Crocodile Tears - Anthony Horowitz [2]
Still clutching his toolbox, Ravi set off down another corridor. When he had first come here, he had been amazed how clean everything was—especially when he compared it to the street where he lived, which was full of rubbish and potholes filled with muddy water and droppings from the oxen that lumbered along, pulling wooden carts between the cars and the motorized rickshaws. He turned a corner and there was the next checkpoint, the final barrier he would have to pass through before he was actually in.
For the first time, he was nervous. He knew what he was carrying. He remembered what he was about to do. What would happen if he were stopped? He would go to prison, perhaps for the rest of his life. He had heard stories about Chennai Central Jail, about inmates buried in tiny cells far underground and food so disgusting that some preferred to starve to death. But it was too late to back out now. If he hesitated or did anything suspicious, that was one sure way to get stopped.
He came to a massive turnstile with bars as thick as baseball bats. It allowed only one person in at a time, and then you had to shuffle through as if you were being processed, as if you were some sort of factory machine. There was also an X-ray scanner, a metal detector, and yet more guards.
“Hey—Ravi!”
“Ramesh, my friend. You see the cricket last night?”
“I saw it. What a game!”
Soccer, cricket, tennis . . . whatever. Sports were their currency. Every day, the plant operators passed it between them, and Ravi had deliberately watched Wimbledon the night before so that he could join in the conversation. Even in the cool of the corridor, he was sweating. He could feel the perspiration beading on his forehead and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. Surely someone would stop him and ask him why he was still holding on to his toolbox. Everyone knew the correct procedure. It should be opened and searched, all the contents taken out.
But it didn’t happen. A moment later, he was through. Nobody had so much as questioned him. It had gone just as he thought it would. Knew it would. Nobody had lifted off the top tray of the toolbox and discovered the twenty pounds of C4 plastic explosive concealed underneath.
Ravi walked away from the barrier and stopped in front of a row of shelves. He pulled out a small plastic device that looked like a pager. This was his EPD—or Electronic Personal Dosimeter. It would record his own radiation level and warn him if he came into contact with any radioactive material. It had already been set with his personal ID and security clearance. There were four levels of security at Jowada, each one allowing access to areas with different risks of contamination. Just for once, Ravi’s EPD had been set to the highest level. Today he was going to enter the heart of the power station, the reactor chamber itself.
This was where the deadly flame of Jowada burned. Sixty thousand uranium fuel rods, each one 3.85 meters long, bound together inside the pressure vessel that was the reactor itself. Every minute of the day and night, twenty thousand tons of fresh water were sent rushing through pipes both to cool the beast and to tame it. The resulting steam—two tons of it every second—powered the turbines. The turbines produced electricity. That was how it worked. In many ways it was very simple.
A nuclear reactor is at once the safest and the most dangerous place on the planet. An accident might have such nightmarish consequences that there can be no accident. The reactor chamber at Jowada was made out of steel-reinforced concrete. The walls were five feet thick. The great dome, stretching out over the whole thing, was the height and breadth of a major cathedral. In the event of a malfunction, the reactor could be turned off in seconds. And whatever happened in