Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Well, screw it, then,” Moira said brightly, reaching for the mouse and bringing up the e-mail program that had been lurking behind the Word screen. “Sounds to me like there’s no harm in trying, is there? I mean, you may be right—they may not print it, but inquiring minds will want to know more, don’t you think?”

  She zipped the cursor to the SEND button, which was when I realized she’d already attached the document to an e-mail and was ready to spread the gospel according to Moira to lots more people than just the New York Times. Mad Moira showing her teeth.

  “Wait!” Creeps said, his voice rising for the first time in our entire discussion. Moira’s hand remained firmly on the mouse, and the pointer remained firmly on the SEND button. The list of addressees on the e-mail seemed to glitter on the screen. It was an impressive list.

  On one hand, I almost wished she’d fired it off. On the other, I breathed a silent sigh of relief. We had him. For the moment, anyway.

  Then two phones went off simultaneously—Creeps’s cell phone and Ari’s house phone. Creeps glared at Moira and stepped away from the computer to answer his cell. His two assistants moved into position to menace us, and then my two helpers moved in front of me to menace them. Teeth were showing everywhere. Ari, moving carefully, picked up the desk phone.

  Creeps had his back turned to the rest of us, but I saw his shoulders stiffen at about the same time Ari exclaimed a startled “What?” and then said he’d be right in.

  “Problem at the plant?” I asked.

  “You could say that,” he replied grimly. “There’s a body in the moonpool.”

  The plant admin building was in a definite state of uproar when I got there. There was a new secretarial face at Samantha’s desk—no surprise there, as her true identity had been revealed—who asked me to wait in Ari’s conference room for further instructions. I had left the dogs in the Suburban because I wasn’t sure what, if anything, Ari would want me to do. I was sort of hoping to be sent back home.

  Ari came back into his office suite fifteen minutes later, looking like his day was fulfilling his every dismal expectation. He beckoned me into his private office and asked me to close the door.

  “We’re going to have to get the divers in,” he said.

  “Divers? In that?”

  “Yeah, there’s a firm of divers who specialize in going down into containment vessels and moonpools. Lemme show you something.”

  He turned on a television in his office and switched to what looked like an internal video surveillance channel. I wasn’t sure what we were looking at until he did something with the remote, and then I realized we were looking down into the moonpool itself. There, way down in that cerulean glow, was the silhouette of a human body, arms and legs spread wide as if crucified on an X-beam. It was lying on top of the spent uranium fuel assemblies forty feet down. I couldn’t tell if it was face up or down, but it was definitely a human form.

  “How radioactive is that part of the pool?” I asked.

  “Very,” Ari said simply, staring at the shimmering image.

  “And no idea of who it is?”

  He shook his head. “And if that body stays down there long enough, any identification is going to be . . . difficult.”

  I had a vision of the body melting down in all that radiation. Eyes like poached eggs. Lovely images like that.

  “Can’t you grapple it?”

  He shook his head again. “From what we can see, the body is draped across and is in physical contact with the fuel bundles. Much too hot. We’ll get a diver to go partway down there, then drop a minicam, see if we can make an ID. After that, we’ll have to figure out how to bring him most of the way up to the rod transfer platform, where I hope we can encase the remains. Problem’s gonna be diver stay-time, as always. But it has to be done fast.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t want to know,” he said.

  “Who’s working the problem?” I asked.

  “Anna P. is in charge. I haven’t located Trask yet to deal with the physical security side. We’ve notified upper management and the NRC, and the company’s calling for the divers as we speak. We hope to have somebody on deck by third shift tonight. In the meantime . . .” He puffed out a breath.

  “This doesn’t affect the plant’s operation, does it?”

  “Nope. This is the moonpool. What we’ve got down there right now is a radionuclide Crock-Pot.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Is it likely that somebody just fell in? I mean, if you did fall in, wouldn’t you just get the hell out of the water as fast as possible?”

  “Yes, you would, and if you stayed at the surface, you wouldn’t be too much the worse for wear. Remember, exposure to radiation is measured in terms of intensity and time. Intensity is a function of proximity.”

  “On the other hand,” I said, “only a drowned body sinks like that. Lungs full of water. Maybe he hit his head on the way in. Are there ladders—some way for someone to get out, assuming he could swim?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, still staring at the screen. “And railings. And surveillance cameras.” He shook his head. “This shouldn’t be possible. I need Trask here.”

  Just like the radioactive water inside Allie Gardner shouldn’t have been possible, I thought. Or the hot water on that truck over at the container port. Everyone could argue that there were other, non-Helios-related explanations for those incidents, but there was no arguing with this.

  “You heard from the Bureau?” I asked.

  “Only that they will take over the investigation once we exhume the body from the moonpool.”

  “Exhume. That sounds like Creeps Caswell. Okay, what do you want from me?”

  “You find people, right? Find Colonel Trask. Whoever that is down there should not have been able to get there by himself. Especially without a protective suit.”

  “There’s nothing on the cameras?”

  “Nada. The Bureau will have to tell us if somebody messed with them. But I really need Trask, and, as fucking usual, his people can’t raise him.”

  His beeper went off, so he motioned for me to get going. I went outside to piddle the mutts and then decided to bring Frick back into the building with me. We went down the hallway to the physical security office, where some of Trask’s shaved-head torpedoes were congregating in the shift supervisor’s office.

  They confirmed they didn’t know where the colonel was. They seemed more concerned about all the heat they were getting from the plant’s director about not being able to contact him than they were about Trask’s health and welfare. One of them came forward to make friends with Frick, who obligingly lifted a lip at him, prompting a chorus of whoas from the other guys.

  “The colonel does his own thing,” one of them said. “Shows up at the plant at all hours, tests the perimeter patrols, the cameras, vital area doors, and that kinda shit. Doesn’t exactly keep regular hours. Says schedules weaken security.”

  “How do you normally reach him?”

  “We don’t,” the supervisor said. “He listens in to all our comms. If he thinks he needs to get into something, he just shows up.”

  “So you expect that he knows about this body?”

  “Be surprised if he didn’t, all the commotion.”

  “Sees all, hears all?”

  The supervisor shrugged. If his boss wanted to play mysterious, he was cool with it.

  “They check his home?” I asked.

  One of the younger ones, who’d been oiling an M4, smiled. “Home? Dude lives on a boat, man. Good luck with that.”

  I called a buddy at the state department of natural resources and asked if he could tie Trask’s name to a specific boat license. He was back in five minutes.

  “Big boat,” he said. “Twenty-one-year-old, forty-five-foot cabin cruiser, officially listed for Carolina Beach. License is current; insured for one twenty large. Called Keeper. That help?”

  I told him it did indeed, and drove out to catch the ferry that crossed
the Cape Fear River estuary. I got to Carolina Beach and drove down to the city marina. I left the dogs in the Suburban and went to the office, where an elderly guy, whose well-used cap read CAP’N PETE, asked if he could help me. I explained who I was and that I was looking for Colonel Trask, who I understood kept a live-aboard boat here. He pointed out the window to one of the piers, where I could see a largish cabin cruiser with the word KEEPER in white lettering across its transom.

  “Right there she is,” he said. “But he isn’t here. Haven’t seen him for a coupl’a days now.”

  “Any possibility we could get aboard?”

  “Got a warrant?”

  “Nope.”

  “There’s your answer, then.”

  I asked him to wait for a moment and put a call in to Ari at the plant. He sounded harassed but understood my problem. I handed the phone to Cap’n Pete, who listened.

  “Best I can do,” he said, handing me back the phone. “I’ll go aboard, see if he’s okay or even there. That help?”

  “That would help a lot,” I said. “It’s not like him to go off the grid for this long.”

  “Then you don’t know him,” he said. “Because that old boy does it all the time.”

  “Yeah, but when he does, he’s usually ambushing his own security crew over there at Helios.”

  “Not exactly what I meant,” he said, reaching for a set of keys. “I was talking about him going out at night and coming back in the midmorning. You know he collects snakes?”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  “He showed me one of ’em, one time. I thought it was a goddamned fire hose until it coiled. Had it right there, on board. Nobody fucks with that boat. C’mon.”

  I followed him out the door as we went down toward the piers. “Most of the owners here, we see ’em either once, twice a year or on every weekend. We got us maybe ten live-ons here; the rest are all just slip renters. But the colonel? He’s the onliest one goes out at night. All the damn time.”

  Which could still be all about testing his security crew over at Helios, I thought. “Does that mean he’s a fairly competent seaman?”

  Cap’n Pete nodded. “Keeps his charts and safety gear up to date, handles that old dog like a pretty woman. Knows the tide tables. Can print out his met charts right on board. Refuels the moment he comes in. Runs a tight ship, he does.”

  “When he goes, he go into the river estuary or out to sea?”

  “Ain’t nobody knows,” he said. “Or asks, for that matter. Here we go.”

  The main piers were open to pedestrians, but the finger piers where the boats actually tied up were blocked by chain-link sections and key-carded. His skeleton key opened the gate and bypassed the electronic devices.

  The Keeper was second outboard, her bow pointed out. I’m no expert, but even I could see that she’d been well maintained. Her brightwork was polished, the hull paint clean, and the bitter ends of the mooring lines were coiled into tight white spirals. There was none of the usual recreational junk I’d seen on the other boats—bloodstained coolers, rods and lines, bait baskets, dirty clothes—anywhere in evidence. There was a small inflatable dinghy hoisted on davits above the main cabin, and even the davit sheaves were polished. The high bow had a reinforcing knife-edge on it to ward off logs and snags in the river, and this was polished, too.

  Cap’n Pete asked me to wait on the pontoon pier and then walked up the short companionway to the fantail of the boat. He banged his key ring on the railing and called out for Trask. There was no reply. He went aboard through a gate in the railing, tried the aft cabin door, found it locked. He knocked on the door and called again. Silence. He looked at me and shook his head.

  “If he’d had a heart attack and was inside, what would you do?”

  “Call 911,” he replied promptly, and then realized what I was asking. He said, “Oh,” and went forward, peering into the cabin windows along the main deck. Then he went up a side ladder to the pilothouse area, found a door unlocked, and went into the interior of the boat. He was back in about a minute.

  “Ain’t nobody home,” he said. “And that’s about all I can do, legal-like.”

  I thanked him for looking, gave him one of my cards, and asked him to call me if Trask showed up.

  He examined the card and then declared that he’d give it to Trask, when and if he showed up, and that he would call me, assuming he wanted to. I smiled and thanked him again. Cap’n Pete looked out for his permanent people.

  I called Pardee from the car and told him I’d found the boat but no Trask. He reported that they were about a half hour north of Southport. He said Moira was a happy camper. She had purchased not one but two computers, and apparently the university had continued to direct-deposit her salary during the time she’d been “away.” The Octopus covering its bets. Interesting program.

  Pardee had a question. “Seems to me,” he said, “that Trask would be all over a major problem in the plant. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  I told him it had certainly crossed my mind, but until those daring divers got there, we wouldn’t know anything.

  I just made the Southport-bound ferry, parking on the very back of the boat. The ferry pulled out, but then slowed way down. The captain made an announcement on the topside speakers that the ferry at the other end had been delayed by a mechanical problem and that there would be a thirty-minute hold. We were all invited to enjoy the scenery while he milled about smartly in the river.

  I got out of my car and walked up through the rows and lanes to the superstructure to get some fresh air. I left the shepherds in the car; the last thing I needed was for Frick to see a seagull flying by and make one of her impulsive bad judgments. Other people had also gotten out of their vehicles and were enjoying the afternoon, which was cool, clear, and breezy.

  Then I saw a familiar face. It was Anna Petrowska’s number two at the moonpool. I didn’t remember his name, but I definitely recognized his face. He hadn’t seen me, or at least I didn’t think he had. I wondered what he’d been doing over in Carolina Beach when there was a dead body in his moonpool. He was talking to someone on a cell phone, so I went around to the other side of the superstructure and made a call of my own.

  Ari answered on the second ring. “Anything?” he asked.

  I told him about my visit to Carolina Beach, and then asked if he had the divers lined up.

  “There was a crew finishing up a project up at our plant near Raleigh; they’ll be here in about an hour.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’ll have to go through all the safety checks and briefs, set the bridge up so the handlers can do their thing, and all that. Two hours or so, then the guy can actually go down. But.”

  “But?”

  “They tell me a minicam won’t be of much use for making an ID—the water’s too turbulent around the stack. And they can’t get that close. There are several fairly young bundles in that stack.”

  I thought about that. “Well, then, call the local cops and get some of their drowning-incident grappling gear. They don’t have to know where you’re going to put it.”

  He laughed, although it was the short bark of an unhappy laugh. “It’s not like they’ll be getting it back,” he said. “Come by in an hour; maybe you’ll see something interesting.”

  “Can’t wait,” I said. Having seen some floaters before, I had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

  I joined the small crowd standing on the platform above the moonpool. It was, if anything, hotter and more humid in the chamber, and our paper moonsuits didn’t help. A steel, gantry-like motorized bridge was positioned out over the pool. There were four handlers on the bridge, all concentrating on the stream of bubbles foaming up beneath them and a bundle of cables, tubes, and smaller wires leading down into the water to a dark, helmeted shape. A compressor was clattering away on the side of the pool. Two nervous-looking Brunswick County EMS techs were waiting by the main access door, with a body bag folded discree
tly at their feet.

  Dr. Anna Petrowska was sitting at a console inside the control room, wearing the same kind of headphones that one of the techs out on the bridge was wearing. Her hair shimmered in the fluorescent light, but the steel glasses she wore took all the pretty right out of her fiercely concentrating face. Three more of her people were watching assorted instruments. Ari, dressed out in a white suit, was standing at the railing with some of his people. He walked over when he saw me come in.

  “Can they get to it?” I asked him.

  “Don’t know yet,” he said. “We’ve had to change the cooling water circulation around the fuel bundles. That’s why it’s so warm in here.”

  “How does this work?”

  “One diver on a platform that can be raised and lowered from that bridge. Another diver in contact with the diver who’s down. The guy in the water is covered in TLDs. They get readings every five feet, and that portable out there computes the allowable stay-time.”

  “He seen anything useful?” I asked.

  “Only that the body is stuck headfirst in the fuel assembly matrix.” He looked at me. “That’s the hottest part of the pool. Not good.”

  “How the hell . . . ?”

  “The suction grates for the water circulation system are directly under the fuel elements.”

  It was bad enough the guy was dead. But sucked down into the glowing water around the fuel elements? I shivered, even in the hot air. “You get grapples?” I asked.

  He pointed to the bridge, where I saw the usual drowning retrieval gear and a frightened-looking cop in a white suit trying his best not to look down into that glowing water. Then one of the bridge techs was talking to him.

  They slowly began lowering the grapple hooks down into the pool while the radio tech talked them through the positioning process. Petrowska signaled for Ari to join her in the control room. I went with him.

  “The diver’s about three meters over the stack,” she said, pointing to a television display. I could see the shape of the diver shimmering on the screen. He was hard-hatted, and the top of his head was emitting a stream of truly beautiful bubbles. “I’ve shut off the circ pumps, so we have some hydrogen generation and rising temps. That will be as low as he can go. He’s got sixty more seconds to get that hook on, and then we’ll have to extract him.”