“The reports mentioned a bug that was supposed to be a natural barrier to leaks,” Charon offered, in the first hint of cooperation Krail had witnessed. “Some kind of bacteria.”
Garner and Junko exchanged an excited look and asked Charon if the name Thiobacillus was familiar; he said it wasn’t.
“But I do remember a couple of reports I was shown that mentioned bacteria as a containment layer.”
“They might have inoculated the barrels, or simply poured the Thiobacillus on top of them,” Junko speculated. “At least that explains how the bacterium got into the slick.”
“And our search ends here,” Carol said. “There’s no way anything but the pit is responsible for the leak.”
“Do you still have those reports?” Garner asked Charon.
“Hell no,” Charon replied. “That was fifteen years ago at least, when B-82 was still on the drawing board and we were doing the site survey. The reports were older than I am. They probably wound up in the attic of some long-dead admiral.”
“I still can’t see the need for all this paranoia,” Carol said, waving her arm around her. “A multi-billion-dollar facility just to guard some second-rate bomb waste? These days, who would even want it?”
“No one, we hope. But fissionable products are never a safe bet,” Krail replied. “The nuclear age in the eighties was not what it was in the forties. Today is different again. Because of the terrorist threat, waste sites no longer reprocess nuclear fuel to separate plutonium, but the pit below us has reprocessed waste in abundance. It was always assumed that stealing plutonium, or producing it from uranium milled on land, was far easier, cheaper, and likelier than any attempt to break into an unguarded waste dump. Only the U.S. knew about the Thebes facility, and we believed only we had the technology to attempt any kind of recovery.”
“Do they?” Carol asked. “Do the Russians even have any submarines left?”
“It’s not a two-player game anymore,” Krail said. “These days we don’t know who the enemy is. There are all these little high-tech factions springing up around the globe. Forget James Bond stuff — the Chinese took half our technology from Los Alamos and posted it on the Internet! Waste sites aren’t regulated or inventoried nearly as much as live weapons. Sellafield is missing some plutonium. The Marshall Islands are missing some too. And the rest of our potential enemies have money to bribe whoever has the right technology. Sure, they’re still more apt to use traditional means, but the reasoning on B-82 has always been, If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
“But now it’s broken,” Garner finished.
“It seems it is,” Krail said, showing his first trace of discomfort. “And we don’t know where, or why. We’re still sorting through the seismic records taken by the rig crew. It could be a landslide, or even an earthquake. The canyon is extremely branched, and locating a given epicenter is not an easy task.”
“You say you’ve checked the opening to the pit — the ‘plug’?” Garner asked.
“Of course,” Krail answered. “First thing. It was intact. Then we moved up the main trench to Scorpion’s location. Nothing.”
Nothing. The word hung in the silent room.
Eventually, everyone’s gaze turned to Garner.
They gathered in another of B-82’s secured areas, the communications van, which included a mainframe computer for the resident Echelon routers and recording devices for practically anything that moved on, under, or above B-82. This extensive database included detailed seismic charts of any movement along Thebes Deep, its time, intensity, and, as closely as could be determined amid the convoluted folds of compressed basalt, its precise location.
“We’ll need charts too,” Garner said to Krail and Charon. “Coast Guard, Navy, USGS, NRO, DFO, SASS — all of them. If it describes anything about the bathymetry down there, I want to see it. The time for secrets has passed.”
“The time for national security hasn’t, Commander Garner,” Charon countered.
“We can’t keep the right hand unaware of what the left hand knows,” Garner said. “It seems to me that’s what started this problem in the first place.”
The rig’s surveillance officers complied with Garner’s request while Krail retrieved his charts from the Hawkbill. The resulting morass of chart paper buried the room’s conference table, but Garner was convinced that a solution resided within the geological, hydrographic, and atmospheric data laid out before them.
Garner and Krail began with the latest NRO satellite data, which described the radioactive disturbance as originating roughly north of Scorpion’s location, then trailing out to the east and passing south of Baffin Island. The information from NOAA’s high-latitude weather satellite confirmed that the prevailing winds were pushing the slick along with the surface currents. The swath described by the infrared projection showed that the highest levels of radiation passed in almost a direct line through Victor Tablinivik’s coastal hunting grounds on Melville Peninsula and the cruise track of the Sverdrup Explorer. Then, as Garner had predicted, the slick continued east, dangerously close to the south-flowing currents that would carry the radiation into the northwest Atlantic.
With this information. Garner had Krail send the radio-controlled dosimeter up over the westernmost point of radiation noted by the satellites. The data from the flying instrument were downloaded to Junko’s PATRIC projection, and, within hours, they had narrowed the most likely source of the radiation to an area of less than ten square miles. Even better, they now had a finite set of coordinates to compare with Krail’s enhanced charts of Thebes Deep.
The charts’ resolution diminished farther away from the locations of B-82 or Scorpion, but between the submarine salvage operation and the construction of the oil rig, a remarkably detailed map of deepwater currents had been derived.
This information was now used to trace the path of the leaked radioactivity through the canyon, then over the lip of Thebes Deep and into the bottom circulation of the Arctic Ocean.
The Hawkbill continued its survey of the north end of the canyon to locate the highest levels of radiation. At the same time, the submarine’s electronics rendered a detailed, up-to-the-minute plot of the fault’s dimensions in the vicinity of the leak. The survey was expected to take most of the following twenty-four hours, so Carol and Junko returned to the Phoenix for some much-needed sleep. Garner and Zubov bunked in one of the rig’s guest rooms, then returned to Charon and Krail to begin discussing the best ways to seal the leak.
“I still don’t understand it,” Krail said, regarding the map of the canyon for the hundredth time. “How the hell can the waste crib here be emitting radiation into the current here?” He slid his finger along the chart. “There must be five miles between them.”
“Second-guessing seafloor slumps and sub sea quakes is about as reliable as predicting the weather,” Garner said. “If the military was able to find one natural cavern for their dump site, there’s probably an entire network of them down there. The collapse of any large spaces would cause new fissures to open up. Between the masses of denser rock, the radiation seeps along the point of least resistance until it breaches the seafloor.”
“But miles through the basin itself?” Krail asked.
“Unlikely, all right,” Garner agreed. “But unless there’s a third rad source down there you’re not telling us about, that’s exactly what happened. The plug is intact and there’s no leakage here, because the waste seeped north and into a bottom current drawing it out to the east.”