“And now Carol Harmon, the level est of academic heads, CEO of a top-five ecoconglomerate, has turned Chicken Little over some kind of rad spill south of Baffin Island. She called me too.”
“With good reason, it sounds like,” Garner said, accepting the coffee. “She can’t test it completely, but she says she’s detected radioactive cesium, strontium, maybe some uranium. At the least, concentrations of uranium 233-to-238, too high to be natural. Maybe some plutonium? Beryllium too? Beryllium’s used to trigger nukes. That sounds like weapons waste to me, Scott. And it sounds like there’s a lot of it in the water up there.”
Krail wrinkled his nose in disagreement.
“Uranium in the Arctic isn’t a problem. There have been some reports around Great Bear Lake the Sahtugot’inc Inuit around Deline come to mind. They’re talking about lung cancer from a uranium mine that operated up there fifty years ago.” The casualness with which Krail seemed to dismiss local health effects did not go unnoticed by either Garner or Zubov. Perhaps Krail had spent too much time behind his desk in the Restricted Access wing.
“And then there’s the airborne crap that settles out of the atmosphere. Mild radiation. PCBS. Maybe some natural sources, but nothing on the scale that she described on the phone. The thing most people forget when it comes to things like ‘spilled uranium’ is that it gets taken up in the environment pretty quickly.”
“The environment’ includes wildlife,” Garner countered.
“Sure, yeah,” Krail conceded.
“But the concentrations just aren’t high enough to be suspect, much less lethal.”
Garner wasn’t nearly as diffident. Very little was known about the movement of uranium through an ecosystem. Iodine 131, with a very high specific activity, had a half-life of about a week, but its cousin 1-129 had a half-life of seventeen million years. Plutonium didn’t travel well in the environment, and would likely settle out in the sediment far worse than the publicly perceived threat of “radiation leaks” from plutonium was the out-and-out loss of stored material from poorly guarded nuclear waste facilities around the world. Uranium, for its part, was still a bit of a mystery. No one really knew how it moved through the environment. Given all of these considerations, Garner found Krail’s cavalier attitude slightly annoying at the very least, their friendship should have been above the usual Navy PR rhetoric.
“What about live weapons?” Garner asked.
Krail almost scoffed.
“You mean lost or leaking nukes something like that?”
Garner nodded.
“Not a chance,” Krail said. “Hollywood paints a different picture of it, of course, but just losing a U.S. nuke is a virtual impossibility. As you might expect, our most destructive toys are also the most locked down.” He indicated the computer terminal on his desk.
“You give me a weapon type and I can tell you exactly how many we have and exactly where they are. And for fifty bucks,” he added, whispering behind his hand in feigned confidentiality, “I’ll even tell you who they’re pointed at.”
“What about someone else’s weapons, like the Russians?” Zubov asked.
“Ah, the Russians,” Krail said with a somewhat sentimental resonance.
Given the stumbling of the Great Bear in recent years, discussion of the once-fervent Cold War and the threat of the Soviet Menace had almost been reduced to charming anecdotes. Far from eliminating or even reducing the threat of nuclear attack, the ebb of the superpower had probably done just as much to destabilize the world’s nuclear arsenal. With weapons, parts, facilities, and even scientists now bartered internationally as frankly as coffee or grain, those charged with providing the common defense could admit only to losing track of many pieces on the global chessboard. Krail reiterated these sentiments as he briefly discussed the latest nuclear developments of the Russians, the French, and the Iraqis.
India and Pakistan had recently put on more nuclear fireworks shows for the sake of national pride, but it was generally agreed that the threat of those arsenals was vastly overestimated. To hear Krail’s evaluation, America was almost ready to place a classified ad to recruit a new Evil Empire against which to fortify its national defense budget, but “China’s shaping up to be a good faux foe to build Cold War II around. I see from the newspapers that the Pentagon’s spin doctors are off to a good start.”
A lack of obvious culprits wasn’t what Garner wanted to hear.
“Carol says the radiation seems to be mainly in the water column, not suspended as atmospheric fallout,” Garner said. “I thought it might be debris from an underwater weapons test.”
“Either way, we would have heard about it,” Krail said.
“What about a waste dump?” Garner suggested. “The Soviets used to dump their nuclear garbage straight into the Atlantic — I’d guess they still do.”
“Sure they do, but nothing like this has come across my desk.” Trust me, said the look on Krail’s face. Garner only wished he could. The lack of specific details about Carol’s findings was beginning to bother him. In Krail he had a friendly, learned ear for this discussion, but Garner was left grasping at straws.
Garner unrolled a Coast Guard chart on Krail’s table and pointed out, as precisely as he could, where the Phoenix had encountered the blue whales and where, given the seasonal wind and current patterns, the floe might have drifted in the past few weeks.
“It’s a long shot,” Garner said. “But as soon as I confirmed the location on the chart, I thought of Scorpion.”
“Which one?” Krail chuckled. It was somewhat of an inside joke around ONR.
During World War II, the Scorpion, a diesel-powered U.S. submarine, had been lost without a trace. Years later, the Americans and the Soviets had each lost a nuclear submarine named Scorpion. The Americans’ sub had been a Skipjack-class vessel apparently sunk by a battery explosion after patrolling the Mediterranean Sea in mid-1968.
Krail provided the story of the Russian Scorpion for Zubov’s benefit.
“We first heard about the sub via our Arctic SOSUS arm,” he began.
“A major avalanche of sediment in a submarine canyon system in the Gulf of Boothia. The seismic disturbance we detected might have been written off as an earthquake, except that the smart little bugger doing the analysis filtered out another disturbance before the landslide signatures began.”
“What kind of disturbance?” Zubov asked.
“We still don’t know,” Krail replied. “Some kind of detonation, but definitely manmade. It was either a delayed weapon, like a mine, or an accidental explosion aboard the vessel. Whatever it was, the brass thought it suspicious enough to suggest we go have a look. What we found under four hundred feet of water and half a mountain of rock was a nuclear sub so advanced it made the Red October look like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
“What year was this?”
“Eighty-five. At the height of Reaganomics and paranoia about the Soviet Menace. Until then we thought our Los Angeles-class subs were the sweetest boats in the ocean. Then we find this huge motherfucking Ivan with technology we were years from implementing. She was a reengineered Soviet Typhoon-class with a triple hull of honeycombed titanium, anechoic plating, shaft shielding, and cavitation damping we couldn’t even get to work on a chalkboard. All new weapons and new sonar arrays. Fifty thousand horses produced by two transmutation reactors cooled by liquid lead.” Twenty years later, transmutation reactors — power plants that used neutron bombardment to generate power from the waste products of other reactors — were just beginning to be evaluated by the private sector.