At all costs

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A body bag with a window.

Jake had forgotten about the special breed of panic that rushed over him every time he sealed himself inside one of these damn suits. The world seemed very small when the only sound you heard was that of your own breathing. He checked to make sure he could reach his escape knife and found himself smiling. Not only could he cut his way out if he had to, but with the Glock still on his hip, he could shoot his way out as well.

Typical of training equipment, he supposed, this stuff was old yet functional. Prior to donning the ensembles, Carolyn had insisted that they perform perfunctory tightness-testing by flapping out the folds, much the way you’d shake out a rug, then laying them out on the ground. Once the folds had relaxed, and air entered the body, arms, and legs of the suits, they zipped them shut and rolled the legs up tight, forming a balloon of air in the upper part. With no obvious leakage, Carolyn proclaimed them safe to wear.

His air pack on his back, and his face mask in place, Jake wrestled himself into the body of the suit and awaited Travis’s help to zip it up around him. As the hood settled over his head, Jake remembered with a dull ache in his gut that the last time he’d looked through a similar Plexiglas face shield, it had a ragged bullet hole through the center of it.

No one said anything. It had been a lot of years, but Jake remembered from the old days that this was the time of smart-ass machismo, practical jokes, and snide comments. Now the undercurrent of fear was palpable.

If this didn’t work, they were flat out of options.

When all the players were at the same stage of readiness, Travis stepped up to each of them in turn and pulled the heavy zippers shut; first Nick, then Jake, and finally Carolyn, where he paused for a long moment and said something to her that Jake couldn’t hear. The comment drew an extended embrace between the two of them, and for just the briefest of instants, he was jealous. Somehow, as adolescence approached, Mom was becoming more important to his son than Dad; and he knew in his heart that it was likely to remain that way forever. The realization triggered a catch in his throat and blurred his vision, but he shook the emotion away. This was neither the time nor the place.

When Carolyn was at last sealed into her Army-green butyl rubber suit, she initiated a round of thumbs-ups. Radios were not a part of this bare-bones entry operation, but they’d developed a system of simple hand signals to convey essential messages, the most critical of which was the universal distress signal-both hands straight up in the air. Even in the old days, no one messed around with that one. You raise your hands over your head, and you’d better by God be in serious trouble, because people were going to risk their lives to get you to safety super-pronto.

Nick paused long enough to duct-tape the combustible gas indicator to the sleeve of his suit before picking up the sledgehammer and leading the way forward. As unlikely as it was to encounter a combustible atmosphere, fire was the single hazard for which these rubber suits provided exactly zero protection. If the detector vibrated against his arm, they would abort the entry and decide what to do about it later. Each of them slung portable hand lights over their shoulders, and Jake hefted the steel pry bar, while Carolyn took custody of the body bags.

Thumbs-up all around, and it was time to head out. They’d already breathed up five minutes’ worth of precious air, and already their suits had begun to puff out from the pressure of their exhaled breath. Pretty soon they’d all look like the StayPuft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters- one of Travis’s favorite movies.

Jake shivered as the first drops of sweat blazed a trail down his backbone, despite the chill of the afternoon air. Inside of five minutes, he’d be soaked, with puddles of sweat accumulating in the tips of his gloves and the soles of his shoes. As he trudged off after the others, last in line, he paused for a moment to look back at Travis, who suddenly looked impossibly small standing there amid the empty boxes. Jake ventured a wave, but his son turned away.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sherman Quill said aloud as he nosed his police cruiser up to the main gate of the Newark site. Of all the times he’d been out to this godforsaken place, this was the first time he’d ever seen anything out of the ordinary, beyond the occasional teenagers locked in carnal ecstasy. Well, there was a first time for everything, wasn’t there?

Somebody had cut a hole in the damn fence! And he could still see the tire tracks in the grass where they’d driven through the opening and down toward the exclusion zone.

What to do now, he wondered. The hole in the chain-link was nowhere near big enough for his full-size Ford with its light bar and whip antenna, and Sherman didn’t have the tools with him to make it any bigger.

He pulled the white microphone from its clip and brought it to his lips. “Unit One to Control,” he said in his practiced monotone.

“Go ahead, Unit One,” the dispatcher replied.

“Hi, Nan. Listen, I’m out at the Newark site and we’ve got a bit of a problem here. Somebody cut a big old hole right through the fence. I’m gonna check it out, but I want you to see about getting some backup for me from State P.D., okay?”

“Okay, Sherm,” Nan replied. In a town this size, formal radio procedure just seemed silly. “You gonna wait there till I check on availability?”

Sherman thought about that one for a moment. Wasn’t a bad idea, actually, but he’d hate like hell to lose the bad guys if he waited, just as he hated the thought of scrambling the state boys only to find nothing there. “No,” he answered at length. “I’m gonna go take a look-see while you call. I’ll give you a shout on the portable if I need anything.”

“You got it, Sherm.” He could hear Nan dialing the telephone in the background while she spoke. “Be careful, guy.”

Sherman smiled. Nan was the county grandmother. As dispatcher for both the police and the fire departments, she doubled as secretary and gofer for both.

“You got it,” he said warmly. After returning the microphone back to its home on the dashboard, he climbed out of the cruiser, set his Smokey the Bear hat just so on his head, slid his nightstick into his belt, and slammed the door.

Travis watched intently from the top of the nearest mound as everyone disappeared from sight. He felt suddenly lonely. Without anyone around, the woods were way too quiet; and in the absence of noise, his ears played tricks on him. Every time he thought he heard a rustle in the leaves, it turned out to be the wind or maybe a squirrel. In his head, such noises were the telltale signs of approaching police with guns and dogs. So wild was his imagination, in fact, that he could have sworn he heard the sound of a car door being shut.

He knew the basics of the plan just from paying attention when no one thought he could hear. The trickiest part, according to his parents’ friend Nick, would be to get through the heavy locks on the exterior of the magazine. He brought a thing he called a Dremel tool to do the job. It looked a lot like an electric screwdriver, but with a carbide disc at the end. He said it would cut the Golden Gate Bridge in half if you had enough time. Travis assumed that the sledgehammer and the pry bar were just backups in case the lock proved to be stronger than a bridge.

Once inside, they were going to put the body his dad kept talking about into a bag and cart it off someplace. After that, he didn’t know what was supposed to happen. One thing was certain: Travis hated being out here by himself. The quicker they got it all done, the happier he was going to be.

Soon he felt relieved to hear the high-pitched whine of the little saw coming from the direction where they all disappeared. At least they were getting down to work. A few minutes later he heard the tink-tink of metal on metal, followed immediately by a metallic clatter, then silence. When no one reappeared after another minute or two, he concluded that Nick had been right about the lock and that they were inside doing whatever they had to do.

It’ll just take a few minutes.

Those had been his dad’s words back in the skanky trailer in West Virginia. When his mom kept rejecting the plan, Dad had assured her that it would “only take a few minutes.” A few meant three, right? “A couple” meant two, and “a few” meant three. Or four, he supposed; five on the outside. After that, people said “about ten” or “about fifteen.” So five minutes, then.

Travis settled into the colorful undergrowth and leaned back against a tree. He could do anything for five minutes. This was almost over. He wasn’t worried. Everything was going to be just fine.

What’s that?

Some sounds can be mistaken for other sounds; he’d certainly learned that lesson this afternoon. But only a cop’s radio sounded like a cop’s radio, and Travis swore to God that’s what he just heard. His blood turned to ice. He brought his legs up and leaned forward until he was on his hands and knees, and he peered intently through the bushes. Something was out there, all right. He could see him moving out in the distance, slithering carefully through the trees, trying his hardest to be silent.

There was the radio sound again, but this time much quieter, as if the man in the woods had turned the volume down.

“Oh, God,” Travis whispered, his mind racing. “They got us.”

Despite the wedge of light which sliced across the interior of the concrete tomb, the darkness seemed impenetrable-a black hole so dense that even the white light of the afternoon sun couldn’t cut through it. Jake felt like a grave robber, nagged by a superstitious fear of waking the dead. He looked behind himself one more time to get his bearings before entering, and as he did, his mind replayed the last time he took in this view. It was mostly concealed by smoke and flames back then, but right there was the spot-directly across on the first berm there-where the man with a rifle, dressed all in jungle camouflage, squeezed off round after round, killing his friends and damn near killing him. He looked away, realizing that the memories of the past were far more frightening than the reality of the present.

They played their lantern beams through the blackness, revealing thousands of square feet of nothingness. The twisted remains of melted steel shelving rose from the concrete floor, standing guard above countless black lumps of charred, spent munitions. Remarkably, the skeletons of old wooden crates could still be seen among the ruins, somehow preserved by a quirk of physics that spared them from total annihilation by the white-hot fires.

As the entry team moved cautiously beyond the doorway and in toward the center of the ruin, their movements stirred dust devils of poisonous soot, which rose lazily from every surface to float in the air, creating a kind of dirty black fog.

They moved to the left, following Jake’s lead. He and Carolyn had gone right on that day in 1983, and he remembered seeing the members of Entry Bravo-My God, could I have forgotten their names already? — waving their lights over their heads. That had been way off to his left. But was it past the door? He tried to remember if Bravo was standing beyond the seam of light when they announced they’d found the body, but the image just wasn’t there. Perhaps this was going to be more difficult than he’d thought.

The harder Jake tried to peer through the gathering cloud of soot, the more difficult it was to see anything. His light beam penetrated only a foot or two ahead before being consumed by the poisonous cloud. It was here, though. It had to be: the evidence that would give them back their lives. As the darkness enveloped him, he stifled surging panic, keeping his mind on track by counting his breaths.

In and out, Jake, old buddy. One breath every five seconds. Twelve per minute. Seven-twenty per hour…

He nearly shit his pants when someone tugged on his arm. It was Carolyn. He could tell by her height. And she was pointing with her light beam to something on the floor. He had to stoop low to see what it was, and when he saw it, he gasped. It was a boot; the same type worn by every Enviro-Kleen entry team member, and in remarkably pristine condition. Closer examination revealed that it was still connected to the leg of a moon suit. He followed the lines along the floor with his light, over a bend that had to be a knee joint, past a waistline, and finally up to the hood. He touched nothing, and closed his eyes as he shone his light through the blackened Plexiglas facepiece. When he opened them again, he felt relieved to see that the fire had rendered the facepiece opaque. Still, in his mind’s eye, he could swear he saw the empty eye sockets of the corpse’s skull staring back at him.

Jake looked away. But for somebody’s poor aim, or perhaps his own incredible luck, that could have been him. Or Carolyn. He swallowed hard to sink the wave of nausea before it could rise to his throat.

“That’s one,” he said to himself aloud, even though no one could hear. Hearing a voice reassured him, even if it was his own. “Now, where’s the original?” The temptation to recover his friends’ remains was overwhelming, but he reminded himself that such was not their mission here.

The remains of two other Enviro-Kleen workers-the rest of Entry Bravo-lay within a couple of feet of the first. Jake took some measure of comfort from their positions in death. The fact that their suits remained melted here and there, but largely intact, told him that they hadn’t burned to death (his most horrid of horrid nightmares), and the fact that they lay sprawled rather than curled up told him that they had not suffered too greatly. Even as he thought these things, he knew that his conclusions were flimsy, but he chose to believe them, anyway.

Nick was the one who found what they came looking for. Six feet, at the most, beyond the furthest moon-suit-shrouded corpse lay a scattered pile of smaller bones-the bones of a child, it appeared. The meat was long gone off this body, and without any protective covering, it was barely identifiable for what it was. But there was no mistaking the vertebral structures of the spine or the looping shape of the few remaining ribs.

Nick’s wild gesticulations with his flashlight drew Jake over toward him, and as soon as he saw the bones, he knew that their journey had ended. Before he could motion for Carolyn, she was there, body bag in hand.

Not a religious man by nature, Jake offered up a quick prayer of apology, begging forgiveness for the desecration he was about to perform. Blessing himself with the sign of the cross-something he hadn’t done in more years than he could remember-he set about the grisly business of loading a small child into a rubber bag.