Astride a Pink Horse

by Robert Greer

  Looking at Mimms, Bernadette asked, “How long ago did the tongue-tied man call? I need you to be as precise as you can.”

  Mimms stared skyward, deep in thought. “I’d say it was about three hours ago, or pretty darn close.”

  Running a quick timetable in his head, Cozy said, “Assuming that Rikia was somewhere between Amarillo and Albuquerque or Lubbock and Albuquerque when he called, that would put him pretty close to Albuquerque by now. That’s if he’s not still fooling around trying to paint that truck.”

  Surprising everyone, Howard Colbain looked up and said, “He’s long past Albuquerque by now. He was an hour east of the U.S. 285 bypass around the city when he called. As for painting a truck, you can spray paint one the size he’s driving with a couple of dozen cans of paint from a hardware store in less than forty-five minutes.”

  Amazed at the sudden outpouring from Colbain, Bernadette looked at her watch. “So if he’s traveling at sixty or so, and he did actually paint the truck in that short a time, where would that put him now, Mr. Colbain?”

  “North of the 285 bypass for sure,” said Colbain. “There’s no way you’ll ever catch up with him now.”

  “Oh, there’s a way,” Bernadette said. “How long did it take us to get from the airport to here?” she asked Cozy.

  “Ten minutes, and that’s with you complaining about my speed, remember?”

  “Think you can cut that to five?”

  “I can try,” Cozy said as a swirl of wind and sand blasted everyone.

  Spitting out sand and wiping it from her eyes, Bernadette squatted and duck-walked her way around Colbain, then Mimms, making certain they were still securely tied to the fence braces. Looking at Colbain, she said, “On our way to the airport, I’ll call and have someone with a badge come out here and pick the two of you up. I’m sure they’ll be real interested in your ties to Rikia Takata. In the meantime, you can both sit here and enjoy the sun, the sand, and the surf.” Eyeing Colbain pensively, she asked, “Why’d you decide to finally give Takata up?”

  Colbain hesitated briefly before answering. “Simple,” he said, spitting out granules of sand mixed with blood and mucus as he talked. “If you’re right about Rikia wanting to set off some kind of nuclear bomb up there in Los Alamos, and believe me, I don’t know a damn thing about that, I’d end up having myself a real health and safety problem down here in Albuquerque. As you can see, the wind blows pretty hard and steady off the mountains around here, and if he did set off a bomb, I’d end up sucking down nuclear fallout 24-7.”

  Shaking her head and thinking that most of the time self-preservation tends to win out over revenge, Bernadette looked at Cozy and said, “I’m thinking it’s time we see if we can’t cut that ten minutes of driving time in half.”

  Just south of the town of White Lakes, New Mexico, and some sixteen miles north of where he’d turned off I-40 onto the U.S. 285 Albuquerque bypass, Rikia Takata pulled off the highway and drove into a clump of box-elder trees in order to take a final look at several maps of Los Alamos. He’d never been to the place where men had assembled the first atomic bomb, making it a point to never show his face in the remote mountaintop town during the planning phases of his mission. That way there could be no finger-pointing and no premission recognition of him as the triggerman, the Shigeo Fukumoto of his day.

  He’d planned from the start to wait until just after the workday wound fully down in order to detonate his bomb during the quiet time when people in the town of twelve thousand would feel safe and secure in their homes.

  It had taken him more than three years to move his plan to its current point. There’d been months of false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends. Endless hours of strategizing, digesting information, and reading. He’d talked with con men, doctors, scientists, other mathematicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs, and not only had he determined how to gather the necessary components to construct a crude nuclear weapon, he’d also found someone to unwittingly load those components into the cargo bay of a U-Haul truck and transport them two-thirds of the way across a continent.

  The most difficult part of his plan had been obtaining cobalt-60, the artificially produced radioactive isotope of cobalt that would serve as the lethal energy and ionizing, radiation-producing source material for his bomb.

  He’d initially tried to secure the cobalt-60 from a food processing plant in Michigan, one of several around the United States that used radiation to kill harmful bacteria and other organisms in meat, poultry, and fish and to extend the shelf life of vegetables. The cobalt used in those plants, in rods no bigger than an inch in diameter and a foot long, known in the industry simply as “pencils,” would certainly have served his purpose, but he’d had to scrap that plan when his industry contact, a Michigan State University food sciences professor, had started asking too many questions about why, as a mathematician, he’d suddenly become so interested in food preservation technology. The subsequent cooling-off period had cost him a year.

  There’d been another four months of downtime after that year, time he’d spent looking at other possible nuclear sources. He’d been close to giving up when he’d stumbled across an article in a New Delhi newspaper reporting that five people in India had recently been injured by radiation that had been traced to a scrap-metals yard in West Delhi. Two of the injured persons had had their hands turn black; lost patches of hair; and developed ulcerative, saucer-sized red blotches on their arms and legs after supposedly coming in contact with the radioactive material.

  The Indian government ultimately traced the source of that radiation to a megavoltage radiation therapy machine that had been discarded by an Indian hospital with the cobalt-60 source still inside the machine’s cancer treatment head. It was then that he knew he’d found a new cobalt-60 source.

  It took him another nine months to insinuate himself into the cancer treatment and therapeutic radiation resources and recovery community. Using his university credentials and reputation as a mathematician, after months of painstaking research he was able to determine exactly how the U.S. government’s inefficient and highly bureaucratic salvage and scrapping protocol for old, out-of-service, hospital-based cobalt-60 units worked. It took a while to determine precisely how the government’s salvage process was flawed, but ultimately he solved the puzzle, concluding that the biggest flaw in the protocol was linked to the fact that U.S.-based cobalt-60 machines, which were to be scrapped or shipped to the developing world, 90 percent of the time were shipped to a single Canadian company for either salvage and/or refurbishment. It was there that the machines underwent a final inspection before being deactivated, scrapped, or recirculated to the underserved world, and there that the cobalt-60 source material was ultimately cataloged and either recovered, reclaimed, or disposed of.

  Grueling hours of legwork and a random phone call had ultimately put him in touch not with some high-ranking government official in charge of overseeing such a critical nuclear risk but instead with a man who was in charge of the North American Cobalt Recovery, Radiation Mitigation, and Storage Program. A program administered by a Canadian company, Applied Nuclear Theratronics of Canada Ltd., and run by a man named Thurmond Giles.

  He’d first called Giles nine months earlier with the pretense of asking the man he’d learned had once been an air force sergeant and a nuclear-missile maintenance expert if he had any suggestions about how a nuclear resource recovery company that he was interested in starting and locating on the desolate plains of Wyoming might get running and certified.

  The journey from that first phone call to Giles to where Rikia now sat had been one of highs and lows. A bumpy, tumultuous road that he had never strayed from in spite of Giles’s constant threat to tell the world about Rikia’s plan if the money he was receiving didn’t keep flowing in. He’d spent most of the $1.2 million of his MacArthur Genius Grant money on Giles, but now that he was within hours of his goal, the difficulties of the past seemed minuscule.

  The twenty 35-mm-film-
case-sized, lead-shielded containers, or “capsules,” as was their preferred scientific name, with their five thousand curies of cobalt-60 that he’d earlier spent a half hour removing from the treatment heads of the twenty teletherapy machines Silas Breen had been hauling, were now safely stored in two pickup-bed tool caddies in the cargo bay of Breen’s truck. It had seemed preposterous to him that all he’d needed to access the cobalt-60 in those treatment heads had been a screwdriver, a three-quarter-inch wrench, and a pair of pliers. Giles, who’d greased the skids for him by doing most of the disassembly months earlier, had made but one error during the entire project. He’d insisted that the final two-hundred-thousand-dollar cash payment for his services take place in a face-to-face meeting with Rikia in Wyoming. That demand had cost him his life.

  The three boxes and sixty pounds of TNT that Rikia had picked up when he’d bought the Volkswagen that would whisk him out of harm’s way represented more than enough explosives to turn the cobalt-60, the truck, and its contents into a dirty nuclear bomb. A bomb that would by his calculations ultimately contaminate a geographic area the size of Texas and, more importantly, make Los Alamos, birthplace of the world’s first atomic weapon, and much of New Mexico, the state that had been the bomb’s womb, quickly uninhabitable. Los Alamos’s twelve thousand inhabitants would be exposed to radiation amounts that would give them a 50 percent chance of dying from fallout within three to four months and a 30 percent chance of dying from a radiation-associated cancer over the next forty years. Los Alamos would become America’s Hiroshima.

  The rest of New Mexico, although affected, would be less contaminated, but it would be years before most of the state would once again be habitable. The psychological impact and the economic and personal damage, although significant, couldn’t begin to equate to the damage unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only because he couldn’t produce a fissionable bomb with power equivalent to the world’s first two nuclear devices used as weapons, Fat Man and Little Boy. And the psychological damage and suffering he’d inflict wouldn’t equal the suffering of his grandfather, who’d died twenty years after Hiroshima from bladder cancer, or his grandmother, who’d died ten years before her husband from thyroid cancer. Nor could it equal the suffering of his own mother, who’d endured years of depression after losing both of her parents to Fat Man–induced cancer. Filled with enough oxycodone to kill three people, she’d died in the decadent San Francisco belly of the American beast while at the wheel of a speeding BMW, with his father as her passenger.

  More hurtful than all those things, however, was the fact that his father, a man whom he’d always considered weak and capitulating, had brought him to the shores of the very nation that had delivered the Takata family and Japan such destruction, defeat, and humiliation. Rikia had always been secretly delighted that the car crash that had killed his mother had removed his spineless, dishonorable father from the world as well.

  He’d once asked Kimiko why she hadn’t felt equally dishonored, soiled, and insulted when the U.S. government in 1988 began doling out twenty-thousand-dollar reparation checks to internment camp survivors. When she’d told him that the money was the ultimate act of appeasement on the part of the U.S. government and thus worth accepting, he’d decided sadly that Kimiko had far too much of his father in her.

  In the end, however, it wasn’t Kimiko or his father but the pompous, omniscient, overbearing, insatiably power-hungry monster known as America that had forced him to act. America, a place where he’d been shunned, passed over, and made fun of for most of his life. America, a place so perfectly suited for his very special kind of retribution.

  He’d calculated the odds of his mission succeeding and determined that he had at least a 95 percent chance of success, and now, with Silas Breen out of the way, those odds had risen. The years he’d spent working out equations and devising algorithms that could be used to combat terrorism would assure him of success because he understood better than anyone that the biggest stumbling block didn’t rest with law enforcement, the military, or the intelligence community. After all, all three dysfunctional components of the American justice and security systems were still spinning their wheels, trying to determine why a former air force sergeant had been murdered at some abandoned missile-silo site instead of recognizing and pursuing the real threat. No, the biggest stumbling block to success, he’d long understood, was bringing in someone else to help with his mission. He’d unfortunately been forced to do just that in order to get his mission off the ground, and he could only hope that it wouldn’t come back to haunt him. It appeared that he’d sidestepped that problem when Breen had been killed, but he realized now that he never should have called Howard Colbain to ask for help with painting Silas Breen’s truck, never should have given Colbain the chance to say no to him. But he had, and what was done was done. All he could do now was play out his hand and hope that Colbain, a man he’d been able to manipulate easily, would keep his mouth shut—or, even better, suffer the consequences of radiation fallout and die a slow, painful death.

  He felt a special sense of accomplishment as he glanced across the truck’s front seat at the cell phone that he would use to detonate his bomb. A simple call to the cell phone would send an electrical current from the phone’s battery through a thin wire filament, not much different from the filament in a lightbulb, ignite a combustible liquid in a syringe nestled inside his sixty pounds of TNT, set off the TNT, destroy the truck, and send a shower of radioactive cobalt-60, truck parts, and metal spiraling into the air to leave behind a long-lived blanket of contamination.

  Thinking that he was not the madman he’d be labeled if caught but merely a thoughtful man who dealt with things in terms of mathematical equivalencies, he found himself wondering why anyone would question what he was doing. He was, after all, only doing what any person of honor, under similar circumstances, would be expected to do.

  Suddenly he found himself laughing at the fact that most of his inside-the-box, narrow-thinking mathematician and physicist colleagues had always argued that a so-called world-ending doomsday bomb would necessarily be fraught with failure because of the huge amounts of cobalt-60 that would be needed to make a bomb capable of destroying the world. All his colleagues were impractical fools, as far as he was concerned. Fools who hinged their argument on the premise that the earth’s massive surface alone would prevent anyone from making such a doomsday weapon.

  The problem with their assumption, he told himself, as he set aside the maps he’d been studying and restarted the truck, was that, like the worldwide antiterrorism community itself, the community’s arrogant intellectual leaders too often thought only in global terms, never in terms of simple formulaic mathematical equivalence, which states that the union of all the blocks in a set must always equal the original set. He had no global desires, no goal of contaminating the world, and he certainly wasn’t out to trigger doomsday. His desire had always been to simply mete out justice. To carve a hole in the American heart and psyche equal to the one that had been carved out of Japan’s in 1945. To, in effect, establish a simple mathematical equivalence.

  As he retook the highway and the truck gained speed, Rikia found himself smiling at the fact that Silas Breen had never had the slightest inkling of why he had chosen to call himself F. Mantew. But then again, there was no need to laugh at such a simple man’s ignorance. How could Breen have possibly known that F. Mantew was a bastardization of “Fat Man,” the code name given to America’s second atomic bomb used as a weapon, detonated over Nagasaki. And there was no way on earth that Breen could have figured out that the pseudonym Rikia had chosen for himself stood for a third bomb, Fat Man II—a bomb that this time around would be detonated on American soil.

  Sugar’s landing gear retracted with a thump loud enough to cause Cozy to turn to Bernadette and ask, “Something wrong with this chariot?”

  “It’s the crosswinds. We barely missed being grounded back there because of wind shear.” Bernadette glanced at the altim
eter. “We’re on top of the winds now but will be bucking sixty-knot headwinds all the way to Los Alamos.”

  “Think you’ll be able to fly low and slow enough to spot that truck?”

  “Slow enough for sure. Low enough, maybe not. It’s pretty tough to buzz a major U.S. highway in a private jet and have it go unnoticed. Fifty-fifty we’ll end up explaining ourselves to the cops, the FAA, the FBI, and homeland security, or if we’re lucky maybe even rate a couple of F-18 interceptors on our tail. But if we spot Rikia, who cares?” Bernadette glanced at an aerial map of the area on her computer screen. “We’ll probably only get one good chance to spot that truck before Rikia spots us. Once he starts up the hill to Los Alamos, the terrain gets pretty rugged. Mesas, canyons, and national forest everywhere. Tough to fly low and in and out of that kind of terrain. Now, if I had my A-10, I could give it a better run. A lot more power and maneuverability with that bird than with Sugar here.”

  “Suppose Rikia makes it all the way up the hill without us ever spotting him?”

  “Then we land at Los Alamos and look for him on the ground. By that time we’ll probably have enough FBI agents, cops, and media types glommed on to us to scare Sasquatch out of hiding. But I don’t think he’s that far ahead of us. We’re in a jet and he’s in a truck, remember?” Bernadette leveled Sugar off at 2,500 feet. Looking worried, she said, “We’re cruising low enough now that somebody’s bound to spot us soon.”

  “Let ’em. Just keep looking for a U-Haul truck with the number 18 painted on the top of the cargo box.”

  “Rikia or Breen could’ve painted over the number.”

  Shaking his head, Cozy said, “I don’t think they would have had the time. Besides, I’m betting Rikia doesn’t know there’s a spy in the sky tracking him.” Straining to see out his window, he asked, “See anything?”