The Moonpool cr-3

by P. T. Deutermann

  Bad idea.

  The top of the snake’s head was ruptured; the bottom was gone, with the lower jaw unhinged and gaping open large enough to accommodate a soccer ball. Its eyes looked no different dead than alive. I felt the coils moving slightly. My bowels constricted.

  Was it dead, or just getting its second wind?

  Then I examined the head and realized it had to be dead. Had to be.

  Primitive creature. The head was dead, but the snake’s body hadn’t got the memo yet.

  Frick stuck her face into mine. You coming, or are we going to eat it?

  I slipped out from under the mess in one quick move and took a deep breath, which hurt like hell. All my ribs felt like they’d been cracked, and even my innards felt like they’d been repacked inside.

  The penlight was failing fast, but I still took one more look back at the huge snake, just to make damned sure it hadn’t revived. It was still there, leaking copious amounts of nasty fluids onto the container floor, its massive coils still moving. I turned off the light. The darkness was almost comforting, now that I knew there wasn’t a Pleistocene worm monster coming for me. My right arm was starting to hurt. I was glad I hadn’t wasted any flashlight on the wound. Besides, we had bigger troubles than that right now.

  I checked the SIG. The slide was locked back. I extracted the spare mag from my belt and fed my friend. Then I realized I could see. Sort of, anyway. I looked up. The little red square up high at the other end was now a little white square.

  Had Trask been watching our wrestling match down here in the box? I hoped he had, because that soft white light meant that night vision equipment was no longer running. With any luck, I’d parked one in his eye and he was no longer running, either, but that was probably too much to hope for. Right now we had to get out of here.

  The small viewing aperture put just enough light along the ceiling for me to finally see the crack. The front third of the upper container’s floor had dropped down to form the ramp. When my weight had come off, it had rotated on spring hinges back up into position, which meant there had to be a latch. The problem was that the ceiling was almost nine feet high. I couldn’t reach it, and thus I couldn’t use my knife to probe the crack and find that latch.

  I looked around for the shepherds, and found them cautiously sniffing the snake’s almost inert body. My ribs hurt just looking at that thing, and I still hadn’t pulled back my shirtsleeve to see how big a mess I had there. I needed to get something antibiotic on it pretty soon, though, or the snake would have lost the battle and won the war.

  The SIG. I could reach the ceiling with the SIG.

  Now the question became: Was it a center latch or a side latch? I’d walked right down the middle of the container and hadn’t detected any sagging or lack of support under my feet. I voted for center latch.

  “Cover your ears, mutts,” I said. I lay down on the floor, holding the gun up with both hands. I fired directly up into the crack on what I hoped was the centerline of the container. Once again, the noise was really startling. I missed the crack by about an inch the first time, steadied my grip, hit it with the second round, and then bracketed that with the next two rounds. The dogs were cowering in one corner, and the space was filling up with gunsmoke. There was a ragged hole of shattered plywood in the middle of the ceiling, and my face was covered with bits of wood. I rubbed the debris off my face and felt a scrape of metal on my cheek. The latch?

  I rolled to my feet and got out my utility knife. My right forearm was beginning to throb now, and my ears were ringing. Fortunately I still had that tiny square of white light, or I’d never have been able to find the crack, much less the latch. I held up my right hand and, yes, there were tiny bits of metal on my hand. I examined the crack, but it hadn’t opened or changed shape. Center latch and side latches? Or maybe it just needed some weight.

  I squatted up and down on my haunches a couple of times to limber up my thigh muscles. Then, pointing the knife straight up, I thrust my whole body, right arm rigidly extended, up at the ceiling as hard as I could. I jammed the serrated point of the knife into the plywood and held on as I fell back down to the floor. I felt burning lines of pain running up and down my right arm.

  The plywood held and the knife came back down with me, showering me with more wood bits.

  I tried again, with the same results, except this time I felt the plywood move just a little. I rested for a minute, and then took another stab at it, moving the aim point to one side of where I thought the latch should be. Definite movement, but apparently there was enough of the latch still there to hold the ramp. I got out the SIG again and used up two more rounds in the center of the hole already there. It was getting hard to breathe with all the smoke.

  I rested again for a minute or so and talked to the dogs. Their sensitive ears wouldn’t work for a week after this. Neither would mine, probably. I was really thirsty and beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get out of here. I kept hoping Pardee had recovered and was probing the boxes outside looking for the source of all the gunfire. Unfortunately, I was eight feet or more below ground level. If the upper box doors were closed, he could be right outside and unable to hear anything.

  I stared up at the mess on the ceiling. If I’d learned anything in my life, it was that persistence was everything if you were in a jam. Maybe if I could use the knife to pry the seam down and get a hand in there, I might be able to hang, dead weight this time, and pull the whole thing down with just my body weight. The thought of jamming my unprotected fingers into the splintered hole up there made me wince, but I had to try something. The air was filling with CO 2 and there was no air supply that I could see except for the snake hole. The shepherds were lying down and panting heavily.

  I put away the SIG, stretched my thigh muscles again, and tried my previous trick of jamming the knife. This time the center of the plywood panel bellied out a little, but it didn’t come down before the knife pulled out again. So I took a deep breath, moved forward a few inches, and jumped again, jabbing at the crack with the knife in my right hand while grabbing for a fingerhold with my left. It would have worked except for the fact that my left arm, injured in a tussle with a mountain lion a few years back, let me down, literally. So I switched hands-the knife in my left hand and my right hand going for the gold.

  It hurt. Splinters under the fingernails always do. But I managed to get four fingers jammed into that crack tight enough that I could hang there, extract the knife, and then jam it into the crack and turn it sideways.

  Now I had two handholds. The one on the left hurt my upper arm, but the one on the right made my fingers feel like they were on fire. I began to bounce, trying to set up a rhythmic pull on that panel, and finally, with a loud tearing noise, down it came. It happened so unexpectedly that I forgot to hold on, and back it went, slapping into the ceiling with a mocking crack as I tumbled down onto the floor. My snakebite reminded me that it was still there.

  I yelled in frustration, but then noticed that the whole panel was drooping an inch or so below the ceiling above. No more latch, so its own weight was working for me this time. One more straight-arm knife jump and I was able to pull it down to face level and, this time, hold on to the damned thing. The air became instantly fresher. I stared up into perfect darkness, though. No lighted aperture in the upper container. Who cared.

  Using the knife in a series of sticks, I pulled myself up the ramp and to the base of the exterior doors. The dogs tried to follow but couldn’t gain any traction. I told them to hang on and went looking for those latch plates Houston of the ICE had told me about. I had to do it all by feel, and then remembered the penlight. It still had a tiny spark of power left, and this allowed me to find the safety release lever. I pulled that, and the sockets for the locking lugs came off.

  I pushed on the door in front of me. The bottom moved; the top did not. Persistence, I reminded myself. Almost there. A few more minutes of humping and thumping and I found and released the top latches. Now
: Were they locked from the outside or just shut? Time to find out.

  This time when I pushed, and to my vast relief, the door opened, and I rolled out onto the dirt of the junkyard path. I looked around for bad guys, but it was just me in the semidarkness. The fresh air felt wonderful, but the shepherds became frantic when I rolled out of sight, so I went back to the container doorway to reassure them-and found that the ramp, with my weight gone, had come back up, leaving them in their subterranean prison. They were audibly not pleased with that result.

  It took another fifteen minutes of wedging and hauling to get them out of there, and their frantic efforts to “help” had just the opposite effect. I swore at them, and they undoubtedly returned the favor, but finally all three of us were outside the dreaded snake pit and gratefully breathing in the smells of rotting junkyard debris, diesel oil, rust, and ancient grease. It smelled wonderful.

  Now to find Pardee. And that bastard Trask.

  Ari Quartermain joined me in the ER at a little past one in the morning. He looked like he hadn’t been to bed in a couple of days, and that gray tinge I usually associated with cardiology patients was back in his face. I was sporting a bandage the full length of my right forearm and several new injection puncture wounds from an enthusiastic if not very competent male nurse.

  The ER docs had been visibly disturbed when they saw the scale of the teeth marks on my forearm. It was obvious to anyone who looked at them that I’d been bitten by at least an alligator, except for the fact that the individual tooth marks were much too small, and far too numerous. The. 45 had laid down a quarter-inch-deep gouge right through the middle of the bite area, but none of the docs had picked up on the fact that it was a bullet wound. That, in turn, meant no police report was necessary. For the moment, anyway; one of the docs had mentioned he was studying to be a tropical medicine specialist and wanted to talk to me later. I mumbled some promises I didn’t intend to keep and then closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as he tended to the wound with some kind of liquid fire.

  Pardee, on the other hand, was in trouble. Center stage, ICU trouble. Whatever Trask had gassed him with was still in control. The docs said that he smelled like ether, and that in the hands of a non-anesthesiologist, ether could be highly toxic and there was a chance of brain damage, or worse, if he didn’t come out of it in the next few days.

  I’d put a call in to Bernie Price and asked him if he could bird-dog Pardee’s police report for us. I preferred to have someone who knew both of us working with the admissions staff, who had all sorts of interesting questions about how Pardee came to inhale ether.

  “You’re sure this was Trask’s doing?” Ari asked.

  “Once again, I never saw him, but it sure sounded like him, and we had prior indication that he was doing stuff over there in the container port.”

  “Stuff.”

  “You don’t actually want to know,” I told him, “but he was allegedly working with the government, so it’s not a criminal enterprise. How’s Helios?”

  “You don’t actually want to know,” he parroted back to me with a wry grin. “The DNA comparison didn’t work, probably because of all the radiation exposure. The coroner’s office is freaking out because the body is not decomposing. Remember all that news about irradiating meat to prevent spoilage? Apparently it works.”

  “Lovely,” I said. “Look: Whatever Trask is planning, he has inside help, and it may be as soon as tonight.”

  He looked at his watch. “Tonight is over,” he said wearily. “It’s tomorrow already. Who’s the inside help, and what is the it?”

  “I like the Russian’s deputy, that Dr. Thomason, but I don’t have any firm evidence. Is he competent to create some kind of incident?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” Ari said, “but it would have to be the moonpool. He doesn’t usually work the reactor side, although technically he’s licensed to do so. If he showed up over there in the middle of the night, everyone in the control center would wonder why.”

  “What’s the worst thing that could happen to the moonpool?”

  “Empty the pool,” he said promptly. “Remember, it’s mostly aboveground. Empty the pool, and the spent fuel stack could catch fire from the heat of decay.”

  “Would that be contained?”

  “To start with,” he said, “but if we got significant hydrogen generation and no remedial action was taken, you could get a gas explosion. Blow the containment building apart, and the Three Mile Island incident would look like an amusing Halloween prank.”

  “But there would be remedial action, right? You have automatic systems to deal with loss of the water?”

  “Certainly, but you said you thought Trask had inside help. If it’s Thomason, or someone with Thomason’s qualifications, he could disable all of those systems, and he could probably do so in a way that would keep the control room from knowing it until it was too late. Hell, I could do that.”

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “What’s your opinion of Thomason?”

  “He’s a good engineer. Ex-Navy nuke, like a lot of them are. Personality-free zone. Gets along with Petrowska, which takes some doing. Doesn’t socialize much within the plant. Don’t know his politics.”

  “Could he have some hidden agenda?”

  Ari rubbed his cheeks with both hands while he considered that question. “I suppose he could,” he said, “but I’ve never heard him ranting and raving, not, for instance, like Carl Trask.”

  “I still think you should alert your security people,” I said.

  He sighed and nodded. “And what, specifically, do I tell them?”

  I had a momentary vision of Trask turning a couple of cobras loose in the control room. My arm twinged. “You have stages of threat alert over there, don’t you? Like the airports? Raise the alert level immediately. You don’t have to explain why. Lock the fucking place down for a few days until we can pull the string on Thomason and actually apprehend Trask.”

  “We’ve already got the FBI and the NRC crawling up our asses,” he said. “I guess we could throw some more shit in the game.”

  “Ari, look: Your plant may be under attack. Two unexplained radiological releases. A dead body in the moonpool. Your physical security director is missing and presumed whacko. I get ambushed in the container port by a guy who has pre-staged facilities-in the junkyard. My partner is a gorp upstairs, courtesy of the same guy who turned a python loose on me. Pretend you’re sitting in front of a congressional committee afterward while a senator recites all that and then asks why nothing was done.”

  He put his shiny bald head in his hands and thought about it. “Coming offline unscheduled is a really big deal,” he said between his fingers. “I can lock the place down, as you put it, but if they’re after the moonpool, that wouldn’t affect the reactor side.”

  “Suppose the moonpool is a diversion?” I said. “Is the NRC looking at the reactor side? The Bureau? Anybody? Or is everybody focused on the moonpool?”

  He looked at me from between splayed fingers. “Fu-u-u-u-ck,” he said.

  Then he got out his cell phone. Ignoring all the signs about using cell phones in the hospital, he placed a call. He identified himself, but didn’t give his phone number, and then made them call him back. Then he asked for the supervisory engineer in the primary control room.

  “Hal, this is Ari Quartermain. This is an emergency communication. I have made an official determination that the reactor system is temporarily unsafe. I direct that you inform the grid operator that Helios is going offline. Once the generator hall comes off the grid, then I direct that you execute a deliberate reactor scram. I am ready to give you the authentication code word.”

  He listened for a moment, looking over at me with a grave expression.

  “That’s right. Make the appropriate log entries.” A pause. “Yes, of course I will take full responsibility, but do it now. There is an inside security threat to the RCS.”

  He listened some more. “No, do not wait. Tell the gr
id operations center they have five minutes to adjust the load. If they protest, tell them you’re going to scram in six minutes. They can handle it. They won’t want to, but they can. Let me know when you’re ready for the code word.”

  He listened, then put his hand over the phone. “He has to get a safe open,” he told me. “Two-man rule and all that.”

  “Can he object, or go over your head?” I asked.

  Ari shook his head. “He’s a nuke. This is a certified emergency procedure. My phone has a unique caller ID symbol that confirms it’s me. There are two code words, actually, one for duress, and one which means he has to do what I say.” He turned back to the phone.

  “I am ready to proceed,” he said. He waited, and then said, “No,” and then spoke a single word. He waited. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll inform the director.”

  He hung up and looked over at me. “Now the real fun begins,” he said. “And this time, Mr. Private Investigator, you’re going to get to play.”

  A weary-looking nurse in blue scrubs came into the waiting area, frowned at Ari’s cell phone, and then called my name. Her name tag had an ICU logo.

  “Your friend, Mr. Bell, is semiconscious,” she said. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s no one home.”

  I digested that announcement for a moment. “Will he recover?” I asked.

  “We don’t know, Mr. Richter. When I say he’s semiconscious, I mean he’s responsive to stimuli. His hand flinches if we probe a finger with a needle. We hope that Mr. Bell is still down there somewhere. For now, I’d suggest you go home until we contact you. Make sure Admitting has your contact numbers. Is Mr. Bell married?”

  “Yes, to a trial attorney, up in Triboro.”

  “Terrific,” she said. “Give that information to Admitting as well, please. She should come down here.”

  I did as she had asked, and called Alicia, Pardee’s wife, myself, to tell her what had happened. She said she’d be down first thing in the morning after she’d set up care for the kids.

  I stopped by the pharmacy to fill some scrips of my own. “I need a shower and some sleep,” I told Ari. “People in there were keeping their distance.”