“While you were at it, you should have buried those dead bodies. We could smell them coming up the pathway. Two of my girls lost their breakfast.”
The visual might have made John smirk if he hadn’t been thinking that the loss of a meal these days wasn’t a laughing matter. “I guess I had to make a decision.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Diane said, a thread of annoyance creeping into her voice. “Moss came to see me yesterday.”
“Really? What for?” he asked.
“He wanted our fertilizer. The stuff we salvaged from the Ace Home Center on Industrial Lane.”
“I thought that place had pretty much been emptied?”
“It had, except for some of the outdoor stuff.”
“But why would Moss need fertilizer? Doesn’t he know you need it to grow the crops?”
Diane sighed. “He told me he needed it to build IEDs.”
“All right,” John replied. “Let me handle it.”
John was getting ready to walk away when Diane said: “How’d it go with Dan Niles?”
“Fine, I guess. I didn’t want him to think the cholera outbreak was his fault. Even if there is a leak, people need to remember to boil the water they drink.” John was sounding annoyed himself and tried to rein it in. “It doesn’t take long before people start relaxing on the safety measures and thinking we’re back to business as usual. It’s making me think that if we ever do get these lights back on, our next headache might be monitoring usage.”
He hadn’t told Diane that Dr. Coffey had brought up the possibility of a saboteur in their midst. First he would allow Dan to run his own investigation and if that didn’t turn up a likely cause for the contamination, then he would talk to Moss about taking measures, although what those would be, John didn’t know.
Of course, there was still a giant elephant in the room—the intel John had gathered from his conversation with their Chinese POW, Huan. Diane had clearly noticed the way he’d been biting his lower lip, a habit he’d had since high school whenever he had too much on his mind.
“When do you plan on telling everyone?” she asked, not wanting to spell out in detail that she was referring to the concentration camps.
“I wasn’t sure if I should.”
“Really, John?”
“What good’s it gonna do besides get everyone wound up over something they can’t do anything about?”
“I agree, but keeping secrets for other people’s sake is a slippery slope, don’t you think? When they finally do find out, the impact will feel like a nuclear bomb blast.”
John grew quiet. That last thing she said reminded him of something he needed to do. He turned then to walk away.
“You’re not upset, are you?” she said as he left.
He stopped. “Of course not, honey. It just occurred to me I need to talk with a man about a bomb.”
Chapter 32
John found Jerry Fowler over behind the Mayor’s office, tossing wild grass to a cranky-sounding gander.
“I see you’ve met George.”
“That his name?” Jerry replied. “I have to admit, I wasn’t George’s biggest fan when he and I first met. Nearly took my finger off as I tried to pet him.”
John let out a burst of laughter. “You wouldn’t be the first. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to turn him into a nice stew and been begged to stop.”
“I’d say your first mistake was to give him a name,” Jerry said, reaching into his pocket for more grass. George poked his beak through the wire mesh, clearly eager for more.
“Trust me,” John told him in no uncertain terms, “that wasn’t my doing.”
“Ah, yes. Kids,” Jerry said knowingly. “The friends of farm animals across the country.”
The comment brought a rush of raw emotion to the surface that John hadn’t anticipated and he struggled to keep his composure. For a moment he imagined Reese with the boys on the trail back to Oneida, giving them a good talking to. “I trust you’re settling in all right?”
Jerry nodded. “There’s no one back in Oak Ridge waiting for me, if that’s what you mean.”
“My main concern was whether you needed anything.”
“At some point, I’d like to take a trip back to my house for a few sentimental items.”
“That can be arranged,” John replied. “Perhaps even sooner than you think.”
Jerry tossed a clump of grass to George and glanced over at John, unsure. “Something about that sounded rather cloak-and-dagger.”
“Maybe I should come clean then,” John admitted. “I’ve been thinking some about our conversation on the way back from Oak Ridge. You mentioned the Y-12 facility there dismantled outdated atomic weapons.”
The look on Jerry’s face made it clear he wasn’t crazy about where this conversation was headed. “I did say that, but I also told you I had very little to do with that side of things. I was in charge of charting and monitoring weather patterns.”
“That part I got. But do you think any of the material there could be used to make a bomb? One that works is what I mean.”
Jerry rubbed his thick fingers through his beard as though he were scratching for fleas. “Gosh, I don’t know. I suppose so. They’re sent there to be dismantled, after all. Although I couldn’t say whether any of the old weapons were still there.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I’ve been thinking about that, and it seemed to me that if the military was having trouble finding vehicles to move troops and equipment to the front, would they really use those resources to haul away outdated bombs?”
“Hard to say,” Jerry admitted. “You do raise a good point, but if those were the only nuclear weapons they had left, they might.”
John nodded. “Well, I suppose it’s worth having a conversation with some of my contacts at the front.”
“So you wanna put together some kind of missile and lob it onto Beijing, is that it?”
The sound of it made John smile. “No, I was thinking of finding a way to lure as many enemy troops as possible into a major U.S. city and dropping it on them there.”
Jerry shook his head. “Oh, goodness. That’s insane.”
“I know,” John admitted. “I’m not pretending to have worked out all the details and ramifications, but taking out a million enemy troops might just turn the tide.”
“It might, but it might also kill lots of innocent Americans.”
“No doubt,” John replied, thinking of the millions probably already in concentration camps waiting to die if they continued to stand by and do nothing. “Maybe part of me expected that most of the folks in cities had either fled to the country or died. It’s crazy, I know, but do you think it’s possible?”
“To have any real effect, I think you’d need a handful of bombs. Besides, I’m sure the army’s already sent off our nukes the minute they learned who was behind this.”
John shook his head. “It doesn’t seem that way. Shortly after the EMP, we were also hit with nuclear attacks which wiped out our silos.”
“There goes mutually assured destruction.”
“Exactly. Listen, you know that place better than anyone in Oneida. If we go back in, will you help us?”
Jerry didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “Have you ever heard of Don Quixote, John?”
“The knight in the Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes?”
“Yeah, the guy who used to charge windmills thinking they were giants.”
“You think this is a fool’s errand?” John said, feeling defeated.
“It is right now. Finding the warheads is one thing, but it isn’t like lighting a stick of dynamite. You need to find someone who knows how to program it and then some kind of vehicle to deliver it.”
“What about a plane?” John asked. “If we do find someone with expertise, maybe we could load it onto a Cessna and fly it over a concentration of enemy forces. There’s the Scott Municipal airport southwest of Oneida.”