by Wes Lowe
“I love you too, Mom.”
He gently lifted his mother’s body, took out the pillow, then placed her back on the bed. He placed the pillow firmly over her face. After three minutes, there was no movement but Davy did not move for another half hour.
After the incident at Three Mile Island, Harold never had any intention of returning to the nuclear power facility in any capacity. He finished law school and was now a junior with the Energy team with the Sommers Dawson Archer firm in Los Angeles. He and Melissa agreed that she would not join him in California until Carter graduated from high school. Harold was putting in sixty hour weeks, so that year he had little time to visit the family in Goldsboro.
Melissa, seeing how depressed Davy was at the loss of his mother, sprang for a surprise vacation to Los Angeles for him and Carter. She hoped that visiting the City of Angels’ mammoth theme parks would cheer him up, and that Carter could visit his father. She told him she would use the time for a girls’ getaway weekend in New York with her old friends.
When they got there, Davy and Carter decided to start their adventure by going to Universal Studios in Hollywood. However the lines were so long at the theme park, they altered plans and decided to pop in early to see Harold at the Sommers Dawson Archer office where they were scheduled to meet for dinner. The front receptionist was on a break so no one was manning her desk so Carter decided to go visit his dad without being announced.
With a broad grin to welcome his dad, he swung open his father’s office door to discover his father and his secretary half-naked in a passionate embrace. So pre-occupied were they that they didn’t notice who it was when Carter slammed the door after he exited.
He was furious with his father. How could he possibly betray his mother? He wanted to call Melissa to tell her what he had unearthed and to file for divorce. Davy advised him not to do so. “Let her enjoy her little vacation before you let out the bombshell.”
Carter reluctantly agreed and did not attempt to contact her.
But when he arrived home, his mother was not there to pick him up at the airport. He called Helen, one of his mom’s girlfriends she supposedly went to the big Apple with. When Helen told Carter that the trip had been canceled, alarm bells went off in the teenager’s head.
Carter alerted the authorities. A search of the area revealed nothing. When he called Harold, his father told him to look after it as he was too busy to return home to deal with it.
Davy set aside his own grief to be with his friend. They called all of Melissa’s friends, searched all the local hangouts where she might possibly have visited, but could find no one that had a clue of where she might be.
Ten days later, Carter received a phone call from the Three Mile Island office. His mother’s car had been abandoned in the Three Mile Island parking lot. No one had bothered to check on it as the vehicle had a staff parking sticker. However, when it was noticed that the car had not been moved for almost two weeks, a call was made to the family home to ask if there was some car trouble.
Carter and Davy immediately headed to TMI. They found in the glovebox of the car a sealed envelope addressed to Carter. He opened it. It was a two line letter.
I’m so sorry Carter, but I can’t take it anymore. Please understand and forgive me.
Carter freaked and called for a search of the area.
It didn’t take long. The news was devastating. Her muddied and soaked shoes were located on the banks beside the Susquehanna River right by the power plant. Even though her body wasn’t found, Carter knew what happened—Melissa had committed suicide by walking into the river and drowning herself.
“I hate him,” screamed Carter to Davy as the two sat at the kitchen table. “He killed my mother with his whoring.”
Davy listened to Carter without interrupting, his own anger surging like a tsunami as his best friend ranted. He couldn’t help but think of Melissa having an affair with his father after finding Harold with another woman on a business trip. Then he realized that Melissa and Ken’s affair was not about a mutual lust for each other, but a mutual hatred for Harold.
He thought of his mother’s dying words, and decided this was the time to share what he knew with his best friend.
It was like a gigantic soap opera but with one major difference.
This was real life.
When Carter finished his tirade, Davy said simply, “Don’t get mad, get even. Make the bastard pay, not only what he did to your mom but my family too.”
His face clouding with rage, Carter cried out, “How? My old man’s on the fast track at the law firm and he’s planning to go into politics. He’s obsessed with being President someday. He’ll be untouchable. I hate him but a simple death is too good for him. He’s driven by his ego. I want to humiliate him when he’s at the top of his game.”
Davy’s eyes lit up. “Yeah. At Three Mile Island, the tragedy might have been averted had officials paid attention to the early suggestions of core meltdown. I remember my dad saying something, but I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. He tried to talk to your dad but he didn’t believe the instrumentation that said there was some kind of heat issue… or maybe he didn’t want to believe. Shutdown would mean job casualties, including his own, and profit loss to the company, meaning benefits and payouts might disappear.”
“So what are we going to do?”
Davy cleared his throat. He knew what he was going to say was going to sound crazy… but he also knew it was brilliant. “We will build a nuke and will detonate it in some remote area. We don’t want to kill thousands of people, but there will be some collateral damage. We’re going to implicate your dad in this. This bold statement will accomplish two things. Warn the world of the dangers of nuclear catastrophe and destroy his legacy.”
Carter crossed his arms thoughtfully. “It’s going to take us years, maybe even decades to put this together. But we can do it. I know we can.”
A devilish smile appeared on Carter’s face as he uttered the reputed last words of Julius Caesar. ”Et tu brute?”
“Huh?” A quizzical look appeared on Davy’s scrunched up face. He didn’t know any Latin and knew even less Shakespeare.
“We are going to get close, and when he’s least suspecting it, drive the knife.”
Carter offered his hand. Davy grabbed it and shook it.
Their pact was sealed.
Harold made an appearance at Melissa’s funeral but told Carter that he had to rush back to work, so he couldn’t stay. As an act of conciliation, he said he would hire a housekeeper to cook, clean and maintain the family home so Carter could live on his own until he graduated from high school.
Like hell. Carter was sure he just wanted to get back to his office squeeze.
Screw him.
Davy moved in as a housemate. Without the pressure of his mother’s health overriding his life, he could now focus on his studies, and his grades improved astronomically.
And he had a study buddy. Knowing that he had to be at the top of his game if he was ever going to exact payback on his father was Carter’s motivation for hitting the books hard.
Both hit the top ten percentiles in their SAT scores. Davy chose Penn State while Harold twisted Carter’s arm to go to school in California. He couldn’t get into Stanford like Daddy wanted, but the University of Southern California was entirely acceptable.
5
Only a Nuke
1995-2017
* * *
After finishing his undergraduate degree in biology, Davy stayed at Penn State to procure his M.D. He did a residency in radiation oncology at the University of Toronto, and after completion, he joined the research team at NYU. Everyone recognized his genius at integrating a multimodality approach into the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer.
He was obsessed with his field of interest, using the outcomes of his research to serve society and the underserved, always putting the greater mission ahead of any individual reward.
Those few that knew his
history assumed he chose it because of the deaths of his parents but whenever he was asked if that were true, he answered soberly, “We live in a radioactive world and must be prepared for all circumstances.”
His unique combination of balancing scientific research with the human touch made him a popular conference speaker. Even better, Davy was handsome, athletic, he was making great money, and women were attracted to him.
After completing an economics degree at USC, Carter returned to the east coast, moving to Boston after he was accepted into Harvard Law School. Always interested in the movie industry, his plan to become an entertainment lawyer was derailed when Harold got elected to Congress. Harold ridiculed his son’s idea of starting at the lowest rung in the mailroom of a major entertainment agency, the entry level position for almost everyone that had career aspirations in the biz, no matter what fancy schools one attended.
While he was not going to become the next Hollywood mogul he dreamed of being, Carter did wind up in Los Angeles. Harold twisted his arm to join his old legal firm Sommers Dawson Archer in the Energy Division, with the goal that someday he might not only become partner but follow Harold’s footsteps into politics.
Carter knew that working in the full spectrum of regulatory requirements for new power plant projects, plant regulation, and decommissioning, would give him and Davy an insider’s advantage of their goal. While he had little interest in the work, Carter applied himself as SDA groomed him for advancement.
Frequent travel to New York gave him and Davy the opportunity to connect in person, explore possibilities and just hang out. When Sommers Dawson Archer sent Carter on a research trip to Chernobyl to see its devastation, Davy joined him.
While there was a certain amount of published information in print and on the internet, visiting the actual site of the tragedy brought the catastrophe to life.
Pripyat, the city founded in 1970 to house the workers for the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, was dead; a ghost town. Long gone were the almost 50,000 residents who once inhabited the former cultural center that had once boasted of being a crown village of Lithuania’s Grand Duchy, then a center of Hasidic Judaism before being incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
On April 26, 1986, a power output surged during a systems test, forever changing the village. An emergency shutdown was attempted, but the power output spiked even higher, leading to an explosion in one of the reactors.
Two workers died instantly, and then further explosions and the resulting inferno released highly radioactive material into the atmosphere, causing fallout four hundred times that of Little Boy in Hiroshima.
Radiation poisoning of the almost 50,000 residents began almost immediately. Many evacuated, most leaving their personal belongings as haunting reminders of what would become known as the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Its legacy of contamination was expected to last at least three hundred years.
Experiencing the Chernobyl disaster was not only an eye-opener, it was transformational—Carter and Davy added a new dimension to their childhood pledge. While wanting revenge on a hated father remained a prime objective, they also wanted to sound the alarm on the dangers of nuclear power.
That had to be done with a bold stroke.
Davy was obsessed with the idea of a nuclear bomb of some kind while Carter was more pragmatic. He argued that their goals could be less costly and difficult with certain modifications but Davy refused to accept this.
Only a nuke was a nuke. Their war chest was building but they were still a few years away from being properly financed when plans had to change—Davy’s health began to decline.
Chills, fever, and nausea, while irregular, refused to go away. And then vomiting and bouts of diarrhea were added to the mix. When he started to lose his hair and sores began showing up on his skin, his days as a chick magnet were over.
Which was just as well; while his libido remained intact, his ability to perform did not.
After the visit to Chernobyl, most of Carter and Davy’s communication had been through email and phone calls. It was a shock to Carter’s system to see Davy’s physical changes on his next face to face visit to New York.
“We have to move up the timetable,” said Davy. “But I don’t think we can pull it off with the cash we have.”
It was a statement of fact. Even though they had no infrastructure and nowhere near as much money as was needed, Davy’s condition indicated that action had to be taken sooner.
Carter cracked a smirk. “I’ve got a plan.”
While there were persons who advertised that they could provide new identities for less than two thousand dollars, Carter and Davy opted for the more expensive services of the secretive Octavius, a master document forger whose clients included international money launderers and corporate espionage spies. The new legal identities Octavius created were more than just new citizenships and passports, but plausible cover stories and credit records.
6
Death and Resurrection
3 Years Ago
* * *
Obituary New York Times
* * *
Dr. DAVID ADAMS(1972-2017)
Dr. David Adams died tragically at the age of 46 years, on February 12, 2017 in a motor vehicle accident while driving to a radiation conference in Cleveland. He had been under recent stress and told his colleagues he was going to drive his rarely used Ferrari through the back roads to unwind. Adams’s Ferrari swerved to avoid a deer stepping into his lane. Unfortunately, he stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake. The vehicle killed the deer before swerving directly into a tree. The ensuing inferno consumed half the tree, incinerated the sportscar’s fiberglass body, and left no identifiable remains.
He will be sorely missed by colleagues and the community.
Carter shook his head, chuckling as he glanced up after reading the obituary on his smart phone. He saw Davy with an equally large grin sitting on the other side of a corner table at the laid back bar of the Travel Inn in Detroit. “You look pretty good for a dead guy.”
“I feel about as bad as I look. Hurt like hell,” complained Davy. “But at least you were able to line up a meeting in Detroit. I would have died for sure if I had to take the damn bus from Cleveland to Los Angeles.”
“So, did you get it?” Davy’s voice rang with urgency.
While encrypted messages were going to be their go-to method of communication, some things were still best done in person.
“The agent came over with a cheque two days later,” answered Carter, his lips curving to a big grin.
The previous year, Carter got Davy to purchase a life insurance policy for $500,000 on himself, with Carter was listed as the beneficiary. While it was less than Davy knew would be necessary, it was an amount that Carter knew wouldn’t raise suspicion, and it was enough to get the ball rolling.
Carter asked pointedly, “So, have you decided how we should do this?”
Gently clapping his steepled hands, Davy nodded in the affirmative. He had explored the two proven incidents of nuclear destruction: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima used a “gun-style” bomb that crashed fissile material together. Nagasaki used a more complex implosion bomb which created a huge explosion and required less fissile material.
Davy decided on the gun assembly--it was easy to make, easy to use, and much cheaper. While it was inefficient, the results could be devastating. Davy didn’t set goals as lofty as the 150,000 people killed on August 6, 1945, but even a fraction of that number would make a bold statement that would not be ignored. And if it were done in a remote area, human casualties would be minimal but the message would still blare loudly.
The basics behind a gun assembly were simple: shoot a piece of highly enriched uranium at your target and… kaboom.
The knowledge required to build a nuclear bomb wasn’t exactly a secret. Davy had been researching the building of nukes since he read a book about the Manhattan Project in high school. There was a
lot of information on the internet as well as published materials on past bomb construction.
“Once it’s built, we’ll fly a plane over the top of our target and drop it from the air. Just like we did with the Japs.”
Shades of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Carter gritted his teeth. “I don’t like it. You also forget that the technology doesn’t exist to cloak a bomber so that no one can detect it if it flew over Los Angeles or New York, unless we use an intercontinental ballistic missile which is totally out of our price range.”
“We don’t need an ICBM because we are going to launch our bomb from close to our target. Besides, too much precision math is needed to calculate getting it to the target, and we’d have to make our control device really small to mount it on the warhead, not to mention we’d need to get a lot more people to make sure we have a proper guidance system with stability control. Let’s make our life simple. We’ll just get jihadists to fly the plane over our target and drop it,” said Davy confidently.
It was hard to fault that logic. The willingness of a terrorist to die for his cause represented the highest form of sacrifice to achieve their political goals and enforce its religious ideology. Carter and Davy would insist to the radical jihadists that a tie-in with Harold, who was now with the Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, would be part of their price for glory.
Carter released an irritated breath. “You make it sound easy.”
“No way,” said Davy, shaking his head vehemently back and forth. “The real problem is not the building or launching of the nuke. It’s getting enough fissile material without getting caught. Nuclear power plants, active or decommissioned, have security so damn tight. It’s worse than trying to break into Fort Knox.”