Vixen 03 (19 page)

“Any reason for the melodramatics?” Pitt tilted his head at the revolver poised in Bass’s left hand.

“It seems you’ve exhumed an excessive amount of information about a subject that belongs buried. I had to be certain of your identity.”

“Then you’re satisfied that I’m who I say I am?”

“Yes, I called your boss at NUMA. Jim Sandecker served under my command in the Pacific during World War Two. He gave me an impressive list of your credentials. He also wanted to know what you were doing in Virginia when you were supposed to be on a salvage tender off the coast of Georgia.”

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“I’ve not made Admiral Sandecker privy to my findings.”

“Which, as you claimed earlier, at the pond, were the remains of Vixen 03.”

“She exists, Admiral. I’ve touched her.”

Bass’s eyes flashed with hostility. “You’re not only bluffing, Mr. Pitt, but you’re also lying. I demand to know why.”

“My case is not built on lies,” said Pitt evenly. “I have two other reputable witnesses and videotaped pictures as proof.”

A look of incomprehension shadowed Bass’s face. “Impossible! She disappeared over the ocean. We spent months searching for her and didn’t find a trace.”

“You looked in the wrong place, Admiral. Vixen 03 lies under a mountain lake in Colorado.”

Bass’s tough facade seemed to dissolve, and in the moonlight Pitt suddenly saw him as a tired, worn old man. The admiral lowered the pistol and swayed drunkenly toward a bench at the edge of the overlook. Pitt reached out a hand to steady him.

Bass nodded thanks and sank onto the bench. “I suppose it had to happen someday. I wasn’t fool enough to think the secret could last forever.” He looked up and clutched Pitt’s arm. “The cargo. What of the cargo?”

“The canisters have broken their moorings, but otherwise they seemed reasonably intact.”

“Thank God for that, at least,” sighed Bass. “Colorado, you say. The Rocky Mountains. So Major Vylander and his crew never made it out of the state.”

“The flight originated in Colorado?” asked Pitt.

“Buckley Field was Vixen 03’s point of origin.” He held his head in his hands. “What went wrong so early? They must have gone down shortly after takeoff.”

“It looks as though they had mechanical problems and tried to ditch in the only open space they could find. It being winter, the lake was frozen over, and they were fooled into thinking they were coming down in a field. The weight of the aircraft then broke through the ice and sank in a deep section of the lake, deep enough so that after the ice melted in the spring, her outline could not be distinguished from the air.”

“And all this time we thought…” Bass’s voice trailed off and he sat there in silence. Finally he said softly, “Those canisters must be retrieved.” (

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“Do they contain nuclear material?” Pitt asked.

“Nuclear material …” Bass repeated, his tone vague. “Is that what you think?”

“The date stated in Vixen O3’s flight plan could have put her in the South Pacific in time for the Bikini H-bomb tests. I also found a metal tag on one of the crewmen, marked with the symbol for radioactivity.”

“You misread the evidence, Mr. Pitt. True, the canisters were originally designed to house nuclear naval shells. But the night Vylander and his crew disappeared they were used for a far different purpose.”

“It’s been suggested they’re empty.”

Bass sat like a wax statue. “If only it were that simple,” he murmured. “Unfortunately, there are other instruments of war besides the nuclear kind. You might say that Vixen 03 and her crew were carriers.”

“Carriers?”

“A plague,” said Bass. “The canisters contain the Doomsday organism.”

An uneasy silence settled over the two men as Pitt digested the enormity of the admiral’s revelation.

“I see by your expression you are shocked,” said Bass.

” ‘Doomsday organism,’ ” Pitt repeated quietly. “It has a terrifying ring of finality about it.”

“An apt description, I assure you,” said Bass. “Technically speaking, it possessed an impressive-sounding biochemical name that was thirty letters long and quite unpronounceable. The military designation, though, was short and sweet. We simply called it ‘QD,’ short for ‘quick death.’ “

“You refer to this ‘QD’ in the past tense.”

The admiral made a helpless gesture. “Force of habit. Until your discovery of Vixen 03, I thought none still existed.”

“What exactly was it?”

“QD was the ultimate in sophisticated military weaponry. Thirty-five years ago a microbiologist by the name of Dr. John Vetterly chemically created an artificial form of life that in turn was capable of producing a disease strain that was and still is quite unknown. As simply as I can put

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it, a nondetectable, unidentifiable bacteriological agent able to incapacitate a living human or animal within seconds of exposure and disrupt the vital body functions, causing death three to five minutes later.”

“Won’t nerve gas accomplish the same thing?”

“Under ideal conditions, yes. But meteorological disturbances such as wind or storm or extreme temperatures can dilute the lethal dosage of a nerve or toxic agent when it’s released over a wide area. An outbreak of QD, on the other hand, can ignore the weather and produce a localized plague that is extremely tenacious.”

“But this is the twentieth century. Surely epidemics can be controlled?”

“If the microorganisms can be detected and identified, then it’s possible. Decontamination procedures, inoculations with serums and antibiotics , will in most cases slow down or halt a raging epidemic. But nothing on this earth could stop QD once it grabbed a toehold on a city.”

“Then how did QD come to be loaded in an aircraft in the middle of the United States?” Pitt demanded.

“Elementary. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside of Denver was the nation’s primary manufacturer of chemical and biological weapons for over twenty years.”

Pitt remained silent and let the old man go on.

Bass looked out at the panorama below, but his eyes were unfocused. “March of fifty-four,” he said, as long-buried events began unfolding in his mind. “The H-bomb was set to burst over Bikini. I was placed in command of the QD tests because Dr. Vetterly was funded by the Navy and I was an expert on naval ordnance. I thought it logical at the time to conduct experiments cloaked under the excitement of the nuclear explosion. While the world was concentrating on the main event, we conducted our tests on Rongelo Island, four hundred miles to the northeast, totally unnoticed.”

“Rongelo,” Pitt said slowly. “The destination of Vixen 03.”

Bass nodded. “A raw, bleached knob of coral poking through the sea in the middle of nowhere. Even the birds shy away from it.” Bass paused to shift his position on the bench. “I scheduled two series of tests. The first was an aerosol device that scattered a small amount of QD over the atoll. The second included the battleship Wisconsin. She was to lie back twenty miles and lob a warhead with QD from her main batteries. That test never took place.”

“Major Vylander failed to deliver the goods,” Pitt surmised.

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“The contents of the canisters,” Bass acknowledged. “Naval shells armed with QD.”

“You could have ordered up another supply.”

“I could,” Bass agreed. “But the real reason I halted the test series was because of what we learned after the aerosol drop. The results were godawful and filled all who shared in the secret with a feeling of horror.”

“You talk as though the island was devastated.”

“Visually, nothing had changed,” said Bass, his voice barely audible. “The white sand of the beach, the few palms, all was as it had been. The test animals we had placed on the island were all dead, of course. I insisted on a waiting period of two weeks to give any residual effects a chance to dissipate before permitting the scientists to examine the results firsthand. Dr. Vetterly and three of his assistants landed on the beach wearing full protective clothing and breathing apparatus. Seventeen minutes later, all were dead.”

Pitt fought to preserve his balance. “How was it possible?”

“Dr. Vetterly had vastly underestimated his discovery. The potency of other lethal agents wears off after a time. Conversely, QD gains in strength. By what method it penetrated the scientists’ protective gear we were never able to determine.”

“Did you retrieve the bodies?”

“They still lie there,” said Bass with sadness in his eyes. “You see, Mr. Pitt, the terrible power of QD is only half its malignity. QD’s most frightening quality is its refusal to die. We later found that its bacillus forms superresistant spores, which are able to penetrate the ground-in Rongelo Island’s case, the coral-and live out an astonishing lifespan.”

“I find it incredible that after thirty-four years no one can safely go in and carry out Vetterly’s remains.”

There was a sickness in Bass’s voice. “There is no way of pinpointing the exact date,” he murmured, “but our best estimate indicated that man won’t be able to step foot on Rongelo Island for another three hundred years.”

Fawkes leaned over the ship’s chart table, studying a set of blueprints, his hand making notations with a pencil. Two large men, well muscled,

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the faces beneath their hard hats tanned and thoughtful, stood on either side of him. “I want her gutted, every compartment, every scrap of unnecessary tubing and electrical conduits, even her bulkheads.”

The man on Fawkes’s left snorted derisively. “You’ve lost your gourd, Captain. Tear out the bulkheads and she’ll break up in any sea rougher than a millpond.”

“Dugan is right,” said the other man. “You can’t gut a vessel this size without losing her structural resistance to stress.”

“Your objections are duly noted, gentlemen,” Fawkes replied. “But in order for her to ride high, her draft must be cut by forty percent.”

“I’ve never heard of gutting a sound ship just to raise her waterline,” said Dugan. “What’s the purpose of it all?”

“You can scrap the armor as well as the auxiliary machinery,” Fawkes said, ignoring Dugan’s question. “While you’re about it, you can see to the removal of the turret masts.”

“Come off it, Captain,” snapped Lou Metz, the shipyard superintendent. “You’re asking us to ruin what was once a damned fine ship.”

“Aye, she was a fine ship,” agreed Fawkes. “In my mind she still is. But time has passed her by. Your government sold her for scrap and the African Army of Revolution bought her for a very special undertaking.”

“That’s something else that rubs us wrong,” said Dugan. “Busting our ass so’s some bunch of nigger radicals can kill white people.”

Fawkes laid down the pencil and fixed Dugan with a rigid stare. “I don’t think you people quite realize the economics of the situation,” he said. “What the AAR does with the ship once it leaves your shipyard needn’t concern your racial philosophies. What counts is that they pay my wages the same as they pay yours and those of your men, who, if my memory serves me, number one hundred and seventy. However, if you insist, I’ll be happy to convey your sentiments to the officials in charge of the AAR treasury. I feel certain they can find another shipyard that will prove more cooperative. And that would be a pity, particularly since their contract is the only one on your books at present. Without it, all one hundred and seventy men on your crew would have to be laid off. I do not think their families will take it kindly when they find out your petty objections put their menfolk out of work.”

Dugan and Metz exchanged angry, defeated looks. Metz avoided Fawkes’s eyes and gazed down sullenly at the blueprints. “Okay, Cap- ; tain, you’re calling the shots.”

There was a confidence born of long years of commanding men re—

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fleeted in Fawkes’s tight smile. “Thank you, gentlemen. Now that we’ve cleared the air of any misunderstandings, shall we continue?”

An hour later the two shipyard men left the bridge and made their way down to the main deck of the ship. “I can’t believe I heard right,” Metz mumbled numbly. “Did that lead-brained Scotsman actually order us to remove half the superstructure, the funnels, and the fore and aft gun turrets and replace them all with plywood sheeting painted gray?”

“That’s what the man said,” Dugan replied. “I guess he figures by dumping all that weight he can lighten the ship by fifteen thousand tons.”

“But why replace everything with dummy structures?”

“Beats me. Maybe he and his black buddies expect to bluff the South African Navy to death.”

“And that’s another thing,” said Metz. “If you bought a ship like this to use in a foreign war, wouldn’t you try and keep the deal under wraps? My guess is that they’re going to blast Cape Town all to hell.”

“With dummy guns, no less,” grunted Dugan.

“I’d like to tell that overgrown bastard to take his contract and stuff it up his ass,” Metz rasped.

“You can’t deny he’s got us by the balls.” Dugan turned and stared up at the shadowy figure behind the bridge windows. “Do you think he’s ripe for a straitjacket?”

“Nuts?”

“Yeah.”

“Crazy like a coyote, maybe. He knows what he’s doing, and that’s what bugs the shit out of me.”

“What do you suppose the AAR really has in mind once they get the ship to Africa?”

“I’ll make book she never sees port,” said Metz. “By the time we’re through ripping her bowels out, she’ll be so unstable she’ll go belly up before she leaves Chesapeake Bay.”

Dugan eased his buttocks onto a massive capstan. He looked down the length of the ship. Her great mass of steel seemed cold and malevolent; it was as though she were holding her breath, waiting for some silent command to unleash her awesome power.

“This whole act stinks,” Dugan said finally. “I only hope to God we’re not doing anything we’ll regret.”

Fawkes examined the markings on a well-creased set of navigation charts. First he computed the known velocity and fluctuations of the

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