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.
72
TEXT MESSAGE from our Russian girl,” Tariq said, striding into the living room. The Emir stood at the window, staring out at the desert. He turned.
“Good news, I trust.”
“We will know in sixty seconds.”
Tariq powered up his laptop, opened his Web browser, and went to a website called storespot.com, one of dozens of free online file-storage sites available on the Internet. All that was required to open an account was a user name, a password, and an e-mail address, and for that there were sites that offered throw-away “self-destructing” e-mail addresses.
Tariq logged in to the account, clicked on three links, and found himself in the upload/download area of the site. There was one item waiting, a plain text file. According