“Yes, sir, I do. Now.”
“So give this plan the Washington Post test: If it ever does come out that the Army torched five or six warehouses full of surplus junk in order to make damned sure that some germ-warfare stuff didn’t get loose into the renegade international arms market, who’s going to fault us?”
Carrothers could not deny that. The DRMO was on a remote part of a partially shut-down post, out at the end of a disused runway, surrounded by concrete aprons, and at least a mile away from the civilian population in all directions. Even with a fire that size erupting in the middle of the night, the worst that might happen off the base would be a grass fire. The post-fire investigations would be done by the Army CIC, whose report would be carefully managed by Army headquarters. A Pentagon public relations team was probably already being positioned to brief the press. No one at Fort Gillem below the level of the post commander would know the real genesis of the fire.
“You started this shit with this DCIS guy,” Waddell concluded. “Now you go put an end to it. General Roman has already conferenced with the head of DCIS, and he confirms this guy Stafford is a squirrel. They’ve ordered the regional supervisor to reel him in and get him back to D.C.
General Roman has assured them that Stafford’s allegations against the DRMO manager are total bullshit.”
“But what if they’re not? What if this Carson actually does have it?”
“That’s the final part of your mission: When the DRMO goes up, the Fort Gillem duty officer will notify Carson. When he shows up, take him into custody. Bring him back to Washington. We’ll let another government agency take him out to a safe house in the Virginia woods to see what he knows or doesn’t know. Now, one further thing.”
Waddel had stood up behind his desk. Carrothers remembered the look on the older man’s face only too well. “The Army chief of staff has been fully briefed on this problem. He is in full concurrence with our taking such drastic action. I can’t emphasize this enough: The Army did not lose a weapon. Is that clear, General? We did not lose a chemical weapon. The Army Chemical Corps is in the fight of its budgetary life with this damned quadrennial review, and the Chemical Corps cannot begin to stand a hit like this. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Good. So you go down there, and you incinerate that place. Burn it to a fucking shadow, along with any trace of that damned Wet Eye. And while you’re at it, give some consideration to where you’re going to retire.
You had your chance, General Carrothers. As best I can tell, you’ve blown it. That’s all.”
Carrothers had spent the rest of the day coordinating the planning for the operation from the Army Operations Center in the Pentagon’s basement. Now he stood by the lead Suburban under the white sodium glare of the truck stop’s light towers and rubbed his face. He was tired, disappointed, and very apprehensive. He could well understand the three-stars’ fear of the missing Wet Eye becoming public knowledge, and burning the DRMO would yield an almost 95 percent probability of destroying the cylinder, assuming it was still there. But what if it wasn’t? What if Carson did have it but had stashed it somewhere else?
And how in the hell had this Stafford found out about it? Or that Carson had it? There were too many loose ends here, and, given that, he hated executing this operation, especially when he knew the whole thing was inspired by panic at the higher echelons of the Army. He knew that somehow he had become a pawn in the Army’s cover-up, and that bothered him most of all. The scenes from Fuller’s video kept coming back to him.
And then, of course, there was Waddell’s parting shot: the fact that Carrothers should start planning his retirement. Well, the more he thought about that, the less that prospect bothered him, unlike what they were about to do tonight.
40
Carson watched Tangent’s crew arrive on a television monitor in the security control room. They were driving a large, dark four-door sedan.
For another five minutes nothing happened. Then there was the glow of the interior light in the car, which quickly went out as the headlights of the Gillem MP patrol flared briefly in the roadway. Three more minutes after that, they tried again. Four men got out, their faces indistinct in the black-and-white image. One went to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and pulled out what looked like a Navy seabag.
The car’s trunk shut soundlessly, and two of the men carried the duffel bag between I them as they approached the front door of the admin building. Carson lost sight of them as they neared the front door.
Okay, he thought. Four of them. One guy in charge, three helpers. Not too bad. He waited, visualizing the seconds passing as they read the envelope. They’d be pissed f off to have to lug that bag back to the car and then drive around, but that wasn’t his problem. He needed to get them off the road and back into the tarmac area, away from patrolling MPs. One of the men went back to get the car; ninety seconds later, he saw it emerge from the darkened space between the warehouse buildings where he had left T the gate open. The car came out onto the tarmac with its ‘ lights off. Good, he thought. There’s plenty of lighting there.
They found the pallet of propellers and stopped. This time, only one man got out, and he picked up the envelope. He read it, then walked across to the warehouse with the large numeral 4 painted on the end.
I should have made a provision here to close that truck gate, Carson thought. If they have unseen helpers, they’ll have a free shot to the tarmac. He scanned the outside perimeter monitors, some of which he had repositioned, but there was nothing going on. He looked back at the car, which was just sitting there on the tarmac. Then the driver was walking back to the car. He opened the door and leaned in. They all got out again, looked around, extracted the bag, and this time dragged it over toward the feed assembly building.
Carson studied them in the patch of light at the entrance f to the assembly building, keeping his finger on the cipher lock’s release button untifhe had them all in the light. Four white men, thirties, forties, in decent shape, all wearing slacks and unzipped windbreakers.
The windbreakers meant they were carrying, he thought. Fair enough. So was he.
He hit the button, and four heads in the monitor turned to the door in a blur of white faces. One man pushed it open, two others dragged the bag through the door, while the fourth watched their backs on the tarmac.
Carson turned toward the monitor that showed the inside of the feed-assembly area as all four came through the door. He could see the conveyor belt off to the right of the image as it proceeded slowly into the screened hole in the far wall. He picked up the handset and made the call. One of the men walked out of camera range, and a moment later the phone was picked up.
“Put the money into those open boxes by the belt. When you’ve got it all boxed, step back to the front door,” Carson ordered.
The man did not reply, simply hung up. Carson watched as they dragged the bag over to the belt line and began unloading it. Unwittingly, or perhaps on purpose, they positioned themselves between the camera and what they were doing at the belt, three working, the fourth watching the rest of the room, his hand inside his jacket. Carson could see that they were dumping something into the carrier boxes, but.the belt was too far away from the camera for him to tell it if was money. They seemed to take a long time, until he realized they probably had to pack the money into the boxes to make it all fit. Then they were done, and they stepped back from the belt, looking around.