Zero Option

39

Brigadier General Carrothers rendezvoused with the An niston team at a large Trans-America truck stop near the intersection of the Atlanta Perimeter and Interstate 20. The Anniston task unit consisted of four Army semis and six large Army MP Suburbans bristling with whip antennas and police lights.

Carrothers had been waiting at the truck stop for half an hour, sitting in thejdarking lot in a black government sedan requisitioned from Dobbins Air Force Base in northwest Atlanta. His driver, an Air Force sergeant, was a smoker. He was standing outside the car, puffing away anxiously among all the diesel fumes. Carrothers had come down on an Army Learjet by himself. The only other officers in the task unit would be the Anniston Depot operations officer and two Chemical Corps captains to supervise the decon sweep teams. Major Mason and Colonel Fuller had remained behind in the Pentagon to man up the CW operations room.

Carrothers had not wanted Fuller there, but it had become obvious that Fuller had had a talk with his old friend the CG. “

General Waddell’s sudden return to the Pentagon had been unpleasant, to put it mildly. The commanding general had also been very busy on the flight back from the West Coast. Waddell did not care for surprises, and Fuller’s back-channel revelations had come as a very unpleasant surprise. Ominously, Waddell had not indulged in any sort of shotting match. Instead, he had summoned Carrothers into his office and had him stand at attention in front of his desk.

“General,” he said, his face grim, “I thought we had a mutually agreed ‘right answer’ to this little problem, but evidently I was mistaken. And now we have some outsiders in the game. Is it your position that this missing cylinder might in fact be hidden somewhere in the Fort Gillem DRMO? That it did not end up in the demil machine?”

“Yes, sir, that might be the case, General. But—”

“Don’t want to hear any damn mights or buts. The only butts I have a long-term interest in have two t’s in their spelling and they are destined for some chain-saw surgery for disobeying my orders. That’s a problem we will discuss at some length later, as well as your future in this organization. Right now, however, I propose to take some direct action, and you are going to feature prominently as a co-conspirator in the effort to put this incubus back in its box, assuming you want to keep that star.”

“General Waddell—” Carrothers began.

“Be quiet, General,” Waddell interrupted. “As far as I’m concerned, we had this mess contained, and you have managed to uncontain it. Now, I have spoken to General Roman, and he agrees with my assessment that we are at the zero-option point. He has authorized me to proceed with some fairly drastic action. For the good of the Army and for the larger purpose of ensuring the national security, you are going to incinerate that DRMO.”

His instructions had been very specific: “You will go to Georgia and run this thing personally. You will destroy the Fort Gillem DRMO by fire.

General Roman has made available a team of Special Forces people, who will go to Fort Gillem. You will establish two perimeters: Anniston MPs on the outside, the Anniston CERT on the inside. The Fort Gillem MPs will be engaged in investigating a faked breakin at the Army-Air Force Exchange Service warehouse on the other end of the base when the action goes down, courtesy of the Special Forces team. The’ snake eaters will arrive early and will hide out at the abandoned airfield.

While they’re waiting, they will disable the firefighting water supply to the DRMO complex and sabotage the fire alarm systems. When they get the go order, they will go through that DRMO with thermite bombs. I want them in and out of there in fifteen minutes.”

The Gillem military police would be lured away to the other end of the base by the breakin alarm. Once someone noticed the conflagration at the DRMO, the Fort Gillem fire engines would respond, but by then, all the buildings would be fully involved. The’firefighters would be delayed at the scene when none of the hydrants worked. Then someone would tell them there might be explosives in the warehouses. The Fort Gillem post commander, who would be cut in on the plan, would make the decision to hold back the Gillem firefighters, on the premise of not risking lives trying to save obsolete military equipment.

When Waddell had finished, Carrothers tried to object again. “Do not argue with me,” Waddell interrupted. “It’s not like we’re destroying valuable government property. Those warehouses are fifty years old. All of that stuff is there because it’s obsolete or otherwise surplus. The dollars we lose in not selling it are far outweighed by the possibility — a possibility regenerated by you, as far as I’m concerned — that some lunatic fringe might get their hands on a can of Wet Eye. You know about the biologic component.”

“Yes, sir, I do. Now.”

“So give this plan the Washington Post test: If it ever does come out that the Army torched five or six warehouses full of surplus junk in order to make damned sure that some germ-warfare stuff didn’t get loose into the renegade international arms market, who’s going to fault us?”

Carrothers could not deny that. The DRMO was on a remote part of a partially shut-down post, out at the end of a disused runway, surrounded by concrete aprons, and at least a mile away from the civilian population in all directions. Even with a fire that size erupting in the middle of the night, the worst that might happen off the base would be a grass fire. The post-fire investigations would be done by the Army CIC, whose report would be carefully managed by Army headquarters. A Pentagon public relations team was probably already being positioned to brief the press. No one at Fort Gillem below the level of the post commander would know the real genesis of the fire.

“You started this shit with this DCIS guy,” Waddell concluded. “Now you go put an end to it. General Roman has already conferenced with the head of DCIS, and he confirms this guy Stafford is a squirrel. They’ve ordered the regional supervisor to reel him in and get him back to D.C.

General Roman has assured them that Stafford’s allegations against the DRMO manager are total bullshit.”

“But what if they’re not? What if this Carson actually does have it?”

“That’s the final part of your mission: When the DRMO goes up, the Fort Gillem duty officer will notify Carson. When he shows up, take him into custody. Bring him back to Washington. We’ll let another government agency take him out to a safe house in the Virginia woods to see what he knows or doesn’t know. Now, one further thing.”

Waddel had stood up behind his desk. Carrothers remembered the look on the older man’s face only too well. “The Army chief of staff has been fully briefed on this problem. He is in full concurrence with our taking such drastic action. I can’t emphasize this enough: The Army did not lose a weapon. Is that clear, General? We did not lose a chemical weapon. The Army Chemical Corps is in the fight of its budgetary life with this damned quadrennial review, and the Chemical Corps cannot begin to stand a hit like this. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“Good. So you go down there, and you incinerate that place. Burn it to a fucking shadow, along with any trace of that damned Wet Eye. And while you’re at it, give some consideration to where you’re going to retire.

You had your chance, General Carrothers. As best I can tell, you’ve blown it. That’s all.”

Carrothers had spent the rest of the day coordinating the planning for the operation from the Army Operations Center in the Pentagon’s basement. Now he stood by the lead Suburban under the white sodium glare of the truck stop’s light towers and rubbed his face. He was tired, disappointed, and very apprehensive. He could well understand the three-stars’ fear of the missing Wet Eye becoming public knowledge, and burning the DRMO would yield an almost 95 percent probability of destroying the cylinder, assuming it was still there. But what if it wasn’t? What if Carson did have it but had stashed it somewhere else?

And how in the hell had this Stafford found out about it? Or that Carson had it? There were too many loose ends here, and, given that, he hated executing this operation, especially when he knew the whole thing was inspired by panic at the higher echelons of the Army. He knew that somehow he had become a pawn in the Army’s cover-up, and that bothered him most of all. The scenes from Fuller’s video kept coming back to him.

And then, of course, there was Waddell’s parting shot: the fact that Carrothers should start planning his retirement. Well, the more he thought about that, the less that prospect bothered him, unlike what they were about to do tonight.