harris, a by-the-book military officer and security officer. He’s the Hydra Mountain site manager and Special Access Program supervisor. (Wait. Is that Denzel Washington?)
- Air Force Col. Shawn Whalen, military aide to the president and expert on all things nuclear. Also Adonia’s main squeeze. (Paging Chris Hemsworth…)
- Victoria Doyle, DOE undersecretary and former Van Dyckman paramour.(No idea.)
Hush-hush
They’re all called into a super-duper secret underground facility in New Mexico on a Sunday morning called Hydra Mountain. Their job is to “review” the facility’s operations ahead of a potentially testy senate hearing on the subject. But why has Rob Harris put together such a disparate “review committee”? Is he really trying to get all perspectives on how to handle nuclear waste, or is something else in play? And what’s with all the government red tape and bureaucratic silo-ing? Ditto straight jackets of regulations and political blinders between agencies, so the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing? Or that a “right hand” even exists.
What could possibly go wrong?
Oops
Well. Turns out “Hydra” is a reconditioned, renovated storage facility left over from the Cold War era. (As in, older than dirt. Ya know. Like Mom. What?) And Hydra “was a rushed, classified stopgap solution, using antiquated systems appropriate for nuclear weapons in combination with state-of-the art, digital devices jury-rigged for storing nuclear waste.”
Oops.
Kimber: Someone say “leftovers” Huh? Huh? Huh?
Mom: Not that kind of leftovers, Kimmi.
Kimber: You mean there’s another kind?
Oh yeah. And a whole lot more. It just takes a while to get there.
About halfway through the book another plane crashes into the “impenetrable” Hydra Mountain in the New Mexico desert. A facility and security lockdown ensues. And the review committee is trapped inside the humungous nuclear waste facility. With all kinds of nasty “counter-measures” going off sixteen ways from Sunday. Think stuck in the Mines of Moria.
Kimber: I hope they brought extra burgers and fries. Or at least some cans of Spam. That stuff lasts forever.
Slow
Trouble is, it takes almost half the book to get there. Prior to that, pro-and con-nuclear energy advocates spend pages and pages trading verbal spars and spats.
This book is slow out of the gate. Think tortoise speed. The first several chapters are so slow, in fact, we almost gave up and chucked it onto our ever-growing DNF pile. But a sweet furry face we all know and love talked us into soldiering on. Good thing. Because the story picks up later on – like around chapter 28 or so. Then it takes off like a runaway freight train.
It also dips an oar into the clean vs. nuclear energy debate and has some surprising plot twists later. Whether or not readers will stick around that long is open to question.
Pages & Paws 