James Huston - Fallout

Kevin said, “I’ll be in touch.”

Luke and Katherine were ushered into a conference room at the end of the hallway. It was poorly lit but well ventilated, with the thick wire screens over the windows. Luke was still in his khaki flight suit with the Russian wings on his nametag. He felt silly wearing the insignia of a Russian Colonel sitting in a jail on a Marine air station.

They waited patiently; they’d been told that they were to be interviewed immediately. Luke refused to sit. He wanted to fix everything, to make it all disappear. But he knew that the chance to do so was well behind him. The big wooden door opened, and four men and one woman walked in briskly. She was carrying a small black wallet, which she flipped opened and held in front of her. “FBI. Special Agent Helen Li. Please sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit.”

“Sit down,” she insisted. He did. She put her identification back into a small shoulder bag, then placed it on the floor next to the chair. She remained standing and leaned against the chair, holding the top of it with both her small hands and looking down at Luke. She was of medium height and very thin. Her straight hair didn’t quite reach her shoulders. “Are you Luke Henry?”

“Of course I am.”

“I’m here to question you about what happened. There are many things I need to ask you—”

“Aren’t you going to give him his rights?” Katherine interrupted.

Helen looked at her. “No.”

“He’s under arrest, you’re here to question him, and you’re not going to give him his rights?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I’m going to instruct him not to answer any questions.”

“You may instruct him to do whatever you wish,” Helen replied quietly.

Luke looked at Katherine and shook his head subtly. “What do you want?”

“There’s a radioactive cloud drifting toward Los Angeles. The entire West Coast is at risk.” She let that sink in. “I know that the pilots who conducted the attack were being trained by you in a secret desert airfield for the last three weeks.”

“It wasn’t secret.”

“That’s not really important right now,” a man said as he stepped forward.

“Right,” Luke replied. “Who are you?”

“This is Keith Berger,” Li said. “He’s with the Department of Energy.”

Luke looked at the short, round man, and saw deep pain in his face, like the pain of someone who’s just lost a child. “Do you know what happened at the plant? There are only two active plants there. Right? I mean, there are two operating reactors,” Luke said. “And they missed them completely. How the hell can there be a radioactive cloud?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “They hit another building. Almost certainly by intent.”

“What building? What was in there?”

“Nuclear waste.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“A lot of it?”

“Yes. High-level radioactive waste. A lot. The waste from Units Two and Three that has been produced in the last ten years. Even more.”

“Wasn’t it safe?”

“It didn’t have the protection of the two generating plants. And the waste is stored in an open pool of water. I’m afraid the Pakistani pilots knew that.”

“An open pool?” Luke asked, his eyes growing larger. “How did they know?”

“They hit the plant at its Achilles’ heel. The concentrated radiation in the waste was worse than if they’d penetrated one of the reactors. The bombs were able to penetrate the non-reinforced building. The spent waste was blown up with the water in which it was stored.”

“What was it doing there? Why was it stored like that?”

He was obviously distressed. “There’s been an argument ongoing for more than ten years within the federal government on where to store high-level nuclear waste. We built a place in Nevada, but then… there was concern about earthquakes. Look, we just couldn’t get agreement. So the waste has been sitting there—pretty much like it was at San Onofre—at most of the nuclear plants around the country.”

Luke stared straight ahead. “This is a disaster,” he said to no one in particular. He looked at Berger. “How could the Pakistanis know that?”

“All you have to do is follow the debates on nuclear waste, and you can find where virtually all the radioactive waste in the country is. There are maps all over the Internet. This waste is as bad as it gets, and it’s right on the coast.”

“But if the wind changes, it won’t get to L.A.”

“Then it would go to San Diego or Palm Springs.”

“So pray for still winds.”

“Then it will settle into the Pacific and ruin the coast of California for a couple of centuries.”

“Ruin?”

“Kill every living thing in the ocean for miles and pollute the bottom and food sources.”

Luke was despondent. “It doesn’t dissipate?”

Berger sighed. “Unlike love, radiation is forever. Or at least close enough to forever to count as forever.”

Helen leaned toward Luke and put her hands on the table. “We must try to control the impact of what has happened. We must try to prevent this from ever happening again. That’s what Mr. Berger is trying to do. But I’m here to find out who did this and why. I need your help. I want you to answer some questions.”

“I don’t think you should say anything,” Katherine interrupted. “We need to get you an attorney.”

“I don’t want a damned attorney!” Luke exploded.

“Do you agree to talk to us?”

“What are you guys doing to try to catch this guy?”

“Who is it that we should be trying to catch?”

“The guy who did this. Major Riaz Khan of the Pakistani Air Force. Do you not know what happened?” Luke asked, looking at Helen, then Katherine.

“I’d like to hear it from you.”

Luke was bone tired. Being awakened from a dead sleep to race to his squadron, only to find a catastrophe under way, had begun to catch up with him. The fact that he had just been in the biggest air battle an American had participated in since Vietnam seemed unreal. Instead of throwing back drinks and telling his friends all about it, he was sitting in a brig, explaining why he should be allowed to breathe. He’d done all he could. He’d fought as hard as he could, but it hadn’t been enough. Five minutes’ more notice, and everything would have been different. Maybe if he’d listened to Brian a little more closely, he wouldn’t be having the self-doubt he felt flooding him. Now he had to try to explain it to people who had no chance of figuring it out. “You know the story…”

Helen didn’t respond.

Luke debated with himself, then began. “Khan and three other Pakistanis were students of my Nevada Fighter Weapons School. Last night—this morning, actually—a bunch of men in trucks broke into the base. They killed the security guards and brought in bombs. I have no idea where they got them. They loaded their airplanes and took off. I got a call from Raymond—one of my employees who happened to be outside the base—and he told me what they were doing.” He sat forward and leaned on the table. “I raced down to the airfield, and four of us climbed into our MiGs. We were under a contract to do some missile testing, and it was scheduled for later that morning. Instead we went after the Pakistanis. We got to the nuclear power plant just as they were—”

“How did you know to go to San Onofre?”

“We didn’t. We just took off and chased them down. About halfway through, the FAA guy and I—Catfish was his call sign—concluded that’s where they were headed. It should all be on the tape. You can listen to it.”

“Go on.”

“Like I said, we were too late, but we got all of them but one. Vlad got shot down.”