Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  He went into the Fixed Base Operation. A couple of other pilots were hanging around, guys waiting for their jetsetters to get poured out of their limos. He could have made steady money flying bigs, but he wanted to be his own man and no way could he afford a jet. It was a struggle to make the payments he did have. But it was his plane. His life. He went when he was ready to go. Or not.

  Nobody said anything when he came in. Why should they? They knew what he was, a guy on the bottom rung, fingernails dug into his airplane, scratching through the sky on fumes and maxed-out credit cards.

  He checked his flight plan, then went into the hangar. He was looking for something, he supposed. Not really thinking about it directly. Just looking.

  There were a couple of mechanics there. “Hey,” he said. “I’m the guy moving the chickens.”

  They were heads into a Citation that looked like it had a hydraulic leak in the left-wing leading-edge controls. That would’ve made for some complicated landings, for sure.

  “Yeah,” one of them finally responded.

  Todd didn’t want to crack the cargo, but the truth be told, it was bothering him. He’d four-one-oned Pahrump and hadn’t located anybody called Gorling. Of course, maybe he was staying at one of the whorehouses or a motel, who the hell knew?

  But chickens? Come on, the guy was paying close to a thousand bucks, here.

  “Who brought them in?”

  “Christ. Lemme think. Coulda been—yeah, a fridge truck.”

  “Mexican fellas?’

  “White men, all.”

  He went back inside, spoke to the FBO operator, a girl of about thirty, dark and tired looking, with a name tag that said: “Lucy.” “I need a phone number for this chicken guy,” he said. “Lemme see the manifest.”

  No phone number for the receiving party. So what was supposed to happen? He just dumped the crate in Pahrump and good-bye, Charlie? He’d been paid; that wasn’t the problem. But he liked things to work right. There were no tracking numbers in this business, and there wasn’t one damn thing about Mr. Gorling on this manifest.

  “The hell with it,” Todd said.

  “Isn’t there a Chicken Ranch in Pahrump?” Lucy asked.

  “Funny girl.”

  “Chickens are a funny cargo for you guys. I could understand caviar or wine, but not chickens.”

  “Unless it’s not chickens.”

  There was a silence, then. The two pilots lounging in the ready room both perked up. Everybody knew the rules. You had to report suspicious cargo. But was it suspicious? Todd had five hundred dollars of his profit riding on the poultry, so he didn’t want a bunch of FBI crew cuts out here fisting the cavities. On the other hand, he was damned if he was going to move illegal drugs. Legal ones he carried all the time. One of his main money cargoes, matter of fact.

  “So maybe I gotta crack the chickens, seeing as it’s not a good manifest.”

  “You try Information?”

  “I did indeed. No cigar.”

  She hit an intercom button on her desk. “Marty, Julio? Captain Freighter needs to crack his chickens.”

  He could hear her words echoing in the hangar, could hear, also, the snickers of the jet pilots.

  He went back out on the apron, looked sadly at his beautifully loaded baby. She was all ready to go, looking like she was born for the sky.

  The two mechanics came across from the hangar, moving slow. Who wanted to manhandle cargo? Not their jobs.

  “Sorry about this, guys,” he said. “I got a sour manifest.”

  Then Lucy came out. She had a weather fax in her hand. “I got a line moving in,” she said. He looked northward and saw it, the flickering of lightning just below the horizon. Ahead of it would be winds, strong ones. He knew his front-range flying. He had about twenty minutes to get in the air and get out of here, or he wasn’t going upstairs for hours.

  “Well, fellas,” he said, “looks like you’re gonna get to earn your money another way.” He took the FBO’s copy of the manifest. “Oops,” he said, jotting down a phone number beside Mr. Gorling’s name. “Bastard gave us a dud contact number. How were we to know?”

  He got in his plane and pulled the door closed.

  Ten minutes later he was rotating. Ahead, as he rose, he saw the squall line racing down the range, alive with lightning.

  He banked west, and flew off into the stars.

  A thousand feet below him a man watched Todd’s plane rising into the sky. The man had been trained, and carefully, to recognize the silhouette of the Cheyenne. He got into his car and drew his cell phone from his pocket.

  For some moments, he studied his watch. Then he made a call. “Mother,” he said, in his soft, calm voice, the voice of the dutiful son, “I am nearly home.”

  4

  THE BRASADA

  Jim had quickly found the spot where the kids had been dropped, but then he’d lost the trail. They had been radioactive because they were near something radioactive, but it wasn’t leaking particles, and frankly, that made it look more and more like an X-ray isotope. It could have been that illegals had been concealed behind a shipment of perfectly legal isotopes and the children, with their small bodies, had been sickened by the radiation and tossed off the truck to die.

  However, he had been to all local public transportation hubs, which consisted exclusively of bus stops. There was an airport but no regular flights. Conceivably, the bomb could have been shipped as air cargo, but he had found a faint radiation signature at the Kerrville Bus Company station on Jefferson, in the cargo-holding area. The bus company had no record of any isotopes or X-ray equipment being moved, so he had logged this as evidence to be followed up.

  He couldn’t personally track down every bus that had left the station in the past two weeks. It could be done by the FBI, but it was a dangerously slow way of working, no matter how efficient they might be. What they would most need to know was exactly when the device had arrived at the bus depot. That would narrow the search to just a few busses, and enable them to catch up with the bomb . . . if there was a bomb.

  To find this out, he needed to investigate the two bridges that crossed the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. If X-ray isotopes had been brought in, they would have been logged. Both bridges had advanced spectroscopic portal radiation monitors, ASPs, installed on them. This was state-of-the-art equipment, and after some false starts in the early going the system was testing to a high degree of reliability. In any case, if the plutonium was not detectable because of shielding, the presence of an unusual mass such as a lead container in any crossing vehicle would have triggered an immediate alert and a search of the vehicle.

  He hoped that his visit to the bridges wouldn’t make the Customs and Border boys uneasy, wondering who the hell he was and tripping him up every way they could. You think ordinary people don’t like bureaucrats. Bureaucrats really don’t like bureaucrats. As he drove, he opened his briefcase and fished out another set of creds, one of the many that he had developed for work along the Texas-Mexico border. Strictly speaking, identifying himself to a federal officer with a false credential was illegal, but his ambiguous status enabled him to get away with a lot. Annoying, but also useful at a moment like this.

  He turned into the station parking area, which was full. He pulled up behind a couple of dusty official Blazers and cut his engine.

  “Excuse me, no parking; you’ll have to get that vehicle in motion.”

  Jim showed him his Customs and Border inspector credential. “What’s your name, Officer?”

  The guy looked over the cred. Then he looked up at Jim. The eyes of this very large young man were nasty little pins, full of hostile suspicion. “Arthur Kenneally,” he said at last.

  Kenneally was maybe twenty-two, spit and polish all the way, although heavy. And sad, Jim thought, and wondered if that meant something. “I need to take a quick look at your ASP,” he said.

  Arthur stared at him.

  “You have an advanced spectroscopic portal radiation mon
itor on this bridge. An ASP. I need to check it out.”

  “There’s no ASP on this bridge.”

  Jim was practiced at concealing surprise, but not this time, and he hoped that the flush he felt surging up his neck would not be visible in the parking-lot lights. “Are you sure?” It was all he could think to ask.

  “I work here.”

  “What about the Camino Bridge?”

  “Mister, there’s nothin’ like that on either bridge.”

  “Are they out for maintenance?”

  “Look, there are no ASPs here. None whatsoever. Do you get that? The number is zero. And you’re double-parked, Sir. If we need to go hunting, we gotta scramble these vehicles.”

  Jim watched him. Why was he so defensive?

  “Sir?”

  “That’s okay, Kenneally. I’m moving out.” A tingling crept through his body, his muscles tensed. He returned to his car, backed out, turned around, and drove into town. It was hard to stay on the road, hard even to think clearly. He recognized that he was panicking. But he had a major problem here, no question.

  Homeland Security had placed ASPs on every bridge that crossed the Rio Grande. They had been problematic at first, but as improved devices became available, the bridges had been high priority. He’d been shown the deployment records by Cynthia Spears. But the records were wrong, which meant only one thing—at some level, there had been sabotage. Either the devices had never actually been deployed or they had been removed.

  Was it local? Did that account for Officer Kenneally’s manner—he knew that the monitors had been ditched, and therefore was part of some sort of illegal group, probably accepting bribes to allow trucks to pass without proper search? Or was the problem farther up the line, in Dallas, where the deployment of the ASPs had been managed, or even in Washington, where the whole national program was directed?

  This felt an awful lot like what had happened in southern Russia, when Jim discovered that facilities listed as secured by the National Nuclear Security Administration were, in fact, not secure at all. And then—because of what was going on with Brewster Jennings and possibly the NNSA itself—his reports would sink into the system and die.

  This had to be reported, of course, and maybe with the same lack of effect, but his mission wasn’t to fix the problem on the bridge or even investigate it. It was his job to find what had already been brought in, and he needed to remain focused on that, because lack of information about when the truck had crossed was going to be a serious challenge.

  The mere fact that this had been done to these bridges increased his conviction that this was not about X-ray isotopes.

  Time was the enemy now, and he drove harder even than he had coming down. He would return not to Dallas but to San Antonio, where he would engage the FBI as fully as he could manage. He didn’t have proof, but he certainly had evidence enough to justify an investigation of what was going on at those crossings and an extensive search for any possible nuclear devices that may have been allowed into the country.

  In addition to the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Emergency Operations needed to be informed, and OEO needed to deploy all thirty-six of their teams to this region, armed with all possible radiation-detection and explosive-suppression equipment. The two FBI teams that specialized in disabling firing systems would need to be put on full alert. The staff at G-Tunnel, the five-thousand-foot-deep shaft where the device might need to be detonated, had to be warned that they were liable to receive a hot nuke within hours.

  He was out on the highway now, driving into the dark, heading for San Antonio as fast as he could go, and it was here that the car took the first blow.

  For an instant it shot forward; then there was another crash from behind as he instinctively hit the brakes. Struggling for control, he gripped the wheel. What was this, a shredded tire? A glance in the rearview mirror revealed only blackness.

  A third crash knocked his head forward and back, and he understood that this was not about the tires. Somebody was ramming him from behind.

  He switched on his high beams and accelerated, drawing away from the other vehicle, feeling his heart match the drumming of the engine.

  So it was Customs and Borders, had to be. That bastard hadn’t been a pissed-off bureaucrat, he’d been a scared-shitless crook. That would be a Customs and Border Protection truck back there, most likely, with Kenneally in it.

  He smashed the accelerator to the floor, drawing farther away from his pursuer.

  Long experience told him not to think more about who was back there. Speculations like that only slowed you down.

  Given the fact that he might not get out of this, he needed to report at once. He flipped open his cell phone—and froze, horrified, when he saw that there were no signal bars.

  His pursuers had known to wait for the dead spot, of course.

  He had to get this report moving!

  Wham! This time the car swerved, went up on two wheels, and almost left the road. As he fought the steering, something in the rear began clattering. Flashes in the mirror told him that his bumper was dragging, making sparks. Another blow might split the gas tank, and then this little game would be over.

  His mouth was dry now, his palms sweating enough to add to the danger of losing control.

  Wham!

  The car shuddered; he felt the wheels slewing, regained control, but barely. No smell of gas, and—at least at the moment—no flames.

  Then the rear window flew to pieces, spraying him with tiny bullets of glass. The flashes that accompanied it told him that he was being fired on with an automatic weapon.

  Back to the drawing boards on the identity of his pursuers, because he’d seen that particular spray of light before, and that was a Kalashnikov, not exactly the kind of weapon used by Customs and Borders. There were incidents of ranchers reporting men with these weapons moving up the coyote trails, but they were drug runners, not U.S. officers.

  He felt that coldness along the neck that comes with being profoundly exposed to a gun. Too familiar.

  It chattered again, its rasp now clearer and closer.

  He took the only choice left to him, and veered off the road into what Texans called the brasada, the brush country. Behind him, he heard the squeal of tires, then the roar of the truck’s engine as the driver geared down to go off-road. Jim could feel his car wallowing in the soft soil.

  The Kalashnikov rattled again—and suddenly there was light behind him, a lot of light, flickering. They’d gotten his tank and he was on fire. Now he had only the gas left in the line, maybe a couple of miles, maybe less, and if that fire ran up the line, he would need to get out of here fast.

  As he continued on, he began to hear the fire, a sound like a fluttering flag, and smell it, too, the sweetness of burning gas, the nasty sharpness of the carpet in the trunk.

  He had to keep maneuvering to avoid contorted mesquite trees and that was slowing him down and he thought that there was a significant risk of an explosion, so he opened the door and rolled out of the car and kept rolling, and the truck passed him at a distance of six inches.

  He scrambled to his feet and blundered off into the tangle of thorny mesquite branches, cacti, and, he had no doubt, snakes. Both his training and experience made it clear that he was in an endgame situation. His pursuers were heavily armed. Already they were off the truck and he could hear them moving in the brush, speaking quick, quiet Spanish: “Over there, Raul. Three meters, that’s it. Forward.”

  He had the uneasy thought that these were military personnel. Mexico was a complex society, the evolution of half a millennium of exquisite corruption. Certainly the military could be involved in something like this. That would be an important route of investigation, assuming that he survived.

  But he had to survive—had to. If they broke this one little link in the chain, the bomb would be free and clear. He cursed himself for hitting the road before making his emergency ca
lls.

  He smelled the sourness of new sweat, the sharp sweetness of old, some sort of liquor, and many cigarettes. There was a human being within feet of his position, and upwind of him. He could taste this man, and the fear that would make him an animal in an instant.