© 2013 by Todd M. Johnson
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6150-2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Lookout Design, Inc.
For my Libby.
“The cost of cleaning nuclear defense sites like Hanford could be so high, and the contamination so great, we may just have to erect a fence around them and call them what they are: national sacrifice zones.”
unknown nuclear engineer, late 1980s
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Ad
Back Cover
Chapter 1
OCTOBER 16, 2013
2:50 A.M.
PRIEST RIDGE, SOUTHERN BOUNDARY
HANFORD NUCLEAR RESERVATION
Under a moonless sky, he slowed the bay stallion as they neared the top of the slope. The evening breeze, strongest there on the narrow plateau at the peak of the ridge, slipped a gust of chill air through his jacket and down his neck. He pulled his hood up over his head.
Through his jeans, the stallion’s thick winter coat warmed his thighs, wrapped bareback around its flanks. He pulled off his gloves and slid his hands up and under its thick overgrown mane, where the heat was captured like a blanket.
As feeling returned to his numbed fingers, the man straightened and gazed far down toward the flats below. A distant object glowed there, dipping and bounding across the dark desert a mile and a half further east—back in the direction from which he’d come. He raised the binoculars slung around his neck, grunting with satisfaction as the magnified object gained definition.
It was sagebrush, moving erratically over the desert surface—like a tiny runaway sun released from the laws of nature and glowing beyond any other source of illumination. Ten to twenty miles per hour, the man judged—propelled by a desert wind. Most people wouldn’t have seen the small object from this distance, he thought with a touch of pride, not without the binoculars. And if they could see it, would they believe what they saw? If he denied the proof of his own eyes, he’d feel as untethered as that illuminated brush out there tonight.
The trajectory of the glowing object confirmed their calculations, another source of satisfaction for him. Sliding the binoculars back beneath his jacket, he patted the stallion reassuringly on the withers as the animal pawed the ground, snorting thick clouds that quickly dissipated in the cold air.
He glanced back up as the shape bounded once more, arcing upward before dropping from sight beneath a fold in the ground. It didn’t reappear.
The eddies of cold air slowed his will to press on. But the man knew he had to. The Hanford Works buildings stood to the northeast, stalagmites in the desert beyond his sight along the Columbia River. One of those buildings housed Hanford’s central security. If he’d been detected on the nuclear reservation grounds tonight, cars could already be dispatched to search him out.
He had raised his heels to kick the stallion into motion when the horse whinnied and backed in alarm. Then he heard it: a ragged boom like a thunderclap from an unseen storm blowing out of the dark from the Hanford buildings. The man shushed the animal, gripping its mane tightly as the sound rolled and echoed off the surrounding hills before fading away.
Another boom followed, even louder, sending a ripple of alarm through the stallion. Then a third.
Thunder on a cold night like this? A landslide? An earthquake?
The last echoes faded off. He listened longer as a breeze whispered through the ground brush. Nothing more.
The horse rolled its head, impatient to go. He reassured the animal gently. But the cold air—so fresh in his lungs a moment ago—now tasted sour in the man’s mouth.
His stomach lurched as the bay suddenly reared to full height. The man tightened his grip on its mane to stop a slide toward its hips—just as the animal dropped back on its front hooves and launched itself into the black.
Over the stallion’s hammering hoofbeats the man shouted for it to slow. Pulling desperately on the horse’s mane to yank its head back and himself forward, the man prayed for even ground and to avoid the ridgeline to their right.
A dozen pounding strides passed before he could center himself on the bay’s back. Then he loosened his legs’ grip and leaned back, yanking harder on the mane. The animal began to ease its pace.
With the slowing beat of the stallion’s strides, for the first time the man could hear what had made the horse lose control. The sound of it set his heart pounding.
Give me whatever you’ve got left, he whispered, leaning deep into the animal’s shoulders again, tightening his legs and mouthing encouragement for speed once more. The animal was confused and hesitated—until he kicked its flanks hard, launching the stallion into a gallop.
Whatever you’ve got left. Whatever it takes to get off this high, naked butte, where the night currents from Hanford will reach long before settling to the desert floor below.
Behind him, the sound was unmistakable and growing ever clearer, rising up and up, striking a deep chord of fear in the man who feared very little. It was a warning siren screaming from one of the buildings of the shuttered plutonium factory, and even over the distance, it chilled him more than the wind ev
er could.
Because the piercing cry heralded a radiation release, in a wail as shrill as a tortured soul.
2:46 A.M.
LAB BUILDING 5
HANFORD NUCLEAR RESERVATION
Twenty-five-year-old Kieran Mullaney winced as he crouched to adjust his worn pair of boots. The sharp pain had to be another blister, this one on the sole of his left foot. He pulled his sock tighter. There was little else he could do.
Kieran looked up into the stare of his supervisor, Taylor Christensen. The man was standing impatiently by the entryway to the “dark side” of Lab Building 5. Steve Whalen, the aging supply manager for LB5, chewed his gum indifferently from behind the equipment counter. They each were watching Kieran, waiting for him to follow Taylor through the door to start the night shift.
Maybe he should do just that, Kieran thought. Keep his mouth shut and start his shift. Because if he complained about his boots, they’d think it wasn’t such a big deal.
But it was a big deal. It wasn’t just the pain he’d endure for another shift from these tight replacement boots Whalen had given him last week. It was that nobody had told him where those boots had picked up the plutonium that made them confiscate them in the first place.
It also was Whalen’s smug attitude, like that of so many old-timers, the ones who’d been at Hanford as far back as when the place was still operational. Guys like Whalen looked down their noses at the youngest workers like Kieran. Whalen had been broadcasting his disdain for Kieran the whole two weeks he and Taylor had been substituting here at LB5. He was doing it now.
Whalen treated Kieran’s supervisor differently; he’d thrown some respect Taylor’s way since they’d arrived as stand-ins for the regular LB5 sampling crew. Kieran got it—Taylor had the look and walk of the third-generation Hanford man he was. Kieran was second generation, but he didn’t have the walk. He didn’t kowtow to the Whalens of Hanford.
Kieran straightened up to his full height. All right. It was their last night here. He’d push back a little.
“Red, I want my own boots back,” he said matter-of-factly, using for the first time the nickname he’d heard others call the tech. “The ones made out of real leather instead of recycled footballs.”
The equipment man squinted at Kieran from under gray eyebrows with a look like he was chewing lemons. “Well, aren’t you the smart one,” Whalen fired back with clipped words. “You can go barefoot if you’d like. But you’ll get back your own boots when they’re done testing ’em.”
“You took them last week and we’re heading back to our regular station tomorrow,” Kieran kept on. “What happened to ‘You’ll get them back in twenty-four hours’?”
Red Whalen cut him off with a wave of his left hand, raising a Geiger counter from the equipment shelf in his right as though it were something holy.
“Didn’t you hear old Samantha here cry out the other day when I wanded your boots for rads, boy? What do they teach you kids in training these days? That was the voice of a protective angel of heaven, shoutin’ that the soles of that leather tied to your feet had found some serious radiation on the dark side—heaven knows where. And all you can do is whine about wantin’ to get back those Walmart specials and take ’em home with you to Momma? Shame on you. I’ll tell you this once more: when they figure out where you got the contamination, the folks at headquarters will clean the rads off the boots and get ’em back to you. End of story.”
Some of the smugness had come off the supply manager’s face—replaced with stubborn anger. This was feeling good, Kieran thought. He held up his HEPA mask.
“How about my air filter?” he said. “I told you my first day here that this one’s too small. Feels like a kid’s snorkel. Don’t they issue you supply guys adult equipment here at LB5—”
Taylor took a step toward Kieran and grabbed the mask from his outstretched hand. “C’mon,” the supervisor growled through his thick moustache, then led the way through the security door for their shift.
With a final glance at Whalen’s flushed face, Kieran passed the equipment counter and followed Taylor into the dark side. He only let his grin surface once he was through the door and out of the supply manager’s view.
Looking at his supervisor’s hunched shoulders, Kieran feared that he’d ticked off Taylor by baiting Whalen. He didn’t want a lecture tonight about how “nobody complained back when Hanford was making the plutonium that went on the trains to Rocky Flats. Everybody knew how important that mission was. This isn’t just another job. . . .”
Taylor had it in him, that vein of pride that rivaled the old-timers. But he must’ve known Kieran was just letting off steam, because the lecture never came.
Their boots clopped on the concrete floor of the first-floor corridor of LB5’s dark side. Every Hanford building ever used for plutonium production had its dark side—the name everyone used for areas where plutonium was produced before the Department of Energy turned out the lights and closed all these buildings for good. Kieran had heard somebody say they chemically recaptured plutonium here at LB5. He didn’t exactly know what that meant. Frankly, he didn’t care. He worked for a company whose job was to do monitoring and testing ordered by Covington Nuclear—sampling for radiation in the air; checking the contents of aging storage containers with long-disused chemicals; taking swipes off the walls and floors for leaking contaminants or rads. Whatever else they told him to do. He didn’t need a history lesson about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for this job. Growing up in Sherman next to the place, he’d had enough of those to last a dozen lifetimes.
Kieran glanced at a plaque on one of the locked doors they passed in the empty hallway. At Hanford, that meant somebody had gotten a fatal dose of rads in the room, along with the standard compensation issued to the family. Kill boards the old guys called them—or agony plaques. The nicknames said it all: it was no way to die.
Kieran mouthed the name on the plaque they’d just passed: Severson Room. Likely he died in the fifties or sixties. That’s when most of them went; when production was so rushed that lots of corners were cut. He wondered who the man was, whether he’d had a wife and kids. Probably both. Most of these guys were family men, good providers given the top-notch pay out here.
Providers like Kieran’s dad—a thirty-year Hanford man. They never worried about money, always had decent cars. Every Christmas topped the one before it. Trips to Disneyland every couple of years, and that surprise trip to Hawaii. College wouldn’t have been a problem, that was for sure.
There was no plaque for his dad out here on the grounds, because he didn’t get a sudden big dose of plutonium or tritium or some other rad that took you out in a flash. He got it slowly, sucking it into his lungs on long daytime shifts. Maybe eating what had settled invisibly onto his sandwich on breaks. Then hiding away deep inside him until the cancer surfaced in his bones before migrating to his lungs. Two years of chemo and he was gone the spring of Kieran’s junior year of college
Nobody offered a plaque for that kind of death.
They passed a room numbered 140. There was no plaque on this door, just a number. He’d never worked in this building before last week—but the room number struck a chord. In a different Hanford lab building miles away was another room 140—the first room Kieran entered as a Hanford worker two years before. Kieran was Taylor’s rookie assistant then, and the supervisor had started him out in a “clean” computer lab—one that wasn’t supposed to be too crapped up because they’d never handled radioactive materials in the space.
But before they passed through the door, Taylor’d looked him in the eye and told Kieran to forget about “clean” rooms or “crapped up” ones. It was fine, Taylor had said, to reserve the HEPA mask just for emergencies, “’cause you can’t really do your job with it on anyway.”
“But other’n that,” the big man had commanded through that thick brush of lip hair he was so proud of, “you act like every room has the potential to dose you. I know they trained you that t
urbines in all these buildings pull the air through filters to scrub it—and that’s true. But if those filters caught everything, you and I’d be out of a job. Fact is, there’s hot dust in the cleanest room and any mote of it could end up in your bones or your thyroid. Think of this place like it’s full of black widow spiders: you don’t want to touch anything you don’t have to.”
Then, to underline his point, Taylor’d pointed up at the nearest sample of dark tape that lined all the Hanford walls at the eight foot level. “And don’t you ever let me catch you climbing ladders or standin’ on chairs above that line. Never. Because the dust on the light fixtures up there’s as thick as in your grandmother’s attic. You take in a mouthful of that and a girl’d be a fool to ever kiss you again.”
Those words rang in Kieran’s ears that first shift, making him almost tiptoe into the darkness of “clean” room 140 in that other building. Then Taylor had flipped the light switch behind him and Kieran had stopped like he’d stepped knee deep into soft tar.
Fat computer monitors and plastic keyboards lined tables and desks scattered around the room, each covered with the faintest layer of dust. Tools lay on benches like they’d just dropped from workers’ fingers. A calendar from the late 1980s decorated a wall next to lab coats still hung on hooks.
Kieran stood frozen, waiting for a shift of ghostly workers to shoulder past him, each layered in that same frosting of powdered dust, to pull on the old lab coats and take their places before the silent computers and benches.
Taylor had walked past and laughed at Kieran’s expression. “Relax. The crews left things like this after their last shift in ’89 ’cause no one told them they weren’t coming back. Nobody knew when, or if, they were coming back. Then the Berlin wall came down and poof. Job done.”
That conversation was two years ago. He still thought about it before every shift.
Kieran’s mind returned to the present as Taylor, a step ahead of him, reached the stairwell of LB5. He followed his supervisor up the dimly lit stairs to the third-floor hallway. There they stopped. Taylor smoothed his moustache with a finger and thumb. Then he handed Kieran a clipboard and testing equipment.
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