Leslie came out of her brooding silence, leaning forward, peering intently at the cove as if something in the mangroves had hissed her name.
“What is it?”
After a moment she laughed and pointed at a three-foot croc swimming along the edge of the cove. “Speak of the devil. One of my flock.”
They watched the young croc drag itself up onto some mangrove roots and immediately fall into a drowse. Armored with thick, bony plates, the creature might have been suited up for medieval battle. Its beauty was in the same realm as that of hammerhead sharks and feral hogs. Only a person who could see past its fierce exterior might feel affection for such a beast. Someone such as Leslie, who had been hardened by the hammer blows of a junkie mother and the mother’s string of dog-shit boyfriends pawing at the young girl’s bedroom door late at night; yet somehow that thick-skinned, unloved child had managed to soldier on, grow strong, and keep her vulnerable heart sufficiently intact to love the unlovable.
A gust of wind roughened the surface of the cove, blurring the wine-dark mirror and kicking up a flurry of sand from the beach. Leslie brushed her hand in front of her face as if wiping away a cobweb. The croc disappeared from its perch on the mangrove roots, off prowling.
“And how do you accomplish this? You and these people.”
“We have a plan. A very good plan.”
“So you break into the plant, shut off the power, you’re a hero to your cause, then the next day they turn the power back on and they track down Leslie Levine and shut her away in prison. What good have you done?”
More circles, deeper in the sand, drawn faster, interlocking, concentric.
“I’m no martyr.”
“You damn sure sound like one.”
“I don’t plan on getting caught.”
“Nobody ever does.”
“We’re going to make as much noise as we can. There’s no choice.”
“Listen to yourself. You’re talking like a half-baked terrorist.”
She turned her head and regarded him with those rich brown eyes. Rimmed with sadness, but resolute.
“The natural world, all those things you care about, Thorn, it’s being destroyed, bit by bit. And what’re you doing? Tying your flies and watching sunsets and drinking a few beers at the end of a long day. Just keeping your head down, ignoring it, pretending it isn’t happening. Letting somebody else fight the Huns.”
It was true. Thorn was keeping his head down. His past crusades had resulted in far too many casualties. Let someone else carry the banners. Someone with a clear conscience. At this moment all he wanted was to get Flynn safely home, nothing more.
“Maybe I was wrong about you. I thought you gave a damn. You stood up for what you believed. You were my hero. You were my conscience.”
He looked at her profile. And saw again the shy kid and her bucket of rotting shrimp donated by the local bait shop, her jerky casts, her sidelong looks at him, that wild, cock-eyed smile when she caught that first snapper.
She rose to her feet, motioned for him to follow, and led him down the spit of sand to the western edge of the basin. She pried apart the branches, turned sideways, and wriggled through a gap, Thorn staying close.
They ducked and wrestled for twenty yards through the dense web of limbs until they reached the rocky shore where the blue waters of Biscayne Bay spread before them. A mile offshore a catamaran was slicing south toward the Keys, and just beyond it, along the mainland coast, was the hulking nuclear plant, its twin cooling towers, its enormous concrete dome, its dozens of outbuildings sheathed in metal girders and scaffolding, the land stripped of vegetation, a barren industrial site, ugly and forbidding.
“Right here in one of the most beautiful, fragile landscapes in the world, every minute of every day, they’re sucking hundreds of thousands of gallons from the aquifer to cool the superheated steam, and inside those buildings there’s enough radioactive fuel to turn South Florida into a ghost town for the next thousand years. Billions of dollars already spent to scrape the land bare and build that monstrosity, billions more to double the size of the plant in the next few years.
“Plant’s forty years old, much older than it was designed to last, but the NRC just gave them a twenty-year extension. It’s crumbling, pipes are leaking, cracks in the concrete. They’re one accident away from catastrophe. I worked alongside those people for years. The workers know the plant’s unsafe, but they’re scared to complain. Last year there were dozens of anonymous tips from whistle-blowers about leaky valves and rusting seams, failed backup generators, but the regulators ignore them. Somebody has to put a stop to it.”