Zero Option

15

General Waddell shut the door behind them as he escorted Colonel Fuller into his private office. They had just come from the first meeting of the newly formed Security Working Group. Carrothers had come up with the name, saying they needed something that would point directly away from the real focus of the task force. Colonel Fuller, an old friend of General Waddell, had been appointed chairman of the task force.

“Well, Myer,” Fuller said. “This is a real mess.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Ambrose.” Fuller eyed the general for a moment. “Okay, I will,” he said. “Being probably the only ex-biological weaponeer still on active duty, I’ll tell y$u something no one else knows. Not those smart young officers out there, nor anyone at Fort Dietrick, either.”

Waddell just stared at him. The reports in from Tooele and Anniston were pointing more and more toward the distinct probability that a cylinder of Wet Eye was missing. None of the bright young men at the meeting had had the first idea of what to do next, including his deputy.

“Wet Eye is not entirely a chemical weapon,” Fuller said. “To be succinct, it’s a hybrid.”

Waddell leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk and resting his head in his hands. He peered over the tips of his fingers at Fuller. “I don’t think I want to hear this, Ambrose.”. “Somebody has to hear it, Myer. Might as well be you, seeing as you’re the proud owner of this developing shit cyclone.”

“Okay, lay it on me.”

“Wet Eye is a hybrid weapon. The only one developed under this great nation’s biological, not chemical, weapons program, before Tricky Dicky shut the BW program down back in 1968. It is a chemical weapon, but it has a biological constituent, a very special pathogen that prospers in a toxic chemical soup. It’s a one-two punch: The chemical constituent disables the victim; the pathogen then does some serious physiological damage.”

“Specifically?”

“It eats the eye. It literally propagates a bacterial chain reaction that consumes the human eyeball. The chemical creates the disabling pathology that gives this stuff its name, a wet-looking, bleary, teary, swollen eyeball that can no longer focus — hence, Wet Eye. The pathogen then consumes the eyeball tissue all the way back to the optic nerve root.”

“Great Christ,” Waddell muttered.

“Yes. Strategically, it was a hell of a weapon — instead of killing, it blinds. The enemy is presented not with corpses, which they can ignore in the heat of battle, but with mega casualties that overwhelm their medical facilities, not to mention gutting their capacity to fight.” “Great Christ,” Waddell said again.

“Indeed. But there’s more. I went back into the BW archives to see when this stuff was developed and tested. Found out something interesting. We didn’t develop this stuff. The Russians did.”

“Somehow that makes me feel better,” Waddell said. “Hold that thought, General,” Fuller replied with an ironic smile. “Apparently the CIA acquired this substance when a defector came over from the other side.

He brought with him a film clip. I’ve had it copied into video format I have to warn you — this is pretty gory stuff. The Russians used humans for the test.”

“Humans?”

Fuller nodded. “Probably residents of the Gulag. This film goes back to the late fifties. But I wasn’t sure this should be seen by those men out there in the working group.”

“Okay, Ambrose,” Waddell said with a grimace. “Roll that pogue.”

Fuller put the videocassette into the VCR and adjusted the controls. A grainy black-and-white film without sound came on the screen. The scene showed what looked like a dirt prison yard, complete with guard towers and high barbed-wire fences, the bottom half of which were clearly studded with electrical insulators made of black glass. Beyond the prison yard, there was only a dense, dark forest. The film had obviously been shot from one of the guard towers, and the barrel of a machine gun protruded into the frame, somewhat out of focus. In the center of the yard, thirty disheveled prisoners sat on the ground with their hands in their laps. Most were staring down at the ground, with only a few looking up at the camera. They were dressed in ragged shirts and pants, and their heads were shaved clean. They were not quite close enough for their expressions to be visible.

At first, nothing happened. Then there was movement on the other guard towers, and the guards could be seen stepping back inside the huts and closing their doors. The machine-gun barrel moved a couple of times, pointing down into the compound. There was an awkward jump cut to a close-up. Suddenly, the prisoners began grabbing at their faces. Some rolled down onto the ground, others got up, and still others began writhing in place. All of them were grabbing at their faces, and then at their eyes. The shot jumped again, showing individual faces; the prisoners were screaming soundlessly and rolling around in the dirt, some holding then-eyes, others clawing at theirs. The scene finally focused on one man who had stood up, backing blindly toward the fence.

He kept clasping his hands to his face and then bringing them forward, as if to see what was on them. Watching a close-up of the man’s face, Waddell gasped. The man’s eyes were gone. In their place were two empty sockets, blood streaming down the man’s face even as he smeared it all over himself while attempting to feel his eyes. He kept backing up until he hit the wires, which blasted him back out into the yard with an arc and a puff of white smoke. He fell headlong to the ground and did not move, a pool of fluids spreading out around his face in the mud.

The victims were usually moving too much for individual faces to be discernible. When certain faces did come into focus, they were all the same, however. There were two gaping black holes where their eyes had been, from which blood and fluids covered their faces like some deadly aboriginal war paint. Fuller shut off the video.

“There’s more,” he said. “But you get the picture, I think.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” Waddell said. “Reagan was right. The Russians were the evil empire.” “Were?” Fuller said. “What makes you think they’ve gotten rid of this stuff?” Waddell sighed and rubbed his eyes, men realized what he was doing and got up and walked over to the window.

“Put what we’ve just seen in technical context, Ambrose. How dangerous is a single cylinder of Wet Eye?”

Fuller dropped the VCR remote onto the table. “The truthful answer is that I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s not a particularly stable brew.

It’s temperature-sensitive. It has to be stored in special environmental containers. There are indications — not proof, mind you, but indications — that the pathogen is capable of mutating if not maintained under those specified conditions. Now unfortunately, these were statistical projections, as opposed to facts based on lab evidence.”

“We didn’t test it?”

“We never tested it. Not after seeing that film. In fact, a few years after we synthesized it, the program was terminated, because we could never be sure of what might going on in the cylinders. That’s one of the reasons the

BW division didn’t make much of this stuff.”

“One of the reasons?”

“The other reason, of course, was that it wasn’t binary safe.”

“Ah, right. So it was undiluted demon spawn right there in the can. But I thought we destroyed all that biologic shit when the program folded.”

“I love the way the Chemical Corps denigrates biological weapons,” Fuller said with a wary smile. “As if chemical weapons were somehow a more wholesome proposition.”

“Cut the shit, Ambrose. We’re hi trouble here.” Wad dell’s tone was more that of a major general than friend.

“Yes, sir, we are. Sorry, I guess I’ve been in this business too damn long. To answer your question, yes, almost all of the biologies were destroyed. But the biological weapons destruction facility was originally at Pine Bluff, in Arkansas. Wet Eye was stored at Anniston, Alabama. Nothing happened for a few years, but then when the Army got around to the Wet Eye arsenal, it had to get permission to move it. You know, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Transportation, like that.

When they got a look at what it was, they all said no, naturally. Since the Army couldn’t get permission to move it, one thousand cylinders of Wet Eye just sat there in the tombs at Anniston until this year, when this country finally ratified the Chemical Weapons Treaty.”

“I don’t remember going after permission to move this stuff,” Waddell said.

“I asked the Army international-law types about that. It seems your JCS reps to the CW Convention put language in about five years ago, stating that unannounced movement of chemical munitions for the purposes of destruction was authorized. Since that language is now in a treaty, and since treaties supersede national laws, your people did not have to ask permission. They just shipped it.”

“Wow. And when we finally shipped them, we lost one.”

“So it would appear. But I guess my point is that we have even more reason to find it quickly, because if it isn’t in its coffin, it might be changing into something a lot worse than Wet Eye.”

“Is that possible? Jesus. This is awful.”

“Well, I’m going to have the group do some discreet checking. The cylinders purportedly were taken out of their coffins and put into tombs awaiting’ destruction at the contained furnace facility at Tooele. If it had been my call, the cylinders would never have been separated from their coffins.”

“Why in hell were they?”

“You’re going to love it. Federal regulations, this time covering surplus, reusable Defense Department material. Remember all that “Fleecing of America’ TV coverage last year on the Defense Logistics Agency’s huge spare-parts inventory? Well, now the Defense Department is required by Congress to offer any reusable thing it declares surplus to the DRMO system. The rules go so far as to state that any nontoxic or nonhazardous material associated even with the chemical weapons program has to be destroyed in the DRMO demil process.”

“That’s crazy. The coffins could have been destroyed right there at Tooele!”

“Left hand, regulate the right hand. Yes, sir, they certainly could have. I suspect this rule probably had more to do with sustaining work for the DRMOs than with the CW program. Anyway, the empty coffins were then all shipped from Tooele back to Anniston, which, in turn, consigned them to the nearest DRMO, which is in Georgia, we think. Being CW-related material, they would have been earmarked to go directly to demil, of course. I’m not sure how the demil process works, but if you approve, the Security Working Group is going to trace them.”

“If I approve?”

“As soon as Headquarters U.S. Army starts asking questions about a shipment of CW containers, wouldn’t you expect a buzz?

I didn’t want to do anything until we’ve thought through the risk of public disclosure. Was I right?”

Waddell nibbed his face with his hands and nodded. “Yes, of course you were. Especially considering this business about the biological component.” Waddell returned to his desk before continuing. “This aspect, I think, we should keep to ourselves for the time being.”

“Really, General?”

“Yes. The group doesn’t need to know about the biologic angle in order to find it.”

“And General Carrothers?”

“Same argument. This is a need-to-know issue right now.”

Fuller just looked at him for a moment, but Waddell wouldn’t look at him. Then Fuller had an idea. “I think I need to turn some of my people on to a simulation drill,” he said. “See if we can determine or predict what might be happening in a cylinder of Wet Eye living outside of its coffin.”

“Okay,” Waddell replied distractedly. “But surely if someone at a DRMO found something in a CW container, wouldn’t we have been notified?”

“You’re assuming that anyone at a DRMO would open a CW environmental container. I know I wouldn’t. Look, if we’re real, real lucky, Myer, and the demil process is a totally contained process, we can maybe make the case here that the cylinder must have been destroyed. If it was lost, it was in one of those coffins. All the coffins have probably been destroyed by now. Shit on us for letting one get loose, but everyone can relax now, because it most likely went through a contained demil process.”

Waddell sat back in his chair. This was the first ray of hope he had seen since this crisis had begun. It would depend on the DRMO, of course, but Fuller was right: If they could certify that a batch of containers had been shipped from Utah, the same number as had been shipped originally from Anniston, and assuming that no one at the DRMO had opened them, just sent them directly to a closed destruction process, then the logical assumption was that anything in the containers would also have been destroyed, assuming it was a contained process, as Fuller had pointed out. Lots of assumptions there, he thought. He blotted out a quick vision of a dozen civilian workers streaming out of a building somewhere with bleeding sockets where their eyes had been. He looked over at Fuller, who was watching him work it out.

“Which DRMO in Georgia, exactly?” Waddell asked.