‘Not me, Charlie – the state department. I’m just a hired hand.’
‘OK – then why not send the US Army to get it back – the real US Army?’
‘They thought no one would notice a small outfit. When the army makes its own moves you find battalions of OD bastards wandering around. They can’t think small, and they do tend to get noticed.’
‘You can have that water now,’ I told him, and gave him my water bottle.
‘I think I stabbed myself in the guts, Charlie. I’m scared I’m gonna die.’
‘Flesh wound, so stop bellyaching.’ OK, so that was an unfortunate turn of phrase. ‘If you turn on your side I’ll dress it for you.’
‘Doris could do that. She’d be gentler. She has soft hands.’
‘Believe me, George, you’re better off with me. Doris is not your friend today – you beat her up, and told her too many lies.’
George did say, ‘Don’t leave me here alone, buddy,’ but I thought that it was time for him to learn one of life’s hard lessons, and walked away to find the prospectors – they wouldn’t be all that far away.
Chris’s Geiger counter had stopped geigering: he was sitting in the heather taking it apart, and reassembling it. Doris sat on a rock a few yards away striking attitudes like Lady Hamilton. Chris wasn’t buying them; he was in love with his instrument. I squatted between them playing the gooseberry.
I asked Chris, ‘Assuming your box of tricks hasn’t given up on you, how on earth did you expect to find this – what did you call it? – box of radioactive isotopes for X-ray machines?’ I was glad I’d logged the word isotopes – you heard a lot of it in years to come. ‘This aircraft is spread over a square mile – it will take you days to search it all.’
He grinned happily. I reckon he really liked his job.
‘Don’t worry, Charlie. If there was ever a large radioactive source in this wreck it will leave a spoor – just like big game. All I have to do is walk around the main impact area in a circle until the counter finds the radioactivity trail . . . then I follow the trail until I find the source. If it survived the wreck it’s probably rolled a long way downhill.’
‘But won’t the radioactivity have been washed away in the rain and snow? It’s supposed to have been up here for ages.’
‘No, Charlie. If the hot stuff was ever here, I’ll find it. It takes hundreds of years to decay.’
‘Decay? You make it sound as if it was once alive.’
‘Sometimes it seems that way. Out of the way now, there’s a good fellow – let the dog see the rabbit.’ He stood up and stretched; apparently he was ready to go geigering again. Doris gave me a po-faced smile, so I went to sit with her and watch the man at work. The breeze had veered, and changed direction. It was now a buffeting little cold wind – George was probably the only one out of it. Chris stumbled a circle of about a hundred yards around the main lochan, detouring for stubby tussocks of heather and juniper.
Doris told me, ‘They said that Petey’s body hadn’t a mark on it – it’s hard to see that that was possible. He was up in front of an airplane that smashed itself to pieces on that bloody rock face. Why do they lie to us?’
‘The excuse they use is that it spares a family’s feelings if you tell them that the dead person didn’t feel a thing.’
‘I think they tell us that to spare their own feelings, don’t you?’
‘Yes, but I’ve seen a few air crashes . . . and been in a couple myself. There’s no sign of fire here, so I think it would have been over very quickly for him, practically instantaneous . . . Now you’ve been here, and seen it, you’ll be able to tell your people that with a clear conscience.’ She didn’t reply; just leaned her head on my shoulder. I hoped I’d helped, and for once I’d been telling the truth.
Chris had a few false alarms – his frying pan showed a marked affinity for the dials from smashed instrument panels, and his machine started to sing whenever it got within range of the luminous paint from the instruments. Suddenly he stopped hopping the bushes, and looked outwards from the circle and down the mountainside away from the way we had climbed in. He looked a bit like a dog that had got the scent. He raised his hand to signal to us, and moved off down the slope. We stumbled after him. Bollocks. I’d hoped the bloody thing had never been there in the first place. Half an hour later we found it in a fast-flowing burn; it had rolled nearly a quarter of a mile. It looked obscene. The Geiger counter went crazy anywhere near it, and the radioactive trail stretched away from us down the burn.
Chris went into man-in-charge drive, and angrily shouted, ‘Shit.’ Then he marked it with a small red flag on a whippy metal pole he had been carrying, and shooed us away uphill in front of him. We ran. Have you ever run up a mountain through hard stumpy heather, junipers and over a rockfall? That was my first atom bomb. Unless one of the radioactive governments gets even flakier than they usually are, it will also be my last.
We stopped when we reached George.
‘You bloody bastard,’ Chris shouted at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
George opened his eyes, and asked, ‘What?’ as if we had disturbed a reverie.
I told him. ‘What, George, is a battered bomb lying in a
