Radioactive (The Rayna Tan Action Thriller Series Book 4)

by Wes Lowe

  After two weeks of being completely incommunicado because he would claim to have isolated himself in a remote cabin, turning off his cell phone and without access to the internet, he would re-surface. His heart would be broken again because of all the crimes and immorality of his father. His own profile would soar when he announced that half of the ten million dollar death benefit he would receive because of Marlena’s murder would go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

  With five million dollars left after the donation, plus the sale of his and Marlena’s exclusive four million dollar home in Malibu, no wonder Carter was looking good and feeling confident about his future in South Korea, where many of the most beautiful and accommodating Asian women in the world lived.

  It was closer to twenty minutes before Becky returned. “We’re good to go,” she announced. She pointed to the two large hyperbolic-shaped cooling towers fifty yards away. “We can get in through the front doors at the cooling towers.”

  Sonny drove the van to the first of the tall structures and parked.. He opened the side panel door for Carter to get out and then opened the rear door. Unlocking a large wooden box, he pulled out three Hazmat-like suits. He gave one to Carter, one to Becky, and kept one for himself.

  “This ain’t really necessary,” said Becky. “None of us ever wore anything like this. And it’s gonna cost us half an hour at least to get all this gear on.”

  “You can skip it if you like, but not me,” said Carter. Never far from his consciousness was the specter of Three Mile Island and what might have happened if Davy’s parents had been protected.

  Sonny added, “A lead apron was protection enough when all I was taking out were small amounts of radioactive material from the equipment, but these are full-fledged dirty bombs and there is a lot of radioactive stuff in each baby. Sure, I put them together with as much care as I could, but accidents happen and I ain’t gonna take no kind of chance.”

  “Okay, okay. You win. Just that I never had to wear these damn space suits,” said Becky.

  Thirty minutes later, having donned their helmets and lead-lined suits, they looked like they had stepped out of a science fiction movie. The only area where safety was compromised was the use of vinyl gloves. Speed, finger, and hand dexterity were going to be critical which would not be possible if they used bulkier, more protective gloves.

  “Now are we ready to see if you were worth the big bucks we paid you, Sonny?” asked Carter.

  Even with his headgear on, Carter could see that Sonny had shot him a quizzical look. “What are you talking about?”

  Carter pointed to the doors of the service entrance. “Even though a lot of the radiation detectors aren’t working, there’s still a bunch that are. Once we get inside the plant, we’ll know for sure how good your lead cases are. If any of the damn detectors start clicking or sending off signals, we’re toast.”

  “I did my math and triple-checked it, Carter. Most shielding is about half an inch thick which reduces the radiation by 50%. I added an extra quarter-inch layer which reduces it to almost nothing. With a cubic inch of lead at about seven pounds per cubic inch, that’s why my boxes are so damn heavy… and why we are safe from radiation poisoning.”

  Sonny pulled out two heavy-duty platform trucks from the van, positioning them right next to the truck’s open doors. He put their brake locks on and made sure they were stable while Carter removed the lead-lined radiation protection covers that covered boxes that resembled oversized suitcase bombs.

  “Can’t you go any faster?” asked Becky with a frustrated urgency in her voice. Sonny was slower than anyone she had been working with at CNP.

  “Not if you don’t want to risk getting blasted to kingdom come if I’m not careful. Those suckers are almost two hundred pounds each and extremely sensitive,” said Sonny. “I got my workout putting them together and then loading them into the van. Every motion was like an exercise of kid gloves.”

  “Son of a gun, how’d you load them into the van by yourself?” queried Becky.

  “I carried the individual sides in one by one. Then I assembled the boxes inside the truck, and stuffed them with TATP. Last thing to go in were the bombs,” huffed Sonny. “We got four boxes in total. Between them is almost a hundred and fifty pounds of TATP. When that stuff detonates, its crystals can reach a temperature of over 2,000 degrees Centigrade. There’s about three pounds of fissile material—cesium, iridium, cobalt, plutonium, americium, uranium… Anything we could get our hands on… And that’s why I’m so damn careful.”

  “Right.”

  While it might have been possible for a single person to lift a bomb, Carter and Sonny weren’t taking any chances. The two men pushed two boxes close to the van’s door, and then stepped out. Next, they carefully lifted one box together and placed it onto one of the platform trucks. They repeated the process for the second box with a bomb in it.

  Although they hadn’t used up a lot of effort, Becky could see that the sweat on the brow of each man.

  “We’re almost ready,” said Carter. He then took out a two hundred foot coil of rope and handed it to Becky. “Carry this and we’re good to go.”

  Nodding, Becky then led the two platform trucks through the entrance and down a long hall whose walls were made of solid metal.

  She stopped in front of a door that resembled a submarine hatch, with a circular hand-wheel instead of a doorknob.

  Becky rotated the wheel.

  Sonny gaped when the door opened to reveal the huge pool standing less than thirty feet away from him. “Wow!” was the only thing he could think of to say. Until now, he had only worked with layout plans and Davy’s instructions. Being right in the room where the bombs would go off filled him with a moment of awe.

  “This is where the spent fuel rods and assemblies cool after they are removed from the reactor core. The short-lived isotopes decay and reduce the ionising radiation coming out of the rods,” explained Carter. “They are still highly radioactive though, and that’s what we will take advantage of. We will put one bomb beside the pool and the other inside the water. After we detonate the first one, we will wait for one minute before we detonate the second one. The first bomb will destroy the pool and allow all the water to gush away, leaving the fuel rods unprotected. The job of the second bomb is to explode and create a nuclear chain reaction whose impact will spread for miles.”

  Sonny’s eyes opened wide. “Sounds good.”

  Carter and Sonny carefully lifted the first bomb and placed it at the exterior base of the pool. Then Carter took the coil of rope from Becky. With Sonny’s assistance, they secured the second bomb and had about seventy feet of slack between one end of the rope and the bomb.

  Together, they gently lowered the bomb through the water and down to the bottom of the pool.

  Carter gave the thumbs up to Sonny. “Now, we’re going to the nuclear reactor. If you were careful now, you gotta be ten times that when we get there.”

  48

  Arrival at Target

  Julio, staying in constant contact with the cell phone that had pinpointed Carter’s location at JFK, followed it to the Connorville Power Plant, confirming his suspicion that it was the target.

  But he was getting worried. There had been no movement for more than an hour. Using a real time high definition satellite aerial view of CNP, he saw a cargo van parked outside one of the twin cooling towers.

  “I’ve found schematics and designs for over fifty dirty bombs as well as conventional nukes,” said Vanessa as she continued hacking Davy’s computer. “We should get more people to CNP to help Rayna and Chuck.”

  “No, we can’t do that,” said Rayna from the traveling chopper.

  “We can’t risk bringing in more bodies,” added Chuck. “If you send in experts to disarm and diffuse, that adds an extra risk of detection, which might just make Carter trigger happy.”

  “They are already on the way,” said Barry. “Disarming a dirty bomb is not the same as dealing with the
IEDs the two of you experienced in the Middle East.”

  Rayna replied, “Don’t send them in yet. Carter’s not going to detonate anything as long as he’s on the premises. He probably knows that there won’t be a massive blast radius but I’m sure he’s gonna want to get away before he sets anything off.”

  “I second that,” nodded Chuck. “Who wants to take the risk?”

  “And what if he finishes faster or he’s got an RPG to take you down?” snapped Barry. “I’m not good with that.”

  “We’re almost there. Have the bomb team stay outside the gates of CNP. If something happens to us, send them in,” suggested Rayna as a compromise.

  Before Barry could answer, Julio exploded, “The van has just moved to the containment building where the reactor is.”

  “How long before we touch down?” asked Rayna.

  “Half hour, tops,” shouted the chopper pilot.

  It was the longest half hour of Rayna’s life.

  49

  Mission Accomplished

  Keeping their hazmat suits on, Carter and Sonny put the platform trucks back into the truck. Rather than trying to climb in with the bulky protective suit, Becky walked in front of the vehicle and guided it to the containment building’s service entrance. Arriving, she punched the numeric code into the keypad and the gate ascended. Sonny parked the van in a loading bay.

  The process for unloading the bombs and putting them in position was going to be a slower process than when they were at the cooling tower. Davy recognized that the greatest potential for disaster was the nuclear meltdown that would be from the rods in the nuclear reactor. Unlike the older fuel rods in the cooling tower which had outlived their maximum radioactive usage, the rods in the nuclear reactor were still relatively new, giving them greater potential for damage. The resulting widespread dispersal of deadly radiation spreading into the environment for miles would impact all life. For humans, exposure to radiation would lead to hair loss, skin blisters, tumors, cancer, and death. While it would not cause the destruction of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima experienced, it would still rank in the top twenty meltdowns of all time.

  That’s why Davy designed his bombs to be larger and heavier.

  Cautiously, Carter and Sonny unloaded the cargo van and placed the bombs and the shielding onto the platform trucks. They began the journey to the reactor, gingerly pushing their destructive cargo.

  Sonny was awed. When Becky turned the circular hand-wheel that opened the door, it was like entering the set of a space adventure movie.

  Above ground was a huge, thick tube reaching sixty feet in height with a diameter of twenty-five feet. Hovering over the tube was a complex of metal platforms and catwalk-like structures. Metal ladders that ascended to the top of the reactor housing were attached to the tube’s exterior with a staging platform in the middle. In addition to the ladders were open air elevators.

  Sonny whistled. He had never seen anything like this, and even when Davy described what was going to happen, it never really sunk in. Filled with a sense of impending doom, gloom, and fear, he asked, “So what’s happening now?”

  ”We’re now at the nuclear reactor core,” explained Carter. “The walls of this large container are seven feet thick and are made of concrete and steel. Normally this thing is full of water, but because the plant is being decommissioned, the water has been drained.”

  Carter paused for emphasis before continuing. “That’s why CNP was chosen. This place is over seventy years old and has outlived its usefulness. Because there’s no water, it’ll make blowing the bombs up easier. We’ll just load up the elevators, take them to the top of the container, and lower them to the bottom. We should be out of here in twenty minutes.”

  He and Sonny then lifted the bombs and placed them on the elevators. Carter pressed the “up” button but nothing happened. The platform did not move and there was no sound.

  “What the? Becky, turn the elevator on.”

  Becky frantically dashed to the control console, but this was something she had never used and didn’t even know how to turn on. “It won’t turn on,” she screamed. “Somebody must have shut down the system, or maybe the damn thing is broken like half the other junk in this place.”

  Carter jumped off the elevator platform and rushed to her. He whipped off her head covering, then pulled out a hypodermic syringe just like the one he used on Rob and injected it into her. As she fell to the floor and started convulsing, he screamed, “You’re useless to me!”

  Carter turned to Sonny and grunted, “We got to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  “No, no, no. That was never part of the deal,” replied Sonny. “I want another ten grand.”

  Knowing he couldn’t afford to antagonize Sonny now, Carter grinned. “You’re a bandit, Sonny. A lovable bandit, but a bandit nonetheless. Let’s get going.”

  Like the bomb at the spent fuel rod pool, the two men secured the bombs with rope. Taking the ends of the two ropes without bombs, Sonny climbed the ladder at the side of the tube. Reaching his goal, he clambered onto the platform at the top.

  Carter shouted “Look down at the reactor. Is there any water?”

  Sonny looked down. At the very bottom were the nuclear fuel assemblies, square metal tubes that were packed with thousands of pellets made of uranium oxide.

  But no water.

  “It’s dry.”

  “Great. Now pull up the first bomb, and then lower it down onto the top of the fuel assemblies.”

  Carter then carefully hoisted the bomb as Sonny pulled from the other end. Carter let go after he had lifted the bomb as high as he could and Sonny carefully pulled it up the rest of the way. As he was directed to, he gently lowered the bomb onto the fuel assemblies.

  “Okay,” shouted Sonny.

  “Good,” called out Carter. “Now haul up the next bomb. Walk to the other side of the reactor and lower it down there.”

  Sonny pulled up the second bomb and obediently stepped gently onto the metal platform to the other side of the reactor. Even though it was only a hundred feet away, Sonny was sweating because the bomb was so damn heavy. He lowered it onto the fuel assemblies.

  Job completed, Sonny scurried back to the ladder and began climbing down.

  He never made it. Carter thumbed the FIRE button on his cell phone, activating the detonator that Davy gave to Sonny just before he left. With the Hazmat suit exploding to bits, Sonny never felt a thing.

  Carter stepped away and headed back to the circular opening.

  Because of the delays, his precise schedule had been shot to shit and he was more than two hours behind schedule. The morning shift was going to start soon and he needed to vanish ASAP.

  Carter weighed his options. None of them was appealing but two of them were lesser evils. One was to walk out, sneak to the hole in the fence, crawl out, and head to the pot farm. The other was to take the clothes off the dead guard, change into them and drive out in the van.

  Carter decided to go with option one. All he needed was to have Davy arrange for a driver to pick him up at the turnoff to the hidden pot farm.

  He made a call. There was no answer. He waited three minutes, then tried again. Still no answer.

  This was not good. No matter how sick Davy was, he almost always accepted Carter’s calls. On the rare occasion that he didn’t, he returned the phone calls within thirty seconds.

  Had Davy succumbed to the radiation poisoning or ricin earlier than expected? He certainly wasn’t looking that great when he saw him last.

  Or had the operation somehow been compromised? Could someone possibly have used Davy to track him down?

  Shit. Carter opened the back of his cell phone, yanked out the batteries, threw it to the concrete floor, and used his foot to grind its innards.

  He made one stop before he left the building.

  The van.

  He went inside and searched Rob’s uniform.

  Jackpot! Behind his back covered by his shirt was a Gloc
k concealed in an inside-the-waistband holster clipped to his belt. He quickly disrobed, took off Rob’s uniform, and put them on. Taking the Glock with him, Carter quickly left the building.

  50

  Clock Ticking

  “Change of plans,” yelled Julio through the headsets.

  “What’s up?” asked Rayna. She, Chuck, and Andrew, the chopper pilot, were about twelve minutes away from their drop-off point. The plan was for the helicopter to drop them seven miles away from CNP so that the noise from the chopper would not alert anyone to their arrival. The bomb disposal experts Barry engaged earlier, Derrick Jones and Kenny Yoshida would pick them up in their explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) vehicle and bring them to the nuclear power station.

  “Andrew, go directly to CNP. Carter’s cell phone signal just died. We’ve got to assume that it was done on purpose and he’s making an untraceable break for it. I’ve alerted Derrick and Kenny to go directly to CNP and start looking for the bombs.”

  “Roger that,” called out Andrew.

  Fifteen tension-filled minutes later, the chopper landed on CNP’s empty parking lot.

  Barry’s voice barked, “There’s no sign of Carter at either the cooling towers or containment building. Derrick’s found one bomb by the fuel rods pool but by its location, thinks that there must be another one close by. Andrew, you go there and help him out. Chuck, you head to the containment building and help Kenny check it out-he hasn’t found anything yet. Rayna, get the drones out. Julio will go over the specifics with you.”