Six Seconds

50

Pysht, on the Juan De Fuca Strait, Washington

Fog cloaked the north shore of Olympic Peninsula as Kip Drucker eased his SUV along the old trail road to the small cove.

He keyed his radio microphone and gave his dis patcher his location.

“Vanessa, Stan wanted me to follow up that CPB call first thing this morning.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection had alerted the Clallam County Sheriff’s Department that a small craft may have illegally unloaded contraband from a larger foreign vessel in the Strait, which forms the border with Canada.

The report originated from a Chinese cargo ship. Chinese crew members had noted the larger ship was out of Yemen and was navigating suspiciously. The captain took a few days to mull over the incident before reporting it to U.S. authorities.

The Chinese crew witnessed the smaller craft land ing on U.S. soil some five to seven miles southwest of Clallam Bay, near Pysht. Wind-driven swells and fog had hampered an effective search.

“I’m going to investigate this zone,” Drucker told his dispatcher.

“Ten-four. And, Kip, I’ve stacked your other calls. First one is Chester Green. Wants you to go to his place for more on his stolen boat from the weekend.”

“Ten-four. Seventy-one out.”

Drucker had two years in as a deputy with the patrol division. He and his wife planned to start a family once he made detective. He still had a lot of course work before he could take the exam. His wife wanted to get going on the baby thing.

Pay attention, he told himself as he walked the desolate shoreline.

Drucker’s sergeant had instructed him to look for anything out of the ordinary. Should be easy as nobody lived out here. Nothing around for a mile or so in either direction. Pysht was beautiful. The name came from an old Indian word. Something about the wind, Drucker couldn’t remember.

The fog cast everything in gray and silver-white. It was surreal the way it blotted out the forest and the Olympic Mountains. Water lapped against the beach and gulls shrieked. Drucker contended with the smells of dead fish and seaweed, while welcoming the occa sional trace of spruce and cedar.

He’d gone nearly a mile, and had come to a large piece of driftwood where he’d decided to turn back. That’s when he heard the chink of glass.

A beached wooden shipping crate jostled gently in the surf. It contained two-dozen brown bottles of liquid. Beer. Made in Nigeria, according to the faded red lettering.

Drucker looked at it, as he tugged on his latex gloves and pulled out a bottle to check the labels. The water had loosened most of them. Big Mountain Taste. Nigerian Blended Ale. Drucker tried to twist a cap. Not a twist cap. His keys jingled as he reached for his jack knife, flipped to the opener and popped the cap. He held his nose over the contents.

It was beer. No question.

He dripped some on the rocks, watching it foam, wondering how it would go down chilled on a Sunday during a Seahawks game. He glanced at the other bottles in the crate, noticing one had split along the seam.

Drucker plucked it.

Leaking, droplets hissed on the rocks. Not like beer foam.

Plumes of smoke rose; smoke with an odd smell. Kind of like medicine, but different. Drucker set the bottle down on the rocks. A tiny thick cloud of smoke rose as the liquid seeped from the bottle.

“What the hell. That’s not beer.”

Drucker reached for his shoulder microphone and called his dispatcher.

Within minutes of Drucker’s dispatch, his call reached the highest levels of national security.

His report pinballed among local, state and federal agencies to Washington, D.C., where intelligence ana lysts captured it. They red-flagged it as evidence sup porting earlier foreign intel concerning a Yemini ship bound for the U.S. with hostile cargo from Africa. Connecting dots.

Was it a potential puzzle piece of an impending attack during the papal visit?

But few in the security chain possessed the clearance needed to access that analysis. It was shared on a needto-know basis.

On the ground at Pysht, Drucker had been advised to treat the mysterious substance as a potential explo sive, or biohazard.

Offshore, vessels from the U.S. Coast Guard, Wash ington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Clallam County, kept watercraft from nearing the site.

No residents lived within a one-and-a-half-mile radius of the area. Drucker was told that immediate evacuation was not necessary. A public announcement was not necessary. Backed up by Washington Highway Patrol and local firefighters, Drucker sealed the scene, as state emergency biohazard experts arrived to make a preliminary assessment.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Ex plosives dispatched a team from the Seattle Field Division to study the substance. The FBI dispatched an evidence response team from the Seattle Field Office to pursue foot and tire impressions leading from the site, treating it as if it were a crime scene.

At the same time across the country a mechanism had been triggered.

An elite new unit drawn from several federal agen cies and the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force had been deployed.

The team of ten personnel, and some seven hundred pounds of state-of-the-art equipment, lifted off in a small, unmarked twin-engine jet from its military base at Indian Head, Maryland.

Dr. Tony Takayasu headed the unit. Like the CBIRF, its mission was rapid response to help local officials in threats involving chemical, biological, nuclear or radio logical incidents.

Takayasu had been seconded from the Livermore Lab in California. He’d headed secret military research on the creation and detection of unknown substances. He was one of the world’s authorities on molecular structures.

Next in command was Karen Dyer, a Harvard pro fessor of advanced chemistry. She also held degrees in physics and DNA research from Berkeley.

Other members included a leading field doctor from the Center for Disease Control, a veteran technician from the FBI’s Explosives Unit who’d worked on the Unabomber case, the World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing. There was also a nuclear physicist from Los Alamos, and several military personnel expert in ex plosives and biological, nuclear and chemical warfare. As their jet crossed the country, Takayasu and his team studied updates sent to them from investigators on-site.

Some three hours later, their plane landed at an airfield near Clallam Bay normally used to transport convicts from the state prison nearby. They were met by a convoy of waiting emergency vehicles which ferried them and their equipment to the site.

Upon arrival, they waited for county and state public safety officials to complete the decontamination process before they were debriefed.

“We’re not sure what it is. We haven’t been able to identify it,” a state official said, as members of the new unit pulled on camouflaged hazardous-material suits and gas masks. “We don’t think it’s a germ or nerve agent. What we can tell you is that the case labelled beer held twenty-two bottles containing beer. Two contained an unknown substance. We need to identify it. Our concern is how many bottles, or cases, have penetrated the border. Somebody’s up to something.”

Takayasu’s team muscled their equipment to the site. It was protected by yellow police tape and a huge canvas canopy. They set to work to collect a sample of the liquid, analyze and identify it in order to determine whether it was lethal.

Each team member conducted examinations and undertook various component testing using advanced equipment, such as micro UV laser fluorescence bio sensors. They ran a number of protocols and formulas. They swabbed, chilled, burned and baked on-site, ana lyzing residue, processing it through secure laptops with links to databases across the country.

“I don’t get it, Tony,” Dyer said. “This liquid sub stance defies our on-site testing. What the heck is it?”

Takayasu was stumped, shook his head and kept working. At sunset he walked from the site and removed his mask, enjoying the cool refreshing air. He gazed out at the water.

The fog had lifted in the twilight and he recalled himself as a seven-year-old boy walking into the bed room of his newborn sister. She was so still. He’d alerted his mother, whose screams he still heard. His sister had died. Later, when he was a high-school student, Takayasu went to the county office and obtained her death records. The cause was sudden infant death, a syndrome that still perplexes many. It drove him to devote his life to science, to unravel that which is unknown.

Takayasu shifted his attention back to his current challenge and considered calling his wife in the east. He was going to miss his daughter’s violin recital in Georgetown. He’d reached for his cell phone, when some of the others approached him.

“What do you think?” one of them asked.

Takayasu showed them his notes where he’d circled C3H5(NO3)3?

“Nitro?”

“No, not nitro,” he said, “in some ways it exhibits similar characteristics but it’s not nitroglycerin.” Taka yasu gazed at the water.

“You look troubled, Tony. You got any thoughts on this?” Dyer asked.

“We’re going to have to do more work in the lab.”

“Sure, but what is your gut telling you?”

“I suspect this is a component that is to be applied to another. It could also be a substance not yet fully pro cessed. At a conference in New Zealand I recall learning about a wild theory or research going on in China. Something involving nanotechnology and radio trans missions. All of it undetectable. What I’ve seen here strikes me as being remotely similar to one of the theo retical components.”

“We’re talking about some kind of explosive?” the FBI bomb expert asked.

“It’s just one component, but I have no clue about the form of delivery.”

“So it could be anything, then?”

“Anything.”