Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (11 page)

“Shoot.”

“I’ve sent my people home, but right now I’d like to take a little outside tour with my vehicle. Drive around the plant perimeter. Outside the protected area, but inside the corporate zone. Get the lay of the public land.”

“A lot of it’s swamp,” he said. “About twelve hundred acres in all, including farmland and designated wetlands. Stay on the roads, and don’t mess with any protected area fences—they’re wired six ways from Sunday. If you do run into the security people, show those badges. The worst they can do is escort you back to the main gate. You work for me, not them.”

“Gosh, you think I’ll run into Trask?”

“Isn’t that why you want to go out there?” he asked with a grin.

By sundown I was parked along the banks of the inlet canal, a man-made baby river that branched off the much larger
Cape Fear River. It had been built to provide cooling water for the turbine steam condensers in the generator hall. I’d driven around the fields and ponds and swamps for about forty minutes before finding the spot I wanted. It was getting dark when Trask’s people finally showed themselves. I picked up a distant tail about halfway through my excursion. It looked like a Bronco or similarly boxy SUV, but they kept far enough back that I couldn’t tell how many people were in the vehicle. Ari had given me a road map of the so-called corporate area, and I’d meandered over most of it.

I was out of my vehicle, taking pictures of the power plant in the distance, when they finally made their move. The complex was now blurring into a twinkling cluster of sodium vapor lights silhouetting the big buildings in the center when the Bronco came in, skidding to a stop from an unnecessarily high-speed approach. Three doors popped open, and three security guys piled out, all decked out in partial SWAT costumes and brandishing stubby assault rifles of some kind. I waited for the
Freeze, motherfucker!
but instead two of them spread out into covering positions behind the headlights while the third approached me. His clear plastic faceplate revealed white bandages on his nose and forehead, and I recognized Billy the Kid. I didn’t see Trask, and I didn’t recognize the other two guys.

“Let’s see some identification,” he said, keeping his rifle at port arms and pretending we’d never met.

I wanted to point out that I was in the public domain area of the complex, but instead I just lifted the chain with my plant ID cards over my head and handed them over. He pocketed them with one hand while keeping his weapon ready.

“Those are not valid,” he announced. He hadn’t even so much as glanced at them.

“How would you know?” I asked. “Or can’t you read?”

“Because our office didn’t issue them,” he said with a hint of triumph in his voice. “You’ll have to come with us.”

“Where we going, Billy?” I asked, just so the other two guys would know I’d recognized him. “And by the way, isn’t this the public area?”

“You were seen conducting surveillance of the power plant,” he said, coming closer to get right in my face. “We have you on camera. Turn around.”

“No,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. I was about an inch taller than he was and a whole lot bigger. “I’m authorized to be here and, for that matter, inside the protected area if I want, by the director of
technical
security. Your boss’s boss, as I understand it. He told me you had no authority over me unless I showed up in an unauthorized place, such as within the vital area.”

Billy was visibly angry now, so I slowly positioned myself to deflect any sudden moves. I could see that his forearms were trembling, meaning that he wanted to club me with that weapon. The other two remained in position, but they didn’t seem to be getting excited just because Billy was.

“I said turn around;
do
it!” he yelled.

“Make me, Billy,” I replied, and then I whistled. The shepherds came out of their hides in the underbrush from behind the other two guards. Each one grabbed a mouthful of a guard’s wrist before the men were even aware the dogs were there. They both yelled in surprise, but they also both had the sense to make no sudden moves. Billy reacted by taking one step backward and swinging his weapon around, but then he, too, froze when he saw that he couldn’t shoot the dogs without hitting his two buddies. I itched to just clock him right there and then, but there really wasn’t any need.

“This is a great time to be very still,” I announced to the other two guys. “You twitch, those two will each amputate a hand. You guys understand me?”

Both of them nodded quickly, trying not to look down into those intent canine eyes. Their faces were red in the Bronco’s taillights. Even with semi-SWAT gear on, they had to be feeling close to fifty pounds per square inch of jaw pressure, and that was just the I-got-you squeeze.

At that moment, the fourth door on the Bronco opened. Colonel Trask stepped out into the headlights and walked over to where Billy and I were standing.

“Billy?” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

“You are so fucking fired,” Trask said. “Gimme that.”

Before Billy could respond, Trask took his weapon away from him, retrieved my IDs, and told him to get into the backseat of the Bronco. Then he looked at me and bobbed his head in the direction of the shepherds. I called them off and they trotted over to me, taking up positions on either side of me and locking on to Trask. He looked down, flashed an admiring grin, and then told the other guards to take the Bronco back to the plant and wait there for him. He handed over Billy’s weapon to one of them as they left.

Once the Bronco had driven away, Trask and I strolled over to the bank of the inlet canal and stared out over the swamps at the cluster of lights around the plant. The inlet canal was a good hundred yards across, and the water was deceptively still. On the other side of the plant, where the hot water came out of the main condensers, two huge nozzles from the plant blew steaming water five hundred feet down a concrete exit channel. There had to be a big current under the surface on the inlet side.

“It’s pretty out here,” he said, handing me back my IDs. “But don’t try this in the summertime.”

“Mosquitoes?”

He fished out some cigarettes, offered me one, which I declined, and lit up. “Yeah, buddy,” he said. “They arrive in formation, take your vehicle first, eat that, and then they come back for you.”

“This a truce?” I asked.

He gave me a sideways look that was half glare, half frustration. “I’ve got the NRC, the FBI, PrimEnergy’s head of security, federal, state, and county environmental engineers, local law, and now you wandering around in my perimeter. How would you feel?”

“I guess I’d have issues with all that,” I said.

He made a disgusted noise. “Issues?
Issues?
I hate that fucking word. You sound like some goddamned liberal.
Issues
, my ass. There is no way somebody took a cesium cocktail out
of this plant, I don’t care what anybody says. We would have had any number of gamma detectors screaming bloody murder before they ever got to the first fence. Not to mention the fact that the guy’s hand bones would be glowing through his skin by now. They’re looking in the wrong place.”

“Maybe it wasn’t cesium,” I said.

“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.”