Deepkill

by Michael Kilian

  “So are you going to fly tomorrow?” He reached for another beer.

  “They still have the airports shut down, and they have the Air National Guard flying CAP.”

  “Can you help me out on the boat again?”

  “I’d be surprised if you had any customers.” She looked at him, noting no change in his expression. “But that doesn’t seem to matter, does it?”

  She had a more compelling question.

  “Burt, why do you keep taking the Roberta June to Deep-kill Shoal?”

  His eyes retreated.

  “If you’re going to stay my friend, Burt, you’d better tell me.”

  “You’ll think I’m crazy. The Air Force does.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Long story,” he said hesitantly. “Only, now I’ve got to turn it into a short one.”

  They both drank. Then he lighted a cigarette. Someone in a car with the windows open and the radio blaring heavy metal rock music moved slowly down the street outside, the bass notes thumping.

  He’d said something to her about a doctor’s appointment—days before.

  “Burt, have you been to the doctor?”

  “Yeah. I went.”

  “What did he say? Do you need an operation or something?”

  “No, Cat. I don’t need any goddamned operation. I’ve got nothing inside worth fixing.”

  The mere mention of his internal organs provoked a cough. He was a long time finishing it.

  “Maybe I’d better switch tanks,” he said. It was his way of saying he was moving on to hard liquor. He filled a small glass with bourbon, then returned to his chair, leaning it back a little. A puff of smoke.

  “What’s at Deepkill, Burt?”

  He exhaled from his cigarette, then put it out in his ashtray and got to his feet—unsteadily, and with something of a grimace.

  “Okay,” he said. “Come with me.”

  Schilling led her upstairs, past an open door that revealed a rumpled, unkempt bedroom and on down to a closed door at the other end of the hall.

  “My little museum,” he said, opening the door and turning on a lamp.

  In contrast to the rest of the house, this room was very neat and orderly, though crowded with objects.

  The walls were half-covered with old framed photographs, most of them military, many of them pictures of aircrews standing and kneeling in front of their aircraft. Here and there were odd pieces of memorabilia: a blue Air Force officer’s cap, much crumpled; a glass-topped box containing insignia and a few medals; a stack of ancient pilots’ logbooks; a painting of a giant cargo plane. Burt said it had been done by Dick Tracy comic-strip artist Dick Locher, who’d been in the Air Force a few years before Burt and had flown the aircraft.

  There was also an old ball compass that had once belonged in an instrument panel, a survival knife, and an old-fashioned .45 automatic, once standard issue for officers before the advent of the modern 9mm model. Cat had a 9mm in her bedroom she had taken with her out of the Navy, but it was no souvenir.

  Burt went to a wide, battered old desk set against the room’s lone window and turned on another lamp. Half the top surface was covered with stacks of bulging file folders and binders. There were framed black-and-white photographs standing at either end of the desk. That on the left was of a man in Air Force uniform whom Cat took to be one of Burt’s military flying buddies. He was young, broad-faced, and had very light, friendly eyes. He’d autographed the photo for Burt.

  The picture on the right was of a woman, also rather young, with dark hair worn in an old-fashioned early 1960’s style. There was no signature. Her eyes were dark, very open and frank, but not communicating much affection.

  Cat peered more closely at the woman’s picture, noting small lines around the eyes, and other signs of strain. Then she turned back to face Burt.

  “Who are these people?” she asked.

  “People I lost,” he said.

  “Lost? You mean they’re dead?”

  “One is.”

  He plucked a mounted scale model of a multiengined aircraft from a shelf, removed it from its stand, and then handed it to her. It was a big cargo plane just like the one in the photograph, and very complex in its detail work. There were actually tiny pilot figures visible behind the little plastic canopy windows.

  “Ever fly anything this big?” he asked, leaning back against a table.

  Holding it by the bottom of the fuselage, she examined it carefully, tilting its wings as though banking in flight.

  “No,” she said. “A Gulfstream jet once. Never anything like this.”

  “In some ways, it was like flying a house,” he said. “Parked on the ramp with the gear down, the pilot’s seat was a good two stories off the ground.”

  She squinted at it. “You could get a truck into one of these.”

  “Yup. Trucks. Armored personnel carriers. Did that. Used to fly to Germany with ’em in the belly.”

  He’d brought his glass and his cigarettes up with him. He found an ashtray and once more lighted up. She guessed he hadn’t changed a single one of his habits since the 1960’s.

  She nodded to the pictures on the desk. “Is that your copilot?”

  He shook his head. “That’s Joe Mikulski, the flight engineer on my last 130. Hell of a guy. Always did the right thing, followed all the rules. A straight arrow, but he was never a jerk about it. One of the guys. Real nice. Safest man I ever had in an airplane.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Burt gestured with his glass toward the other photograph.

  “That’s Roberta June. She went by June. Hated Roberta.”

  “Your wife?” He’d never told her for whom the boat was named.

  “She was, until 1968.”

  “Did she die?”

  “No. She’s living in California. Married some guy. But I lost her. Lost Mikulski. In different ways, but both because of that flight. It was my last flight—last time I flew an airplane for the Air Force. Took off just up the coast from here, Dover Air Force Base. Night flight to England, then a hop over to Germany. I’d done a couple dozen of these trips out of Dover. All routine. The ship had been down for maintenance, but everything in the preflight and run-up showed perfect. You want another drink?”

  “I’m fine, Burt.”

  “Never had a problem before that, not in all my time in the service. Never had anything go wrong with that aircraft. Nothing big-time anyway. But just as we were climbing out of four thousand, right by the mouth of that bay out there, both port engines died on me. Turned out to be a blockage in the fuel line—a minor fuckup that went major, some valve that was put in backward. Did I ever tell you about the real Murphy’s Law?”

  She shook her head.

  “The real Murphy was a colonel in charge of the Army rocket sled project in the late forties. Remember Paul Stapp, the test pilot they had riding the sled?”

  Cat shook her head again.

  “It was in the movie newsreels—his face all flattened and distorted when the rocket sled hit speed. The project was a test of G-forces on pilots. The first run damn near killed Stapp, but the G-meter showed zero. Colonel Murphy took a look at it and discovered somebody had wired in the telemetry sensors backwards. And so he uttered the immortal words ‘If there’s a way to fuck something up, somebody will find it.’ Later on, it got kinda cleaned up for public consumption.”

  Cat snapped off the lamp on the desk. “You know, Burt, I think I’ll take you up on the offer of a walk on the beach.”

  She again declined another drink, giving him something of a dark look at the renewed suggestion. He ignored the implied reproach, and brought the bottle of bourbon with him.

  Pausing first to drop her shoes in her Jeep, she led Burt in a trudge over the dune, happy in the coolness of the sand on her bare feet as she came down the other side. The daylight was gone from the sky in the east, but there was still a pastel wash of blue and pink in the west. Delaware Bay was turquoise fading
to dark blue, with only a light chop showing, though the breeze to weather was increasing.

  Cat walked out into the water, till it came up nearly to her knees. Burt stood at the edge of the sand, just behind her.

  “You’re not going swimming?” he asked.

  “No such luck, old man.”

  She looked back. He was lifting the bottle. She waded back onto the beach.

  “Let’s walk,” she said.

  “I was telling you about that flight.”

  The click and yellow flame of a cigarette lighter.

  “You’re supposed to be telling me about Deepkill,” she said, looking straight ahead. In the distance, she could see the evening party boat coming out of the Roosevelt Inlet, its lights twinkling and merry. Whoever they were, those people weren’t worrying about terrorists.

  “You know, except for bombing missions during the big war, I never heard of anyone losing two engines like that,” Burt said. “Two at once. On the same side. I had a hell of a time. Couldn’t keep the wing up. Couldn’t hold altitude. We started flying like a brick. It was night. End of winter. I was over the ocean. Not far off the shore, but not near enough.”

  He stopped to point to a place in the sky.

  “You might have died in the water,” Cat said. “Hypothermia comes on pretty quick.”

  “That’s the truth. I figured there was only one way out. Dump cargo. It was the only chance we had.”

  They started walking again.

  “I had two big pieces of cargo—weighing more than two tons apiece.”

  “Armored personnel carriers?”

  He stopped again, looking at her. “I was never supposed to say anything to anyone about this. Top secret. Talk and you go to jail. All these years.”

  “I won’t rat on you.”

  “They were nuclear weapons.”

  She stared at him, blinking, not quite comprehending.

  “Missiles?”

  “This was 1967. They were bombs.”

  “You dropped two atomic bombs off the Delaware shore?”

  She gazed out over the darkening water, imagining it, imagining weirdly the bombs detonating, evaporating everything in view.

  “Hydrogen bombs. Mark 28’s. They contained a lot of HE—high explosive. But that was just to ignite the nuclear stuff inside. Nothing happened when they hit the water.”

  “Are the bombs still there? In the water?”

  “Yeah. They sure as hell are.” He stared out to sea as though one more good hard look might reveal the exact location. “Somewhere a little south of here, other side of Cape Henlopen. Near the Deepkill shoal. Maybe in the Deepkill Slough that runs along the shoal. As soon as we jettisoned them and stabilized flight, I returned to Dover. I was low. Skimmin’ the waves. I don’t know how we made it.”

  “No one did anything about them? The bombs?”

  “You’re Navy, Cat. Didn’t you ever hear of Palomares? In Spain?”

  “Something about a B-52 crash?”

  “A B-52 collided with its refueling tanker over Palomares. It was carrying Mark 28 nuclear weapons and three of them hit the ground. They didn’t explode, but spewed radioactive debris all over the place. The fourth one went into the drink. It took them weeks to find it. The Navy came in with a couple of submersible underwater vehicles—one of them called ‘Alvin’—and finally found it by following a track it left in the sea bottom after it hit. The whole recovery project cost the U.S. government eighty million dollars and a hell of a lot of ill will all over the world. The Air Force didn’t want another.”

  “They just ignored it?”

  “Publicly. On the quiet, they had the Navy poke around out there for a while, but they didn’t find anything. They never called in the varsity team—which was Bob Ballard.”

  “The undersea explorer?”

  “He was Navy then. A sub hunter. Sunken submarines. Ours and the Russians. But they never went to him. They’d gone through the motions, and that was enough. The Air Force debriefed me and my crew, then told my CO they’d take care of everything. They assured me there was no problem. The Mark 28’s had three stages, not counting the uranium—high explosive, the plutonium core, and the triggering mechanism. You had to have the plutonium core and the trigger mechanism installed before they could go off. They contained maybe a couple kilos of plutonium. The bombs on my plane weren’t supposed to have the triggering mechanism in them while in transit. They installed that in Europe at the bomber bases. So there wasn’t any real problem with their going into the sea. That’s what they said. Nothing to worry about.”

  “You said they never told anyone.”

  “Oh, they put out some cover statement to the local papers that some ‘general cargo’ had been jettisoned because of the emergency. They ordered us to keep our mouths shut. Olssen, my copilot, he raised a little hell about it, and got himself transferred out to Guam for his troubles.”

  The slope of sand was somewhat steep where they were. Cat sat down on its incline, leaning forward, hugging her knees as she gazed out over the water. The party boat was crossing the bay. To the north, a large ship was coming down toward the sea, out of Wilmington or Philadelphia or maybe the Delaware Canal. The lights of Cape May directly opposite were brightly visible now. How many people lived in that town year-round? Or in Lewes?

  “We had some trouble with one of the bombs,” Burt said, sitting down beside her. “That’s how I lost Mikulski. He went out with it. Right into the sea. They never found his body. I think he may have gone all the way down to the bottom with it.”

  “Dear God.”

  “The bomb had gotten hung up somehow. Mikulski, he got himself down on the cargo ramp and was working on the nose of the damn thing. The bomb came free, and he went with it.”

  Yet another cigarette. More whiskey. Leaving the cap off, he offered her the bottle. This time she took it.

  “When they debriefed Olssen, they didn’t like what he insisted had happened. They sent him to the Pentagon, then shipped him out to the Pacific. They must have really put the fear into him because I never heard from him again. He did his tour and then left the service. Moved out to Montana.”

  Another swig of whiskey.

  “He died last year,” Burt continued. “His wife sent me a letter he’d written me toward the end but hadn’t sent. It said that the last bomb had the plutonium core and the trigger in it. Mikulski discovered that when they were getting the thing ready to jettison. Olssen was afraid to mess with it. The bomb was about to break free. But Mikulski crawled down there and was trying to remove the trigger device when the bomb went out.”

  Burt took a deep breath, then coughed.

  “So I dropped at least four kilos of plutonium 239 and I don’t know how much uranium into the ocean out there, along with a device to set it off. Along with my friend.”

  Four kilograms. About the size of a couple of softballs. Maybe a little larger. Enough to kill a city.

  “But it’s been all these years,” she said. “Nothing’s happened.”

  “Everything corrodes in the sea,” Burt replied. “Sometimes you get concretions. Rocky lumps that form around rusting metal. But mostly things rust through, and break up—ships, airplanes, bombs, whatever.”

  “Didn’t you tell the Air Force about your copilot’s last letter? Surely they’d want to do something about it.”

  In the dim light, she could see his bitter grin. “I’ve written ’em three times since I got that letter from Olssen. I only got one letter back, and they didn’t say very much useful. They must have just checked the files. Same as before. No problem. Nothing to worry about.”

  “And you believe Olssen over the Air Force?”

  “Any fucking day of the week.”

  Yet another cigarette—and another swig of bourbon. It was as though he had some quota of them to consume before he left this life, and was hurrying.

  “There was an official report on all this,” he said. “It was declassified in 1989 but they didn’
t get it into circulation until 1996. I got a copy from an outfit called Save Our Shores. ‘Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving U.S. Nuclear Weapons, 1950–1980.’ It’s upstairs. There were some other incidents like mine. In ’57, a cargo plane dropped a couple of unprimed Mark 17’s into the Atlantic off the Jersey Coast, and nobody knew a damn thing about it until this report came out.” He smoked. “The difference is that one of mine has plutonium and a trigger in it.”

  “If it’s in an official report, then they ought to be doing something about it.”

  “No, ma’am.” Another swallow of whiskey. “The report says the ‘devices present no hazard.’ And the location? That’s ‘defense information.’ They say they’ll neither ‘confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at any specific place.’ You know what that means? That means they don’t know where these damn things are and don’t give a shit about finding out.”

  He started coughing again, and then doubled over, almost retching. To her amazement, when he was able to sit upright again, he took another drink of whiskey. Who said drunks had no willpower?

  Cat got to her feet, brushing off her shorts and looking skyward, where the lights of a high-flying jet were visible as it passed from southwest to northeast. Had to be a fighter, moving that fast—someone flying a combat air patrol.

  The breeze was really brisking up now. She was getting a little cold.

  Burt tried to get up himself, but slipped back. She leaned over and offered her hand. He took it, seeming surprised at how easily she was able to pull him up.

  “I didn’t want to tell you this, Cat. I’m goin’ to die, honey.”

  “We’re all going to do that.”

  “For me, it’s pretty damn soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “A year maybe. Not much more than that.”

  She swallowed. Now she was cold all over. She knew he didn’t want her to say anything. She took his hand, squeezing hard. Sick and old as he might be, it was like squeezing mahogany.

  “I thought about dying a lot, last few years,” he said. “I always thought that at the end, I’d just go down to New Orleans or up to Atlantic City or someplace and spend my last days eatin’ fine meals and drinking good whiskey and renting myself some dangerous woman.” He coughed again. “But that’s all out the window. I’ve gotta do this, Cat. Find the damn bombs. This is what I want to do with what time I’ve got left. Trouble is, I need some money to do it.”