Ground Zero (The X-Files) (19 page)
Mulder closed the folder and tucked the photographs into his briefcase before the general could take them back. “Why are you telling me all this?” he asked. “Do you want to make sure someone is caught for Nancy Scheck’s death?”
Bradoukis looked deeply saddened. “That is part of it,” he said, “but also, I fear for my own safety.”
“Your safety? Why?”
“Nancy was the DOE liaison for the Bright Anvil Project.
I
am the Department of Defense liaison. I’m afraid I might be next on the list. I’m trying to hide—I’ve been staying in a different hotel every night. I haven’t been home in days. Though I doubt such measures will do any good against a force that can swoop down through bedrock and attack two soldiers in an underground missile control bunker.”
“I don’t suppose you have any suggestions on how we might stop this…thing?” Mulder asked.
The general flushed again. “Bright Anvil itself seems to be the link. Whatever has been awakened,
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or at least triggered into violent action, came about because of this impending test. There’s no telling how long the force has been around, but it became active only recently.”
Mulder jumped in. “Then whatever is going to happen, whatever event these killings are building toward, will probably occur out in the Marshall Islands. That’s the only place we can be sure of.” He plunged ahead without thinking.
“General, my partner and I need to be there. I need to be at the site to see what’s happening.”
“Very well,” Bradoukis said, “my feeling is that these attacks could be attempts to prevent the test from occurring, with some of these other murders perhaps being incidental…or it might be the force, whatever it is, lashing out at other targets and then returning its focus toward the main goal. Since the Bright Anvil test is already in place, I believe that is where the next strike will occur. But I’m taking no chances that it won’t come after me as a loose end.”
“If Bright Anvil is such a highly classified test,” Mulder said, “how will my partner and I get out there?”
The general stood up. “I’ll make a few phone calls. I’ll even call Assistant Director Skinner, if need be. Just be ready to get on a plane. We don’t have any time to lose.”
169
Mulder’s Apartment, Alexandria, Virginia Wednesday, 6:04 P.M.
With a suitcase lying open on his bed, Mulder dashed back and forth, packing everything he would need for a vacation in the Pacific islands.
Because of the amount of traveling he did for the Bureau, he kept his toiletries already packed in a small dopp bag in the suitcase; all that remained was to throw in sufficient changes of clothes.
Smiling, he carefully removed three garish Hawaiian floral shirts from his bottom drawer and placed them in the suitcase. “Never thought I’d be called on to wear these for business purposes,” he said. Then he packed a pair of swim trunks; he hadn’t had a chance for a long, strenuous swim down at the FBI Headquarters pool for more than two weeks, and he looked forward to the opportunity. Unless he exercised regularly, he couldn’t keep his body—or his mind—at peak performance. 170
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He stashed a battered paperback of an old Philip K. Dick novel he had been reading and a fresh bag of sunflower seeds in his luggage as well. It would be a long flight across country to the Alameda Naval Air Station, near San Francisco, where their transport plane would depart for Hawaii; then a smaller plane would take them out to Enika Atoll along with the rest of the Bright Anvil team. In his living room the television blared loud enough for him to hear. He had seen those old movies a dozen times already, but he simply couldn’t pass up the “Monster Madness Marathon” of black-and-white films from the fifties, each showing a giant lizard or insect or prehistoric beast that had somehow been awakened or mutated by ill-considered atomic tests. The movies were morality plays, chastising the hubris of science while celebrating the genius of the human spirit. Right now, giant ants had infested the cement-lined drainage canals of Los Angeles, much to the consternation of James Whitmore and James Arness.
In his kitchenette several small white cartons of carry-out Chinese food sat on the table, flaps open, next to two paper plates. He’d already heaped one of the plates with steamed rice, kung-pao chicken, and dry-fried string beans with pork. As he packed, he shuttled back and forth between his suitcase, the television, and the kitchenette, grabbing a few bites to eat.
With his mouth full of garlicky string beans, Mulder heard a sharp rap on his apartment door. “Mulder, it’s me.”
He swallowed quickly before rushing to let his partner in. Dressed in professional, though comfortable, traveling clothes, Scully carried a bulging duffel bag. “I’m all packed. I’m even ten minutes early,” she said. “That gives you plenty of time to tell me what’s going on.”
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He gestured her inside. “I’ve arranged for two tickets to paradise. You and I are going off to the South Seas.”
“Your message told me that much,” she said. “But what for?”
“We’ve got a pair of front row seats at the Bright Anvil test. I asked for season tickets to the New York Knicks, but this was the best they could do.”
She blinked her blue eyes in astonishment. “The test? How did you manage that? I thought—”
“Connections in certain high places,” he said. “One very frightened brigadier general who was willing to go out on a limb for us. I picked up some Chinese carry-out for a quick dinner before we head to the airport.” He indicated the extra paper plate. “I got an order of kung-pao chicken—your favorite.”
Scully set her duffel bag on an empty chair and looked at him curiously. “Mulder, I don’t recall that we’ve ever gone out for Chinese food together. How would you know what my favorite meal is?”
He favored her with a reproachful look. “Now what kind of FBI agent would I be if I couldn’t find out a simple thing like that?”
She pulled up a chair at the small dining room table and scooped out some of the chicken chunks laden with red Szechuan peppers. Taking an appreciative whiff of the aromatic spices, she snagged the extra pair of disposable chopsticks next to the napkins. Mulder came out of the bedroom, lugging his packed suitcase. He secured the locks, then placed his briefcase on top of it. “I think I told you once, Scully, that if you stuck with me I’d show you exciting lands and exotic places.”
Scully shot him a wry look. “You mean like an island about to be flattened by a secret nuclear weapons test?”
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Mulder placed his hands in front of him. “I was thinking more of coral reefs, blue lagoons, the warm Pacific sun.”
“I thought it was hurricane season out there,” she said.
“That’s what Bear Dooley and the Bright Anvil scientists kept studying on their weather maps.”
Mulder sat across from her to eat his food, lukewarm by now. “I’m trying to be optimistic,” he said. “Besides General Bradoukis said something about us going on a ‘three-hour tour.’”
Scully finished her meal and checked her watch. She reached inside her jacket to pull out the two airplane tickets.
“I picked these up from the Bureau travel office on my way over, as you requested,” she said. “Our plane leaves Dulles in about ninety minutes.”
Mulder tossed their plates in the wastepaper basket, looked at the remains of the Chinese food in the white boxes, and without a thought dumped the remnants of all three dishes together into a single container. Scully watched him in astonishment. “It’s good for breakfast that way,” he said. “Add a few scrambled eggs—delicious.” He placed the container in the refrigerator.
Scully picked up her duffel. “Sometimes you really are spooky, Mulder.”
After switching off the television—the giant ants had been superseded by a gargantuan tarantula out in the Mojave Desert—he followed her out.
He noticed that the metal “2” of the “42” on his apartment number had fallen off again onto the floor. “Just a second, Scully,” he said, picking up the number. He ran back in to the junk drawer in his kitchen, where he pulled out a screwdriver. “This number keeps coming off. Very suspicious, don’t you think?” He checked it for listening devices on the inside,
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rubbing his finger along the curve of the thin metal. At one time he’d been certain someone was spying on him, so he had removed every detachable thing in his apartment including the numbers on his door. Now the “2” refused to stay where it belonged.
“Mulder, you’re paranoid,” Scully said with wry amusement.
“Only because everybody’s out to get me,” he said. After reassuring himself that the metal number was clean, he used a spare set of screws to attach it tightly to the door.
“Okay. Now we can go. I hope you brought your suntan lotion.”
She shouldered her duffel. “Yeah, and my lead umbrella for the radioactive fallout.”
174
Enika Atoll, Marshall Islands,
Western Pacific,
Wednesday (across the International Date Line), 11:01 A.M.
The atoll had recovered remarkably well in forty years. The low, flat island, little more than a massive coral reef with a shallow dusting of topsoil, was once again burgeoning with lush tropical vegetation, breadfruit and coconut palms, vines, ferns, tall grasses, and low taro plants and yams. The reefs and lagoons swarmed with fish; birds and butterflies thronged in the foliage above.
When Captain Robert Ives had left here four decades earlier, he had been a young seaman recruit who had barely learned to shut up and do as he was told. The spectacular Sawtooth nuclear test had been the most awe-inspiring sight his slate-gray eyes had ever witnessed. It had reduced Enika Atoll to a hot, blasted scab, its entire surface sterilized, its coral outcroppings sheared off in the boiling froth of the sea, vegetation crisped, wildlife exterminated. The intricate network of reefs extended far past 175
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the portion of the atoll that actually rose above the surface, in many places lurking only a few feet beneath the water. With amazing recuperative powers, Nature had reclaimed the territory that humans had so swiftly and violently snatched away. Once again, Enika Atoll looked like an isolated island paradise, pristine and uninhabited. At least Captain Ives
hoped
it was uninhabited this time. On the shore of the atoll, sheltered behind the rugged coral rocks that formed the highest point of the island, Bear Dooley and his team of researchers used sailors and Navy engineers to help make preparations for their secret test. A small landing strip had been cleared along a straight stretch of beach. Bulldozers, off-loaded from the
Dallas
, plowed through the jungle, scratching narrow access roads from the sheltered control bunker to the lagoon on the far side of the atoll, where the Bright Anvil device would be set up and detonated.
Trapped aboard drab gray ships for so much of their tours of duty, the Navy engineers enjoyed the work, riding heavy machinery and knocking down palms and breadfruit trees, leaving naked paths of churned-up coral dirt like raw wounds on the island.
They needed to construct a bunker to house the controls that would run the small warhead detonation. Because the control bunker would be so close to the detonation, it had to be incredibly sturdy. Captain Ives instructed his engineers in an old trick.
After laying down electrical troughs and pathways to a backup generator in a shielded substation next to the blockhouse, the engineers stacked bags of concrete mix and sand around and around a bowed wooden frame in a shrinking circle, creating
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a structure that looked like an igloo or beehive. Then, with pumps hooked up to clunky ship firehoses thrust into the ocean, the engineers sprayed the outside of the structure, soaking the sand and concrete mixture. After a day or two of hardening in the warm Pacific sunshine, the bunker would be virtually indestructible.
NASA engineers had used the same technique at Cape Canaveral to erect protective bunkers for control systems and observers close to the early rocket launchpads. Such bunkers had withstood the explosive stresses inflicted upon them—and in fact had survived so well that the Corps of Engineers had abandoned the old structures in place out in the Florida swamps because they could think of no way to demolish them!
As the sandbags dried against the reinforced parabolic frames that held them in place, Bear Dooley supervised the installation of his test equipment inside. The broadshouldered deputy project leader helped install the control racks that had been carefully crated and stored down in the Navy destroyer’s hold. He was willing to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty to speed up the work. The bearlike man sweated in the tropical heat, but he refused to wear cooler clothes, treating his flannel shirt and denim pants as required dress. Dooley listened in on the shortwave radio to regular weather updates for the Marshall Islands. Every time the announcement tracked the approaching tropical depression, now nearly a full-fledged hurricane, he grew ecstatic.
“It’s coming,” Dooley had said to Ives the last time he received such news. “And we’ve got a lot of work to do. Timing is crucial.”
Ives let the man have his way. He had his orders, after all. 177
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He didn’t think Bear Dooley was even aware of the previous H-bomb test that had taken place in this same area. Dooley didn’t seem the type of man who wasted time studying history or worrying where things came from. For the rest of his life, though, Robert Ives would be haunted by the knowledge that they had made a horrendous, tragic mistake here at Enika Atoll.
By now Ives had seen the Bikini Islanders repatriated, after the government had stripped the topsoil from their blasted island and replaced it with fresh dirt, replanted the jungles, restocked the lagoons.
The mysterious islanders on Enika, though, had not enjoyed such solicitous treatment. Sawtooth had been one of the first H-bomb tests, kept quiet at the time, just in case the device failed. During those Cold War years the U.S. couldn’t afford to let anyone see that its thermonuclear devices didn’t function well enough to keep the Commies awake at night.