Friez stood straight again. Liz relaxed in her chair.
Campion went on, "Wells said he saw a ship docked at the island prior to the eruption, loading, well, sounds crazy, but they were loading bodies."
"Bodies?"
"Yes, General. Wells says he saw a ship docked at the island and that armed men in biohazard gear were cleaning up bodies around the island with heavy equipment and dumping them onboard a freighter."
Thunder said, "And then came the eruption? Or, what appeared to be an eruption?"
"According to Wells, yes ma'am."
"Okay, Captain, what is your status right now?"
Campion answered the generaclass="underline" "As I mentioned, the task force is only a few miles offshore. We'll start running sorties again when dawn breaks here, but I don't know if things will have cooled own enough to send in shore parties. From what we saw last night, the lava has done a good job of burning everything to the ground. Lots of fires still, and lots of heat, although it looks like the amount of stuff coming from the volcano has slowed to a trickle."
"And no signs of Wells's mystery visitors?" Thunder asked.
"No, ma'am. But we will expand our reconnaissance west and south of the island based on the ship he saw. Odds are, it's long out of the area though."
"Keep up the search, Captain," Friez ordered. "We'll try and make sense of things on our end."
"Yes, General. Peleliu out," he said, and the line went dead.
Friez turned away from the desk and walked around the office. For a moment Thunder thought she saw a glimmer of sentiment in his eye. After all, this office had been his for years, until his promotion to Washington last fall.
"We'll try to make sense of things," she repeated Friez's last words to Campion. "Actually, I think it's starting to make a lot of sense."
"Explain," The general demanded.
"A crew comes in and cleans up the mess, then an eruption — or something like one — burns the evidence to the ground. It sounds to me like someone tested a biological weapon on Tioga Island and then tried to erase their tracks."
"Then you're suggesting zombies as a biological weapon, if Wells was right."
"Who knows what he really saw," she said. "Crazy people, something like rabies, who knows? Until we have some sort of hard evidence, all we have to go on is a short report from a soldier who has suffered extreme fatigue and heat exhaustion, and we're getting that report from the other side of the Pacific Ocean."
She spoke but Friez barely listened as he retreated to the far corner of the room and rested an arm on her filing cabinet. He seemed off in thought.
"General? Sir?"
He spoke, seemingly to himself: "Zombies as a biological weapon. Or something like that. Just thinking off the top of my head but that sort of thing is a whole new level of warfare."
"A whole new level of nasty, you mean."
He took notice of her again.
"Yes, very nasty. A weapon that turns people into a crazed mob. That sort of thing would have the potential to overrun a metropolitan area in short order, depending on rate of infection."
Liz felt a chill run up her spine. He had a particular look in his eye. Not quite a kid on Christmas morning, not quite a doctor sifting through microbes in a petri dish, but something in between. She had seen that look on the faces of military researchers before. Hell, she had had that look in her own eyes in the past. The result had been the loss of test subjects, an investigation, and the threat of a court martial.
"General, if you didn't know about this then I'm guessing we're not playing both sides of the same coin here."
"Rest assured, Colonel, if the defense department was experimenting with a biological weapon this revolutionary, I would have a file on it."
She did not like the way he said "revolutionary."
"I can't believe it. You are interested in this. As a bio weapon."
"I told you, we are not involved, Colonel."
"If not us, then obviously the Russians," Thunder said.
"What? I suppose that's a possibility."
She stood fast, pressed a finger into her desk, and insisted loudly, "It must be the Russians. They're the only ones into stuff like this."
Friez approached her, tilted his head as if studying her, and then said, "Of course. One mention of the Russians and unconventional programs would send you flying off the handle. This is not a time for your personal feelings to get in the way of your judgment."
"They’re not."
"Yes they are, Colonel. A few years ago you were running a program that was about as far out there as zombies as a bioweapon. Then things got really fucked up and one of your test subjects defected to the Russians."
"He didn't defect. He was abducted."
"Not the way we see it, Colonel. But I believe all that came out during the committee hearings. You pushed and pushed until your entire operation fell to pieces. How many dead? Six? Seven? So don't stand there and lecture me about nasty programs. There was a time when you were the Queen of Nasty at the Pentagon."
Liz took a deep breath, held it, and let out a long exhale.
"Good. Calm down, Colonel Thunder. The reason you are sitting here at Darwin isn't because of the Blue project, but because of what you did at Red Rock. Despite everything going on, you put the pieces together and stopped that place from falling apart. You redeemed yourself, at least in my eyes."
Liz looked at the ceiling, then the desk, then the ceiling again.
"Point is, Colonel, the Russians aren't always the boogeymen. There are a lot of rogue governments, crazy scientists, and even private entities that like to explore this type of thing. What we have to do now is concentrate on dealing with what we know. So you tell me. What's next?"
She sat down in her chair, folded her arms, and told him, "Campion starts aerial searches again at dawn to try and find Major Gant and Dr. Stacy. If there was a ship that left the island yesterday, then they have to try and find that, too. Because if they don't, General, all we have is a pile of lava and a burned out island."
The lights flickered on, turning the dark room into a very bright one instantaneously. In response, Major Gant exploded awake as if the light had physically slapped him.
He glanced across the square chamber and saw that Dr. Stacy had suffered the same reaction, sitting up fast on her bunk with her eyes blinking fast and breathing in fast huffs. She probably wished the whole thing had been a bad dream, going back months ago to when she had accepted the position of scientific consultant for the team.
For some reason their captors had allowed him to keep his watch, so while the windowless chamber offered no clue as to time of day, a glance at his wrist told him it was six in the morning, or 0600 hours military time.
"Rise and shine," he said wiping sleepers from his eyes and reaching for his BDU shirt, which he had taken off so as to be more comfortable.
Their "quarters" consisted of the one main chamber with a pair of cots on either side as well as a tiny bathroom with a shower stall. Lighting came from a bank of fluorescents and there were no decorations, no features, not even a ventilation shaft that might be conveniently large enough for Stacy to escape through (as she had joked, upon their arrival).
"Another beautiful morning," she quipped through sagging, red eyes. "I can't believe you actually managed to sleep."
"Who said I managed to sleep?"
"You snore, Major. Loud enough to wake the dead." She paused, considered, and then chuckled.
"Funny, I've never heard myself snore," he replied, using the same line he used with Jean time after time in response to her annoyance at the buzz-saw-like noises he apparently made when in deep slumber.