Zero Option

40

Carson watched Tangent’s crew arrive on a television monitor in the security control room. They were driving a large, dark four-door sedan.

For another five minutes nothing happened. Then there was the glow of the interior light in the car, which quickly went out as the headlights of the Gillem MP patrol flared briefly in the roadway. Three more minutes after that, they tried again. Four men got out, their faces indistinct in the black-and-white image. One went to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and pulled out what looked like a Navy seabag.

The car’s trunk shut soundlessly, and two of the men carried the duffel bag between I them as they approached the front door of the admin building. Carson lost sight of them as they neared the front door.

Okay, he thought. Four of them. One guy in charge, three helpers. Not too bad. He waited, visualizing the seconds passing as they read the envelope. They’d be pissed f off to have to lug that bag back to the car and then drive around, but that wasn’t his problem. He needed to get them off the road and back into the tarmac area, away from patrolling MPs. One of the men went back to get the car; ninety seconds later, he saw it emerge from the darkened space between the warehouse buildings where he had left T the gate open. The car came out onto the tarmac with its ‘ lights off. Good, he thought. There’s plenty of lighting there.

They found the pallet of propellers and stopped. This time, only one man got out, and he picked up the envelope. He read it, then walked across to the warehouse with the large numeral 4 painted on the end.

I should have made a provision here to close that truck gate, Carson thought. If they have unseen helpers, they’ll have a free shot to the tarmac. He scanned the outside perimeter monitors, some of which he had repositioned, but there was nothing going on. He looked back at the car, which was just sitting there on the tarmac. Then the driver was walking back to the car. He opened the door and leaned in. They all got out again, looked around, extracted the bag, and this time dragged it over toward the feed assembly building.

Carson studied them in the patch of light at the entrance f to the assembly building, keeping his finger on the cipher lock’s release button untifhe had them all in the light. Four white men, thirties, forties, in decent shape, all wearing slacks and unzipped windbreakers.

The windbreakers meant they were carrying, he thought. Fair enough. So was he.

He hit the button, and four heads in the monitor turned to the door in a blur of white faces. One man pushed it open, two others dragged the bag through the door, while the fourth watched their backs on the tarmac.

Carson turned toward the monitor that showed the inside of the feed-assembly area as all four came through the door. He could see the conveyor belt off to the right of the image as it proceeded slowly into the screened hole in the far wall. He picked up the handset and made the call. One of the men walked out of camera range, and a moment later the phone was picked up.

“Put the money into those open boxes by the belt. When you’ve got it all boxed, step back to the front door,” Carson ordered.

The man did not reply, simply hung up. Carson watched as they dragged the bag over to the belt line and began unloading it. Unwittingly, or perhaps on purpose, they positioned themselves between the camera and what they were doing at the belt, three working, the fourth watching the rest of the room, his hand inside his jacket. Carson could see that they were dumping something into the carrier boxes, but.the belt was too far away from the camera for him to tell it if was money. They seemed to take a long time, until he realized they probably had to pack the money into the boxes to make it all fit. Then they were done, and they stepped back from the belt, looking around.

Okay, he thought. He called the number again. The same man walked over to the phone and picked it up.

“Put the boxes on the belt. When it’s in the next building, I’m going to stop the belt. When I’m satisfied that the money is real, I’ll call you back and tell you where I’ve put the item. Until then, I’m disabling the cipher locks. Don’t try to leave.” “How long?” the man asked. It sounded like Tangent; Carson was pretty sure he recognized the voice. He could not, however, see the man’s face on the monitor. “Fifteen minutes,” he replied, hitting the button to disable the lock. “The item is prepositioned.”

“How do we know you won’t just take off?”

Yes, that was Tangent. “We’ve been through this. The item is worth nothing to me. It’s of use only to you and your ultimate customers.

Believe me, it’s not something I want to keep.” He hung up then, not wanting to waste any more time talking.

He watched them upload the boxes onto the belt. They stood together in a group, watching the belt slowly carry the boxes through the interbuilding aperture. He switched monitors, focusing on the boxes as — they came into view in the demil room, into the lighted area between the aperture and the intake of the Monster. When all four boxes were visible, he walked over to the emergency firefighting control panel and remotely opened the circuit breakers for the conveyor belt. He could reset them if he needed to once he got to the demil room itself. Then he studied the image of the demil room on the monitor. The security cameras inside the building could not zoom down, as they were only there for intruder detection and filming, but it looked like money: stacks of bills crammed into the boxes, each stack bound in a narrow paper wrapper.

Show time, he thought. Time to go see if it’s real or if it’s Memorex.

Before he got up, he took one last scan of the entire monitor bank: the tarmac area, the individual warehouse surveillance cameras, the feed-assembly room. The men were still all there, sitting now on upturned boxes, almost invisible in the dim lights of the battery-operated fire lights. One of them was smoking a cigarette, the glowing tip unnaturally bright in the grayish low-contrast display. The demil room, with the boxes in clear focus under the ceiling light. The admin building, with its empty corridor. The admin parking lot — empty.

Not empty.

He froze halfway out of the chair, staring at the image. All the way at the back of the parking lot, deep in the shadow of a line of parked boxcars, he could see the grille of a car. A big car. That’s all he could see. Nothing of the interior, just the grille. The rest of the car was in deep shadow.

So where in the hell did that come from? Has it been there all along?

“I don’t think so,” he intoned to himself. He scanned the other monitors again, looking hard for any other changes, especially in the cameras pointed out onto the tarmac area and the truck lane. The truck lane.

There were four trailers parked in a row on their jack stands. Next to them were two tractor trucks, in one of which he’d planted the cylinder.

He looked hard. Something wrong with the image of the trailers. There.

The last trailer on the line was sporting some extra tires, smaller tires, about halfway back along the frame on the far side.

A car there. Or was it two cars? Son of a bitchl Tangent had brought help. Lots of help, from the look of it. In the time it had taken to get them into the feed-assembly building, at least three vehicles had moved into position. Waiting for what, a signal of some kind? There was no camera looking into the approach to-the truck lane, but he was willing to bet there was another car there, too. Damn, damn, damnl

So move your ass. Time for plan B.

He smacked the switch to turn out the lights, grabbed the empty briefcase, and slipped out of the control room. He walked quickly to the back door of the flea-market warehouse and looked through the window out onto the tarmac. His original plan had him walking across the tarmac to the derail building. He thought about those three cars. The one out front of the admin building could not see into the tarmac area. The one hidden behind the trailers also had its view blocked, although there might be watchers positioned behind those big truck tires. But if there was another car in the approach to the alley, they would have an unobstructed view of the tarmac, at least once he stepped out into the open area between the last lane of pallets and the demil building.

He took a deep breath. Tangent and his crew had seemed relaxed in the feed-assembly building. I’d be relaxed, too, if I had eight, ten more people outside, he thought. They probably weren’t planning to do anything until they had the cylinder and he had the money. Which meant that his walk to the demil building would be the get-ready signal to them, but they’d have nothing to gain by moving on him yet. By carrying a briefcase, he hoped they’d think he had the cylinder with him. Since they didn’t know what the cylinder looked like, they could not know it wouldn’t fit in a briefcase. He was counting on that.

He wiped the sweat off his forehead, took another deep breath, and put his hand on the door release. Okay, then, let’s do it.

He stepped through the door and walked directly out across the tarmac.

The night air was colder than he had expected, and his footsteps on the tarmac echoed off the sheer metal walls of the warehouses. He resisted an almost overwhelming urge to look left, down into that truck alley. If they saw him looking, the whole thing might kick off prematurely. They obviously planned to make the swap and then get their money back. Well, he had provided for that little contingency.

He walked down the nearest lane of pallets to the one containing the propeller blades, then past Tangent’s car, and across the seemingly endless open space between the car and the demil building. The skin on his face felt unusually warm in the night air, and he briefly imagined night scopes tracking him from unseen watchers at either end of the tarmac. He felt like the original sitting duck out here.

Twenty feet.

Ten feet.

Could they hear him next door, in the feed-assembly building? Almost there. Stay cool.

He reached the demil building, punched in the code, and let himself into the anteroom. He dumped the briefcase and walked quickly into the control room, which housed the Monster’s control console. He’d earlier placed the console in standby mode, so all the buttons were lighted. He found the button that placed the demil building’s access devices in local-operator control and shut down the cipher lock on the front door.

It was a heavy steel door, so it wasn’t like someone could just kick it in.

He walked over to the conveyor belt and examined the boxes. It looked like real money. Tightly wadded packages of hundred-dollar bills were crammed into the boxes. He pulled the first of two duffel bags he’d positioned near the conveyor belt and began unloading the money. It was packed very tightly, right up to the top of each box, so he had to pry at the edges of the top layer to get to the rest of the money. The second layer down looked and felt just like the first layer. All right!

He pocketed several of the banded packages from the top layer in case something went wrong. If they had put counterfeit in, it would be deeper in the box; the top layers were probably real money.

Next he had planned to test it. He wished he could get one more look at the monitor bank to see if anyone was in motion out there. But he had the sense that he was running out of time. So far, they had followed his orders. But for how long would they be so cooperative? Tangent was obviously preparing to double-cross him. Okay, then; they simply wouldn’t get the cylinder.

You’re out of time. Move it. Make the call.

He shoveled the rest of the money into the duffel bags and zipped them up. Then he picked up the extension phone on the control console and called next door. One ring. Two rings.

“Yes.” Yes, that was definitely Tangent.

“The item is in my office,” Carson lied. “On top of the bookshelf. You go across the tarmac, into the warehouse one, and go through that building to the admin building. The doors are unlocked. Turn left, down the hall, last office on the left.”

“How do we get out of here?”

“You’ll find a sledgehammer next to the door you came in. It’s in an empty cardboard box right by the door. Knock the hinge pins off and then you can push, the door straight out.”

“Okay.” There was a pause. “Carson.”

“What?”

“Our association doesn’t have to end here, you know.”

“Yes, it does. You brought too many friends with you tonight. Otherwise, it was nice doing business with you.” I probably shouldn’t have said that, he thought as he hung up the phone, grabbed the two duffel bags, and walked over to the conveyor belt. Now they’d know he was onto them.

He got up on the motionless belt and scuttled into the safety cage, dragging the two bags, until he reached the steel batwing doors of the interbuilding aperture. He listened, and sure enough, he could hear shouts and the banging of the sledge on the front door in the feed assembly building. He also thought he heard a car engine somewhere outside. He waited impatiently, and then suddenly there was a banging and hammering noise coming through from the demil building’s front door.

They’re heee-e-re, he thought irreverently. Then, to his surprise, someone started hammering away on the connecting door between demil and the feed-assembly room. Unlike the front door, the connecting door was aluminum. That damn thing wasn’t going to hold very long.

Shit! Now what? He began to panic, especially when he became aware of someone on the other side of the aperture doors. He backed away from them as they were pushed in toward him, held only by the belt cogs. He could see through the side of the cage that whoever was using the sledgehammer on the connecting door had battered the middle of the door into an ominous bulge and was now going after the hinges. The guy in front of him was pushing and shoving, and, slowly but surely, the crack between the aperture doors was widening. He was trapped.

At that moment, he caught a glimpse through the crack of a single baleful eye in a straining red face. Almost instinctively, Carson kicked out at the doors, catching the man on the other side full in the face with the edge of the door. There was a grunt and the pushing and straining stopped.

Carson had forgotten about the belt cogs and their locking effect on the aperture doors. He had to start the conveyor belt again in order to escape. He scrambled back out of the cage and ran for the console, very conscious of what was happening to the connecting door, and of the sounds of vehicles and shouting from out in front of the demil building.

He smashed down on the button to start conveyor belt, but nothing happened. Then he remembered he had opened the breakers. Panicking now, he ran across the room to the wall that had all the breaker panels.

Frantically, he searched for the right breaker, straining to read the labels. Then he kicked himself mentally: Look for an open breaker! He finally found it in the fourth panel, reset it, and bolted back over to the main control panel. He hit the button again and the belt cranked into motion. Then he realized that they would hear the belt, which might bring the rest of the crew back into the assembly building to aid the man on the belt, whose inert form was even now pushing through the aperture doors.

Got a cure for that, he thought, hitting the main power switch for the Monster, which came to life with a reassuring roar of pumps, motors, blowers, and steel teeth. Keeping an eye on the disintegrating connecting door, he ran to the belt and hauled the two bags of money off. He waited a couple of seconds for the man’s unconscious body to come past the edge of the safety cage. Whoever he was, he was middle-aged, still red in the face, especially with that nasty gash across his forehead where the door had taken him out. He was also wearing some kind of shoulder rig.

Carson was about to haul the man’s body off the belt when the top.hinge of the connecting door came flying off in a loud crash, pinging down onto the concrete floor between his feet. Carson didn’t hesitate. He jumped onto the moving belt and crawled against the direction of the belt’s travel and through the now-unlocked aperture doors. He stopped just inside the cage on the other side, marking time on his hands and knees against the movement of the belt, until he saw another man thirty feet away complete the destruction of the connecting door and step through. The instant the man was out of sight, Carson scrambled out of the safety cage with his bags, jumped off the belt, and ran for the back of the feed-assembly room. Over the noise of the Monster, he heard one prolonged scream and then the sounds of more vehicles roaring down the tarmac with what sounded like several sets of brakes screeching to a halt. He had just about reached the very back of the feed assembly room when someone yelled from the front doorway for him to halt.

Halt, my ass, he thought as he rounded the partition of the coffee area at the back and went through the steel fire door into warehouse four, encouraged by the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the door frame. He dropped the bags, slammed the door shut, and then rolled the forklift he had prepositioned against the fire door, snubbing the back right wheel tightly against the door’s bottom. He grabbed up his bags and walked quickly, not running now. That forklift was going to buy him all the time he needed. He trotted down the first row of multitiered shelves stacked up to the ceiling. Behind him someone was banging on the fire door.

By the time he reached the door into warehouse three, he knew he was going to pull this off. All the doors were blocked from the inside. He could get out of any building, but they would need some heavy equipment to get in. Even with that crowd out there. One more warehouse and he could duck out into the fire lane, and from there into the woods outside the fence. He had decided to cut the fence in two places, one down near the demil building, the other at the opposite end of the warehouse line.

He was still furious about Tangent’s betrayal, but what the hell — he had the money, and Tangent wasn’t going to get his precious cylinder. He’d have to figure out how to dispose of that thing later. He was sorry about the guy on the belt, although the other guy should have reached him in time. That scream, however, didn’t augur well.

He hurried through the door into warehouse three and was in the act of rolling the next forklift into position when he heard the unmistakable earsplitting roar of a chain saw starting up down at the far end of the warehouse, followed by a terrible screeching noise as someone obviously started to cut through the far metal wall of the warehouse. He couldn’t see through the forest of steel shelving towers, but he could sure as hell hear it. What the hell was this?! Had he miscalculated? They had chain saws?

He grabbed the bags and zigged to the right, instinctively heading toward the fire doors on the rear wall of the warehouse. These rear doors all led into the back alley, his escape route to his truck. As suddenly as it started, the chain saw went silent. He stopped ten feet from the fire door and crouched down behind a shelf tower. He peeked between two shelves in time to see a large man wearing a helmet and oversized goggles about two hundred feet away down the aisle, trotting toward him between the shelving tiers, casually throwing things into the lanes as he came. And then the shadows behind the man erupted into dazzling sun-bright light, accompanied by a whoomping sound and then the roar of fire. Stunned, Carson saw other blooms of incredible fiery radiance exploding in the warehouse to the right and left of the lane where the helmeted man was still coming, each succeeding blast of the incendiaries throwing every detail of the high metal roof beams and trusses into stark relief, even as clouds of bright white smoke billowed above the shelving tiers.

Carson finally moved when the helmeted man was only sixty feet away.

Scrambling on his hands and knees, he pulled the bags with him, desperate now to reach the end of the shelf tier and the fire door before the helmeted man got there and threw one of those things at him.

Keeping low, he pushed backward to open the fire door with his feet, even as one of the incendiaries clattered up against the back wall in the next lane down to his right and then exploded in a blinding wash of incredible light, producing a wave of heat that singed his cheek as he rolled through the fire door into the alley behind the building. He kicked the door shut just in time. As he got to his feet, there was that terrifying whoomp behind the door and then the cracks around the door turned arc-light white, and the door vibrated as if the Devil himself was behind it and badly wanted out.

He dragged himself and the bags across the alley to the fence, staying low, skinning his knees on the concrete; then he got up and started trotting down the alley toward the nearest cut in the fence, which was behind the derail building. As he ran, he felt, rather than saw, that each of the warehouses was being racked by internal explosions, the gable vent screens of each building now etched in bright white light as the old steel shook and rumbled from the, sudden release of energy inside. Glowing white clouds of smoke were starting to pump out of ridgeline ventilator cowlings.

When he got to the cut in the fence, he dropped the two bags and then began to pull apart the chain link. But then he stopped. He was right behind the demil building, which apparently had not been fired yet.

There were clear sounds of shouting and vehicles on the other side of the demil building, but no one had come around back. He could just see the snout of the semi where he’d hidden the cylinder, maybe forty feet away. There was a loud roar as warehouse three’s roof lifted off, releasing a huge bolus of yellow-and-red flame into the night sky.

Christ, he thought. I was just in there.

He made his decision. Leaving the bags, he sprinted down the back wall of the demil building, reaching the truck in a few seconds. He climbed up two steps to reach the outside toolbox and cracked it open. There was pandemonium going on around the corner out on the tarmac, a cacophony of shouting men, vehicle engines, and the, rising rumble of a major fire.

Incendiaries exploded inside i the demil building, sending a sheet of flame into the alley as the rear fire door opened momentarily.

The cylinder was right where he had left it. He grabbed it and ran back to the fence, barely avoiding the sheets of white flame howling out around the deformed fire door, only to find that the two sides of the cut fencing had sprung back together again. He pushed the cylinder through the cut in the fence, then started to struggle with the obstinate fencing.

“You!” thundered a voice from behind him “Halt! Freeze!”

He looked over his shoulder and was stunned to see two uniformed men pointing shotguns a{ him from the corner of the demil building.

Soldiers! As he stared in shock, the demil building’s back wall began to shake like a single sheet of steel, and then the back edge of the roof opened like a loose sail and belched out a sheet of flame from one end of the building to the other. Some of the roof truss ends were snapped off and there was a sudden rain of hot steel and rivets clanging all along the alley. The two men jumped back around the corner of the building to avoid the hail of hot shrapnel, at which point Carson threw his whole body through the opening and then turned to grab the bags, but the damned fence wire had sprung back again. He grabbed the cylinder, but the bags jammed in the wire when he tried to pull them through. A great sucking sound from the demil building just then caused him to look up, and he saw that the whole back wall was bulging toward him, about to come crashing down into the alley. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the two soldiers again, still pointing their guns at him, but he wasn’t waiting for them anymore.

He turned to jump down into the bushes, even as the demil building collapsed along its full length in a horrific crash. Something lashed the skin of his back as he bolted through the high weeds, which he realized were now on fire behind him. He raced along the path to the truck, pursued by the crackling and snapping sounds of a brush fire.

He got to the truck, opened the door, threw in the cylinder, and climbed in. He was barely able to get it started and get out of there before the roaring brush fire was up on him. Yelling in fear, he flattened the accelerator and drove blind, careening through the smoke and flames until he shot out onto the gravel road that ran along the back perimeter fence of Fort Gillem. Behind him, the whole world appeared to be on fire.

Carrothers had staged the Anniston team out on the abandoned runway about five hundred yards from the darkened shapes of the DRMO. The trucks. were parked in military order, in line abreast. The Suburbans were parked in front of the trucks. A six-man perimeter of Anniston military police was stationed out in the darkness along the edges of the runway. Carrothers stood by the right-front fender of one of the Suburbans. It was a clear, dark night, with little wind, which was fortunate. The lights of Atlanta to the northeast suffused the night sky with a faintly orange glow.

He had ordered everyone into MOPP gear, including himself, but he’d relaxed head hoods until the operation got under way. The protection suit wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t comfortable, either, and he was already itching. He didn’t really believe there was any risk from the cylinder, but he wanted his people to remember why they were there and why they were going to destroy a government facility in the middle of the night.

When the Special Forces team radioed in the code word indicating they were in position along the side walls of the first two buildings and that the DRMO appeared to be clear of personnel, he had given the “go”

order himself. The lead Suburban had moved out quietly to the airfield end of the DRMO complex to the team-extraction position.

Nothing happened for a minute, and then the sound of chain saws erupted at the far end of the DRMO, sending their characteristic buzzing howl into the quiet night air for about twenty seconds before going quiet.

Another sixty seconds of silence, and then he thought he heard the first incendiaries igniting in a series of dull thumps. The first signs of fire became visible a minute or so after that, starting at the far end and working toward his trucks. He gave the order to complete dressing out, pulled on the rest of his hood assembly, and then got into his Suburban. The fires were going pretty well by now, with one building really burning and a lot of multicolored white smoke climbing into the sky. He nodded at the driver and they pulled out, — heading down the runway toward the DRMO complex. As they arrived, he could see several figures converging on the extraction vehicle, getting in, and then that Suburban was accelerating off to his right, — away from the DRMO.

Good, the team’s out. He looked behind him as the rest of the Suburbans fanned out along the DRMO fence on the airfield side to set up the exclusion perimeter. The big semis were still back where he’d parked them. The sweep teams wouldn’t come in until the buildings had all gone down. He wondered what the troops were thinking. He had given everyone a quick brief as to why the Army was having to do this, that foreign terrorists might have hidden a chemical weapon in the complex and could be planning to move it to then-target area tonight. The DRMO was too hard to search; therefore, the decision to destroy it had been made.

He’d put as much drama into it as he could, knowing that everyone would have to be debriefed back at the depot to ensure security. One of the warehouse roofs fell in, masking the words as his radio spat something at him.

“Say again?” he said.

“Vehicles sighted in the tarmac area,” reported the excited voice. It sounded like one of the captains, but the hoods made it hard to tell.

“There are civilians running around out on the tarmac.”

“Civilians? Oh shit, he thought. “How many?”

“Maybe a dozen, sir. Looks like they were trying to get into the big building at the end. But that fire’s gonna get ‘em pretty quick.

There’re four cars out there on the tarmac, and their tires are smoking.

Whoever they are, they’re going apeshit out mere.”

Son of a bitch! Four cars? What the hell was this? Had the Fort Gillem security people screwed up? He gave the signal to his driver to move forward, right up to the fence.

“Can you drive through that fence?” he shouted to the driver. The noise of the fires was much louder than he had expected, even in the hoods.

The snake-eaters had done their job very damn well.

The driver’s hood nodded and he headed the big vehicle toward a center section of the chain-link fence, accelerating. Carrothemtalmost got his seat belt on over the MOPP gear before the big vehicle left the edge of the runway with a bang, fishtailed a couple of times on dirt and gravel, and then hit the fence at about forty-five miles an hour. The fence didn’t give; instead, it slid up over the hood and then the windshield as the Suburban plunged ahead, audibly ripping off wipers, police lights, and antennas on the way. Carrothers could hear the stuff snapping off as the fence clattered overhead, and then they were through. The driver brought the vehicle to a screeching halt at the edge of the tarmac, unable to get it over some concrete barriers lining the edge of the open area.

Carrothers piled out into a scene from a war zone. All of the DRMO buildings except the demil building were fully engulfed hi fire, and it was starting to bulge ominously. The heat and the noise were nearly overpowering. He was grateful he was in a chem suit, because those poor bastards out on the tarmac were probably starting to barbecue. There were four sedans out there, now clustered in a circle among the pallets.

There appeared to be about ten men out there, hunkering down behind their cars and under some of the larger pieces of palletized equipment to escape the rain of flaming debris and sparks. He yelled to his driver to summon the other vehicles, and then he ran toward the men on the tarmac, stumbling awkwardly in the chem suit as he tried to get through the lines of pallets while avoiding small fires on the ground. The heat was very much stronger than he had expected, and he had to duck his Plexiglas mask away when the near end of the admin building bulged out and then collapsed in a wall of flame. Behind him, the back wall of the demil building came crashing down, sending a wave of flame across the tarmac.

He could see that the fields behind the fence were also on fire.

One of the men crouching behind a pallet of propellers saw him when he was about fifty feet away and stood up. Carrothers waved at him to come ahead, waited to make sure the guy understood and was going to get the rest of them, and then began to back out of the tarmac area, very conscious of the thumps and crashes of objects coming down out of the burning sky. The Plexiglas of his mask was beginning to singe his cheeks in the intense heat, and he could see that the running men were having trouble breathing as all the oxygen at ground level was sucked into the conflagration surrounding them.

There were two more Suburbans nosed in at the uprooted fence by the time the running men converged on Carrothers. The MPs had piled out of the vehicles to let the unprotected men climb in. A minute and a half later, they were all back out on the runway, where even at five hundred yards there were bits of flaming debris raining down out of the spark-filled smoke cloud boiling overhead. Carrothers could hear the faint sound of distant sirens as he pulled his hood off. He yelled at one of the captains to execute the chemical perimeter operation, then walked over to the first of the other Suburbans, where some of the civilians were opening doors and looking cautiously out. Their faces were smudged with soot, and they all seemed to be having trouble getting their breath back. Out on the tarmac, the first of the cars’ gas tanks let go in an orange blast, followed immediately by another one.

Carrothers signaled two large MPs to come with him. They wordlessly assumed covering positions with twelve gauge military riot guns held at port arms across their chem suits. A couple of the civilians froze when they saw the shotguns.

As Carrothers walked up, a fiftyish man looked around. He was bent over, coughing his lungs out, while trying to wipe his glasses with a handkerchief. Behind him the DRMO roared into fiery extinction.

“I’m Brigadier General Carrothers, U.S. Army Chemical Corps,” Carrothers announced over the noise of the fire. “Who are you people and what hi the hell were you doing in there?”

The man tried to speak but then erupted into another fit of coughing that bent him almost in half. When he had control of himself, he pulled out a leather credential case. “Special Agent Frank Tangent, FBI,” he wheezed, showing Carrothers his credentials. “Did you say Army Chemical Corps?” ‘

“Yes, I did.” The agent wiped his forehead and looked back over at the destruction going on behind them. “Well, sir,” he said, coughing again, “I guess you and I need to talk.”