“Why the perpetual red-ass?”
Ari ran a hand over his gleaming scalp. “He’s convinced the country’s gone soft, especially on this war on terrorism. America has lost its manhood, is embracing appeasement, throwing away good soldiers’ lives in shitholes like Iraq and Afghanistan, paying court to billionaire Hollywood marshmallows, stuff like that.”
“He may have a point there,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it’s a democracy, isn’t it. Personally, I think it’s more of a classic case of a man confusing the deterioration of his own aging faculties with the rest of the nation. You know, grumpy old men. Old guys are always saying everything’s going to hell. Not like it used to be in my day, by God, when I had to walk three miles to school through ten feet of snow, et cetera.”
“How old is Trask?”
“Mid-sixties, actually.” He saw my surprise. “I know—he doesn’t look it.”
“Where’d he get the nickname?”
“He apparently likes snakes. You know, some kind of offbeat hobby.”
We talked contract and agreed on the broad provisions of a statement of work. “I have a request,” I said when we were done with that.
“Shoot.”
“I’ve sent my people home, but right now I’d like to take a little outside tour with my vehicle. Drive around the plant perimeter. Outside the protected area, but inside the corporate zone. Get the lay of the public land.”
“A lot of it’s swamp,” he said. “About twelve hundred acres in all, including farmland and designated wetlands. Stay on the roads, and don’t mess with any protected area fences—they’re wired six ways from Sunday. If you do run into the security people, show those badges. The worst they can do is escort you back to the main gate. You work for me, not them.”
“Gosh, you think I’ll run into Trask?”
“Isn’t that why you want to go out there?” he asked with a grin.
By sundown I was parked along the banks of the inlet canal, a man-made baby river that branched off the much larger Cape Fear River. It had been built to provide cooling water for the turbine steam condensers in the generator hall. I’d driven around the fields and ponds and swamps for about forty minutes before finding the spot I wanted. It was getting dark when Trask’s people finally showed themselves. I picked up a distant tail about halfway through my excursion. It looked like a Bronco or similarly boxy SUV, but they kept far enough back that I couldn’t tell how many people were in the vehicle. Ari had given me a road map of the so-called corporate area, and I’d meandered over most of it.
I was out of my vehicle, taking pictures of the power plant in the distance, when they finally made their move. The complex was now blurring into a twinkling cluster of sodium vapor lights silhouetting the big buildings in the center when the Bronco came in, skidding to a stop from an unnecessarily high-speed approach. Three doors popped open, and three security guys piled out, all decked out in partial SWAT costumes and brandishing stubby assault rifles of some kind. I waited for the Freeze, motherfucker! but instead two of them spread out into covering positions behind the headlights while the third approached me. His clear plastic faceplate revealed white bandages on his nose and forehead, and I recognized Billy the Kid. I didn’t see Trask, and I didn’t recognize the other two guys.
“Let’s see some identification,” he said, keeping his rifle at port arms and pretending we’d never met.
I wanted to point out that I was in the public domain area of the complex, but instead I just lifted the chain with my plant ID cards over my head and handed them over. He pocketed them with one hand while keeping his weapon ready.
“Those are not valid,” he announced. He hadn’t even so much as glanced at them.
“How would you know?” I asked. “Or can’t you read?”
“Because our office didn’t issue them,” he said with a hint of triumph in his voice. “You’ll have to come with us.”
“Where we going, Billy?” I asked, just so the other two guys would know I’d recognized him. “And by the way, isn’t this the public area?”
“You were seen conducting surveillance of the power plant,” he said, coming closer to get right in my face. “We have you on camera. Turn around.”
“No,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. I was about an inch taller than he was and a whole lot bigger. “I’m authorized to be here and, for that matter, inside the protected area if I want, by the director of technical security. Your boss’s boss, as I understand it. He told me you had no authority over me unless I showed up in an unauthorized place, such as within the vital area.”
Billy was visibly angry now, so I slowly positioned myself to deflect any sudden moves. I could see that his forearms were trembling, meaning that he wanted to club me with that weapon. The other two remained in position, but they didn’t seem to be getting excited just because Billy was.
“I said turn around; do it!” he yelled.
“Make me, Billy,” I replied, and then I whistled. The shepherds came out of their hides in the underbrush from behind the other two guards. Each one grabbed a mouthful of a guard’s wrist before the men were even aware the dogs were there. They both yelled in surprise, but they also both had the sense to make no sudden moves. Billy reacted by taking one step backward and swinging his weapon around, but then he, too, froze when he saw that he couldn’t shoot the dogs without hitting his two buddies. I itched to just clock him right there and then, but there really wasn’t any need.
“This is a great time to be very still,” I announced to the other two guys. “You twitch, those two will each amputate a hand. You guys understand me?”
Both of them nodded quickly, trying not to look down into those intent canine eyes. Their faces were red in the Bronco’s taillights. Even with semi-SWAT gear on, they had to be feeling close to fifty pounds per square inch of jaw pressure, and that was just the I-got-you squeeze.
At that moment, the fourth door on the Bronco opened. Colonel Trask stepped out into the headlights and walked over to where Billy and I were standing.
“Billy?” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“You are so fucking fired,” Trask said. “Gimme that.”
Before Billy could respond, Trask took his weapon away from him, retrieved my IDs, and told him to get into the backseat of the Bronco. Then he looked at me and bobbed his head in the direction of the shepherds. I called them off and they trotted over to me, taking up positions on either side of me and locking on to Trask. He looked down, flashed an admiring grin, and then told the other guards to take the Bronco back to the plant and wait there for him. He handed over Billy’s weapon to one of them as they left.
Once the Bronco had driven away, Trask and I strolled over to the bank of the inlet canal and stared out over the swamps at the cluster of lights around the plant. The inlet canal was a good hundred yards across, and the water was deceptively still. On the other side of the plant, where the hot water came out of the main condensers, two huge nozzles from the plant blew steaming water five hundred feet down a concrete exit channel. There had to be a big current under the surface on the inlet side.
“It’s pretty out here,” he said, handing me back my IDs. “But don’t try this in the summertime.”
“Mosquitoes?”
He fished out some cigarettes, offered me one, which I declined, and lit up. “Yeah, buddy,” he said. “They arrive in formation, take your vehicle first, eat that, and then they come back for you.”
“This a truce?” I asked.
He gave me a sideways look that was half glare, half frustration. “I’ve got the NRC, the FBI, PrimEnergy’s head of security, federal, state, and county environmental engineers, local law, and now you wandering around in my perimeter. How would you feel?”
“I guess I’d have issues with all that,” I said.
He made a disgusted noise. “Issues? Issues? I hate that fucking word. You sound like some goddamned liberal. Issues, my ass. There is no way somebody t
ook a cesium cocktail out of this plant, I don’t care what anybody says. We would have had any number of gamma detectors screaming bloody murder before they ever got to the first fence. Not to mention the fact that the guy’s hand bones would be glowing through his skin by now. They’re looking in the wrong place.”
“Maybe it wasn’t cesium,” I said.
“Whatever—same rules apply. They’re searching the wrong place.”
“What’s the right place, then?” I asked.
He pointed across the mile or so of swamps and inlets to the cluster of lights flooding the container port upriver. “Right over there,” he said. “That’s where it came from, and there’s probably more of it there right now. That place is a fucking turnstile for terrorists. Ten zillion pounds of stuff comes through there every day from all over the world, and they physically inspect—are you ready for this?—none of it.”
“From what little I know about it, I’d tend to agree with you,” I said, thinking back to my last conversation with Creeps. “I think the federal crowd here has to rule Helios out before the main focus returns across the river.”
He took a deep breath and then let it out. “Maybe,” he said. “But then I can’t figure out why Quartermain has brought someone like you into it.”
“Someone like me?”
“Oh, c’mon, you have zero expertise in the field of nuclear energy or industrial security.”
“Let me ask you something—do you get advance warning when there’s going to be one of those force-on-force intrusion drills?”
He looked sideways at me again. “Yeah, we do. Otherwise, someone might get shot.”
“What’s your record, then?” I asked. “The bad guys ever get through?”
“That’s nobody’s business but ours.”
I smiled. “Let me put it another way,” I said. “Your force-on-force drills ever assume the other side has inside help?”
He thought about that before answering me. “Possibly.”
“So how do you do that—someone role-plays, right? Someone’s designated to unlock a door or look the other way, and then you guys have to run that scenario to ground.”
“What’s your point?”
“Hypothetically, you use one of the Helios nukes to do that, or does one of your own security force people act the part of a bad nuke?”
“One of ours,” he said. “Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically, right. But suppose there’s a real one in there somewhere, some engineer who might actually let a bad guy in if the bribe money was good enough, or the blackmail dangerous enough—you drill for that, do you?”
“That’s Quartermain’s—” he began, then stopped.
“Unh-hunh,” I said. “That’s Quartermain’s bailiwick. Look, my people and I are not going to fuck around, cutting fences or trying to plant a fake bomb in the reactor building. What we work on out there in the world is mainly people-hunting. I’ve brought a surveillance expert and a computer hacker with me. We’re going to look hard at Quartermain’s program, not yours. And for the record, I’d just as soon do that without having to deal with guys in SWAT gear jumping out of the bushes all the time. That shit irritates my dogs.”
He stared out over the canal for a half minute. “Maybe we can work something out,” he said finally.
“Were those your people we ran off in Southport? The two guys pretending to be PrimEnergy utility workers while they pointed an acoustic cone at our windows?”
He frowned and shook his head. “Negative,” he said. “We don’t work off-site.”
I gave him a spare-me look.
“The Hilton?” he said. “That was unofficial. How’d you run ’em off?”
I told him, and he grinned.
“How’d you get your nickname?” I asked.
“My degree was in biology,” he said. “Herpetology, to be exact. I find snakes to be more predictable animals than most humans.”
Then his phone began to chirp. He stepped away from me, listened, swore, and snapped it shut.
“What now?” I asked.
“There’s been another one,” he said. “They got a radiation hit on a container.” He pointed with his chin at the forest of lighted gantry cranes upriver. “Over there, in the port.” He gave me a triumphant look. “See?” he said. “Told you that shit didn’t come from here.”
Then my phone rang.
“That’ll be Quartermain,” Trask said.
It was.
Tony, Pardee, and I met him at the Hilton, since none of us really knew our way around Wilmington yet. He was in the lounge having some coffee. He signaled the waitress to bring us some when he saw us.
“So,” I said, sitting down. “You and Helios off the hook?”
“Temporarily,” he said. “They got a radiation hit down in the container port. They have monitors all over the place, and each truck leaving the docks goes through two radiation scanners, one they know about, one they don’t.”
“What constitutes a hit?”
“They’re looking for gamma, primarily,” he said. “Gamma radiation indicates enriched uranium or plutonium, the bomb stuff. But any radionuclide will do it, and if a detector goes off, they lock down the entire port.”
“Bet that’s popular.”
“Oh, yeah. A colossal backup of cargo, containers hanging in midair. Ships that were supposed to sail at midnight missing their departure windows. Instant financial impact. Big deal.”
“Tough shit,” I said. “There is a war on, or so I hear.”
“Yeah, but that’s why they called us, among others. They wanted an instrument decon team from the Helios nuclear safety office. They’ve got radiation on or in a container but can’t find a source object.”
“How do we fit in?”
“I want you to see how an actual radiation incident is handled.”
He reached down and brought up a briefcase, opened it, and gave each of us a radiation dose monitor called a thermo-luminescent dosimeter, or TLD. It looked like a Dick Tracy wrist radio. I’d seen everyone in the plant wearing one, or more, and we’d been given temporary TLDs for our tour.
“These are your permanent TLDs,” he said. “They’ve been logged out to you by name and badge number, and you’ll turn them in weekly for readings. It’s your responsibility to look at them daily to make sure you have not received a dose you didn’t know about.”
“Good deal,” Tony muttered, examining the TLD suspiciously. It was bigger than the ones we’d worn for the tour. “I can remember when ‘receiving a dose’ meant something altogether different.”
“Same basic equipment tends to fall off your body,” Quartermain said without even a hint of a smile. “My team is already down there. Let’s boogie.”
We followed him in his official PrimEnergy car up to Third Street and then east through Wilmington to the container port. We went through some surprisingly elaborate security at the main gate, where we were given yet more, if temporary, ID badges, vehicle passes, and plastic hard hats. All this happened after they’d searched both vehicles, inside, out, and under. None of the people doing the searching seemed to care about the shepherds. There was already a double line of semis, each with a seagoing container strapped to its back, parked along both sides of the exit lanes. Some of the drivers were out along the road, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the flap to subside.
A container port requires vast amounts of horizontal space; Ari told us that the one in Wilmington consists of four hundred acres, most of it paved. There were none of the conventional warehouses one would associate with a seaport. The beauty of containers is that they’re weatherproof, so they just stack the outgoing containers ten high all over the place until it’s time to go to sea. Most of the incoming containers get dropped directly onto flat-frame trailers and go down the highway within minutes, literally, of being offloaded.
Unless there’s a problem. A twinkling cluster of red and blue lights down on the pier indicated that there was indeed a problem.
<
br /> The gate people had told us not to drive onto the handling piers near the gantry cranes, so we parked next to a ten-pack stack and walked in. As we approached on foot, we could see several emergency vehicles parked at odd angles out on the pier but not too many people; apparently the nature of the problem was no longer a secret, and savvy humans were keeping their distance. I could see two guys in white spacesuits working around a single truck-and-trailer rig in the glare of both portable floods and the overhanging spotlights of an enormous gantry crane overhead. There was a cluster of mostly Asian faces peering curiously down from the high bows of a sixty-thousand-ton container ship.
I left the dogs in the vehicle. Quartermain took us over to a command center van bearing the markings of the Customs and Border Protection Agency, where a small crowd of Border Patrol cops, Coast Guard officers, and port authority officials stood around watching the moonwalkers inside the perimeter do their thing with instruments and sample kits. I noticed that the van was positioned upwind and that the bystanders were keeping a respectful distance. I half-expected to see the gangly figure of Creeps in the crowd, but none of these people looked like Bureau types. Tony popped a cigarette out of a pack, but one of the port authority guys immediately shook his head at him. Quartermain explained that some radiation came in the form of tiny airborne particles, so a spill scene was no place to be taking deep drags of air.
“Spill scene?”
“Procedurally, we’re treating this as a radiation spill, even though we know that’s not what it is,” he explained. “That’s a spill team, and they’re trained to find and decontaminate radioactive materials that shouldn’t be there.”
The back doors of the container had been opened, and we could see a stack of cardboard boxes filling the opening, packed right up to the container’s ceiling. One spacesuit man was incongruously on his back on a mechanic’s creeper, taking readings underneath the rig, while the other was on his knees holding a floodlight for him. A worried-looking middle-aged man in a suit and white hard hat came over when he spotted Quartermain, who introduced him to us as Hank Carter, security director for the Wilmington Port Authority.
Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Page 8