Drone Command

“I think he’s asleep. We should go,” Myers said.

“Yeah. We’ll come back tomorrow.” He took her hand in his, and they slipped quietly out of the room.

They returned the next day. Will had died during the night, taking last rites with a priest, clutching his wife’s photo and the crucifix as he prayed. The nun said he went peacefully.

They drove back to the hotel in silence.

At his suggestion, Myers picked up the phone to order room service while Pearce headed for the shower. She worried about him. A lot had happened in the last few days. He’d lost people he’d loved and took the lives of many more. Not many men could handle that.

She wasn’t sure how he liked his steak, so she hung up the phone and stepped into the steaming granite-and-glass bathroom to ask. He was curled up on the shower floor, weeping like a child, scalding water blistering his skin. She rushed in, slammed the shower off, gathered him up in her arms, and lay on the wet stone floor with him, holding him until his sobs gave way to a fitful, trembling sleep.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

FUKUSHIMA PREFECTURE, JAPAN

29 MAY 2017

Pearce and Myers flew a JAL Sky Suite 777 nonstop from San Francisco to Tokyo to meet up with President Lane and his mission to Beijing. But when they touched down, Pearce informed her that he wouldn’t be attending the summit. “I’m no politician” was his excuse, and when that failed, “I’ve got some Pearce Systems business to attend to.” Myers was clearly disappointed but said she understood and flew to Beijing on Air Force One without him later that afternoon.

Pearce called August Mann from the airport and confirmed that he had landed. Mann reported that everything was still running smoothly at the site and that everything was on schedule. Pearce arrived the next day.

The giant tsunami that struck the facilities at Fukushima had slammed the Unit 4 building particularly hard. The reactor had already been shut down for repairs before the deadly tidal wave hit, but it was still a nuclear catastrophe waiting to happen. The American-designed facility was particularly problematic for an area of the world prone to both earthquakes and tsunamis. One of its most distressing features was an elevated cooling pool storing more than fourteen hundred spent nuclear fuel rods that contained nearly forty million curies of deadly radiation. Exposing those fuel rods to the air, some scientists argued, would be an environmental holocaust. Now, several years after the tsunami, Unit 4 was sinking into the ground, threatening to collapse the building and destroy the pool.

August Mann ran the nuclear-deconstruction division of Pearce Systems, and he and his unmanned ground vehicles had been contracted to help remove the contaminated debris that humans couldn’t touch. But once his automated systems were in place, TEPCO found other useful work for them to carry out, including tackling the Unit 4 building problem. Because of the hazardous radiation in and around Unit 4, it was impossible for anything but remotely controlled robots to work in the area for any length of time. Mann and his drone team were attempting to stabilize the foundation of the Unit 4 structure to keep it from sinking farther into the water-soaked soil in order to avoid the building’s collapse and the resulting catastrophe.

Mann’s remotely piloted tracked vehicles had carried hundreds of heavy steel rods and large metal cylinders across the irradiated mudscape over the last few weeks. There were so many problems at the Fukushima facility and its other reactors that Mann and his team were left largely unsupervised by the overworked, understaffed TEPCO managers.

Pearce and Mann were in one of Pearce Systems’ off-site control stations a safe distance from the radiation poisoning the air, soil, and water in and around Unit 4. Pearce sat at the control station running one of the Pearce Systems tracked robots that was carrying yet another metal cylinder in its hydraulic claws as it lumbered toward the sinking foundation.

Pearce’s cell phone rang. He tapped his Bluetooth. It was Myers.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Better than expected. President Sun was surprisingly compliant.”

“Why are you surprised?” Pearce knew the Chinese respected force, and the sinking of the Liaoning alone would have been more than enough to convince Sun it was time to deal honestly with the Americans, for whom they’d lost respect over the last two decades.

“He not only agreed to the new security arrangements we’ve been discussing, but he’s eager to reassess his country’s predatory trade and currency practices.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You sound like you’re busy. Did I call at a bad time?”

“No. I’m almost through here. Go on.”