Project Cain (Project Cain)

by Geoffrey Girard

  Sorry? I said.

  A glorious night for a baseball game, he said again.

  Yeah, I replied dreamily, I guess so.

  Go, Senators, he said, and grinned hugely and turned back to his own sink and mirror.

  I lumbered slowly from him and the bathrooms, the memory of Richard Guerrero’s face waning at last. When I took my seat, Castillo didn’t say anything at first. We just sat there in silence as usual and watched the next couple of batters. I’m not even sure I knew which team was which anymore. I made a point of trying to refocus on that. On something—anything—real.

  I stole a quick look at where the face had been and saw only people.

  Castillo asked me if everything was good.

  I turned. Thought about it.

  I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t know much of anything anymore.

  I for sure didn’t know that I’d just met Ox.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He arrived an inning later. The black guy in silk. I was kinda shocked when he first entered our row, but then Castillo stood to greet him and I figured out who it was. Ox hugged Castillo warmly, then shook my hand. Marvelous night for baseball, he said, and winked at me.

  Castillo sat down again, sarcastically thanked Ox for dressing so “covertly,” and Ox grinned back, taking the empty seat next to Castillo. Covert enough, Ox said. (I loved that smile already. His was a smile that said, No matter how shitty things had been or were or would be, things were really all right in the grand scheme of things. It was a much-needed attitude during all of this.)

  Right away Castillo asked about Shardhara.

  No messing around here. He’d called Ox for one thing, and he’d waste no time getting to it.

  If Ox knew what Shardhara really was, maybe some of my father’s other notes and plans would start to fall into place. It was a puzzle piece that could maybe pull so much more of the picture together. At least enough for Castillo to find my father. Maybe the others. Maybe enough to end all of this.

  Ox tilted his head, said: Never heard of it.

  • • •

  About Ox.

  He was raised in Nashville.

  His father was a minister with the Church of Christ Holiness USA who’d hosted a lecture by Martin Luther King the day before King was shot. His mother had died a couple of months after Ox was born. He’d been raised by his grandmother, who was the daughter of former slaves and had been a famed psychic and healer in Nashville until her death at age 105.

  He’d done ROTC in college and learned computer programming and software development. He’d been in the military for almost twenty years and had lived in seven different countries. In the Army he’d been a cook, a demolition expert, or a lieutenant who’d trained Special Forces for Afghanistan. His story changed depending on who he was talking to. In all cases, the job he gave was a cover for his real role: working with the CIA to recruit and nurture relationships with dozens of tribal leaders and factions during the war.

  It was in this time that he’d met and befriended Castillo.

  He has no doubt that the Loch Ness Monster is real. Bigfoot, too. His favorite movies are Escape from New York and The Magnificent Seven. His favorite singers are named George Jones and Prince. (I don’t much care, despite his best efforts, for either.)

  He’d been in jail for six months in Kentucky on weapons charges. He has a very young wife and two young sons. He is bald by choice only, and every other year grows a thick Afro to “confound The Man.”

  He likes to play the card game Magic. He makes his own beer and ice cream. He says things like “The lion takes no counsel from the warthog” and “When you’re roasting two potatoes, one of them is bound to get charred.”

  He believes that the government isn’t worried about giving everyone false answers all the time because it has successfully gotten everyone to ask the wrong questions.

  • • •

  Castillo doubted that Ox had just driven nine hundred miles just to say he didn’t know anything. Or to watch the SeaWolves play baseball.

  Ox retorted he might have driven eleven hundred miles to see an old friend, and then raised his hand for the beer vendor. What’d you contact me for anyway? he asked.

  You know something about everything, Castillo replied.

  Ox’s face had gone blank in thought. No emotion, no response as he focused only on the game below.

  That bad? Castillo asked.

  But before saying anything more, Ox first wanted to know more about what Castillo was involved in. They both spoke in hushed voices beneath the game’s noise. I could hardly hear them myself.

  Castillo had just apologized, said he couldn’t get too specific. Ox’s eyes had narrowed some, a trace of irritation. He requested a “taste,” just to make sure he and Castillo were on the same page. Said he didn’t want any “unspecified nastiness” coming upon him and his family.

  So Castillo told him the basics: that a private company was doing shitty things for his and Ox’s former bosses. Horrible shitty. Involved experiments. Kids. Civilian deaths. And someplace or someone named Shardhara. Their bosses had said they had no clue what that meant, but Castillo could tell when people were bullshitting him, which they were on this topic. He also noted how quickly Ox had gotten back in touch.

  Ox kept looking only at me now.

  You one of the kids? he asked.

  I glanced nervously at Castillo, who nodded that it was OK to reply.

  Yes, sir, I said.

  For the first time, Ox stopped smiling.

  • • •

  Castillo noted that Ox didn’t seem too surprised by any of this, and Ox replied that nothing had surprised him since he was four, and then he teased Castillo for still being puzzled by such things.

  Castillo leaned back in his seat and admitted that he had been surprised by some of what he’d seen this week.

  And that’s why I love you. Ox’s smile had returned, and he looked directly at me again. You working with a man who still believes in GOOD GUYS and BAD GUYS, he told me.

  (My first thought: Thank God.)

  Ox was trying to get a rise out of Castillo, and it had worked. Castillo argued he’d worked some “morally questionable” operations in his day. That he wasn’t a “child.” That he knew the US military had to “cross the line” sometimes.

  Cross the line. Ox snickered at that phrase, then sipped his beer.

  He asked: You know your history, boy? He’d asked me, technically, but had been totally looking at Castillo when he did. I figured he was using me to make some kind of point to Castillo. I was a prop. Then he asked me if I knew about the Nazis.

  Sure, I replied. He must have thought I was four years old or something. (Which, I suppose, is technically closer to the truth than sixteen, but Ox did not know that then. He was just making his point. And so I looked at him like it was a stupid question, accordingly.)

  Ox said: The Nazis were famous for killing millions and conducting lethal experiments on humans, right? Famous for being evil? And these United States of America got rid of the evil Nazis. Yes? Only problem is, at the exact same time, the USA was also conducting lethal experiments on humans.

  I looked straight at Castillo, who was looking back at me. We were both thinking the same thing. Ox still had no clue how bad it’d gotten at DSTI. Castillo’d admitted to the experiments, but not the specifics yet. And as horrifying as those specifics were, I admit: It was nice sharing a secret with someone like Castillo. It was the only real connection we had, I guess.

  The government still is, I said.

  Ox winked.

  Well, of course, he said.

  • • •

  He told us a story about this guy named Cornelius Rhoads, an American scientist who purposely put cancer cells into a bunch of people. They all died. The United States had recently invaded Puerto Rico, and this guy began using underprivileged Puerto Ricans for his tests, so no one really paid much attention to what was going on. A local politician named
Campos got ahold of some letters where this American scientist was bragging about killing all these Puerto Rican people, and Campos went to the American newspapers with the letters. His reward? This Campos guy was arrested for being a “terrorist” and spent the next twenty years in a Puerto Rican jail, where he was declared insane and Dr. Rhoads used him as a subject for radiation experiments. Can you believe that? Dr. Rhoads was soon promoted to run the US Army Biological Warfare department.

  Ox said: Research it yourself sometime online. Some days it’s almost funny.

  Ox then said: Before you can truly appreciate Shardhara, you gotta know your history.

  • • •

  Ox talked for, like, two hours. It was probably only ten minutes, but it was definitely a monologue and one he’d clearly given before. I tried to follow as much of it as I could. Castillo, I saw, was doing the same. Listening like a kid with a test the next day and really trying to learn the material.

  Here’s what I can remember:

  1. The Department of Defense recently admitted, despite a dozen different treaties banning research and development of biological agents, that it still operated biological-agent research facilities in more than one hundred institutions and universities across the nation. One hundred illegal projects! And that’s just what they’d been forced to admit.

  2. When the Manhattan Project scientists finished the world’s first atomic bomb, they started a second project: injecting plutonium directly into hundreds of American men, women, and children. Their mission was to study the effects of exposure to atomic weapons. Their very first test subject was a civilian who’d simply had a car accident near the lab. One of their last tests was giving irradiated milk to disabled orphans.

  3. Ten years later, these same military scientists were dropping light-bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis (a common flu) in the New York subway system, just to see how effective biological weapons would work on a large population. Within four days, a million New Yorkers were infected. It was just for practice. (Ox said the military loves to practice.) Later the Senate confirmed that more than two hundred populated areas in America were deliberately contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Places like San Francisco, DC, Key West, Minneapolis, St. Louis. The CIA had forty different universities and drug companies working on this.

  4. Something called MK-ULTRA. A covert drug test secretly given to military personnel, mental patients, prostitutes, and the general public to study if psychotic drugs could be a potential weapon: LSD, heroin, morphine, pot, whatever. They kept people stoned 24/7 for weeks, just to “see what would happen.”

  That’s when Ox asked me if they’d taught anything about Tuskegee in school. I told him I didn’t go to school-school but that I still knew what the Tuskegee experiment was. My father might not have cared much about baseball, but we had talked about science and its history a lot. Between him and my various camps and science tutors, I knew my scientific facts pretty well.

  Ox looked at me, curious. Told me to go for it. So I told him what I knew.

  That American government scientists got a bunch of poor farmers, African-Americans, in the South and gave them fake treatments for some disease. They could have cured them but let more than a hundred die just to see how the disease progressed.

  Ox nodded in approval and asked how I knew all that. I told him my dad was a scientist. There was still a touch of pride when I said it. I did not add that this same scientist had maybe engineered six killers and somehow helped them escape and had maybe been involved in the murder of a dozen people.

  His dad’s most definitely a scientist, Castillo said. HE, however, was not saying it like it was a good thing. It was clear that Castillo knew my dad as only one thing.

  Ox thought about that a long while. I think he was still trying to figure out how I fit into all of this. What exactly my father DID as a scientist. He knew he wasn’t here to discuss food dyes or plastics or the weather.

  Ox told me it wasn’t just any old scientists at Tuskegee. It was the US Public Health Service, and they infected hundreds in Guatemala also, which America had invaded in 1901. Mostly institutionalized mental patients, with diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis without the patients’ knowledge or permission. The infected were even encouraged to pass the disease on to others as part of the study.

  Again, just to SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN.

  It was sounding all too familiar.

  • • •

  Ox then gave this huge list of secret tests the US military had conducted over the years. He’d put his beer down between his feet and was ticking them off on his fingers faster than I could even count: Project Artichoke. Project Paperclip. Third Chance. QK-Hilltop. Project Derby Hat. The names were almost hysterical. But when I looked them up later on Google, I learned how many people had maybe died and it didn’t seem so silly anymore. Project Chatter. Camelot. Operation Whitecoat. Montauk. MK-SEARCH. MK-NAOMI. MK-OFTEN. Project 112. Project SHAD. DTC Test 69-12. H.R. 15090. Big Tom. Fearless Johnny. The Philadelphia Experiment. Program F. (Have fun brushing your teeth tonight, he added. He’d grinned at me with that last, and I had no idea what the heck he was talking about, but it was the first one I looked up later.)

  And now he could add PROJECT CAIN to his list.

  • • •

  Ox warned that we wouldn’t find out the real truth about any of these projects (not even Project Cain, it turns out) until years and years from now. When it was finally declassified. When people were too old to worry about being silenced or punished for talking. When there were worse things to think about. He said it wasn’t until 1995 that Americans learned that four hundred people had been injected with plutonium fifty years earlier. With the admission decades after the fact, there was also an apology. Apparently the government always did it that way. The US apologized for the experimentations on Pedro Campos in 1994. Apologized for the LSD tests in 1995. Apologized for Tuskegee in 1997. Apologized for Guatemala in 2010.

  Ox asked Castillo how long before the government apologized for what they’d done to the US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vets like they are. He was referring to all sorts of dangerous chemicals American troops had been exposed to, chemicals almost entirely provided courtesy of the US military. Various injections and radiated bullets and toxins. I could tell from Castillo’s face that there was enough truth to the claims Ox was making. It seemed to me that some of this was accepted and well known and some of it was still totally hush-hush.

  Ox asked: When will the government admit to all of it in public? When will they officially apologize to us?

  Or to us? I wondered out loud, the words just escaping.

  I was thinking about ALL the kids at Massey. Those that’d been murdered, those still on the run. And, well, me too.

  Ox looked at me. We’ll all be dead first, he said.

  And he wasn’t just talking old age.

  • • •

  Ox told us more about the government’s top secret MK-ULTRA/LSD tests, and about Dr. Frank Olson.

  Frank Olson was the scientist in charge of the whole MK-ULTRA project. During the project, he’d directed a covert test in 1951 done on a small French village called Pont-Saint-Esprit, where LSD-derived toxins were dispensed throughout the town by American scientists. Ten people died and thirty spent the rest of their lives in a mental institution.

  Olson knew the experiment was WRONG and so he quit. Maybe he’d planned to go to the New York Times or 60 Minutes or something with the whole story, right? No one ever found out. A few days later it was reported in all the papers that Olson had committed suicide by jumping out a thirteenth-story window. That there’d been LSD in his system.

  His family didn’t believe ANY of this and fought for the truth for the next forty years. And when Olson’s body was finally exhumed in 1994, the medical examiner termed the death a “homicide” and pointed to cranial injuries that indicated Olson had been knocked unconscious before he’d exited the window.

  The United Stat
es apologized for that too and then paid his family $750,000.

  • • •

  Ox said: You understand yet? What they’re willing to do? These fucking people.

  Ox said: You think a dozen, a hundred, kids matter to these guys?

  They don’t, Castillo agreed. So tell me about Shardhara.

  • • •

  Ox had gotten this story from a soldier he’d met through some doctor he’d known at a veterans hospital in Miami. Ox had gotten talking about secret government tests one day, and the doctor had kinda laughed it all off and mentioned this one guy who’d once hinted at some pretty wild claims. Ox got the guy’s name, and when they met, he could tell this second guy had just been waiting/begging to tell someone, anyone, who just might believe.

  To get it off his conscience. To finally let Shardhara out.

  This guy was Sergeant First Class Hollyman.

  In 2008 (as Hollyman had told it to Ox and Ox told it to us), Hollyman and five other soldiers escorted a couple of Defense Department agents on some secret mission into northern Afghanistan. They were always doing “secret” missions so it was no big deal at the time. Shardhara was a typical remote Afghanistan village. No electricity or running water. Depopulated. Overrun and controlled by the Taliban. Hollyman figured it was a standard operation: capture some weapons, maybe shoot a couple of Bad Guys, done. Then he was ordered to pull on an NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) suit, like a hazmat suit for biological weapons like sarin or mustard gas. And a biological weapon is exactly what they found.

  The village had been destroyed. Everyone dead. Everyone. The bodies apparently shredded by a hundred bullets, folk hacked to bits. Missing limbs. Ripped apart. Bitten. Men and women stripped naked and attacked. Hollyman and the other soldiers couldn’t make sense of it. Some kind of Taliban reprisal, they thought, but the twenty Taliban soldiers there were just as dead as the villagers. They found kids dead with knives, what looked like self-inflicted wounds. They found only one survivor. An old crazy woman they located in one of the huts. Hollyman told Ox that she’d been eating the dead. Just sitting on the floor, eating the bodies that surrounded her.