Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (12 page)

“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.

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.

“That’s not much of a deterrent,” Tony observed.

“The bad guys wouldn’t know that until they got close to the truck, and I’d guess he has a panic button in there. This place is huge.”

We’d come to the very end of the container pier. The Cape Fear River was nearly a half mile wide at this point, and looked wider because of the total darkness on the other side. Channel buoys winked at us all the way down the river. We could hear that muscular current swirling through the dolphin pilings at the end of the pier. The water smelled of salt marsh and diesel oil; some seagulls overhead on night patrol screamed at us. The visible debris in the water was streaming by at a good five knots.

“Something’s not computing here,” I said. “I mean, look: If some bad guys are trying to smuggle in radioactive material, why in the hell would they, first, plant some in town, and then, second, splash it on the
outside
of a container here in the port?”

“How do we know it got downtown?” Pardee asked.

“We don’t,” I admitted. Pardee had a point. If Allie ingested the hot stuff, she could have done that anywhere. The fact that she was downtown when it got to her didn’t mean anything.

Pardee nodded.

Tony finally lit up his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling a cloud. “You’d think, if the jihadis were trying to get a dirty bomb or something in, they sure as hell wouldn’t want to alert that crew back there.”

“And not once, but
twice
? Radiation getting loose in the Wilmington area? Maybe from the Helios plant, maybe not. Now this. Maybe it’s some whack-job stealing shit from a hospital radiology lab, spreading it around town just for grins.”

“The fact that it was outside may be important,” Pardee said. A seagull appeared out of the darkness and landed boldly twenty feet away. Frick went for it, resulting in a lot of squawking and feathers. Frack, showing his age, just watched.

“Yeah, I agree. I wonder if it’s maybe a—”

At that moment, we saw a commotion up at the tractor-trailer. They had unloaded about half the boxes from inside the container. From our vantage point, it looked like they’d gone all the way to the front wall of the container, but then I realized there weren’t enough boxes out on the pier. They’d hit a fake wall.

The Helios team was backed out, and a bunch of border cops jumped into the container and went to work on the wall. We started walking back to get a closer look, but stayed close to the first row of stacked containers as we went up the pier. The cops appeared to be getting nowhere fast, so they filed out and let a couple of longshoremen climb into the container with axes in hand. I saw Ari walk over to the edge of the pier, obviously searching for a cell phone signal.

Then there was a shout from inside the container as the fake wall burst open and a dozen or so men bolted out, piled right over the startled longshoremen, and ran flat-out into the container stacking area, fanning out in all directions, before the cops could comprehend what was going on. Everyone at the scene was caught completely flat-footed. A couple of cops pulled their weapons, but then realized they couldn’t shoot the stowaways just for running. One security truck peeled out in pursuit and instantly collided with the corner of a container in a true Keystone Kops moment. Tony started laughing.

Then we heard a shout from our left. It sounded like it had come from down below the edge of the pier. We ran to
the edge in time to see Ari Quartermain floating past in the current about twenty feet off the pier, waving frantically. The lights from one of the gantry cranes shone down into the water, or we would never have been able to see him.