Zero Option

29

Carrothers was dozing in his chair when the Operations ‘Center duty officer called in with a secure phone call from I the Chemical Emergency Response Team’s leader at Fort Gillem.

“This is General Carrothers.”

“Sir, this is Captain Mclean, CERT-Si. Reporting [- negative results, General. No hits on any of the surveil6 lance monitoring equipment, and no visible sign of the missing cylinder.”

“You’re satisfied you gave the place a good search, Captain?”

“A good search, General? No, sir, not possible, not in I three hours.

No way, General. There must be thousands off items stacked on shelves and in bins or on pallets, as well ‘

as several tractor-trailer loads of stuff parked and waiting to be unloaded. We did a complete chemical-trace survey, at molecular sensitivity settings, inside each of the ware houses. We’ve got that new mark-seven nose. We followed that up by a sight survey of as much as we could cover in the buildings in three hours. You want to really take this place apart, we’d need a battalion and a couple of months to do it.”

Carrothers was silent for a moment. Damn. “Okay. Get I the team out of there and close the place back up. And make sure the local MPs keep their mouths shut. You used. the exercise cover story again?” {

“Yes, sir. The Fort Gillem ops officer was here; he’s handling the Gillem MPs. I told them the first drill was screwed up and that we’d decided to do it again. Nothing they haven’t heard before. There was one other thing, General: We did pick up that DCIS guy who’d been snooping around the Anniston Depot. One David Stafford.” I Oh shit, Carrothers thought. “What the hell was he doing there?”

“He declined to say, General. He was apparently already here when we got here. The Anniston, MPs caught him on a night scope, watching us from a car across the way from the DRMO. We also encountered the manager of the DRMO, one Wendell Carson. He, too, was apparently here before we got here. Two of our monitors caught him making tracks down a back alley.”

Carrothers sat up straight. “The manager was there? In the early hours of a Sunday morning? And he was running away?” “The MPs said he was trucking down a back alley behind one of the warehouses. Looked to them like he was trying to get out of there without being seen.”

“What did he have to say for himself?” “He said they’d been having some problems with someone stealing stuff on the weekends. He thinks it might be some of his employees. He says he decided just to come down in the middle of the night, see what he could see.”

“The Fort Gillem MPs know anything about that?”

“Haven’t checked, General. We’ve been real busy here. I asked him why he ran, and he said he wasn’t running.

Said he wasn’t sure what was going on and that he was only trying to get back to his office, on the other side of the tarmac.”

“Did he know that Stafford was there, too?”

“I don’t think so, sir. I went ahead and gave Mr. Carson the cover story, and he said he would just stay out of our way. To my knowledge, he just went home.”

“Okay. And what did you do with Stafford?”

“I decided to have our MPs take him back to Anniston, General. Our briefing was that any unauthorized personnel who intruded on this operation were to be held until we received further orders. It looked to me like the manager had every right to be here. Stafford didn’t, so I held him.”

“Exactly the right decision, Captain. I don’t want Stafford talking to anyone until we get someone from Washington down to Anniston. He is a federal officer, so treat him in a civil manner, no stockade cells or anything like that, but keep him isolated until you hear from me.” ‘

“Yes, sir, General. I’ll relay that to the depot operations center ASAP.

They’ll hold him until further orders from you.”

“Right. One more question: Any chance Stafford and Carson were there together?”

“Don’t think so, General. I would think Stafford would have said something when he realized we were going to hold him.” f

“Okay, that computes. Now get your collective asses the hell out of there.”

Carrothers hung up the phone. Major Mason had been listening on the muted extension and copying down the salient points of the conversation.

“Who’s going to go down there, General?” Mason asked expectantly.

“Three guesses, Major. And you’re going with me. Get us a jet out of Andrews — Priority One. I want to leave by ten hundred, and I don’t care if it is Sunday. File direct to the strip at the Anniston Depot via Atlanta. And get in touch with the FBI operations center here in Washington.

See if they can lend us a polygraph operator from their Atlanta office.

Get yourself relieved here as duty officer now, then go home and get packed. Have a car pick us both up.”

“Yes, sir. How long in Anniston, sir?”

“One day, max. If we can’t find out what we need to know by then, we’ll have bigger problems up here than down there.”