Critical Mass (3 page)

He’d get a satellite lookdown of the area from the National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency. From Nabila’s brother, Rashid, who worked in their reconnaissance unit. If he was lucky, Rashid might actually find a picture of the truck. With the computers they had available, whether or not a truck had stopped in the street near where the children had been found could be determined in an hour or less. If they were lucky, they’d get the make, the year, conceivably the license plate and a visual of whoever had taken the kids out and laid them on the sidewalk.

Interesting to see if Nabila and Rashid were on speaking terms again. Rashid had been against the marriage, called it an abomination. He’d been right, but for the wrong reasons. He and Nabby were among a tiny handful of Muslims in the intelligence community, and they were there only because of political pull. At a time when you could not understand the enemy without at least understanding Arabic, American’s clandestine services had locked arms to keep Arabic speakers out. In Jim’s opinion, that made Nabby and Rashid crucial personnel—but they were nevertheless treated with suspicion, and their activities were carefully watched.

Silently, Nurse Martinez closed the curtain around Rodrigo’s bed. “I won’t be able to rouse him. It’s not a coma, but the sleep is profound.”

It would, Jim knew, turn into death, and he thought that could happen at any time. But the boy had done all that was needed of him. He had informed Jim that he had crossed the Rio Grande in a truck with a plutonium bomb for a companion. So the burning question now became, how could that happen? Who in the world could miss a thing like that? Even if the detectors failed, they searched all vehicles, especially trucks.

Then the nurse opened the curtain around the little girl’s bed, and Jim did not understand what he was seeing, not at first. Then he realized that she was under a tent of lead.

“She’s emitting,” the nurse said.

He contained his shock. There was only one way the girl could be that radioactive, and the knowledge of what that was drew a coldness into his
belly. She had been made to carry unshielded plutonium or plutonium dioxide on her person, in her rectum, her vagina, her stomach. Poor damn little thing! The stuff was so heavy, she couldn’t have carried much.

“These kids were the only victims found?”

“Yes.”

“No other cases of radiation sickness in the area? At all?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll need to know the exact spot on Main where they were found.”

“Of course.” She drew him a little map.

He left the hospital, trying not to run. The moment he got to his car, he threw open the trunk and unlocked the silver case that held his detection equipment. His standing orders required him to contact the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate in the event he became aware of the presence of a nuclear weapon inside the United States. He wasn’t actually sure of this, though. The situation was highly suspicious, to say the least, but he needed harder evidence if he was going to get a massive interdiction response.

Among his tools were brushes and a vacuum to gather dust, cameras, an ultrasensitive GPS device, a Geiger counter, and a device that could detect the kind of high-explosive materials likely to be used in nuclear detonators.

He put the Geiger counter on the front seat beside him, and headed for the address the nurse had given him.

A nuclear bomb could be loose in the United States. If it was, it would be on its way to its target right now and they would be wasting no time. Certainly anybody capable of injecting a plutonium nuke across the U.S. border understood U.S. detection systems well enough to know that it was going to be found, and soon.

So they would be moving as fast as possible. If he was lucky, there were maybe a few days until the thing was detonated. But for all he knew, it could be in the air right now, approaching Los Angeles or Denver or some other vast concentration of innocent Americans.

He left the parking lot, forcing himself to drive as carefully as possible, forcing himself to continue to think clearly and calmly.

The thing was out there. Oh yes. He just needed to lock down a little more evidence to make sure the whole system took notice, and this was treated like the emergency that it was.

RESSMAN AIR SERVICE

Todd Ressman was beginning to think his business might actually work. Last
year, he’d cleared a little money, and so far this year, every month had seen positive cash flow. It had been a long haul, very long, since he’d been laid off during the death of Eastern Airlines in 1991. But what’s nearly twenty years in a guy’s life?

He’d done charter work, off-the-books work, piloted for discounters, worked in Africa and Asia . . . and in the end gotten together enough cash for a down payment on his cargo-modified Piper Cheyenne. He’d put down sixty grand, all of his savings. He wasn’t going to move people, not after all his years in the damn airlines. Cargo didn’t complain, and had few other alternatives. If you were going to get something moved out of Colorado Springs fast, he was the go-to guy, and tonight he was taking a machine tool and a crate of frozen chickens to the Pahrump Valley Airport in Nevada. He was slotted for flight level 18, and at economical cruising speed he expected to land just after midnight.

The flight would cost him $3,118.23 and would generate revenue of $5,004.19. If he got something in Pahrump, the run would be even better. What he might get there he couldn’t imagine, however. The town’s chief industry was sod, followed by prostitution and gambling. And speaking of chicken, the Chicken Ranch airport was one of the drop-ins, for God’s sake,
but not for a cargo operator, obviously. Nevertheless, he’d learned in the years he’d been running his service that the worst thing you could do was anticipate. His business ran on the unexpected.

The tool he had, for example, looked like some kind of disassembled drill press. It was heavy, but not heavy enough to take up all of his poundage. The chickens in their sealed crate had been a late addition.

Who would spend all this money to move a drill press, or, more fantastically, chickens that couldn’t be worth but a few hundred dollars?

He knew the answer, which was always the same: folks had their reasons.

He’d take off in a few minutes, into what promised to be a gorgeous night. This was why he did it, why at fifty-eight years of age he was still going up every day of his life. He never got used to it, never tired of it. Back on Eastern, he’d flown sixes, then sevens, then twenty-sevens. He’d seen Eastern in its glory days and in its Lorenzo days. The death of that airline had not been pretty, nossir. Frank Lorenzo had destroyed it surgically, pulling off one valuable part after another, until there was nothing left but a lot of wretched old planes and men and women who would not quit until the thing was simply liquidated, which was what had happened.

Well, that was groundside stuff. Todd wasn’t really interested. What he wanted in his life was his two PT6A-28s roaring on the wings of his lovely, quick airframe, his glowing instruments before him and the stars in the sky.

He got aboard and checked his stow, making certain that all the tie-downs were secure. Thirty years in the air had taught him that the sky had a lot of ways to hurt you and the best method of dealing with that was to respect the fact that airplanes that usually wanted to fly sometimes decided not to do that anymore.

He could have been flying with another pilot, but why spend the money? Generally, he rented ground crew by the hour. He was based out of Colorado Springs but really would take anything anywhere in the United States, Canada, and, less willingly, Mexico. He spent two or three weeks flying, usually, then went back to C.S. and his house and Jennie, whom he had met on the old LaGuardia–Pittsburgh run pushing twenty-eight years ago.

He looked over his manifest. The drill press was from Goward Machines, destined for some outfit called Mottram Repair. They must need it bad, to move it like this. As for the chickens, they were going from Blaylock Packers to an individual, Thomas Gorling. Todd could figure out most of his cargoes, but this one had him stumped. He had it back against the bulkhead,
well secured. You always had to ask yourself, what happens if this airplane turns upside down? Given a small plane and a big, violent sky, that could happen. Had happened. In fact, in his years in the air just about every damn thing had happened. He’d experienced fires, crazy passengers, every known malfunction you could imagine. Usually, the Cheyenne was a pretty tolerable traveler, but she could get obstreperous when she was running heavy and there were crosswinds about.

He went into the Fixed Base Operation. A couple of other pilots were hanging around, guys waiting for their jetsetters to get poured out of their limos. He could have made steady money flying bigs, but he wanted to be his own man and no way could he afford a jet. It was a struggle to make the payments he did have. But it was his plane. His life. He went when he was ready to go. Or not.

Nobody said anything when he came in. Why should they? They knew what he was, a guy on the bottom rung, fingernails dug into his airplane, scratching through the sky on fumes and maxed-out credit cards.

He checked his flight plan, then went into the hangar. He was looking for something, he supposed. Not really thinking about it directly. Just looking.

There were a couple of mechanics there. “Hey,” he said. “I’m the guy moving the chickens.”

They were heads into a Citation that looked like it had a hydraulic leak in the left-wing leading-edge controls. That would’ve made for some complicated landings, for sure.

“Yeah,” one of them finally responded.

Todd didn’t want to crack the cargo, but the truth be told, it was bothering him. He’d four-one-oned Pahrump and hadn’t located anybody called Gorling. Of course, maybe he was staying at one of the whorehouses or a motel, who the hell knew?

But chickens? Come on, the guy was paying close to a thousand bucks, here.

“Who brought them in?”

“Christ. Lemme think. Coulda been—yeah, a fridge truck.”

“Mexican fellas?’

“White men, all.”

He went back inside, spoke to the FBO operator, a girl of about thirty, dark and tired looking, with a name tag that said: “Lucy.” “I need a phone number for this chicken guy,” he said. “Lemme see the manifest.”

No phone number for the receiving party. So what was supposed to happen? He just dumped the crate in Pahrump and good-bye, Charlie? He’d been paid; that wasn’t the problem. But he liked things to work right. There were no tracking numbers in this business, and there wasn’t one damn thing about Mr. Gorling on this manifest.

“The hell with it,” Todd said.

“Isn’t there a Chicken Ranch in Pahrump?” Lucy asked.

“Funny girl.”

“Chickens are a funny cargo for you guys. I could understand caviar or wine, but not chickens.”

“Unless it’s not chickens.”

There was a silence, then. The two pilots lounging in the ready room both perked up. Everybody knew the rules. You had to report suspicious cargo. But was it suspicious? Todd had five hundred dollars of his profit riding on the poultry, so he didn’t want a bunch of FBI crew cuts out here fisting the cavities. On the other hand, he was damned if he was going to move illegal drugs. Legal ones he carried all the time. One of his main money cargoes, matter of fact.

“So maybe I gotta crack the chickens, seeing as it’s not a good manifest.”

“You try Information?”

“I did indeed. No cigar.”

She hit an intercom button on her desk. “Marty, Julio? Captain Freighter needs to crack his chickens.”

He could hear her words echoing in the hangar, could hear, also, the snickers of the jet pilots.

He went back out on the apron, looked sadly at his beautifully loaded baby. She was all ready to go, looking like she was born for the sky.

The two mechanics came across from the hangar, moving slow. Who wanted to manhandle cargo? Not their jobs.

“Sorry about this, guys,” he said. “I got a sour manifest.”

Then Lucy came out. She had a weather fax in her hand. “I got a line moving in,” she said. He looked northward and saw it, the flickering of lightning just below the horizon. Ahead of it would be winds, strong ones. He knew his front-range flying. He had about twenty minutes to get in the air and get out of here, or he wasn’t going upstairs for hours.

“Well, fellas,” he said, “looks like you’re gonna get to earn your money another way.” He took the FBO’s copy of the manifest. “Oops,” he said,
jotting down a phone number beside Mr. Gorling’s name. “Bastard gave us a dud contact number. How were we to know?”

He got in his plane and pulled the door closed.

Ten minutes later he was rotating. Ahead, as he rose, he saw the squall line racing down the range, alive with lightning.

He banked west, and flew off into the stars.

A thousand feet below him a man watched Todd’s plane rising into the sky. The man had been trained, and carefully, to recognize the silhouette of the Cheyenne. He got into his car and drew his cell phone from his pocket.

For some moments, he studied his watch. Then he made a call. “Mother,” he said, in his soft, calm voice, the voice of the dutiful son, “I am nearly home.”

THE BRASADA

Jim had quickly found the spot where the kids had been dropped, but then he’d
lost the trail. They had been radioactive because they were near something radioactive, but it wasn’t leaking particles, and frankly, that made it look more and more like an X-ray isotope. It could have been that illegals had been concealed behind a shipment of perfectly legal isotopes and the children, with their small bodies, had been sickened by the radiation and tossed off the truck to die.

However, he had been to all local public transportation hubs, which consisted exclusively of bus stops. There was an airport but no regular flights. Conceivably, the bomb could have been shipped as air cargo, but he had found a faint radiation signature at the Kerrville Bus Company station on Jefferson, in the cargo-holding area. The bus company had no record of any isotopes or X-ray equipment being moved, so he had logged this as evidence to be followed up.