Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “This isn’t making any sense, Dr. Quartermain,” he said. “We’ve got alarms, your guys are getting a lot of noise on the detectors, but we can’t find a single frigging point source on that can.”

  “You got gamma?” Quartermain asked.

  “No, alpha. It’s not high intensity—the levels are too low. It’s also spread out, like somebody painted the container with something radioactive.”

  “Like water, maybe?” I said in a quiet aside to Ari.

  He nodded. “Tell them to look for any accumulations of water, and test those,” he said.

  “Water?” Carter said. “This is a container port; there’s water everywhere.”

  “Tell them to look along the edges of that container or on the bottom of the trailer itself, in the cracks. All the places where water might linger after coming down off a ship. And check the truck.”

  Carter gave Ari a sharp look, as if wondering whether the Helios security director knew something he didn’t and, if so, how. Then he went over to the command van and climbed in. Moments later we saw one of the spacesuited guys stop, listen to his radio, and give a thumbs-up sign that he understood. There was a rough-looking white man dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt sitting inside the van looking very uncomfortable, and I guessed that he must be the truck driver. I sent Tony and Pardee to go for an inconspicuous stroll around the temporary perimeter, just looking. I told them to fan out and see who or what might be watching the circus with more than casual interest.

  A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the command van, and Carter beckoned Ari over. I went with him.

  “You were right,” Carter said. “It’s water. Or some kind of radioactive fluids pooled on the trailer frame, underneath. Not the container. Which brings up my next question.”

  “Just an educated guess,” Ari said. “Based on the recent incident downtown. We’re assuming that was water, too, because the victim drank it.”

  “Damn. Can your people help us decontaminate?”

  “Yep. I’ll send for a foam generator. They’ll spray the entire underside of the trailer and then wait for the foam to harden. Then it can be broken off as a solid, bagged, and taken back to our low-level waste holding area.”

  Carter looked vastly relieved. “Should we sweep the entire pier?” he asked.

  “Have you searched inside the container itself?”

  Carter shook his head. “That was next,” he said.

  “Okay, do that and let my guys sweep whatever comes out,” Ari said. “Then I’d sweep the ship that container came off of, and I’d suggest you talk to and sweep all those guys watching us right now up there, if that’s the ship.” He pointed at the row of oriental faces sixty feet above us. To a man, they all vanished.

  “No problem,” Carter said, opening his flip-radio and barking out some orders. Moments later, the huge gantry crane rumbled into life and rolled down the pier to where the ship’s gangway was positioned. A crew of hard hats emerged out of the darkness and attached cables to the gangway, and then the crane just lifted it off the ship. Whoever was onboard was going to stay there or go for a night swim in the Cape Fear River.

  One of the customs agents in the van stuck his head out and told Carter that the FBI was at the main gate and inbound.

  I looked sideways at Ari, and he understood. He said that he would stay there to coordinate the decontamination team’s efforts, and that we outlanders should make our creep. I saw Tony and Pardee standing under a light tower a hundred yards or so down the pier. I went back to the car and let the shepherds out, and then we walked down to join them, giving the spill scene a wide berth.

  “What’d they find?” Tony asked.

  “It sounds like it’s the truck and trailer, not the container, but of course it could have dripped down from the container. It’s a mystery right now. You guys see anything of interest?”

  “Lots of ladders,” Pardee said. He pointed to the edge of the concrete handling pier, which itself was a hundred yards wide and constructed as a bulkhead pier along the riverbank. I could just see the round tops of ladder railings leading down over the edge of the pier.

  “They’re every hundred feet or so,” Tony said.

  “Meaning, if this hot stuff didn’t come from overseas, it could have come by boat? From the river?”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted a boat for?” Pardee asked.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass,” I said. Up near all the strobe lights, we could see a trio of Bureau cars pulling in to join the evolving radiation incident. “Let’s move right along, shall we?”

  We strolled casually down the entire length of the container pier, which was easily a mile long. I let the shepherds range out to the edges of the lighted area. The dark river and the even darker wetlands stretched off to our right. I thought I could make out the lights of Helios downriver. To our left were the container stacks, whose rows seemed to go on forever into the terminal yards. There was one other ship tied up alongside the pier, and two gantries were busy snatching containers from the pier and lifting them up into the massive ship, which had developed a slight starboard list as the cans, as they were called, came aboard. The gantries with their projecting booms reminded me of medieval siege towers, only with lights.

  We walked down to the very end of the pier area, checking for security cameras and fences where the industrial area ended. There appeared to be a railroad switchyard inboard of the container work and storage area. Large forklifts were hoisting containers onto flatbed railcars in the glare of sodium vapor lights. On the far, landward side of the yard we could see what looked like a container junkyard outside the security fence, filled with damaged or badly rusted steel boxes dropped haphazardly on a low hillside.

  A white pickup truck with a police light bar mounted over the cab drove by, stopped, and backed up. We walked over. The security guard inside, who had to be at least sixty years old, wanted to know who we were and what were we doing down there. I told him we were with Dr. Quartermain, and we all flashed our temporary gate IDs. He gave the shepherds a wary look, rolled the window up, and then made a call on his radio. We couldn’t hear the response, but apparently it satisfied him that we were not saboteurs. He nodded and drove off.

  “That’s not much of a deterrent,” Tony observed.

  “The bad guys wouldn’t know that until they got close to the truck, and I’d guess he has a panic button in there. This place is huge.”

  We’d come to the very end of the container pier. The Cape Fear River was nearly a half mile wide at this point, and looked wider because of the total darkness on the other side. Channel buoys winked at us all the way down the river. We could hear that muscular current swirling through the dolphin pilings at the end of the pier. The water smelled of salt marsh and diesel oil; some seagulls overhead on night patrol screamed at us. The visible debris in the water was streaming by at a good five knots.

  “Something’s not computing here,” I said. “I mean, look: If some bad guys are trying to smuggle in radioactive material, why in the hell would they, first, plant some in town, and then, second, splash it on the outside of a container here in the port?”

  “How do we know it got downtown?” Pardee asked.

  “We don’t,” I admitted. Pardee had a point. If Allie ingested the hot stuff, she could have done that anywhere. The fact that she was downtown when it got to her didn’t mean anything.

  Pardee nodded.

  Tony finally lit up his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling a cloud. “You’d think, if the jihadis were trying to get a dirty bomb or something in, they sure as hell wouldn’t want to alert that crew back there.”

  “And not once, but twice? Radiation getting loose in the Wilmington area? Maybe from the Helios plant, maybe not. Now this. Maybe it’s some whack-job stealing shit from a hospital radiology lab, spreading it around town just for grins.”

  “The fact that it was outside may be important,” Pardee said. A seagull appeared out of the darkness and landed bo
ldly twenty feet away. Frick went for it, resulting in a lot of squawking and feathers. Frack, showing his age, just watched.

  “Yeah, I agree. I wonder if it’s maybe a—”

  At that moment, we saw a commotion up at the tractor-trailer. They had unloaded about half the boxes from inside the container. From our vantage point, it looked like they’d gone all the way to the front wall of the container, but then I realized there weren’t enough boxes out on the pier. They’d hit a fake wall.

  The Helios team was backed out, and a bunch of border cops jumped into the container and went to work on the wall. We started walking back to get a closer look, but stayed close to the first row of stacked containers as we went up the pier. The cops appeared to be getting nowhere fast, so they filed out and let a couple of longshoremen climb into the container with axes in hand. I saw Ari walk over to the edge of the pier, obviously searching for a cell phone signal.

  Then there was a shout from inside the container as the fake wall burst open and a dozen or so men bolted out, piled right over the startled longshoremen, and ran flat-out into the container stacking area, fanning out in all directions, before the cops could comprehend what was going on. Everyone at the scene was caught completely flat-footed. A couple of cops pulled their weapons, but then realized they couldn’t shoot the stowaways just for running. One security truck peeled out in pursuit and instantly collided with the corner of a container in a true Keystone Kops moment. Tony started laughing.

  Then we heard a shout from our left. It sounded like it had come from down below the edge of the pier. We ran to the edge in time to see Ari Quartermain floating past in the current about twenty feet off the pier, waving frantically. The lights from one of the gantry cranes shone down into the water, or we would never have been able to see him.

  “Get it,” I yelled at Frack, who went over the side in one big jump and splashed down into the water. He surfaced a moment later and began paddling in the direction of the struggling Quartermain. Tony found a life ring with a rope attached, and we started walking to keep up with the current as Frack dragged the man closer to one of those ladders we’d spotted. The dog had Ari by his jacket collar, and, fortunately, Quartermain wasn’t fighting the dog, but swimming with him instead. When they got close enough, Tony made sure Ari could see the life ring and then tossed it to him. Once he had it, Tony belayed the rope on the pier and let the current bring both man and dog alongside, close enough for Quartermain to grab one rung on the next ladder. Up the pier I could hear sirens approaching.

  Frack still had a mouthful of Quartermain’s jacket, but Ari, thinking faster than I might have managed under the same circumstances, held on to the ladder with one hand while he poked the life ring over the dog’s front end. I called Frack off, and the three of us hoisted him back up to the pier while Quartermain clung to the bottom of the ladder. I’d swear Frack was grinning as we hauled his fuzzy wet butt over the edge of the pier. That mutt loves an adventure.

  Tony went down the ladder and helped Quartermain climb up. Once they were topside, Ari flopped down on the concrete, gasping from his exertions in the icy water.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “One of those runners knocked me into the river,” he said, still puffing. “I think he went in, too, but I didn’t see him again.”

  Frack stuck his nose into Ari’s face and gave him a big lick. Ari patted the dog’s head and thanked him formally for saving his ass. Up the pier there were more cops arriving, and several vehicles were starting to prowl the virtual canyons between all the stacked containers. We flagged down a passing security truck and asked the rent-a-cop to take a badly shivering Ari up to the scene to see if they could get a blanket for him.

  Tony and Pardee automatically had started to walk up the pier, but I called them back.

  “Bad idea,” I said. “Bunch of embarrassed cops and feds up there. Time for us interested parties to dee-part.”

  As we drove back into Southport, I asked Tony if he’d found any decent gin mills in town. Tony, being Tony, knew of four; he was nothing if not attentive to important logistical details. We stopped at one a block in from the municipal beachfront. I left the shepherds in the vehicle. The place was about as dead as an off-season beer joint could be, which suited us just fine. The bartender was down at one end of the bar, eyes glued to the evolving story of a mass escape of stowaways down at the container port.

  “Well,” Tony said, “Quartermain wanted the attention off Helios; that mess should do it.”

  The television was now showing aerial views of the container pier.

  “Anybody ever say if the radiation they got over there was similar to what they found inside Allie?” Pardee asked.

  “They think they had alpha at the truck scene,” I said, “and that’s the best candidate for what got Allie.”

  “Yeah, that’s kinda my point,” Pardee said.

  “As in, these could be two related incidents?”

  “Three incidents—Allie, the hot trailer, and now a bunch of illegals in a container.”

  Tony finished his drink and put the glass down with an audible clink. “I don’t know, boss,” he said. “Maybe we should just do what Creeps suggests. Radiation poisoning? Gamma fucking rays? Human smuggling? That’s all federal shit. This is no place for us local gumshoes.”

  “Granted, but I still want to know what happened to Allie.”

  “We know what happened to Allie,” he replied. “We just don’t know why.” He paused to deliver a mild burp. “Although I have a theory.”

  “Which is?”

  “She ran into a ‘thing’ in the night,” he said. “A national security ‘thing.’ It went bump and then ate her up from the inside out. I’m sorry for her, don’t get me wrong. But shit happens, you know? As in, wrong time, wrong place?”

  This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Pardee?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I’ll stay if you want,” he said. “But whatever the hell’s going on here is gonna go major league after tonight, and I, for one, don’t want to disappear into one of those overseas rendition centers.”

  I sighed and studied my glass for a moment. I could understand where they were coming from. When we set up H&S Investigations, we agreed that it would be mostly part-time work—basically, guys would put in as much time as any of them wanted or needed to make some money. None of us had to take on a case if we didn’t want to, and, after a life of chasing vicious street criminals, additional excitement was typically not the objective.

  “All right,” I said. “I copy all that. Lemme talk to Quartermain tomorrow, see if we’re still in the picture. Although . . .”

  “Although what?” Tony asked.

  “You guys are probably right—we should back out of this hairball. On the other hand, working some bullshit for Quartermain likely gives us our best chance to find out what happened to Allie—and why.”

  “Isn’t that what the Bureau’s gonna do?”

  “They might, but if this is part of a larger national security picture, they just might bury the part that involved Allie.”

  I looked over at the television, where the bartender was switching through the local Wilmington channels with the mute button on now. The same picture kept coming up—an overhead of the container port from a helicopter and the world’s supply of flashing blue and red lights dispersed along the pier, trying to surround the gazillion containers stacked out there. The runners were definitely not in evidence. I suggested it was time to call it a day.

  The next morning, I left a message for Quartermain with the delectable Ms. Samantha Young. Then the three of us went down to the marina below Southport and picked out a boat. We settled on an Everglades 290, which was twenty-nine feet long, with a supposedly unsinkable fiberglass hull and twin 225-horsepower Honda engines. It was designed primarily for daytime sport fishing and was rated to carry up to fourteen people. It had an enclosed cockpit structure amidships, a GPS navigation system, two radios, a fathometer, and a
Decca short-range radar set. I booked it for two weeks, with the understanding that it would be berthed each night back at the marina. I paid in advance for the first week’s rent, full-replacement insurance, and a damage deposit. Tony was a boat enthusiast; I had owned a lake boat at one time, but he would be the designated driver.

  Quartermain called my cell as we were finishing up at the marina. He wanted me to come to the plant. I told the guys to find some charts of the area and to lay out a track to get up to the plant from Southport. Then I drove over to the power plant. I left Frack in the Suburban and took Frick in with me. I didn’t really need a dog with me, but I wanted everyone I encountered to know that when they saw me, they’d better look out for at least one German shepherd.

  Samantha escorted us over to the main reactor complex this time, and then into the spent fuel storage building security office. There I was surprised to run into Colonel Trask, who said he’d take me to the upper-level control room himself. One of the security people checked me into the building, duly noting the presence of the dog in the facility log. A plant technician took me into an adjoining room, where I dressed out in a lightweight spacesuit and registered my current TLD reading. Then Trask and I proceeded into the moonpool access area.

  The building was constructed of heavy, steel-reinforced concrete and presented three layers of security checks before we could access the moonpool itself. Because the spent fuel pool was mostly aboveground, we stepped out of an airlock chamber through a heavy steel door and faced a solid wall of heavily studded concrete. I noted surveillance cameras trained on us through each step of the security points. We had to climb eight sets of steel ladder-stairs to get to the top, passing a mezzanine level on the way. Trask didn’t say much beyond directions on when to step through doors. Interestingly, it took swiping both his badge and mine to get through the doors. Trask explained that this had to do with the two-man rule: No one was allowed to go anywhere in the vital area by himself. Just before going inside the main pool enclosure, he positioned both of us in front of a wall-mounted video camera and verbally identified us to the camera lens. After a moment, the door in front of us was remotely unlocked, and Trask pointed me through it.