The Communist woke up with a snort and some throat-clearing noise.
He saw Janet.
“Hey, good-looking,” he said.
“How do you get a sweet little old lady to yell, “Fuck
“Billy—” “You get another sweet little old lady to yell, “Bingo!”
” She laughed.
“Hey, Billy, why don’t you get some of this wonderful coffee and let me run this missing college kids case by you.”
Browne McGarand approached the smokeless powder-finishing building from the east side of the complex, staying in the shadows as he walked through the twilight. He had parked his truck well off the fire road that branched to the left off the main entrance road, then had hiked a mile southwest until he intercepted the railroad cut. From there, he had turned northwest, walking along the single track until he reached the security gates that bridged the rail line. When the installation had been shut down, the gates had been padlocked and further secured with metal bars welded top and bottom across, in case someone cut the chains and locks.
Browne had left all the bars, chains, and locks on the exterior gate in place. Instead, he had used a portable cutting-torch rig to cut through the tack welds that married the chain-link fence to the round stock frame of the gates. By undoing one bolt, he was now able to lift a corner flap of the chain-link mesh and simply step through.
There was a second set of gates fifty feet inside, to match the double security fence that surrounded the entire 2,400 acres of the Ramsey Arsenal.
These had been locked but not welded, and here he had cut down and replaced the rusty padlock with a rusty one of his own. The Ramsey Arsenal, which was really an explosives-manufacturing complex, had been in caretaker status for almost twenty years. A local industrial-security firm made periodic inspections. He had watched them often, but their people made all their security and access checks from inside the inner perimeter.
More importantly, with the exception of the main gates, they never physically got out of their truck, choosing simply to drive around and look at everything from the comfort of their air conditioning.
He shifted the backpack with the girl’s supplies down off his back and onto the ground. The water bottles made it heavy. He unlocked the inner gates, slid the right one back a few feet on its wheels, and stepped through with the pack. He closed the gate but did not lock it. Directly ahead lay the main industrial area, which covered almost one hundred acres. The complex consisted of metal and concrete buildings large and small, many connected by overhead steam and cooling water piping. There were mixing and filling sheds built down in blast-deflection pits, chemical-storage warehouses, metal liquid-storage tanks, the cracking towers of the acid plant, rail-and truckloading warehouses, and the hulking mass of a dormant power plant with its one enormous stack. The complex was the size of a small town, behind which slightly more than two thousand acres of trees concealed
the finished ammunition-storage bunkers. The rail line, a spur of the Norfolk & Western main line that ran through Christiansburg, immediately branched out into sidings that pointed into the complex in six different directions.
He checked his watch. It was almost sundown. There was just enough light to see where he was going. He did not want to use his flashlight until he was well into the maze of buildings and side streets of the industrial area. The only sounds came from his boots as he walked down the main approach road. A slight breeze stirred dead leaves in the gutters. The largest buildings flanked the main street, which ran from the admin building down to the power plant four blocks away. A series of pipe frames in the shape of inverted U’s gave the main street a tunnel-like appearance. At fifty-foot intervals, there were large hinged metal plates in the street, measuring twenty feet on a side. The plates gave access to what had been called “the Ditch,” which in reality was a concrete tunnel into which large batches of toxic liquids could be dumped quickly in the event a reaction went wrong. All the buildings were locked and shuttered, and, for the most part, empty. Each building had a white sign with a name and building designation reference number for the use of the security company.
With the exception of the power plant, all of the machinery had long since been taken away.
He reached the nitroglycerine-fixing building. He thought about the girl as he walked toward the building, trying to figure out how she played into his grand scheme. He had only mild regret about the two boys who had been killed by the flash flood. In any event, many more strangers were going to die. The girl and her friends were just a few more innocent bystanders. In the six months that he had been producing the hydrogen, no one had ever intruded into the Ramsey industrial complex. There were long-standing rumors in the nearby towns that Ramsey had produced chemical weapons during World War II. Even a hint that there might be some nerve gas still locked away in the deep bunkers tended to keep people out of the facility, and such rumors had never been officially discouraged by the Army. It was all bunk, of course. The plant had been one of several GOCO facilities: government-owned, contractor-operated by various commercial companies to manufacture artillery propellant and warhead fillers for the Army.
He could not imagine what the three kids had been doing here, but Jared’s traps had done their job. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if the flash flood had taken all three of them. But he could not bring himself to execute her, even though she had seen their faces.
In the back of his mind, he thought she might actually become useful down the road, when he got closer to Judgment Day. That was how he liked to think of it: a day of reckoning, with him and his grandson delivering those agents of Satan into God’s iron hands for summary judgment.
It was much darker now. He slowed and then moved sideways into the shadow of a loading dock and sat down to await full darkness. The concrete felt warm against his back. He always did this when he came in: sat down, listened and watched. Made very, very sure no one had followed him in. He closed his eyes and prayed for the strength to carry on, to go through with his mission of retribution. They had manufactured nearly three-quarters of the hydrogen, and the pressure in the truck was starting to register into the double digits for the first time. Not much longer. All they needed was the rest of the copper, and jared said he had found a new source. There was plenty of acid, thank God. He opened his eyes and listened.
There was nothing but the night wind and the ticking sounds of the metal roofs and the piping towers cooling in the darkness. Time to go.
There were two doors on the nitro building: one large segmented-steel hanging door big enough to admit a truck or rail car the other a human sized steel walk-through door. The building’s sign was still legible in the gloom: nitro fixing. He struck the smaller door once with his fist.
“Put on the blindfold,” he ordered.
He waited for a minute, then unlocked the padlock, removed it, and pushed the door open. The interior of the building was a single huge room, which now was in near-total darkness. With his eyes fully night adapted he could just make out the outline of the skylights far above. He could also just see the girl’s face in the middle of the room, a pale blur of white hovering above the dark pile of blankets. He pushed the base of the door with his foot so that it swung all the way back against the concrete wall and then turned on the flashlight, fixing the girl’s face in its blinding beam. She flinched but said nothing. The blindfold was in place, as he had ordered. The remains of the last food delivery were right by the door. He flipped the light around the open shop floor, illuminating each corner.