Chaingang

23

SOUTH OF WATERTON

“What time did Big Boy check into this location?” the civilian at the monitor screen asked. Big Boy was their in-house name for Chaingang Bunkowski.

“Just a second. Let me get the log.” The warrant officer took a clipboard down and read it for a few moments, then read the time to the man in front of the screen. “Seventeen twenty-two thirty. Yesterday."

“Occupants arrived when...?"

“Nineteen twenty-eight."

“Jesus. The bastard's still in there with ‘em.” He made a note on a manifest in front of him and keyed a switch on his console. Then cut the switch and double-checked his code-pad. Big Boy was “Friendly” on the one-time voice pad. He opened his microphone again and gave the radio call sign for the disposal team:

“White Tracker to Natural Athlete, you copy?"

“Read you, White Tracker. Over."

“Friendly's got an overnighter in North Sector Four. Check your directory under four hundred and eleven Yankee. Please confirm. Over.” There was a pause while Natural Athlete asked White Tracker to wait one, and they looked up the skinny on a location in North Sector Four, and then ran down the “grids” in the Yankee quadrant. Their directory confirmed the location of the residential listing under the name Stahly, Frank, at four-one-one Yankee.

“Natural Athlete calling White Tracker. We confirm—that is a rog."

“Okay. We'll let you know when Friendly is outta there, and you guys can be standing by with the meat wagon, you copy? Over."

“We copy. Over."

“Ten-four. Y'all have fun now. This is White Tracker out.” Christ. He wouldn't have their job for anything. Uncle Sugar didn't have that much money.

The man who was occasionally Christopher Sinclair sat behind a metal desk in his office within the Control Center. Names meant nothing in his line of work. He was one thing in the Clandestine Services interagency directory, another thing where he got his personal mail. His own name—that had been buried long ago. The names he used were worknames. Part of the business he was in. They meant about as much as did titles. His happened to be “chief of section,” which—in this situation—meant chief scapegoat.

The project had begun for him during the COUNTRYSAFE operation, which had been, in his view as well as his boss's, an unmitigated disaster. That had been far away in another time and place, and his name had been Robert Newman back in those halcyon Vietnam days.

There were forces within the service as well as within the embassy that conspired to mitigate, not to mention distort, the failure that was to be officially perceived as a success. He'd been called upon to draft a CYA memo, a cover-your-ass document that would—in carefully drafted and oblique language—present the debacle's best face.

“We are not the KGB,” he had written, contending that while we could mount a small commando mission, call in a well-placed air strike, bring a carrier into the South China Sea, or mine the Gulf of Tonkin, we could obtain from neither the military or private sector “expendable assets who have proven to be highly adept at sensitive assassinations."

When push came to shove, we had no expertise at hiring cold-blooded killers who excelled at their special craft. “Uncle Sam is not,” he was pleased to observe, “in the murder business."

There were those operations that demanded the services of such monstrous horrors as the legendary Chaingang Bunkowski, around whom the COUNTRYDAY operation had been structured. Serious and vital hits, among them being the most delicate and important missions entrusted to the Action Unit, demanded pro-level wet work of the highest degree of skill. The elite military units and the usual roster of “cowboys” simply would not do.

But COUNTRYSAFE, a different (but related) ill-conceived, covertly mounted op originating in the secret swamps of the intelligence community, had not lived up to its name. If anything, it had put the country in the gravest peril.

During the blizzard of cables and CYA memoranda in the wake of the op, a man doing R & D in one of the service's Midwest shops, a Dr. Norman, happened to access certain correspondence from workname Robert Newman, née Christopher Sinclair, to his superiors. Norman knew a like mind when he encountered it, and an alliance was formed during those Southeast Asian War years that would stand the test of time. Both of them, to be sure, were Chaingang Bunkowski believers.

Someday they knew there would be a chance to restructure the unit in a domestic setting. To create, perhaps, a hard-core cadre capable of sensitive wet work: counter-terror, spike teams, orchestrated assassinations, either state-side or wherever covert missions were set into place. With Mr. Bunkowski at its center, such an ultrasecret unit was potentially capable of the most terrifying efficiency.

But planning for these things and implementing them would prove to be an all-consuming challenge that would become a kind of awful obsession. The initial problem was in the emerging technologies: They had the level of weapons development that was required even back in the sixties, but there was (1) the matter of finding drugs or some other reliable, scientific means of controlling their “assets,” and (2) the problem of monitoring the operations. One could not just turn a Chaingang, Bunkowski loose—however great the temptation—because although he could perform the mission, there was too much danger he could evade his keepers.

By the time the technologies finally caught up with their lifelong dream, in the early nineties, the problems had shifted. Now there was the matter of Chaingang's weight and his advancing age.

No accurate birth records survived, but Dr. Norman was sure he'd been born in late 1949 or early 1950. He was middle-aged. Could he physically perform as he had when he was eighteen? The answer to that was clearly yes. It had taken a small army to capture him some two and a half years ago.

The weight was the primary concern. He'd lost all the excess weight once, in the 1980s, when he'd hoped to completely alter his appearance, but had promptly regained a the original poundage and more. At five hundred pounds—give or take—how many years were left to him?

The problem was therefore to train other Chaingangs who could take his place. This was the time to begin the comprehensive on-the-job film and tape record of the most prolific mass murderer in history, to observe him at work, record his every technique, amass a visual catalog that chronicled his every MO, so that others could learn his extraordinary “art."

These were among the exigent needs demanding action when Dr. Norman convinced his colleague to move on the project. When the computers found Waterton, Norman convinced like-minded associates that they had the implant, the tracking system, the “overview"—his word for their trump card—and a sufficiently obscured control mechanism that would allow the plan to work. Even Chaingang Bunkowski, presentient though he was, would have difficulty seeing through the superficial elements that hid their few agenda.

Now it was happening. The service was now in the motion picture business, busily creating documentary footage of a mass killer filmed in the act! If anything went wrong, he knew how much hell there would be to pay. The one critical aspect, the overriding one, was that this thing could never go public. The American body politic would never buy any part of this one.

Because he was a thirty-year veteran at CYA, that's what he did now; he began his version of the op in case the thing misfired—his spin on the project, close to the truth but never all the truth—what he would tell the hierarchy when he was summoned on high to do his word-dance when this mutha’ went out of control.

He sat at his rented desk, took a piece of blank paper, took pen in hand, and in a neat, medium back-slant, wrote across the top of the page:

What to say if we fuck up.

The silver-haired man stared at the piece of paper for a long while—maybe ten minutes. Then he laughed out loud, crumpled up the paper, and tossed it into the bag marked INCINERATE.