Astride a Pink Horse

by Robert Greer

  “Yeah. Enough that he’ll be spending the next hour and a half tangled up in paperwork. He impounded Sugar, though. So I gave him Freddy’s number.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Hey, she’s Freddy’s plane. So I figured he should handle it. Let’s get the heck out of here before Gray Suit starts asking questions about this motorcycle.”

  Cozy slipped the oil-stained strap of a soft-sided, tennis-racket-sized case he’d taken from the plane over his right shoulder as Bernadette eased onto the back of the motorcycle. “Awfully small for the two of us,” she said, wrapping her arms around Cozy.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers.” He reached back and double-checked the bike’s sissy bar.

  “What’s in the case?” Bernadette asked, shouting above the bike’s throaty roar as they took off.

  “Freddy’s pistol-grip shotgun,” Cozy yelled back. “What else?”

  Setting up the bomb’s trigger proved to be more time-consuming than Rikia had expected, and as he began checking the ten syringes that he’d pilfered from a university chemistry lab to make certain that they each contained exactly 20 cc of combustible liquid, the clock in his head started to tick louder. Moving from syringe to syringe, he found himself sweating. The muted daylight and forest canopy that had once been his protective shields and friends were rapidly becoming his enemies. Even with one of Silas’s highway safety lanterns in hand, the crates in the cargo bay seemed to suck up all the light. Thinking that perhaps he should’ve done at least one practice run, he quickly ticked off the reasons he hadn’t. Practice runs established a track record, leaving behind traceable shards of information, and he understood the significance of never leaving footprints in the sand.

  With New Mexico State Police Colonel Andy Gutierrez impatiently rocking from side to side next to him, Thaddeus Richter stood talking to the portly man who’d minutes earlier chastised and then lectured Bernadette about her unscheduled landing at Los Alamos. An hour earlier, Richter had finally put most of the pieces of the Thurmond Giles murder puzzle together, convincing himself that Silas Breen’s truck more than likely contained the makings of a dirty nuclear bomb intended to be set off at the birthplace of the first atomic weapon. Uncertain how he could possibly get from Albuquerque to Los Alamos fast enough to make what he’d figured out matter, Richter had about given up any hope of doing so. He’d reluctantly called the bureau office in Santa Fe to tell agents there to take over and race up the hill to Los Alamos. As he’d fueled his vehicle for what he expected to be a run to Los Alamos that would turn out to be too little, too late, word about a New Mexico state trooper’s investigation of the buzzing of Highway 285 at Pojoaque by a jet had crackled across his two-way.

  He’d rushed inside the bureau’s office complex, called that trooper, verified that the information he’d just heard was correct, and, after assuring the confused-sounding trooper that the plane doing the buzzing wasn’t an FBI aircraft, sprinted from the building prepared to run, lights flashing, to Los Alamos.

  As he’d slipped into his vehicle, an Albuquerque bureau agent had raced up to let him know that the aircraft that had been buzzing U.S. 285 at Pojoaque had just landed at Los Alamos and that a ranking New Mexico State Police officer was headed by chopper from Albuquerque to Los Alamos to check the situation out. Following an eight-minute race to the Albuquerque airport and lots of pleading on his part, Richter had hitched what turned out to be a thirty-three-minute helicopter ride to Los Alamos with Colonel Gutierrez.

  Now, as he wrapped up his conversation with the rattled-looking airport official, Richter looked up to realize that five New Mexico State Police cars, a half-dozen Los Alamos patrol cars, and two homeland security vehicles had joined them on the tarmac. Surveying the scene and turning to Colonel Gutierrez, Richter said, “As I mentioned on the way up, this whole Tango-11 incident isn’t about delivering drugs, stolen artifacts, or even moving secondhand radiation therapy equipment to Third World black markets, Colonel. Not by a long shot. Somebody’s planning to set off a nuclear device here. Trust me.”

  “You could be wrong, you know,” Gutierrez said skeptically.

  “I don’t think I am. Until yesterday, that pilot Mr. Fordyce here described so precisely was the U.S. Air Force officer in charge of investigating the break-in at Tango-11. Her name’s Major Bernadette Cameron, and the guy operating that motorcycle they blasted out of here on is a reporter named Elgin Coseia. They know what we know, Colonel, and likely a whole lot more. There’s a truck with cobalt-60 nuclear source material bumping around this mesa somewhere.” Turning to Fordyce, Richter asked, “Which way did you say that motorcycle headed?”

  “Beelined straight for the airport exit and made a left turn. Didn’t slow down for a second.”

  “Sounds to me like they knew where they were going,” said Gutierrez.

  “Yeah. Like maybe they’d spotted that U-Haul truck from the air,” said Richter.

  Looking frustrated, Gutierrez said, “I’ve got three state troopers who were already up here on the hill searching buildings inside the National Laboratory compound, and Los Alamos PD has every available officer on this. I’ll APB that motorcycle and call for backup, but it’s a winding thirty-minute drive up the hill from Pojoaque, and this can be one hell of a big mesa when you have to comb it foot by foot. Anywhere specific you think we should look?”

  Richter stared toward the airport exit. “Down the hill. I’m thinking we need to be on the ground right now. Not upstairs in a chopper.”

  “Your show. I’ll have a car here in less than a minute.”

  “Good,” said Richter, his eyes now locked on the airport exit as he considered not how to locate a U-Haul truck but rather how to spot a motorcycle.

  Everything was in place—secured, jelled, glued, and ready. Rikia Takata’s protective radiation gear sat on the front seat of the Volkswagen along with Silas Breen’s .32 and the all-important cell-phone bomb trigger. As a final precaution, he’d let the air out of the tires of the U-Haul to make certain that if things got dicey, the truck bomb casing, as it were, couldn’t easily be moved.

  With his hands wet with perspiration, he recalled something a high school Latin teacher had once crammed into his head: Thrice is better than twice. Heeding that teacher’s singsong advice, he decided to check the leads to the cobalt-60 capsules a final time.

  The twenty lead-encased capsules didn’t look very ominous. In fact, lined up as they were, ten each on the top of a couple of pickup-bed toolboxes in the U-Haul’s cargo bay, they reminded him of spice-rack bottles. Remnants of the gel that would become the current that would trigger his nuclear blast clung to his fingers. Tacky and slightly rubbery, the gel had a cleansing, post-thunderstorm, fractured-ozone smell. A smell that was overwhelmed by the putrid smell of Silas Breen’s already decaying body.

  As he surveyed the cargo bay and its contents one last time, he thought briefly about Hiroshima, his photographer grandfather, and the incinerated man on a pink horse. “Done,” he whispered as if speaking to someone. Glancing over his shoulder at the capsules for a final time, he stepped down from the cargo bay onto the truck’s bumper and jumped to the ground.

  Bernadette spotted the turnoff to the forest service road seconds before Cozy. “That’s it just ahead,” she yelled above the rumble of the motorcycle. “Twelfth road from the airport’s southern boundary fence.”

  “See it.” Cozy slowed down and turned onto a narrow, badly rutted dirt road. “It sure looked smoother from the air,” he said as the motorcycle bumped through ruts, and over tree stumps and rocks.

  “Everything does.”

  “Think he’s still here?”

  “Yep.”

  Cozy eased the motorcycle to a stop, slipped the shotgun, a lightweight pistol-grip double-barrel that Freddy had purchased in Colombia after once nearly being kidnapped there, out of its case, rotated the case aside, and handed the gun to Bernadette. “Think you can handle it?”

  “I’ve handled heavier.”


  “What about pulling the trigger if it comes to that?” Cozy asked, nosing the bike farther into the forest.

  “I’m a fighter pilot, Cozy. They train us to kill,” Bernadette said, tightening her now one-handed grip around Cozy’s waist.

  They’d bumped another quarter of a mile down the kidney-jarring road when Cozy saw a flash of something that looked silver or gray moving in the trees. It took him a second or two to realize that whatever it was was moving fast and headed their way.

  By the time Bernadette shouted, “Something’s headed for us!” Rikia Takata, tightly gripping the steering wheel of the Volkswagen he was driving with both hands as he sped away from the U-Haul truck, spotted them. Recognizing Bernadette, he muttered, “Shit,” and floored the accelerator.

  As car and motorcycle closed the gap between them in some bizarre, deep-pine-forest game of chicken, Cozy saw only fog. “Cozy!” Bernadette screamed as Cozy continued to accelerate. They were within sixty feet of each other when Cozy yelled, “Shoot, Bernadette! Shoot!”

  Taking aim at the VW’s windshield, Bernadette squeezed the shotgun’s trigger once. Seconds before the motorcycle’s front tire hit a rock, the bike fishtailed out of control and left the trail. The VW’s windshield shattered, and the bike danced along a line of boulders lining the muddy floor of a bar ditch. They were twenty yards past the Volkswagen before Cozy could get the bike back under control and stopped. Gunning the engine, he jumped the bike out of the ditch, spun it around in a glade of ferns, and with a blown shock and bent front tire rim headed back for the Volkswagen, which had broadsided the trunk of a fifty-foot-tall lodgepole pine.

  The force of the impact had snapped Rikia’s left ankle and slammed his head into the dashboard. Bleeding from his nose, he was slumped over the steering wheel. Dazed and with blood curling around one corner of his mouth, he raised his head and swiped at the blood with his right hand. He tried to concentrate, tried his best to refocus on his mission, but his mind was too cloudy, too inexplicably foggy. He tried to force the VW’s door open, but the frame was bent, and the door barely budged. Patting the car seat for his cell phone and then his shirt pocket for his cyanide capsules, he grabbed the phone and Silas Breen’s .32 in one hand. Powered by a rush of adrenaline, he shouldered the car door open, jumped out, and, with his broken ankle throbbing, hobbled toward a clump of piñons.

  Grimacing in pain, he aimed the .32 at two undulating, ghostly human shapes that were crouched low to the ground and seemed to be moving toward him. He squeezed off a right-handed shot, then used his left hand to punch in the first of six cell-phone numbers that would trigger his bomb. He’d punched in the second, third, and fourth numbers and, with a bloody index finger, was prepared to punch in a fifth when a shotgun blast slammed into his neck.

  Screaming, he dropped the cell phone and clutched his neck with both hands. Suddenly the front of his shirt was covered in blood, and he felt as if he were falling. As he struggled to breathe, he could hear the crunch of footfalls on the pine-needle-covered forest floor. The crunching sound moved closer and got louder until he passed out.

  Bernadette kicked the .32 out of Rikia’s hand to send it skittering across a bed of pine needles and soft dirt before kneeling over him to check for a carotid pulse. Looking up at Cozy, she said, “He’s alive. Better call 911.”

  Cozy slipped his cell phone out of his pocket, punched in 911, and in response to the operator’s robust “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” said, “We’ve got a badly injured man and a possible nuclear device on a forest service road just outside Los Alamos. Better send someone who can handle the situation.”

  “Can you give me any more information and a better location, sir?” the operator asked, her voice barely rising.

  “No, I can’t!” Cozy yelled over a surge of static.

  “Are you still there, sir?”

  Sensing Cozy’s frustration, Bernadette snatched the cell phone out of Cozy’s hand and yelled into it: “This is Major Bernadette Cameron, United States Air Force. We’re one right turn off New Mexico State Road 502 and exactly twelve forest access roads from the southern boundary fence of the Los Alamos Airport. Get someone the hell out here on the double, damn it!” She snapped the cell phone closed and checked to see if Rikia was still breathing.

  “Is he still alive?” Cozy asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  Cozy walked over to Rikia’s cell phone and turned it off. “Wonder who he was trying to call when you popped him?”

  “No way of telling now,” said Bernadette. “Let’s leave that problem to the folks who show up.”

  “Fine by me,” Cozy said as the faint wail of sirens erupted in the distance.

  “Freddy’s not going to be happy about his toy,” Bernadette said, sounding apologetic as she stared at the damaged motorcycle.

  “Better than if we’d crashed Sugar.”

  Surprised at how intently Cozy was also suddenly staring at the motorcycle, Bernadette asked, “What’s got you so mesmerized?”

  “I don’t know, really,” Cozy said as an odd, enlightened look slowly spread across his face. The look seemed to announce as it broadened into a smile that a long-lingering fog had finally lifted.

  The oak-paneled room in the Bradbury Science Museum, where Cozy and Bernadette had been sitting for almost three hours, was a small room smelling of floor wax inside a government facility that had been constructed in 1963. Designed to highlight Los Alamos National Laboratory’s role in technology and science, including the Manhattan Project, the building, normally open to the public, had four hours earlier become off-limits to anyone without the highest government security clearance. A half-dozen Styrofoam cups containing remnants of stale coffee sat on the large, oval boardroom table that Cozy and Bernadette shared with FBI Agent Thaddeus Richter and a red-haired, beady-eyed man with a buzz cut and closely cropped, military-regulation-length sideburns.

  The red-haired man, who’d introduced himself as Melvin Stoops, had remained in the room with Agent Richter after nearly a dozen people from the FBI, homeland security, and the New Mexico State Police had taken turns interviewing Bernadette and Cozy. Everyone had been silent for over a minute when Bernadette, who’d been thinking about Rikia Takata’s cell phone, asked Stoops, “Is Takata still alive, and do you know if his cell phone was the bomb trigger?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss those issues, Major,” Stoops said dismissively. “Now, how about we get back to your and Mr. Coseia’s roles in the current matter? My job is to determine whether, in association with Mr. Coseia, your actions represent a court-martialable offense, Major Cameron.”

  Cozy leaned forward in his chair, dropped his elbows down hard on the table, and stared angrily at Stoops. “Are you going to court-martial me, too, jackass?”

  “Cozy, please,” Bernadette said, grabbing Cozy’s arm.

  “Please, my ass, Bernadette. You just stopped some wacko from setting off a nuclear weapon, and you’ve got this nitwit talking about court-martialing you. Can’t you do something about this, Richter?”

  Richter shrugged. “No.”

  “I can have you removed from the room,” Stoops said calmly to Cozy.

  The look Bernadette flashed Cozy, a look that said, Please shut up, served to calm him down, at least momentarily.

  Looking slightly less sure of himself, Stoops asked, “Why is it that you decided to strike out on your own with the Tango-11 investigation, Major? And why didn’t you inform your superiors of your actions? Especially Colonel DeWitt.”

  “There wasn’t time,” Bernadette said, suspecting that Stoops was more than likely an air force OSI internal affairs colonel who had been hurriedly sent to Los Alamos with orders to quickly put a damper on anything that had the potential to embarrass the air force. “Besides, I’d already informed the FBI.”

  Stoops looked at Richter for confirmation.

  “We’d talked,” said Richter.

  Staring down at the top page of his more
than four pages of notes, Stoops said, “We’re almost done for the night, Major. Here’s my last question. Why did you stray so far from your original assignment, which was simply to investigate the security breach at Tango-11?”

  “I was just hoping to help solve a murder, I guess.”

  “But you’re not a police officer or a sheriff or anyone with such authority, Major.”

  Unable to bite his tongue any longer, Cozy said, “And the air force says she’s not a pilot anymore, either. But in light of the day’s events, I beg to differ.”

  Stoops eyed Cozy impassively and began collecting his papers. “I’ll be talking with you tomorrow, Major—in the absence of Mr. Coseia or Agent Richter, you might like to know.”

  “Fine,” said Bernadette, watching Richter, who looked even less pleased than she was by Stoops’s announcement, rise and head toward the door.

  “You and Mr. Coseia are staying here in Los Alamos, of course,” Stoops said, getting up out of his chair.

  “Yes,” Bernadette said, feeling as if she were somehow a criminal suspect.

  “Of course you are.” Stoops smiled and headed for the door.

  As the door closed behind Richter and then Stoops, Cozy asked, “How the heck did that apple-polishing idiot get from wherever he was to Los Alamos so fast?”

  Smiling and tweaking Cozy’s cheek, Bernadette said, “He’s probably out of Travis Air Force Base in California, and that’s not so far when the company you work for has a nice little stash of supersonic jets.”

  An hour and a half later Cozy sat on the edge of the sagging king-sized bed in his room, banging out a story on his laptop. Freddy Dames had called him a half-dozen times about the story, and finally, at twelve thirty in the morning, bone-weary both mentally and physically, Cozy was close to having it done. He and Bernadette had settled into adjoining rooms in a two-story limestone building that they’d been escorted to by an FBI agent. Not at all surprised that their rooms were adjoining, Bernadette stood in the doorway that connected them and watched Cozy type.