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 boldly 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 amp;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 gazilli
on 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.
Quartermain was waiting for me in what looked like a monitoring anteroom along with some technicians. His eyes looked a bit puffy, and he was moving awkwardly, although that may just have been because he, too, was already suited up in a white whole-body coverall. There were no windows in the building, and the air was humid and surprisingly warm.
The moonpool itself was still spooky-looking. The water was incredibly clear and suffused with that ethereal blue-green light down toward the bottom, caused apparently by the residual radiation. And whereas the reactors were caged in huge hemispherical reinforced concrete domes, the spent fuel storage pool was open to view from catwalks on all four sides. It looked like the water was actually moving a little bit. Quartermain said it was and again explained the mechanics of the pool, the water cooling and the emergency backup refill system.
“So why’d they build them aboveground?”
“Pre-9/11 reactor design considerations,” he answered. “Robotic machines defuel and refuel the reactors, since humans can’t go anywhere near that stuff. There’s a whole tunnel complex underneath this building. The robots pull the fuel elements down out of the core, turn them sideways, cart them through a tunnel to the moonpool, stand them back up again, and then set them up for long-term storage. Takes months to do it, and after a while the pools get full. Then any other elements have to go into cask storage. Basically, it’s easier to transfer the stuff from an aboveground pool to the dry casks.”
“Casks, as in big lead-lined tanks?”
“Yup. Exactly. Steel and lead. We have some here, but they’re empty. So far, anyway. But if they don’t open Yucca Mountain pretty soon, we’ll be using them.”
“Is spent fuel a valid terrorist target?” I asked.
“Yes, there’s some bad shit down there at the bottom. That’s one of the main reasons we have people like Trask and his ex-Rangers here. Now: about last night.”
“Other than your unplanned swim, you got what you wanted, right?”
“I think we did. My spill team still has to write up their report, and we’ll be doing some more analysis on the foam once we get it back here.”
“Anyone tying the material to the stowaways?”
“Internally, Homeland Security and the Bureau are treating it as an attempted RDD attack, although the official cover story is only talking about the runners.”
“RDD?” All the acronyms were beginning to overwhelm me.
“Radiological dispersion device-dirty bomb, in English.”
“Except there was no bomb, right?”
“We had hot stuff and illegal males hidden in the same box. All sorts of conjecture about that. For all we know, there’s a bomb still over there, in another container.”
“They catch any of the runners?”
“Two,” he said. “South American, not Middle East. The ICE guys are baffled.”
More acronyms. “ICE?”
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement. More feds. You need to brush up on your alphabets.”
“I’m trying not to. So now what?”
“They’ll determine the destination for that container, and then screen the entire system for any other containers going to the same destination. If they find one, that’s where they’d expect bomb components to be.”
I thought his reasoning was a little tenuous. “You didn’t exactly find a thermos of bad stuff in that container, Ari,” I said.
“Yet,” he shot back.
“Okay, so let the big dogs run with it. You no longer need me or my people, right?”
He didn’t answer right away. He glanced sideways at three fully masked technicians who were taking readings from some instruments suspended in the pool. We turned our backs to them and the glowing pool before he replied. Frick, who seemed nervous, stayed close by my side. I wondered if the dog could sense the presence of something dangerous down there in that shimmering water.
“Actually,” Ari said, “I’d like you to stay. Remember my telling you that we might be able to trace marker isotopes when Ms. Gardner was killed?”
I nodded, although that hadn’t worked out with Allie’s postmortem.
“We have been able to recover the isotopic markers from our spill team’s monitors.”
“And?”
“The markers aren’t unequivocal,” he said grimly, indicating the moonpool with a sideways nod of his head, “but one could make the case that they point right here.”
“Who knows that?” I asked, wanting suddenly to get out of this foreboding building.
“At this moment, nobody but me and my lab people. They’d just brought me the report when I called you. But I will have to notify the company and, more importantly, the NRC. And then we’re probably going to experience some more interesting times, in the Chinese sense.”
I remembered Creeps saying they’d shut the plant down if they could prove the water came from the moonpool. “You’re saying you now think somebody did take radioactive water or materials, or both, out of this facility?”
“Seems impossible, doesn’t it,” he said. “You’ve seen the security. And, of course, it could have come from another BWR plant. But we’re the closest. Plus, you can’t and you wouldn’t get near an operat
ing power reactor, so…”
I looked around as I digested this bit of news. The pool was contained in a sealed concrete building, swarming with radiation-monitoring instruments, accessible only through three layers of security checks, one manned, two electronic, and under constant television surveillance from a control room. So it wasn’t likely that someone just wandered up here with a rope and a bucket.
“Who’s the guy in charge of this area?” I asked.
“Not a guy,” he said. “Her name is Anna P. Martin. Doctor Anna Petrowska Martin, to be specific.”
“Judas Priest!” I said. “You’ve got a damned Russian on your management team?”
“Now, now, don’t rush to judgment. We also have Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and, yes, one Russian, and even some native-born Americans.”
“You do?”
“Consider the state of public education in this country these days, Mr. Richter. You think America’s producing bumper crops of nuclear engineers? If it weren’t for technically educated foreigners, there’d be no nuclear power or any other high-tech industry in this country. What we can’t rape and pillage from the Navy’s nuclear power program, we make up with foreigners. All of whom are fully vetted American citizens, by the way, as is Dr. Martin.”
I shook my head. I had strong views on Russians even being in this country, having dealt with my share of them in the Manceford County major crimes office. The Russian gangs made the Mafia look like pasta-bellied pussies. They were vicious beyond belief, and I firmly believed we should deport every damned one of them back to their beloved rodina tomorrow.
I was about to expand on these sentiments when I realized that one of the white-suited techs was standing behind me. He took off his headgear. Her headgear. I’d formed a mental image of a fullback-shouldered Madame Khrushchev when Ari had told me about Comrade Dr. Martin, but this was most definitely not the case.
“Did I hear my homeland being mentioned?” she said, shaking out a wave of platinum-blond hair. She was one of those chiseled Slavic beauties, with pronounced cheekbones, bright ice-blue eyes, and a challenging mouth. I could hear the Eastern European accent, but she’d obviously been in the States for some time. I’d paid no attention to the “guys” in the baggy white suits, or I would have noticed that one suit wouldn’t necessarily be called baggy.
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