Radiant Dawn (20 page)

That Doctors Armitage, Wittrock and Mrachek all died within twelve months of the completion of Project RADIANT is suspicious indeed, but in itself lends little to recommend it as a corollary to the present investigation. However, building upon hypothetical scenarios extrapolated from the China Lake incident, one may proffer the following inductions:

1) The China Lake incident was perpetrated by military professionals working with highly advanced energy-based weapons technology, who took steps to take no human lives, but did steal a huge amount of a destructive incendiary. It follows that, if they are indeed bent on unleashing the napalm, it will most likely be upon a strategic target, and not a population center. They have adequately demonstrated both their power over, and respect for, human life.

2) Armitage and Wittrock were involved in nonlethal weapons research when they were pulled onto RADIANT, and not as principals. Dr. Mrachek was a medical doctor, and nothing in her public record shows anything less than a passionate dedication to the preservation of human life. What little record of RADIANT still exists does NOT indicate that it was a softkill project. RADIANT was the last project any of them worked on for the government: after its murky conclusion, Armitage retired, Wittrock vanished into the private sector, and Mrachek resigned her commission and went to Africa. 3) I realize this is even more far-fetched than an assassination conspiracy theory, but it must, I believe, be considered, as no one other scenario addresses both the implicit motive and modus operandi of China Lake. What if one or more of them is still alive?

My department has reviewed thousands of documents and hundreds of dossiers, and found no one alive with the expertise and resources to devise a working electromagnetic antipersonnel device of China Lake magnitude. If Dr. Armitage was the leading authority on the effects of radiation on living tissue, and a specialist in nonlethal solutions to armed conflict, he may have been the only person capable of designing a device such as was used at China Lake, and if he's been living underground for fourteen years, he will have had ample time to build ties with a militia group composed of fellow scientific and military veterans, and continue his research. Moreover, his work on RADIANT may have triggered his move underground, and may be the impetus for the current activity. Why now? The RADIANT papers' conclusion that "further research under different auspices" may take place in the future looms large in my mind.

Taken
in toto
, the facts suggest a disturbing scenario, wherein the military arm of this investigation must be considered tainted by conflict of interest: it would be in their best interest to see the "terrorist" threat neutralized without oversight from either the Department Of Justice or the American people. If the Bureau is to remain true to its core mandate, I do not see how it can without securing sole authority over the investigation, and, in fact, opening a new and separate investigation on the Pentagon's possible culpability in the possibly deliberate mishandling of this case.

I must apologize for not having more scenarios to present, but the chain of evidence leads me in this direction each time I take it up. We know entirely too little about RADIANT, and I must urge that more pressure be brought to bear on the DoD to disclose the unblacked files if we are to put this line of reasoning to rest once and for all. In humblest dedication, I remain

Sincerely Yours,

SA Martin Cundieffe

He awoke in a world of cold and darkness, on a floor of vibrating rust. He was blindfolded, his hands were cuffed behind his back, and his legs bound with heavy plastic restraints. Their tingling soreness told him he'd been out for at least an hour. A band of surgical tape held a cotton swab in place on the inside of his right elbow, but he didn't feel drugged. They'd taken his blood? He lay still, feigning sleep as he drank in the sensations of his prison.

The floor throbbed with the regular pulsation of a semi on an interstate, and the way it rocked told him he was probably in a storage container on a flatbed trailer. The cold was not refrigeration, though he could feel an icy draft against his ankles; it was the dead of night, so he'd been out for the entire day.

He was not alone. Feet shuffled beside his face, whispers threaded through the gray diesel rumble. He jerked away from a boot that prodded his shoulder. A voice, commanding, with a high Southern drawl, boomed in the small box.

"We know you're awake, son. We want some answers."

Storch suddenly felt a wave of recognition. He knew the game they were playing. Robin Sage. Every Green Beret knew it, for it was the core of Special Forces training. Robin Sage was an extended war game that separated the rank and file, order-following soldier from the commando by demanding that they think for themselves. Trainees were dropped off into Pineland, an embattled nation that was really North and South Carolina, which was striving for independence from the tyranny of Opforland. Storch's four-man squad had to meet with and negotiate a relationship with guerrilla leaders in the region, civilian locals who played the role of terrorists with fierce gusto. In initial contacts, they became willing hostages, enduring the guerrilla's muscle-flexing and interrogation tactics to show they could be trusted. Long, bumpy rides in trunks, guns in his face, sudden mock field executions, hours lying hogtied on cold floors just like this one. These people weren't real terrorists, they were playacting from the same script on which he'd been trained. Storch felt he knew what to expect, and wrapped himself up in it, to shelter from the creeping certainty he still had no idea what he'd gotten into.

"Look alive, soldier!" The booted foot stomped the floor just before Storch's face so the floor thrummed, shocking him back into the present. A ramrod-stiff backbone of pure commanding officer behind that voice. And some residue of an accent that sounded familiar.

"I'm awake, sir. What do you want to know?"

"Where's the body?"

"Your guess is as good as mine,
sir,
" he replied, pouring all the acid he had into the last word. "It was in as safe a place as I could find."

"Oh, I doubt that very fucking much, Sergeant. I find it hard to believe you possess the wherewithal to tuck your dick in your shorts without a note pinned to your sleeve. You were a mistake, Sergeant, and you will never know how much your fuckups have cost us. If Harley hadn't been killed because of a breach of security in your store, he could have done it, and it would've been done right. And another thing, what the fuck were you doing, killing all those cops?"

"I didn't kill Twombley. I wasn't even in Furnace Creek yesterday morning. I saw a pickup that looked like mine and had my license plates on it coming back from there yesterday morning, and if there's anything you can tell me about that, or about what went down at China Lake, I'd sure as hell like to know about it."

A moment's hesitation, indrawn breath louder than the wind whipping at the sides of the cargo container. "You're full of shit, Sergeant."

Another voice cut him off. "We had nothing to do with framing you for any murder. If you were framed, it was to drive you to us."

"By who? Why would I come to you? Why would they think I'd come to you assholes?"

"That's what we'd like to know, dickweed," the commander snapped back.

Storch listened for the others in the container with them, wondered if he was supposed to take this man's abusive bullshit or try to kill him to show his worth. It amazed him how quickly the unacceptable decisions awakened as instinct again. He decided to see how far he could push with words. "Sir, what rank are you, and in what Army do you serve? Because I never enlisted in it."

"We're all in this war, boy."

"You hid ordnance in my store. Without my knowledge. You involved my friend in some bullshit crusade that killed him, or drove him to kill himself. You caused the Federal government—or whoever—to raid my store, which somebody burned down, and scattered my town. You ordered me out to take a lost little girl's dead body and hide it for you, making me an accessory to murder. You—or somebody else, I don't give a shit who— killed Sheriff Twombley and framed me for it, so now I'm a wanted copkiller. Then the body disappears, along with another one of my friends. You want me to go along under your good word that I'm hurting the people who hurt me? I don't even know who the fuck you are!"

The commander took a big deep breath, so deep Storch thought he could hear the walls buckle. Behind it there was whispering. That was where the real power was, he knew.

The shouting that should have come blew out in a big sigh, and Storch thought he could see the man's breath as a cloud of brighter blackness. "We are the Mission, the army of
homo sapiens
, Sergeant Storch. We are a militia of human beings fighting a holy war against eugenic terrorists. Our cause is survival of the fittest, and we are every bit as fanatical about our cause as any towelhead suicide bomber you ever saw on CNN."

A woman's voice, older, military but well-educated: "You've proven your loyalty to the United States in combat, but where do your loyalties lie as a human being?"

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about." Turning in the dark towards the voice, his senses so keyed up he could hear their breathing through the drone of the truck, could smell sweat on their bodies. Four men, one woman. They were wearing nightvision goggles. Thankfully, they only smelled of nondeodorant soap, sand and machine oil. The woman was menstruating.

"Do you believe that the human race, such as it is, should remain at the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder?" someone demanded. Storch thought of superior specimens like Leon and Gina and tried not to laugh, not to scream at them as the solemn voice went on. "Do you believe that eugenics and genetic engineering are a crime against the natural order, demanding extreme force to prevent their application to the human genome?"

What was this, a loyalty oath? "Yeah, I believe God created Adam and Eve in his image, and they ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and were cast out of Eden into a world of shit, and it's been all downhill ever since." Two of the men chuckled behind their fists. Storch had never uttered so much as a word of prayer since his parents divorced, but his father's faith had come rushing in along with the willingness to kill. God, he was even
crazier
than his father. "But I didn't come here to join up. I just want to know who they are, and where."

"You're a god-fearing man," the commander replied, "so understand it like this: they are the ultimate abomination, for they sin against nature as well as God. They are a foe before which governments, commandments and creeds are nothing but sticks and stones in the paws of dumb animals. They are the Test which humankind must pass to prove its right to exist."

The woman chimed in. "They have taken great steps to drive you to join us. You weren't followed, but you're being watched. If they have not contacted you already, then know that they will, and that they will tempt you to betray us, and your kind, in the coming war. Look inside yourself, Zane Ezekiel Storch, and ask yourself what side you will take in that war."

Then there were hands on him again, and a rag pressed to his clamped mouth, and sleep.

When he woke up, he was still in the cargo container. The truck had stopped moving and he was alone. A remote square of pale daylight stabbed at his eyes from one wall, and he realized they'd unbound him. What was this, another test?

Storch sat up and hugged himself. He couldn't hold his head up, let it settle against his knees. He hadn't asked for this, for any of it. All he'd wanted since he came home from the war was to be left alone, to grow old in peace, a latter-day Cincinnatus. In the last eight years, he'd managed to strike some sort of deal with his past and with his illness, and he'd been able to become almost normal. The others, the few men from his squad that he'd kept in touch with for awhile after they got back, had all retreated into bitterness and paranoia, hating their own government as they'd once hated its enemies. But he'd gotten it together as well as he knew how and gone on with his life. He didn't want to kill anymore, didn't want to think in terms of "US" versus "THEM." He wanted to be free, and didn't harbor any illusions about what the word meant or about how hard it was to keep. Now, in the span of three days, he was a prisoner again—of somebody else's war, and not any kind of conventional, sane war, either. Both sides in this conflict seemed to be competing to drive him insane, to pry him away from everything that made sense in his life, to reduce him again to a soldier, a headful of hardwired fight or flight instincts. They wouldn't let him fly, they wouldn't explain it to him, wouldn't let him decide. He wanted to fight, now, yes indeed. But he wanted answers, to see for himself what was what, and what the fight was over, before he cast in his lot on either side. And perhaps they'd all regret that they'd ever decided to disturb Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch from his sleep of self-exile, because he'd fight them all.

The blackness of the cargo container was merely darkness again, the absence of light, not a void fraught with phantom inquisitors. He could get out of a box.

Kneeling, he tugged at the heel of his left boot. The false bottom of the heel came away in his hand and he pulled out a spool of monofilament wire. It looked like metallic angling line, or silvery dental floss, but Storch handled it gingerly, taking care not to touch it as he unspooled it and stretched it between his fists. As a garrote, the wire could cleanly saw the head off a victim, but its primary purpose was as a saw. He'd ordered the boots from
Soldier Of Fortune
magazine because of their sturdiness and comfort, and never in five years had he opened the heels to use the special tools inside. Now he blessed the earlier, edgier incarnation of himself that'd seen the necessity of carrying hidden weapons in his shoes.