Ward greeted Merrit at her car, as he had the security guard. She looked at him questioningly as she got out.
"What's going on, Doctor Ward? The guard is at the entrance to the drive sending everyone else home. He said something about a security check by the feds."
"Someone tried to steal the Synbats last night."
Merrit blinked in surprise. "Who?"
"I don't know." He gestured over his shoulder at the blood-stained glass, and Merrit's eyes grew wide. "Whoever they were, they didn't do a very good job. There's two more bodies down in the lab inside the inner containment."
"Didn't the guard stop them?"
Ward rolled his eyes. Merrit had worked on this project as long as he had, but it was obvious that she had never really thought through the implications of what they were creating. "The people breaking in probably killed the guard, Merrit. Or the guard was in on it with them. Not only are the Synbats gone, but they took the backpacks with them."
Ward led her into the building, locking the door behind them. As Merrit caught her first glimpse of the eviscerated body, she gasped and staggered back, grabbing onto the security console for support. Ward led her to a seat on the far side of the console, out of sight of the body, while he sat down in front of the computer.
"But how did they get out?" Merrit asked in a weak voice.
"I don't know yet," Ward replied.
"I should have been called," Merrit mumbled. She looked up. "We have to terminate them immediately."
Ward shook his head. "That's two years of work down the drain."
"We can rebuild. We can't let someone have the Synbats or let them run free, especially with the backpacks."
Ward leaned forward in his chair. "We can't be sure we can rebuild. It took us more than twenty thousand transgenic attempts to get this generation as viable results. Without the Synbats we'd have to start all over again from scratch except for the data we have in the computer. And with the effect that this escape and these deaths are going to have, we probably won't get that chance. With the Synbats still alive we have a slim chance of keeping this project going. Without them, we're sunk. We have to catch them alive."
Merrit was obstinate. "But they killed and they'll do it again unless we terminate them."
She still didn't understand, Ward realized angrily. "Damnit, of course they killed! The goddamn Pentagon ought to be happy that their toy worked."
Merrit gazed at Ward with a level, almost dead stare. "We need to terminate immediately."
Ward jumped to his feet and leaned his face into Merrit's. "They're a weapon! Weapons kill! That's all Trollers' Black Budget people care about. We gave them what they wanted! It isn't our fault they escaped. The security setup is the government's responsibility."
Ward took a deep breath and sat back down. He looked Merrit in the eye. "We can still keep this going if we get the Synbats back. We need them to work on the refinements."
Merrit's tone was softer but her message wasn't. "We can find out all we need to know from postmortem work on the bodies and the data we've already collected. Plus we had the aberration with this generation that was unacceptable. We've got to terminate."
Ward stuck to his position. "You know as well as I do that the information we need is in the nervous system and the brain. Any postmortem brain material needs to be frozen and preserved within fifteen seconds of death in order to do any sort of valid analysis. And we'd have to have injected the tracers prior to death." He shook his head. "We aren't even fifty percent done with our live work on the four of them."
Ward remained firm in his decision. "Let's get the map from downstairs and see which way they went. We need to retrieve the direction finder and get the azimuth."
The phone call from Agent Freeman of the Nashville Defense Intelligence Agency regional office had been logged in by the Fort Campbell staff duty officer (SDO) at 6:46 A.M. Since that time, the SDO, Major Johnson, had spent twenty-five fruitless minutes trying to track down someone who could act on the message he had been given. This Freeman fellow could not have picked a worse time to call, Johnson fumed. At the present moment, almost every soldier on Fort Campbell was out doing morning physical fitness training.
Fort Campbell was home to almost twenty-three thousand soldiers, including the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division, the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), and the Headquarters for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Straddling the Tennessee-Kentucky border, the sprawling 105,000-acre military reservation was fifty-five miles northwest of Nashville. The main post was on the eastern end of the reservation; the western end of the Fort Campbell training area came within nine miles of site seven. Because of the fort's location, it had been designated by the DIA to supply the emergency response force for any incidents involving site seven along with several other sites in Tennessee and Kentucky. At the present moment, it wasn't doing a very good job of fulfilling that mission.
Major Johnson knew nothing about the alert code words that Freeman had relayed to him. Johnson was a field artillery officer who pulled SDO every few months on a rotating roster. His SDO instruction book directed him to contact someone at the post's Directorate of Plans and Training Management (DPTM) in response to such a call from the DIA. Unfortunately, no one was answering the phone. Johnson knew that the military members of DPTM were out doing physical training and probably wouldn't be in until about nine. The civilian workers were still making their way onto post for their 8 A.M. work call.
Johnson kept ringing the DPTM number every three minutes, hoping that sooner or later — hopefully sooner — someone would answer. Until then there was nothing else he could do. He had already rung up the on-call person listed in his instruction book, only to be told by a grumpy wife that her husband had left home for physical training a half hour ago.
Johnson looked at the message he had written in his duty log: Site Seven. Priority One Alert. Reference DIA Contingency Plan One Seven. Johnson was smart enough to realize that anything labeled "Priority One Alert" had to be serious, which was why he swore every time he called DPTM and didn't get an answer. Finally, at 0716, the line was lifted on the other end.
Ward checked the azimuth on the portable computer screen one last time, then drew a pencil line across the topographic map. The mark went west from the lab site toward Lake Barkley and the Land Between the Lakes recreation area on the far side of the lake.
"They're along this line, which means that they weren't taken or else they certainly would be farther away. They must have killed all the men who were trying to take them."
Ward pointed at the map. "They're in an uninhabited area. There's nothing between here and the lake. They aren't in a position to hurt anyone. I was right not to terminate them."
He looked up at Merrit. She looked more pale than usual. The sight of the two dead men, seen when they had gone downstairs to pick up the transponder, had stunned her into sickness. She responded quietly to Ward's reasoning. "As long as they stay where they are, they most likely won't be a problem. But we still must terminate them."
Ward ignored her and focused on the green screen of the computer. The antenna on the roof was picking up the signal emitted by the small radio transceivers built into the collars that the Synbats wore. Since only one azimuth was being displayed, the four Synbats were together. The number had not changed at all, which meant that they were either sitting still or moving in an exact straight line away from the lab. Ward suspected the former. Based on the strength of the signal, the computer estimated that they were within five kilometers of the lab.