by Robert Greer
“Blue sky,” Bernadette said, wondering how something that had started out as a simple break-in at an abandoned missile-silo site had reached its current level.
Noticing the thoughtful, almost brooding look on her face, Cozy said, “You’re looking awfully serious there, Major.”
“Nuclear gadgets tend to do that to me,” she said with a wink.
“Then I say we go down for a closer look.”
“Closer it is,” she said, nosing the Gulfstream lower. “At least as close as we dare.”
The dispatch call to the Pojoaque Indian Reservation cop, telling him that several locals were claiming to have spotted a jet buzzing Highway 285 just before State Road 502 turned west and headed up the hill to Los Alamos, normally wouldn’t have gotten much attention. But the fact that the jet had reportedly flown up and down a twelve-mile stretch of 285 between Santa Fe and Pojoaque, cruising along at no more than a couple of thousand feet, not once or twice but three times, as if the pilot were searching for something on the highway, had gotten the res cop’s attention.
When the res cop mentioned the dispatch call to a New Mexico state trooper friend he was having a cup of coffee with at a Pojoaque diner, the trooper’s eyes lit up.
“Damn, Redbird, the feds are looking for a truck that’s reportedly headed north up 285 from Albuquerque,” the wide-eyed trooper said, setting his coffee cup aside. “We’ve had two FBI bulletins on it this afternoon. Could be that plane your folks spotted was looking for the same truck. Word on the street is that the truck’s hauling either stolen Indian artifacts or drugs. Maybe your plane was a government jet? FBI, even?”
“Nobody mentioned seeing any government markings.”
“Strange,” said the trooper. “I’ll call your info in to the number listed on those FBI bulletins when we’re done. It’s an Albuquerque exchange. That’s strange, too, since there’s a bureau office right up the road in Santa Fe.”
“Think it’s real urgent?” the res cop asked.
“Everything’s supposedly urgent that comes in with ‘FBI’ stamped on it.” The trooper took a sip of coffee and waved for their waitress. “But right now what’s urgent is me getting myself a slice of cherry cobbler.”
After two unproductive midmorning conversations with Otis Breen about his missing son, Thaddeus Richter sat down at his desk just before noon to stare blankly out his office window and contemplate the suddenly overcast Denver skies. When his administrative assistant buzzed him at twelve thirty to let him know that he had someone from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the phone, he shrugged and took the call. A couple of minutes later he knew what Silas Breen had been hauling, although it hadn’t been easy for him to get a straight story out of the bureaucrat. In fact, it had taken something akin to diplomatic maneuvering on his part to get the man to admit to knowing anything about Silas Breen’s connection to Applied Nuclear Theratronics of Canada Ltd., or to that company’s former employee Thurmond Giles. It turned out the connection had come to light and been passed on to an Oklahoma Nuclear Regulatory Commission office after an inquisitive Oklahoma Port of Entry officer on I-44 had reported that a truck that had begun a trip in Ottawa was running on illegally recapped tires and that the driver, Silas Breen, had been cited and fined three hundred dollars. The suspicious port of entry officer had called Ottawa to find out exactly what Breen was hauling, then called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after learning that Breen’s load included twenty out-of-service radiation-therapy-unit cobalt-60 heads. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission bureaucrat had ultimately called Richter in response to seeing the same FBI bulletins that the New Mexico state trooper at Pojoaque had seen.
Just before two p.m. an FBI agent in Albuquerque called Richter to tell him that an Albuquerque police officer, in response to an anonymous tip, had found a man named Howard Colbain and an associate, Jerico Mimms, wired to a couple of fence braces on the Colbain property and that Mimms claimed that the incident was linked to a mysterious U-Haul truck. A truck that the Albuquerque PD had received an FBI bulletin about, with Richter listed as the agency contact person.
Fifty minutes later Richter was on a plane bound for New Mexico. By five p.m. he was in Albuquerque interrogating Colbain and Mimms.
As the three men sat in a dimly lit police substation room that reeked of Lysol and recently painted drywall, Richter, looking far less haggard than either Mimms or Colbain, slipped his reading glasses up on his nose, stared across the table directly at Colbain, and said, “We can string this out as long as you’d like, Colbain. Your claim that Major Cameron and Mr. Coseia assaulted you is only part of a bigger story. I want to know about Silas Breen.”
Looking weary, Colbain said, “I’ve told you, just like I’ve told half-a-dozen other cops around here, I don’t know anything about any Silas Breen.”
“What about you, Mimms?”
Mimms shrugged. “Nope, don’t know him.”
“And you’re positive you didn’t know what Breen was hauling?” Richter asked Colbain.
“I don’t know him. I don’t know what the hell he was hauling, where he was headed, or for that matter the exact distance from here to the moon, okay?”
“Suppose I told you he was hauling hospital equipment.”
“No news there,” Colbain said. “Before you waltzed in, another cop told me the same damn thing.”
“And if I told you Breen was hauling a bunch of treatment heads salvaged from old radiation therapy machines? Heads that may contain cobalt-60? Would that mean anything to you?”
“Afraid I don’t know what the hell cobalt-60 is.”
“It is a radioisotope of cobalt. A nuclear source material.”
“Then I’d say that maybe he was just hauling those treatment heads of yours from one useful place to another.”
Mimms nodded as if to say, Makes sense to me.
Shifting his focus, Richter said, “You knew Thurmond Giles, of course.”
“From a distance.”
“And your late wife knew him as well?”
Colbain forced out a reluctant “Yes.”
“Did you know that it was Giles who arranged for the shipment of those treatment heads?”
“Of course not,” Colbain said, looking and sounding totally surprised.
“You sound a bit snookered, Mr. Colbain.”
“Are we close to being done here?” Colbain shot back.
“Nowhere near, I’m afraid.”
Colbain sighed and, looking like a man who couldn’t quite decide what direction to take next, stared past Richter. When Richter repeated, “Nowhere near,” Colbain rested his elbows on the tabletop, dropped his bloody chin and lacerated neck into his hands, and continued staring blankly at the wall.
In November 1942, the Manhattan Engineer District, the government agency responsible for the development of the world’s first nuclear weapon, authorized the Albuquerque Engineer District to conduct a site investigation into the possibility that a location near the Los Alamos Ranch School in Otowi, New Mexico, might satisfactorily serve as the site for the final development, processing, assembly, and testing of a nuclear weapon known then as the atomic bomb. The project was code-named “Project Y.”
The site had to meet several requirements, the foremost of which was the requisite isolation. In addition, the location had to encompass an area large enough to provide an adequate testing ground for the bomb, the climate had to be mild enough to allow for work on the project to take place during winter, access to roads and rail needed to be adequate, the population within a hundred-mile radius had to be sparse, utilities and housing had to already be present or easily developable, and the location had to be far enough from any American seacoast to eliminate the potential of an enemy attack.
In March 1943 the forty-seven-thousand-acre Otowi location, isolated on a New Mexico mesa on the eastern slope of the Jemez Mountains, was chosen as the site for Project Y. Sixteen miles away from the nearest town, the site ultimately became known as Los Ala
mos. Local residents simply called it “the Hill.”
Primary access to the Hill in 1943, just as now, was via what is now known as State Road 502, and the site, crisscrossed by mountain streams and canyons, including at least a dozen box canyons, with no access to the mesa on either side, had remained just as remote as it had been during World War II.
Cozy was busy studying a computer-generated topo map of Los Alamos and the surrounding Jemez Mountains when Sugar hit air choppy enough to send him a half foot out of his seat. Grabbing the seat cushion, he muttered, “Damn.”
Concentrating on State Road 502 below as it snaked its way up the hill from Pojoaque for Los Alamos and totally unperturbed by the unstable air, Bernadette maneuvered Sugar between two canyon walls and to within 1,500 feet of the highway below. “We’re gonna have fighter jets on our tail sooner or later,” she said.
Increasing the size of the image on the computer screen, Cozy said, “You pays your dime, you takes your chances.”
“Where’d that come from?”
“My grandmother. It was a favorite saying of hers whenever times got rough.”
“That’s one way of looking at things, but I’ve always preferred having the odds in my favor. That’s one reason I called my dad before we took off from Albuquerque. I just hope he still has enough contacts to keep me from being court-martialed and you from doing five to ten if this whole thing goes south.”
“Makes two of us.” Cozy’s stomach headed for his knees as Bernadette dropped the jet lower and followed a forest service road into a canyon.
As Bernadette dipped the plane’s left wing, Cozy said, “I’m still not sure why you think Rikia would head for one of these canyons and not straight for Los Alamos.”
“Just a hunch. A hunch of my dad’s, really. Something left over from his days in Vietnam.”
“Mind sharing it with me?” Cozy asked, adjusting his headset as they swooped down the canyon at almost 300 knots.
“One word—isolation. The same reason the government chose Los Alamos as its bomb-making site in the first place. It’s the kind of place the Vietcong would have chosen to assemble their troops before an assault during the early years of the Vietnam War, according to my dad. A place where from the air you literally can’t see the forest floor for the trees. And that’s something that pretty much makes recon impossible. The Vietcong would assemble in a place like that, map out their assault strategy, disperse, pull off a hit-and-run attack, and then go their separate ways. It worked quite well for them until a nosy U.S. jet jockey, disobeying orders and cruising along slow and low on a return from a bombing mission, figured out what they were doing.”
“Your dad?”
“No other than. And you know what it got him? A reprimand. But it also got the Vietcong a little present in the long run. A chemical weapon known as napalm,” Bernadette said, smiling.
“Looks to me like you’re determined to follow your dad’s lead.”
“Always have,” Bernadette said proudly.
Thinking, The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Cozy continued studying the topo map on the screen as they shot up out of the canyon. “Guess this is what happens when you pays your dime,” he said, his stomach doing somersaults as gravity slammed him into the seat back.
Rikia had initially planned to detonate his bomb in front of the Irradiation of Chips and Electronics ICE House Memorial in Los Alamos, the site where the nuclear components of the original prototype nuclear-charged Trinity device were assembled. Several months earlier he’d changed his mind, however, deciding that the contamination he was aiming for didn’t require detonation of his bomb in what now amounted to the town square.
As he sat sweating inside the cab of the U-Haul in a heavily forested canyon six miles outside Los Alamos, he thought through the final bits and pieces of his plan. He’d be miles away when he triggered his device—outfitted in protective radiation gear and headed for Colorado. He hadn’t had a chance to test-drive the Volkswagen he’d purchased, but he’d started it several times, so he knew that it ran. He expected that the car would easily and swiftly get him back home to Wyoming and out of harm’s way.
He felt a sense of relief as he got out of the cab to go check on his protective gear, the Volkswagen, and the cobalt-60 source material one final time. When he thought he heard a plane overhead, he glanced up toward a canopy of evergreen limbs and the unmistakable sound of jet engines. Obscured by the tree cover, the plane couldn’t be seen, but it was there, flying low enough above the treetops to cause him concern. There perhaps was some kind of last-minute obstacle to his plan. As suddenly as he’d heard the plane, however, it was gone.
He knew better than to chase on foot after what amounted to nothing more than a noise, and he wouldn’t chase after it in the Volkswagen or the truck. There was too much at stake for him to do so, too many unforeseen things that could happen if he did. There was nothing to suggest that the plane had been trying to spot him and nothing to indicate that the person flying it had seen Breen’s truck. Even so, he now had something to worry about besides simply setting off his device, donning his protective gear, and speeding down the hill.
He wasn’t concerned about being caught. The two cyanide capsules in his shirt pocket were there to guard against that. His worries now were simply two. First there was the off chance that his plan, which he’d spent years piecing together, wouldn’t work and that the bomb wouldn’t go off. Glancing skyward toward the muted light, he again listened for the sound of a plane. When he heard nothing, he smiled. There was, however, a nugget of insecurity behind the smile. Insecurity born of his second, more serious worry. He couldn’t be at all certain that he or his truck hadn’t been seen by the plane.
Cozy pressed both hands against his headset and nodded excitedly. “I’m telling you, I saw the 8 plastered on the roof of that truck as plain as day, Bernadette. I didn’t see a 1, but I sure as heck spotted an 8.”
Bernadette, who’d rolled the Gulfstream belly up and over a mesa before uprighting the plane and dropping down into a canyon next to the one in which Cozy claimed he’d seen Silas Breen’s truck, said nothing. Judging from his queasiness and the ringing in his ears that they were flying either sideways or upside down, Cozy grunted, “Are we upside down?”
“We were for a little bit,” Bernadette said, leveling Sugar off. “When you spotted that truck, I knew I needed to reduce our engine noise pronto or have whoever was down there on the ground spot us. No better way to make sure they didn’t than to hop over a mesa and duck down inside a canyon. That’s the problem with these Gulfstream 150s—they tend to let you know they’re coming and whine like little babies.”
With every organ below his diaphragm floating in a sea of jelly, Cozy asked, “What do you think Rikia, or Breen if he’s with him, will do now?”
Watching Cozy’s face turn parchment-paper pale, Bernadette said, “Take long, slow, deep breaths, and whatever you do, Cozy, don’t dare throw up. Good,” she said, watching Cozy comply. “Now, in answer to your question, I’m hoping that whoever’s down there in that truck stays put because in exactly eight minutes, I’m going to set Sugar down and we’re going to find either him or them.”
“How on earth will we know what canyon the truck’s in?”
“It’s a mile off 502 to the south and a half mile or so from the blind end of a canyon. And it’s sitting on a forest service road with a little pond to the west.”
“Are you certain?”
“Sure am. The air force used to pay me to be certain of things like that.” She nosed the Gulfstream due west. “What I need for you to do, starting right now, is to count every road that intersects 502 to the south as we make our descent. Every road, Cozy, until we land. It’s important.”
“Okay,” he said, loudly calling off, “One,” and looking for the next road. “By the way, does Los Alamos have a runway long enough to put this baby down?”
“Absolutely. And from quite a long way back. We built an atomic bomb
here, remember.”
Bernadette set the Gulfstream down in Los Alamos at four minutes after six p.m. on a 5,500-foot runway that had been built in 1947 by the Atomic Energy Commission. As they taxied toward the terminal, she said to Cozy, “Remember, that’s twelve right-hand access roads down the hill from the airport’s southern boundary fence.”
Cozy shook his head. “How on earth did you spot that fence from the air?”
“Practice,” Bernadette said, looking smug and staring out the cockpit window at a man approaching the plane. “Somebody’s here to ask about our unexpected arrival. Let me do the talking, okay?”
“Your deal, Major.” Cozy snapped off a crisp salute. “While you’re dealing with them, I’ll get Freddy’s toys from the back.”
“Make it quick,” Bernadette said, wondering what additional toys besides Freddy’s motorcycle Cozy could be referring to.
Cozy nodded as the plane rolled to a stop. He’d opened the forward entry door and let down the stairway when a man with a bulging belly in a gray suit rushed up the stairs. Stopping Cozy as he headed for the rear of the plane, the man said, “I need to speak to you about your unauthorized use of airspace and your unscheduled landing, sir.”
“Talk to the pilot,” Cozy said, brushing past the indignant-looking man, who then stepped to the open door of the cockpit, looked at Bernadette, and asked sternly, “This plane yours?”
“Nope,” Bernadette deadpanned, slipping her shoes on. “Mine’s an A-10.”
All Cozy could think about as Bernadette continued to be counseled by the man in the gray suit and as he stared at Freddy’s BMW HP2, which he’d struggled to get out of the Gulfstream and down onto the tarmac, was how many times he’d watched Freddy off-load the motorcycle so effortlessly. Suddenly he was thinking about fog. Fog rising from a river bottom that ran alongside a deserted eastern Colorado road. He stood, momentarily transfixed. When he glanced down at his left leg and then back up, Bernadette was racing toward him.
“Did you finesse him?” Cozy asked.
