WEST OF KADAGAC, KAZAKHSTAN
The boxcar seemed to have disintegrated into the air. Guns and Massette drove all the way to the yard and back to the border four times without spotting it on any of the sidings; they sneaked into the yard and searched for it there, going so far as to check several cars to see if they had been painted over. Twice yardmen asked what they were doing, and at one point Guns thought he would have to pull out his gun and shoot a worker who seemed a little too insistent in his questioning.
It wasn’t in the yard. Massette thought the tunnel must have something to do with the disappearance; they searched it without finding a siding or even a doorway, Guns’s heart pounding the whole time as he worried a train would come and flatten him inside. They used their Geiger counters on the sidings without finding anything, then as a last-ditch effort began walking the tracks with the detectors.
About a half mile north of the tunnel, the tracks ran level with a sandy road on the right. Massette realized there was something odd about it, and began madly kicking around in the dirt; Guns couldn’t figure out what the hell he was doing
until Massette stopped with a curse, then dropped down and scraped soil from the buried rails.
“That bulldozer,” said Massette, pointing toward the woods.
There was a gap between the buried rail spur and the tracks of about four feet, just long enough for a flanged section to be fitted in. They found the pieces—the pair looked like long, curved french fries, with triangular heads—in a pile of rocks near the woods with some blocks and metal bars and chain. A few yards farther on, the rails were no longer buried; they headed through some brush toward a clearing a few hundred yards ahead.
Guns took out his pistol, holding it behind his back as they walked up the rail line. Massette stopped suddenly, catching sight of something in the distance.
“Better flank me,” he said.
Guns trotted into the woods to parallel him. The tracks ran in a large semicircle to the east, back in the direction where the tunnel had been. A small clearing sat beyond a set of cement posts; a partially dismantled train car sat in the middle of them.
“And here we are,” said Massette loudly, arriving in the clearing. “Merde alors.”
It looked as if the flat casks from the French processing operation had been stacked on the bottom and sides of the car; at roughly a foot thick, they could have been easily missed by a casual inspection. The rad meters registered only trace amounts of material, bits of contamination that had been picked up inadvertently at the original waste site and left on the car. The casks—assuming of course that they had been there—would have contained high-alpha-producing waste, highly dangerous, but only if the containment vessels were broken and the material pulverized.
“Put it in trucks here,” said Massette. “Or one truck. We should probably follow this road,” he told Guns. He pulled out his map.
“It’s not on the map,” said Guns.
“Setting this up must have taken quite a long time.”
“Yeah,” said Guns.
“The fact that they would then blow up the train and leave the remains, leave the bulldozer, eliminate the possibility of using it again—they’re ready to go.”