Zero Option

27

Wendell Carson sat in the dark on his screened back porch, nursing a beer and considering the problem of Senior Investigator David Stafford.

It was unseasonably warm this evening. The trees in the backyard stirred uneasily in the humid night air, and heat lightning flared over Alabama on the distant southwest horizon. His wife was inside watching television in the bedroom while she painted on her nightly fright mask.

He could hear the awkward drone of the weekend fill-in concluding the local eleven o’clock news.

Stafford knew.

He knew why the Army team had really been there, and he knew what the cylinder looked like.

And he had said he was going to tell the Army.

Carson no longer cared how Stafford had found out. Bud Lambry had obviously confided in Dillard after all.

Maybe to protect himself, he’d told Dillard more than he had let on, and then that dumb ass had gone running his mouth to Stafford. Had to be.

Unless … A calf bawled in the darkness of the farmer’s field behind Carson’s property, and its mother lowed back reassuringly. Farther away, someone’s chained-up dog was barking neurotically in the distance, its persistent yapping noise annoying the stillness. The beer bottle was sweating in all the humidity, trickling cold rivulets across the back of his right hand. He felt himself zoning out, his perception collapsing to a cube of space right in front of his eyes, which were closed, almost against his will.

He had been having the recurring bad dream ever since the thing at the airport, the one where he was trapped in a river and headed for a waterfall. Now the waterfall image reappeared. Once again, he felt the deadly wet grip of that surging current, and then the stomach-levitating sensation of going over. And he was not alond. There were other people in the river with him, dead, every one of them, and yet looking at him, ten thousand distorted faces frozen in soundless screams. Superimposed on this frightening image was the face of that damned girl, scanning the back of his braincase with those obsidian eyes. The girl from Graniteville. Graniteville..

He opened his eyes with a start. Stafford had gone’to Graniteville.

Damn! Was there some kind of connection there?

He realized he was gripping the beer bottle hard enough to hurt his hand. He forced his fingers to relax. Stafford had gone to Graniteville and then had come back talking about a cylinder. Which he could never have seen himself, because it had been either in Carson’s possession or stuffed into that roller. Even the Army team, with all its sensors and experts, hadn’t been able to find it, hidden right in front of them.

Graniteville.

He had a sudden intuition that he should go to the DRMO. His entire future was that cylinder, and suddenly he was desperate to lay his hands on it, to make sure it was still there. But first he would need an excuse to get out of the house.

He finished his beer and pitched the bottle in the trash as he went through the kitchen. He went quietly out the front door to his Army pickup truck, where he retrieved his government-issue bag phone. He carried it into the living room of the house and turned it on. Once he had a signal, he called his home number on a roamer circuit and then laid the handset down. He stepped quickly over to the house phone and c’aught it on the first ring.

“I’ve got it,” he called down the hall, then pretended to have a brief conversation. He hung up and walked back to the bedroom.

“MPs have a problem down at the DRMO,” he said. “Somebody tried to break in. Kids, most likely. I’ll be right back.”

His wife, intent now on a rerun, nodded absently. He looked for a moment at that fat face covered in what looked like zinc oxide, then realized once again how important the cylinder and the money from its sale were going to be. He got a jacket in case it turned cooler later, picked up his bag phone, and went back out to the truck. At this hour, it would take only about forty minutes to get to Fort Gillem.

He had to see it again, to make sure it was still there. j. Then he would worry about any possible loose ends in Graniteville. If he was going to pull this deal off for really big bucks, nobody could know the cylinder even existed. The Army had to believe it had been destroyed, which left Stafford, and, just possibly, that girl hi Graniteville. The image of Bud Lambry disappearing into the Monster in a shower of blood and oil bloomed in his mind. He shifted one small mental gear, and Lambry’s face was replaced by

Stafford’s. He took a deep breath as he pulled out on the county road and turned toward town. In for a penny, he mused, in for a pound. For a million bucks, he would do whatever it took.

“General Carrothers, sit, call on line thirty-five, non-secure. A Mr. Ray Sparks, DCIS, Smyrna.” “Thank you,” Carrothers said. He picked up the phone and asked Sparks to go secure. He nodded across the room at Major Mason, who picked up a muted handset to listen in. A moment later Sparks was back up on secure.

“Mr. Sparks, I’m sorry to roust you out at this time of the morning, but we have a little problem with one of your people.”

“That would be Dave Stafford?”.

“That’s right, Mr. Sparks. We’re trying to figure out why a Washington-based DCIS agent is knocking on the front door of the Anniston Army Weapons Depot, asking for the CIC office, which is not located there, which is something we have reason to believe he already knew. Any thoughts, Mr. Sparks?”

There was a perceptible pause. “Well, General, we’re not quite sure ourselves what he was doing there,” Sparks said. “He’s supposed to be on assignment to the DRMO at Fort Gillem on a fraud case. All I can think is that he was present when your chemical team arrived the other night and he wanted to find out what that was all about.”

Carrothers caught the unspoken question. “What that was about was a no-notice tactical exercise of a Chemical Emergency Response Team, Mr. Sparks. Now that we’re in the business of shipping chemical weapons to the national destruction site out in Utah, we keep one of these teams in readiness at each of the Army’s special weapons depots. We exercise them frequently. We send them to military installations, usually at night, to keep the civilian population from getting unduly alarmed. I guess my question is, Why would your guy care?”

“He’s not my guy, General. He’s on assignment from your fair city, in fact. But let me ask you something else: Is there any chance that your team went to Fort Gillem for something other than an exercise?”

Mason’s eyes widened as he looked over his handset at Carrothers. “Not that I know of, Mr. Sparks,” Carrothers said quickly. “We have a number of sites we send the teams out to. The ops center here randomly picks one and gives the go order. What prompted that question?”

“Something Mr. Stafford alluded to the other day, General,” Sparks replied. “But I probably misinterpreted it.”

“I’d sure like to know what he had in mind,” Carrothers said. “Any chance we can talk to Stafford?”

“Well, there’s a small problem with that, General. We can’t seem to find Mr. Stafford. Last contact we had was by phone from Ariniston, Alabama.

Oxford, actually. See, the weird thing is, I talked to the Alabama state cops. You know, I thought maybe he had had an accident out on the interstate or something. Driving in Alabama can be something of a blood sport sometimes. But anyway, they said funny I should ask, because there was a stop-and-hold warrant out on Stafford’s car, and it was the Fort Mcclellan military police who had put the want out.”

Can-others shook his head slowly as Sparks’s unstated question once again hung in the air. Mason was now busy writing notes and avoiding eye contact with the general.

“Once again, I’m cold, Mr. Sparks,” Carrothers replied. “Unless the base CO at Anniston thought maybe Stafford had been running some kind of perimeter security-penetration drill. I guess I’d better pulse our circuits, see what the hell is going on down there. How about this? You hear from Stafford, get him to explain what the hell he was doing, and why. Then call me back, if you would. In the meantime, I’ll get onto my field people and find out why they put out a stop-and-hold on a DCIS agent”

“Yeah, I’d be interested in the answer to that, General. We’re all on the same team here, I thought. You know? DCIS7DOD?”

Carrothers understood the implied threat: DCIS worked directly for the Department of Defense, which was senior to the Department of the Army.

“I quite agree, Mr. Sparks,” Carrothers said, anxious now to terminate this conversation. “Team play is very important.” As in, Why don’t you know where your guy is and what he’s doing, smart-ass?

Sparks ignored the gibe. “We’ll get back to you as soon as we hear from Stafford, General.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sparks. And I suppose it goes without saying that if there is something going on, we’d all profit from keeping it in-house until we can get our arms around it, don’t you think?”

“I understand perfectly, General. DCIS operates on that very same principle to the greatest extent possible. Good morning to you, sir.”.

Carrothers hung up the phone a bit more forcefully than he intended.

Mason raised his eyebrows at him.

“Damn,” Carrothers growled. “This thing is getting away from us. I can just feel it. You heard that question?”

“Yes, sir. And that last bit, about keeping things in house. ‘To the greatest extent possible.’ “

“Right. In other words, Sure, we’ll keep it quiet, unless we catch the Army at something really egregious, and then we’re gonna yell.”

“Yes, sir. But how in the hell could mis Stafford guy know what the team was doing there?”

Carrothers got up and began to pace. “How indeed? More important, where is Stafford now? I hope to Christ he’s not skulking around that DRMO, not with another inbound response team.”

Mason nodded. “Well, if he is, maybe we’ll get him this time. I think we’d be in a better bargaining position with DCIS if we had their guy in, um, protective custody.

He burned senior management in DCIS. There has to be an angle there we can work. Go over this Sparks guy’s head, maybe. Talk to the DCIS here in the building.”

“We might have to do just that. I need to think, Major. We’ve got to get this thing back in the bottle.”