PROLOGUE
U.S. ARMY MUNITIONS COMMAND
EDGEWOOD, MARYLAND
Be all that you can be, Emery thought. In the Army.
During his two years in green, he’d seen some butt-ugly posts—Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; Dix, Sill, and Devans in Massachusetts before they’d closed that hock-bucket down—but this…
This?
“Good God,” Emery muttered.
The U.S. Army Edgewood Arsenal made Bosnia look like the French Riviera. Home of the illustrious 1st Redeposition Battalion, Edgewood seemed to be the sinkhole where the Army buried all its junk, and men like Emery were the masters of the junkyard.
Quanset huts and fences—acres of them, all set in mud. No grass was allowed to grow on this post because dirt and mud would take castable footprints, something CID wanted in case anyone was stupid enough to break into this joint. In essence, then, the Edgewood Arsenal was a seemingly limitless mud hole.
It’s the ass-crack of the world, Emery thought, and here I am stuck between the cheeks.
Whenever he pulled sentry duty, it rained. Dressed in an olive-drab hood and poncho, Specialist 4th Class Craig Emery walked his solitary guard post in front of a long warehouse. Just like the warehouse he’d guarded last night, and the night before that, and so on. The warehouses all looked the same. Slung around his shoulder was an M-16A2. His boots clicked wetly through the rain puddles.
Just like the rain puddles last night, and the night before that.
And so on.
Emery, like a lot of eighteen year olds fresh out of high school, had fallen for the recruiter’s shtick, hook, line, and sinker. He’d wanted to be an infantry man, try to make the cut with the Rangers, go to jump school and all that. He’d wanted to be a SOLDIER. But once the recruitment officer got to jacking his jaws, that was all she wrote for Emery.
“You don’t want to be a ground-pounder, do you?” he’d insisted. “You want to be a 095-Echo Security Materials Technician. See, Craig, you passed the background check. You qualify for a Secret clearance with an access higher than most U.S. congressmen. The Army needs men like you, Craig. Men of integrity, men of character. Plus, when you get out, the Army pays all your college tuition, or if you stay in, you get a $25,000 re-enlistment bonus.”
Wow, Emery had thought.
“Don’t be a sod-pounder, Craig. As a 095-Echo Security Materials Technician, you’ll be working the U.S. Army Munitions Command, and you’ll be maintaining critical security on…secret weapons.”
Wow, Emery had thought. Security Materials Technician!
That’s all it took. Emery signed on the dotted line and was shipped of to Basic a week later. He was going to work on secret weapons!
Security Materials Technician indeed. The title sounded intriguing, and, yes, Emery received his Secret clearance just as he graduated Basic and was shipped to his Advanced Individual Training at Fort Goodfellow in San Angelo, Texas. He’d passed the polygraphs. He’d never stolen. He’d never used drugs. And he’d never done any…atypical things with animals. Emery was in!
At Goodfellow, though, he’d found out just exactly what a Security Materials Technician was.
A sentry. A flunky walking a guard post. That was it.
No, in the two years and eleven months of his three-year stint, Emery had never seen a single “secret weapon.” Oh, there were plenty such things on the vast post: old field nukes from the 60s and 70s, RAP artillery shells, binary chemical-weapons canisters. He’d even heard that the base stored hundreds of Whisky-79 155mm warheads which were essentially neutron bombs but, because of their older design, had slipped through some SALT II loopholes.
But Emery never saw any of this stuff, and he certainly never worked on it.
He just guarded it.
I should’ve joined the Rangers, he regretted. Should’ve gone to Kosovo.
Because there was another thing: Nothing ever happened here. Action was not this post’s middle name.
Just walking one eight-hour shift after another, looking at the same long gray locked warehouses.
In the rain.
Behind him, heavy rolls of razor wire topped the double-layer steel fence.
The fence hummed.
An ever-familiar warning sign read: NO TRESPASSING! DO NOT TOUCH PERIMETER FENCE!
Emery passed two more such signs: RESTRICTED AREA. USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED and SECTION 21, INTERNAL SECURITY ACT OF 1950 - 50 U.S.C. 797 - ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE FIRED UPON.
Yeah yeah yeah, Emery thought, rain running off him as though he were a human drain-spout.
He glanced at his watch. Thank God! he thought.
It was 11:59 p.m.
His post ended in one minute.
Or maybe not.
Emery had already abruptly stopped. He was staring at the perimeter fence.
There was a hole in it, a big one. At least three feet around.
Nothing ever happens here, he reminded himself. He unslung his rifle, its plastic handgrips tight in his fingers. He pulled back the charging handle—
clack!
—and fed a 5.56mm round into the chamber.
Then he turned around one hundred and eighty degrees.
“Fuck,” he muttered between his clenched teeth.
Nothing ever happened here?
Emery was staring at the nearest warehouse door. He saw three heavy-duty padlocks lying in pieces at the foot of the door.
The door stood ajar.
Emery whipped out his hand-held Motorola radio…
««—»»
The guard hut was cozy, warm. And dry.
Those poor bohunkers, Staff Sergeant Young thought with a chuckle, thinking all off his boys out there in the rain tonight. It rained a lot around here.
But the Sergeant of the Guard didn’t have to walk a post. SSG Young felt he’d earned the privilege. Combat Infantry Badge and Purple Heart in Desert Storm. He’d be E-8 by now if it weren’t for that minor altercation at Nurnberg two years ago. You punch a 2nd lieutenant in the face at a bar, you get busted. Didn’t matter that the punk had only been in the service nine months. Didn’t matter that it was over a pissant bar argument about baseball. Young was a Yankees fan. The lieutenant…the fucking Orioles.
Didn’t matter. When an EM punches an officer in the face, the officer always won.
Young pleaded guilty before the UCMJ court, and when the judge took one look at his record, he’d let Young off light in a big way. One stripe in the shitter and ninety-days Extra Duty.
Young’s escalating security clearance had landed him at Edgewood. It was easy time, and Young figured that he deserved it, after so many times of being fired at—and shot—by Hussein’s Republican Guard. He’d taken out six of the pricks before they’d tagged him. Young had been deep in the field, sensor-reading Iraqi weapons igloos that had been lazed and bombed by the Air Force. The things their CAT detectors had told them…
Well, that was another story.
At least I got the shots, he thought.
Right now he was slouched back at the guard desk reading—of all things—TV Guide. Forget about the Playboys and Hustlers under the desk. This ish had the first pix of Pamela Lee with her de-planted bosoms.
What a woman, he thought. With or without, babe, you’re the greatest…
That’s when the base-station radio went off.
“Sergeant of the Guard, Post Number 3!”
Pam was on the floor as Young rushed to the set. He keyed the mike:
“Post 3, this is Security Point SOG. What’s your status?”
“Sarge, this is Emery! Sector 9 fence is breached! And the door to Vault 6 is open!”
Young spat out his wad of Cannonball chewing tobacco. “Emery! Lock and load, and man your post. A SERT’s on the way!” Young, harried now, grabbed a phone. “Division CQ, this is 1st Redep. Wake up the CO and tell him we got a breach.”
Goddamn godamn goddamn, he thought when he hung up the phone. Nothing ever happened at this post. But tonight…something had.
Young clicked the radio base to another channel, then grabbed the mike.
“Base Security, this is 1st Redep SOG. Put the Base on Op Stat 4 Alert, now. I need a Special Emergency Response Team dispatched to Vault 6, now.”
The alarms were already blaring when Staff Sergeant Young donned his field hat, cocked his Beretta 92F, then ran out the guard shack’s door.
««—»»
“Right there, Sarge!” Emery yelled.
Rain ran in rivulets down Young’s face and arms. “Where?”
Emery pointed to the hole cut into the fence. Behind them, the spotlights were roving, and many armed soldiers could be seen searching the outside perimeter.
The breach alarm continued to blare.
Then the Emery pointed to the opened warehouse door. “And there!” he shouted.
Young eyed the cracked Milspec locks on the ground, thinking Shit! “We ain’t waiting for the SERT team,” he told Emery. “Come on.”
Young pushed open the warehouse door, thrust out his sidearm.
Inside, the warehouse extended vast as a ship’s cargo hold. Intermittent caged lights hung overhead, throwing blocks of stiff shadows. Long aisles formed by wooden crates stacked ceiling-high. A sign warned from a low support beam: NO OPEN LIGHTS. NO SMOKING. DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES.
“This sucks, Sarge,” Emery complained. Fear put a slight crack in his voice. “You see how those door locks were busted? Somebody popped ’em right off the u-bolts. I heard those locks—”
“You heard right,” Young snapped back. “They’re the best padlocks in the world; a .50-cal round won’t break them. And how’d they get through the security fence? It’s 1,500 volts.”
“We-we should wait for the SERT team, Sarge.”
“Bullshit. Whoever busted in might still be here.”
Sweat formed around Emery’s collar. “Yeah, which is why we should—”
“Pipe down,” Young ordered. “And aim your weapon forward—it ain’t a goddamn broom. You watch right, I watch left. Keep an eye out for trip-wires. And shoot anything that moves.”
Young lead on through the main aisle, determined, eyes keen over his pistol sight. Emery followed with quite a bit less enthusiasm. As they moved deeper into the warehouse, the air grew heavy with the scents of bare wood and fire-retardants.
“First section of the warehouse is mainly primers and rigging gear. Now we’re getting into the tough stuff.”
Emery began to sweat harder as he read the stenciled markings on various crates:
MINES/M-18 (Claymore) APERS, One (1) Box of Twelve (12)
BLOCK, DEMOLITION M2 (Tetrytol) 6.5 LB, Six (6) Pieces
GRENADES, HAND, FRAG MK2A1 with FUSE M204A1.
“Aw, come on, Sarge!” Emery raised his voice. “This is all bomb shit! It could be some terrorist busted in here and rigged the place to blow. We need to get our asses out of here and call the ordnance people!”
“Shut up,” Young quietly replied. “You’re a fuckin’ soldier, start acting like it.”
“To hell with that shit! I’m short; I’m discharged in a month!”
Young spared his underling the thinnest of grins. “Better to go out with a bang, huh?”
“To hell with that shit, Sarge!”
Young chuckled. Sure, the kid was shit-scared, but maybe that would keep him on his toes, where he needed to be. “Eyes open, mouth shut. This ain’t the Navy, boy. This isn’t a rig-job—”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re still alive. Whoever busted into the vault had some serious know-how. If they’d rigged charges, this quad would be a crater by now, and there wouldn’t be enough left of you or me to fill a bottle cap.”
“You really know how to make a guy feel secure, Sarge,” Emery muttered.
“My guess is a material theft. Some whacked-out Bin Laden terrorist, or one of those asshole white militias. Keep your eyes peeled for opened crates.”
Emery dragged his feet. “Opened crates,” he muttered to himself. Then something hooked his vision off to the right. “Hey, Sarge? Is that a—”
“What?”
“Is that an opened crate? Right there? Two o’clock?”
Young slowly roved his gaze, the bead of his pistol-sight following it. After a moment of comprehension, then, he stood upright and slumped. His pistol slipped out of his hand and clattered to the cement floor.
“Holy mother of God,” Young whispered.
“What!” Emery cracked. “What is it?”
Indeed, there before them sat an empty wooden crate, it’s nailed lid pried off into splinters.
“What is it?” Emery repeated, his lower lip trembling.
“A world of hurt,” SSG Young answered in drained monotone.
Only then did Emery see what his superior non-com meant. He was close enough now to read the stenciled markings on the side of the empty crate:
PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY CORP OF ENGINEERS
LOT 2244-63, M-129/W-54 - YIELD, SELECTABLE: 0.5-1.5KT
NET WEIGHT: 298 LBS.
Emery’s mouth fell open when he read the rest.
CONTENTS: ONE (1) (S-)A-D-M:
(SMALL) ATOMIC DEMOLITION MUNITION.