“Whatever-same rules apply. They’re searching the wrong place.”
“What’s the right place, then?” I asked.
He pointed across the mile or so of swamps and inlets to the cluster of lights flooding the container port upriver. “Right over there,” he said. “That’s where it came from, and there’s probably more of it there right now. That place is a fucking turnstile for terrorists. Ten zillion pounds of stuff comes through there every day from all over the world, and they physically inspect-are you ready for this?- none of it.”
“From what little I know about it, I’d tend to agree with you,” I said, thinking back to my last conversation with Creeps. “I think the federal crowd here has to rule Helios out before the main focus returns across the river.”
He took a deep breath and then let it out. “Maybe,” he said. “But then I can’t figure out why Quartermain has brought someone like you into it.”
“Someone like me?”
“Oh, c’mon, you have zero expertise in the field of nuclear energy or industrial security.”
“Let me ask you something-do you get advance warning when there’s going to be one of those force-on-force intrusion drills?”
He looked sideways at me again. “Yeah, we do. Otherwise, someone might get shot.”
“What’s your record, then?” I asked. “The bad guys ever get through?”
“That’s nobody’s business but ours.”
I smiled. “Let me put it another way,” I said. “Your force-on-force drills ever assume the other side has inside help?”
He thought about that before answering me. “Possibly.”
“So how do you do that-someone role-plays, right? Someone’s designated to unlock a door or look the other way, and then you guys have to run that scenario to ground.”
“What’s your point?”
“Hypothetically, you use one of the Helios nukes to do that, or does one of your own security force people act the part of a bad nuke?”
“One of ours,” he said. “Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically, right. But suppose there’s a real one in there somewhere, some engineer who might actually let a bad guy in if the bribe money was good enough, or the blackmail dangerous enough-you drill for that, do you?”
“That’s Quartermain’s-” he began, then stopped.
“Unh-hunh,” I said. “That’s Quartermain’s bailiwick. Look, my people and I are not going to fuck around, cutting fences or trying to plant a fake bomb in the reactor building. What we work on out there in the world is mainly people-hunting. I’ve brought a surveillance expert and a computer hacker with me. We’re going to look hard at Quartermain’s program, not yours. And for the record, I’d just as soon do that without having to deal with guys in SWAT gear jumping out of the bushes all the time. That shit irritates my dogs.”
He stared out over the canal for a half minute. “Maybe we can work something out,” he said finally.
“Were those your people we ran off in Southport? The two guys pretending to be PrimEnergy utility workers while they pointed an acoustic cone at our windows?”
He frowned and shook his head. “Negative,” he said. “We don’t work off-site.”
I gave him a spare-me look.
“The Hilton?” he said. “That was unofficial. How’d you run ’em off?”
I told him, and he grinned.
“How’d you get your nickname?” I asked.
“My degree was in biology,” he said. “Herpetology, to be exact. I find snakes to be more predictable animals than most humans.”
Then his phone began to chirp. He stepped away from me, listened, swore, and snapped it shut.
“What now?” I asked.
“There’s been another one,” he said. “They got a radiation hit on a container.” He pointed with his chin at the forest of lighted gantry cranes upriver. “Over there, in the port.” He gave me a triumphant look. “See?” he said. “Told you that shit didn’t come from here.”
Then my phone rang.
“That’ll be Quartermain,” Trask said.
It was.
Tony, Pardee, and I met him at the Hilton, since none of us really knew our way around Wilmington yet. He was in the lounge having some coffee. He signaled the waitress to bring us some when he saw us.
“So,” I said, sitting down. “You and Helios off the hook?”
“Temporarily,” he said. “They got a radiation hit down in the container port. They have monitors all over the place, and each truck leaving the docks goes through two radiation scanners, one they know about, one they don’t.”
“What constitutes a hit?”
“They’re looking for gamma, primarily,” he said. “Gamma radiation indicates enriched uranium or plutonium, the bomb stuff. But any radionuclide will do it, and if a detector goes off, they lock down the entire port.”
“Bet that’s popular.”
“Oh, yeah. A colossal backup of cargo, containers hanging in midair. Ships that were supposed to sail at midnight missing their departure windows. Instant financial impact. Big deal.”
“Tough shit,” I said. “There is a war on, or so I hear.”
“Yeah, but that’s why they called us, among others. They wanted an instrument decon team from the Helios nuclear safety office. They’ve got radiation on or in a container but can’t find a source object.”
“How do we fit in?”
“I want you to see how an actual radiation incident is handled.”
He reached down and brought up a briefcase, opened it, and gave each of us a radiation dose monitor called a thermo-luminescent dosimeter, or TLD. It looked like a Dick Tracy wrist radio. I’d seen everyone in the plant wearing one, or more, and we’d been given temporary TLDs for our tour.
“These are your permanent TLDs,” he said. “They’ve been logged out to you by name and badge number, and you’ll turn them in weekly for readings. It’s your responsibility to look at them daily to make sure you have not received a dose you didn’t know about.”
“Good deal,” Tony muttered, examining the TLD suspiciously. It was bigger than the ones we’d worn for the tour. “I can remember when ‘receiving a dose’ meant something altogether different.”
“Same basic equipment tends to fall off your body,” Quartermain said without even a hint of a smile. “My team is already down there. Let’s boogie.”
We followed him in his official PrimEnergy car up to Third Street and then east through Wilmington to the container port. We went through some surprisingly elaborate security at the main gate, where we were given yet more, if temporary, ID badges, vehicle passes, and plastic hard hats. All this happened after they’d searched both vehicles, inside, out, and under. None of the people doing the searching seemed to care about the shepherds. There was already a double line of semis, each with a seagoing container strapped to its back, parked along both sides of the exit lanes. Some of the drivers were out along the road, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the flap to subside.
A container port requires vast amounts of horizontal space; Ari told us that the one in Wilmington consists of four hundred acres, most of it paved. There were none of the conventional warehouses one would associate with a seaport. The beauty of containers is that they’re weatherproof, so they just stack the outgoing containers ten high all over the place until it’s time to go to sea. Most of the incoming containers get dropped directly onto flat-frame trailers and go down the highway within minutes, literally, of being offloaded.
Unless there’s a problem. A twinkling cluster of red and blue lights down on the pier indicated that there was indeed a problem.
The gate people had told us not to drive onto the handling piers near the gantry cranes, so we parked next to a ten-pack stack and walked in. As we approached on foot, we could see several emergency vehicles parked at odd angles out on the pier but not too many people; apparently the nature of the problem was no longer a secret, and savvy humans were keeping their distance. I could see two guys in white spacesuits working around a single truck-and-trailer rig in the glare of both portable floods and the overhanging spotlights of an enormous gantry crane overhead. There was a cluster of mostly Asian faces peering curiously down from the high bows of a sixty-thousand-ton container ship.