“How does it work?” Emert asked. “There’s a lead shutter at one end? It opens and sends a beam of gamma rays out the tube?”
“This is the strange part, to my way of thinking,” said Thornton. “To take a radiograph, you put the film behind the pipe, you hide behind a shield, and you turn a crank that pushes the pigtail out the end of the box. That lets the gamma rays from the source go through the pipe—and pretty much anything else nearby—and hit the film.”
“Seems kinda primitive,” said Emert.
“Kinda dangerous, too,” I added.
“Yes, it does,” said Thornton. “And yes, it is. Anytime somebody’s using one of these, it’s important to get everybody else out of the area. The people who use these things tend to get the highest annual radiation exposures of any workers in the nation—ten times what somebody at a nuclear power plant gets. And that’s if the thing’s working right. If something goes wrong, it can get real bad, real fast.” He showed a picture of a pigtail—just the wire cable and the bead of the source, detached from the camera. “Occasionally the pigtail comes loose,” he said. “The operator thinks he’s reeled it back into the camera, but instead, it’s lying on the ground, sending out all this gamma at anybody unlucky enough to come close.”
“Or pick it up,” I said bitterly.
“Or pick it up,” he echoed. He proceeded to tell us, and to show us, the story of a pipeline welder in the mountains of Peru who—late in the afternoon of February 20, 1999—found a short length of wire cable lying on the ground. Thinking he might be able to use the cable or sell it for scrap, the man picked it up and put it in his pocket. It remained there until he took off his pants that night and draped them over the back of a chair. The man’s wife sat briefly in the chair.
Then, at 1 A.M., came a knock at the door. During the evening, the radiographer had tried to take an image of a weld. When he developed the film, he found that it was blank; unexposed. Backtracking, he checked the camera and discovered that the pigtail was gone. A frantic search began, which led to the welder’s house, where the source was recovered. The iridium had nestled against the man’s thigh for six hours; it had hovered at the base of his wife’s back for a few minutes. But in those hours and minutes, everything changed.
Twenty hours after pocketing the source, the welder entered a hospital in Lima. A red oval had appeared on the back of his right thigh, and he was vomiting. By the following day, the oval was an open ulcer, surrounded by a halo of inflammation. Within a month the crater extended almost to the bone, and infections and tissue damage were rampant. Six months after the man’s exposure, surgeons in Paris amputated his right leg and removed the right half of his pelvis—skeletal trauma that exceeded almost anything even I had ever witnessed—along with much of his intestinal and urinary tract. The man’s wife was luckier; she developed a burn at the base of her back, but it healed.
The wall went dark, but the images hung in my mind, and no one said anything for a while. Finally Emert did. “That guy lived?”
“He lived. He’s alive still,” said Thornton. “If you call that living.”
My thoughts flew from hospitals in Peru and Paris to one in Knoxville. I prayed that I had not just witnessed a preview of what lay in store for Eddie Garcia’s hands or Miranda’s fingers.
“So you guys think the gamma source in Novak’s gut was from one of these industrial radiography cameras?”
“We’re virtually sure. Field Imaging Equipment is sending somebody from Shreveport up to Savannah River to verify that.”
“And they can tell us whose camera the source came from?”
He shook his head. “I wish it were that simple. There are thousands of these cameras out there—all over the Texas oil patch and the Gulf Coast, for instance—and they’re not as tightly regulated or closely tracked as you might think. When a refinery or a pipeline-inspection contractor buys one, they’re required to register it with the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But after that?” He shrugged. “They can chuck it in a jeep and drive from one coast to the other with it. If it gets lost or stolen, the owner has to report that to the NRC. But what if nobody knows for a while? They might use the hell out of it for a week or two, then lock it away in a tool closet for six months or a year. Hell, hundreds of these cameras went missing in the chaos caused by Hurricane Katrina. Lost, mostly, but probably some were stolen.”
“Hundreds?” The number astonished me.
“Several hundred. Nearly all of them recovered since.”
“Nearly?”
“A few are still unaccounted for,” he acknowledged.
“So one of those missing Katrina cameras could have supplied the source that killed Novak?”
“Hang on,” he said, “I’ll get to that in a second. Another complication is that there’s no serial number on the source we found in Novak.”