Ravi Chandra was going to be a rich man.
It made his head spin to think about it. In the
next few hours he would earn more than he had
managed in the last twenty years: a fantastic sum,
paid in cash, right into his hands. It was the start
of a new life. He would be able to buy his wife the
clothes she wanted, a car, a proper diamond ring
to replace the flimsy band of gold she had worn
since they were married. He would take his two
young boys to Disneyland in Florida. And he would
travel to London and see the Indian cricket team
play at Lord’s, something he had dreamt about all
his life but had never thought possible.
Until now.
He sat hunched up beside the window of the
bus that was taking him to work, as he had done
every day for as long as he could remember. It
was devilishly hot. The fans had broken down
once again and of course the company was in no
hurry to replace them. Worse still, this was the end
9
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CROCODILE TEARS
of June, the time of year known in South India
as Agni Nakshatram – or Fire Star. The sun was
un forgiving. It was almost impossible to breathe.
The damp heat clung to you from morning till night
and the whole city stank.
When he had money, he would move. He would
leave the cramped, two-room flat in Perambur, the
busiest, most crowded part of the city, and go and
live somewhere quieter and cooler with a little
more space to stretch out. He would have a fridge
full of beer and a big plasma TV. Really, it wasn’t
so much to ask.
The bus was slowing down. Ravi had done this
journey so many times that he would have known
where they were with his eyes closed. They had left
the city behind them. In the distance, there were
hills – steep and covered, every inch of them, with
thick green vegetation. But the area he was in now
was more like a wasteland, with just a few palm
trees sprouting among the rubble, and electricity
pylons closing in on all sides. His place of work
was just ahead. In a moment, they would stop at
the first security gate.
Ravi was an engineer. His identity badge with
his photograph and full name – Ravindra Manpreet
Chandra – described him as a plant operator. He
worked at the Jowada nuclear power station just
three miles north of Chennai, the fourth largest
city in India, formerly known as Madras.
He glanced up and there was the power station
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11
in front of him, a series of huge, multicoloured
blocks securely locked inside miles and miles
of wire. It sometimes occurred to him that wire
defined Jowada. There was razor wire and barbed
wire, wire fences and telephone lines. And the
electricity that they manufactured was carried all
over India by thousands more miles of wire. How
strange to think that when someone turned on
their TV in Pondicherry or their bedside light in
Nellore, it had all begun here.
The bus stopped at the security point with its
CCTV cameras and armed guards. Following the
9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, nuclear
power plants all over the world had become recognized
as potential terrorist targets. New barriers
had been added; security forces had been enlarged.
For a long time it had all been a damned nuisance,
with people ready to jump on you if you so much as
sneezed. But people had got lazy. Take old Suresh,
for example, the guard at this outer checkpoint.
He recognized everyone on the bus. He saw them
at the same time every day: in at half past seven,
out at half past five. Occasionally he’d bump into
them, strolling past the shops on Rannganatha
Street. He even knew their wives and girlfriends.
It wouldn’t have occurred to him to ask for ID or
to check what they were carrying into Jowada. He
waved the bus through.
Two minutes later, Ravi got out. He was a short,
skinny man with bad skin and a moustache that
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CROCODILE TEARS
sat uncomfortably on his upper lip. He was already
wearing overalls and protective steel-capped
shoes. He was carrying a heavy toolbox. Nobody
asked him why he had taken it home. It was quite
possible that he’d had to fix something in the flat
where he lived. Maybe he’d been moonlighting,
doing some jobs for the neighbours for a few extra
rupees. Ravi was always carrying a toolkit. It was
as much a part of him as an arm or a leg.
The bus had come to a final halt beside a brick
wall with a door which, like every door at Jowada,
was made of solid steel, designed to hold back
smoke, fire or even a direct missile strike. Another
guard and more television cameras watched as the
passengers got out and went through. On the other
side of the door, a blank, whitewashed corridor led to
a locker room, one of the few places in the complex
that wasn’t air-conditioned. Ravi opened his locker
(there was a pin-up of the Bollywood star Shilpa
Shetty stuck inside the door) and took out a safety
helmet, goggles, earplugs and a fluorescent jacket.
He also removed a bunch of keys. Like most nuclear
power stations, there were very few swipe cards or
electronic locks on the doors at Jowada. This was
another safety measure. Manual locks and keys would
still operate in the event of a power failure.
Still clutching his toolbox, Ravi set off down
another corridor. When he had first come to work
here, he had been amazed how clean everything
was – especially when he compared it with the
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13
street where he lived, which was full of rubbish,
and potholes with muddy water, and droppings
from the oxen which 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 jail, perhaps for the rest
of his life. He had heard stories about Chennai
Central Prison, 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 only allowed one person in at
a time and then you had to shuffle through as if
you were being processed like some sort of factory
machine. There were 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 match!”
“Two wickets down and we still came back. I
thought we were finished!”
Cricket, football, tennis … whatever. Sport was
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CROCODILE TEARS
their currency. Every day, the plant operators passed
it between them and Ravi had deliberately watched
the match 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’d hoped it would. Nobody
had lifted off the top tray of the toolbox and
discovered the ten kilos 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 – which
recorded his own radiation level and warned him if
he came into contact with any radio-active material.
It was 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.
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This was where the deadly flame of Jowada
burned. Sixty thousand uranium fuel rods, each
one 3.85 metres long, bound together inside the
pressure vessel that was the reactor itself. Every
minute of the day and night, twenty thousand
tonnes of fresh water were sent rushing through
pipes. The resulting steam – two tonnes 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 one and a half metres thick. The
great dome, stretching out over the whole expanse,
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
this chamber would be contained. Nothing could
be allowed to leak through to the outside world.
A thousand safeguards had been built into the
construction and the running of Jowada. One man
with a dream of watching cricket in London was
about to blow them apart.
The approach had come six weeks before at the
street corner closest to his flat: two men, one a
European, the other from Delhi. It turned out
that the second man was a friend of Ravi’s cousin
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CROCODILE TEARS
Jagdish, who worked in the kitchen of a five-star
hotel. Once they had recognized each other, it
seemed only natural to go for tea and samosas –
particularly as the European was paying.
“How much do they pay you at Jowada? Only
fifteen thousand rupees a month? A child couldn’t
live on that amount, and you have a wife and
family. These people! They cheat the honest worker.
Maybe it’s time they were taught a lesson…”
Very quickly the conversation was steered the
way the two men wanted it to go; and that first
time, they left him with a gift, a fake Rolex watch.
And why not? Jagdish had done them favours in
the past, giving them free food which he stole
from the kitchen. Now it was their turn to look
after Ravi. The next time they met, a week later,
it was an iPhone – the real thing. But the gifts
were only a glimpse of all the riches that could be
his if he would just agree to undertake a piece of
business on their behalf. It was dangerous. A few
people might be hurt. “But for you, my friend, it
will mean a new life. Everything you ever wanted
can be yours…”
Ravi Chandra entered the reactor chamber of
the Jowada nuclear power station at exactly eight
o’clock.
Five other engineers went in with him. They
had to go in one at a time through an airlock – a
white circular corridor with an automatic sliding
door at each end. In many ways it looked like
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something out of a spaceship and its purpose was
much the same. The exit wouldn’t open until the
entrance had closed. It was all part of the need
for total containment. The five men were dressed
identically, with safety helmets and goggles. All of
them were carrying toolboxes. For the rest of the
day they would carry out a series of tasks, some
of them as ordinary as oiling a valve or changing
a light bulb. Even the most advanced technology
needs occasional maintenance.
As they emerged from the airlock into the
reactor chamber they seemed almost to vanish, so
tiny were they in these vast surroundings, dwarfed
by the bright yellow gantries and walkways overhead,
by electric hoists and cables, soaring banks
of machinery, fuel rod transportation canisters and
generators. Arc lamps shone down from the edges
of the dome, and in the middle of it all, surrounded
by ladders and platforms, what looked like an empty
swimming pool plunged twelve metres down, with
stainless steel plates on all four sides. This was the
reactor. Underneath a one hundred and fifty tonne
steel cap, millions of uranium atoms were splitting
again and again, producing unimaginable heat.
Four metal towers stood guard in the chamber. If
they were shaped a little like rockets, they were
rockets that would never fly. Each one was locked
in its own steel cage and connected to the rest
of the machinery by a network of massive pipes.
These were the reactor coolant pumps, keeping the
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CROCODILE TEARS
water rushing round on its vital journey. Inside
each metal casing a fifty-tonne motor was spinning
at the rate of fifteen hundred revs per minute.
The pumps were labelled north, south, east and
west. The south pump was going to be Ravi’s primary
target.
But first of all he crossed to the other side of
the reactor chamber to a door marked EMERGENCY
EXIT ONLY. The two men had explained everything
very carefully to him. There was no point attacking
the reactor cap. Nothing could penetrate it.
Nor was there any point in sabotaging the reactor
chamber, not while it was locked down. Any blast,
any radiation leak, would be contained. To achieve
their aims an exit had to be found. The power of
the nuclear reactor had to be set free.
And there it was on the blueprint they had
shown him. The emergency airlock was the Achilles
heel in the fortification of Jowada. It should never
have been built. There was no need for it and it
had never been used. The reason for a passageway
between the reactor chamber and the back
of the turbine hall, where it opened onto a patch
of wasteland close to the perimeter fence, was to
reassure the workers that there was a fast way out
if it should ever be needed. But what it also provided
was a single pathway from the reactor to the
outside world. In one sense it was the barrel of a
gun. All it needed was to be unblocked.
Nobody noticed Ravi as he strolled over to the
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19
emergency door; and even if they had, they wouldn’t
have remarked on it. Everyone had their own worksheet.
They would assume he was just following
his. He opened the inner door – a solid metal plate
– and let himself into the corridor. About halfway
along, there was a control panel fixed high up in
the wall. Standing on tiptoe, Ravi unscrewed it,
using one of the few real tools he had brought with
him. Inside, there was a complicated mass of circuitry
but he knew exactly what to do. He cut two
separate wires, then spliced them together. It was
quite easy, really. The exit door slid open in front
of him, revealing a patch of blue sky beyond a wire
fence. He felt the sluggish air roll in. Somewhere,
perhaps in the control room, someone would notice
what had happened. Even now a light might be
blinking on one of the consoles. But it would be
a while before anyone came to investigate, and by
then it would be too late.
Ravi went back into the reactor chamber and over
to the nearest of the four reactor coolant pumps.
This was the only way that wide-scale sabotage
was possible. What he was aiming for was known in
the nuclear industry as a LOCA – a loss of coolant
accident. It was a LOCA that had caused the catastrophe
at Chernobyl and had almost done the same
at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, America. The
pump was locked in its cage, but Ravi had the key.
That was one of the reasons he had been chosen
for this job. The right man in the right place.
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CROCODILE TEARS
He stopped in front of the cylindrical wall that
rose more than twenty metres into the air. He
could hear the machinery inside. The noise was
constant and deafening. His mouth was dry now
as he thought about what he was going to do. Was
he mad? Suppose they traced this back to him. But
at the same time, there was cricket, Ajala – his
wife – Disneyland, a new life. His family were not
in Chennai today. He had sent them to friends in
Bangalore. They would be safe. He was doing this
for them. He had to do this for them.
For a few brief seconds greed and fear hung in
the balance, but then the scale tipped. He knelt
down and placed the toolbox against the metal
casing, opened it and removed the top shelf. The
inside was almost filled with the bulk of the plastic
explosive but there was just room for the timer:
a digital display showing ten minutes, a tangle of
wires and a switch.
Ten minutes. That would be more than enough
time to leave the chamber before the bomb went
off. He would exit the same way he had come in,
and once he was on the other side of the airlock, he
would be safe. If anyone questioned him, he would
say he needed the toilet. After the blast, there
would be panic, alarms, a well-rehearsed evacuation,
radiation suits for everyone. He would simply
join the crowds and make his way out. They would
never be able to trace the bomb to him. There
wouldn’t be any evidence at all.
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People might die. People he knew. Could he
really do this?
The switch was right there in front of him. So
small. All he had to do was flick it and the countdown
would begin.
Ravi Chandra took a deep breath. He reached
out with a single finger. He pressed the switch.
It was the last thing he did in his life. The men
from the street corner had lied to him. There was
no ten-minute delay. When he activated the bomb,
it went off immediately, almost vaporizing him.
Ravi was dead so quickly that he never even knew
that he had been betrayed, that his wife was now
a widow and that his children would never meet
Mickey Mouse. Nor did he see the effect of what he
had done.
Exactly as planned, the bomb had torn a hole in
the side of the coolant pump, smashing the rotors.
There was a hideous metallic grinding as the entire
thing tore itself apart. One of the other plant
operators – the same man who had been chatting
about cricket just a few minutes ago – was killed
instantly, thrown off his feet and into the reactor
pit. The other engineers in the chamber froze, their
eyes filled with horror as they saw what was happening,
then scattered, diving for cover. They were
too late. There was another explosion and suddenly
the air was filled with shrapnel, spinning fragments
of metal and machinery that had been turned into
vicious missiles. The two closest men were cut to
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CROCODILE TEARS
pieces. The others turned to run for the airlock.
None of them made it. Sirens were already sounding,
lights flashing, as the machinery disintegrated.
Everything in the chamber turned into a black and
red hell. A cable whipped down, trailing sparks.
There were three more explosions, pipes wrenching
themselves free, fireballs spinning outwards, and
then a roar as burning steam came rushing out like
an express train. The worst had happened. Jagged
knives of broken metal had smashed open the
pipes, and although the reactor was already closing
down, there were several tonnes of radioactive
steam with nowhere to go. One man was caught
in the full blast and disappeared with a single,
hideous scream.
The steam thundered out, filling the entire
chamber. Normally the walls and the dome would
have contained it. But Ravi Chandra, in almost the
last act of his life, had opened the emergency airlock.
Like some alien stampede, the steam found it
and burst through, out into the open air. All over
the Jowada power station, systems were being shut
down, corridors emptied, emergency safety measures
put into place. But it was already too late.
The people of Chennai saw a huge plume of white
smoke rise up into the air. They heard the alarms.
Workers at Jowada were calling their relatives in
the city, warning them to get out. The panic began
at once. More than a million men, women and
children dropped what they were doing and tried
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to find a way through traffic that had come to a
complete standstill. Fights broke out. There were
collisions and smash-ups at a dozen different junctions
and traffic lights. But it had all happened
too quickly and not a single person made it out of
the city before the radioactive cloud, blown by a
northerly wind, fell onto them.
The story appeared that night on television news
all around the world.
It was estimated that at least a hundred people
had died in the hour following the explosion.
There had been casualties within the Jowada
power station itself, but curiously far more were
killed in the mad crush to get out of Chennai.
By the following morning the newspaper headlines
were calling it A NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE – in
capital letters, of course. The Indian authorities
were adamant that the steam cloud would have
contained only low-level radiation and that there
was no need for panic, but there were just as
many experts who disagreed.
Twenty-four hours later, an appeal was made to
help the people of Chennai. Further casualties were
being reported. Homes and shops had been looted.
There were still riots in the streets and the army
had been called in to restore order. The hospitals
were full of desperate people. One British charity
– it called itself First Aid – came forward with a
comprehensive plan to distribute food, blankets
and, most important of all, potassium iodate tablets
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CROCODILE TEARS
for every one of the eight million people of Chennai
to counter possible radiation sickness.
As always, the British people were unfailing in
their generosity, and by the end of the week they
had raised one and a quarter million pounds.
Of course, if the disaster had been any greater,
they would have raised much, much more.
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