Radioactive
Lloyd Vancil
Author Bio
Lloyd Vancil is a Vietnam veteran and world traveler. He has been married to the love of his life for over forty years and they have three wonderful children. A large red parrot often accompanies him and helps keep him in line.
Description
Disaster strikes when LAPD Detective Sergeant Mitchell Foster’s orders lead to fatal consequences for his family. Foster is haunted by his past and nearly destroyed by this new grief but he must pull himself together when a terrorist raid on a nuclear storage facility puts law enforcement officials across the country on alert, Detective Foster is drawn into the investigation of a home grown terrorist plot aimed at turning a most of the Los Angeles basin and half of Nevada into a radioactive wasteland.
As Foster struggles to keep his guilt, anger, and frustration from boiling over, deal with his family’s grief and anger, an even bigger threat looms. Conspiracies mount as the Department of Homeland Security and FBI investigations merge and land in Mitchell’s lap. With time running down, Detective Foster must set aside the past and stop the home grown terrorists who want to kill millions of innocent Americans. The murder of a Department of Homeland Security officer and an attack on his partner complicate the picture. He refuses to step back from the case even when his partner is wounded and his supervisor orders him to. In the middle of that pressure, DHS and the FBI ask Mitchell to find missing Russian atom bomb and the ultimate suicide bomber before it is too late.
Nearly lost in grief over his loss, Foster finds himself falling in love with a strong woman who is drawn to the wounded warrior and his determination to survive. Just when he thinks the worst is over, he finds the joint Department of Homeland Security, FBI investigation is depending on him and a police department wrapped up in a major nuclear spill.
Mitchell is trying to cope with a city wide panic, find a revolutionaries a murderer , stop a bank robbery, and find a dirty bomb that could make a large part of California and Nevada uninhabitable. Tomorrow’s headlines will read, “Terror plot averted,” or “LA Radioactive.” The difference is down to one grieving, angry cop, his woman, a physics professor, and Mitchell’s stone cold determination to win a race to save tomorrow.
Book excerpt
Doomsday −65 11:22 (PST)
Ninety miles southeast of Seattle
Once, the fence had been intimidating. Now the rusted links and faded signs that warned against trespass on federal property were less impressive. The weeds and brush that grew against the fence on the outside were nearly matched by the growth inside. Years of budgetary neglect had taken their toll. A few yards away, inside the fence, vent pipes poked from the tops of concrete containments. When it rained, the water steamed from the nuclear fire–heated tops of some of these vents. The budget had taken the roving guards, discontinued the grounds care, and deleted funds for the electronic guards that had replaced both. Someone argued that a place as remote as this, as undisturbed as this for this many years, was obviously guarded by “inaccessible terrain.”
Funding was withdrawn and steam rose every time the rain fell. When the wind blew from the east, steam drifted unhampered across a meadow, through another fence, and out into the wake of the cars and trucks that roared through the inaccessible terrain and down the nearby interstate every hour of every day. Perhaps it was ironic that some of the money diverted from care of the fence was used to build interstate exit 214. The exit led to a gate in the fence that guarded the steaming containments.
The sign declared, “Exit 214 — Hemmingferd Nuclear Material Management —US Department of the Interior.”
The truck that roared out of the night looked like a fugitive from a road war movie. Painted primer brown, it carried a fair amount of rust and mud over scratches and dents. A huge stinger blade from a Rome Plow, designed to rip new roads through green jungle, had replaced its bumper. The bright metal of the huge blade carried several bright red smears of paint among the scratches from a recent meeting with something more than brush and small trees.
The man at the wheel grinned, teeth white in a thick, blue-black beard. He wore an old fatigue coat with Enviro-Party patches sewn on it. The rest of his clothes were dark. Next to him sat a woman, more than six feet tall and well muscled; she bounced on the seat, even though she braced for every impact. She wore a jacket nearly identical to the driver’s. She also wore a red-and-white checkered scarf around her head that concealed her features, except for the sparkle of one dark eye and a jagged scar that crossed her left brow and vanished beneath the scarf over her left cheek. Her left eye was a sightless white ghost.
On top of the cab squatted a single fifty-caliber machine gun, and behind it another, younger man clung for dear life to the swinging receiver of the big gun. He thanked Allah that the welding that held the gun mount was strong enough. His fatigue jacket flapped its patches in the wind. He carried nearly 240-pounds of massive muscle and wore a predatory grin under his brown beard.
Author Website
http://levancil.com/
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