Critical Reaction (39 page)

Emily was the rider in the family, but Ryan wasn’t a complete novice when it came to horses. At a glance he saw that these animals were well fed and cared for, but bore the ragged coats and manes of wild horses. “Where are the saddles and bridles?”
he called ahead to Ted. Ted didn’t answer as he guided the four of them with their horses over a low ridge. On the other side they walked down a short slope, at the base of which stood Heather. She turned as they neared.

Here beyond the reach of the truck headlights, the desert appeared darker still. Only as Ryan came closer did he see that Heather was standing next to a fence line. At her side, the strands of the fence were broken where they intersected with a metal pole.

“This fence is old,” Ted said, pointing to the gap. “Early on we scouted out places where we could breach it and make it look like animals discovered the breaches or knocked the fence down themselves. It helps that this outer fence is not a security priority anymore—and they’re years behind in repairs. We identified a couple dozen of these spots, but we’re down to four or five unused ones.”

Ryan felt his stomach growing edgier at the prospect of actually moving onto the reservation grounds. He watched as Heather walked back and handed a tool to Ray, taking the rope of his horse in exchange.

“Ted, before we step onto these grounds I’ve got to know where we’re going,” Ryan finally said, resolved.

The rancher turned to face Ryan as though gauging his seriousness. He glanced at his watch, then back to Ryan. At last, he looked at each of the horses in turn before lifting his hat and running a palm across his braided hair.

“Since the 1940s,” Ted began, his voice now falling to a near whisper in the hushed night air, “the radioactive contamination on the Hanford Reservation has created a phenomena of glowing wildlife—rabbits, bucks, sagebrush. Hunters have reported it for decades. Scientific studies confirm it. It’s caused by radiation in the soil and water taken up by the plants, the plants consumed by animals. There are patterns for it, linked to where there’s buried waste and contaminated water.”

“Six years ago, we began to see a new pattern: irradiated animals and plants on the southern and southwestern borders of the reservation where they hadn’t been reported before. Heather, my wife, and I began to catalog it with nighttime observations on horseback. The patterns pointed to a large new disposal site in an area near Priest and Rattlesnake Ridges on the Hanford grounds. We triangulated a general location and then, in the last nine months, found the site. We’re going there tonight.”

Ryan’s anxiety wasn’t relieved by this new information. Questions crowded his mind. “How many times have you done this already?” he asked.

Ted shook his head, holding up his wrist with the watch. “Ryan, it’s eleven forty. The ride from here is about two hours; another two hours from the place we’re headed to the draw where Ray will pick us up. So we either leave now or Ray here will take you back to the ranch while we get this done.”

Ryan looked at Emily. He could see at a glance that if he left now he’d leave without her. Besides, he couldn’t back away now. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Ted turned and grabbed his horse’s mane in both fists. “Wait,” Ryan suddenly called. “Are we going bareback?”

Ted pulled himself up, throwing a leg over his mount’s back with a speed and strength Ryan wouldn’t have thought possible for a man of his age. Once he’d centered himself, he tied the rope loosely around his waist then looked over his shoulder at Ryan, still on the ground.

“Yep,” he answered.

“Why bareback?” Ryan asked plaintively.

“We can’t take saddles in case we have to leave the horses and go to cover,” Ted answered, straightening his hat. “Then, if the horses are found, there’ll be no sign of the riders. You can keep your rope and use it to steady yourself. But if security comes, you’ve got to get off the horse and take it with you. Let the horse go on alone from there. Find a low spot and stay there. Then
we’ll send someone in to retrieve you the next evening. It’s risky, having two fence breaks on consecutive nights, but we’ve done it once before. And another thing, as we’re riding, hunch low and close to the horse’s withers. They still have a few heat sensors scattered around the grounds. If they pick up a heat signal, we want it to look as much like a riderless horse as possible.”

The talk about security filled Ryan with a sudden certainty that every word they were speaking must be amplified across the desert right to the nearest guard station. For a brief moment, that thought even drove away his fear of making this ride bareback.

“And what’s the contingency if we get caught?” Emily spoke up. Ryan was relieved that her voice was tinged with the same nervousness that he felt.

Sitting atop the tall horse, Ted only shrugged. “In that case, we’ll just have to find a good lawyer.”

To Ryan, balancing on the horse’s back in the dark felt like drifting in an oarless dinghy in the open ocean. Still, his horse knew its way and was deceptively well trained; he could have been on a trail ride for all the ease of guiding it. And the terrain was fairly flat, with only a few hills and gullies to cross.

All he had to do was hang on. Tight.

Clinging to the mare’s mane, the only sounds Ryan could hear were the snorts of the horses and the wind shaking brush or kicking up sand. The only sights were variations of shadow. In the lead was Heather’s horse, followed by Emily’s. Ryan was behind his daughter, with Ted presumably in the rear—though Ryan didn’t turn to check, convinced that he’d fall.

Then he felt Ted’s presence as his horse came abreast. “About a month or so before the October explosion, we had a breakthrough trying to tie down this site’s exact location,” the rancher said. “There was a lot of activity out here when we were making our nighttime observations. Occasional headlights. Frequent
engine noises. We think they had a smaller experimental problem about that time, maybe another accident. Trân thinks that was why your client was at LB5 on October sixteenth.”

“Why would an earlier test failure have placed Kieran on the site?” Ryan whispered.

Ted leaned closer. “Dr. Trân has analyzed the workforce at LB5 for the past few years, from documents Pauline Strand got in discovery. They’re all long-term employees at LB5—most from Hanford, though some are transfers from other defense facilities. They even have their own security personnel at the site. Men who never go anywhere else. We think that most or all of the permanent LB5 workers are aware of the experimentation in the lower levels—though probably not the details. They likely think it’s government sanctioned. But our theory is that the small accident caused some injuries on site, leaving Covington unexpectedly short. Since they had to show DOE a full roster of maintenance and security personnel, for a short time in October they were forced to bring some people on site who weren’t on their team.”

“Including Kieran, and Poppy and the rest?”

“You mean Patrick Martin? We didn’t know his name until you learned it at trial, but yes. It’s the only explanation we can come up with for the risk of bringing Kieran and the others on-site. Then the October explosion made the place we’re headed to a regular visiting site for several weeks.”

They came over a small hill, and Ryan saw Heather slow her horse and point low past the horse’s withers.

As he came closer, the starlight was enough for Ryan to make out faint car tracks on the ground ten feet below them, directed west. With a kick, Heather got her horse moving again, following the tracks.

A hundred yards ahead they rounded a ridge. Heather brought her horse to a halt again before sliding off its flank to the ground. She untied her rope from her waist and cast it around the horse’s
neck, handing this lead to her father before ascending the sloping ground a few yards away.

Heather stopped halfway up the slope, scuffing her foot in the dirt and then dropping to her knees on the gentle slope and rustling with her fingers in the loose earth. After a moment, her fingers seemed to get purchase. She looked up at her grandfather.

“C’mon and help,” Ted grunted in Ryan’s direction as he slid from his horse.

Emily took all four horses’ ropes as Ryan walked to where Heather and her grandfather were crouched. Kneeling, he dug his fingers into the ground where Ted motioned.

Immediately he could feel it. There was a lip of heavy, weighted cloth here, under the loose soil. At another signal from Ted, they each rose with a handful of the cloth in hand, scattering dirt as it pulled up and away from the slope.

As they set the cover to the ground, Ryan stepped back from the space revealed.

Beneath the overturned earth was a darker surface, smooth and blacker than the surrounding soil. A light suddenly cut the darkness and Ryan turned to see Ted cupping a flashlight in his hand, pointing toward the dark space.

“It’s a door,” Ted said. “Cut into the underlying rock face here.” Then he pointed to a rectangular impression on one side. “That’s a magnetic lock.”

“What’s underneath the door?” Ryan asked.

“The trash of Project Wolffia,” Heather said quietly.

Ryan shook his head. “What’s Project Wolffia?”

“Some of our . . . friends in Sherman overheard that phrase used by persons we believe were scientists on the project. We think it’s their name for the project. Wolffia is the name of the smallest blossoming flower in the world.”

Scientists with a sense of humor, Ryan thought. Or irony.

“So how do you know the trash from the project’s under here?” Emily called up the slope.

“Other than the observations I already told you about,” Ted said, “we’ve brought Geiger counters. The radiation levels are safe here on the surface, but they’ve gone up the past year. A lot. Then, around the October explosion, we found that shard I showed you, plus a couple more smaller ones. We must have just missed crossing paths with a hurried disposal trip, because it was the first and only time we found debris here on the surface. We believe it’s from the casing for the chemical trigger—the one that exploded in October when Kieran was in the building. That material sealed it for Dr. Trân’s conclusion about what they’re doing at LB5.”

It was cold out tonight, but Ryan scarcely noticed in his growing excitement. If Pollock and his granddaughter were right—and it was all starting to make sense now—then underneath this door was the proof he needed to win Kieran’s case. He was standing over the evidence that would turn this jury on a dime.

“So how do we get inside?”

Heather shook her head. “We have no way to open this.”

He couldn’t have heard that right. “There’s got to be a way,” he protested.

It was Ted’s turn to shake his head now. “We tried to see if we could get a duplicate magnetic key to open it, but this is a sophisticated, programmed mechanism. There’s no way for us to get a duplicate key or break in.”

“Then we get the authorities out here and force them to open it up,” Emily said.

Ted shook his head again. “If we go to the authorities, we have to admit we’ve been on the grounds. We’re more likely to get arrested than convince DOE to search this place. And even if we’re successful, by the time we can convince anyone to take us seriously, Covington will have arranged to close this up for good.”

Ryan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. What was the point of coming out here, taking all this risk, if there was no way to use the evidence under their feet? “Well, we can use
that shard,” Ryan pressed. “Have Dr. Trân identify it at trial. It might be enough for Judge Johnston to let us inspect LB5—and eventually gather enough evidence to get into this debris pile. It could make Kieran’s case.”

“Not so fast,” Ted answered firmly, turning fully toward Ryan in the dark. “We wish Kieran the best, but winning his case isn’t what this is about. The reason we offered to help Kieran was to create an opportunity to prove the existence of Wolffia. We hoped your case would get us a tour of the LB5 rooms where the experiments have gone on, and give Dr. Trân a chance to develop more proof of the project. The important thing here is to gather enough evidence to get DOE’s attention and get Project Wolffia shut down for good, along with any future plans Covington might have for secret research at Hanford.”

He pointed to the ground. “But like I said before, if we move too soon, make it clear we know about this place while Covington can still manipulate security on the reservation, they’ll just remove the debris and bury this site so there’s no sign of it. Not only do we fail to shut down Wolffia, we reveal our presence out here and lose years of work. That doesn’t do either of us any good.”

Which was why they’d stepped so gingerly into the litigation in the first place, Ryan thought.

They stood silently in the dark for several minutes until Ted said they should be leaving. Together, they replaced the cover over the door and spread dirt back across its surface. Ted took care to kick away the signs of their footsteps as Heather walked to the horses, taking the ropes from Emily’s hand and examining each animal in turn. “I think we should give them a little more rest,” she called up the slope.