Ground Zero (The X-Files) (27 page)

“Good,” Dooley said. Outside, the typhoon boomed like a series of muffled explosions.

“Good?” Miriel said, shaking her head. “Doesn’t it bother you, Bear, that regardless of all the moral and ethical considerations you dismiss so easily, this test goes blatantly against international law? Aboveground nuclear explosions have been banned for more than thirty years.”

Dooley looked at her, and his broad shoulders sagged.

“Miriel, we had a phrase in my high school class. I think it even showed up in the yearbook as our class motto.

‘Everything’s legal until you get caught.’ And we’re not going to get caught. This hurricane will mask the test signature. It’ll cover all the destruction on the atoll in case anyone’s watching with satellites. No problem.

“And because there isn’t any fallout from Bright Anvil, weather stations aren’t going to report a sudden increase in radioactive daughter

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products. We’ve got it all covered.” He clasped his big hands in front of him in an unconscious pleading gesture. “Come on, Miriel—you worked on this baby for years. You and Emil solved most of the problems—”

Miriel interrupted him. “I didn’t
solve
any of the problems, and neither did Emil. None of us understands the technology behind Bright Anvil, or even where it came from. Doesn’t that bother you?”

He shook his head, stonewalling. “I don’t understand how my car engine works, either, but I know it starts every time I turn the key…well, usually. I don’t know how my microwave oven works, but it reheats my coffee just fine.” His wide, bearded face held a boyish sense of wonder, a hope behind it.

“Miriel, I’d really like you to be a part of the team again,”

he said. “Without Emil, this whole project nearly fizzled. When we lost you, we lost our greatest contender. I’ve been doing my damndest to keep everything working and running on schedule—but that’s not what I’m good at. I’m no match for you, but I’m not going to walk away from my responsibilities. I’m going to see that Bright Anvil goes off as planned, because that’s my job.”

Scully stood next to Mulder, watching the debate between the two scientists. Mulder seemed intrigued, but Scully felt her abdomen tightening in knots to hear Bear Dooley’s unbridled enthusiasm.

“I’m disappointed in you, Bear,” Miriel said. His face fell, as if that were the worst thing she could have told him. She remained standing, formal and rigid, one step away from the instrument racks.

“I know you want to test this new weapons system in a

‘real use’ situation, but I wish you’d let it
bother you
a bit to think of just what that ‘real use’ may be once Bright Anvil is weaponized. The only advantage to the hydrogen bombs and the enormous

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thermonuclear warheads we’ve been stockpiling is that they’re too destructive for any sane government to consider using.”

Miriel became more animated, waving her hands in front of her like captive birds. “But Bright Anvil gives us precise annihilation,
clean
destruction. It terrifies me to think that the United States may have a brand new warhead it won’t be afraid to use.”

“Miriel,” Dooley said sharply, cutting off her lecture, “I wouldn’t want anyone but a professional mechanic to try to fix my car. I wouldn’t want anyone but a surgeon to do brain surgery on me—and I wouldn’t want anyone but a wellversed diplomat to make decisions on nuclear policy. I know
I’m
not a professional diplomat…
but neither are you
.”

She frowned at his outburst, but Dooley continued. “It’s the government’s job to use these weapons responsibly,” he said, blinking his eyes rapidly as if grains of sand had gotten in them. “You have to trust the government,” he repeated.

“They know what’s best for us.”

Mulder looked at Scully with his eyebrows raised, an expression of amazement on his face. 246

THIRTY-FIVE

Enika Atoll

Saturday, 4:25 A.M.

Mulder watched Bear Dooley stride over to the countdown clock bolted to the uneven wall. The bearded engineer squinted, peering at it as if he could barely make out the regularly descending numbers.

“Fifty minutes,” he said. “Everything still check out? I want a verification on each subsystem.” He looked around, scanning the faces of his team. The technicians all agreed, studying their own stations, checking instrument racks.

“Good. Countdown’s proceeding without a hitch,” Dooley said to no one in particular, rubbing his hands together as he stated the obvious.

Just then the heavy door to the blockhouse ripped open with a siren blast of wind. Howling rain pelted in at a nearly horizontal angle, like bullets of water in a shotgun spray. Two bedraggled and shellshocked sailors staggered in, gasping; they worked together to swing the door shut, bolting it

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into its jamb. They were sopping wet, their uniforms yanked and disarrayed by the violence of the typhoon. In the incandescent light inside the sheltered bunker, their skin had a pasty, grayish appearance, reflecting their deep fear. Even seasoned seamen rarely saw a storm of such incredible magnitude.

“Okay, everybody’s inside,” one of them shouted, as if he thought the storm would still drown out his words…or perhaps the throbbing gale had partially deafened him.

“Generator’s functioning properly,” said the other sailor.

“It’s sheltered from the rain and wind, and it should hold up even if the typhoon gets worse. The center of the wind wall will be here soon.”

Dooley nodded, speaking gruffly. “Generator damn well better keep functioning—that power source is running all our diagnostics. If that fails, this whole test will be a bust even if Bright Anvil does go off as planned.”

“Don’t forget, we’ve got the secondary generator, Bear,”

Victor Ogilvy pointed out.

“I’m sure you’ll get your data,” Miriel Bremen said sourly.

“What could possibly go wrong?”

As if to taunt them, the lightbulbs overhead flickered briefly, then came back on with full strength.

“What was that?” Dooley said, looking up at the ceiling.

“Check it!”

“Power fluctuation,” Victor answered. “The backup UPS

modulated it, though. We’re fine.”

Dooley strutted around like a tiger in a cage. He glanced at the wall clock. “Forty-three more minutes,” he said. While the technicians focused intently on their stations, Mulder watched the scarred blind man who had told them such an unbelievable story only hours earlier. 248

GROUND ZERO

After adding Ryan Kamida’s tale to the details of the mystery as he saw it, Mulder began formulating a hypothesis that fit all the information. It began to make complete, if fantastic, sense to him. He pondered how best to broach the subject with Scully. She would no doubt find the explanation preposterous…but then she often did.

Scully considered it her purpose in life to be Mulder’s devil’s advocate, to convince him of the logical explanations behind the incredible events they had witnessed in their many cases together…just as Mulder himself accepted it as his goal to make Scully
believe
.

He leaned closer to his partner, speaking in a low voice near her ear, though the roar of the typhoon whipping around the concrete beehive was enough to drown out the words for any eavesdropper.

“I’ve been thinking, Scully—and I’ve got an idea. If what Mr. Kamida says is true, then we could be dealing with some sort of…psychic shockwave, a burst of energy that was transformed into something half-sentient during the original H-bomb blast that took place on this island.”

Scully looked at him, blinking her blue eyes. “What are you talking about, Mulder?”

“Let’s take a look at this, Scully. Imagine the entire population of islanders here, all together, unsuspecting, living out their normal lives—and then suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted across the brink of death by one of the most powerful instantaneous blasts ever recorded on this planet. Isn’t it possible that such a blast could have acted as some sort of
boost
to a…a higher level of existence, crossing some sort of energetic barrier.”

“That’s not how I see it, Mulder,” Scully said.

“Just think about it,” he insisted. “Every single one of Kamida’s people, all screaming at once, all of 249

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them not just killed, but utterly
annihilated
, practically disintegrated down to their last cells.”

“Mulder, if the energy of an atomic blast can somehow turn its victims into—” she searched for words, then shrugged— “into a vengeful collection of radioactive ghosts with superpowers, then how come there aren’t a hundred thousand phantom juggernauts running around after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts?”

“I thought of that,” Mulder said, “but those were the first atomic weapons. Even though those bombs were powerful, the Fat Man and Little Boy warheads produced just a fraction of the power that was unleashed in the hydrogen bombs that were detonated out here on the Pacific Islands. The test assemblies in the fifties reached ten or fifteen
mega
tons, whereas the Hiroshima blast was only twelve point five
kilo
tons. That’s a big difference—a factor of a thousand.

“Maybe the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts weren’t quite enough to cross that threshold. And, as far as I know, nobody else was killed directly in any of the other H-bomb blasts.”

Scully looked at him seriously. “And you think that this collection of ghosts is hunting down people originally involved in the development of nuclear weapons, as well as individuals in charge of the Bright Anvil test, and…assassinating them out of revenge?”

“Maybe revenge,” Mulder said, “or maybe they’re just trying to prevent the tests from continuing. Everything points toward stopping the Bright Anvil test, which could well be the start of a whole new series of aboveground blasts, not to mention fallout-free warheads that might be readily used in combat. What if these ghosts are trying to prevent what happened to them from ever happening again?”

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Scully shuddered. Mulder supposed that if he had made the same proposal in the light of day in the cool shelter of their offices at FBI Headquarters—or anyplace else that seemed safe—she might have scoffed at his reasoning. But here, in the darkest hour before dawn, surrounded by brooding hurricane-force winds out on a deserted Pacific island, any sort of creepy story had a greater ring of truth. Mulder suddenly had another thought. “The ashes!” He spun around to see that Ryan Kamida sat placidly at the analysis table, his scarred hands folded atop the smooth Formica surface. His ravaged face was directed toward them. His lips were quirked in a mysterious smile, as if amused at Mulder’s explanation; he looked as if he had heard every word.

Mulder hurried over to him. “The ashes—what were the ashes all about, Mr. Kamida?”

The blind man nodded in deference. “I think you know the answer, Agent Mulder.”

“Those were the ashes of the victims from your island, weren’t they? You’re using them as…as signal flags, or magnets to draw the attention of the ghosts.”

Kamida turned his face down toward his folded hands.

“When I grew older and accustomed to my blindness, after I had developed connections and earned plenty of money, I came back here to Enika Atoll. The spirits of my people had told me their story, told me my life, told me over and over again what had happened here until I was mad with the repetition. I had to come home, for my own sanity.”

He quieted and raised his blind gaze to both Mulder and Scully. “Some entrepreneurs will do strange things for eccentric people without asking questions, so long as the money is sufficient.

“I spent many days here on the reefs, crawling 251

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over this abandoned atoll that had grown its jungle back again. I was blind, but I knew where to go, I knew where to look, because the voices guided me. With a knife and a trowel and a barrel, I spent days in the hot Pacific sun, working, scraping a few bits at a time. I found the scant ashes of my people who had been incinerated in a flash and burned into mere shadows on the rock.

“Much time had passed, and one might have expected the stains to have been weathered away, returned to the coral and the sand, to be eaten away by rainstorms and the surf. But they were still there waiting for me, like shadows in human form outlined against the sheltered reefs. I collected them one at a time as the spirits guided me.

“I gathered as much of the ash as I could. It seemed a pitifully small amount, all that remained of an entire island population. But it was enough for my purposes…and theirs. When I was ready, I sent samples of the ash, like calling cards, to those people who needed to receive them.”

“You sent a vial to Nancy Scheck?” Scully asked. Ryan Kamida nodded. “And a packet to Emil Gregory. And to Oscar McCarron in New Mexico. The spirits didn’t really
need
the ash. Left to themselves, they could find their own targets. But it helped…and it helped me to direct them.”

Mulder felt sick with horror. “Nancy Scheck and the others each received only a tiny sample of that ash—but you brought an
entire barrel
with you here to this island.”

He suddenly recalled the three fishermen, terrified, unloading their ominous cargo and setting it on the beach, where it now sat unprotected, because Bear Dooley wouldn’t allow it inside the blockhouse.

“It is everything I have left,” Kamida said. “It will bring them here. All of them. Finally.”

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Just then the phone rang. Victor Ogilvy grabbed it. His eyes widened as he pressed the phone headset tight against his head, as if he had difficulty making out distinct words from the transmission.

“Bear!” Victor said, clinging to the telephone, staring at it with his mouth partially open. “Bear, that was a communication from Captain Ives. He said their radar systems aboard the
Dallas
just picked up something big and powerful approaching the atoll. Not a storm. He doesn’t know what it is—like nothing he’s ever seen before!”