“All right,” I said. “I copy all that. Lemme talk to Quartermain tomorrow, see if we’re still in the picture. Although…”
“Although what?” Tony asked.
“You guys are probably right-we should back out of this hairball. On the other hand, working some bullshit for Quartermain likely gives us our best chance to find out what happened to Allie-and why.”
“Isn’t that what the Bureau’s gonna do?”
“They might, but if this is part of a larger national security picture, they just might bury the part that involved Allie.”
I looked over at the television, where the bartender was switching through the local Wilmington channels with the mute button on now. The same picture kept coming up-an overhead of the container port from a helicopter and the world’s supply of flashing blue and red lights dispersed along the pier, trying to surround the gazillion containers stacked out there. The runners were definitely not in evidence. I suggested it was time to call it a day.
The next morning, I left a message for Quartermain with the delectable Ms. Samantha Young. Then the three of us went down to the marina below Southport and picked out a boat. We settled on an Everglades 290, which was twenty-nine feet long, with a supposedly unsinkable fiberglass hull and twin 225-horsepower Honda engines. It was designed primarily for daytime sport fishing and was rated to carry up to fourteen people. It had an enclosed cockpit structure amidships, a GPS navigation system, two radios, a fathometer, and a Decca short-range radar set. I booked it for two weeks, with the understanding that it would be berthed each night back at the marina. I paid in advance for the first week’s rent, full-replacement insurance, and a damage deposit. Tony was a boat enthusiast; I had owned a lake boat at one time, but he would be the designated driver.
Quartermain called my cell as we were finishing up at the marina. He wanted me to come to the plant. I told the guys to find some charts of the area and to lay out a track to get up to the plant from Southport. Then I drove over to the power plant. I left Frack in the Suburban and took Frick in with me. I didn’t really need a dog with me, but I wanted everyone I encountered to know that when they saw me, they’d better look out for at least one German shepherd.
Samantha escorted us over to the main reactor complex this time, and then into the spent fuel storage building security office. There I was surprised to run into Colonel Trask, who said he’d take me to the upper-level control room himself. One of the security people checked me into the building, duly noting the presence of the dog in the facility log. A plant technician took me into an adjoining room, where I dressed out in a lightweight spacesuit and registered my current TLD reading. Then Trask and I proceeded into the moonpool access area.
The building was constructed of heavy, steel-reinforced concrete and presented three layers of security checks before we could access the moonpool itself. Because the spent fuel pool was mostly aboveground, we stepped out of an airlock chamber through a heavy steel door and faced a solid wall of heavily studded concrete. I noted surveillance cameras trained on us through each step of the security points. We had to climb eight sets of steel ladder-stairs to get to the top, passing a mezzanine level on the way. Trask didn’t say much beyond directions on when to step through doors. Interestingly, it took swiping both his badge and mine to get through the doors. Trask explained that this had to do with the two-man rule: No one was allowed to go anywhere in the vital area by himself. Just before going inside the main pool enclosure, he positioned both of us in front of a wall-mounted video camera and verbally identified us to the camera lens. After a moment, the door in front of us was remotely unlocked, and Trask pointed me through it.
Quartermain was waiting for me in what looked like a monitoring anteroom along with some technicians. His eyes looked a bit puffy, and he was moving awkwardly, although that may just have been because he, too, was already suited up in a white whole-body coverall. There were no windows in the building, and the air was humid and surprisingly warm.
The moonpool itself was still spooky-looking. The water was incredibly clear and suffused with that ethereal blue-green light down toward the bottom, caused apparently by the residual radiation. And whereas the reactors were caged in huge hemispherical reinforced concrete domes, the spent fuel storage pool was open to view from catwalks on all four sides. It looked like the water was actually moving a little bit. Quartermain said it was and again explained the mechanics of the pool, the water cooling and the emergency backup refill system.
“So why’d they build them aboveground?”
“Pre-9/11 reactor design considerations,” he answered. “Robotic machines defuel and refuel the reactors, since humans can’t go anywhere near that stuff. There’s a whole tunnel complex underneath this building. The robots pull the fuel elements down out of the core, turn them sideways, cart them through a tunnel to the moonpool, stand them back up again, and then set them up for long-term storage. Takes months to do it, and after a while the pools get full. Then any other elements have to go into cask storage. Basically, it’s easier to transfer the stuff from an aboveground pool to the dry casks.”
“Casks, as in big lead-lined tanks?”
“Yup. Exactly. Steel and lead. We have some here, but they’re empty. So far, anyway. But if they don’t open Yucca Mountain pretty soon, we’ll be using them.”
“Is spent fuel a valid terrorist target?” I asked.
“Yes, there’s some bad shit down there at the bottom. That’s one of the main reasons we have people like Trask and his ex-Rangers here. Now: about last night.”
“Other than your unplanned swim, you got what you wanted, right?”
“I think we did. My spill team still has to write up their report, and we’ll be doing some more analysis on the foam once we get it back here.”
“Anyone tying the material to the stowaways?”
“Internally, Homeland Security and the Bureau are treating it as an attempted RDD attack, although the official cover story is only talking about the runners.”
“RDD?” All the acronyms were beginning to overwhelm me.
“Radiological dispersion device-dirty bomb, in English.”
“Except there was no bomb, right?”
“We had hot stuff and illegal males hidden in the same box. All sorts of conjecture about that. For all we know, there’s a bomb still over there, in another container.”
“They catch any of the runners?”
“Two,” he said. “South American, not Middle East. The ICE guys are baffled.”
More acronyms. “ICE?”
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement. More feds. You need to brush up on your alphabets.”
“I’m trying not to. So now what?”
“They’ll determine the destination for that container, and then screen the entire system for any other containers going to the same destination. If they find one, that’s where they’d expect bomb components to be.”
I thought his reasoning was a little tenuous. “You didn’t exactly find a thermos of bad stuff in that container, Ari,” I said.
“Yet,” he shot back.
“Okay, so let the big dogs run with it. You no longer need me or my people, right?”
He didn’t answer right away. He glanced sideways at three fully masked technicians who were taking readings from some instruments suspended in the pool. We turned our backs to them and the glowing pool before he replied. Frick, who seemed nervous, stayed close by my side. I wondered if the dog could sense the presence of something dangerous down there in that shimmering water.