Voodoo Ridge (20 page)

We began to pick up speed.

Going faster came at a price. The oil temperature climbed steadily. So did the exhaust gas temperature. Both climbed well beyond what I would’ve ordinarily considered safe. But this was no ordinary flight and there was no other alternative. Either I pushed my plane to the brink, or Savannah and our baby might well die. The
Duck’s
engine had been rebuilt, thanks to Larry, after our crash in San Diego. I could only hope it would hold up under the strain.

Just this one time. C’mon, Duck, you can do it. I know you can.

I could feel rising heat on my knees and my feet, radiating through the firewall. The engine, fortunately, sounded otherwise normal. I hoped like hell it stayed that way.

Below, the green forested slopes of the Sierra rose up to meet us like a mirage, deceptively soft and benign. If the
Duck’s
power plant were to suddenly seize and we went down, I knew there was a good chance I might end up in some inaccessible draw, hoping for rescue or, like the mummified pilot sitting in that Twin Beech, waiting interminably for rescue. Better, I decided, to let somebody know where I was.

I radioed Oakland Center to request flight following. Air traffic controllers would assign me a transponder code allowing them to more readily follow me on radar. Only I got no response. I was probably too low for them to pick me up on their scopes.

Flying without a net, over potentially hostile terrain, wasn’t particularly daunting or new. I’d done it dozens of times hunting Republican Guard armor on low-level sorties into Kuwait and Iraq during Desert Shield and Storm. The realization that nobody in the world has any idea where you are can be unnerving if you let it, or oddly comforting. I opted at the moment for the latter, focusing on Savannah, trying to convince myself that everything would work out.

Approaching Mariposa, the weather gods decided to cut me some slack. The headwind I’d been bucking shifted back to the north. The
Duck
responded as if he’d been gulping vitamins. Our airspeed climbed steadily until the GPS showed we were doing 139 knots across the ground—nearly 160 miles an hour. I eased off the throttle, bringing the RPM’s back to 2500, cooling the engine, and cruised at a blazing 135 knots.

With our increased speed, the ETA ticked back down to 1107. I figured to make up even more time as we started downhill on our descent.

Maybe we would make it in time after all. I patted the top of the instrument panel.

Nice job, Duck.

At fifty miles out, I radioed Oakland Center and requested radar advisories for any aircraft in my area. At twenty miles out, Center handed me off to the tower at Santa Maria. The controller there told me to plan on making right traffic for Runway 30. At ten miles out, with no other aircraft in the pattern, he cleared me to land. My approach was uneventful; my landing, not the greatest, but it would do. From the air, I had seen the Radisson hotel on the south end of the field where Crocodile Dundee had instructed me to deliver the suitcase.

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, say intentions,” the controller radioed me as I cleared the runway.

“Charlie Lima’s going to the Radisson.”

“Right on Taxiway Alpha, left on Alpha three. Monitor ground, point nine. Have a nice day.”

I repeated his instructions back to him and continued rolling toward the Radisson at high speed. No one told me to slow down. Santa Maria’s airport was a mere shell of what it had been during World War II, when it was used as a military training base, crammed with fork-tailed, P-38 fighters. Its vast flight line now sat largely empty.

Parking was plentiful behind the boxy, four-story Radisson; there were no other airplanes on its ramp. I shut down the
Duck’s
engine and hopped out. My watch read 1113. Two minutes to spare.

As I was hauling the suitcase out of the luggage compartment, my phone rang.

“Logan.”

“Have you not gotten any of my messages? Where the hell have you been?” The urgency in Matt Streeter’s voice was hard to miss.

“Have you found Savannah?”

“We’re still looking.”

A palpable feeling of lament and relief washed over me—they hadn’t found her, but they hadn’t found her body, either. I began running toward the hotel with the suitcase.

“There’s something you need to know,” Streeter said.

“Not now. I’m right in the middle of something.”

“I’m afraid it can’t wait, Logan. That crate in that airplane you found? It was carrying forty pounds of enriched uranium. The kind they use to make atomic bombs.”

My mouth tasted like chalk.

Forty pounds of enriched uranium.

During training at Alpha, we were told that nine pounds was enough to construct a portable nuclear device, a so-called “suitcase nuke.” Depending on the type and purity of nuclear material used, such a bomb could create a blast radius wide enough to level downtown Colorado Springs or Buffalo, New York.

I slowed to a stop at the back door of the hotel, my heart suddenly palpitating, my brain swirling, and stared down at the suitcase in my hand, staggered by the horrific choice that confronted me:

I could hope to save the love of my life by cooperating with her kidnapper, or I could potentially save the world.

My watch showed 1115.

Out of time.

One second later, my phone buzzed with an incoming text message.

“We had an arrangement, Logan.”

THIRTEEN

“I
’ll call you back,” I told Streeter and hung up.

Did Dundee understand the significance of what was in the suitcase? I had to assume so. What did he intend to do with the uranium? Who was the buyer? What would he do to Savannah if I told him that I was on to him, and that I was done playing his game? Would he listen to reason? Recognize the futility of his plan? Let her go?

We had an arrangement, Logan.

I stared at the screen, more afraid than I’d ever been in my life.

Fear is rooted in what the Buddha deemed “delusions”—the distortions with which we look at ourselves and the world around us. By learning to control our minds, we can eliminate those delusions and, eventually, our fears. The truth, though, was that I couldn’t think straight. Savannah was going to live or die. The choice was mine and mine alone.

My phone rang. After several seconds, I pushed “answer,” slowly raised the phone to my right ear, and listened without speaking.

“You’re being watched,” Dundee said. “I know you’ve landed. Now, either you do what you agreed to do, immediately, or the lady’s blood will be on your hands.”

I scanned the windows of the hotel for any sign of surveillance, but saw none.

“You’ve got exactly one more minute, Logan. Take the suitcase into the hotel like you were instructed, walk out the front door, put it under the car, and walk back inside, or I swear, she . . . will . . . die.”

“Let her go. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

“You’re wasting time. Get moving.”

“You’ll kill her anyway.”

“Fifty seconds.”

I saw Savannah’s face in my mind’s eye. The way she watched me the first time we made love, her eyes locked on mine. The way her lips drew into a slow, satisfied smile, knowing the effect she was having on me. Every fiber of my being as I stood there on the tarmac compelled me to take that suitcase and do as I’d been instructed.

But I couldn’t.

Not without spitting on everything that millions of brave and honorable men and women had fought for. Not without imperiling the lives of untold thousands of innocent people.

I couldn’t.

“You still there, Logan?”

“Still here.”

“Thirty seconds.”

“I know what’s in the suitcase.”

Dundee was seething, barely able to get the words out. “I told you not to look.”

“I didn’t have to. You know you’ll never get away with it. So, let’s just call it a day. You let Savannah go, unharmed, and I give you my word that I won’t come looking for you right away. What d’you say?”

“I say shit goes downhill and payday’s Friday. Fuck you, mate.”

And that was it.

I
CALLED
911 in a haze, too numb, really, to accept the likely implications of the decision I’d just made.

After the Radisson and several nearby structures had been evacuated, a member of the Santa Maria Police Department’s bomb squad, garbed in his “Lost in Space” protective suit, approached the suitcase where I’d left it at the back door of the hotel and gingerly sliced it open. Inside were a dozen, two-foot-long metal canisters, each containing uranium pellets. The car under which I was to have deposited the suitcase had been reported stolen the night before in San Luis Obispo, a half hour away. It had been wiped clean of prints.

“You should’ve told me,” Streeter said over the phone as I sat in the hotel lobby, my legs still shaking an hour later. “We could’ve at least tried to help.”

“There was nothing you could do, not under the circumstances.”

I wanted to know how, at the height of the Cold War, nuclear material could have gone missing from a secure government facility.

Streeter said he’d filed a query online with the National Crime Information Center, requesting any records about thefts that may have occurred at the Santa Susana lab in 1956. The NCIC files showed that there’d been what was described as a burglary in October 1956. It was never solved. His query, he said, triggered a call that morning from a US Department of Energy investigator in Washington, who told him their conversation was strictly off the record.

“The DOE guy told me it wasn’t a break-in,” Streeter said. “It was a staged robbery.”

“Staged?”

“Yeah. By the CIA.”

The DOE investigator told Streeter that workers at Santa Susana a year earlier had begun secretly constructing America’s first operating nuclear power plant, which they euphemistically referred to as a “sodium reactor” to deflect any attention from the press. Five years later, some kind of catastrophic meltdown occurred, Streeter said, and all of Los Angeles came close to being vaporized. Washington was largely successful in covering it all up, and the lab was eventually shut down.

The year the staged robbery occurred, Streeter said, coincided with Pakistan leasing a base to the United States so that American military forces could keep closer tabs on Soviet ballistic missile testing. What Islamabad wanted in return was a small amount of fissile material to build a working atomic bomb that Pakistan could then wave in the face of India, its sworn enemy, who was building its own nuclear weapons at the time.

“Washington couldn’t just hand over the stuff without the Indian government going nuts,” Streeter said, “so they got the bright idea of planning a heist and making it look like the Russians were responsible. They found some Russian ex-pat, a former military pilot, to do the job. Everybody at the Santa Susana lab was briefed ahead of time. Then, one of the guards got sick. They brought in a temp, some moron, and nobody bothered to tell him what was up. There was a gunfight. He got shot. They think the guy who was working for the CIA got shot, too. Afterward, everybody at the lab had to sign sworn statements saying they’d go to prison if they ever talked publicly about what happened.”

The bloodshed didn’t end at the lab, according to the DOE investigator.

“That newspaper story you came across, the one about the security guard getting shot at the airport in Santa Paula? They think the guy drove to the nearest airport to Santa Susana, which was Santa Paula, shot that guard to cover his tracks and protect the agency, then flew the uranium out,” Streeter said. “The guard, before he died, said it was a Twin Beech. The DOE confirmed that.”

Whoever killed Chad Lovejoy and made off with uranium, Streeter speculated, had probably been exposed to a lethal dose of radioactivity. He was worried I might’ve suffered a similar fate.

“Uranium isotopes are unstable,” I said, “which makes the uranium itself barely radioactive. You don’t even really need special packaging to protect yourself.”

Streeter didn’t ask me how I knew such things, and I didn’t elaborate. He said his supervisors had formed a task force, assigning three more detectives to investigate the murder of Chad Lovejoy and Savannah’s disappearance, which they now considered linked. He said he wanted to make arrangements to have my phone examined forensically in hopes of backtracking Dundee’s calls. I suggested he’d probably be wasting his time. If Savannah’s kidnapper had any smarts, he would’ve paid cash for a disposable cell phone and bought calling minutes from one of hundreds of offshore service providers, rendering his communications with me or anyone all but untraceable.

“Never thought of that,” Streeter said.

I asked him if his newly formed task force had developed any viable leads that might, in the near term, lead them to Savannah.

He paused. Then, reluctantly, he said, “Unfortunately, not at this time.”

I had to hang up. I had to sit down.

Blue-uniformed Santa Maria police were flitting in and out of the lobby, talking urgently on their hand-held radios, questioning hotel employees and guests who’d been allowed back inside after the suitcase had been driven away for closer inspection and the scene declared safe. I watched them go about their work from the comfort of an armchair, like some bit player in a cop movie. Large scale models of World War II aircraft hung from the ceiling over the dining area adjacent to the lobby. I focused on them and tried hard not to think of the choice I’d made.