P Deutermann - The Moonpool

Ari came back into his office suite fifteen minutes later, looking like his day was fulfilling his every dismal expectation. He beckoned me into his private office and asked me to close the door.

“We’re going to have to get the divers in,” he said.

“Divers? In that?”

“Yeah, there’s a firm of divers who specialize in going down into containment vessels and moonpools. Lemme show you something.”

He turned on a television in his office and switched to what looked like an internal video surveillance channel. I wasn’t sure what we were looking at until he did something with the remote, and then I realized we were looking down into the moonpool itself. There, way down in that cerulean glow, was the silhouette of a human body, arms and legs spread wide as if crucified on an X-beam. It was lying on top of the spent uranium fuel assemblies forty feet down. I couldn’t tell if it was face up or down, but it was definitely a human form.

“How radioactive is that part of the pool?” I asked.

“Very,” Ari said simply, staring at the shimmering image.

“And no idea of who it is?”

He shook his head. “And if that body stays down there long enough, any identification is going to be… difficult.”

I had a vision of the body melting down in all that radiation. Eyes like poached eggs. Lovely images like that.

“Can’t you grapple it?”

He shook his head again. “From what we can see, the body is draped across and is in physical contact with the fuel bundles. Much too hot. We’ll get a diver to go partway down there, then drop a minicam, see if we can make an ID. After that, we’ll have to figure out how to bring him most of the way up to the rod transfer platform, where I hope we can encase the remains. Problem’s gonna be diver stay-time, as always. But it has to be done fast.”

“Why?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“Who’s working the problem?” I asked.

“Anna P. is in charge. I haven’t located Trask yet to deal with the physical security side. We’ve notified upper management and the NRC, and the company’s calling for the divers as we speak. We hope to have somebody on deck by third shift tonight. In the meantime…” He puffed out a breath.

“This doesn’t affect the plant’s operation, does it?”

“Nope. This is the moonpool. What we’ve got down there right now is a radionuclide Crock-Pot.”

“Damn,” I said. “Is it likely that somebody just fell in? I mean, if you did fall in, wouldn’t you just get the hell out of the water as fast as possible?”

“Yes, you would, and if you stayed at the surface, you wouldn’t be too much the worse for wear. Remember, exposure to radiation is measured in terms of intensity and time. Intensity is a function of proximity.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “only a drowned body sinks like that. Lungs full of water. Maybe he hit his head on the way in. Are there ladders-some way for someone to get out, assuming he could swim?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, still staring at the screen. “And railings. And surveillance cameras.” He shook his head. “This shouldn’t be possible. I need Trask here.”

Just like the radioactive water inside Allie Gardner shouldn’t have been possible, I thought. Or the hot water on that truck over at the container port. Everyone could argue that there were other, non-Helios-related explanations for those incidents, but there was no arguing with this.

“You heard from the Bureau?” I asked.

“Only that they will take over the investigation once we exhume the body from the moonpool.”

“Exhume. That sounds like Creeps Caswell. Okay, what do you want from me?”

“You find people, right? Find Colonel Trask. Whoever that is down there should not have been able to get there by himself. Especially without a protective suit.”

“There’s nothing on the cameras?”

“Nada. The Bureau will have to tell us if somebody messed with them. But I really need Trask, and, as fucking usual, his people can’t raise him.”

His beeper went off, so he motioned for me to get going. I went outside to piddle the mutts and then decided to bring Frick back into the building with me. We went down the hallway to the physical security office, where some of Trask’s shaved-head torpedoes were congregating in the shift supervisor’s office.

They confirmed they didn’t know where the colonel was. They seemed more concerned about all the heat they were getting from the plant’s director about not being able to contact him than they were about Trask’s health and welfare. One of them came forward to make friends with Frick, who obligingly lifted a lip at him, prompting a chorus of whoas from the other guys.

“The colonel does his own thing,” one of them said. “Shows up at the plant at all hours, tests the perimeter patrols, the cameras, vital area doors, and that kinda shit. Doesn’t exactly keep regular hours. Says schedules weaken security.”

“How do you normally reach him?”

“We don’t,” the supervisor said. “He listens in to all our comms. If he thinks he needs to get into something, he just shows up.”

“So you expect that he knows about this body?”

“Be surprised if he didn’t, all the commotion.”

“Sees all, hears all?”

The supervisor shrugged. If his boss wanted to play mysterious, he was cool with it.

“They check his home?” I asked.

One of the younger ones, who’d been oiling an M4, smiled. “Home? Dude lives on a boat, man. Good luck with that.”

I called a buddy at the state department of natural resources and asked if he could tie Trask’s name to a specific boat license. He was back in five minutes.

“Big boat,” he said. “Twenty-one-year-old, forty-five-foot cabin cruiser, officially listed for Carolina Beach. License is current; insured for one twenty large. Called Keeper. That help?”

I told him it did indeed, and drove out to catch the ferry that crossed the Cape Fear River estuary. I got to Carolina Beach and drove down to the city marina. I left the dogs in the Suburban and went to the office, where an elderly guy, whose well-used cap read CAP’N PETE , asked if he could help me. I explained who I was and that I was looking for Colonel Trask, who I understood kept a live-aboard boat here. He pointed out the window to one of the piers, where I could see a largish cabin cruiser with the word KEEPER in white lettering across its transom.

“Right there she is,” he said. “But he isn’t here. Haven’t seen him for a coupl’a days now.”

“Any possibility we could get aboard?”

“Got a warrant?”

“Nope.”

“There’s your answer, then.”

I asked him to wait for a moment and put a call in to Ari at the plant. He sounded harassed but understood my problem. I handed the phone to Cap’n Pete, who listened.

“Best I can do,” he said, handing me back the phone. “I’ll go aboard, see if he’s okay or even there. That help?”

“That would help a lot,” I said. “It’s not like him to go off the grid for this long.”

“Then you don’t know him,” he said. “Because that old boy does it all the time.”

“Yeah, but when he does, he’s usually ambushing his own security crew over there at Helios.”

“Not exactly what I meant,” he said, reaching for a set of keys. “I was talking about him going out at night and coming back in the midmorning. You know he collects snakes?”

“So I’ve heard,” I said.

“He showed me one of ’em, one time. I thought it was a goddamned fire hose until it coiled. Had it right there, on board. Nobody fucks with that boat. C’mon.”

I followed him out the door as we went down toward the piers. “Most of the owners here, we see ’em either once, twice a year or on every weekend. We got us maybe ten live-ons here; the rest are all just slip renters. But the colonel? He’s the onliest one goes out at night. All the damn time.”