After the Rain

“What site?”

George smiled and pointed his cigar out the window. “How about the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant? It’s about two miles that way. Irv Fuller’s company won the bid to build a security wall around the reactors. Dale and Irv went to high school together. So…Dale sells machines. Irv buys them. That’s the connection that made Dale invaluable.”

Nina found herself in a new place: dread plus one. “But how do you get it inside?” she whispered.

George laughed. “It’s already inside. Just sitting there. The construction company brought it in on a trailer, with all their stuff. Their workers have to pass background checks. The guards look inside lunch boxes and underneath vehicles. But they ain’t taking tires apart on the machines that came to make the plant safer.

“Yeah, right now Dale is probably having Irv Fuller walk him through plant security-just another vendor visiting the site. The tricky part is, Dale has to move the machine next to the spent fuel pool.”

Nina listened, numb. Leaving dread plus one…

“Dale comes back, confirms the machine is in position, we drive off thirty, forty miles, and then I make a phone call. You got any idea what’s going to happen when a ton of Semtex hits that spent-fuel-pool wall from a range of about six feet?”

Nina strained against the cords in a spasm of inarticulate fury. So that’s why they’re so wired into the weather reports. The wind direction. They have to get upwind of the explosion.

George waited for her tantrum to pass, then he smiled. “The people who built these plants are a little shortsighted. They never figured out what to do with all those fuel rods. So they just cram them into these pools. Dumb shits. Prairie Island’s got four, five feet of cinder-block wall. We got a ton of military-grade explosives. No contest.”

Spent, sweaty, filthy, with Ace Shuster’s dry, caked blood on her chest, Nina could only stare at him.

George narrowed his eyes and tossed his hands in the air. “Boom. The pool ceases to exist. No more water. The zirconium cladding on the fuel assemblies-about fourteen hundred of them-reacts exothermically. That means they catch fire at about a thousand degrees Celius.”

George scratched his chin thoughtfully and pointed at her. “Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission admits that that kinda fire can’t be put out. It would burn for days. We’re talking massive radiation exposures.”

George stood up, clenched his cigar between his teeth, and said, “So the short answer to what happens is- some people will die fast. On the Arabian Peninsula, we’ll watch a whole lot more of you die slowly on Al-Jazeera. Parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa will be uninhabitable for the next three hundred years. Impressive, no?”

Then he reached down into the passenger seat again. His hand came up holding one of those damn Epipens. And a roll of duct tape. “Time for your medicine, Nina,” he said.

She twisted away but he jabbed at her thigh. She caught a break because George wasn’t adept with the pen. Part of the dose dribbled on her skin. Then he tore off a gob of the tape, striped it across her mouth, and said softly, “Sweet dreams.”

Nina listened to George leave the camper, then she reared against her restraints, calculating how long she had before the drug took effect. She counted seconds, made it past fifty before the leading edge of the fluffy narcotic cloud bumbled into her blood.

Still, she kept straining. The bedstead jumped on the carpet. Once, twice. A clatter of wood on her right side caught her attention. Weaker now. Drifting. But she had to focus.

Sonofabitch! The dummies, they had too much faith in the drug. She fought for concentration. Okay. When you strain up off the bed, the motion you feel is the sideboard riding up. No shit. She visualized the bed’s construction, the way the pieces fit together. If you can get your weight up off the bed and rip upward with your bound right hand while you’re in the air, maybe you can yank the sideboard tongue out of the slot in the headboard. Then…

She blinked sweat, bubbles now. Streaming. Part of her started to float away. The rest of her was turning to cool, dreamy lead. Fight. Think…Woozy, she stared at the inane appliances in the room: the VCR, the camera, the tripod…This is not how I intend to die-the drugged plaything for these creeps.

Chapter Forty-three

Who was it said everybody should get fifteen minutes of fame? Dale couldn’t remember. But then he wasn’t saying it, now, was he?

He was no-shit living it.

THE PRAIRIE ISLAND MDEWAKANTON DAKOTA COMMUNITY WELCOMES YOU, said the sign. Some dirty- faced Indian kid pointed a plastic water cannon at him as he drove down a street lined with distressed rez housing. Dale gave the kid the finger. Ain’t you a lucky little shit! Got the Treasure Island Casino across the street like a gaudy pink pile of melanoma; got high-tension wires for a sky; and the Great White Father gave you a mountain of nuclear waste for a backyard.

His heart started to bang in his chest like a trip hammer when the twin gray domes of the nuclear plant appeared over the treetops. It was located on the river, about half a mile off the road, behind a chain-link fence. Barbed wire on the top. Dale eased the Lexus fifty yards from the nearest car in the visitors parking lot. Parked, got out. Just like George said, act natural.

Two lanes of traffic, one entering, one leaving, motored slowly by a small white guard station. Two guards in brown Wackenhut uniforms monitored the traffic. They wore black Sam Brown belts, sidearms, and one of them had an assault rifle on his shoulder. The other had a mirror on a long pole and was inspecting the underside of an incoming car.

Dale walked up and was challenged by one of the guards. He called back, “Dale Shuster. I have an appointment to meet Irv Fuller at the gate. I’m suppose to be on some list.”

“Fuller, the head construction guy?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“We got another construction guy,” the guard with the mirror yelled to the one with the rifle.

“I sold him some machines for the job. There’s a problem with one of them, so I’m here to take a look. Might have to replace it. Which won’t be cheap,” Dale said.

The other guard nodded. “My sympathies. Just make sure the badge don’t leave his person. If you don’t watch them, these guys pass them back and forth going out on breaks.”

The guard with the shouldered rifle waved to his partner, then motioned for Dale to remove the items from his pockets. Dale took out his keys, some change, and put them in a plastic basket and had a metal detector passed over him. Then the guard spoke into his mobile radio.

This was the touchy part. He assumed that plant security did their background checks early this morning when he gave his Social Security number to Irv. But what if the Cavalier County Sheriff’s office posted a missing- persons bulletin on him? Would this security system monitor such reports after the initial check? Dale and George were betting they would not.

They bet right. After talking for a minute, the guard checked his clipboard, then asked Dale for ID. Dale handed over his driver’s license and his Social Security card. The guard consulted his clipboard again, removed a numbered clip-on badge, and gave it, along with the ID, back to Dale. Dale breathed a little easier. He’d been preapproved. Then the guard waved Dale beside the guard shack, into the shade, and said, “Put on the badge and wait here, sir. Mr. Fuller will be out in a minute.”

Dale waited, gazing up into the late-afternoon sun, which was starting to flame out across the Mississippi, setting up a gorgeous golden haze over Wisconsin.

Five minutes later a blue Jeep Cherokee pulled up. It had a logo on the side: Holtz-Sydney Construction. A tall man in jeans, boots, and a blue denim designer work shirt got out. Irv Fuller in his styled salt-and-pepper hair looked sports-fan tanned and fleshy. Though not exactly porky, he did have a creeping double chin and the good- time rosettes of incipient gout pooling in his ample cheeks.