Astride a Pink Horse (34 page)

“Your dad?”

“No other than. And you know what it got him? A reprimand. But it also got the Vietcong a little present in the long run. A chemical weapon known as napalm,” Bernadette said, smiling.

“Looks to me like you’re determined to follow your dad’s lead.”

“Always have,” Bernadette said proudly.

Thinking,
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
, Cozy continued studying the topo map on the screen as they shot up out of the canyon. “Guess this is what happens when you pays your dime,” he said, his stomach doing somersaults as gravity slammed him into the seat back.

Rikia had initially planned to detonate his bomb in front of the Irradiation of Chips and Electronics ICE House Memorial in Los
Alamos, the site where the nuclear components of the original prototype nuclear-charged Trinity device were assembled. Several months earlier he’d changed his mind, however, deciding that the contamination he was aiming for didn’t require detonation of his bomb in what now amounted to the town square.

As he sat sweating inside the cab of the U-Haul in a heavily forested canyon six miles outside Los Alamos, he thought through the final bits and pieces of his plan. He’d be miles away when he triggered his device—outfitted in protective radiation gear and headed for Colorado. He hadn’t had a chance to test-drive the Volkswagen he’d purchased, but he’d started it several times, so he knew that it ran. He expected that the car would easily and swiftly get him back home to Wyoming and out of harm’s way.

He felt a sense of relief as he got out of the cab to go check on his protective gear, the Volkswagen, and the cobalt-60 source material one final time. When he thought he heard a plane overhead, he glanced up toward a canopy of evergreen limbs and the unmistakable sound of jet engines. Obscured by the tree cover, the plane couldn’t be seen, but it was there, flying low enough above the treetops to cause him concern. There perhaps was some kind of last-minute obstacle to his plan. As suddenly as he’d heard the plane, however, it was gone.

He knew better than to chase on foot after what amounted to nothing more than a noise, and he wouldn’t chase after it in the Volkswagen or the truck. There was too much at stake for him to do so, too many unforeseen things that could happen if he did. There was nothing to suggest that the plane had been trying to spot him and nothing to indicate that the person flying it had seen
Breen’s truck. Even so, he now had something to worry about besides simply setting off his device, donning his protective gear, and speeding down the hill.

He wasn’t concerned about being caught. The two cyanide capsules in his shirt pocket were there to guard against that. His worries now were simply two. First there was the off chance that his plan, which he’d spent years piecing together, wouldn’t work and that the bomb wouldn’t go off. Glancing skyward toward the muted light, he again listened for the sound of a plane. When he heard nothing, he smiled. There was, however, a nugget of insecurity behind the smile. Insecurity born of his second, more serious worry. He couldn’t be at all certain that he or his truck hadn’t been seen by the plane.

Cozy pressed both hands against his headset and nodded excitedly. “I’m telling you, I saw the 8 plastered on the roof of that truck as plain as day, Bernadette. I didn’t see a 1, but I sure as heck spotted an 8.”

Bernadette, who’d rolled the Gulfstream belly up and over a mesa before uprighting the plane and dropping down into a canyon next to the one in which Cozy claimed he’d seen Silas Breen’s truck, said nothing. Judging from his queasiness and the ringing in his ears that they were flying either sideways or upside down, Cozy grunted, “Are we upside down?”

“We were for a little bit,” Bernadette said, leveling
Sugar
off. “When you spotted that truck, I knew I needed to reduce our engine noise pronto or have whoever was down there on the ground spot us. No better way to make sure they didn’t than to
hop over a mesa and duck down inside a canyon. That’s the problem with these Gulfstream 150s—they tend to let you know they’re coming and whine like little babies.”

With every organ below his diaphragm floating in a sea of jelly, Cozy asked, “What do you think Rikia, or Breen if he’s with him, will do now?”

Watching Cozy’s face turn parchment-paper pale, Bernadette said, “Take long, slow, deep breaths, and whatever you do, Cozy, don’t dare throw up. Good,” she said, watching Cozy comply. “Now, in answer to your question, I’m hoping that whoever’s down there in that truck stays put because in exactly eight minutes, I’m going to set
Sugar
down and we’re going to find either him or them.”

“How on earth will we know what canyon the truck’s in?”

“It’s a mile off 502 to the south and a half mile or so from the blind end of a canyon. And it’s sitting on a forest service road with a little pond to the west.”

“Are you certain?”

“Sure am. The air force used to pay me to be certain of things like that.” She nosed the Gulfstream due west. “What I need for you to do, starting right now, is to count every road that intersects 502 to the south as we make our descent. Every road, Cozy, until we land. It’s important.”

“Okay,” he said, loudly calling off, “One,” and looking for the next road. “By the way, does Los Alamos have a runway long enough to put this baby down?”

“Absolutely. And from quite a long way back. We built an atomic bomb here, remember.”

Bernadette set the Gulfstream down in Los Alamos at four minutes after six p.m. on a 5,500-foot runway that had been built in 1947 by the Atomic Energy Commission. As they taxied toward the terminal, she said to Cozy, “Remember, that’s twelve right-hand access roads down the hill from the airport’s southern boundary fence.”

Cozy shook his head. “How on earth did you spot that fence from the air?”

“Practice,” Bernadette said, looking smug and staring out the cockpit window at a man approaching the plane. “Somebody’s here to ask about our unexpected arrival. Let me do the talking, okay?”

“Your deal, Major.” Cozy snapped off a crisp salute. “While you’re dealing with them, I’ll get Freddy’s toys from the back.”

“Make it quick,” Bernadette said, wondering what additional toys besides Freddy’s motorcycle Cozy could be referring to.

Cozy nodded as the plane rolled to a stop. He’d opened the forward entry door and let down the stairway when a man with a bulging belly in a gray suit rushed up the stairs. Stopping Cozy as he headed for the rear of the plane, the man said, “I need to speak to you about your unauthorized use of airspace and your unscheduled landing, sir.”

“Talk to the pilot,” Cozy said, brushing past the indignant-looking man, who then stepped to the open door of the cockpit, looked at Bernadette, and asked sternly, “This plane yours?”

“Nope,” Bernadette deadpanned, slipping her shoes on. “Mine’s an A-10.”

All Cozy could think about as Bernadette continued to be counseled by the man in the gray suit and as he stared at Freddy’s BMW HP2, which he’d struggled to get out of the Gulfstream and down onto the tarmac, was how many times he’d watched Freddy off-load the motorcycle so effortlessly. Suddenly he was thinking about fog. Fog rising from a river bottom that ran alongside a deserted eastern Colorado road. He stood, momentarily transfixed. When he glanced down at his left leg and then back up, Bernadette was racing toward him.

“Did you finesse him?” Cozy asked.

“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.