Zero Option

42

Carrothers sat slumped in his chair inside the traveling command center, waiting for the conference call from Washington. He was still wearing the body part of his chem suit, minus the gloves, hood, and mask. The back doors of the trailer were thrown open to let in some cool air, but everything in the area of the operations trailer still stank of smoke.

Except for the communications console, manned by a Spec-4 in fall chem gear, the rest of the consoles and monitors were unattended. He could hear the murmur of radio conversation outside on the airfield concrete as the monitoring team made final reports from the fire perimeter. He could not see the remains of the DRMO because the trailer doors were pointed away from the wreckage, but the destruction had been complete.

Carrothers was trying to keep his emotions in neutral. He was tired and barely able to think. No eating or drinking had been permitted because of the possibility of chemical contamination in the air, which meant he had had no coffee. He was waiting for General Waddell to come up on a secure satellite conference net.

The Fort Gillem firefighters had been allowed into the fire perimeter after two hours, giving the chem sweep team time enough to test the atmosphere surrounding the fire site. The DRMO was gone. The only vestige of the installation left standing was the chain-link fence. All the brush and trees over on the back side had gone up, giving them all some anxious moments as it spread toward the main fence of the base, but a quick-thinking fireman had taken a truck outside the fence and started a backfire. Of i the buildings, there was nothing but rectangular piles of red-hot ashes. The partially melted remains of the demil machine crouched in the ashes like some blackened fossil.

A helicopter, presumably from one of the local television stations, had buzzed overhead toward the end of the conflagration, but the Fort Gillem post commander had a professional briefing team set up. to handle those people. Carrothers could visualize it: Yes, big fire, lost all the buildings, but there was no danger to the surrounding community. Army fire-investigation team enroute. Several weeks before any findings. No, not valuable property. Just warehouses storing surplus and obsolete military material. j No injuries. Employees being told to take two days off, with pay, of course, while post officials sort things out. Blah, blah, blah. He wished the upcoming call would be that innocuous. They had found not one trace of the weapon.

“General, we have a circuit,” the comms specialist announced through his mask.

“Put us on the speaker, soldier, and then you may stand down.”

“Yes, sir. Patching.”

There was a hiss of static, a tone burst of the security systems synching into the trailer’s satellite dish, and then silence.

“This is the Army Command Center, calling for Brigadier Carrothers,” the speaker announced. The comms operator got up and left.

“General Carrothers present. This node is secure.”

“Stand by one, sir.”

“This is Major General Waddell. General Carrothers, you there?”

“Yes, sir, General.” He noted the formal address.

“Very well. What is the status of the DRMO?”

“The DRMO is destroyed. The perimeter has been maintained. The sweep is concluding now. Unfortunately, we have no detections.”

“Nothing? Not even a trace?”

“No, sir. Nothing. It was a hell of fire, General. A zero trace detection was always one of the possible outcomes of the fire. As is another possible outcome, which is worrying me even more.”

“Meaning the cylinder got away, I presume. Is there press interest yet?”

“Absolutely. Our press team is preparing to do a tape for the local morning news segments, but General, there is something else. We weren’t the only government agency down here at the DRMO tonight.”

There was a pause on the net. “I don’t think I want to hear this,” Waddell said.

“You’ll be seriously pissed when you do, General. In the process of destroying the DRMO, we’ve captured ten FBI agents.”

“What? What did you say?” Can-others sighed. “It seems,” he said, “that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had a sting operation running, for severat years, actually. The guy in charge of the FBI team that was here tonight is one Special Agent Frank Tangent. He’s been running a back-room cell in Washington that has been paying inside thieves at various DRMOs around the country for military components, mostly military electronics and software. Then they’ve been turning that stuff around, after the FBI lab altered it a little bit, so it doesn’t work quite like it’s supposed to, and selling it to some major-league foreign arms dealers in Washington and New York.”

“The FBF s been doing this?”

“Yes, sir. They’re apparently big into sting operations these days.

Their objective was to build an intelligence database on the international arms market, and thereby see if they could catch some big-time bad guys, but they had to have real stuff from the DRMOs to make it look like they themselves were real.”

“All right. But why Atlanta?”

“Because one of their pet thieves was here, one well dell Carson, the manager of this DRMO. It seems that Mr. Carson called awhile back and offered to sell them what he believed to be a chemical weapon.”

“Great God! And they didn’t inform us?”

“No, sir, they did not. At first Tangent said they didn’t really believe the guy. Now, General, it’s been a long night, and an unpleasant couple of days, so when I corralled Tangent and his crew down here, I started speculating to the air about having a six-pack of MPs throw his ass back into the coals, and then he told me the real reason.”

“Which was?”

“Which was that he personally was trying for a ‘coup,’ as he called it.

He was gonna come down here, buy back the cylinder with a hundred thousand of real money laid on top of about million bucks in counterfeit, and then grab up Carson. Then the plan was to stage a press deal to show how fucking good the FBI is. It seems that Bureau management has been putting a lot of heat on the worker bees to generate some good news about the FBI, instead of all the flak they’ve been taking recently.”

Waddell groaned out loud. “Not to mention making the Army look like king-sized assholes for losing the cylinder in the first place.”

“Well, General, if the shoe fits … Anyway, that didn’t seem to matter very much to Tangent and company, although I got the impression his supervisors may not have known about this particular operation.”

“Judas Priest,” Waddell said. “And where was that DCIS guy in all of this?”

“In the cold. Somehow he stumbled onto what Carson was doing. Tangent panicked, figuring Stafford was going to blow away his cover, so it was Tangent who generated that intel spot report we saw. He was trying to discredit Stafford and get Washington to pull him back. Of course neither the Bureau nor DCIS had any idea we were going to come down here and burn this place down. And, oh, by the way, they lost an agent in there tonight.”

“How?”

“Seems he got caught up on some kind of conveyor belt just as they were about to arrest Carson. The belt took him into the derail machine — literally. We’ve got some pretty shocky agents out there on the tarmac right now. They got to watch.”

“My God,” Waddell said again, as if he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Yes, sir. It’s a full-blown cluster fuck. The really bad news is that we think Carson got away with the cylinder. Two of the perimeter MPs tried to stop a guy going through the back fence just as the last building went up. One of them took a shot at him, but apparently he missed. The guy got away.”

“Did he have the cylinder? Was it Carson?”

“Unknown to both questions, sir. But Tangent said he and Carson had already traded the money, and they were about to trade the cylinder when the first Ranger started throwing thermite. After that, it was pandemonium. It’s so totally rucked up, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, except that We may now have some desperate sumbitch on the run with a can of Wet Eye under his arm.”

“Great God,” Waddell said. Carrothers had never heard Myer Waddell at a complete loss for words; it was a bad sign.

“Where’s this Tangent guy now?” Waddell asked finally.

“He’s right here at Fort Gillem, along with his crew. I gave him a satellite-link call to his headquarters in Washington. If they truly didn’t know about this, that will be an interesting phone call. Either way, General, I think it’s time for the elephants to get into this one.

If we’re going contain this thing now, it’s gonna take more stars than I’ve got.”

“Yes, you’re absolutely correct. And cover it we will. I’ll call General Roman right away, and get a line of communications opened to the Bureau.

The only thing we have going for us is that both agencies will have every reason, to cooperate in smothering this little PR disaster hi its crib. And find Carson. You wrap things up there at Fort Gillem, and keep the command trailer set up. We’ll be back to you. My God, Lee, this is about the worst screw up I’ve seen in thirty-five years in the Army.”

“Roger that, General. Carrothers off net.”