A Nuclear Thriller
Eight men take a nuclear plant. The emergency is logged at its lowest level, and it stays there all night.
The Title
An Unusual Event is the mildest of the four federal nuclear emergency classifications. It is the one you declare for a transformer fire or a bomb threat you do not credit. It mobilizes almost nobody. Functionally, it is a phone call.
Every rung above it turns something on. Keep the night logged at the bottom and the sirens stay off, the response stays small, and whatever is really happening gets to happen quietly.
0035 hours · Notification of Unusual Event declared · Never revised
Synopsis
On an ordinary September night at Pelican Point Nuclear Generating Station, eight men come across the water, kill a security officer at the fence, and are standing in the control room in under ten minutes.
They are not there to cause a meltdown. They want time, and they want quiet. So the official emergency declaration is entered at the lowest level on the federal ladder, an Unusual Event, and it never moves. The sirens stay off. The response stays small. The people who could help are never told they are needed.
Inside the fence, four people who were never supposed to matter start working the problem with the only tools they have left: a plant they know better than the men holding it. A senior operator one year from retirement who gave up his license the year his wife died. A seventy-two-year-old security officer who ran a reactor for thirty years before he ever carried a sidearm. An instrument technician with a notebook. And a former Army MP who has spent four months reading system descriptions on her breaks because the training department keeps telling her no.
By sunrise the attackers are gone and the plant is still standing, and the arithmetic does not close. Eight men crossed a harbor for a hundred and twenty tons of spent fuel they left lying in a ditch four hundred yards short of the water. Nobody went back for it.
Which means the fuel was never the point, and whatever was, has been walking out of this plant for seven months.
Approx. 109,000 words · Nuclear / techno-thriller · Standalone
On Shift Tonight
Senior Nuclear Plant Operator
Fifty-two, a widower, one year from a retirement he is not sure he wants. He held a reactor operator license here for twenty years and handed it back the year Emily died, because a man does not run a reactor with his mind somewhere else. He still knows every valve in the building.
Security Officer
Twenty-eight, an Army MP who traded a war zone for a guard post. She has been working through the plant's system descriptions on her breaks for four months, unpaid and unasked, chasing a seat in operator training the training director has already told her she will not get.
Security Officer
Seventy-two. Navy nuclear submariner, then thirty years at the controls of this plant as a licensed senior reactor operator, and now the man at the armory window handing out sidearms at the start of a shift. He does not lead with any of it. Sara is the first person in years to ask.
Control Room Shift Supervisor
Fifteen years on this shift and a reputation for never once over-calling or under-calling a notification. He knows the classification scheme better than anyone in the building. At 0035 he writes down the smallest number on the page and signs his name to it.
The Author
Kendall Peterson spent eleven years at the Turkey Point Nuclear Plant, nine of them as a senior nuclear plant operator and two in Emergency Preparedness, learning firsthand the routines, the pressure, and the discipline it takes to run a reactor through the night. He then spent a number of years in emergency management, helping organizations prepare for and respond to all types of emergency situations.
That experience is the foundation of Unusual Event, a thriller built from real knowledge of how a nuclear plant runs and how it can fail.
Peterson has written several works of nonfiction and three screenplays. Unusual Event is his debut novel. He lives in South Florida with his wife and children.
Sample
Read the prologue and the first chapter now, and see the night unfold from the fence line in.
Experience
Listen to four bonus audio episodes from the author, from Fire From The Stone to One Bad Day, and play the soundtrack on Spotify.
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