CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Newark, Arkansas. August
1983
Building 234 lay nestled between Buildings 1719 and 2680, near the center of what used to be the Ulysses S. Grant Army Ammunition Plant. At one time, the numbering system must have meant something to someone, but now the signs were just random markings on countless low-rise red brick buildings. If the exterior of Building 234 was boring, then the interior was downright ugly. The glare of the fluorescent lighting, reflected off baby-shit brown walls, cast a yellow tint, making everyone inside look chronically ill.
As usual, Jake and Carolyn were
running late, although this time it truly wasn’t their fault. Not
that having an excuse would buy them any sympathy. Today was
opening day for the biggest job in Enviro-Kleen’s history, and
everything had to go perfectly. As they dashed down the hallway
toward the packed conference room, Jake tried not to think about
the trouble they might be in. Worrying was Carolyn’s job,
anyway.
“Hey, it’s the newlyweds!” Glenn
Parker announced gleefully as the Donovans tried to sneak in.
Clearly, they’d yet to get to the serious portion of the meeting.
“I was just telling everyone what a superman you were last night,
Jakester. Those thin walls are better than a porno flick,
man.”
Carolyn blushed crimson as the room
erupted in laughter and applause. Jake grinned wide and bowed.
“I’ll leave the curtain open for you tonight, buddy. Pictures to go
with the sound.”
With her jet-black hair, huge brown
eyes, and pleasing shape, Carolyn was the only female on a crew of
thirty-seven horny, single young men. That she undoubtedly played a
major role in their fantasies as they sought relief alone in the
darkness of their motel rooms didn’t bother her a bit. Truth be
known, it was kind of a turn-on.
“Don’t have any trouble walking this
morning, do you, Carolyn?” Parker persisted, drawing another big
laugh.
“If you can still use your hand, then
I can still walk.” That one brought the house down.
Nick Thomas, site safety officer on
the Newark project, and the man in charge of this last meeting
before the operation went hot, struggled to regain control of the
room. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said, pressing the air with his palms.
“Could we get back on topic, please? Jake, Carolyn, take a seat.
Where’s Tony Bernard?”
The folding metal seats in the
conference room appeared to predate the building itself, and the
two remaining at the back of the room were the worst of the lot.
Guaranteed butt-busters. Jake tried sitting for about two seconds,
then opted to stand.
“Tony’s sick,” he announced, rubbing
the place on his lower back where the chair had dug in. “That’s why
we’re late. We were trying to roust him out of his room, but he’s
heaving his guts out. Trust me, you don’t want him
here.”
The concern on Nick’s face was
immediate and obvious. They’d rehearsed this operation a hundred
times and had calculated the work-rest cycles based on a full
contingent of entry workers. He turned to Sean Foley, the project
manager, who’d been scowling from the corner behind
Nick.
“We go, anyway,” Foley grunted. An MBA
marketing type, the boss had little time for the entry workers’
cowboy mentality to begin with. He’d be damned if he was going to
pull the plug on a multimillion-dollar contract just because
somebody got sick without permission. The room fell
silent.
Nick took the cue as his opportunity
to continue. He flipped on the overhead projector, and the
pull-down screen was filled with a line drawing labeled “Magazine
B-2740.”
“Okay, troops, this is our home for
the next twenty-eight weeks. Assuming that this place is identical
to its five hundred brothers and sisters here at the Newark Mass
Destruction Emporium, we’ve got interior dimensions of one hundred
feet across and seventy-five feet deep.” As he spoke, he moved a
rubber-tipped pointer to highlight items of interest on the screen.
“These little squares you see on the drawing are the reinforced
concrete pillars. And in case I’m going too fast for the Aggies in
the crowd, pillars are things that hold the roof up.”
A chorus of whoops arose from the
crowd as two Texas A&M graduates extended birds high into the
air. A graduate of Oklahoma State, Nick never missed an opportunity
to pull their chain. As the laughter died down, he placed a color
photograph on the machine.
“As you can see here, the place is
built like a bunker: an igloo design with reinforced concrete all
around and five feet of earth piled on the top and sides. God only
knows how much dirt there is in the back. A lot. There’s only one
way in or out of this place, folks, and that’s through these blast
doors in the front.”
None of this information was new to
anyone in the room, and Nick knew it. Every detail of the Newark
cleanup had been rehearsed in an identical magazine, far away from
the exclusion zone. But this was show time, and a person couldn’t
be too prepared. Of the thirty-odd people gathered in the
conference room, only eighteen would even leave the command center
once the operation started; and of them, only six would actually
enter the magazine. No one knew for sure what they would find, but
by all indications, it was going to be ugly.
At one time or another, Magazine
B-2740 had housed everything from high explosives to the full
spectrum of chemical warfare agents. As for the present,
speculation abounded, but all anyone knew for sure was that the
place “had a lot of shit in it” (the words of the EPA inspector who
saw a container of mustard gas near the entrance a year ago and
panicked). Being more specific was Enviro-Kleen’s job.
The worst concerns for everyone were
the nerve agents VX and GB, both of which they expected to find in
large quantity. Toxic at an exposure of 1/100,000 of one part per
million, the stuff scared the hell out of Jake. Translated to
layman’s terms—Aggie terms, according to Nick—that ridiculously low
number was the equivalent of one drop of nerve agent dissolved in
the total quantity of air breathed by an average adult over a
twenty-seven-year period.
“Just remember,” Nick concluded, “a
little dab’ll do ya.” Suddenly, his demeanor switched from safety
guy to professor. He pivoted on the balls of his feet and pointed
at Adam Pomeroy, the newest addition to the Enviro-Kleen team. “Mr.
Pomeroy!”
Adam’s head jerked up from the doodles
he’d been drawing on his spiral notebook. At twenty-three, he
looked sixteen and had already been voted most likely to contract a
venereal disease. “Huh?”
“Tell me the mechanism of injury for
VX agent, please.”
Adam looked like he was back in
school, raking the ceiling with his eyes as he searched for the
answer. When he got it, he smiled. “It’s a cholinesterase
inhibitor,” he said proudly.
“And what does that
mean?”
The smile went out like a snuffed
candle. “Um . . .”
“Mr. Parker.”
Glenn smiled. He’d been in this
business for eight years now and rarely got caught short. “It means
that impulses can’t pass from one nerve cell to the
other.”
“Excellent. Jake, what do you do in
the event of an exposure?”
Jake rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on,
Nick.”
Carolyn nudged him with her elbow.
“You come on, Jake,” she
said harshly. “This is serious stuff.”
A rumbling “Ooo” passed through the
crowd.
“You swell up and die,” Jake answered
finally.
“Bzz,” Nick said, mimicking a game show host.
“Wrong. Thanks for playing, though. Carolyn?”
“Atropine, self-injected in the
thigh.” Precaution being her middle name, she’d actually practiced
the procedure, using sterile saline. It wasn’t nearly as difficult
as she’d feared.
“Very good. Mustard gas. What happens
when you’re exposed to that?” This one was for anyone to answer.
Jake raised his hand. “Jake.”
“You swell up and die.”
“Yes! That one you got
right.”
There was more laughter, but with a
nervous edge to it; like everyone knew that show time had arrived.
Nick turned serious again. “Please be careful,
people.”
Magazine B-2740 rose out of the
Arkansas forest like some ancient native shrine, its smooth,
reinforced concrete face rising twenty feet over the crumbled
access road. As he struggled into his suit, just at the line where
the support zone met the decontamination zone, Jake couldn’t help
but wonder what future archaeologists would think of this place a
thousand years from now. What conclusions would they draw from the
giant cave dwellers who called this neighborhood their
home?
Dressing for a Level A entry like this
required a group effort. The air packs came first, worn on top of
two layers of clothing: the shorts and T-shirts they wore to work,
under the obligatory royal-blue Enviro-Kleen uniform. Latex inner
gloves came next. The final step was the entry suit itself, with
its built-in five-ply gloves and booties. Leather work gloves
finished off the ensemble, along with calf-high neoprene work
boots, size huge, with splash deflectors to keep scary shit from
getting inside and rotting either the suit or its
occupant.
With his own air pack in place now,
Jake fitted the holster for his portable radio around his waist and
cinched it tight, threading the hands-free microphone through the
straps of his air pack and into his right ear. After he clipped the
customized transmit button to the right-hand shoulder strap, he
mashed the mushroom-shaped button with his gloved palm. He looked
like a Roman legionnaire saluting his emperor.
“Entry One to Ops. You
there?”
“I got you, Entry One.”
Jake shot his hand down to the volume
control, cringing as Drew Price’s voice pierced his
brain.
“A bit loud there, honey?” Carolyn
laughed on the air.
Jake stuck his tongue out at her.
“Hey, Ops, give me a short test count, will you?”
He could hear the smile in Drew’s
voice as he replied, “Test for Jake. One, two, three, four, five.
Five, four, three, two, one. That okay?”
Jake touched his chest again. “Peachy.
Thanks.”
While the rest of the teams went
through their radio check protocols, Jake and Carolyn fitted their
masks to their faces and tightened the straps.
“You look like an anteater,” Carolyn’s
voice said in his earpiece.
“Well, we can’t all be as beautiful as
you, sweetheart,” he replied.
“Can it, guys.” Foley was on the air
now. Mr. Personality. “From this point on, it’s all business,
understand?”
“Got it,” Carolyn said
sheepishly.
Jake flipped him off—well out of
sight, of course.
The Donovans and their fellow
moon-suiters moved to the final dressing stage, where secondary
decon personnel stood waiting to seal them into their “protective
ensembles.” They called themselves the Silverados, thanks to the
aluminized fire-resistant outer layers of their suits, which had
been specially manufactured for this job. According to theory, the
outer layer would buy the owner of the suit an extra ten to fifteen
seconds in the event of a fire. Jake thought it was hysterical.
They were dealing with explosives, for God’s sake. If it burns, you
die. Any questions?
The Silverados stood with their arms
extended out to their sides, and their feet stuffed into their
booties, as the decon toads helped them wriggle into their heavy
armor, guiding their arms and hands into their corresponding
holes.
Jake felt a quick rush of panic as the
big hood was lifted over his head and the vaporproof zipper was
pulled closed. It had happened to him before, and just like last
time, he was able to swallow the feeling before it became a
problem.
A body bag
with a window.
His brain launched a shiver. Once
zipped inside, there was no escape from that suit without help; the
zipper was simply not accessible. Always a borderline
claustrophobic, he’d had nightmares about being stranded inside as
he sucked his air pack empty, then slowly suffocated. The thought
was absurd, but he nonetheless kept a six-inch Buck knife in the
pocket of his coveralls.
Literally sealed off from the outside
world now, Jake could hear nothing but the sound of his own
breathing: an eerie hiss that sounded remarkably like Darth Vader.
He turned to survey the status of the rest of his team and caught a
glimpse of his own reflection on the suit’s visor. Just his eyes,
actually, and they looked huge. Last came the syringes of
atropine—the only known antidote for what they might find. These
were duct-taped to the outside of their suits, on the opposite
shoulder from each Silverado’s dominant hand.
Jake pressed the transmit button
through his suit. “Entry One to Entry Team. Let’s do one more radio
check.”
“Entry Three’s good to go.” As the
only female on the team, Carolyn really didn’t need the numerical
identifier, but protocol was protocol.
“Entry two.”
“Four.”
“Five.”
“Six.”
Jake watched in turn as each person
acknowledged him, making sure that all of them knew their own
number.
“You copy them all, Ops?” This was the
last step before moving ahead down the road.
“I got six,” Drew Price
replied.
“And six is the magic number,” Jake
acknowledged. “Okay, people, let’s get to it.”
The plan called for Jake’s three-man
team, Entry Alpha, to enter the magazine and move to the right,
while Entry Bravo, the other three-man team, worked around to the
left. Ideally, they’d meet in the middle, then work up the center
aisle to the front. Jake shared a quick glance with Carolyn, and
they touched gloves as their team’s industrial hygienist—none other
than smart-mouth Glenn Parker—fumbled with the lock. Designed to
Department of Defense specifications, the assembly was huge.
Resembling a standard padlock, only five times bigger, it dangled
out of sight, hidden up inside a steel cowl. According to the
locksmith who was called in to fabricate a key, the tumbler design
was an oldie but a goodie—for all practical purposes, unpickable.
Under normal circumstances, opening the lock would be a cumbersome
task. Triple-gloved, with no sense of touch, it was a major
undertaking.
Like every other operation, this one
had been rehearsed a dozen times on identical magazines, and Parker
had gotten as proficient as anyone. The radios were silent and
tensions were high as he reached his hands under the cowl.
Instantly, a swarm of wasps appeared, scrambling from their invaded
nest, and all six Silverados screamed like little girls,
instinctively dashing for cover.
The panic lasted for only a second or
two—until they realized that even a bionic bee would bust a stinger
on these outfits—but it was long enough to ignite a panic from the
ops center.
“Entry teams! What’s wrong?” Drew
yelled into his mike.
The fear gone, but his adrenaline
through the roof, Jake laughed. “Um, sorry, Ops. We had a bit of an
insect problem down here. Everybody’s okay. We’re
fine.”
“You people are on vox, goddammit,”
Foley spat. Jake could just imagine him pushing poor Drew out of
the way to get to the microphone. “Who’s on vox?”
The ear mikes they used had an option
for voice-activated transmission—vox—for use in one-on-one
communications, but the procedure for the Newark site forbade its
use. Too many people talking at once just created confusion. “Am I
on vox?” Jake asked himself, but the words fell dead inside his
suit.
Then he heard “Test, te—” The speaker
abruptly shut up. Jake saw number four—Carlos Ortega—snaking his
arm out of his sleeve to access the radio holster on his
belt.
“Who was that?” Foley barked. “Who
didn’t follow procedure?”
Jake quickly waved Carlos off. No
sense answering a question like that. “Um, Ops? We got it taken
care of. Everyone’s off vox now. We’re proceeding with the
entry.”
“I want to know who it
was!”
Everybody looked at Jake, who grabbed
his crotch and extended a gloved bird. He motioned to the lock and
Parker went back to work.
Jake marveled yet again at the total
isolation the moon suits provided against the real world. There was
Parker, not ten feet away, rattling metal against metal, yet the
operation produced virtually no sound. The only reality for Jake
was the weight of his gear, the fluttering sensation in his
stomach, and the heat. God, the heat. With his arms dangling at his
sides, he could already feel the accumulated puddles of sweat at
his fingertips.
Finally, Parker’s head nodded
triumphantly, and he stood, displaying the lock as a trophy.
“Okay,” Jake announced on the air. “The lock’s off. We’re making
entry now.”
Drew was back on the mike now. “Okay,
Entry. Here’s hoping for an empty room.”
Yeah,
right.
Jake thought for a moment that this
must be what it’s like to open an ancient mummy’s tomb: walking
into the unknown, unaware of whatever curses might be awaiting you.
Parker pulled hard to get the door to move, but once started, it
moved easily, propelled by its own momentum. A sharp blade of light
cut across the inky blackness of the magazine’s interior. So much
for an empty room, Jake mumbled. The place looked like somebody’s
attic, stacked with a million boxes of varying types, sizes, and
construction. Generally speaking, the contents of wooden boxes were
considered scarier than their counterparts wrapped in cardboard,
but there were so many of each that such distinctions brought
little comfort.
“Well, Ops, so much for a short-term
contract. This place is packed.”
“Okay, Entry. Keep us
informed.”
No one moved until the two industrial
hygienists said it was safe to do so. In this business, the patient
man was the one who lived long enough to retire. People pretended
not to care about all the safety shit during the lectures, but not
one of the Silverados inside Magazine B-2740 questioned for a
moment that a mistake might put them in an early
grave.
“I show zeros across the board,”
Parker announced.
“Me, too,” said Adam Pomeroy, Parker’s
counterpart on Team Bravo.
“Tallyho,” Jake said. Only Carolyn
could hear the hesitation in his voice, and she looked over to him
one more time. He looked away.
The seam of light died quickly as they
stepped deeper into the concrete cavern. Curiously, the blackness
seemed most opaque right at the line separating light from
dark.
“Entry One to Operations, we’re
inside.”
“Okay, Entry One. Any first
impressions?”
The place was huge, extending far
beyond the range of their hand lights, and it looked as full as it
could possibly be. The wooden box that had spooked the EPA guy sat
right where it was supposed to be, just inside the doors, near the
center—virtually the first spot to be illuminated when the blast
doors opened. U.S. Army—Danger
Poison, it read, just above the telltale
skull-and-crossbones symbol. Then, immediately below,
Chemical Agent—Mustard
Gas.
But that was just the beginning.
Beyond that one container, stretching on in all directions, was
shelf after shelf of God knows what. Assuming that wooden
containers with stenciled writing meant military hardware, and
assuming that military hardware meant things that made craters,
then this place was one huge bomb. Then there were the
fifty-five-gallon storage drums, and the cardboard boxes, and the
glass jars. . . . It just went on and on and on.
Jake palmed his mike button. “First
impressions? Yeah. We underbid this contract by about a million
dollars.”
“Two million,” Carolyn added. In the
darkness, everyone became faceless in the moon suits, but still,
she knew her husband was smiling.
With Parker leading the way, Jake’s
Alpha team moved deeper into the shadows, and with each step, their
world became progressively smaller, limited only to that which
could be touched by the beams of their hand lights. The shelves
stretched high toward the concrete ceiling, and on initial
inspection, everything looked the same; every angle identical to
the other. Jake found himself continually glancing back toward the
shimmering white wall of sunlight behind them. As long as he could
see the light, he told himself, he wouldn’t get lost. That visual
anchor, though, was shrinking in size and getting further away by
the second.
“Talk to me, Parker,” Jake
said.
“Still zeros. Shouldn’t you guys be
doing something more productive than following me?”
It was a good point; in fact, it was
the operational plan. The I.H.s bore the task of assessing the
chemical hazards of the facility, and that required them to
traverse the whole place, corner-to-corner. Jake and Carolyn and
the other technicians should have already started writing down
their inventory. Somehow, though, the sheer scale of the project
drew them deeper into the magazine.
“Hey, guys, we’ve got something here.”
It was Adam Pomeroy, and his voice was shaky.
Jake pivoted all the way around, 360
degrees, but he couldn’t see a thing. “Where are you? What have you
got?”
Adam waved his hand light over his
head, and Jake caught a glimpse through the shelving. He had no
idea that they’d become so far separated. “I’m right here,” Adam
said. “And I found a skeleton.”
“Come again?” Jake said incredulously.
“Did you say skeleton?” He
walked as he spoke, trying to wind his way through the maze of
crap.
“You got it,” Adam
confirmed.
“Keep waving that light so I can find
you.”
“I see him,” Carolyn said, leading the
way toward the front of the magazine.
Jake put his hand on her shoulder,
bringing her to a stop. He thought he heard something odd. A
popping noise. Backfires maybe, from the breathing air compressor?
Shit, that couldn’t be good news. “Do you hear that?” he asked on
the air to anyone who wanted to answer.
“Almost sounds like gunfire,” said
somebody from Bravo.
Jake looked over in their direction.
Damned if it
doesn’t.
In a microsecond, their world erupted
into brilliant white light. Jake felt a pulse of wind and instantly
became disoriented. There was a sense of flying through the air and
then the reality of impacting something hard. There should have
been noise, and there should have been pain, but there was neither.
Only searing heat as something caught fire over where Bravo used to
be. Thoroughly disoriented, he couldn’t tell if he was lying on the
floor, or if he’d been thrown against a wall. Up and down had no
meaning in all the confusion.
A second flash rocked the inside of
the magazine, and this time the noise was deafening. Yellow flames
joined the white for just an instant, before the heavy black smoke
enveloped everything and the heat became invisible.
He had to get out. This was the
nightmare; the scenario that could never happen. In that instant,
he knew that he was dead.
“Jake!”
He whirled to his right, expecting to
see Carolyn, but found himself greeted by more
blackness.
“Jake! Where are you!”
His earpiece! Christ, she could be
anywhere, but her voice would always be inches away. He found the
transmit button and mashed it. “Jesus, what was that?”
“Thank God, Jake. Where are
you?”
“I don’t have a clue. Where are
you?”
A third grenade screamed over Jake’s
head, missing him by inches as it sought and found the right rear
corner of the magazine. This time the explosion had a physical
dimension. He felt the heat pulse pick him up and deposit him
butt-first into a stack of shelving, which quickly collapsed under
his weight. In the brilliance of the flash, he saw Carolyn’s silver
outline against the roiling billows of smoke as she was deposited
within feet of him.
“Carolyn! Are you okay?”
His only answer came from somewhere in
the back of the magazine, well beyond the thick black veil of
smoke. An ungodly shriek rose from those depths; a howl, really,
whose volume increased geometrically until it finally drowned out
all other sound. Then it fell silent.
“Carolyn!” he screamed. “Carolyn,
where are you?” He could barely hear himself, and he wondered if
he’d been deafened.
Out of nowhere, a pair of hands landed
heavily on his shoulders, and he felt his suit pull tight at the
crotch as someone dragged him across the floor. He struggled first
to his knees and then to his feet, cheering aloud as he caught a
glimpse of the big “3” on the silver suit in front of him. Carolyn
was alive!
Still disoriented, Jake stumbled after
her, on the assumption that she knew where she was going. The fire
behind grew larger by the instant, made bigger still by secondary
explosions, as munitions cooked off. Suddenly he wasn’t stumbling
anymore. He was running, and pushing Carolyn along in the
process.
Flames and smoke billowed through the
door frame as they dove face-first onto the grass-stubbled roadbed.
Slapping his hand against his transmit button, Jake yelled, “Run!
Run! Run!” But he still couldn’t hear himself.
Together, they scrambled to their feet
and dashed for the decon line, but Carolyn stopped short, causing
Jake to stumble one more time. This time he caught himself before
he fell. Then he saw it. Carnage. Bodies everywhere, in twisted
heaps on the ground.
What the .
. .
Carolyn heard the shots, then saw the
shooter: a faceless monster, blended perfectly with the trees but
for the muzzle flashes and the bucking of the rifle at the end of
his arm. He seemed so close. She wondered how they could still be
alive, and in the instant the thought flashed into her head, she
saw a spray of Plexiglas explode from the facepiece of Jake’s suit.
She screamed and caught him before he could fall to the
ground.
“Oh, God! Oh, my God,
Jake!”
But Jake didn’t fall. Instead, he
grabbed her by the arm and scrambled for cover on the far side of
the magazine. He climbed the steep mound first, then practically
threw her the rest of the way.
Then they ran. And ran. The woods
crashed by in random flashes of green and yellow and white as they
charged through the forest, away from the monster with the rifle,
away from the looming smoke cloud, toward nothing in particular.
They needed distance, and they needed it right now.
With each step, the heavy air tank on
Carolyn’s back shifted wildly between her shoulder blades, wearing
away her skin under the fabric of her coveralls. Suddenly, her feet
felt unsure, clumsy. A loop of vine reached up from the forest
floor and snagged her by the ankle, pulling her down heavily into a
pile of leaves at the base of a fallen tree.
Rest, she thought. I just need to rest here for a minute. Get my breath . .
.
But then Jake’s hands were on her
again, and she was on her feet, being dragged toward God knows
where. Yanking herself free from his grasp, she punched the
transmit button between her breasts.
“I can’t keep running,” she said. Her
lungs burned from the effort, her head reeled. The inside of her
suit had become a sauna—hotter than she’d ever been. “We’ve got to
take a rest.” Jake wouldn’t answer her, so she tried it again,
thumping the button and this time yelling, “Slow down,
goddammit!”
“. . . slow down. Later.” Jake’s voice
seemed distant in her earpiece, and she’d walked on his
transmission, talking at the same time he was trying to
talk.
She felt like she was still running,
but the passing foliage had slowed down to the pace of a barely
brisk walk. “I can’t hear you!” she shouted. Like yelling somehow
made the signal stronger. Now he wasn’t answering her at all. Was
he hurt? Jesus, he was shot in the face! Of course he was hurt.
“Jake!”