Dead or Alive

rest of my life. I want to do something. Make a difference, serve my country.”

“So go teach Sunday school.”

“Next thing on my list.”

Ryan Senior sighed. “You’re not a kid anymore, I guess.”

“Nope.”

“Well, it doesn’t mean I have to like it, and I probably never will, but I suppose that’s my problem. Your mom, though, that’s going to be a different story.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“No, you won’t. I will, when the time’s right.”

“I don’t like lying to her.” Ryan Senior opened his mouth to speak, but Jack quickly added, “And I didn’t like lying to either of you. Hell, if not for John, I might not have ever told you.”

“John Clark?”

Jack nodded. “He’s sort of my de facto training officer. Him and Ding.”

“Nobody better at this stuff than those two.”

“So you’re okay with this?”

“Sorta-kinda. I’ll tell you a secret, Jack. The older you get, the less you like change. Last week, Starbucks stopped selling my favorite roast. Threw me off for days.”

Jack laughed. “I’m a Dunkin’ Donuts kind of guy.”

“That’s good, too. You’re careful, right?”

“With the coffee. Yeah-”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.”

“Yeah, I’m careful.”

“So what’s he got you working on?”

Another smile from Jack. “Sorry, Dad, your need to know expired a while ago. If you win the election, we’ll talk again.”

Ryan Senior shook his head. “Fuckin’ spooks.”

Frank Weaver had spent four years in the Army, so he was well familiar with the maddening ways in which the government often went about its business, but he’d thought he’d left that all behind when he got his honorable discharge and went to truck-driving school. He’d spent ten years doing that, doing long hauls from coast to coast, sometimes taking his wife along, but mostly eating up the miles while listening to classic rock. God love XM satellite radio, he thought, and thank God the government was going to let him keep it for this new job. He hadn’t relished the idea of working for the government again, but the pay had been too good to pass up, what with the hazardous-duty bonuses and all. They didn’t call it that, exactly, but that’s what it amounted to. He’d gone through a special training program and background checks by the FBI, but he had nothing to hide and he was a damned good driver. In truth, there was nothing extraordinary about what they had him doing-except for the cargo, that was, but he never had to touch the stuff. Just show up, let someone else load it, then get it safely to its destination and let someone else unload it. Mostly they drilled him on emergency procedures: what to do if someone tried to hijack the load; what to do if he got into an accident; what to do if a UFO came down and beamed him out of the cab… The Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission trainers had “what-if” drills for everything you could think of, then a hundred more you’d never imagine. Besides, he’d never be driving the route alone. They hadn’t told him yet whether his escorts would be in marked or unmarked cars, but you could bet they’d be armed to the teeth.

There’d be no guards this time, though, which surprised Weaver a bit. Yeah, it was only a trial run and his load would be empty, but given the way the DOE played everything as if it was real, he’d expected an escort. Then again, maybe they were lying; maybe he’d have an escort he wasn’t supposed to see. Still didn’t change his job.

Weaver downshifted and braked, swinging the rig into the entrance drive of the Callaway Nuclear Power Plant. A hundred yards ahead he could see the guard shack. He braked to a stop and handed his ID card down to the guard. The entrance was blocked by five steel-core concrete pillars.

“Engine off, please.”

Weaver complied.

The guard looked over his ID, then slipped it into his front shirt pocket and had him sign in on the clipboard. Weaver’s flatbed was empty, but the guard did his job, first walking a complete circle around the rig, then checking the undercarriage with one of those rolling mirror-cart things.

The guard reappeared below the window.

“Please step out of the truck.” Weaver climbed down. The guard again examined Weaver’s ID, taking a good ten seconds to check to make sure the faces matched. “Please stand beside the guard shack.”

Weaver did so, and the guard climbed into the truck’s cab and spent two minutes searching the interior before climbing down. He handed Weaver his ID card.

“Dock number four. You’ll be directed along the way. Speed limit is ten miles an hour.”

“Got it.”

Weaver climbed back into the cab and started the engine. The guard lifted his portable radio to his lips and said something. A moment later, the concrete pillars retracted into the ground. The guard waved Weaver through.

Dock four was only a hundred yards away, on the back side of the plant. At the halfway point a hard-hatted man in coveralls waved him on. Weaver did a Y-turn, backed up to the dock, and shut off the engine.

The dock foreman walked up to Weaver’s door. “You can wait in the lounge, if you want. Take us about an hour.”

It took almost ninety minutes. Though Weaver had seen pictures of the thing during training, he’d never seen one in person. He and the other drivers had nicknamed it “King Kong’s Dumbbell,” but the DOE people had gone to a lot of trouble drumming the particulars into their brains. Officially known as the GA-4 Legal Weight Truck (LWT) Spent Fuel Cask, the container was an impressive piece of engineering. How they’d settled on the dumbbell shape Weaver didn’t know, but he assumed it had something to do with durability. According to the trainers, the GA-4’s designers had torture-tested the thing, subjecting it to dead-fall drops, incineration, puncture hazards, and submersion. For every ton of nuclear waste-fuel assemblies from either pressure water reactors or boiling water reactors-four tons of shielding went into the GA-4’s shell.

Hell, Weaver thought, you could no more get into the damned thing than you could steal it with anything short of a truck, a crane, and perhaps a heavy-lift chopper. It would be like those idiots you occasionally see on television who hook a chain to an ATM, drag it off, then dump it somewhere because they can’t break it open.

“Never seen one up close,” Weaver told the dock foreman.

“Looks like something from a sci-fi movie, doesn’t it?”

“Sort of is, in a way.”

Per protocol, the two of them walked around the flatbed, checking “preflight” items off their forms as they went. Each tie-down chain was new, and had been stress-tested at the plant, as had the ratchets, each of those secured by dual padlocks. Satisfied the cask wasn’t going anywhere before it reached its destination, Weaver and the foreman signed and countersigned the forms, each taking his own copy.

Weaver waved good-bye and climbed into his cab. Once the engine was going, he powered up the GPS nav system affixed to his dash, then scrolled through the touch-screen menu and selected his route; the unit had been preprogrammed with dozens of them by the DOE. Another safeguard, he’d been told. No driver would be given his until leaving a pickup facility.

The route popped up on the screen as a purple line overlaid on a map of the United States. Not bad, Weaver thought. Major highways for most of the trip, 1,632 miles total. Four days.

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