“Well, Myer,” Fuller said. “This is a real mess.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Ambrose.” Fuller eyed the general for a moment. “Okay, I will,” he said. “Being probably the only ex-biological weaponeer still on active duty, I’ll tell y$u something no one else knows. Not those smart young officers out there, nor anyone at Fort Dietrick, either.”
Waddell just stared at him. The reports in from Tooele and Anniston were pointing more and more toward the distinct probability that a cylinder of Wet Eye was missing. None of the bright young men at the meeting had had the first idea of what to do next, including his deputy.
“Wet Eye is not entirely a chemical weapon,” Fuller said. “To be succinct, it’s a hybrid.”
Waddell leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk and resting his head in his hands. He peered over the tips of his fingers at Fuller. “I don’t think I want to hear this, Ambrose.”. “Somebody has to hear it, Myer. Might as well be you, seeing as you’re the proud owner of this developing shit cyclone.”
“Okay, lay it on me.”
“Wet Eye is a hybrid weapon. The only one developed under this great nation’s biological, not chemical, weapons program, before Tricky Dicky shut the BW program down back in 1968. It is a chemical weapon, but it has a biological constituent, a very special pathogen that prospers in a toxic chemical soup. It’s a one-two punch: The chemical constituent disables the victim; the pathogen then does some serious physiological damage.”
“Specifically?”
“It eats the eye. It literally propagates a bacterial chain reaction that consumes the human eyeball. The chemical creates the disabling pathology that gives this stuff its name, a wet-looking, bleary, teary, swollen eyeball that can no longer focus — hence, Wet Eye. The pathogen then consumes the eyeball tissue all the way back to the optic nerve root.”
“Great Christ,” Waddell muttered.
“Yes. Strategically, it was a hell of a weapon — instead of killing, it blinds. The enemy is presented not with corpses, which they can ignore in the heat of battle, but with mega casualties that overwhelm their medical facilities, not to mention gutting their capacity to fight.” “Great Christ,” Waddell said again.
“Indeed. But there’s more. I went back into the BW archives to see when this stuff was developed and tested. Found out something interesting. We didn’t develop this stuff. The Russians did.”
“Somehow that makes me feel better,” Waddell said. “Hold that thought, General,” Fuller replied with an ironic smile. “Apparently the CIA acquired this substance when a defector came over from the other side.
He brought with him a film clip. I’ve had it copied into video format I have to warn you — this is pretty gory stuff. The Russians used humans for the test.”
“Humans?”
Fuller nodded. “Probably residents of the Gulag. This film goes back to the late fifties. But I wasn’t sure this should be seen by those men out there in the working group.”
“Okay, Ambrose,” Waddell said with a grimace. “Roll that pogue.”
Fuller put the videocassette into the VCR and adjusted the controls. A grainy black-and-white film without sound came on the screen. The scene showed what looked like a dirt prison yard, complete with guard towers and high barbed-wire fences, the bottom half of which were clearly studded with electrical insulators made of black glass. Beyond the prison yard, there was only a dense, dark forest. The film had obviously been shot from one of the guard towers, and the barrel of a machine gun protruded into the frame, somewhat out of focus. In the center of the yard, thirty disheveled prisoners sat on the ground with their hands in their laps. Most were staring down at the ground, with only a few looking up at the camera. They were dressed in ragged shirts and pants, and their heads were shaved clean. They were not quite close enough for their expressions to be visible.
At first, nothing happened. Then there was movement on the other guard towers, and the guards could be seen stepping back inside the huts and closing their doors. The machine-gun barrel moved a couple of times, pointing down into the compound. There was an awkward jump cut to a close-up. Suddenly, the prisoners began grabbing at their faces. Some rolled down onto the ground, others got up, and still others began writhing in place. All of them were grabbing at their faces, and then at their eyes. The shot jumped again, showing individual faces; the prisoners were screaming soundlessly and rolling around in the dirt, some holding then-eyes, others clawing at theirs. The scene finally focused on one man who had stood up, backing blindly toward the fence.
He kept clasping his hands to his face and then bringing them forward, as if to see what was on them. Watching a close-up of the man’s face, Waddell gasped. The man’s eyes were gone. In their place were two empty sockets, blood streaming down the man’s face even as he smeared it all over himself while attempting to feel his eyes. He kept backing up until he hit the wires, which blasted him back out into the yard with an arc and a puff of white smoke. He fell headlong to the ground and did not move, a pool of fluids spreading out around his face in the mud.
The victims were usually moving too much for individual faces to be discernible. When certain faces did come into focus, they were all the same, however. There were two gaping black holes where their eyes had been, from which blood and fluids covered their faces like some deadly aboriginal war paint. Fuller shut off the video.
“There’s more,” he said. “But you get the picture, I think.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” Waddell said. “Reagan was right. The Russians were the evil empire.” “Were?” Fuller said. “What makes you think they’ve gotten rid of this stuff?” Waddell sighed and rubbed his eyes, men realized what he was doing and got up and walked over to the window.
“Put what we’ve just seen in technical context, Ambrose. How dangerous is a single cylinder of Wet Eye?”
Fuller dropped the VCR remote onto the table. “The truthful answer is that I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s not a particularly stable brew.
It’s temperature-sensitive. It has to be stored in special environmental containers. There are indications — not proof, mind you, but indications — that the pathogen is capable of mutating if not maintained under those specified conditions. Now unfortunately, these were statistical projections, as opposed to facts based on lab evidence.”
“We didn’t test it?”
“We never tested it. Not after seeing that film. In fact, a few years after we synthesized it, the program was terminated, because we could never be sure of what might going on in the cylinders. That’s one of the reasons the
BW division didn’t make much of this stuff.”
“One of the reasons?”
“The other reason, of course, was that it wasn’t binary safe.”
“Ah, right. So it was undiluted demon spawn right there in the can. But I thought we destroyed all that biologic shit when the program folded.”
“I love the way the Chemical Corps denigrates biological weapons,” Fuller said with a wary smile. “As if chemical weapons were somehow a more wholesome proposition.”
“Cut the shit, Ambrose. We’re hi trouble here.” Wad dell’s tone was more that of a major general than friend.
“Yes, sir, we are. Sorry, I guess I’ve been in this business too damn long. To answer your question, yes, almost all of the biologies were destroyed. But the biological weapons destruction facility was originally at Pine Bluff, in Arkansas. Wet Eye was stored at Anniston, Alabama. Nothing happened for a few years, but then when the Army got around to the Wet Eye arsenal, it had to get permission to move it. You know, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Transportation, like that.