Wounded Earth (30 page)

Chao had sent Yancey to sit in another unmarked van, twiddling his thumbs, because the kid's antsiness was getting on his nerves. Dr. McLeod had set the rendezvous point—here at the Savannah River Site's south gate—but she hadn't shown up yet. Chao hoped she made it. He wanted to shake her hand.

Thanks to Dr. McLeod's warning, there had been enough time to search the buildings for unauthorized personnel and the parking lots for truck bombs. Chao had plain-clothes personnel planted among the Savannah River Site workers, watching for tell-tale signs of an attack from within. He had sharpshooters in the woods at every road entering the site. He had rocket launchers prepared to shoot down any helicopter that might consider repeating the trick that had doomed Hanford.

The Site's in-house security was on alert, although he wouldn't give a nickel for the whole lot. They were untrained, undisciplined, and he suspected that several of them were drunk when he arrived. Before noon. When the crisis was over, he would have their idiot supervisor Danka fired.

He had asked local law enforcement to get their night crew out of bed and send out everyone they had to look for anything, anything, unusual. Then he settled in to wait for a disaster that might happen now, tomorrow, or never. And, just to complicate the unforeseeable, he remembered the last sentences of his briefing for this job.

“No civilian casualties. Do you understand? None. We failed at Waco and at Ruby Ridge. We never had a chance to help those people at Hanford yesterday. Enough. You have a trained, well-armed task force. They have ignorant rabble. Subdue them.”

* * *

It was several miles to Cynthia's worksite, down a narrow, potholed road that showed its age. J.D. knew its age because Larabeth, briefing him with the thoroughness of a scientist, had told him the history of the contaminated site BioHeal was working to clean up.

In the early days of the weapons program, producing the product had been foremost. Waste disposal was necessary but inconvenient. Nuclear waste had sometimes been stored in basins like those at Hanford. It had sometimes been buried and forgotten. In comparison, non-nuclear waste was cast aside as casually as bubble gum wrappers.

Cynthia and her BioHeal group were working at a non-nuclear dump deep in the woods of the Savannah River site. It was the source of a tremendous plume of contaminated groundwater.

Larabeth had warned J.D. that he would be sneaking onto a busy construction site. Well-drilling rigs would be poking holes in the ground. Technicians would be field-testing samples while geologists monitored their work. And all those people would be starting to shut the whole operation down for the weekend, decontaminating personnel and performing equipment maintenance. Cynthia would be running the show.

The trick would be to find her and deliver the message without giving himself away as a greenhorn or, worse, as an impostor. It would be dangerous to tip his hand too soon. The goal was to let Babykiller's spy get caught up in an “emergency” evacuation a la Chapter 14 before he knew what was happening.

J.D. reviewed the plan as he drove down a fifty-year-old road built to carry trucks full of toxic wastes to the dump site. The road had seen little use since the dump was closed. A canopy of water oaks closed over him. Sometimes the road dipped downward with the land and he could see water standing between wide-buttressed cypress trees.

The countryside made him think of the Louisiana swamps, but there was a difference. The swamps at home felt wild. Sometimes he heard them calling him to step off the solid path, to pick his way on the high ground back into their wildness until the black muck claimed him. These woods called him, too, but they felt safe and green. Everywhere green. He felt secure, enclosed in a natural womb.

The transition from wilderness to work site was abrupt. He rounded a corner and the road ended in a small clearing. There was a makeshift gravel parking area to his left. To his right, there was. . .he supposed destruction was the best word for it.

The clearing was littered with fair-sized stumps and it looked like the BioHeal team spent a sizeable amount of its time hacking back the encroaching woods. Nature had done her best to heal herself after the trucks were gone and the dump was forgotten. She had evidently spread her green blanket over the scar and pretended like it wasn't there. But it was there and it would take Nature a long time to rust away the drums and break down the solvents and neutralize the acids that humans had put in the ground. She could probably do it, given time, but people were trying to learn to clean up their own messes.

J.D. watched a backhoe bite at the soil covering the hillside. Some of the soil was stained a color that couldn't be natural. The backhoe operator segregated the growing pile of stained soil from other piles that looked clean. The front-end-loader busily moved these small piles to two huge piles, covered with plastic sheets.

Another backhoe operator was industriously freeing crushed and rusted 55-gallon drums from the hillside. Some of them were still dripping God-knows-what. J.D. could see drums and pieces of drums—probably hundreds of them—protruding from the ground.

The excavation area was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape and orange traffic cones. The yellow tape also marked a narrow lane from the excavation to the far door of a small building.

Workers wearing face masks that J.D. smugly identified as Level C protection were spooning soil from the large piles into glass jars. Racks of these jars were quickly accumulating beside workers seated at a table covered with electronic equipment and more glass jars.

Another worker was walking around outside the crime-scene tape waving something that looked like a hand-held vacuum cleaner, except he wasn't waving it close enough to the ground to actually pick up anything. He carried the hand-vac, or whatever it was, over to a tiny woman who was standing outside the cordoned-off area, watching the activity.

A long black ponytail hung out from beneath her hardhat. Her face was obscured by a pair of wrap-around safety glasses and her form was covered with the same baggy blue plastic coveralls that the other workers were wearing, but J.D. knew her. He'd known her for years.

It was Cynthia.

She was standing stock-still in the midst of sheer havoc, but there was no question who was in charge. She had inherited Larabeth's air of authority, and J.D. wished he could stand there and watch her exercise it, but there was no time. She could be in danger, right this minute. All the hardworking people around her could be in danger, too. J.D. knew in his gut that there was a spy among them.

He hesitated one more moment. Larabeth had prepped him carefully. She had described the worksite in detail. She'd told him how to avoid contaminating clean areas—or himself. He just had to get to Cynthia and give her the letter.

It sounded good on paper, but he was out of his element. He didn't even know what tetrachloroethene was, for God's sake, and if he didn't get to Cynthia fast, these people were going to expect him to help clean it up. Hoping for the best, he opened the trunk of his car and pulled out his steel-toed boots, his blue BioHeal hard hat, and one of his very own disposable jumpsuits. He could at least look like he knew what he was doing.

He zipped the jumpsuit over his clothes, thankful for the .38 strapped beneath it all. Patting the gun, he prayed,
Please God, give me time to get to this if I need it.

The jumpsuit was barely zipped when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Damn. He wasn't ready to respond to Cynthia, who was asking, “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'm Jackson Sellers, reporting for work.” Mentioning his assumed name made him think of his security badge. This charade would go nowhere if she thought he was some nut trying to crash BioHeal's party. He noticed her badge was clipped to her jumpsuit. He unzipped his jumpsuit partway, reached up under it and got his badge, then clipped it to his collar. Just like hers.

Oh, hell. He guessed it was time to just give her the letter and get this thing started, so he did.

“No one told me I had a new employee coming, and Friday afternoon is a strange time to start a new job,” she said, tapping her cheek with the unopened envelope. “Your badge says 'Field Tech.' Are you here to run the OVMs? Or to help develop the new monitoring wells?”

Forget the OV-whatevers and read the letter, he thought. But he said, “I think that letter will explain everything.”

“Well, whatever it is, you'll need equipment. Come with me while I take these bailers to the equipment shack and we'll sit down, read this letter, and try to figure out exactly why you're here.”

Bailers, J.D. thought. That's what they use to get water samples out of monitoring wells. Remembering that one simple fact made him feel so competent.

She reached in her coverall pocket and underhanded something to him. It followed a lazy arc and he caught it lefthanded.

“Looks like you forgot your safety glasses. Here's an extra pair,” she said. “Don't forget them again. It's the law. Besides, there's not a thing on the Savannah River Site I'd care to have in my eyes.”

* * *

Cynthia took her time walking back to the equipment shed. Jackson Sellers was following her like a lap dog and that was good, because she was completely pissed off at her boss. Nobody—not even Kelly—was stupid enough to send a brand-new technician, unannounced, to start work two hours before quitting time on a Friday.

She intended to get the man into the relative quiet of the equipment shed and tell him to come back on Monday when she had time to think. But not right away. She liked to let her employees know from the get-go who was in charge.

Cynthia barked an order to a busy well driller. She checked a sampling technician's quality control procedures. And she studiously ignored Mr. Sellers' polite requests that she read the letter in her hand.

Babykiller
waited in the security office at the southern gate of the Savannah River Site. The decor was classic government-issue, circa 1955. He drummed his fingers on the steel desk sitting on the dingy linoleum floor. The whole drab ensemble was surrounded by cinder-block walls. Every last item in the room—desk, floor, walls, and window blinds—was some shade of government gray.

He was content to wait in the dim gray room for his plan to unfold. The success of this operation would bring him satisfaction on so many levels. He would have his revenge against the almighty government that had poured enough Agent Orange over his head to give him cancer. Against environmental whackos who wept over the ethical treatment of animals but didn't give a damn about the people who got in their way. Against eminent scientists who vehemently affirmed the safety of this landfill or that nuclear power plant, but fought like madmen to keep them out of their own back yards.

He would also be taking his revenge on a few hundred thousand innocent bystanders, and even more if atmospheric conditions were right. It was regrettable, but necessary. To be truthful, he wasn't even sure how regrettable it was. He had trouble working up sympathy for people who had the audacity to live normal lives when he had become what he was.

He roused himself from his contented musings. It was time. He had known she was coming, felt it in every cell before his technician traced her phone call. He had known she was here before this oaf standing before him had come to tell him so.

“She's right outside, sir. Used her own security pass to enter the site. I guess she didn't know you had eyes everywhere.”

Babykiller was in a rare humor and, thus, did not waste breath in reprimanding the man for talking too much. He just straightened his tie and said, “Send her in.”

* * *

Larabeth waited outside the security gate. She flashed her picture ID again, trying to get the guard to wave her through. She figured there was a sixty-forty chance that she had arrived in time, if she could just gain entrance to the site. There was no plausible reason for the guard to delay her any further. She had clearance to work at dozens of secured government sites. All her papers were in order.

The guard, not satisfied with a quick ID flash, took her security pass in his hand and examined it. “Ma'am, I need you to come inside.”

“I'm sure my security clearance is current, and I'm in a big hurry—”

The man stepped out of the guard shack and opened her truck door. He repeated, “I need you to come inside. I have orders.”

The sunshine nicely illuminated the weapon strapped to his hip. Electing to cooperate, she followed the man inside as he said, “I've been watching for you all afternoon. Somebody important is waiting to talk to you.”

Yancey. How silly of her to forget that the FBI agent was waiting to take her into protective custody. Well, her plans had changed, and she hoped he was flexible enough to go with the flow. FBI agents weren't known for their flexibility, but Yancey was young. Perhaps he wasn't completely ossified.

Assuming Yancey was willing to take orders from her, he might actually be helpful. Between the two of them, they could surely fish J.D. and Cynthia out of this mess, but there was no time to waste. If Yancey was willing to hop into her truck, no questions asked, then he could go with her. Otherwise, she would be moving on alone.

The security guard held open a steel door marked simply “Office,” letting her enter alone. She looked around for red-headed Yancey's broad frame, but there was only one man in the room and it wasn't Yancey. She had only seen the young FBI agent once, but the man behind the desk was fifty-ish, pale, and slightly built. Whoever he was, he could wait. She turned to leave.