The Devil_s Workshop

Chapter 41

It arrived at Fort Detrick at one A. M., taking a military rail that ran onto the base from the switching yard at Frederick, Maryland. The train had no markings, was painted pure white, and was only four cars long. The engine was a sleek EMD-F59PHI with slanted windows and a short hood. It had an isolated "Whisper" cab and a rooftop hump, which disguised an air scoop that routed the diesel fumes high up and over the trailing cars. The special cab was designed to have extra-wide visibility. Since the train was just four cars, the three-thousand-horsepower engine was fast, but light, rated and geared for 110 mph. The White Train also had an aggressive blended brake system with a high deceleration rate. Behind the engine was a pure white cylindrical, covered metal hopper car. It was specifically designed for toxic waste disposal, with both an inner and outer shell made of hard titanium and a special space-age superheated ceramic. It usually carried hazardous waste from either nuclear breeder reactors or military storage facilities disposing of inoperative warheads. The next car, also white, was a Pullman, with living compartments for ten Marines, who rode the roof of the cars in four-man shifts. They were armed with automatic rifles to protect the train from attack or theft because of the weapons-grade nuclear material that was often aboard. Behind the troop car was another white hopper car, identical to the first.

The White Train pulled to a stop on the isolated rail spur in a restricted area near Company A, First SATCOM Battalion Headquarters. The area was jeep-patrolled by units of the Torn Victor Special Forces group. As soon as the train stopped, two black Bell Jet Rangers with fifty-caliber nose cannons landed. One set down on a patch of ground in front of the engine, one behind the last car. The helicopter gunships were assigned to fly air cover over the train, wherever it went.

Colonel Chittick stood in the field and looked at the impressive arrival of the White Train. There was only one such unit operating in the United States. It was booked by appointment through the Pentagon; its missions included frequent runs carrying nuclear waste from Three Mile Island, through the Appalachian Mountain Pass, across the South to Texas, where its radioactive load was pumped from the covered caskets inside the hopper cars into a titanium pipe that went thousands of feet down into the hot inner crust of the earth. There it was swept away by the burning, molten inferno of inner-earth gases into the planet's core.

As the engine shut down, its diesel growled like an unfed beast. Colonel Chittick hoped that in a matter of hours, they would have all of the sarin and anthrax that had been developed and stored at Fort Detrick over the last twenty years pumped aboard the hopper cars and that the train would be safely out of there.

The troop car door suddenly opened, startling Colonel Chittick. Then a uniformed scientist from the C. D. C. branch at Walter Reed Hospital got off. He was in an Army Major's uniform, complete with medical insignias.

"Major Flynn?" Colonel Chittick asked, reaching out to shake his hand.

"Yes. Colonel Chittick?" the man replied. Flynn did not have a trace of military bearing; he was a narrow-shouldered, balding man with glasses. He wore no combat designations or ribbons. He looked to Colonel Chittick to be in his mid-fifties.

Chittick nodded as they shook hands. The two of them had spoken twice on the phone.

Now, several Marines got out of the troop car and looked around. They were all dressed in camouflage uniforms and high-laced combat boots with their pants bloused and tucked neatly inside; all were wearing white helmets with the HAZMAT seal on the back.

"Come on," Chittick said. "We can take my car to the containment area." As the two Bell Jet Rangers finished winding down, the whine from their engines was finally replaced by the sound of cold night wind blowing across open fields of tall grass. Chittick led the Major over to a sedan command car, parked on a concrete apron with its headlights on. They got into the car, Colonel Chittick behind the wheel. He had released his driver for security reasons. As he pulled off the apron onto the narrow lane, he looked back over his shoulder… The White Train was parked in the middle of the empty field lit by moonlight, looking like some ghostly apparition with the two black dragonfly helicopter gunships next to it.

"Pretty fucking impressive," Chittick said.

"We transport some very nasty stuff," Major Adrian Flynn said, in his quiet, unobtrusive, scientific voice.

The trip to the Underground Containment Room took about ten minutes, and finally Chittick pulled up to a chain-link fence where two uniformed M. P. S with fully automatic M-14S let him pass. They drove down a concrete ramp to a pair of heavy metal doors that were cut into the side of a hill, like a fifties-style bomb shelter. They got out, and Chittick motioned Major Flynn over to the back of the car, where he removed two HEPA masks and canvas bio-suits from the trunk, then handed one rig to the Major.

"What's this for? I thought the material was stable."

"Well, let's call it a precaution," Chittick said. "There's a changing room right inside the underground," he added.

They moved down to the metal doors cut into the concrete wall. Colonel Chittick punched in a code. The door lock clicked and he swung it wide, then both men stepped inside.

They were in a small ready room, lit by neon bulbs. It was spare, with only two benches. The ceiling, walls, and floor were all poured concrete. There was a lead-foil material on the floor that wrapped up around the baseboards.

"Are you getting leakage?" Major Flynn asked, looking with alarm at the metal sheeting on the floor.

"This stuff started getting stored here in the mid-seventies. Back then they were using steel drums. We didn't switch to bio-containment caskets until the mid-eighties." Chittick tried to make it sound matter-of-fact, but Major Flynn was now glaring at him.

"You gotta be kidding," he said. "And how much time do I have, again, to get all this out of here?"

"No time, Major. We could have Senate investigators down here in a matter of hours-days at the most. There's more than just a little shit in the wind on this deal right now."

"My invoice says I'm picking up hundreds of gallons of sarin, anthrax, and accelerated Prions. Now you're telling me some of this stuffs in old oil drums?"

"Major, let's spare each other the golly-gee-whiz bullshit. We all know it's never as neat and clean as everybody says it is. The world is full of careless assholes, and we have to be ready to defend ourselves."

Major Adrian Flynn didn't say what he was thinking, but in that moment, he definitely agreed that the world was full of careless assholes… and he was standing next to one of the biggest. After a moment of reflection, he finally started putting on the bio-containment gear.

Flynn and Colonel Chittick finished dressing, then moved to a security door, which was marked with stenciled red letters: