The DIA had their pick of these men, and to date there was no record of anyone resisting arrest by DIA agents. Which, Alexander thought, was just a little bit ominous.
“Strike!” the squawker boomed again. “Ground Unit Three. There’s something up here, Mr. Bahr.”
“Hold your position,” Bahr’s voice grated from one of the ’copters. “What do you see?”
“Nothing clearly. It’s hot, though . . . .”
“Get some flares in the air. Bring your circle in tighter, but hold fire . . .” Bahr’s voice trailed off in a crackle of static. Then another voice came in.
“Mr. Bahr? This is Johnson, at the plant. You were right, sir. Three U-metal slugs are missing from Number Four pile. Dummies loaded instead.”
“Good work,” Bahr’s voice came back. “That about clinches it. We’ve got them cornered out here. Sit tight.”
Stunned, slack-mouthed, Alexander slumped back in his seat, his heart barely beating, cold sweat forming on his palms and forehead. A dead, crushing weight seemed to be locked inside his chest.
Three slugs missing.
Even McEwen could not help him now.
His security system, worked out step by step over the months at Wildwood, thought to be absolutely flawless, had let three U-metal slugs, each weighing fifteen pounds and furiously radioactive, get out of the compound. And his career . . . he swallowed, a bitter taste cloying up in his mouth.
A supply dump in Watooki at best. At worst, a full-scale DIA investigation, a court-martial, a DEPCO psych-probe, the final down-grading.
Once Bahr got those three slugs, he was finished.
Somewhere in the sky a flare burst, throwing dead white light down on the treetops. Another flare, and another, appeared below the fiery ’copter rotor jets. Alexander pulled himself out of the car, stumbled up the hill into the woods. He heard radio chatter crackling from a ground unit as he passed:
“Disk . . . .”
“What is it? Where?”
“. . . looks like some kind of craft . . . .”
“Where?”
“. . . metal disk, over there to the left . . . .”
“. . . been there all the time . . . .”
“Move back, move back . . . .”
Beyond the closing circle of men, Alexander could see something. It lay in a clearing in the trees, vaguely defined in the harsh flare light . . . something large and gray and flat.
“Put a camera on it, whatever it is,” somebody was shouting very near him.
“Get us Air, Lowrie Field; well need Air. Ground units hold . . . .”
Quite abruptly, the gray thing in the clearing seemed to blossom out like a violent orange flower. The blast wave of the explosion struck Alexander like a wall, hurling him flat, as a flame-colored cloud mushroomed upward, brilliantly lit from below by something burning furiously, briefly, then sputtering out in a wave of intense heat. The ’copters still in the air closed in like so many vultures to peer down into the smoking crater, and in the silence and darkness there was only the scattered sound of bits of wood, dirt and metal falling down through the trees; then shortly after, the smaller fragments, almost dust, sprinkling slowly down in the rain, silent, invisible, and slightly radioactive.
Chapter Two
Numbly, Alexander flexed his fingers a couple of times, feeling his wrist artery hammer revealingly against the pressure cuff that was making his left hand swell and discolor, and driving one of the polygraph pens across the recording sheet in an agitated sinusoid pattern.
“It’s all very simple, Major,” Bahr was saying, walking around in front of him. “All we want from you is the truth. Now, I think that’s a reasonable enough request under the circumstances. Just a few simple facts. You know them. You must know them, because you were the security officer there, and you admit you devised the system. Our investigation is going to turn up those facts eventually. You’ll help yourself if you save us some time.”
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Alexander insisted, his diaphragm collapsing in a long, exasperated sigh.
McEwen, sitting on one side of the room, motioned to Bahr, who glared at Alexander for a moment and then turned away with a growl. From the corner of his eye Alexander watched them whisper. Bahr’s huge fist slapped the arm of McEwen’s chair angrily; the elderly DIA Director mumbled back something low and inaudible, shaking his head. Alexander couldn’t catch the words, but one thing was apparent: Bahr was winning the argument.
John McEwen had arrived. McEwen, the ace-in-the-hole, the white hope, the letter-of-the-law defender of National Stability and the democratic way of life, took one look at the gaping crater five miles north of Wildwood, and ordered a complete news blackout (illegal except under hemispheric Condition B), isolation of the area within a twenty-mile radius (illegal without consent of the Army unit responsible for the land, since it was part of a military reservation, and Alexander had not even been asked for his consent), and scrambling of all communications (legal, but almost without precedent since the bleak days of 1995-96 when the panic wave that followed the Crash was at its bloodiest).
Bahr had outlined the observed facts to McEwen, briefly and authoritatively, and McEwen had accepted the most obvious explanation. The three U-metal slugs missing from the plant had been carried—by person or persons unknown—past the road alarm, and loaded into the vehicle in the woods—whatever that was—which promptly blew up when searchers approached it too closely.
When Alexander had protested and brought up certain annoying details such as the questions of method, motive, and the silent exit monitors at the plant gates, Bahr had countered angrily with charges of obstruction, interference, non-co-operation and concealment. Quickly he tore into the lardy arrival of Alexander’s security troops, who were still strung out halfway across Illinois on a long eye-beam perimeter, wondering what had happened.
Finally Alexander had played his trump . . . the blatant illegality of Bahr’s DIA unit forcing an inventory at the plant. McEwen muttered something unintelligible about Project Frisco, and walked back to stare into the crater again. Alexander was packed into a ’copter and flown to Chicago for questioning.
The questioning had started six hours ago.
In spite of the glare of lights in front of him, Alexander could turn his head enough to get a fairly good look at McEwen’s face. The DIA Director’s skin looked dirty gray, his eyes hollow with deep creases. The comers of his mouth were pulled down, immobile even when he talked. The face was a mask, the face of a man who had been sick for a long time . . . or afraid.
Do I look like that? Alexander wondered. He knew the look of a man who was fighting to hold on; he had seen it on his own face often enough these last few months.
He broke off sharply as the real, immediate problem of how to get this investigation over with exploded in his mind. He felt a sudden wrenching in his stomach, and a dizzy, sick feeling of fear. So far neither he nor Bahr had given the slightest indication of their previous acquaintance, imposing their own private rules in this cat-and-mouse game of polygraphy in which Alexander was the carefully-calibrated mouse. But the questioning was getting sharper. Bahr didn’t seem to tire; already Alexander could feel fatigue catching up with him.
It was only a matter of time before his ability to pick his way through the razor-edged questions would begin to falter, and confusion and bewilderment would set in . . . .