I left the dogs in the vehicle. Quartermain took us over to a command center van bearing the markings of the Customs and Border Protection Agency, where a small crowd of Border Patrol cops, Coast Guard officers, and port authority officials stood around watching the moonwalkers inside the perimeter do their thing with instruments and sample kits. I noticed that the van was positioned upwind and that the bystanders were keeping a respectful distance. I half-expected to see the gangly figure of Creeps in the crowd, but none of these people looked like Bureau types. Tony popped a cigarette out of a pack, but one of the port authority guys immediately shook his head at him. Quartermain explained that some radiation came in the form of tiny airborne particles, so a spill scene was no place to be taking deep drags of air.
“Spill scene?”
“Procedurally, we’re treating this as a radiation spill, even though we know that’s not what it is,” he explained. “That’s a spill team, and they’re trained to find and decontaminate radioactive materials that shouldn’t be there.”
The back doors of the container had been opened, and we could see a stack of cardboard boxes filling the opening, packed right up to the container’s ceiling. One spacesuit man was incongruously on his back on a mechanic’s creeper, taking readings underneath the rig, while the other was on his knees holding a floodlight for him. A worried-looking middle-aged man in a suit and white hard hat came over when he spotted Quartermain, who introduced him to us as Hank Carter, security director for the Wilmington Port Authority.
“This isn’t making any sense, Dr. Quartermain,” he said. “We’ve got alarms, your guys are getting a lot of noise on the detectors, but we can’t find a single frigging point source on that can.”
“You got gamma?” Quartermain asked.
“No, alpha. It’s not high intensity-the levels are too low. It’s also spread out, like somebody painted the container with something radioactive.”
“Like water, maybe?” I said in a quiet aside to Ari.
He nodded. “Tell them to look for any accumulations of water, and test those,” he said.
“Water?” Carter said. “This is a container port; there’s water everywhere.”
“Tell them to look along the edges of that container or on the bottom of the trailer itself, in the cracks. All the places where water might linger after coming down off a ship. And check the truck.”
Carter gave Ari a sharp look, as if wondering whether the Helios security director knew something he didn’t and, if so, how. Then he went over to the command van and climbed in. Moments later we saw one of the spacesuited guys stop, listen to his radio, and give a thumbs-up sign that he understood. There was a rough-looking white man dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt sitting inside the van looking very uncomfortable, and I guessed that he must be the truck driver. I sent Tony and Pardee to go for an inconspicuous stroll around the temporary perimeter, just looking. I told them to fan out and see who or what might be watching the circus with more than casual interest.
A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the command van, and Carter beckoned Ari over. I went with him.
“You were right,” Carter said. “It’s water. Or some kind of radioactive fluids pooled on the trailer frame, underneath. Not the container. Which brings up my next question.”
“Just an educated guess,” Ari said. “Based on the recent incident downtown. We’re assuming that was water, too, because the victim drank it.”
“Damn. Can your people help us decontaminate?”
“Yep. I’ll send for a foam generator. They’ll spray the entire underside of the trailer and then wait for the foam to harden. Then it can be broken off as a solid, bagged, and taken back to our low-level waste holding area.”
Carter looked vastly relieved. “Should we sweep the entire pier?” he asked.
“Have you searched inside the container itself?”
Carter shook his head. “That was next,” he said.
“Okay, do that and let my guys sweep whatever comes out,” Ari said. “Then I’d sweep the ship that container came off of, and I’d suggest you talk to and sweep all those guys watching us right now up there, if that’s the ship.” He pointed at the row of oriental faces sixty feet above us. To a man, they all vanished.
“No problem,” Carter said, opening his flip-radio and barking out some orders. Moments later, the huge gantry crane rumbled into life and rolled down the pier to where the ship’s gangway was positioned. A crew of hard hats emerged out of the darkness and attached cables to the gangway, and then the crane just lifted it off the ship. Whoever was onboard was going to stay there or go for a night swim in the Cape Fear River.
One of the customs agents in the van stuck his head out and told Carter that the FBI was at the main gate and inbound.
I looked sideways at Ari, and he understood. He said that he would stay there to coordinate the decontamination team’s efforts, and that we outlanders should make our creep. I saw Tony and Pardee standing under a light tower a hundred yards or so down the pier. I went back to the car and let the shepherds out, and then we walked down to join them, giving the spill scene a wide berth.
“What’d they find?” Tony asked.
“It sounds like it’s the truck and trailer, not the container, but of course it could have dripped down from the container. It’s a mystery right now. You guys see anything of interest?”
“Lots of ladders,” Pardee said. He pointed to the edge of the concrete handling pier, which itself was a hundred yards wide and constructed as a bulkhead pier along the riverbank. I could just see the round tops of ladder railings leading down over the edge of the pier.
“They’re every hundred feet or so,” Tony said.
“Meaning, if this hot stuff didn’t come from overseas, it could have come by boat? From the river?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted a boat for?” Pardee asked.
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” I said. Up near all the strobe lights, we could see a trio of Bureau cars pulling in to join the evolving radiation incident. “Let’s move right along, shall we?”
We strolled casually down the entire length of the container pier, which was easily a mile long. I let the shepherds range out to the edges of the lighted area. The dark river and the even darker wetlands stretched off to our right. I thought I could make out the lights of Helios downriver. To our left were the container stacks, whose rows seemed to go on forever into the terminal yards. There was one other ship tied up alongside the pier, and two gantries were busy snatching containers from the pier and lifting them up into the massive ship, which had developed a slight starboard list as the cans, as they were called, came aboard. The gantries with their projecting booms reminded me of medieval siege towers, only with lights.
We walked down to the very end of the pier area, checking for security cameras and fences where the industrial area ended. There appeared to be a railroad switchyard inboard of the container work and storage area. Large forklifts were hoisting containers onto flatbed railcars in the glare of sodium vapor lights. On the far, landward side of the yard we could see what looked like a container junkyard outside the security fence, filled with damaged or badly rusted steel boxes dropped haphazardly on a low hillside.
A white pickup truck with a police light bar mounted over the cab drove by, stopped, and backed up. We walked over. The security guard inside, who had to be at least sixty years old, wanted to know who we were and what were we doing down there. I told him we were with Dr. Quartermain, and we all flashed our temporary gate IDs. He gave the shepherds a wary look, rolled the window up, and then made a call on his radio. We couldn’t hear the response, but apparently it satisfied him that we were not saboteurs. He nodded and drove off.