“All right. Let’s finish this off.” She slid the box down the line.
As the second hand hit twelve, aligning with the minute hand, the workers at the Records Center broke from the chains of the job. They moved for the stairs, to spread out into the city of St. Louis until eight the next morning when they’d be drawn back by the siren call of the time clock. Sammy stayed behind. She had nowhere in particular to go other than her apartment to stare into the aquarium sitting on a stand beside her bed. She figured the fish would be all right for a while without her. She often stayed late, thumbing through interesting files and finishing the tasks that never seemed to get done in the required eight-hour workday.
Her supervisor, Brad Tollander, a history Ph.D. who ran this section of the Records Center, stopped by her desk as he headed out. “What are you working on, Sam?”
Sammy and Brad were the two old-timers of the Center. They’d come in together just after the famous fire that had badly damaged the top floor of the building. They’d been here when many of the eighteen wheelers filled with records had driven up to the loading dock. They’d helped unload carton after carton, year after year. Between the two of them they knew where almost every record was.
Despite the recent valiant attempt to list everything on a computer database, there was no substitute for the years of knowledge in their two heads. Sammy often wondered what would happen when they both retired. There would be records sitting in boxes that no one knew were in the stacks. Computers were fine, but some things just couldn’t be quantified into the little sections on the database.
Sammy shrugged. “Just going through some of the unit histories we cleared today. A few looked kind of interesting.”
Brad nodded. Reading files was one of the perks of the job. “All right. I’ll see you in the morning.” He trudged up the stairs.
Sammy turned back to the computer screen. As soon as the door swished shut behind her supervisor, she punched into the unclassified database, accessing armed forces installations. She started with the army. It took her ten minutes to determine that there was no listing for Eternity Base. She moved on to the air force and then the navy, with similar results. On the off chance the marines might not have told its mother branch, she checked the corps records too. Nothing. That meant that this one file folder of photos was the only mention in the entire Records Center of such an installation. Or at least in the unclassified records, she reminded herself.
Sammy had put the photos in time sequence earlier, and she noticed that the dates on the back had spanned four months — from late August through December 1971. Judging from the pictures, Eternity Base was some sort of structure constructed under the snow cover in a cold-weather area. That led Sammy to her second avenue of investigation. She accessed the database on Alaska and tried cross-referencing. Again she drew a blank.
She wondered if Eternity Base might be part of the Defense Early Warning (DEW) line constructed across northern Canada — maybe even in Greenland. Her fingers flitted over the keys of the computer as she checked that, but no cross-reference showed up there either.
Sammy then took a different route. She turned off the computer and moved into the stacks. She went directly to the section that held army organizational records — every army unit’s record, from battalion level on up. Finding the section that held the engineer units, Sammy followed the number of the battalions as they went up. She pulled the cardboard box labeled 67TH ENGINEERS, 1970–1974.
Kneeling on the floor, she tugged out the thick folder for 1971. It was bulging with copies of orders, promotions, citations, operations plans, and the various other forms of paperwork that army units churned out in the course of business. Sammy slowly peeled through the pages and stopped at a stamped set of orders. The orders deployed the 67th Engineer Battalion (Heavy Construction) from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to Vietnam on 20 June 1971.
It didn’t take a Ph.D. to know that Eternity Base wasn’t in Vietnam. She continued through the rest of the folder, looking for a set of orders detaching B Company from the battalion for the Eternity Base operation. Such orders would list the destination, but there were none to be found. As far as she could tell, the 67th Engineers had been attached to the III Corps Tactical Zone, doing various construction jobs throughout the area until redeployment to the United States on 18 May 1972. The unit had been disbanded in early 1974 during the big drawdown in forces after the war.
Sammy ran a hand through her short hair as she considered the puzzle. She knew the army paperwork system very well, and it was unheard of for an entire company to disappear for four months and not leave a paper trail. Why was Eternity Base so important that it could pull an engineer company out of a war zone for four months?
After another thirty minutes of going over the 67th’s records for 1971 in more detail, Sammy still could find no hint of where B Company had gone. All references to that unit simply ended in August and reappeared at the end of December. Another person might have been frustrated, but Sammy was intrigued. This was a challenge. She slid the folder back into the box and replaced it on the shelf. Then she wandered out among the twelve-foot stacks, slowly making her way to her next destination, on the far side: the TDY records.
TDY is military jargon for Temporary Duty, and every time any army element — from the individual on up — was assigned away from the parent unit, a set of TDY orders had to be cut authorizing it. Since B Company had obviously been separated from the 67th Engineer Battalion, Sammy felt reasonably confident that a set of orders would be there, listing where the unit had gone.
She narrowed her search to the folder containing all TDY orders for III Corps, Vietnam, July-August 1971. Finally she found a mention of the phantom company. A single sheet of wrinkled paper — Department of Defense Form 1610—detached B Company, 67th Engineer Battalion, from III Corps, effective 18 August 1971, to the operational control (OPCON) of MACV-SOG.
Sammy’s eyebrows raised at the last term, and her pulse rate quickened. She knew very well that MACV-SOG stood for Military Assistance Command Vietnam — Studies and Observation Group. What had MACV-SOG wanted with an engineer battalion? Despite the innocuous name, Sammy knew that SOG had run Special Forces cross-border missions throughout the war, along with many other classified operations. Some of the records for that unit were in the vault, requiring a top secret Q clearance to even take a look.
Checking SOG records was out of the question. Sammy looked at the rest of the orders. There was no termination date in the appropriate block. It just read: UNTIL MISSION COMPLETION. Destination was listed as CHI LANG, VIETNAM.
Sammy shook her head. She didn’t care what the orders said; those pictures had not been taken in Vietnam. So where had B Company really gone? She replaced the orders, put the box back on the shelf, and headed for her desk. Her mind was clicking along, sorting all the data she had sifted through today, as she pulled on her leather jacket and headed up the stairs. She used her access card to open the door and stepped out into the lobby.
The guard casually looked her up and down as she left. His interest was not sexual. Not only were there numerous classified documents in the vault, but the personnel records were not for public dissemination. Nothing came in or out that wasn’t authorized. The previous year, one of the part-timers had been fired for trying to take Elvis’s army medical chest X-rays. Sammy wondered how American taxpayers would feel if they knew that Elvis’s X-rays were now locked in a classified vault along with the original plans for the first atomic bomb.