Critical Reaction (22 page)

“Ready, sir,” one of the guards called out, pushing shut the rear hatch.

Adam nodded and walked toward the Land Rover that held Dr. Schutten’s remains.

Adam gripped the strap above the passenger door of the black Land Rover as it followed the rutted path running along the eastern base of Rattlesnake Ridge. They were far enough inside the reservation and sufficiently sheltered from the nearest highway by the ridge to permit headlights if they wished. He told the driver so, and the lights came on.

Adam adjusted the HEPA mask strapped across his nose and mouth. He never traveled through the back country of the Hanford Reservation without one. The chief of security for the project behind the wheel didn’t wear one, nor did the two other security staffers in the first Land Rover, just ahead. In fact, he’d caught the Chief’s sideways glance of humor when Adam donned his own mask.

He didn’t care. They could risk inhaling stray radiation particles out here on the reservation—where the DOE and its contractors had misplaced over a ton and a half of plutonium over the years. Adam was twenty-eight and planned for a long and prosperous life.

The lead security vehicle ahead of them rounded a rugged outcropping in the base of the ridge and slowed. Then it turned off the narrow path, making room for Adam’s, which pulled alongside.

He stepped out of the SUV and looked around the dark and silent landscape beyond the play of the headlights. In two years at Hanford, Adam had not once felt appreciation for the arid lands of the Hanford Reservation. He’d seen it often in daylight, when blue camas, black-eyed susan, and prickly pear sprinkled the brown and gray desert with color. But it wasn’t enough
compensation for miles upon miles of hot, dusty flats—with only gullies and round-topped ridges to break up the monotony of the place. This was the perfect locale to dump radioactive waste, he thought: this place and radiation were made for each other.

But then he was in a foul mood. Though he’d elected to come here tonight, he never liked driving out onto the reservation to the “pit.”

The Chief had parked so that the car lamps lit up the terrain for fifty feet at the base of the gradual slope they faced. The other SUV’s lights were on high, broadening the illumination another ninety feet up the slope of the hill.

Even after decades and in the near darkness at his feet, Adam could make out the faint dips in the ground where the temporary rail ties had once lead up to the illuminated hillside. Behind them, Adam knew, the marks grew fainter the further east one walked, as the ground grew harder—until their traces disappeared completely half a mile from this spot.

The Chief and other security man were already donning Demron hazmat suits. He joined them, pulling on the dark, lightweight radiation gear and crowning it with the mask that covered his head with its own filtration system extending from the faceplate like a boar’s snout.

Adam was still adjusting his mask when he was startled to see, in the dim starlight to the west, the movement of large creatures across the horizon. Through his feet, Adam felt the ground vibrate faintly from their passing.

“It’s wild horses, sir,” the Chief said calmly. “Mustangs. We must’ve startled them. They come through this draw on their way west. They get through the fence lines occasionally and muck up the motion sensors. They’ll stop west of here where there’s grass and water, and they get rounded up in the daylight.”

Relieved, Adam finished settling his suit around him. The Chief checked to see that all of them were fully sealed in their protective suits. Then, from a canvas bag inside the Rover, he
produced flashlights, which he passed to each of them. Adam took his and then reached back into the vehicle for an electronic pad the shape of a small notebook.

“Let’s get the good doctor underground,” Adam said, his voice magnified through the filter.

The Chief led the way. He reached into the open SUV and grasped a handle on the end of the lead bag, pulling it out with a grunt. A second man grabbed the far end just before it slid from the vehicle onto the ground. Together they trudged up the face of the slope.

Nearly thirty yards up the hill, they stopped, dropping the bag onto the ground. The Chief pulled out his flashlight and searched for a moment before bending down and feeling along the sloping soil at his feet with both hands. After a moment his fingers stopped, then tightened around something under the ground’s surface. He stood with a grunt at the effort, lifting a heavy camouflage fascia from the slope, then pulling it back and away. Inches of accumulated dirt and rocks scattered from its surface.

The Chief moved aside, allowing the car lights to illuminate an eight-foot square of dark gray iron underneath, its shape smooth except for a raised plate along one edge. Adam stooped and pressed the flat pad in his hand against the mating metal plate on the slab, then used his free hand to type a code into the keypad that topped the instrument. It required some effort through the Demron gloves, but after three tries he heard a clang of sliding metal from beneath the plate.

As Adam stepped to one side, the Chief and his men grasped inset handles and pulled the slab up and over, resting the hinged iron door atop the fascia. Then, flashlights in hand, the Chief and one man hoisted the bag and stepped into the opening revealed in the face of the slope.

Their feet clanged on the metal staircase within as they disappeared. Adam waited. He heard the muffled footsteps halt,
then the echoes of a faint thud of the heavy bag striking a metal surface. Scraping sounds followed, like something was being moved. Then the flashlights reappeared, ascending out of the hole as the team reemerged into the cool air.

The chief was about to close the metal door when Adam stopped him. He pulled his own flashlight from his pocket, flicked it on, and stepped into the opening.

With slow, careful steps, Adam descended into the darkness, splaying the light from side to side. At the bottom of the metal stairs, he turned the flashlight’s glare from the ground to the structures directly ahead of him.

He’d only been there once before in the night, in the hours when there was no sunlight from the open door overhead and the only illumination was the spot of a flashlight. That solitary circle of light played now against the white surface of the two metal boxcars, reflecting a ghostly hue around the entirety of the small cavern.

The rear boxcar was closed, its door locked shut. Behind that door, Adam knew, lay debris and scrap from the Project—material from the LB5 accident that preceded the big one last October.

He shone the flashlight on the other boxcar directly ahead. Its cargo door was fully open.

Dr. Schutten’s body bag lay on the floor of this boxcar. It rested next to dozens of neat piles of debris retrieved and carted here from the October LB5 explosion. Adam knew what each pile represented: he’d catalogued them himself.

On the furthest side of the boxcar, beyond the debris, the flashlight caught the bulky form of the other three bags placed there nine months before. The families of the other three researchers had long since said their good-byes to sealed caskets, empty except for ballast. Given the cover story that they’d died in a fiery car crash, no one had questioned the need for closed caskets. They couldn’t possibly have returned the first three bod
ies to the families, not with the radiation levels they’d absorbed in the explosion.

It’d been easier dealing with Dr. Schutten. He had no close friends or relatives. No one awaited his final remains. And placing Dr. Schutten’s body here until they’d decided the final disposal site for all of them was as logical as it was convenient.

Adam directed the flashlight further to his right, illuminating the locomotive coupled to the boxcars. Only the rear half of the engine had been excavated for Project Wolffia. Half in and half out of the surrounding soil, it looked as though it had been driven headlong into the wall of the cavern. He took a step closer.

The rear access door to the locomotive still bore the heavy chain and padlock that Adam had placed there himself. Good.

Satisfied, Adam took the steps back up the metal staircase. As soon as he emerged, the Chief and his men closed the iron door, covering it with the heavily weighted fascia. The Chief’s crew used a spade he’d retrieved from his Land Rover and scattered shovelfuls of dirt evenly across its surface. Then they all retreated to the SUVs, where one of the guards produced a canister and sprayed the surfaces of their suits for decontamination.

Ten minutes later, Adam was feeling the jolts and bumps of the dirt path leading back to the highway.

He’d be pleased when they reclosed the pit for good. His predecessor on the project had overseen the disinterment of the “white train” as a storage site for the waste and byproducts of Project Wolffia. But it was his problem now. His unease was less about radiation exposure than the stark consequences if the contents of the train were ever discovered. There was enough illegal about the Project itself without the DOE or someone else discovering the human remains interred here in the buried white train.

He looked out at the passing shadows of terrain. Foote never expressed concern about accidental discovery of the pit. The
vice-president had always been more concerned about an intentional betrayal by Project workers, like these security guards. Adam wasn’t troubled by that prospect. Those in the know had been selected with great care: their psychological profiles examined by Dr. Janniston, subjected to repeated interviews—even their financial status and stability vetted. The chief of security was from Los Alamos, a third-generation nuclear defense worker himself. Most of the remaining Project security team was from Hanford—but the one commonality they shared was an unshakable belief in America’s need for nuclear protection as deep as Cameron Foote’s. It was a belief that diminished concern about the precise nature of Project Wolffia—so long as they were assured it served the mission.

“My father worked at Hanford,” the Chief said, breaking his characteristic silence. “He once told me he remembered when this train was buried.”

“Really,” Adam answered, only mildly interested.

“Yep. He saw it loaded once, too. He said the white trains would pull into the loading area around ten o’clock at night and they’d bring out the lead containers with the plutonium, easing it into the cars like it was made of glass. It was loud during loading, he said, because the filtered air coolers were rolling all the time on the cars, running cool air through them to keep the plutonium from overheating. It was a new moon and the night was so dark it was like watching some kind of spirit fly off when that bright white train pulled out. He said the route took it along the north shore of the Columbia to down near Celilo, then south and east to Rocky Flats.”

“Mmm. That must’ve been a sight,” Adam said distractedly.

The chief went silent as he maneuvered the rough road. “You mentioned earlier that we might need to put some pressure on Patrick Martin,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“So do we go ahead with that?”

He thought about the skill of Dr. Janniston. Should he wait to allow Janniston to induce Martin to change his statement? Or should he couple Janniston’s efforts with more aggressive measures by the security team?

There were risks involved in overplaying things. Besides, Dr. Janniston would get Martin to change his report; Adam had seen the psychologist at work when they’d screened the workers, and he was convinced of it. If that failed, then he’d have the security team apply additional outside pressure. And if all that was unsuccessful, in the last extremity they’d crush Martin’s credibility with Janniston’s psychological report.

“Be prepared to put some pressure on Martin, but wait until I give the word,” Adam said.

The Chief nodded. “I’m told Mr. Martin’s family goes way back to the town of Hanford itself.”

“Then he should be cooperating,” Adam responded.

“A good family man, too,” the Chief said, almost under his breath.

Was that a tone of reluctance? Adam felt the weariness of his pace the past few weeks weighing him down. He set his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes.

“Then if it comes to it, I suggest that’s where you start,” Adam said as he drifted asleep. “With his family.”