Zero Option

13

Brigadier General Carrothers returned from the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club feeling somewhat better. His one hour workout had left his cheeks bright red when he walked back into his office. Nothing like a small war with the weights to burn off stress, he thought, and he had had plenty to burn off. Lee Carrothers was six four and extremely fit, having never lost the habits of physical training that had helped maintain the desired lean and mean Army officer image. He was a West Point graduate who had steered himself along the conventional career path from second lieutenant to brigadier in twenty-four fast years. He had a narrow hatchet-shaped face, white-blond, buzz-cut hair, a ruddy complexion, a prominently hooked nose, and bright blue eyes under almost white eyebrows. He’d been fortunate enough to marry a general’s daughter, and thereafter he had alternated between specialty tours in the Chemical Corps and front-office aide and executive assistant jobs. Jealous colleagues who groused about Carrothers’s early promotion said he’d done it all on his hawklike good looks and his wife’s connections, but more than a few of them had discovered, often to their discomfiture, that Lee Carrothers was a great deal smarter than the average bear. His image as a lean and mean ambition machine was just icing on the cake. It was assumed among his contemporaries in the Chemical Corps that he would be the next CG of the Chemical Corps.

The clerk hi the front office handed him a message as he walked through the door. General Waddell was returning early from Europe. He would arrive at Andrews Air Force Base at 2300 tonight.

Incoming! Carrothers shouted mentally as he went into his office. The commanding general of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps had been predictably furious when he found out that precious hours had been wasted out in Utah doing another inventory audit. ‘What part of sight inventory didn’t those idiots understand?’ he had roared over the satellite link. Good fornicating question, Carrothers thought. Waddell had asked about Fort Dietrick’s reaction to the news, but Carrothers, unsure of what operators might be listening to the satellite call, had sidestepped that question. He’s thinking about it, General, just like you told him to.

Waddell caught on immediately and did not press the issue. Carrothers would brief Waddell on the colonel’s advice about clamping the mother of all lids on this little mess when the general was in a better frame of mind. Yeah, like at 2300, after a seven-hour flight back from Germany, Shee-it.

He called Tooele for a status on the sight inventory. Twenty-five percent complete. Estimated tune of completion, twenty-four hours. As the general was aware, these things were not all stored in one pile.

Several underground bunkers had to be opened and safety-tested.

Since the cylinders were no longer in coffins, they had to be individually unstacked, serial numbers verified, end caps safety-checked, etcetera, etcetera. The general, Car rothers had replied, understood results, and he hoped that was abundantly clear to every swinging dick out there who wanted to keep his present rank and commissary privileges.

He called the commanding officer at Anniston. “Is everybody involved sequestered?” he asked. Everybody was, from the base ops officer down to all the clerks involved. “Anything stirring on the troops’ grapevine?”

“Not yet.”

“Keep it that way. If in doubt, clamp harder. And do that audit again.”

“Already doing it.”

Anniston was conducting a sight inventory of their own, looking to see if there was an extra coffin lying around. “Good move,” he said.

He hung up and reflected on the difference between the two commanding officers. Colonel Franklin at Anniston was obviously trying to think ahead of the problem; the CO at Tooele was behind the power curve. He rubbed his eyes. What should you be doing besides waiting for word, oh proactive one? he thought. You should be anticipating Waddell’s questions, that’s what. The general would be sitting on that airplane thinking up a hundred questions that would come rapid-fire as soon as he stepped off the transport. Carrothers called his clerk and asked him to hit the microfilm archives on Wet Eye. It wasn’t what he wanted to do.

He wanted to go out there to Tooele and kick ass to make things go faster, but he knew from experience that when the general wants it bad, he usually gets it bad. The good news was that they had managed to clamp a lid on this little fiasco until they could find out what had really happened. Wet Eye. His headache was coming back.

Carson returned to his office and flopped down in his chair. He had found an almost-perfect hiding place for the cylinder — in the demil room, of all places. He had wandered all over the DRMO, ostensibly on a manager’s walk through, aware, as usual, that the walkie-talkies would be in action the moment he was between warehouses, alerting the next crew.

He knew they sneeringly called him “Gwendell” behind his back. That was okay with him; his little walks had an effect analogous to that of the empty cop car parked behind a sign on the freeway. And, as he was fond of reminding them, they filled out time sheets. He could sign them or he could hold them, in which case no checks would be forthcoming, so it was Gwendell, sir, if you don’t mind.

He had gone looking for a hiding place that was, first of all, safe. He couldn’t put it in some of the gear waiting to be auctioned, because Murphy’s Law would guarantee that it would be auctioned, and then he’d have some Bubba opening the thing at a flea market and depopulating Atlanta. He couldn’t hide it out there among the dozens of dark nooks and crannies in the warehouses, because that was where a professional search team would start looking. If the Army found out the cylinder was missing, the DRMO would be one of the first places they would look, because this was where the coffins had ended up. The coffins, of course, had all been derailed. Could he prove that? With records, yes. One thousand environmental weapons containers received from the Anniston Army Weapons Depot in Alabama, after they had been returned to Anniston from the Army chemical weapons destruction facility in Tooele, Utah. All marked for demil, no reutilization, no public access. Straight up Monster feed.

In fact, he had realized, the Army might be happy to I hear that. With any luck, they might assume that if the

II cylinder had gone missing, it had probably been derailed with its coffin. Whatever the hell was in it would have been sucked into the Monster, unless it was an explosive, gas of some kind. Then who knows what might have hap I pened? In a twisted sense, Lambry’s find may have prevented a real tragedy right here at the DRMO. Yeah, right. Nice try.

J But if they discovered it was missing they would surely. come looking, and depending on what was in that cylinder, I they would come with some pretty sophisticated chemical weapons detection equipment.

Now, obviously that cylinder wasn’t leaking, or everyone around would have been flopping and twitching by now, but he knew enough about the packaging of special weapons to know that the Army might’have put some kind of tracking device on or in that cylinder.

He had been drawn to the demil room more by a dread I desire to revisit the scene of Lambry’s demolition than from any expectation of finding a hiding place. He was still faintly amazed at himself, that he could be so calm and collected about that. He must have been more afraid of Bud flian he had realized. Once in the demil room, which was inactive as the conveyors were being loaded next door, he had stared at the Monster for several minutes. Was there a way to hide the cylinder inside the Monster? Probably not. Behind the band-saw blades were several other lethal phases of destruction, all of which involved several meaningful moving parts. Beyond that were the chemical treatment phases, so that wouldn’t work. But then he saw the steel rollers of the conveyor belt that fed the Monster. Steel cylinders, about four inches in diameter, spaced every three feet or so. They were partially obscured by the rubber of the belt and the expanded metal screens surrounding the Monster’s maw.

Making sure no one was watching through the small window in the door between demil and feed assembly, he bad walked over to the belt where it entered the safety screens and bent down to take a look. Just as he did so, the belt jumped into motion, startling him. He’d forgotten they were loading the belt in the next building. He bent down again. Inside the safety screens, where the belt turned down toward the floor and then back toward the other building, the rollers were spaced much closer, about eight inches apart.

As he stared at the assembly, the belt, stopped moving. He thought it might just be possible, if — he could get the end cap off of one of those rollers. He’d; have to take a better look tonight, when the run was finished and the place was empty, but the roller would make; a very good hiding place.

The next physical problem would be the actual hand over of the cylinder. He hadn’t heard back from Tangent yet, but he knew that this was going to be a far different ‘ transaction from all the previous ones. Before, the “winning” bidder had simply come into the DRMO and picked [up the stuff he’d bought at an ostensibly legal auction.

That had been one of the advantages of the scam: Wendell I Carson had never physically touched any of the things he

I had diverted to his client.

But this time might be different. He could visualize one I of those drug deals in a dark parking lot where everybody ‘ had one hand on his gun and the other on either the money, or the merchandise. Unlike the drug kingpins, Wendell [Carson would not be accompanied by a phalanx of beefy guys with wraparound sunglasses and ponytails who sported MAC-10s, whereas Tangent might. So he was going to have to figure something out, something that gave him some advantages, like doing the transaction right here at the DRMO, where he knew the ground.

Carson knelt down by the safety screens encasing the conveyor belt and removed all the nuts holding the side screen onto its frame. He got the screen off, put it to one side, and sat back on his haunches. Tonight’s demil shift had ended at eight-thirty, and he had waited for almost three hours before making his move. The first stage was to take a toolbox over to demil and get the screen off, and then see if he could get the end cap off one of the rollers.

It took him twenty minutes of huffing and puffing before he managed to pry the bearing assembly off of the third roller back from the feed aperture. He then measured the inside diameter of the roller: four inches. The cylinder, feeling Warm in his’ sweaty palms, was about three inches in diameter, and not as long as the roller. This would work. He left everything in pieces and walked back over to his office. He was safe from video-camera surveillance, since all the security cameras except two were inside the warehouses. He had let himself into the security control room and turned the tarmac cameras off. There was never anything of high value stored out on the tarmac, just the flea market stuff that was too big to sit on the shelves inside, but he didn’t want any tapes showing him going into demil at this hour. The only thing he had to watch out for would be an MP car making its rounds. There were no windows in the demil building, so there would be no lights observable from the outside.

By midnight, he had the cylinder inside the roller and the entire assembly buttoned back up. He stood up, satisfied with his work. The only way anyone would ever find that thing would be if it came open, in which case he definitely would not want to be around for the happy occasion. It was time to go home. The next move was Tangent’s. He looked at the silent maw of the demil machine for signs of what had happened to Lambry, but the blade bank gleamed back at him indifferently. As he walked out, he remembered to go back to Security and reenergize those two cameras. He also wondered, Was it just my hands, or was that cylinder getting warm?