“You mean there’s a second rad source down there?” Carol asked.
Krail shook his head and paused as he drew from his coffee cup.
“Not exactly. Scorpion’s sinking wasn’t the real problem for us. In fact, the salvage operation provided us with more intelligence about the Soviets’ sub-building capabilities than we ever had before. The problem was that she could penetrate Thebes Deep without our knowing it and begin snooping. Check the charts — even a magnetic compass is useless for navigation out there.”
“Were you worried the Soviets could station hidden submarines here within striking distance of the U.S.?” Junko offered.
Krail almost chuckled.
“With the advent of ICBMS, the Soviet subs were practically within striking distance of the U.S. while still in their slips.”
“Then why?” Carol asked. “Besides the proximity to North American landfall, who’d care about protecting a hole in the ground?”
“Unless it’s part of our defense system,” Garner suddenly proposed.
“There you go,” Krail said. “No shitting you, Brock.”
“B-82 was set up as some kind of gatekeeper, but a gatekeeper for what? Not the wreck of Scorpion, this far away. And not as a passive listening post — you have SOSUS for that.” The others could almost see the tumblers in Garner’s mind turning over.
“There is something else down there, and it’s leaking. Something manmade, but not a sub. Judging by the isotope signatures Junko has developed, that means it’s either a silo or a waste dump. Stop me when I’m getting warm, Scott.”
“You’re red hot,” Krail admitted.
“Since a silo or a weapons arsenal wouldn’t be built inside a weak kneed canyon, let alone allowed to leak, I’m guessing nuclear waste. Weapons waste.”
“Like I said,” Krail nodded. “There’s no shitting you.” He looked over at Charon and Stimson.
“See that? For the record, I didn’t have to tell him anything. The smart bastard figured it out all on his own.”
Krail cleared his throat and continued. He had relayed this information before, to far more sensitive and powerful audiences. Now, it seemed, what once had been a matter of the highest national security was little more than a dusty embarrassment.
“With the development of the A-bomb during World War II, the world — okay, the United States began to search for high-grade deposits of uranium. As you probably know, virtually all rock and soil on earth have at least some amount of natural uranium. But the really good stuff — the kind needed for making pure compounds for plutonium development — was believed to exist only in the Congo, in Czechoslovakia, and in northern Canada. Czechoslovakia was obviously out, and the Congo was too far from home. That left the Eldorado mine at Great Bear Lake and other sites like it here in the Arctic.
“Now it all seems trite, but in the heat of the moment, the whole damn-the-torpedoes mentality to get the bomb built, anything seemed possible. Hell, even the things that didn’t seem possible were given gambling money. Radium was going for twenty-five thousand dollars per gram. The United States knew there were sizable deposits of pitchblende in the Arctic, and pitchblende means uranium. They also knew the Arctic was a little too close to the Soviet Union to leave it entirely unchecked. Everyone knows about the Manhattan Project now, but back then, it was only one branch of America’s nuclear advancement program. The Naval Ordnance Laboratory operated several speculative ventures of its own, and at least one of those was operated as a joint effort with the Russians. The Manhattan Project had fuel reclamation sites at Hanford and Oak Ridge — today they also have South Carolina and Idaho, but back then there were only two approved military dump sites. Hanford alone took on ten thousand tons of radioactive waste — the question became, how could we hide just as much waste generated from other secret projects, many of which were going on outside the continental United States?”
“You find a remote trench and hope it’s deep enough to contain the evidence,” Garner said.
“Exactly,” Krail said. “Eventually, Los Alamos won the race to the bomb and the NOL projects were halted. They picked the Thebes Deep from a list of possible dump sites and rolled barrel after barrel of atomic waste into it until all the evidence was gone.”
“Were they nuts” Carol said. She couldn’t believe what Krail was admitting. “What about undersea earthquakes? What about leaks?”
“Yes, it was a risk,” Krail admitted. “A massive geological survey of the site was carried out and it was determined that the benefits outweighed the risks. Depth, low bottom-water circulation, natural caverns and clay deposits, and — most important — a whole bunch of nothing in every direction. The military conducted seismic tests on the seafloor, then drilled a laundry chute into bedrock an eighth of a mile deep years before industry technology caught up to them. The geologists told them that if the seabed moved, or slumped, or collapsed, it would only bury the waste cribs further.
“To answer your next question,” Krail continued, “I don’t know the number or position of the barrels, the size of each barrel, or what was in the damn things: Whoever filled that hole wasn’t taking stock for Tiffany’s. They built a concrete plug over the opening, brushed off their hands, and waited for eternity to arrive.”
“But there wasn’t anything like B-82 here,” Carol said. “What did they use for a sentry?”
“There wasn’t a perceived need for one,” Krail answered. “With the coming of the space race and satellite technology, the U.S. didn’t want anything to mark this area. There was kind of an unspoken trust with the Russians, even during the height of the Cold War anything to do with the NOL nuclear projects was off-limits.”
“They didn’t need it,” Garner speculated. “The development work with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory was probably enough to get Russia’s own nuclear development programs moving long before that.”
“They still need uranium,” Krail countered. “Or plutonium. And there’s plenty of both down there. Even if Scorpion was only in the area by coincidence, it was enough of a message that the waste site needed a fulltime guardian. You have to run the numbers a couple of times, and squint, but B-82 really is cheaper than a long-term defense operation with submarines, ships, or satellites. No alternate arrangements, short of an Adopt-an-Iceberg program, generate their own revenue.”
“Even if it is in Canadian waters,” Carol muttered to Junko. “A nuclear-free zone. Which, as far as they know, it is.”
“Would you rather see this material dumped in international waters?” Krail challenged.
“I’d rather see it not dumped at all!” Carol shot back.
“At three hundred meters, it’s too shallow to be a long-residence dump site in anyone’s backyard,” Junko said. “The current specifications say twelve hundred meters.”
“The current specifications didn’t exist in the forties,” Krail said tightly. The last thing he wanted to get into was the rationale of a fifty year-old decision.
“Christ, they sat people out on lawn chairs to watch the Trinity testing. They thought they could block it with sunscreen that’s how much they knew about the danger. This godforsaken hole in the ground was as high tech as it got — in those days the specifications called for four levels of containment and geological stability for one thousand years.”
“Four levels of containment?” Junko interjected. “I count three: the pit itself, the barrels, and possibly a stabilizing compound like cement or glass inside the barrels assuming they thought of that. So what’s the fourth level?”
“Beats me,” Krail said. “I wasn’t even born when all this went on. All I have are some classified government memos to go by, and those aren’t noted for meticulous detail.”