Well, who knows what that means? Except I’ve got a responsible citizen telling me that it’s happened before around this girl, accompanied by evidence that she was able to visualize what someone else was thinking.”
“Evidence’?” Sparks said, looking at Stafford over the tops of his glasses. Stafford had trouble meeting Sparks’s eyes.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Sparks said. “What’s your ‘evidence’ tell you is going on?”
Stafford threw up his hands. “Beats the shit out of me. Maybe this is just a case of my trying to make this assignment into something, when we both know that it’s mostly a put-up job.”
Sparks tactfully did not reply to that, concentrating instead on stirring his sweet tea. Stafford was beginning to feel like a fool for even bringing up the psychic angle. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go back to the DRMO auction angle.”
Sparks grinned at him. “Was she good-looking? This Warren woman?”
“Up thine, as the Quakers say,” Stafford replied.
Colonel Fuller was chairing the afternoon meeting when Brigadier General Carrothers came in and sat down. The Security Working Group space had been set up as a mini command center, with secure communications, status boards, a conferencing facility, and several PCs. Fuller gave Carrothers a quick recap.
“General, it’s now fifteen-thirty. The reaction team should arrive at Fort Gillem in. about an hour and a half,” he said. “Two semis, one with the troops and their gear, the other with the sensor pack and comms suite.”
“Plain vanilla trailers, right?” Carrothers asked. “No visual markings?”
“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” one of the majors said. His name tag indicated his last name was Mason. “Anniston is treating this as an exercise of their Civil Chemical Emergency Response Team. There will be one officer on the team who knows what this is really about. Everyone else on the team will think itls a routine exercise. We arrive about seventeen hundred to minimize contact with employees.”
“Good. What’s the procedure?”
“The trucks will go in as unobtrusively as possible, park, and take initial readings while the main team itself remains in containment. If there are no immediate sensor hits, the team leaders will determine where the Tooele containers are and then proceed to secure that area for individual inspection.”
“And if they’ve already been destroyed?”
“Then they’ll check the demil facility itself, and whatever by-product assembly areas are connected to demil.”
“We expect the sensors to find nothing,” Colonel Fuller interjected.
“The cylinder is, of course, hermetically sealed. If the containers are still there, and if it’s in one of the containers, they’ll retrieve it and get out of there. If the containers have already been destroyed, they’ll have to run some tests on the demil output streams to see if there’s any residual evidence that the cylinder itself was processed.”
“If it went through demil and contaminated that facility, what do we do then?”
“That’s not likely,” Fuller said: “This is Wet Eye we’re talking about.
If that hftd happened, we would have already known about it. The whole world would have already known about it.”
Carrothers thought about that and then nodded. He was about to ask another question, then stopped short. He gave Fuller a sign that he wanted to talk to him privately, and he left the room. Fuller came out a minute later, joining Carrothers in the empty hallway outside the room.
Fuller was General Waddell s friend, but he did not really know Carrothers. He kept it formal. “Yes, sir?”
“See if I have this right: The best outcome is that the environmental containers are all still there, we find the cylinder, get it out of there without anyone knowing it was there, and declare the ‘exercise’ successful, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the worst outcome is that all the containers have been destroyed, and we find no evidence of the cylinder, chemical or otherwise?”
“Not necessarily, sir.”
“Huh? Ambiguity is not in order here, Colonel.”:
“It might be, General,” Fuller said, pausing while a staff officer walked by them. He walked Carrothers through the container demil scenario, being careful to highlight the assumptions. “Yes, we’re pretty sure we lost one. No, it did not get loose. The screw up is an internal matter, which we deal with internally.
Shoot some guilty bastards and close the records.”
“That’s the mother of all cover-ups you were talking about.”
“Yes, sir, sort of. But what purpose would be served by admitting we lost one, if no harm was done?”
“Colonel, what worries me is that there’s always the possibility someone found the cylinder and kept it.”
“To do what?”
“To sell it, of course.”
Fuller looked both ways up and down the hallway before answering. “We feel-that’s a highly unlikely possibility, General.”
” ‘We’?”
“General Waddell and I,” Fuller replied smoothly.
“Carrothers gave him a long look. He started to object, but the significance of that-“We” was beginning to penetrate. A “right answer”
was developing here.
“Okay,” he said. “Have the team leader report the moment they find something, or when he has concluded it’s not there.”
19
Carson’s secretary knocked once on his door, opened it, and announced that a Mr. White and a Mr. Jones were there to see him on urgent business. The fact that she hadn’t used the intercom, and that both Mr. White and Mr. Jones were standing right behind her, told Carson everything he needed to know. The Army Chemical Corps had arrived.
First, he needed to downplay their arrival so as not to alarm his secretary.
“Oh, yes, fine. Come in, gentlemen. That’s all, Mrs. Vonner. I’ll see you Monday.”
His secretary gave him an odd look, but she withdrew, shutting the door behind her. Carson indicated to the two officers that they should sit down, but they remained standing. They were dressed in civilian suits, but their physical bearing and haircuts gave them away at once. They flipped out their wallets and presented military identification cards.
The younger-looking one spoke first.
“Sir, I’m Captain White from the Anniston Army Weapons Depot in Alabama.
This is Captain Jones. We’re here to conduct a no-notice exercise of the Army’s Civil Chemical Emergency Response Team. We understand that a shipment of chemical weapons environmental containers was shipped here recently, originally from Tooele, Utah?”
Carson pretended to think. White and Jones. Right. “I’d have to check our records, Captain,” he said. “We move a lot of things through this facility. Tooele, Utah, did you say?”
“Yes, sir. One thousand containers for chemical ammunition. Aluminum and composite construction, with external umbilicals for total environmental containment. They’re not large — maybe four feet long, four point five inches in diameter. Originated in Tooele, transshipped through the Anniston Depot.”
“Interesting. Unfortunately, you’ve come just after quitting time. Let me go down to our Records Department. Feel free to. wait right here.
This won’t take long. Have some coffee.”
He left them standing there and went down the hallway, where the last of the admin office employees were leaving for the day. He went into the Records Department and sat down at one of the PCs. Ordinarily, this would have taken some time to make a database search, but in this case, he knew precisely where the records of the Tooele shipment were. In a minute, he had them printing out in his secretary’s office. He walked back and collected the readout.