by M M Buckner
Hammer Nesbitt lumbered across the dock like a peevish old bear and took a peek at Yue’s map. “Tell me that ain’t the spill from your lagoon,” he said, shaking a fat finger in Roman’s face. “See that creek? That leads straight outta your swamp where your chemicals got loose.”
Yue’s mottled skin tightened over her cheekbones. “I defy you to find toluene in that canal.”
The big Texan rounded to face her. “I never said toluene. I don’t know what kind o’ shit you people spilled. What the hell is it, that’s what I wanna know. People’s livelihoods are at stake here.”
Yue vibrated like a tuning fork. “Peter, show this gentleman your analysis.”
Peter finished coating himself in sunscreen, then languidly found his notes and read out the laundry list of pollutants, while Roman slapped his leg in tempo with the passing seconds. It was the same list Reilly had discovered. Carolyn Reilly—where was that fickle girl? Roman made a mental note to fire her as soon as he had time.
Then he bounded into the speedboat. “Let’s go, Meir. I want to see the gates.”
Max Pottevents revved up the engine, and Peter Vaarveen asked to come along. Soon the four of them were tearing down the sun-drenched canal toward the Mississippi River, where the Oceano Mundial cleanup ship was just passing through the open blue gates.
Roman hailed the captain and mate standing on the foredeck. At thirty-six feet, the Refuerzo was a small, sleek Class II Harbor Skimmer with water-jet propulsion and state-of-the-art equipment. Agile and quick, she required only a two-man crew, and her pilot house stood a mere twelve feet high, but OM’s manager assured Roman that her onboard capabilities were impressive. As soon as her glossy green-and-white silhouette passed through the gates, Meir radioed the Horst crane operator, and Roman watched the shining gates close. When he heard the hiss of their watertight gaskets mating, he drew his first easy breath in days.
“It’s contained,” he said quietly, resuming his seat in the speedboat.
“Yep, but now what do we do with it?” Meir knocked cigar ash into the water.
Capt. Michael Creque pulled alongside their speedboat and introduced himself. A blond, hard-weathered good ol’ boy from Lake Charles, he pronounced his name to sound like “Mackle Crick.” But his eyes moved with a quickness that belied his slow speech, and his questions showed long experience at his trade. His mate, a skinny black man named Spicer, barely spoke a word. Yet when Peter Vaarveen stepped onto the Refuerzo deck without permission and began snooping around, Spicer said just enough to make him leave.
“One of them odorless, colorless jobs, eh?” Captain Creque eyed the green waters sloshing around his hull. He sniffed the dry air and shook his head. “Got any idea of the specific gravity?”
“We—” Peter glanced at Roman with a subtle smirk. “We aren’t sure. It changes.”
Creque took off his cap, rubbed his head and studied Peter’s printout. “Well, Spicer’ll download your data so we can set us a perimeter. If we cain’ break her down with chemicals, I guess we’ll drop us a collar around the whole she-bang and suck her up. You got you a empty holding lagoon anywheres close by? Otherwise, you’ll have to rent you some tankers.”
While Meir and Creque worked out the cleanup details, Roman relaxed and checked voicemail. He had a sense that, finally, reasonable minds were at work and that his mystifying adversary would soon be captured and neutralized. Once they had the colloid confined in a lagoon, Yue would learn whether it could be made to serve Quimicron’s interest, or whether it should simply be destroyed. Roman never doubted the efficacy of science. He smiled at the watertight gates spanning the mouth of the canal. If he’d been an effusive man, he would have slapped Peter Vaarveen’s back—he felt that buoyant.
It was too late to meet with his Panama shippers, and he’d sent a VP to deal with the refinery people in Mobile, Alabama. Awkward setbacks. But he still hoped to rendezvous with the Brazilian banker. That deal was vital. With this Baton Rouge incident contained, he could leave Meir and Yue to mop up while he went to bargain for a natural gas port in Fortaleza, a port that would open a fertile new market for Quimicron SA. He called the hangar to ready his jet.
Suck
Sunday, March 13
6:14 PM
In the dying light, CJ focused her binoculars on Peter Vaarveen, who was repositioning the orange buoys in a wider circle.
“You’re growing,” she whispered to the colloid.
Engine roar echoed across the water. She turned to watch Max pilot the company speedboat up the canal from Gulf-Pac to Quimicron. She admired the way he cut the engine and glided precisely up to the loading dock without colliding. Max grew up on the river. He was good with boats—she’d noticed that before.
As soon as Max tied off, Roman leaped ashore and sprinted up the steep ramp over Quimicron’s ring levee. Good legs, she observed. But where was he going in such a hurry? She keyed Max’s number into her cell.
“He don’ confide in me,” Max replied to her question.
“But he must have dropped some hint.”
“All I know is, they closed the gates, and they gonna pump djab dile into a lagoon.”
She kicked at a tuft of fescue grass. “They have to get it onto their own property, under lock and key.”
“Maybe that evil need to be under lock,” Max said.
“Not Quimicron’s lock.”
“On ap rive. I cain’ talk no more. Rory want me helping them cleanup boys.”
“Did he . . . um . . . did Roman say anything about me?”
“No, lamie.”
Max turned off his phone and stuck it in his coverall chest pocket, then gazed across the twilight canal to the swamp. He knew about where CJ lay hiding, and though he couldn’t see her, he almost waved. But he dropped his hand. His coworkers might notice. In any case, she probably wasn’t looking his way.
A glance at his wristwatch made him suck his teeth. No chance of making the session at the Snakedoctor Club. Zydeco players met there every Sunday night to jam and try out new songs. Friends stopped in to listen, dance a little, maybe put some money in the jar. But tonight was special. His ex-wife Sonia had promised to bring Marie.
Max felt in his breast pocket. The fragile silver chain was still there, locked in its pink jewel box, with a tiny silver pendant shaped like a heart. He’d bought the small necklace for Marie’s birthday. Reluctantly, he punched Sonia’s number into his cell, and the boat rocked gently under his feet while he waited through the rings. He still didn’t understand why the court gave sole custody to Sonia. Max had to coax and bribe for every hour with Marie. He hadn’t seen her for weeks, and he’d been working out the new song for her birthday.
As he made his apology and listened to Sonia’s usual tirade, the tips of his fingers itched for his frottior, and he whistled Marie’s tune softly through his teeth. “Awright. Okay. Yes,” he said. Then he shut his phone, revved up the speedboat and motored back down the canal to pick up Mr. Meir. Some days, he despised this job.
Max and Merton worked all through the clear bright evening to drain a holding lagoon. As the sky dissolved from gold to red to black, they pumped its corrosive contents into an abandoned well, then washed out the concrete basin with a high-pressure hose, blasting off the viscous orange scum that clung to its walls.
Next, they reeled out a flexible eighteen-inch diameter pipeline. By flashlight and moonlight, they laid it along the ground from the empty lagoon, up along the ring levee and down the canal bank to the Gulf-Pac dock. It wasn’t long enough, so they had to fit a connection. Headlamps crisscrossed through the night while another crew set up a pair of heavy-duty vertical pumps at the Gulf-Pac dock. Trucks from all over southern Louisiana kept showing up with equipment. Max had to give Mr. Roman Sacony credit, the man showed enterprise.
Meanwhile, the Refuerzo tangoed around the canal dropping a perimeter of foam-filled PVC booms just outside the circle of orange buoys. Max helped stage floodlights, and he watched them when
he could. He admired how the two cleanup men moved like synchronized athletes.
As the half-moon passed overhead, Creque and Spicer draped lead-weighted plastic sheets from each of the booms. The nonpermeable curtain reached all the way to the canal bed and sank several inches into the silt, safely containing all eight tons of the colloid. The collar put Max in mind of an oversized shower curtain hanging down in the water. By midnight, they were ready to catch djab dile.
Spill
Monday, March 14
12:05 AM
The liquid inside the Refuerzo’s watertight collar lay still. No convection moiled its liquid sheen. No wind troubled its smoothness. No vapors rose. Its coherent surface reflected the floodlights like a black mirror.
Yet in the midnight darkness below, free-floating computer chips fired signals, and miniature polarized fields quietly sorted compounds into new groups. Charged particles of iron and steel washed together, and double-helix skeins of mixed debris spiraled round and round. Hybrid microbes emitted new acids.
Capt. Michael Creque had a rhyme he liked to quote: “The solution to pollution is dilution.” Which translates: To deal with a liquid contaminant, just add water, and keep adding more water till the poisonous parts-per-billion fall within acceptable regulatory standards. But despite his pithy poem, Creque knew that removing a pollutant from open water was tricky.
His vacuum pumps guzzled fuel, so hosing up the entire eight tons in the collar would be expensive. That’s why he and Spicer tried other techniques first. The Refuerzo carried the latest remediation gadgets, and Michael Creque understood how to use them. First he dropped absorbent pads into the contaminated area, then recovered and bagged them like wet diapers. When Yue told him the diapers weren’t picking up the right contaminants, he deployed oleophilic brushes and rope mops, which used differences in specific gravity and surface tension to stir up and attract oil-based chemicals from water.
Apparently, the colloid was not oil-based. So as the half-moon sank toward the horizon, Spicer broke into their arsenal of dispersant sprays. Creque’s sprays could break down, coagulate, flocculate, and precipitate a dozen different categories of toxic materials. After two hours, Yue ran an analysis and gave this method another nix.
This chemical spill was something beyond their experience. But Creque and Spicer were not discouraged. They downed two cans of Red Bull apiece—their caffeinated beverage of choice—then deployed their circular weir. This grisly device came fitted with a high-capacity grinder pump that could chew up the heaviest, most viscous spills mixed with the lumpiest of trash. Nothing had ever sneaked past their circular weir—until now. As they watched, the unpredictable colloid seemed to gain weight and settle to the bottom. Their weir caught nothing but brown canal water.
So finally they resorted to the pumps. The moon had set and the night air had turned cold when at last they connected their high-tech vacuum system to Quimicron’s temporary pipeline. Night birds screamed and took flight when they fired up the vertical pumps. Methodically, they swept the suction hose back and forth inside the collar, and gradually, the fabric curtain deflated.
Diffuse
Monday, March 14
4:45 AM
“Malè. Nothing’s working,” Max yawned over the phone. After four hours of sleep in the back of Rory’s truck, he’d returned to monitor the temporary pipeline at the holding lagoon.
CJ gripped her phone and smiled. Across the canal, she lay in thick weeds at the mouth of the unnamed rivulet, listening to Max breathe. She hadn’t slept much either. The clear pre-dawn had turned frosty, and she hadn’t brought enough clothes. In the chilly darkness, she hugged herself to stay warm.
“They’ve been pumping for over an hour. Must be a thousand gallons in that lagoon,” she said.
“Oui, over five ton. But no djab dile. All they capture is clean water.”
Clean water. CJ savored those words. Her colloid was doing his magic again. Without understanding why, she felt an instinctive bond with the wild changeling.
Through binoculars, she watched Yue and Vaarveen yell at each other beneath Gulf-Pac’s floodlights, and she regretted not buying a high-sensitivity microphone so she could eavesdrop. She’d give a big chunk of her trust fund to hear what they were saying.
Across the ebony water, the Refuerzo’s pumps growled like hungry sea monsters, frightening away bats. A pall of blue smoke hovered over the canal, and the collar lay on the water like a dented star, collapsing inward. Big-eared swamp rabbits crouched in their warrens, and salamanders dove under rocks. Li Qin Yue and Peter Vaarveen stood on opposite sides of the computer, airing a difference of opinion.
“Do it again.”
“Screw you. I’ve done it three times already.”
The computer-generated map of the EM field had lost its ovoid shape. The screen now displayed a splotchy pixel pattern with a gaping hole at the center where the Refuerzo’s pumps were sucking, and around this gap, the field was visibly dissolving. All signs indicated they had captured the colloid. And yet . . .
“We’re pumping textbook pure water.” Peter held a stoppered test tube up to the light. “I can’t even find trace impurities.”
“That can’t be.” Yue waved her fists. “We’ve acquired over three-fourths of the volume. There has to be something in that lagoon. You missed it.”
“The hell. Run your own analysis.” Vaarveen threw the tube at her.
When it bounced off her hands and broke on the concrete dock, Yue screeched. “You’re worthless. You didn’t even find the pollutants we identified before.”
Peter gave her a sour grin. His white-blond hair looked gluey, and fingerprints smudged his bottle-thick glasses. He’d borrowed a disreputable-looking coverall to keep out the chill, and Deet insect repellent hovered around him like a personal fog.
Yue looked as if she wanted to spit. Her boney frame quaked with cold in her thin lab coat, but she disdained wearing other people’s clothes. Her iron-colored braid hung limp down her back, and muddy stains darkened her sleeves where she’d been jerking at the vacuum hose. Fatigue lined both their faces, and they swayed with exhaustion.
Roman Sacony watched them in silence. He had not gone to Miami. He’d let the Brazilian banker slip through his fingers. Perhaps he’d made a mistake, listening to his instincts to stay in Baton Rouge. But after watching his science team brawl like cats, he didn’t think so. This battle wasn’t over. This enemy had not yet surrendered.
In the shadows at the far end of the dock, he leaned against a forklift and rubbed his grainy eyes. He had swallowed another of Li Qin’s capsules to stay awake, and the stimulant coursed through his bloodstream, exciting his weary nerves. Reflections rocked back and forth in the canal’s languorous black ripples, and waves of cold air wafted up from the water. The pump engine fumes gave him a headache. Dawn was coming.
“Christ, it’s come back,” Yue hissed.
Roman saw her leaning toward the computer screen as if she were going to dive in. He moved rapidly to see the image. Deep within the collapsed collar, an ink blot diffused like a strange black blossom, darkest at the center, fanning out to a fine intricate fringe. Their hours of pumping had gone for nothing. The EM field had regenerated. His enemy had eluded their hose.
Roman knew he’d expected this outcome. He never trusted easy wins. As he confronted his opponent’s portrait on the screen, his fingers slid over the liquid crystal display, almost caressing it. “Can you enlarge this section?”
Yue clicked a command to magnify the peripheral fringe. When it zoomed up to 500x, Peter Vaarveen let out a hoot. “It’s a Mandelbrot set.”
“Yes.” Roman recognized the famous image of lacey seahorse-shaped spirals generated by a well-known quadratic recurrence equation.
Yue’s neck bones popped. “It’s too linear. Liquids don’t mix like that.”
“Why is it still there?” Roman glowered at the canal. “We’ve pumped the collar almost empty.”
“We pumped w
hat it wanted us to pump,” said Vaarveen.
“What it wanted?” Yue scowled. “You’re starting to believe these ‘creature’ stories.”
Vaarveen plopped down in a folding chair, stretched his long legs in front of him and snickered. “Do you have a better explanation?”
Roman was losing patience with both of them. He checked his watch. The gates were closed. The colloid wasn’t going anywhere.
“You’re thinking like children,” he said. “Get some sleep. Come back when your brains are clear.”
Bathe
Monday, March 14
5:39 AM
The abrupt silence after the pumps shut down frightened a screech owl and scattered a pack of coyotes. CJ raised up on one elbow. Covered in cold mud, her wet hair was matted with grass seed, and her clothes crawled with chiggers. She dug through her pockets to find a handkerchief clean enough to wipe her binocular lenses. The crew was going home. Now it was her turn.
She gulped one last syrupy swallow of Coke, crushed the plastic bottle, stowed it in her backpack, then dropped her shorts to pee. Why hadn’t she thought to bring some long pants? Her bare legs were milk-blue with cold.
She slogged through the chilly swamp and found her boat lolling among the willows. If only they hadn’t closed those stupid gates, she could have motored up the canal. The boat would have made everything easier. But with the canal closed, she would have to carry her gear overland. At least, she found a sweatshirt to wear.
Her phone rang. Max was trying to call, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t want him to know what she was planning. After loading her equipment in a net bag, she slung it over her shoulder and hiked back through the swamp.
At the canal waterline, she dumped her gear and sorted things out. No way did she intend to dive, not again. She wasn’t that harebrained. No, she would simply wade out in hip boots and take a few readings from the surface—although the thought of tugging the cold rubber hip boots over her bare legs made her shiver.