Disruption: A River Of Secrets And Betrayal

by J. B. Jamison

  There was no one in the galley as they entered. "Captain, we will only be able to make a brief visit to the doctor's workspace I'm afraid. As I mentioned before, we have taken every precaution with the radiation, but it makes no sense to press our luck and overstay our welcome if you know what I mean. The doctor and his team are prepared to deal with the risks, but I'm afraid you and I don't have all of the same protections they have."

  The Captain hesitated.

  "Oh, no Captain, it is perfectly safe for a brief visit. We could actually stay much longer, but again, we have no desire to risk anyone being harmed, so we're just being extra careful. Please, come with me."

  The leader stepped from the galley door and walked to the stern of the boat where there was a door to a small storage room. The doctor's team had turned that space into their temporary laboratory, for assembling their little devices.

  "The doctor and his team have made good use of the space, don't you think Captain?"

  "Where are the things that were in there? We may need..."

  "Have no worry Captain, everything has been temporarily moved to where it can be gotten to if needed, nothing has been lost. And, when we are finished, everything will be put back just as we found it. Here, I'm sure you are curious just how everything works."

  The leader motioned for the Captain to follow him into the room. The Captain hesitated again and then entered.

  To the right of the door was a small table with a silver case sitting on it next to a few simple tools, and to the left was a small stack of three empty boxes. There were some metal panels placed against the inner wall, but other than that, it was just an empty, cleaned out storeroom.

  "Welcome to our little laboratory, Captain, please come in." The doctor was smiling as he nodded toward the visitors. "I imagine you were expecting something a bit more elaborate?"

  The Captain stood and looked around the room, and the doctor continued. "Allow me to show you just what we are doing here, so you can be assured that there is no risk to you or your crew. In fact, you can see the extra lead shielding we have placed against the walls to make sure your crew is fully protected."

  The doctor stepped to the middle of the room with a look on his face like the new daddy standing next to the hospital nursery window. "As I believe our friend has told you, we do not keep all of our supplies here on the boat with us; that would create too many risks. So, we don't need a very large space, or many other tools, just a few things to do a final assembly of our devices. Would you like to see one of them, Captain?"

  "See one of the devices? You mean one of them is here, now?"

  "Certainly Captain." The doctor added a small grin to his face. "In fact, you are standing next to as we speak."

  The Captain turned to the table beside him and looked more closely at the silver container sitting on it. It was so plain he hadn't paid it any mind when he entered; a small silver case that looked like an old water softener you have at home, except for the fact that a water softener doesn’t contain a high explosive that will fill the house with radioactive shit if the thing blows up. The look on his face and his sudden movement were noticed.

  "Relax Captain," the doctor said. "The device is completely assembled and ready for deployment, so there is little danger from any radiation now that it is sealed. Besides, it has not yet been armed."

  The Captain smiled and tried very hard to appear calm and in control, though his eyes didn’t match that thought.

  "Captain," the leader said, "the barges we picked up this morning held the pieces for the first three devices. Those were for the three bridges near downtown New Orleans. That last barge you picked up near Reserve held the materials for this device, number four, which is to be placed under the Gramercy Bridge that is just ahead of us now. We will pick up another new barge up near Romeville, as I'm sure you have seen in your new orders, and it will hold the materials for device number five."

  The Captain was trying to take in the information in a way that would make sense in his mind.

  "You see Captain, by not holding materials on our boat, we reduce any risks to ourselves, plus, we reduce the risk of drawing the attention of any monitoring device; as you said earlier, there are many of those around. Once the devices sink into the deep mud of the river bottom, they are fully safe from detection, but until that time we must be careful. That is why I said the first steps through New Orleans were the most challenging of our entire mission. With all of the monitoring around large cities, as well as the harbor shipping, we needed to be very careful to not do anything that might draw the attention; and it appears that we have been successful."

  The leader turned to the doctor and his team.

  "And now Captain," the doctor stepped toward the table, "we are approaching our next location, so we must make our preparations. Why don't you stay and see just how the process works."

  One man picked up a piece of thin line from the corner. It had a small hook on one end that he connected to a ring on the end of the device. They slowly carried the device out the door and sat it gently on the deck. After checking the hook and ring, one of the men lowered the device into the water, handling the line carefully to see that it slid behind the boat away from the prop wash, and did not become caught in the wash and pulled into the props themselves. As they had done three times already, they played out the line to pull the device behind the boat, until the stern deck fells into the shadow of the Gramercy Bridge sliding past one hundred sixty feet above them. With a jerk, the rope disengaged the hook from the eye, and the device gently settled into the river beneath the bridge."

  "We have some time before we will have our next supplies, so why don't we all take a bit of a rest?" The doctor sounded very pleased with their work. "And Captain, thank you so much for joining us."

  The group headed toward the cool of the galley for some refreshment. The Captain glanced back down river at the bridge fading into the distance, where device number four gently settled in the river currents, coming to rest on the bow of a battered old rake barge, sunk in the river a decade ago after striking the bridge piling during hurricane Katrina.

  Chapter 12

  "Caught anything?"

  It’s what you shout at anyone sitting in a flatboat containing fishing poles. The shouter was standing on a dredge anchored just above the IC Rail Marine Terminal south of Romeville, and the fishing boat was going past on its way upstream. The boat carried two people with the poles, a couple of tackle boxes and a cooler, either for the day's catch or for the drinking that would make up for a poor showing.

  "Just getting started, but we've got enough booze that it doesn't really matter."

  And then, they were invisible again; just another boatload of guys fishing; doing business as usual.

  Just a mile or so above the terminal they pulled to the shore into a quiet spot just below a set of barges. The spot might be a good place to find fish, but it didn’t matter. While one fisherman tied the boat to the stern of the first barge, the second pulled a large bag out of the cooler. He lifted it up to the deck of the barge and followed it, then reached back to grab the second bag his partner had pulled from under the seat. He carefully lowered the bags into one of the barge's loose tank covers. He tightened the lid, jumped back into the skiff, and untied it from the barge.

  They drifted back downriver in silence as they went through the plans for the next stop below Baton Rouge.

  Chapter 13

  It was the first time the Captain saw the entire group at one time. There were seven all together. The leader and his three goons, and the doctor with two others helping him. What struck him was how this group of murderers was sitting around the room, telling stories and laughing; more like a bowling team in the bar between games than people who had just sunk four dirty bombs into the Mississippi river. The Captain had a long list of questions he wanted to ask and was just opening his mouth to do so when he realized one of the guys with the doctor was a woman.

  "Ah, I see you are surprised to
see Susan here Captain," the leader smiled. "Doctor, why don't you introduce the Captain to your team, we have no further need for secrecy now that the mission is underway."

  "Certainly, I will be most happy to. My work would be impossible if not for them." He turned to the man sitting on his left. "This is Lawrence, Captain. Lawrence is responsible for designing the casing for our devices, and for doing the final assembly here on our boat."

  Lawrence nodded, smiled and reached a hand across the table to the Captain, who forced his own hand to respond.

  "It is very nice to meet you, Captain. I am sorry for the inconvenience we have caused you, but I assure you it will be worth the trouble when we are finished."

  "And this is Susan," the doctor nodded to the young woman sitting next to Lawrence. "Susan is our specialist in nuclear science, and is responsible for the, uh, dirty side of our mission."

  Everyone in the group smiled and chuckled at the doctor's little bit of humor; everyone except the Captain.

  "Susan was one of my graduate assistants at the university, and greatly impressed me with her abilities. When it came time to create our team, it was obvious to me that she was the best for the role. Her Navy training has proved to be invaluable."

  "Navy?" the Captain heard himself ask.

  "I was helping with cleanup after Desert Storm," Susan looked at the Captain with steel gray eyes, "I spent my time in places that no one else wanted to go."

  "The doctor has several other members of his team, as you might expect," the leader smiled. "They are in different places, each doing their part in preparing our supplies for the mission. And you have met Bradley, Thomas, and Bear, my three colleagues." The leader nodded toward each of the men standing around the room as he mentioned their names.

  "Yes, we've met," the Captain said through clenched teeth. They simply returned the stare, but with an apparent lack of any feeling whatsoever; just business as usual.

  "They are doing their part to collect the supplies as they arrive, and being here to help me in any ways that might be necessary as we go."

  The Captain looked around the room at the group, "I'm just curious, you all seem to be fairly normal people." Everyone in the room smiled at each other and laughed, though the Captain hadn't intended it as a joke. "How did you end up here, as a part of this, this, this...'mission'?"

  "I'll go first,” Susan said. “As doc said, I was in the Navy, doing nuke work. I went into it with my eyes open; I knew very well that I might pay the price in twenty years or so, as exposure to the radioactivity began to mess with me. But I also knew that the Navy would take care of me. Then, as expected, about three years ago I started having symptoms; liver function, skin cancers...several things. But what I didn't expect was that the help I had been promised wasn't there. I spent months going from office to office, visits to different VA hospitals, each one of them saying my problems weren't from radiation. My medical bills broke me, and my parents. Then I started hearing from others I had served with. They were having exactly the same experiences. At first, I couldn't believe it and assumed there was some screw-up somewhere. But I began to realize there was no screw-up; there was just too much risk in revealing some of the things that had gone on, the things that really caused the problems we were having. So, the risk to the military was bigger than our risk; which meant we lost. I watched friends die, some of them horrendously, and it just made me furious. I had gone back to school to keep my mind busy, and that's when I started working with Dr. Shallenger, heard about the mission, and joined up. Something just had to be done."

  Over the next several minutes, the Captain heard similar stories from the others; serious illnesses and deaths that might have been prevented, family members losing jobs, businesses, homes, because of decisions and actions made by others far away who never even noticed. As he listened, the Captain couldn’t help but think about his recurring back problems and how the insurance company would not let the doctor perform the surgery that would actually fix them. But he sat in silence. They didn’t sound like terrorists or murderers. But he knew that somehow, at some point, they had to be stopped.

  The Captain walked back to the pilothouse to sit and stare out the window with Frank. The next bridge was the Sunshine Bridge, about twenty-five miles upriver. The leader said they would pick up the pieces for the device about five miles below the bridge; so that gave them a few hours.

  "I'm going to try and sack out for a while," Charlie looked out the bow window as he spoke, "you ok here for now?"

  Frank looked at him and shrugged his shoulders, "Sure, Cap, everything is just business as usual here. Go get you some sleep."

  Charlie walked down the gangway to his cabin, picked up a book as he laid down, hoping that the latest western he had brought on board might distract him from the wild west show that has taken over his boat. Once again, sleep came quickly.

  Chapter 14

  She was certain she had turned it off, but there it was, her cell phone playing Sweet Home Alabama at full volume, and every face in the room turning to her with that smile that said, "Hah, you screwed up!" Emily tried to put her hand over the phone's speaker as she moved between the chairs to get to the door, where she stuck the phone next to her ear and yelled, "WHAT?"

  "We've got a hot one. You need to get in here." It was Lennie Ryan; Special Agent in Charge of the New Orleans Field Office, and her boss.

  "What? I'm off today. What is it?" she asked with only slightly less irritation.

  "Gramercy Bridge, about 30 miles west of here. The NRC has called us in."

  "A bridge? C'mon Lennie, they call every time one of those portable hospital trucks triggers a sensor. You don't need me for that. Call somebody else; it’s my night off," as she started back toward the door to her weekly fitness club meeting.

  The bridge sensors were one of the better-kept secrets spanning all the way back to the cold war. They had been installed to sound off anytime someone might be crazy enough to travel around with some kind of radioactive stuff in their vehicle. There were actually two sensors on each bridge, one at each end. That way they could look at the order in which they were triggered and identify the direction the stuff was traveling. They worked pretty well at first; back when radioactive stuff was a rare commodity. But today, with just the medical uses of radiation in mobile radiotherapy vehicles, those sensors were being triggered several times a day and had become just another piece of the routine. A hot sensor was certainly not a valid reason to give up a perfectly good evening off.

  "It’s not a bridge sensor. I don't know all of the details, but I do know that they've called in one of their tactical search and secure teams...so whatever it is...it’s got them fired up. They've escalated it and want us there."

  "They've called in tactical?"

  "Yeah, apparently they think they've found something with Cobalt-60 in it. You need to get over there."

  She stopped with one hand on the door. She really didn’t need to go back into the weight-loss meeting. She didn’t even need to be there at all. She didn’t need to lose weight. She was in great shape. She just liked the process of counting the calories and the structure it gave. It was the one part of her life that she had any real control of right now. That’s what she didn’t want to miss tonight.

  The presentation about the various acceptable substitutions for sugar was just getting underway as she turned from the door and walked down the hall where she could hear. And think.

  "Cobalt-60? You guys better not be messing with me here, or I swear..."

  "They’re pretty sure." Lennie had the sound in his voice that said even though he was Emily's boss, he was very aware of the cost to be paid if anyone was dumb enough to yank her chain on her day off. She was the only person in the office that would dare talk back to him like that, and that’s one of the reasons he liked having her around. "They found it three hours ago, and the NRC team did their routine first response. Now it’s escalated."

  "Ok, do we know of any loads of Cobalt-60 movi
ng through that area today, anything from the military, or agriculture?"

  Among other common uses, Cobalt-60 is one component in the equipment to kill bacteria in food processing, and in lots of other industries that need to have high powered sterilization take place. In other words, there is a lot of it moving around out there.

  "Nothing."

  "Ok, you said about three hours ago; which way was it moving?"

  "Well, that's the thing, it wasn't the bridge sensors that caught it, so we don't know for sure that it was moving across the bridge. They think it is in the water under the bridge."

  "Under the bridge? You mean, whatever it is...it’s still there?"

  "Apparently so. That's why Search & Secure was called in."

  The hallway was silent as Emily stared at her shoes. She took a deep breath and looked at the bulletin board next to the parking lot door. She took the time to read a few old notices to keep herself from saying things she might regret later.

  "So, are there any other little details I need to know about?"

  "No, that's it. As soon as they realized something unusual was going on, they closed the bridge to traffic and called us in."

  Emily looked at the time on her cell phone, began moving toward the door, "Whose team is on call?"

  "It’s Elliot's team."

  "Ok, good. You might give them a heads-up that something might be coming their way tonight. And let the NRC guys know I'm on my way. With traffic, I should be there in about an hour," as she stepped out the door.

  "They're at the Gramercy bridge, or just west of it. They said they would meet you there. There's a little road that goes up over the levee just about a half mile north of the bridge. They said to drive over the levee, and you'll see their boat."