by David Freed
“South Lake Tahoe traffic, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima is departing the pattern to the south. Final call, South Lake Tahoe.”
Prudence dictated that I navigate toward Santa Maria in the same cautious manner by which I’d flown into Lake Tahoe days earlier—mainly following passes while purposefully avoiding overflying the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Mountain flying is ever-unpredictable, offering pilots smooth, uneventful passage one minute and potentially deadly unseen air currents the next. Powerful downdrafts can suck you into the earth almost at will, while spiraling rotor waves of air that wash unseen over crest lines like giant ocean swells can break apart airplanes like so many toys. But, again, there was no time for such worries. I had to fly directly to Santa Maria, regardless of the risk, if I hoped to beat Dundee’s deadline. I spiraled upward, leveled off at 10,500 feet, and flew as the crow flies, skimming the tops of peaks, trusting in the Duck and fate.
The sky above me was a patchwork of puffy, cotton ball clouds—altocumulus in the meteorology parlance—positioned with precise equidistance from each other, as though someone had purposely arranged them that way. I could see no altocumulus lenticularis ahead—thin, lens-shaped clouds frequently touted by National Enquirer photographers as flying saucers, but better known to pilots as harbingers of severe turbulence, best avoided. The air was smooth. The Duck was running fine, all engine instruments were within normal tolerance. The GPS showed 235 miles to Santa Maria, with an ETA of 1107. If my tailwind held, I’d get there with less than ten minutes to spare.
I loosened my seat belt a little. For the first time since receiving Dundee’s call that morning, I allowed myself to breathe a little easier and pondered the mysterious cargo in the Duck’s luggage compartment.
Whatever was secreted inside that suitcase had sat untouched for nearly sixty years inside the hulk of a stolen airplane, the result of an intelligence mission gone wrong. The contents had come by way of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a since-closed, top-secret federal research facility tucked into the Simi Valley outside Los Angeles. All I knew of the lab was what I vaguely recalled from the one rocket science class I’d taken while at the Air Force Academy. We’d learned how liquid propellant fuels used on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft, the ones sent to the moon during the 1960s, had been formulated at Santa Susana.
But it defied logic, the notion that it was rocket fuel I was hauling.
Whoever had looted that crashed airplane regarded its cargo as so valuable that he’d murdered Chad Lovejoy for it. He’d then kidnapped Savannah to force me to fly it out of Lake Tahoe to lessen his chances of getting caught in a police traffic stop or checkpoint. Was he planning to sell those goods on the black market? That was my guess. But who’d buy a miniscule batch of ancient rocket fuel? Propellants have evolved light years since the 1950s. Nobody who knew anything about missile technology today would pay a dime for anything that old.
Something else was in that suitcase. Had to be.
I was so focused on speculating what that something was, I never saw the other airplane.
A white streak flashed from my left to right, perhaps no more than twenty feet above the Duck’s nose. I turned my head to look, but it was already gone—a twin-engine King Air, headed west, climbing up through my altitude. A millisecond earlier and we would’ve collided in midair. My heart felt like it was doing jumping jacks.
Maybe it was karma, the reason why it had taken as long as it had to get the engine started when the Duck and I were still on the ground. Or maybe it was sheer, dumb luck. Either way, I didn’t much dwell on it. I had a deadline, literally, and a delivery to make.
The airspeed indicator was down to less than 100 knots. The tailwind I’d enjoyed departing Lake Tahoe had turned into a headwind, chopping our speed across the ground by nearly one-third. My GPS now showed a projected estimated time of arrival at 1123.
We weren’t going to make it.
I tried not to think of the way Savannah had screamed over the phone. I tried not to think of the welfare of the child, my child, she was carrying. I tried to focus instead on the task at hand: getting to Santa Maria before 1115.
My only alternative was to punish the Duck and hope he forgave me.
I shoved the throttle full forward, enriching the fuel-air mixture. The RPM needle on the tachometer crept past the red line.
We began to pick up speed.
Going faster came at a price. The oil temperature climbed steadily. So did the exhaust gas temperature. Both climbed well beyond what I would’ve ordinarily considered safe. But this was no ordinary flight and there was no other alternative. Either I pushed my plane to the brink, or Savannah and our baby might well die. The Duck’s engine had been rebuilt, thanks to Larry, after our crash in San Diego. I could only hope it would hold up under the strain.
Just this one time. C’mon, Duck, you can do it. I know you can.
I could feel rising heat on my knees and my feet, radiating through the firewall. The engine, fortunately, sounded otherwise normal. I hoped like hell it stayed that way.
Below, the green forested slopes of the Sierra rose up to meet us like a mirage, deceptively soft and benign. If the Duck’s power plant were to suddenly seize and we went down, I knew there was a good chance I might end up in some inaccessible draw, hoping for rescue or, like the mummified pilot sitting in that Twin Beech, waiting interminably for rescue. Better, I decided, to let somebody know where I was.
I radioed Oakland Center to request flight following. Air traffic controllers would assign me a transponder code allowing them to more readily follow me on radar. Only I got no response. I was probably too low for them to pick me up on their scopes.
Flying without a net, over potentially hostile terrain, wasn’t particularly daunting or new. I’d done it dozens of times hunting Republican Guard armor on low-level sorties into Kuwait and Iraq during Desert Shield and Storm. The realization that nobody in the world has any idea where you are can be unnerving if you let it, or oddly comforting. I opted at the moment for the latter, focusing on Savannah, trying to convince myself that everything would work out.
Approaching Mariposa, the weather gods decided to cut me some slack. The headwind I’d been bucking shifted back to the north. The Duck responded as if he’d been gulping vitamins. Our airspeed climbed steadily until the GPS showed we were doing 139 knots across the ground—nearly 160 miles an hour. I eased off the throttle, bringing the RPM’s back to 2500, cooling the engine, and cruised at a blazing 135 knots.
With our increased speed, the ETA ticked back down to 1107. I figured to make up even more time as we started downhill on our descent.
Maybe we would make it in time after all. I patted the top of the instrument panel.
Nice job, Duck.
At fifty miles out, I radioed Oakland Center and requested radar advisories for any aircraft in my area. At twenty miles out, Center handed me off to the tower at Santa Maria. The controller there told me to plan on making right traffic for Runway 30. At ten miles out, with no other aircraft in the pattern, he cleared me to land. My approach was uneventful; my landing, not the greatest, but it would do. From the air, I had seen the Radisson hotel on the south end of the field where Crocodile Dundee had instructed me to deliver the suitcase.
“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, say intentions,” the controller radioed me as I cleared the runway.
“Charlie Lima’s going to the Radisson.”
“Right on Taxiway Alpha, left on Alpha three. Monitor ground, point nine. Have a nice day.”
I repeated his instructions back to him and continued rolling toward the Radisson at high speed. No one told me to slow down. Santa Maria’s airport was a mere shell of what it had been during World War II, when it was used as a military training base, crammed with fork-tailed, P-38 fighters. Its vast flight line now sat largely empty.
Parking was plentiful behind the boxy, four-story Radisson; there were no other airplanes on its ramp. I shut down the Duck’s engine and hopped out. My watch
read 1113. Two minutes to spare.
As I was hauling the suitcase out of the luggage compartment, my phone rang.
“Logan.”
“Have you not gotten any of my messages? Where the hell have you been?” The urgency in Matt Streeter’s voice was hard to miss.
“Have you found Savannah?”
“We’re still looking.”
A palpable feeling of lament and relief washed over me—they hadn’t found her, but they hadn’t found her body, either. I began running toward the hotel with the suitcase.
“There’s something you need to know,” Streeter said.
“Not now. I’m right in the middle of something.”
“I’m afraid it can’t wait, Logan. That crate in that airplane you found? It was carrying forty pounds of enriched uranium. The kind they use to make atomic bombs.”
My mouth tasted like chalk.
Forty pounds of enriched uranium.
During training at Alpha, we were told that nine pounds was enough to construct a portable nuclear device, a so-called “suitcase nuke.” Depending on the type and purity of nuclear material used, such a bomb could create a blast radius wide enough to level downtown Colorado Springs or Buffalo, New York.
I slowed to a stop at the back door of the hotel, my heart suddenly palpitating, my brain swirling, and stared down at the suitcase in my hand, staggered by the horrific choice that confronted me:
I could hope to save the love of my life by cooperating with her kidnapper, or I could potentially save the world.
My watch showed 1115.
Out of time.
One second later, my phone buzzed with an incoming text message.
“We had an arrangement, Logan.”
THIRTEEN
“I ’ll call you back,” I told Streeter and hung up.
Did Dundee understand the significance of what was in the suitcase? I had to assume so. What did he intend to do with the uranium? Who was the buyer? What would he do to Savannah if I told him that I was on to him, and that I was done playing his game? Would he listen to reason? Recognize the futility of his plan? Let her go?
We had an arrangement, Logan.
I stared at the screen, more afraid than I’d ever been in my life.
Fear is rooted in what the Buddha deemed “delusions”—the distortions with which we look at ourselves and the world around us. By learning to control our minds, we can eliminate those delusions and, eventually, our fears. The truth, though, was that I couldn’t think straight. Savannah was going to live or die. The choice was mine and mine alone.
My phone rang. After several seconds, I pushed “answer,” slowly raised the phone to my right ear, and listened without speaking.
“You’re being watched,” Dundee said. “I know you’ve landed. Now, either you do what you agreed to do, immediately, or the lady’s blood will be on your hands.”
I scanned the windows of the hotel for any sign of surveillance, but saw none.
“You’ve got exactly one more minute, Logan. Take the suitcase into the hotel like you were instructed, walk out the front door, put it under the car, and walk back inside, or I swear, she . . . will . . . die.”
“Let her go. She’s got nothing to do with this.”
“You’re wasting time. Get moving.”
“You’ll kill her anyway.”
“Fifty seconds.”
I saw Savannah’s face in my mind’s eye. The way she watched me the first time we made love, her eyes locked on mine. The way her lips drew into a slow, satisfied smile, knowing the effect she was having on me. Every fiber of my being as I stood there on the tarmac compelled me to take that suitcase and do as I’d been instructed.
But I couldn’t.
Not without spitting on everything that millions of brave and honorable men and women had fought for. Not without imperiling the lives of untold thousands of innocent people.
I couldn’t.
“You still there, Logan?”
“Still here.”
“Thirty seconds.”
“I know what’s in the suitcase.”
Dundee was seething, barely able to get the words out. “I told you not to look.”
“I didn’t have to. You know you’ll never get away with it. So, let’s just call it a day. You let Savannah go, unharmed, and I give you my word that I won’t come looking for you right away. What d’you say?”
“I say shit goes downhill and payday’s Friday. Fuck you, mate.”
And that was it.
I CALLED 911 in a haze, too numb, really, to accept the likely implications of the decision I’d just made.
After the Radisson and several nearby structures had been evacuated, a member of the Santa Maria Police Department’s bomb squad, garbed in his “Lost in Space” protective suit, approached the suitcase where I’d left it at the back door of the hotel and gingerly sliced it open. Inside were a dozen, two-foot-long metal canisters, each containing uranium pellets. The car under which I was to have deposited the suitcase had been reported stolen the night before in San Luis Obispo, a half hour away. It had been wiped clean of prints.
“You should’ve told me,” Streeter said over the phone as I sat in the hotel lobby, my legs still shaking an hour later. “We could’ve at least tried to help.”
“There was nothing you could do, not under the circumstances.”
I wanted to know how, at the height of the Cold War, nuclear material could have gone missing from a secure government facility.
Streeter said he’d filed a query online with the National Crime Information Center, requesting any records about thefts that may have occurred at the Santa Susana lab in 1956. The NCIC files showed that there’d been what was described as a burglary in October 1956. It was never solved. His query, he said, triggered a call that morning from a US Department of Energy investigator in Washington, who told him their conversation was strictly off the record.
“The DOE guy told me it wasn’t a break-in,” Streeter said. “It was a staged robbery.”
“Staged?”
“Yeah. By the CIA.”
The DOE investigator told Streeter that workers at Santa Susana a year earlier had begun secretly constructing America’s first operating nuclear power plant, which they euphemistically referred to as a “sodium reactor” to deflect any attention from the press. Five years later, some kind of catastrophic meltdown occurred, Streeter said, and all of Los Angeles came close to being vaporized. Washington was largely successful in covering it all up, and the lab was eventually shut down.
The year the staged robbery occurred, Streeter said, coincided with Pakistan leasing a base to the United States so that American military forces could keep closer tabs on Soviet ballistic missile testing. What Islamabad wanted in return was a small amount of fissile material to build a working atomic bomb that Pakistan could then wave in the face of India, its sworn enemy, who was building its own nuclear weapons at the time.
“Washington couldn’t just hand over the stuff without the Indian government going nuts,” Streeter said, “so they got the bright idea of planning a heist and making it look like the Russians were responsible. They found some Russian ex-pat, a former military pilot, to do the job. Everybody at the Santa Susana lab was briefed ahead of time. Then, one of the guards got sick. They brought in a temp, some moron, and nobody bothered to tell him what was up. There was a gunfight. He got shot. They think the guy who was working for the CIA got shot, too. Afterward, everybody at the lab had to sign sworn statements saying they’d go to prison if they ever talked publicly about what happened.”
The bloodshed didn’t end at the lab, according to the DOE investigator.
“That newspaper story you came across, the one about the security guard getting shot at the airport in Santa Paula? They think the guy drove to the nearest airport to Santa Susana, which was Santa Paula, shot that guard to cover his tracks and protect the agency, then flew the uranium out,” Streeter said. “The guard, before he died, sa
id it was a Twin Beech. The DOE confirmed that.”
Whoever killed Chad Lovejoy and made off with uranium, Streeter speculated, had probably been exposed to a lethal dose of radioactivity. He was worried I might’ve suffered a similar fate.
“Uranium isotopes are unstable,” I said, “which makes the uranium itself barely radioactive. You don’t even really need special packaging to protect yourself.”
Streeter didn’t ask me how I knew such things, and I didn’t elaborate. He said his supervisors had formed a task force, assigning three more detectives to investigate the murder of Chad Lovejoy and Savannah’s disappearance, which they now considered linked. He said he wanted to make arrangements to have my phone examined forensically in hopes of backtracking Dundee’s calls. I suggested he’d probably be wasting his time. If Savannah’s kidnapper had any smarts, he would’ve paid cash for a disposable cell phone and bought calling minutes from one of hundreds of offshore service providers, rendering his communications with me or anyone all but untraceable.
“Never thought of that,” Streeter said.
I asked him if his newly formed task force had developed any viable leads that might, in the near term, lead them to Savannah.
He paused. Then, reluctantly, he said, “Unfortunately, not at this time.”
I had to hang up. I had to sit down.
Blue-uniformed Santa Maria police were flitting in and out of the lobby, talking urgently on their hand-held radios, questioning hotel employees and guests who’d been allowed back inside after the suitcase had been driven away for closer inspection and the scene declared safe. I watched them go about their work from the comfort of an armchair, like some bit player in a cop movie. Large scale models of World War II aircraft hung from the ceiling over the dining area adjacent to the lobby. I focused on them and tried hard not to think of the choice I’d made.
I honestly didn’t know what else to do, Savannah. Please forgive me.
“Mr. Logan?”
Standing over me was a burly Latino police officer in his fifties. He wore silver captain’s bars on his collar and a salt-and-pepper crumb catcher on his upper lip. With him was a compact, clean-shaven man of about thirty-five with dark, movie-star features and perfect hair. But for the pistol bulge under the right armpit of his well-tailored gray business suit, he could’ve passed for a bank executive.