Zero Option

30

Dave Stafford sat in a state of cold fury in a windowless room somewhere at the Anniston Depot.

They had arrived at the depot in company with the truck convoy just after sunrise. The response team’s trucks and the NIP vehicles had gone right through the main gate, past the parking lot still filled with a dozen or so semis, and then through the industrial area of windowless concrete buildings. The trucks had peeled off the base’s main road after a half mile or so, but the MP cars kept going until they reached what appeared to be the depot’s administrative area.

There was a small grassy square, surrounded by very old office buildings and some typical amenities of a military base, such as a post exchange, a medical clinic, and a small theater. Three of the MP vehicles had pulled into what looked like a motor-pool area, while the fourth, containing Stafford and two large MPs, continued on down yet another tree lined road farther into the depot’s ulterior.

The salient feature of the depot was the seemingly unending number of trees. Thick stands of pines lined every road, making it look as if the depot were a collection of small outposts scattered about hi a large pine forest. It was only after looking at it for a while that Stafford realized the trees were probably a screen for the real business of the depot, which had to be several thousand acres of ammunition bunkers lurking back in there somewhere.

And yet there were no fences visible or even signs indicating a security area.

His vehicle had taken him down a series of two-lane roads bordered by dense woods, until they arrived finally at what looked like an operations center of some kind. A large windowless building dominated several smaller workshops and truck parks. There were several complex antennas mounted on top of the big building, and what appeared to be a nest of air-nitration machinery mounted on one side. The vehicle Stafford was in descended a ramp on one side of the building. At the end of the ramp were steel doors, which opened as they approached. The vehicle drove directly through the doors and into a parking bay inside the building. Two more MPs were waiting when the doors closed behind them.

“This way, Mr. Stafford,” the shorter of them said when Stafford was let out of the backseat. Short was a relative term; they were all over six feet in height.

He had tried blustering, demanding to know why he had been brought there, demanding to see the commanding officer, and so forth. The MPs had ignored him as they fell in beside him, with the shorter MP leading the way and another guard right behind him. They marched through some more steel doorways and into the interior of the building. Stafford noticed that the steel doors all had heavy rubber hermetic seals. They had taken him down one long hallway, up a set of concrete stairs, and into another hallway before taking him into this room, which was about twelve feet square. It contained a metal table, four metal chairs, and a water fountain in one corner. A door on the back wall was partially open, revealing a washroom. The walls were painted pea green. There they had left him.

His initial anger had been with himself, for letting them catch him that way. He certainly should have thought about infrared sweeps. His warm upper torso contrasted with the otherwise-cold interior of the rental car would have shown right up as a heat source. They had taken him back into the DRMO complex, holding him by the side of the entrance to the tarmac area. No one had spoken to him, probably because the noise of the portable generators made conversation nearly impossible. He had observed that one of the trucks was a mobile operations center of some kind, just like the last time, but this time there was no pretty girl to make public explanations. He had seen one officer, not suited up, but dressed in what looked like Desert Storm fatigues, going in and out of the mobile command trailer.

At one point he had simply tried to walk away, which is when his two guards had put him none too delicately into the backseat of the Suburban parked between two buildings and locked him in. He hadn’t even tried to struggle. With just one arm, he was definitely out of the physical heroics business for a while. There had been no door handles in the back, and there was a metal screen between the front seat and the back, which told him all he needed to know about his real status. An hour or so later, the team had packed up. When his Suburban joined the convoy back to Anniston, he realized he might be in serious trouble.

He wondered then if Sparks had made some calls. Was this a follow-up on the little operation at the Holiday Inn in Oxford? This reinforced team had not seemed to be making even a pretext of doing an exercise this time. These people had been looking for something, and he had literally squirmed in the backseat of that Suburban thinking about what he could tell them. But after another hour of just sitting there, he had begun to take stock. Okay, so they knew who he was and they wanted to talk to him. Thank you, Ray Sparks. He also knew that one thing he had going for him was the fact that they had not admitted, and would probably never admit, that a weapon was miss

Ksf ing. In a way it was checkmate: As long as they couldn’t: admit they had a weapon missing, and as long as he kept his mouth shut about what he suspected, he should be safe. All of which assumed they were going to question him in a civilized manner and not take him out to a deserted rifle range somewhere for a meaningful physical experience. The down side was that if he kept his mouth shut, he couldn’t tell them what he suspected about Carson, either, for more reasons than one.

If his reasoning was correct, taking him back to the Anniston Depot might be something of a bluff on the Army’s part, which further reinforced his sense that he should play the role of the aggrieved civil servant, admit nothing, and try to put them on the defensive as fast as he could. The anger he was generating now was consciously contrived. He wanted to work himself up into a state of righteous indignation. He was positive that this was the right way to play it.

Provided that someone was actually going to come in there and talk to him. He was hungry and thirsty. He got up and tried the water fountain.

Nothing but air came out.