CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Nick knew he should be exhausted, yet
the three-hour ride in the sleek Gulfstream jet had left him oddly
energized. He could get used to this. The Gulfstream was a flying
hotel suite, with lush seating, a fully stocked bar, and a
miniature office, complete with a desk, computer terminal,
telephones, and even a fax machine. Certainly, it was a far cry
from the discount carriers he normally used, where service meant
having some Cossack bounce a pack of greasy peanuts off your head
while the passenger in front crushed your kneecaps with his seat
back.
Nick was the plane’s only passenger.
Like a child on an amusement ride, he sat in every seat and played
with every button and knob in the passenger compartment, just to
see what they would do.
They’d touched down in Little Rock at
about five in the morning, where a stone-faced driver met the
aircraft on the tarmac and shuttled Nick the rest of the way to
Newark. He and his luggage were deposited at an ancient, condemned
motel complex a few miles from the industrial park. A long, low
roof covered a row of decrepit doors and windows, each identical to
the one next to it. Window, door, window, door; and so it went at
exact intervals, along the covered sidewalk, for the length of the
abandoned structure. An empty metal frame and dangling electrical
connections doubled for a sign atop a rusted pole in the crumbling
parking lot.
Nick recognized this place as the
decomposed carcass of the Ouachita Grove Motor Hotel—the same
fleabag where he’d stayed last time, when he was part of a
high-spirited team of hazardous waste site workers.
The mute, faceless driver piloted the
vehicle past the thoroughly vandalized motel office and back toward
the strip of rooms. For the first time, Nick’s stomach boiled with
a sense of very real danger. Anything in the world could happen to
a man out here, and no one would even hear the screams. Certainly,
no one would find his body; the rodents would see to that. A place
like this probably had rats the size of cattle. They’d have his
bones stripped clean within hours.
What the
hell have you gotten yourself into?
Once parked, the driver led Nick over
the curb and up to room 24. The hardware had been ripped off long
ago, but the silhouette of the numbers still remained in the chalky
paint of the delaminated door.
Inside, a card table with four folding
chairs had been set in the center of the room, under the skeletal
remains of a ceiling fan. Overwhelmed by the stink of mildew and
moldy foam rubber, Nick sneezed three times in the first half
minute of entering the place. The driver produced a penlight from
an inside pocket somewhere and, using its yellow beam to guide the
way, found two battery-powered lanterns and turned them on. Next,
he parted the tattered curtains on the window frame.
What did it say about the curtains,
Nick wondered, when even the vandals left them alone?
“Here you go,” the driver said. “I
delivered a few boxes for you last night. That’s them over there.”
He pointed to a spot in the back of the room where a dozen
cardboard containers lay stacked in an awkward pyramid. “Your
friends should be here shortly. I know the place looks creepy, but
don’t let it get to you. It’s safe. No one will be by who’s not
supposed to.”
As the driver let himself out of the
room, Nick called after him, “Where are you going?” but the guy
ignored him. It probably was none of his business,
anyway.
Three hours passed in silence, and
Nick busied himself with the task of reading through the thick
printout he’d brought with him.
It all came back quickly: the layout
of the plant, the perimeter of the exclusion zone. He remembered it
all so clearly, as if the intervening decade and a half had just
dissolved from his mind. Preparing for the Newark cleanup had been
his first solo shot as site safety officer, and he’d been
determined not to blow it. If he’d done his job well, he’d have had
it made.
Months before the entry-team cowboys
showed up with their attitudes and their silver suits, he had been
there with his assessment team, pulling samples out of the soil,
air, and water to determine what might have leaked out over the
years to threaten the fishes and the squirrels. It was nasty,
filthy work—real wet-feet, dirt-under-the-fingernails stuff—the
result of which was a stack of reports and maps and diagrams that
empirically demonstrated just how little anyone knew about Uncle
Sam’s Arkansas root cellar.
Sometimes, though, the absence of
information told as important a story as a computerful of data. As
he reviewed the ancient charts and graphs there in the moldy motel
room, he remembered the sleepless nights these papers had generated
so long ago. It had been his responsibility to select the equipment
the Silverados would use to make that first entry, and his sleep
had been haunted by the penalties they’d pay if he miscalculated
the risks.
In the end, of course, the reality had
played out to be far more horrifying than any nightmare. He simply
had not foreseen the possibility of a terrorist
attack.
Not that the Silverados could have
known that. Not that they cared. All they heard were the
explosions, if they’d heard even that much. Sometimes, in the
darkest days of his depression, Nick wondered how many of his dead
friends had spent their last instant on earth cursing him for
screwing up the one job he had to do.
Hardly a day went by—even before Jake
and Carolyn resurfaced in the news—that he didn’t think of those
bodies; the way they dropped where they stood, strewn all over the
roadway leading to Magazine B-2740. By the time anyone even tried
to reach the exterior team, the corpses of those decon people and
admin staffers were caked in soot. The ones closest to the open
blast doors had melted into their moon suits, testament to the
ferocity of the fire which had simply been allowed to burn. Further
away, the bodies were just dead; so many lumps of flesh, contained
within their protective garments, where their blood pooled out of
sight.
Nick’s mind replayed the recovery
operations, where each of the contaminated bodies was placed inside
an enormous rubber pouch that had been designed for just such a
use, albeit with an eye toward a radiation accident rather than a
chemical one. The bagged bodies had been taken to a staging area,
where they were bagged yet again and shipped off to a military base
for decontamination and autopsy.
Not the entry teams, though. Their
bodies were deemed to be contaminated beyond recovery. Unlike
biological agents, which would have been killed by the extreme
temperatures, the chemical agents in Magazine B-2740 merely changed
form as they were burned, recombining with the products of
combustion to form wholly new, and potentially even more hazardous,
compounds. The products of such reactions were reasonably
predictable when the process started with known entities, but as
more chemicals were added to the recipe, the list of potential
combinations grew geometrically, quickly reaching the point where
meaningful predictions became impossible. In the Newark Incident,
where no one even knew what the original chemical combinations
were, the possibilities were infinite.
During the fire itself, the magazine
had been a boiling cauldron of fire, smoke, and chemicals as
burning rocket propellant and high explosives ignited crate after
crate of chemical warheads, raising the temperature within those
walls to 4,000º Fahrenheit. According to the accident report—itself
an educated best guess—the inferno created its own windstorm,
sucking in huge quantities of air through the same opening through
which the fireball was trying to vent itself, thus causing a
continuous recirculation of the same poisonous
atmosphere.
Faced with so much uncertainty, the
professional whiners and camera hogs at the EPA did what they did
best: they played it safe, declaring the building’s threshold to be
the absolute limit to entry. No one could take a step beyond the
doorway without violating federal law. That the bodies inside were
once people’s sons, or that they were once friends of Nick’s, was
deemed an irrelevant detail.
He brooded on what he was about to do.
What if the EPA know-it-alls were right?
What if we are walking into a toxic nightmare? Even
if he and Jake and Carolyn could figure a way to engineer the
hazards down to the remotest possibility, how could he ever justify
taking this kind of risk, just to put the past back on the right
track?
As the sound of an approaching
automobile pulled his attention back through the front window, he
realized his answer had just arrived.
“I’m not staying here,” Travis said firmly as he
climbed out of the Cadillac and saw what was left of the Ouachita
Grove Motor Hotel.
“Hush, Travis,” Carolyn
hissed.
“But I . . .” Jake’s gentle hand on
his shoulder told him that it was prudent to shut up.
Carolyn moved only her eyes as she
took it all in, her jaw slightly agape. “Oh, my God,” she
whispered.
“One each, Arkansas-issue ghost town,”
Jake mused aloud.
“You guys actually slept here?” Travis asked.
Jake smiled. “Well, it wasn’t quite
this bad back then.”
They all jumped as the door to room 24
opened, and Jake and Thorne simultaneously swung their hands to
their holsters. Jake stopped the instant he saw who it was, but
Thorne kept going, bringing a huge, chrome-plated .45 to bear on
the new arrival.
“Freeze!” Thorne shouted.
Nick Thomas’s eyes popped to the size
of saucers, and he threw his hands in the air. “Jesus!” he shouted.
“Holy shit!”
Jake threw a hand toward Thorne. “No!
That’s Nick! Don’t shoot him!”
Thorne held his aim for another second
or two, just to make sure, then brought the gun down. “Goddamn
amateurs,” he grumbled, stuffing his weapon back under his sports
coat. “You keep surprising people like that and you’re gonna die
young.”
Nick haltingly lowered his hands, and
his legs wobbled a bit as color drained from his face. Carolyn
darted forward to help him sit down before he fell. “Holy shit,”
Nick said again. It seemed to be the entire breadth of his
vocabulary. “Holy shit.”
Travis started to chuckle but stopped
when Jake nudged his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Nick,” Jake said, hurrying
over to help. “Are you okay?”
“He nearly shot me!” Nick declared.
“You send some thug to drag me all the way out here, and then you
point guns at me?”
“He’s not a thug,” Carolyn corrected,
but no one seemed to hear.
Jake shrugged, looking a little
pained. “We didn’t know it was you, Nick. You just startled
us.”
Nick looked at him like he’d grown a
third eye. “Startled you?” he said incredulously. “Jesus, Jake, you
were gonna shoot me for startling you? Suppose it hadn’t been
me?”
Jake and Carolyn shared an
uncomfortable glance, then changed the subject.
“So. What’s new?” Carolyn asked,
sparking a welcome laugh all around. She ventured a hug, as best
she could there on the sidewalk, and Nick returned the
effort.
“Jesus, you guys look awful,” he
said.
Jake helped Nick back to his feet.
“How nice of you to notice. Diplomacy is still your specialty, I
see.”
Nick wanted to laugh—to lighten the
moment—but he couldn’t. “Seriously, Jake, are you all
right?”
Jake’s look said it all:
Are you nuts? “It’s been a
tough fourteen years.”
“And who’s this?” Nick nodded toward
the boy.
“This is our son, Travis,” Jake said
proudly. “And our fourteen years don’t hold a candle to his last
two days. He didn’t know about any of this.”
Travis offered a boyish, uncomfortable
smile and extended his hand, just as he’d always been
instructed.
“Nice to meet you,
Travis.”
The boy nodded, then took his hand
back and chased a rock with his sneaker.
The sound of tires crunching gravel
startled them all, but when Jake saw no aggressive movement from
Thorne, he relaxed.
“That’s the same car and driver who
brought me here,” Nick explained.
As the green Chevy pulled closer,
Thorne waved to the driver, who slowed to a stop. The two of them
chatted for a while through the window. When Thorne came up for
air, he strolled over to Carolyn.
“Okay, Sunshine,” he said. “I’ve got
to go now. Mr. Sinclair wants me to keep a low profile. I’ll leave
the Caddy here for you to use.”
“You can’t go!” Travis said. “You’re .
. .” He shrank away from Thorne’s piercing glare.
“Everything you asked for should
already be in the room. Mr. Sinclair said he’d take care of all the
other details, whatever they are. Just be sure to be back at the
airport on time tonight.” He delivered his entire speech to
Carolyn, as if no one else was even there.
“Thanks, Thorne,” Carolyn said with a
smile. She offered him her hand, but he looked confused. “And thank
Uncle Harry for me, too.”
Suddenly, Thorne looked like he’d run
out of words. He grasped her hand quickly, scowled, and
disappeared.
“Well, you certainly have a way with
criminal types,” Nick said after Thorne had climbed into the
car.
“Stop calling him that!” Carolyn
barked. “I owe that man a lot.”
Conversation stopped as everyone
watched the Chevy leave. When it was gone, Carolyn abruptly shifted
gears again. “So are we going to be able to pull this thing off or
not?”