P Deutermann - The Moonpool

A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the command van, and Carter beckoned Ari over. I went with him.

“You were right,” Carter said. “It’s water. Or some kind of radioactive fluids pooled on the trailer frame, underneath. Not the container. Which brings up my next question.”

“Just an educated guess,” Ari said. “Based on the recent incident downtown. We’re assuming that was water, too, because the victim drank it.”

“Damn. Can your people help us decontaminate?”

“Yep. I’ll send for a foam generator. They’ll spray the entire underside of the trailer and then wait for the foam to harden. Then it can be broken off as a solid, bagged, and taken back to our low-level waste holding area.”

Carter looked vastly relieved. “Should we sweep the entire pier?” he asked.

“Have you searched inside the container itself?”

Carter shook his head. “That was next,” he said.

“Okay, do that and let my guys sweep whatever comes out,” Ari said. “Then I’d sweep the ship that container came off of, and I’d suggest you talk to and sweep all those guys watching us right now up there, if that’s the ship.” He pointed at the row of oriental faces sixty feet above us. To a man, they all vanished.

“No problem,” Carter said, opening his flip-radio and barking out some orders. Moments later, the huge gantry crane rumbled into life and rolled down the pier to where the ship’s gangway was positioned. A crew of hard hats emerged out of the darkness and attached cables to the gangway, and then the crane just lifted it off the ship. Whoever was onboard was going to stay there or go for a night swim in the Cape Fear River.

One of the customs agents in the van stuck his head out and told Carter that the FBI was at the main gate and inbound.

I looked sideways at Ari, and he understood. He said that he would stay there to coordinate the decontamination team’s efforts, and that we outlanders should make our creep. I saw Tony and Pardee standing under a light tower a hundred yards or so down the pier. I went back to the car and let the shepherds out, and then we walked down to join them, giving the spill scene a wide berth.

“What’d they find?” Tony asked.

“It sounds like it’s the truck and trailer, not the container, but of course it could have dripped down from the container. It’s a mystery right now. You guys see anything of interest?”

“Lots of ladders,” Pardee said. He pointed to the edge of the concrete handling pier, which itself was a hundred yards wide and constructed as a bulkhead pier along the riverbank. I could just see the round tops of ladder railings leading down over the edge of the pier.

“They’re every hundred feet or so,” Tony said.

“Meaning, if this hot stuff didn’t come from overseas, it could have come by boat? From the river?”

“Isn’t that what you wanted a boat for?” Pardee asked.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” I said. Up near all the strobe lights, we could see a trio of Bureau cars pulling in to join the evolving radiation incident. “Let’s move right along, shall we?”

We strolled casually down the entire length of the container pier, which was easily a mile long. I let the shepherds range out to the edges of the lighted area. The dark river and the even darker wetlands stretched off to our right. I thought I could make out the lights of Helios downriver. To our left were the container stacks, whose rows seemed to go on forever into the terminal yards. There was one other ship tied up alongside the pier, and two gantries were busy snatching containers from the pier and lifting them up into the massive ship, which had developed a slight starboard list as the cans, as they were called, came aboard. The gantries with their projecting booms reminded me of medieval siege towers, only with lights.

We walked down to the very end of the pier area, checking for security cameras and fences where the industrial area ended. There appeared to be a railroad switchyard inboard of the container work and storage area. Large forklifts were hoisting containers onto flatbed railcars in the glare of sodium vapor lights. On the far, landward side of the yard we could see what looked like a container junkyard outside the security fence, filled with damaged or badly rusted steel boxes dropped haphazardly on a low hillside.

A white pickup truck with a police light bar mounted over the cab drove by, stopped, and backed up. We walked over. The security guard inside, who had to be at least sixty years old, wanted to know who we were and what were we doing down there. I told him we were with Dr. Quartermain, and we all flashed our temporary gate IDs. He gave the shepherds a wary look, rolled the window up, and then made a call on his radio. We couldn’t hear the response, but apparently it satisfied him that we were not saboteurs. He nodded and drove off.

“That’s not much of a deterrent,” Tony observed.

“The bad guys wouldn’t know that until they got close to the truck, and I’d guess he has a panic button in there. This place is huge.”

We’d come to the very end of the container pier. The Cape Fear River was nearly a half mile wide at this point, and looked wider because of the total darkness on the other side. Channel buoys winked at us all the way down the river. We could hear that muscular current swirling through the dolphin pilings at the end of the pier. The water smelled of salt marsh and diesel oil; some seagulls overhead on night patrol screamed at us. The visible debris in the water was streaming by at a good five knots.

“Something’s not computing here,” I said. “I mean, look: If some bad guys are trying to smuggle in radioactive material, why in the hell would they, first, plant some in town, and then, second, splash it on the outside of a container here in the port?”

“How do we know it got downtown?” Pardee asked.

“We don’t,” I admitted. Pardee had a point. If Allie ingested the hot stuff, she could have done that anywhere. The fact that she was downtown when it got to her didn’t mean anything.

Pardee nodded.

Tony finally lit up his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling a cloud. “You’d think, if the jihadis were trying to get a dirty bomb or something in, they sure as hell wouldn’t want to alert that crew back there.”

“And not once, but twice? Radiation getting loose in the Wilmington area? Maybe from the Helios plant, maybe not. Now this. Maybe it’s some whack-job stealing shit from a hospital radiology lab, spreading it around town just for grins.”

“The fact that it was outside may be important,” Pardee said. A seagull appeared out of the darkness and landed boldly twenty feet away. Frick went for it, resulting in a lot of squawking and feathers. Frack, showing his age, just watched.

“Yeah, I agree. I wonder if it’s maybe a-”

At that moment, we saw a commotion up at the tractor-trailer. They had unloaded about half the boxes from inside the container. From our vantage point, it looked like they’d gone all the way to the front wall of the container, but then I realized there weren’t enough boxes out on the pier. They’d hit a fake wall.

The Helios team was backed out, and a bunch of border cops jumped into the container and went to work on the wall. We started walking back to get a closer look, but stayed close to the first row of stacked containers as we went up the pier. The cops appeared to be getting nowhere fast, so they filed out and let a couple of longshoremen climb into the container with axes in hand. I saw Ari walk over to the edge of the pier, obviously searching for a cell phone signal.

Then there was a shout from inside the container as the fake wall burst open and a dozen or so men bolted out, piled right over the startled longshoremen, and ran flat-out into the container stacking area, fanning out in all directions, before the cops could comprehend what was going on. Everyone at the scene was caught completely flat-footed. A couple of cops pulled their weapons, but then realized they couldn’t shoot the stowaways just for running. One security truck peeled out in pursuit and instantly collided with the corner of a container in a true Keystone Kops moment. Tony started laughing.