Astride a Pink Horse (33 page)

As he retook the highway and the truck gained speed, Rikia found himself smiling at the fact that Silas Breen had never had the slightest inkling of why he had chosen to call himself F. Mantew. But then again, there was no need to laugh at such a simple man’s ignorance. How could Breen have possibly known that F. Mantew was a bastardization of “Fat Man,” the code name given to America’s second atomic bomb used as a weapon, detonated over Nagasaki. And there was no way on earth that Breen could have figured out that the pseudonym Rikia had chosen for himself stood for a third bomb, Fat Man II—a bomb that this time around would be detonated on American soil.

Sugar’s
landing gear retracted with a thump loud enough to cause Cozy to turn to Bernadette and ask, “Something wrong with this chariot?”

“It’s the crosswinds. We barely missed being grounded back there because of wind shear.” Bernadette glanced at the altimeter. “We’re on top of the winds now but will be bucking sixty-knot headwinds all the way to Los Alamos.”

“Think you’ll be able to fly low and slow enough to spot that truck?”

“Slow enough for sure. Low enough, maybe not. It’s pretty tough to buzz a major U.S. highway in a private jet and have it go unnoticed. Fifty-fifty we’ll end up explaining ourselves to the cops, the FAA, the FBI, and homeland security, or if we’re lucky maybe even rate a couple of F-18 interceptors on our tail. But if we spot Rikia, who cares?” Bernadette glanced at an aerial map of the area on her computer screen. “We’ll probably only get one good chance to spot that truck before Rikia spots us. Once he starts up the hill to Los Alamos, the terrain gets pretty rugged. Mesas, canyons, and national forest everywhere. Tough to fly low and in and out of that kind of terrain. Now, if I had my A-10, I could give it a better run. A lot more power and maneuverability with that bird than with
Sugar
here.”

“Suppose Rikia makes it all the way up the hill without us ever spotting him?”

“Then we land at Los Alamos and look for him on the ground. By that time we’ll probably have enough FBI agents, cops, and media types glommed on to us to scare Sasquatch out of hiding. But I don’t think he’s that far ahead of us. We’re in a jet and he’s in a truck, remember?” Bernadette leveled
Sugar
off at 2,500 feet. Looking worried, she said, “We’re cruising low enough now that somebody’s bound to spot us soon.”

“Let ’em. Just keep looking for a U-Haul truck with the number 18 painted on the top of the cargo box.”

“Rikia or Breen could’ve painted over the number.”

Shaking his head, Cozy said, “I don’t think they would have had the time. Besides, I’m betting Rikia doesn’t know there’s a spy in the sky tracking him.” Straining to see out his window, he asked, “See anything?”

“Blue sky,” Bernadette said, wondering how something that had started out as a simple break-in at an abandoned missile-silo site had reached its current level.

Noticing the thoughtful, almost brooding look on her face, Cozy said, “You’re looking awfully serious there, Major.”

“Nuclear gadgets tend to do that to me,” she said with a wink.

“Then I say we go down for a closer look.”

“Closer it is,” she said, nosing the Gulfstream lower. “At least as close as we dare.”

The dispatch call to the Pojoaque Indian Reservation cop, telling him that several locals were claiming to have spotted a jet buzzing
Highway 285 just before State Road 502 turned west and headed up the hill to Los Alamos, normally wouldn’t have gotten much attention. But the fact that the jet had reportedly flown up and down a twelve-mile stretch of 285 between Santa Fe and Pojoaque, cruising along at no more than a couple of thousand feet, not once or twice but three times, as if the pilot were searching for something on the highway, had gotten the res cop’s attention.

When the res cop mentioned the dispatch call to a New Mexico state trooper friend he was having a cup of coffee with at a Pojoaque diner, the trooper’s eyes lit up.

“Damn, Redbird, the feds are looking for a truck that’s reportedly headed north up 285 from Albuquerque,” the wide-eyed trooper said, setting his coffee cup aside. “We’ve had two FBI bulletins on it this afternoon. Could be that plane your folks spotted was looking for the same truck. Word on the street is that the truck’s hauling either stolen Indian artifacts or drugs. Maybe your plane was a government jet? FBI, even?”

“Nobody mentioned seeing any government markings.”

“Strange,” said the trooper. “I’ll call your info in to the number listed on those FBI bulletins when we’re done. It’s an Albuquerque exchange. That’s strange, too, since there’s a bureau office right up the road in Santa Fe.”

“Think it’s real urgent?” the res cop asked.

“Everything’s supposedly urgent that comes in with ‘FBI’ stamped on it.” The trooper took a sip of coffee and waved for their waitress. “But right now what’s urgent is me getting myself a slice of cherry cobbler.”

After two unproductive midmorning conversations with Otis Breen about his missing son, Thaddeus Richter sat down at his desk just before noon to stare blankly out his office window and contemplate the suddenly overcast Denver skies. When his administrative assistant buzzed him at twelve thirty to let him know that he had someone from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the phone, he shrugged and took the call. A couple of minutes later he knew what Silas Breen had been hauling, although it hadn’t been easy for him to get a straight story out of the bureaucrat. In fact, it had taken something akin to diplomatic maneuvering on his part to get the man to admit to knowing anything about Silas Breen’s connection to Applied Nuclear Theratronics of Canada Ltd., or to that company’s former employee Thurmond Giles. It turned out the connection had come to light and been passed on to an Oklahoma Nuclear Regulatory Commission office after an inquisitive Oklahoma Port of Entry officer on I-44 had reported that a truck that had begun a trip in Ottawa was running on illegally recapped tires and that the driver, Silas Breen, had been cited and fined three hundred dollars. The suspicious port of entry officer had called Ottawa to find out exactly what Breen was hauling, then called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after learning that Breen’s load included twenty out-of-service radiation-therapy-unit cobalt-60 heads. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission bureaucrat had ultimately called Richter in response to seeing the same FBI bulletins that the New Mexico state trooper at Pojoaque had seen.

Just before two p.m. an FBI agent in Albuquerque called Richter to tell him that an Albuquerque police officer, in response to an anonymous tip, had found a man named Howard Colbain and an
associate, Jerico Mimms, wired to a couple of fence braces on the Colbain property and that Mimms claimed that the incident was linked to a mysterious U-Haul truck. A truck that the Albuquerque PD had received an FBI bulletin about, with Richter listed as the agency contact person.

Fifty minutes later Richter was on a plane bound for New Mexico. By five p.m. he was in Albuquerque interrogating Colbain and Mimms.

As the three men sat in a dimly lit police substation room that reeked of Lysol and recently painted drywall, Richter, looking far less haggard than either Mimms or Colbain, slipped his reading glasses up on his nose, stared across the table directly at Colbain, and said, “We can string this out as long as you’d like, Colbain. Your claim that Major Cameron and Mr. Coseia assaulted you is only part of a bigger story. I want to know about Silas Breen.”

Looking weary, Colbain said, “I’ve told you, just like I’ve told half-a-dozen other cops around here, I don’t know anything about any Silas Breen.”

“What about you, Mimms?”

Mimms shrugged. “Nope, don’t know him.”

“And you’re positive you didn’t know what Breen was hauling?” Richter asked Colbain.

“I don’t know him. I don’t know what the hell he was hauling, where he was headed, or for that matter the exact distance from here to the moon, okay?”

“Suppose I told you he was hauling hospital equipment.”

“No news there,” Colbain said. “Before you waltzed in, another cop told me the same damn thing.”

“And if I told you Breen was hauling a bunch of treatment heads salvaged from old radiation therapy machines? Heads that may contain cobalt-60? Would that mean anything to you?”

“Afraid I don’t know what the hell cobalt-60 is.”

“It is a radioisotope of cobalt. A nuclear source material.”

“Then I’d say that maybe he was just hauling those treatment heads of yours from one useful place to another.”

Mimms nodded as if to say,
Makes sense to me
.

Shifting his focus, Richter said, “You knew Thurmond Giles, of course.”

“From a distance.”

“And your late wife knew him as well?”

Colbain forced out a reluctant “Yes.”

“Did you know that it was Giles who arranged for the shipment of those treatment heads?”

“Of course not,” Colbain said, looking and sounding totally surprised.

“You sound a bit snookered, Mr. Colbain.”

“Are we close to being done here?” Colbain shot back.

“Nowhere near, I’m afraid.”

Colbain sighed and, looking like a man who couldn’t quite decide what direction to take next, stared past Richter. When Richter repeated, “Nowhere near,” Colbain rested his elbows on the tabletop, dropped his bloody chin and lacerated neck into his hands, and continued staring blankly at the wall.

In November 1942, the Manhattan Engineer District, the government agency responsible for the development of the world’s first
nuclear weapon, authorized the Albuquerque Engineer District to conduct a site investigation into the possibility that a location near the Los Alamos Ranch School in Otowi, New Mexico, might satisfactorily serve as the site for the final development, processing, assembly, and testing of a nuclear weapon known then as the atomic bomb. The project was code-named “Project Y.”

The site had to meet several requirements, the foremost of which was the requisite isolation. In addition, the location had to encompass an area large enough to provide an adequate testing ground for the bomb, the climate had to be mild enough to allow for work on the project to take place during winter, access to roads and rail needed to be adequate, the population within a hundred-mile radius had to be sparse, utilities and housing had to already be present or easily developable, and the location had to be far enough from any American seacoast to eliminate the potential of an enemy attack.

In March 1943 the forty-seven-thousand-acre Otowi location, isolated on a New Mexico mesa on the eastern slope of the Jemez Mountains, was chosen as the site for Project Y. Sixteen miles away from the nearest town, the site ultimately became known as Los Alamos. Local residents simply called it “the Hill.”

Primary access to the Hill in 1943, just as now, was via what is now known as State Road 502, and the site, crisscrossed by mountain streams and canyons, including at least a dozen box canyons, with no access to the mesa on either side, had remained just as remote as it had been during World War II.

Cozy was busy studying a computer-generated topo map of Los Alamos and the surrounding Jemez Mountains when
Sugar
hit air choppy enough to send him a half foot out of his seat. Grabbing the seat cushion, he muttered, “Damn.”

Concentrating on State Road 502 below as it snaked its way up the hill from Pojoaque for Los Alamos and totally unperturbed by the unstable air, Bernadette maneuvered
Sugar
between two canyon walls and to within 1,500 feet of the highway below. “We’re gonna have fighter jets on our tail sooner or later,” she said.

Increasing the size of the image on the computer screen, Cozy said, “You pays your dime, you takes your chances.”

“Where’d that come from?”

“My grandmother. It was a favorite saying of hers whenever times got rough.”

“That’s one way of looking at things, but I’ve always preferred having the odds in my favor. That’s one reason I called my dad before we took off from Albuquerque. I just hope he still has enough contacts to keep me from being court-martialed and you from doing five to ten if this whole thing goes south.”

“Makes two of us.” Cozy’s stomach headed for his knees as Bernadette dropped the jet lower and followed a forest service road into a canyon.

As Bernadette dipped the plane’s left wing, Cozy said, “I’m still not sure why you think Rikia would head for one of these canyons and not straight for Los Alamos.”

“Just a hunch. A hunch of my dad’s, really. Something left over from his days in Vietnam.”

“Mind sharing it with me?” Cozy asked, adjusting his headset as they swooped down the canyon at almost 300 knots.

“One word—isolation. The same reason the government chose Los Alamos as its bomb-making site in the first place. It’s the kind of place the Vietcong would have chosen to assemble their troops before an assault during the early years of the Vietnam War, according to my dad. A place where from the air you literally can’t see the forest floor for the trees. And that’s something that pretty much makes recon impossible. The Vietcong would assemble in a place like that, map out their assault strategy, disperse, pull off a hit-and-run attack, and then go their separate ways. It worked quite well for them until a nosy U.S. jet jockey, disobeying orders and cruising along slow and low on a return from a bombing mission, figured out what they were doing.”