They finally stopped in front of one of the bunkers, and his escorts got out. There were more suited figures waiting by a second Humvee under the lights by the entrance, and Stafford could now see that this bunker’s steel doors were open, although he could not see inside the bunker because of the painfully bright lights. His escorts invited him to step out, and he did, cautiously, wondering why he was the only one out here not dressed out in protective gear. He was taken down the long concrete ramp to the front of the bunker, where one of the guards motioned for him to wait. Two of the hooded figures were taking readings from an electronic monitoring panel mounted beside the external doors.
They waited. There was no sound other than the raspy inhalations and exhalations from the soldiers’ respirators, and the occasional squawk from one of the Humvee radios. He tried to see into the bunker, but saw that there was a second set of steel doors, which were still closed.
They appeared to be hydraulically operated, as there were four large hydraulic cylinder arms reaching from concrete pylons to the middle of the doors. Everyone waited some more, and Stafford remembered the old Army adage about hurry up and wait.
Carrothers finished suiting up, leaving only his hood and gloves off before getting into the mobile ammunition carrier. He thought about what he was about to do. He had studied Stafford’s bio sheet on the plane ride down. David W. Stafford, senior investigator for the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. Forty-three years old. Formerly with the Naval Investigative Service and, before that, seven years as a private investigator for a law firm after having been a police detective with the Norfolk, Virginia, metropolitan police. Four-year enlisted hitch in the Navy before that. Solid citizen, and a professional investigator.
There was nothing in the bio about any whistle-blowing incident. He thought about the little maneuver with the Crown Vie. Heads-up ball, that.
The question was, What did he know? General Waddell would be all for locking Stafford up at the depot until they found the cylinder.
Carrothers Was not so sure about that option. The elephants, as the three-and the four-stars in the Pentagon were known, were starting to panic, which meant that lesser beings like brigadier generals now ought to be reviewing their own political escape routes. Waddell had made it clear that Carrothers’s second star was riding on getting this ball of snakes back into its box. And yet … If someone had stolen a cylinder of Wet Eye, that constituted a genuine national emergency. Maybe Waddell was right: Whatever it takes, do it. But find it. Get it back. Which was why he was trying this little stunt.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
After about fifteen minutes of just standing there, Stafford heard something coming. He thought it might be another Humvee, but he saw instead an enclosed vehicle of some kind coming down the rail spur, powered by nearly silent electric motors. The vehicle had a passenger compartment forward, and what looked like twenty-foot-long dual enclosed cargo bays behind the passenger compartment. The interior of the passenger compartment was red-lighted, giving the vehicle a menacing buglike appearance, an image reinforced by two whip antennas mounted above the cab. The vehicle clicked along the rail spur, slowed, and then turned left and descended into the bunker alley in front of the steel doors, where it stopped with a squeal of hydraulic brakes. Stafford saw that everyone around him was now standing at attention, as best they could manage in their suits. The doors of the cab opened upward like gull-wing flaps, and a tall figure, also dressed out in a chemical warfare protective suit, got out of the right side of the cab and walked over to where Stafford, who was trying not to reveal his apprehension, stood.
“Open the inner doors,” the tall figure ordered, his strong, commanding voice overcoming the acoustic masking effect of his respirator. Two men went to separate control panels mounted on either side of the inner doors. They If each put a key into a lock, put their hands on two separate II switches, looked at each other, nodded their hoods once, turned the keys, and depressed the switches simultaneously. There was a loud hiss as the partial vacuum inside the bunker was broken, and then the hydraulic arms began to retract, pulling the steel doors open on steel tracks embedded in the concrete. Lights came on inside the bunker, and the tall figure motioned with one outstretched hand for Stafford to precede him inside the bunker. I Reeling almost naked among all the suited figures, Stafford willed his feet to start walking while he stared into the bunker. Inside were stacks of bombs. The bombs were massive, painted olive-drab, and about six feet long and three feet in diameter. They were girdled with two steel reinforcing rings around their circumference. The tail-fin assemblies were missing, and there were shiny fuze ports blanked off at each end. Each bomb was resting in a wooden cradle, the wood smashed down under the crushing weight. There was white stenciling on each bomb case, indicating a hang weight of two thousand pounds. There was a bright yellow band painted around the midsection of each bomb’s nose, and some more letters, which were unintelligible to Stafford.
The tall figure motioned for him to go farther into the bunker. Stafford noticed that none of the others followed them in. He had to be careful of his footing, because the rail line came all the way into the bunker.
There was an ammunition-handling crane positioned all the way at the back of the bunker, and a gantry track running along the arched concrete ceiling. The figure stopped when they had reached the ammunition crane.
Dave turned to face him.
“Mr. Stafford, do you know why you’re here?” the figure asked. His voice had a hiss to it, but there was still no mistaking the authority in it.
Stafford could not make out a face behind the goggles above the respirator mask, only piercing eyes. He had to struggle to find his own voice; the atmosphere in the bunker was very dry and filled with the peculiar smell of very old metal.
“No, I don’t. Who are you? And why am I being held this way? What is this place?”
“This is the Anniston Army Weapons Depot, Mr. Stafford, as you well know. It is a depository for special weapons — chemical weapons. This is a CW storage bunker, sometimes known as ‘a CW tomb.’ These are two thousand-pound gravity bombs. They contain substance VX, which is a nerve gas. These bombs are almost fifty years old. In theory they are not leaking. Our monitoring instruments tell us they are not leaking.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Stafford said, trying to put some sarcasm in his voice. “Seeing as I’m the only one not in protective clothing.
Why have I been brought here?”
The figure stared at him, as if waiting for Stafford to realize something. Then he leaned forward. “Mr. Stafford, we want you to understand something, and understand it very clearly. The substance in these bombs is one of the most lethal compounds ever devised by man. One cubic centimeter volatizing can paralyze simultaneously the central nervous systems of a thousand human beings. One of these bombs exploded upwind of a medium-sized city would extinguish very nearly the entire human and animal ‘ population in a matter of a very few minutes.”
Stafford just looked at him. The figure leaned even closer, to the point where Stafford could smell the rubber of his suit
“Mr. Stafford, you should understand that while these bombs are extremely toxic, they do not contain the most toxic substances in die arsenal. There are some substances which do far more horrible things than VX does. There are substances that cause human blood to boil. There are substances that cause the arteries in human lungs to swell and rupture. There are substances that consume human skin. There are substances for which we have no names, only numbers.”