Page 11 of Acting on Instinct
Lynx tapped the phone to end the conversation. “Phossy jaw. The subject of many a nightmare when I was a child.”
“I imagine so,” Nomad said as he stuck out a hand toward the new guy. “Nomad. No affiliation.”
“Interesting. I’m Dawson, Tidal force.” He returned the handshake and then lifted his hand toward White. “So shit must be hitting the fan somewhere. Good to see you, White.”
“We were just learning about why our subject might possibly be glowing in the dark and smelling of garlic.”
“Vampire hunter?” Dawson asked.
“My initial thought as well,” Nomad said, feeling less like he’d lost his mind out there on the Moroccan roadway.
“I have a theory that the subject was looking in or around the caves in Germany and was exposed to white phosphorus. I’ll come back to your vampire quip in a moment because it’s possible that you two might not be far off the mark.”
“Excellent.” Dawson rubbed his hands together. “I love when you do this kind of shit, Lynx.”
Lynx pulled her brows together. “My job?”
“Exactly.”
“I’m going to take you back to a conversation we had in the cafeteria last summer,” Lynx swept her skirt under her as she took her chair again. “You had just come back from your vacation in Germany along the Baltic Sea. You told me a story about some fellow tourists who were beachcombing and picking up what they thought was amber.”
“Yeah,” Dawson said, pulling his ankle up to rest on his thigh, leaning back comfortably, settling into the conversation. “Little kids, that could have gone really badly.”
White lifted her chin, and Dawson caught her eye. “They were lumps of white phosphorus that had washed up on the shore. When they dry out, they can cause severe burns or ignite. So you can imagine a young family driving home to the city, and their bags in the back of the car catch on fire. It’s a hot burn that could potentially catch the fuel tank.”
“Not amber, then,” White said. “Why was there white phosphorus in the sea?”
“White phosphorus was used for different munitions in WWII. After the land war, this material posed an enormous danger. Someone in the Allied framework decided that the safest and best thing to do was to dump it into the North and Baltic Seas.
“Or maybe leave it in caves?” Lynx asked.
“Salt caves specifically, yeah, sure. Do you want the why? Is that helpful to your puzzle?”
“Potentially. So yes, why salt caves?” Lynx asked.
“Well, I can see White got excited when I said that. So let’s explore. Salt caves are uniquely safe places to store munitions. Start with impermeability. Salt caves are often impermeable, so if your container fails, it would serve as a safety net for hazardous chemicals. Salt mines have stable temperatures and low humidity. If you’re talking about white phosphorus munitions, that low humidity will prolong the time it takes for the casings to rust and decompose, possibly exposing the chemicals to air and catching on fire. The Germans weren’t thinking about that so much as they were thinking about safety from bomb raids.”
“But you’ve studied this, right?” Lynx asked. “Chemistry degree and a fondness for military history?”
“That’s right,” Dawson said. “But you were talking about phossy jaw in the present tense? It happened during the Great Wars, sure. Someone’s walking around like that now?”
“Speculation,” Lynx said. “Could be a rabbit hole. But I see cogs whirring. And I bet it has something to do with the vampire comment.”
“Bats, anyway. Guano is acidic. And bats like salt caves because the temperature is a good constant for them. If they’re using a cave and dropping guano on the eighty-plus-year-oldweapons casings, it could eat through and expose the white phosphorus.”
“But didn’t you say it would catch fire?” White shuffled around in her chair, finally wrapping her hands around the end of the leather arms and squeezing.
“If moisture got into an oxygen-deprived area of the cave that contained leaking white phosphorus munitions, the chemicals would create a highly toxic micro-climate, if you will, that would be saturated with phosphorus vapors—phosphine gas. Yes, if the cave were damp, you’d have the vapors without the fire.”
“Bats,” Nomad said, wondering if, at the time of the cave tours with his parents, that was what he’d heard, that they couldn’t go in because of toxins, and that he remembered that they were also talking about bat hibernation.
“The caves catch on fire?” Lynx asked.
“Yes, or they can emit a chemical glow. You can’t go in. You’d die almost immediately. When I say toxic, I mean lethally,” Dawson said.
“If you were deep in the cave or near that product, that’s true, right?” White asked. “But if you were in the front part of the cave, you might have natural ventilation that dissipated it?”
“Let’s see, phosphoric acid mist would be caustic. You’d potentially have the warning of mucosal irritation—eyes, skin, lungs. It might cause chemical pneumonia.”
