Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

“Yeah. Well. Maybe if they'd gotten to him sooner. Or for longer.”

“Maybe.” She didn't sound convinced. She'd taken a liking to Diana Prince, and she didn't take kindly to Frank shooting her. “Are things back to normal now?”

He thought about the nine funerals in Kulukak, the plain coffin shipped home to Seattle. “It is for us. Not for others. But yeah, for us, I think so.”

“Is your father gone?”

“Oh yeah.”

The raven let loose with a series of calls that sounded like one big, continuous belly laugh.

“Why do you say it like that?”

Liam thought back to two days before, two weeks after Don Nelson had been found dead on the site of the old dugout. “So you had the wrong man,” Charles had said.

“The wrong men,” Liam had said equably.

Charles shook his head. “Sloppy.”

“Fairly,” Liam agreed. “Must be hereditary.”

“I beg your pardon?” There was frost on Charles's vowels.

“I called your office. At Hurlburt Field.”

“Really?” Charles examined the contents of his glass with interest. “Why, when I'm right here?”

“You are no longer assigned to Hurlburt. You up for promotion, Dad?”

Charles laughed it off. “I'm always up for promotion.”

Liam had heard that kind of laughter before, the laughter of military officers trained to support one another in life-and-death situations and yet oh so aware that a misstep here, a missed salute there and you were retiring at your present rank. It was sharply edged, competitive laughter that gave no quarter and had nothing to do with humor. “Sure you are. You've been a colonel now, what, five, six years? About time to move up, isn't it? What's next? Major general?”

“Brigadier,” Charles said involuntarily. His mouth snapped shut and formed a thin line.

“That's right, brigadier,” said Liam, who had remembered that perfectly well but had wanted to see if Charles would jump at the bait. “Means you're off active flight duty, right, your next promotion?”

He waited with every outward sign of being willing to wait until this time next year for Charles's answer, until his father said reluctantly, “Not necessarily.”

“Yeah, but you'll be flying a desk sooner or later, so it makes sense that you'd already be looking for a job that suited you. So then I called your new office.”

Charles frowned down at his plate, disconcerted by Liam's sudden change of subject. “How did you get the number?”

“Innate charm,” Liam replied. “Also hereditary. You're working on some kind of Superfund cleanup task force, aren't you, Dad? In fact that's the real reason why you're here. Not to facilitate turning redundant Air Force buildings over to the local community, but to hide a toxic waste site.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I've got to get back, anyway.” Charles pushed his plate away and half rose to his feet.

“Sit down, Dad.” Charles had sat down, had glared at Liam from the other side of one of Bill's booths where they were hav- ing a meal before Charles shipped out. “Don Nelson had it all down in his journal. He found your dump site. He went down to the river below the dump site and smelled fumes, so he figured it was leaking. He wrote to a reporter for theNews.” A good one who could be your worst nightmare, Liam thought, and wondered why he hadn't said it out loud.

“I had a friend do some searching on the Net for me. Fuel spills into fresh water are less publicized than ocean spills, although spills into fresh water are way more destructive. Freshwater is more sensitive to a spill than salt water, plus people and other mammals drink fresh water, and birds nest in it, fish lay eggs in it, mosquitoes give birth in it, like that. And of course the fish eat the larvae and the birds eat the fish and the people eat the birds and pretty soon you've got toxic poisoning of human beings, never mind the environment. Did you know,” he added parenthetically, “that human beings are inedible? It's a fact. We sprayed DDT all over the place for years and it got into the food chain and now we're inedible. I ought to find that comforting, but I don't somehow.”

Maria stopped by with another round of drinks. Charles flashed his automatic smile. Maria wilted a little, rallied and moved on to the next table.

“You get the idea, Dad,” Liam said. “You spill petroleum or petroleum by-products into fresh water and it gets into everything from the algae up.” He took a bite of cheeseburger. “You want to know the worst kind of fuel spill there is?”

Charles, busy with his own burger, didn't reply.

“I'll tell you,” Liam said. “Light refined products. Kerosene. Gasoline. Jet fuel. It spreads like that”-he snapped his fingers-“and it soaks right into the ground. No surface tension to speak of, like crude oil has. Specific gravity is way lighter than crude, and viscosity… well, hell, jet fuel hasn't much more than lighter fluid. The fumes evaporate, there isn't any residue, you'd hardly know it was there.” Liam dug into his fries. “Until it starts showing up in your drinking water as benzene. A known carcinogen. Cancer-causing substance,” he added helpfully.

“I know what carcinogen means,” Charles snapped.

Liam wiped his mouth with a napkin and leaned forward, speaking in a low voice. “Good. Because I want you to know just what it is YOU'VE BEEN DOING OUT ON THAT FUCKING BASE!”

There was a reasonable lunch crowd at Bill's that day, and conversation stilled for a moment when Liam's roar echoed around the room. But people were eating and drinking and talking and laughing, and Jimmy was singing about fruitcakes strutting naked through the crosswalk in the middle of the week, so it was only a momentary lull. Bill eyed Liam narrowly before deciding to let it ride and returning to her New Orleans guidebook. It was open to the section on graveyards, which in New Orleans, she had informed everyone the previous day, were a tourist attraction.

For his part, Liam felt another root send out tentative tendrils into Newenham ground. He wouldn't have put it in quite those words, but he was rallying to the defense of his new home. He was telling his father, Air Force Major Charles Bradley Campbell, You may not shit in my nest. He let his voice drop back to a normal tone. “You've been burying fifty-five-gallon drums of byproducts, haven't you? I saw all the heavy equipment at the base. Thought it was mostly there for snow removal, and it probably was, to begin with.” Liam ate a fry with more relish than he was feeling. “Why, Dad? Do you make general quicker if you don't go to all the time and expense of disposing of toxic waste in an environmentally acceptable manner?”

Charles wiped his hands on his napkin and folded it precisely in fours. “You said there was a journal?”

“Yeah, there's a journal.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

Liam looked at the last of his cheeseburger with regret, and savored it as it went down. “I had the M.E. test a sample of Nelson's tissue. He and McLynn had been getting their drinking water out of the Snake River. They'd been filtering it, of course, for beaver fever. But Nelson had traces of benzene in his body.”

“I repeat,” Charles said, very controlled, “what are you going to do with the journal?”

“I don't know,” Liam said. His brow creased in deep thought. “Wy's a friend of that reporter Nelson wrote to,” he offered. “Do you think she'd be interested?”

Charles's mouth set in a thin line. “Cut the crap, Liam. What do you want?”

“I want you to dig up that dump east of the archaeological dig,” Liam said promptly.

“Do you know how much that would cost?”

“Nope,” Liam said. “Don't care, either. Dig it up and dispose of it properly. And I'll be checking, Dad. Wy and I will be doing fly-bys on a regular basis. Dig it up, move it out, dispose of it, and I don't mean drop it in the Nushagak. I'll find out if you do, and I'll resurrect that journal and the results of that tissue sample. I'm pretty sure this was all your own idea, so I don't imagine the Air Force would be pleased to hear officially about it.” He smiled. “One thing for sure after that: you wouldn't have to sweat out any more promotion reviews.”