The Cassandra Sanction by Scott Mariani Read Free Book Online Page A

eitherto Grant himself or his anonymous company name, Kester Holdings. On docking at the Chinese port of Shenzhen after its month-long voyage, the containers had been unloaded by crane and placed on military trailer trucks originally designed for transporting tanks. From there, the convoy of trucks had taken it to an army rail depot, where the huge vehicles had rolled up onto the even more massive militarytrain already loaded with troops and prison labourers.
    The purpose-built railway stretched many hundreds of miles northwards through China and deep into the mountains of Tibet, the line itself mostly carved out by chain-gangs of convicts. Threat of execution made them the most effective workers, and by definition they were the cheapest. However many dropped dead of exhaustion, were crushedby heavy machinery or shot while trying to escape, fresh reserves were always readily available.
    The cargo consisted of 892 drums of high-level nuclear waste. Each drum contained 55 US gallons or 208 litres, and measured 35 inches in height by 24 inches in diameter. Their yellow paint was scored and scuffed from rubbing together in transit, and many of them were already showing signs of corrosionafter their long sea voyage. They’d eventually rust through, but by then it wouldn’t matter, at least not to Grant. The occasional drum might rupture as it degraded, and if it wasn’t buried deeply enough the small explosion could sometimes break the surface, spewing radioactive white foam that resembled whipped cream and would remain lethally radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
    Grant didn’t care much about that, either. They had unlimited space out here. Every time they excavated a new site, it was far enough away from the last one to avoid contaminating too many of the convicts. They were routinely checked for radiation after handling the merchandise. If one of them made the Geigers crackle, the soldiers would just put a bullet in the bugger and toss his body in the pit.It was the cheapest solution to the problem. These communists understood free enterprise better than most nations.
    The nuclear waste dumping facilities came courtesy of the Ninth Academy, the most secretive organisation within the whole of China’s extensive nuclear programme. It was largely thanks to the Ninth Academy that, in the years since its annexation to the People’s Republic in 1951,Tibet had steadily developed into China’s Nuclear Central. First they’d ravaged the unspoilt wilds for their plentiful uranium resources, then they’d used the country for conducting nuclear weapons tests, and now it was used as a convenient dumping ground for nuclear waste – not just from the vast territory of China itself, but from all over the planet.
    Hey, it all had to go somewhere. Granthad wide experience of offloading nuclear waste in a number of countries. Simply tipping it into the sea was a cost-effective no-brainer, common dumping grounds being the coasts of Italy and Africa. If you couldn’t get away with that, burying it was your next best option, though transportation became more of a problem in the kinds of wilderness areas essential to escaping the watchful eye of theenvironmentalists. Kester Holdings had established nice little niches in Somalia, Kenya and Zaire, but China (despite being so much damned further to travel) was his favourite. The Chinese were excellent to deal with, even if the presence of so many armed troops made Grant edgy at times. While stringently denying any such practice, in reality the Chinese government were more than happy to acceptdeals from western corporations with large quantities of so-called ‘black list’ materials to dispose of, as quietly as possible, and equally large quantities of cash to offer in return.
    It worked out beautifully for all concerned. The environmentalist NGOs found it difficult to penetrate the country, which meant the little creeps couldn’t spy on what he was doing, and he could operate