After the Rain

by Chuck Logan

  Showing off.

  Words were insignificant in the cascading horror, but words were all she had. She couldn’t stop from shouting: “You put that thing in there!”

  “Yep. And in about an hour…poof!” He tossed his hands in the air. “Now we’ll take a little drive, back roads west to Le Sueur, then drop down on 169 past Mankato and pick up I-90 west. Somewhere in there, depending on how the wind holds, we’ll make the call. Turn on the radio and listen to the news on the way to Sioux Falls. It’s all really very simple. Stay upwind and put a couple hundred miles between us and the plume. Looks like they’ll be eating cesium 137 for supper in Milwaukee and Chicago.”

  Dale wagged his finger. “They’re gonna learn the hard way: a spent fuel pool is forever.” He laughed at his own joke, watching for Nina’s reaction. “You’re no fun,” he said. He flung an arm back and pulled the curtain shut.

  Nina pictured the satellite phone in George Khari’s pocket. They weren’t kidding. They were going to set it off with a simple phone call. Jesus…

  Nina felt the van move, the rhythm of the road—then cocked her head, picking up a distinctive motor slap, mixed in with the road sound. Then the sound passed over them, faded behind, and was gone.

  Weird. Sounded like a Sikorsky Black Hawk.

  She refocused on the tension in the cords that held her wrists and ankles. With all her strength, she arched up her whole body.

  Chapter Forty-four

  Everybody was yelling at once, piling in, falling all over each other as the Black Hawk lifted off Sydney Fuller’s lovely lawn and blew her pink wisteria all to hell. The Hawk gained altitude and nosed over, heading south.

  Broker lost his footing in the scramble as Yeager punched numbers on his cell. Holly was already talking to whoever he worked for on the fancy radio console. “Northern Route is active. I say again: Northern Route is active. We have an event, suspicion is high that there is a device inside the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant on the Mississippi River. That’s about forty miles southeast of the Twin Cities.

  “I need the physical layout of the reactors and the pool. Get somebody on the horn at Prairie Island and patch them through to me…”

  “I got him,” Yeager yelled, “Irv, hey, it’s Jim Yeager from Langdon. Have you…Holy shit!” Yeager thrust out the phone like it was hot and pounded Broker on the arm with it. “Dale was just there in the plant. Left five minutes ago.”

  Broker and Holly stopped in place as Yeager’s words upped the adrenaline ante. They locked eyes. Holly erupted with a demented laugh, threw his hands in the air, and crowed, “Hey—here’s to Kit and her blue poop.”

  They all joined in a spasm of crazed exuberance. Then the chopper tilted and they all collided as Holly resumed yelling into the radio headset. “I need to talk to somebody on the ground, goddamn it, ’cause we’re coming in hot in a Black Hawk and we intend to land inside the plant. I need a ground contact—security, the plant manager, I don’t care.” He untangled from Broker and Yeager, lurched toward the cockpit. The door was open now. “What’s our ETA?” he yelled.

  “About ten minutes,” the pilot said.

  “ETA ten minutes. Get ’em ready for me. Of course we need a reaction team, NBC, EOD, the full schmear…No. I don’t know what it is, except we think it’s already inside…”

  Holly put his hand to the earphones, banged on Broker’s arm, and pointed to the pilot. Broker went forward. The pilot had a map out and said, “Tell him I’m flying line-of-sight on the river. We’ll come right over it, no messing with the ground clutter trying to read the road net.”

  Yeager was shouting into his phone. “Irv, Irv…Okay, you calm down, too. Look, Dale sold you some machines, right?…Yeah, two front-loaders. We think—”

  Holly shook his head violently.

  “No,” Broker put his hand over Yeager’s cell, “not till we’re on the ground and evaluate those machines. They’ll start messing around without knowing what they’re dealing with.”

  Holly said, “Tell him Dale’s wanted for questioning in the death of his brother.”

  Yeager got back on the phone. “Irv. Ace Shuster was shot to death back home this morning. We think Dale was there. So I need to talk to you fast. And could you locate the two machines he sold you? We want to take a look at them.” Yeager ended the call, grimaced. “He agreed, but he sounded confused.”

  “You ain’t seen confused. Just wait till we get on the ground,” Holly said.

  They grabbed handholds on the seats as the chopper pitched forward, picking up speed. Broker felt like the rotors were spinning in his chest. The whole wild day. Dale was out there in front of them somewhere, on the ground. And Broker was sure now he had Nina with him. Gotta believe that. She’s down there on one of those roads in a vehicle.

  Alive.

  Without realizing it, he had pulled the crumpled pack of smokes from his pocket. Holly and Yeager reached over and dug out mangled cigarettes, straightened them, and lit up. Broker joined them. Inhaled, exhaled, looked in the pack.

  Two left.

  Fields and tree lines and housing developments rushed beneath them as they flew southeast with the St. Croix River on their left. They passed over the confluence, where the St. Croix flowed into the Mississippi.

  “Any minute now,” Broker yelled.

  The crazed rush subsided and Holly’s face twisted into a disgusted snarl. “Those goddamn motherfuckers. We told them. And we told them. I helped run the black-hat teams out of Special Ops at Bragg. We’d play aggressor to test nuclear plant security for NRC. Fuckin’ private security guards. Bunch of guys who couldn’t make it as cops. Timothy McVeigh became a private security guard when he flunked the psychological test for Special Forces…”

  He stared at Broker. “You know what the fuckers did? They canceled the exercise because it was too easy for us to breach security at the plants—when we told them that eighty percent of their guards would shit their pants if faced by a real attack by a serious opponent. Flat run and hide.” He shook his head. “But I got a feeling this thing we’re heading into ain’t something you stop with gates, guns, and guards.”

  He alerted to the satellite phone next to his ear. “Finally. Plant security.” He leaned into the phone. “This is Northern Route Six. I am inbound your position in an Army Black Hawk helicopter. We intend to land as near the reactors as possible. Preferably on the construction site. Have a vehicle waiting and get Irv Fuller, the construction contractor. This is not a test. Goddammit! It’s a U.S. Army helicopter and I am an Army colonel.”

  Holly rolled his eyes, shouted at Broker, “He wants some confirmation. Says we could be anybody.”

  Holly yelled into the phone. “Listen carefully, Jody; this bird is coming in hot. You start plinking at us, we’ll burn you up. We believe your security has been breached. I need to talk to your boss, I need to talk to the most senior person on the site. You must be getting confirmation from NRC, somebody in Washington. This is real serious…Well, goddamn it, find him on his fucking coffee break!”

  Holly lowered his phone and went back to shaking his head, furious. He dug into a go-bag lying on the deck and pulled out a picture ID on a lanyard. He hung it around his neck. “The goddamn French put antiaircraft missiles on their nuclear waste dumps to protect them. The Germans decentralize their waste and bury it in huge bunkers. Our defense amounts to public relations, full-page ads, and hardcore denial. We been telling these assholes at the nuclear plants for ten years, since the first World Trade Center bombing…Greedy fuckers, just too damn cheap to—”

  Holly interrupted his tirade, cocked his ear to his phone. “Finally, got somebody from NRC. Uh-huh. What’s the layout of the reactor and pool? Oh, that’s great. Typical. Thanks. Bye,” Holly made a face, looked away.

  “What?” Broker asked. “The reactors are in hardened containments, aren’t they?”

  Holly shook his head vehemently. “It ain’t the reactors I’m worried about. It’s the cooling pool. NRC just
told me the one at Prairie Island is just this big tin shed between the reactors. They say the pool is below grade and bunkered. We’ll see.”

  The cooling pool.

  Broker tried to picture it. He summoned a documentary image of this vast watery honeycomb grid. Robotic arms moving the lethal fuel assemblies into the tight-packed cubbyholes. He knew as much about nuclear plants as the next guy—heavy avoidance laced with a whiff of Armageddon.

  The pilot reached a hand back and waved.

  “There it is,” Holly yelled. They crowded forward to get a look.

  Two rounded gray towers nestled next to the hazy river fringed with trees and parking lots. A large rectangular building with a blue roof crowded the reactors in the foreground. A lower structure was stitched between them. Across a canal, banks of squat towers released a cloud of white vapor. Past the plant an open rectangular area was surrounded by a landscaped, raised barrier. In the center of the open space a number of tall white cylinders were invitingly grouped like bowling pins.

  The Black Hawk banked and descended toward an access road that ran past a parking lot from which cars were starting to leave.

  “There.” Holly pointed toward a gash of black gray earth in back of the towers. The sun glinted on a chain-link fence erected around the construction site. Coming in lower, they could see the equipment: excavators, bulldozers, and wheel-loaders strewn around the work site.

  Several Chevy Blazers jockeyed around on the grass, trying to anticipate the landing point of the incoming helicopter. Holly clamped his cell to his ear. “Finally,” he said. “Prairie Island Security? Okay, listen up. This is Northern Route Six…”

  Holly said to Broker, covering his cell phone with his hand, “Guy’s voice is shaking like hell.” He removed his hand. “This is Six. C’mon, c’mon, talk to me.” Holly shook his head. “Negative. We’ll kick up too much dust on the site. We’ll put down on the grass next to the fence.”

  Holly leaned into the cockpit and debated with the pilot. Quickly they picked an open plot of grass near the construction fence. The Hawk descended, flared, and landed with a jolt. Holly, Broker, and Yeager jumped off. One of the Blazers pulled up and three men got out. One wore a natty brown private-guard outfit, duty belt, sidearm. The second guy caught Broker’s attention. He wore a dress shirt, tie, and a yellow hard hat. And he had this credit-card-sized plastic gauge in a plastic baggie clipped to his shirt. The card had a gray window in the corner. The numeral zero was displayed in the window. The last man wore jeans, a blue work shirt, and boots. That would be Fuller. All three approached with faces the color of flour, eyes like jelly.

  They headed for Yeager, who was in uniform. Yeager pointed at Holly, then shook hands with the guy in the work shirt. He walked Fuller aside and started talking.

  While the plant guard and the manager-type struggled with the idea that the guy who looked like a Willie Nelson roadie was a Delta colonel, Broker jogged through the gate in the construction fence. He ignored two heavily armed guards in brown uniforms who nervously flanked him, AR-15s at the ready. Fuck them. He was looking for the front-loader.

  He ran past a deep trough and a pile of heaped dirt and saw two 644Cs. One was parked parallel in a rough line with other equipment, some of it still on trailers. But the other loader sat next to the wall of a building between the two reactor towers.

  Jesus, just sitting there, perfectly perpendicular to the wall. Like it had been positioned. His stomach tightened as he ran to the machine. When he got within fifty yards he stopped and looked up. The honeycomb image returned with a vengeance, and now the gray domes towered above him like enormous hives. He imagined them buzzing with radioactive killer bees. Aggressive, swarming the containment, insane to get out.

  Holly, Yeager, and Fuller came jogging behind him. The guards and the manager followed, somewhat reluctantly.

  “I need a big wrench or a hammer,” Broker yelled. He sniffed and looked under the loader. “There’s a big puddle of gas under here.”

  Fuller signaled to a workman who was hesitantly approaching, part curious, part nervous. “We need some tools here, fast.”

  The worker put down his cooler, jogged to a shed next to the construction trailer. Broker pointed to the card around the manager’s neck. “What that?”

  “Dosimeter. Measures radiation.”

  Broker smiled tightly, “Might be a good idea to walk around this machine, see if you get a reading.”

  “You serious?”

  Just then the worker returned, panting, with a heavy toolbox. Broker opened it, selected a heavy claw hammer, and immediately began tapping the counterweights on the back of the machine. Broker’s first and second hammer blows gave off a dull solid clang. The third strike rebounded hollow, twanging.

  The manager, the security guard, and Fuller looked at each other.

  “Why is this machine sitting here?” Broker asked.

  Fuller said, “Dale put it here. He wanted to see how it ran.”

  Holly grabbed a wrench from the toolbox, and he and Broker carefully attacked the end of the rearmost counterweight.

  “Oh my God,” gasped the manager as a crack appeared in the cast-iron weight. Using the open wrench and the hammer claw, Holly and Broker carefully peeled back the thin, milled-out iron. It dropped off in flakes.

  Nobody said a word.

  They were too busy trying to interpret the shapes Holly and Broker had revealed. Lumps of red clay connected by wires. A flat, dark plastic wafer in a taped plastic bag.

  Holly gently scraped at the clay with a fingernail, brought it to his nose, sniffed, then put it to his tongue. He said, “Semtex. Military-grade blasting cap wired to a telephone pager.” He turned to the manager.

  “Wait a minute…” the plant official said. His face was going dreamy and dissociative. His eyes seemed to recede into his head.

  “There’s another hole like this on the other side. They’re angled,” Yeager said. “We talked to the guy who milled out the channels for Dale.”

  “What’s on the other side of that wall?” Holly demanded in a steely voice.

  “That wall’s five feet of steel-reinforced concrete,” the manager said, drawing himself up.

  “Are there tunnels, subterranean rooms? Goddamn it, how much of the pool is below ground?” Holly shouted.

  “Most of it,” the manager said, starting to tremble.

  “Yeah, right! There’s water on the other side of that wall. Fucking water. Get it out of here,” Holly yelled. “Get the ass end pointed in the river, anywhere, just get it away from this wall.”

  Fuller scrambled up the step into the cab, sat down, leaned into the controls. Nothing happened. He stuck his head out and yelled, “She’s dead.”

  One of the workmen started checking the engine. He yelled, “Irv, battery wires cut. And the gas line.”

  Fuller jumped down from the cab, visibly shaken. “This is a fucking boat anchor. Without power the hydraulics are dead, no steering.”

  “It’s a bomb,” the security guard said under his breath. He started backing up. The sudden way he moved reminded Broker of something. Then he placed it. The movie Jaws, when people in the water thought they saw the shark and started backpedaling, in panic, trampling people. As he backed up, he started talking with barely controlled panic into his mobile radio:

  “We have a level-one event. Activate the Emergency Notification System. Yes, goddammit. Now! Call the city of Red Wing, Goodhue County, the State Office of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and the governor. And call the St. Paul bomb squad. We may have a bomb next to the spent-fuel pool. Evacuate all nonessential personnel. We have to shut down.”

  “Shut down?” the manager yelled. “You idiot! WE CAN’T SHUT DOWN THE COOLING POOL!” His knees buckled.

  It was starting.

  “IT’S A BOMB!” yelled the nearest construction worker, as he started to walk rapidly toward the gate. Broker and Holly stared at each other.

  “We gotta move th
is thing,” they both said at the same time.

  Fuller gritted his teeth. “Dale was here to check this machine because the wheels felt a little stiff…”

  “Shit,” Holly said. He and Broker stared at each other. “The wheels…”

  They went to one of the wheel wells and struck at the twist valve cover with a hammer and a wrench. After several strikes it loosened. Straining, manic, they forced the cover to turn on its threads and removed it. The wheel was filled with congealed vinyl-like material. Broker fumbled in the toolbox, found a heavy screwdriver, and probed into the opening.

  “Something in here,” he said, grimacing, fumbling. Blood ran as he skinned his hand. But he managed to snag a loop of…hose. Embedded in the hardened foam. Pulled it out. He peeled away the gunk.

  Very lightweight garden hose wrapped in tape. Yeager snapped open a Buck knife and handed it to Broker. He slit the tape and peeled open the bulge of hose. Broker reflexively stood up and backed away—a phobic, reflex firing of muscles. The hose was packed with red Semtex.

  “Christ, could be all four wheels.” Holly’s voice sounded like a dead bolt sliding into place. “That could be…”

  “A ton,” Broker said in a controlled, hollow voice.

  “Right,” Holly said. He spun on the manager. “You ain’t gonna have a hole in your pool, buddy. You ain’t gonna have a pool.”

  The plant manager started to tremble. Broker watched his face turn clammy, then he ceased to sweat. His eyeballs enlarged and his pupils contracted. “Wait a minute. What are you saying?” he whispered. “How could that get in here?”

  Holly shook his head. “I’m sure you vetted the construction crew, And you checked the bottoms of the trucks these machines came in on. But you didn’t disassemble the machines themselves. And even trained sniffer dogs miss Semtex—that’s how good those smart Czech bastards made it.

  “So basically what we got here is a directional charge of the world’s best explosives, maybe four hundred pounds of it aimed directly at the foundation of your cooling pool.” Holly clicked his teeth, looked around. “Plus the wheels. This fucker will crater big enough to hold a couple three Olympic pools. And it’s rigged for remote detonation with pagers…”