Perilous Panacea by Ronald Klueh Page B

beyond what was in the DOD/DOE investigation report.
    After a long phone conversation with Spanner, he got two FBI agents from the Knoxville office involved in the investigation. He told them everything but the contents of the shipment, which was classified, and which they did not need to know, at least not yet.
    After Tennessee, Saul was off to Albuquerque. He wanted to go home, because the night before, he tried to call Mary seven times and never got her. Sometimes when he was out of town, she stayed with Joyce Able, but when he called Joyce’s apartment, he got a busy signal.
    In Albuquerque, he spent two days interviewing people involved with the fail-safe communications system that crashed. Just as in Tennessee, little new was learned beyond what was in the CID report. A system with dozens of fail-safe protocols failed, and the computer and communications experts at Kirtland Air Force Base could not say why. A couple people said the cyber attack and the hijacking had to be coordinated, but they expressed reservations that anybody could pull something like that, given the complicated nature of all the systems involved.
    After Albuquerque, he flew to Augusta, Georgia, rented a car, and drove to Aiken, South Carolina, where the next day he interviewed people in the receiving office at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL). As expected, they knew very little about the hijacked trucks that were scheduled to deliver their cargo to SRNL. Their only problem was that the manifest of the hijacked material did not agree with the one they received prior to the shipment, the one approved by NNSA headquarters in Washington. The hijacked shipment contained material they had not requested and would have no reason for receiving. Their conclusion: someone had used the computer to manipulate the shipment contents as a setup for the hijacking.
    The next day he drove to Montmorenci, South Carolina to interview Luke Walker, the driver of one of the hijacked trucks. Walker, who had been shot in the head and left for dead was in his forties. He removed his red University of Georgia baseball cap to reveal a shaved head and a scar around the back where doctors had operated to remove the bullet. He spoke in a weak, southern-accented voice. “We were on this two-lane road…”
    “Why were you off the interstate?”
    “We wondered the same thing. We got this ED just after we took off that changed our route and took us off of Interstate 75 and put us on U. S. Highway 321 near Lenoir City.” He told how they seemed to lose communications momentarily, then voice communications was reestablished, and they were told to take an even smaller road with almost no traffic.
    “We figured it had to do with NUKE WATCH, you know, those anti-nuclear peace protesters that sometimes follow us and harass us, take pictures and stuff.
    “Anyway, we came round this bend, and there were four cars. It looked like they’d had one hell-of-a wreck. These two young women came running up to our truck with blood all over them. They waved their arms and screamed that they needed help back at the cars. Well, sir, we all got out to try and help.”
    “Did everybody get out?” Saul asked, “The two in each truck plus the four in the two escort vehicles?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Are drivers supposed to get out of the truck?”
    “Only in an emergency, but we couldn’t get by because the road was blocked by the wreck, or what we thought was a wreck. And there looked to be a bunch of people hurt besides those two women. This one woman had a bloody face, and the other one’s arm was bleeding. Well, we thought it was blood. They had on these real-short shorts, and one of them looked like her clothes were about tore off her. These women led us to the cars screaming about somebody being dead. We barely got to the cars when a gun went off, and they told us to reach for the sky.”
    “Don’t you carry weapons?”
    “Yes, sir, the escort guards do. They probably pulled