Critical Reaction

by Todd M Johnson

  “What kind of proof.”

  “The kind that Trân says we might get in a tour of the lower levels of LB5.” Ryan paused. “Or any kind that would convince Judge Johnston to allow us to take that tour.”

  Ted glanced up in the dim light of the stall. “If you had that kind of proof, could you win the lawsuit?”

  Ryan looked the man over. “Show me the evidence and I’ll tell you.”

  They were circling here. But if Pollock had evidence that could generate an LB5 tour, Ryan wanted it. “I can promise,” he quickly finished, “that without the proof we’ll lose.”

  Ted worked his way around the horse, cleaning each hoof in turn as he listened. “Well, let me think about that, too. Tell me what else you want to know.”

  Emily spoke up this time. “Why didn’t you come to us directly if you wanted to help with Kieran’s lawsuit. Instead of making Kieran lie to us.”

  Ted shook his head. “I’m not interested in the spotlight.”

  “Why not?” Emily shot back. “And what do you think is going on in LB5?”

  Ted patted the horse once more, then slipped past Ryan and Emily out of the stall, moving to the next one.

  “Kieran places a lot of faith in you two,” he said as he began to tend the colt in the new stall. “He didn’t want us to keep anything a secret. I told him that was the price for our help.”

  “That help is going to be wasted the way things are going,” Ryan pressed.

  Ted looked back at Ryan for a long interval. Finally he shook his head.

  “Okay.” He set his brush on a ledge and stepped back out of the stall. “Come with me.”

  Ryan and Emily followed Ted to the end of the stable and into an empty stall.

  On the shavings covering the stall floor sat a dark gray metallic box. Ted took from the wall a glove resembling an oversized oven mitt and some tongs. Opening the box, he put the tongs inside, pulling out a small, ragged shard of metal about the size of his hand. Ryan approached.

  “Stay back,” Ted said. “It’s not very radioactive, but there’s no point in coming closer. There are no features you’d recognize on it anyway.”

  Both Emily and Ryan looked at the shrapnel-like metal from across the stall until Ted set it back in the box again.

  “That’s a piece of metal Dr. Trân tells us is part of what’s going on at LB5,” he said.

  “What is it?” Emily asked. “Where’d you get it?”

  “It’s a piece of a casing for an experimental chemical nuclear trigger,” Ted answered as he put the glove away. “We got it out on the Hanford Reservation grounds. We’re certain it came from LB5.”

  Ryan’s mind was sprinting to piece all this together. So this was why Trân had been so confident in his theories. He wasn’t relying on deductive reasoning; he had physical proof in the form of trigger-related detonation material. But then why hadn’t they come forward with it? And why did they still hesitate to give them this evidence?

  He put the questions to Ted, who stared silently back for a moment. “I think that would be easier to explain if you’d take a little trip with us tonight.”

  “Where?” Emily asked.

  Ted looked at her, then back at Ryan. “Out onto the Hanford grounds. If your father here can ride, I’ll take you both there tonight on horseback.”

  Chapter 43

  The truck and horse trailer were headed southwest under the midnight sky darkened with a new moon. Out here on the desert, far beyond any lights of town or farms, only the ten-foot swath of their headlights pierced the surrounding black.

  They’d left the Pollock ranch and driven a dozen miles or more southwest before turning onto a two-lane highway that angled back to the northwest, parallel to the Hanford Reservation grounds. In the front cab, Ted Pollock sat with a tasseled hat pulled low on his forehead. Ryan sat next to him. Ted’s twenty-five-year-old granddaughter, Heather, was in the back seat with Emily along with a slender, quiet man that Ted had introduced only as Ray.

  Though he was still awaiting the promised explanation from Pollock, Ryan was content for the moment to sit silently, contemplating why he’d agreed to an incursion onto the Hanford grounds. It was obviously a breach of federal law, and so an act that could end his legal career—as well as his daughter’s, who’d insisted on coming along. The only limit Ryan had ultimately placed on the night was an insistence that Kieran remain at the Pollock ranch. He would not agree to their client risking not only the case but his already endangered job and security clearance as well.

  So why had he taken such an uncharacteristic risk? At first, he’d told himself it was because of the strange turn the case had taken since Taylor Christensen took the stand, and the stark evidence of the trigger casing Ted had shared tonight. But over the past hour of travel he’d concluded these were only part of the reason. The larger truth was that sometime the past few days—hearing Patrick Martin’s story and seeing Covington’s machinations—Ryan’s last hesitation about the case had slid away, replaced by his familiar drive to win. It felt as though he’d stepped into a comfortable pair of shoes he’d once thought lost.

  After a quick supper at the ranch, Ted had driven this truck and trailer out to a paddock beyond the hills that surrounded the house. There in the growing dusk, Ryan made out half a dozen shaggy horses pawing at the dusty ground. They were soon joined by Heather, her black hair pulled back in a single braid. Ray had arrived shortly after. Together and without a word to Ryan and Emily, Pollock, Heather, and Ray had loaded four of the horses onto the trailer for this journey. As they worked, Ryan had tried to get more details about the trip—but each time Ted Pollock had put him off. “You’ll understand everything soon,” he’d said in a tone that made clear they’d learn nothing more just yet.

  Ted was slowing the truck now, leaning into the windshield. Ryan couldn’t see what he might be looking for in the dark, as nothing about the shadowy road or its borders looked any different than what he’d seen for the past hour. But Ted recognized something, because he eased the truck over onto the shoulder at a spot where the ditch had flattened nearly to ground level. There wasn’t another headlight visible on the highway in either direction as Ted drove carefully across the nearly level ditch, out toward the desert to the north.

  Once they were fully off the highway, Ted let out a sigh of relief before glancing at Ryan.

  “You wanted to know what’s going on in LB5?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Alright. Dr. Trân believes that the casing I showed you is part of a project to develop a chemical trigger for a nuclear weapon.”

  “Develop one?” Ryan shook his head in surprise. “Trân said there might be trigger materials in the LB5 lower levels. I thought he meant they were being stored there.”

  “No,” Ted said. “We think it’s a lot more ambitious than that.”

  “Why make a trigger in a decommissioned lab building?” Emily asked. “Doesn’t the government have plenty of labs to work on nuclear defense projects?”

  “Not the government,” Ted answered, his eyes again focused on a trail only he could see in their low headlights. “Covington Nuclear.”

  “You’re saying Covington’s working without government sanction,” Ryan said.

  Ted nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because it would mean a lot of money to Covington if they succeeded. The government would pay a great deal for a chemical trigger able to detonate a nuclear reaction in a small bomb; things a large one can’t on a battlefield.”

  “And no one has done it before?” Ryan asked.

  Ted shook his head. “Not according to Trân. Not one nearly as small as that casing shard implies. And we believe Covington’s very close, if they haven’t already succeeded.”

  “Why wouldn’t the government just hire Covington to make the trigger?” Ryan asked.

  They hit a small bump and Ted braked gently, glancing over his shoulder worriedly toward the horse trailer and slowing their pace t
o a near glacial speed. “Because they’ve officially told the world they haven’t, and won’t. Though that doesn’t mean the government would turn down the technology if it was presented to them complete.”

  “Then what happened last October?” Emily asked.

  Ted glanced at Emily in the rearview mirror. “We believe Covington did its work on the trigger project at LB5 at night so that project personnel could come and go with little visibility. Using these grounds was illegal: we figure it violated at least a dozen federal laws and maybe a couple of international treaties. The explosion happened because no one had predicted the Vat 17 problem. Nobody expected pressure or heat from the chemicals in that tank to occur in the first place, let alone reach the basement through the connecting tubes. Very bad timing.”

  “And the radiation?” Emily asked. “Where’d that come from?”

  “That’s why Dr. Trân thinks they’re close,” Ted said. “He says that at late stages of testing, they’d have small quantities of plutonium present to test the trigger mechanism’s success in producing a micro reaction. Dr. Trân believes the plutonium was too close to the trigger when Vat 17 accidentally detonated it. The explosions spread the radiation to the third-floor corridor.”

  Ryan’s initial surprise at this explanation was fading, replaced by a sullen realization of how long he and Emily had been kept in the dark by Ted Pollock and Dr. Trân, and manipulated to serve this man’s ends.

  “So tell us why you’re doing whatever you’re doing,” Ryan demanded. “Why are you getting involved in Kieran’s lawsuit? What’s LB5 to you?”

  They were easing forward at no more than five to ten miles per hour, as Ted appeared to search for a landmark.

  “I’ll tell you after I’ve shown you what we’ve come to see,” he answered distractedly

  Ryan had opened his mouth to say no when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He glanced into the back seat. It was Emily, clearly anticipating what he was about to do. In the near darkness of the cab, he saw her shake her head gently with an imploring look.

  Ted slowed the truck further, then braked. “We’ll walk from here,” he said, shutting off the ignition. The headlights he left on.

  Ray was out of the truck immediately, heading to the rear of the trailer, while Heather walked out past the pooled light of the headlamps and into the blackness ahead. “I’ll go prepare the fence,” she said softly to Ted as she went by him.

  Ted turned back to Ryan and Emily as he led them to join Ray at the trailer. “We convinced Hanford to give us a contract,” Ted said. “A contract to pick up stray horses that wander onto the Hanford Reservation grounds and trip their security motion detectors. The fact is, there aren’t that many mustangs left in this area to be a real problem. But the Hanford engineers and security don’t know that. And Hanford doesn’t have the budget to keep up the fence lines like they did back when production was on. It wasn’t too hard to make it look like horses broke onto the grounds every few months. For two years, we’ve released horses onto the reservation land and forced Hanford security to catch and release them outside the fence line.

  “Finally, we approached them and got the contract to pick the horses up west of here, where they run naturally to a water hole. We tell them we sell the horses out east. In fact, we trailer the horses off the reservation grounds, but keep them in the paddock at our ranch. Two years of that and it’s gotten to be routine: Hanford expects horses to get onto the grounds every few months. Once they were used to it, we started going in with the mustangs we released.”

  Ray was leading the first of the four horses off of the trailer, a rope slung around its neck. Ted took the rope from Ray, handed it to Emily, then joined the man in getting the rest of the horses off of the trailer. When all four horses were on the ground, Ted handed one of the ropes to Ryan, then gestured into the darkness where Heather had disappeared. “The fence is about a hundred yards that way,” he said.

  Emily was the rider in the family, but Ryan wasn’t a complete novice when it came to horses. At a glance he saw that these animals were well fed and cared for, but bore the ragged coats and manes of wild horses. “Where are the saddles and bridles?” he called ahead to Ted. Ted didn’t answer as he guided the four of them with their horses over a low ridge. On the other side they walked down a short slope, at the base of which stood Heather. She turned as they neared.

  Here beyond the reach of the truck headlights, the desert appeared darker still. Only as Ryan came closer did he see that Heather was standing next to a fence line. At her side, the strands of the fence were broken where they intersected with a metal pole.

  “This fence is old,” Ted said, pointing to the gap. “Early on we scouted out places where we could breach it and make it look like animals discovered the breaches or knocked the fence down themselves. It helps that this outer fence is not a security priority anymore—and they’re years behind in repairs. We identified a couple dozen of these spots, but we’re down to four or five unused ones.”

  Ryan felt his stomach growing edgier at the prospect of actually moving onto the reservation grounds. He watched as Heather walked back and handed a tool to Ray, taking the rope of his horse in exchange.

  “Ted, before we step onto these grounds I’ve got to know where we’re going,” Ryan finally said, resolved.

  The rancher turned to face Ryan as though gauging his seriousness. He glanced at his watch, then back to Ryan. At last, he looked at each of the horses in turn before lifting his hat and running a palm across his braided hair.

  “Since the 1940s,” Ted began, his voice now falling to a near whisper in the hushed night air, “the radioactive contamination on the Hanford Reservation has created a phenomena of glowing wildlife—rabbits, bucks, sagebrush. Hunters have reported it for decades. Scientific studies confirm it. It’s caused by radiation in the soil and water taken up by the plants, the plants consumed by animals. There are patterns for it, linked to where there’s buried waste and contaminated water.”

  “Six years ago, we began to see a new pattern: irradiated animals and plants on the southern and southwestern borders of the reservation where they hadn’t been reported before. Heather, my wife, and I began to catalog it with nighttime observations on horseback. The patterns pointed to a large new disposal site in an area near Priest and Rattlesnake Ridges on the Hanford grounds. We triangulated a general location and then, in the last nine months, found the site. We’re going there tonight.”

  Ryan’s anxiety wasn’t relieved by this new information. Questions crowded his mind. “How many times have you done this already?” he asked.

  Ted shook his head, holding up his wrist with the watch. “Ryan, it’s eleven forty. The ride from here is about two hours; another two hours from the place we’re headed to the draw where Ray will pick us up. So we either leave now or Ray here will take you back to the ranch while we get this done.”

  Ryan looked at Emily. He could see at a glance that if he left now he’d leave without her. Besides, he couldn’t back away now. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Ted turned and grabbed his horse’s mane in both fists. “Wait,” Ryan suddenly called. “Are we going bareback?”

  Ted pulled himself up, throwing a leg over his mount’s back with a speed and strength Ryan wouldn’t have thought possible for a man of his age. Once he’d centered himself, he tied the rope loosely around his waist then looked over his shoulder at Ryan, still on the ground.

  “Yep,” he answered.

  “Why bareback?” Ryan asked plaintively.

  “We can’t take saddles in case we have to leave the horses and go to cover,” Ted answered, straightening his hat. “Then, if the horses are found, there’ll be no sign of the riders. You can keep your rope and use it to steady yourself. But if security comes, you’ve got to get off the horse and take it with you. Let the horse go on alone from there. Find a low spot and stay there. Then we’ll send someone in to retrieve you the next evening. It’s risky, having two fence b
reaks on consecutive nights, but we’ve done it once before. And another thing, as we’re riding, hunch low and close to the horse’s withers. They still have a few heat sensors scattered around the grounds. If they pick up a heat signal, we want it to look as much like a riderless horse as possible.”

  The talk about security filled Ryan with a sudden certainty that every word they were speaking must be amplified across the desert right to the nearest guard station. For a brief moment, that thought even drove away his fear of making this ride bareback.

  “And what’s the contingency if we get caught?” Emily spoke up. Ryan was relieved that her voice was tinged with the same nervousness that he felt.

  Sitting atop the tall horse, Ted only shrugged. “In that case, we’ll just have to find a good lawyer.”

  To Ryan, balancing on the horse’s back in the dark felt like drifting in an oarless dinghy in the open ocean. Still, his horse knew its way and was deceptively well trained; he could have been on a trail ride for all the ease of guiding it. And the terrain was fairly flat, with only a few hills and gullies to cross.

  All he had to do was hang on. Tight.

  Clinging to the mare’s mane, the only sounds Ryan could hear were the snorts of the horses and the wind shaking brush or kicking up sand. The only sights were variations of shadow. In the lead was Heather’s horse, followed by Emily’s. Ryan was behind his daughter, with Ted presumably in the rear—though Ryan didn’t turn to check, convinced that he’d fall.

  Then he felt Ted’s presence as his horse came abreast. “About a month or so before the October explosion, we had a breakthrough trying to tie down this site’s exact location,” the rancher said. “There was a lot of activity out here when we were making our nighttime observations. Occasional headlights. Frequent engine noises. We think they had a smaller experimental problem about that time, maybe another accident. Trân thinks that was why your client was at LB5 on October sixteenth.”

  “Why would an earlier test failure have placed Kieran on the site?” Ryan whispered.