Watt sets the phone back in its cradle and flicks the key to the OFF position. Communication within Vector Eleven is always on a secure phone, called a STU, or stew in Pentagon parlance, even routine calls like the call Watt just made to his aide in the outside office.
Kicking his feet up on the windowsill, the general stretches back in his chair. Out his office windows, Watt can see a fair number of cars in South Parking. Recently retrofitted with bombproof glass, the panes are now an inch thick and tinted a greenish yellow that bleaches out the color from the surrounding landscape so it looks like you’re peering through dime store sunglasses. The lot is half full, at least he isn’t the only one working on a Saturday.
His stew buzzes.
“Watt,” he answers.
“Sir, the video from the VA hospital was just downloaded,” his aide informs him. “It should be up on your screen.”
“Join me, Williams. I’d like your read on this.”
Watt opens the file. He leans forward in his chair looking at the black-and-white footage from a security camera. Overlooks the intersection of two corridors, ceiling fixtures pool light in evenly spaced dots down the empty hallways.
Williams walks into Watt’s office, the general motions him over to his PC.
“Get our contact at the VA hospital on the line while we watch the video.”
“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Williams walks over to the stew and turns the key, punches in a number and puts the receiver up to his ear.
“Give me Bigelow . . . this is Lieutenant Williams at the Pentagon calling,” Williams says into the stew. “Bigelow, please hang on while we review the tape in case General Watt has any questions.” Normally his boss is a cool character, but Williams notices that the events of the last two days are beginning to take their toll. Watt has even more of that Khrushchev demeanor that people around the Pentagon have remarked about if only because of his stocky build, doughface and closely cropped white hair. Now he’s looking even older and more rotund, an obvious contrast to most of the officers at his rank who are ramrod slender and buff to the extreme.
Williams’ eyes shift over to the computer. On the screen a female nurse in scrubs comes into view pushing a wheelchair down the corridor. Her head’s bent down, she checks back over her shoulder.
“How do you pause this damn thing?” Watts grumbles as he clicks buttons on his screen.
Williams puts down the phone and finds the pause button for his boss.
“We’re going to have to get some video technicians in on this—you can’t tell who in the hell these people are.”
“Wait a minute, let me check,” Williams says, picking up the stew. “Bigelow, we are at the place on the tape that you indicated. What can you tell us?”
“Yes, we can see the wheelchair and the nurse. Who are they?”
“I see,” Williams responds to the voice on the other end of the phone, and then turning to Watt, says, “The patient’s name is Risstup and the nurse is a VA employee named Sharon Thorsen. Apparently she shot our security guy full of sedative then took off with Risstup.”
How in the hell can this be happening? Watt asks himself. He knows full well who the patient is. The nurse is still a big question. “Ask him what’s the story with this nurse?”
Lieutenant Williams pauses. Then rephrases his boss’s question, “Why would you think a nurse would kidnap a mentally ill patient from your hospital the day after Thanksgiving?”
Williams snaps into the phone, “Maybe you would prefer to use another word, Bigelow, but from our vantage point, it sure looks like a kidnapping.”
He waits for a reaction, then says, “Okay, we’ll do that. He says we should look at the part with the car.”
Williams taps on the screen to fast forward the tape. In the scene, the nurse dashes across the lot toward a car parked in the shadows, the wheelchair zipping along in front of her.
“It’s a car, but it’s too dark to tell what make or whether someone’s in it. Could be another person involved,” Watt says, his frustration level rising. “Ask him if he has any theories why a nurse would abduct our man.”
Williams asks the question, and then shakes his head at Bigelow’s response. Holding his hand over the receiver, Williams says, “He says he’s only been on the ward for a month. Anything else you’d like to ask, sir?”
Watt scowls at his aide. Williams gets the message and ends the call.
Watt drums his fingers on his desk. Whoever is behind this operation is one jump ahead. Obviously an inside job, the nurse had kidnapped him but did she have an accomplice? And if she did, who the hell is it?
General Watt knows he will be called on the carpet. Everyone will be looking to him for the answers. As critical material officer, Pentagonese for the job of riding herd on all the spent nuclear materials—military and civilian—stashed all over the country, Watt is the Pentagon’s atomic janitor, responsible for storing and safekeeping all the nuclear trash discarded over the past sixty years. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of radioactive waste stacked ten high at the Savannah River Plant, spent plutonium pits and nuclear fuel rods in storage casks all over the country, hundreds of acres of contaminated soil at Rocky Flats, Colorado, and radioactive buildings in Dayton, Ohio. Every week brought him a new headache, some spill off a truck or leakage from a rusting tank, radiation mysteriously emitting from a safe room or a fire at some facility in Norfolk or New London threatening to release radiation.
In addition to dealing with the atomic garbage, he has the chore of keeping an eye on the lost nuclear weapons. Except for an enterprising journalist occasionally sticking his nose into the subject, the unrecovered nukes have stayed out of sight and out of mind.
Now a nurse in a VA hospital has to stir the pot. Watt has twenty-four hours, he figures, to find out where in the hell the missing patient is. If ever the label “loose cannon” was applicable, this was it.
He looks up at Williams. “Find out everything you know about Thorsen and Risstup—down to their shoe sizes and whether they like their eggs over easy or sunny-side up. In the meantime, get me everything in the building concerning Risstup. And I want to know every number called out of that hospital for the last two weeks.”
“I have Risstup’s file on my desk, sir, I’ll have the call log within the hour.”
Thankfully, Williams is always two moves ahead of him. Normally, someone higher up the chain of command would snag a promising young officer like Williams. Yet once the doors of Vector Eleven opened for you, they closed behind you just as abruptly. A few officers had made the unwise decision to opt out of Vector Eleven—only to find themselves permanently posted to the military mission in Khartoum, or banished to a missile range in the Utah desert. Williams willingly accepted the tradeoff—a commitment to a career in Vector Eleven to guarantee he would stay at the center of the action and avoid a merry-go-round of low-profile assignments.
The file on Risstup is in two parts. His service records up to the time he was presumed lost and a second section that began three years ago with his admission to the VA hospital. The assumption on the military’s part had been that the crew went down with the B-52. The last words about the six were written on granite gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery—Missing in Action—their cases closed until three years ago when the Pentagon began receiving crank calls from some character in Pittsburgh. When Watt picked up on the story, alarms went off and he acted fast.
The caller claimed to be a survivor of the crash. Was warning anyone who would listen about an H-bomb jettisoned before his plane went down. Insisted it was recoverable but couldn’t give a coherent reason why. “His memory kept going in and out on him,” the crack team Watt sent out to assess the situation reported, “flickering on and off like a light bulb on its last legs.”
The caller could barely remember his name, had lived hand to mouth for years, often homeless. No family but was well known in shelters, soup kitchens and police stations, having been picked up for vagrancy numero
us times. The team’s report noted that before they had him hosed down and cleaned up they could barely stand to be in the same room. Their conclusion was that he was probably the missing Air Force major but he did not pose a threat. After years on the streets, his health was a question mark. Doctors called in said the only issue was which of his organs would give out first. His arteries were shot, heart weak—who knows how many minor strokes he’d had—it wasn’t a matter of if but of when.
Watt’s people recommended that the former pilot be treated with respect. Committed to the senility ward of a local VA hospital under his own name and left to live out his remaining days in peace and in a stupor, a daily cocktail of sedatives insuring he didn’t make any more crank calls to anyone.
While he had reservations about the course of action, Watt was under the gun on a number of projects and signed off. Within a week, the man was diagnosed to have advanced senile dementia and committed to the Pittsburgh VA hospital. Watt was guaranteed that people were going to keep an eye on him and was assured that for all practical purposes Risstup might as well have disappeared off the face of the earth.
Hard to get good help these days, he sardonically observes. If they’d taken care of him back then, I wouldn’t be in this mess. But Watt knows that as easy as it was to blame his crew, he had taken his eye off the ball, if only for a second. And that he would be the one to pay.
He quickly scans the first part of Risstup’s file. The officer’s last assignment was in 1958 to the 57th Air Division, 99th Bomber Wing, 348th Bomber Squadron at Westover Air Force Base, near Worcester, Massachusetts. Co-pilot on a B-52D, Risstup flew multiple airborne alert missions during the time he was at Westover.
On the next series of documents he opens up Watt has to note his security classification number and sign his name. Marked SCI/SAP, SCI refers to Sensitive Compartmented Information and SAP to Special Access Programs. The Polo Step designation is the final hurdle. Even the SecDef’s eyes aren’t cleared. Only Vector Eleven members have access.
The file has not been opened in a while—from the color and feel of the paper Watt guesses for years. Mishaps with nuclear weapons were carefully concealed from congressional watchdog committees and prying investigative journalists.
Though never admitted publicly, it was common knowledge around the Pentagon that squadrons of B-52s and B-47s carrying armed nuclear weapons flew around the clock for ten years. Flying three routes, over the Arctic, the United Kingdom, and over Spain, thousands of SAC bombers went to failsafe points two-thirds of the way toward Russian targets before turning back to base.
Watt loves to tell the story of the B-52 landing in Moscow on the first friendly visit back in the 1970s. A Russian official greeting the huge plane welcomed the pilot by saying, “Welcome to Moscow. This must be your first visit here.”
The pilot smiled and responded, “Oh, no, we’ve flown to Russia many times before.”
Halfway through the SAP document, Watt finds what he’s looking for. He speedily reviews the information. His concerns are confirmed.
The language used is pure bureaucratese, but the story could have come out of Hollywood. He immediately recalls the details. It was August, thunderstorm and northeaster time on the East Coast—August 14, 1958—if his memory serves him right. Watt checks. It does.
He reads on. Risstup’s plane flew into a nasty weather pattern not long after takeoff. Westover lost radar contact with the plane early in the flight. Metal fatigue and equipment breakdown was the price paid for keeping so many of America’s B-52s in the air at all times. The airborne alert missions lasted over twenty-four hours and covered over ten thousand miles, again and again the aircraft went out, for weeks, months and years. Not surprising there were stories of B-52s coming apart in mid-flight.
Watt pours over the map, tracing the plane’s route with the tip of his pencil. The flight path is a straight line from just east of Westover south to a location over central New Jersey. At the point radio contact was lost, the flight path turns into a dotted line.
Watt leans back in his chair, exhaling heavily. Right now is when he needs a cigarette. He pops a Tums instead. A goddamn dotted line means they lost contact and don’t have the vaguest idea how much longer the aircraft stayed in the air. Who knows where the aircraft went down? It could be over the ocean—or anywhere in the mid-Atlantic for that matter.
The comment in the file by the commanding officer at Westover at the time is maddening. “All B-52 crews were given orders to jettison nuclear weapons over water if circumstances deemed it necessary. In all probability the crew followed orders and jettisoned the Mk-15 weapon, serial number 47332, over the Atlantic Ocean.”
“In all probability—damn!” Watt mutters and pounds his desk. The base commander didn’t even know exactly where the aircraft went down—how could he report the weapon was dropped in the drink?
What they used to get away with in those days, Watt grumbles. He remembers the story of a hydrogen bomb that was dropped on a farmhouse in North Carolina sometime in the late ’50s or early ’60s. Fortunately it was out in the sticks and the Air Force hustled out to the site and sealed it off. The family was given immediate medical treatment, they patched up the mom, dad and the kids, set the family up in a new house and bought their silence with a fat check, recovered one of the nukes near the surface, left the other buried, put a chain-link fence around the site, established an easement preventing digging and simply walked away. It was over and done with. Now it would be another story.
If a nuclear weapon were jettisoned from a plane today, CNN would have instant around-the-clock coverage with correspondents all over the world fanning it into major news. There would be a congressional committee immediately formed to investigate, politicians would swarm all over the mishap, the administration would be on the warpath and heads would roll in every ring of the Pentagon.
Not much worries Greg Watt. But the thought of an ex–Air Force pilot on the loose who knows where a nuke was dropped was like a live grenade rolling under his desk.
What had been ancient history, stale information from Cold War days that was supposed to have fallen through the cracks, suddenly gets moved up to the front burner. The blanket of secrecy Vector Eleven had thrown over the nukes lost during the Cold War could be compromised. The implications were clear. Everyone up the line would take the heat—but because he hadn’t taken care of business Watt would get the shaft.
“Excuse me, sir, I have the phone logs,” Williams said, poking his head through the half-opened door.
“Let’s see what you have.”
“Nothing from the VA hospital in the last two weeks. I’ve had three men combing through them for the last hour. But the nurse’s cell phone record has one call that leapt out at me.”
“Smart of you to get her log,” Watt says.
Williams briskly shuffles through to the seventh page. His finger stops at a line. “Right here. The nurse made a call on her cell to a number in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
Watt looks up at Williams. “So?”
“That number belongs to Howard Collyer.”
Watt has to struggle to keep his jaw from dropping. “Holy fucking shit,” is the only phrase he can come up with. “Not the Howie Collyer?”
“The same. I double-checked. He retired from the Building and moved to Charlottesville over a year ago—deemed a security risk—if you remember.”
“How could I forget?” Though Watt has never met Collyer, as a diehard ACC football fan, he’s well aware of the story of Howie Collyer and his freak field goal as well as with his fixation on lost nukes. Watt drops his head into his hands. If Collyer’s involved in this . . . Watt doesn’t finish the thought. His alimentary canal burbles disagreeably.
Watt picks up his stew and dials a number. He barks into the phone, “Prepare a flying squad to head down to Charlottesville immediately. I want to know everything that’s going on in Collyer’s house. And if Howard Collyer, a nurse named Sharon Thorsen and a VA patient
named Risstup are anywhere around there, I want them detained. Code Five authority. Call me when you have something.”
Two more calls and Vector Eleven is on full alert—its intricately woven web extends into all corners of the Pentagon and every agency having to do with national security. If the president knew of Vector Eleven’s influence, he’d be envious. With operatives in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and all the intelligence branches of the armed services, not to mention Vector Eleven’s own Special Ops unit based at Fort Belvoir, finding Howard Collyer should be a walk in the park.
One more loose end Watt is determined to take care of. Collyer has a close friend at the CIA, a guy who was a top spook in the ’70s in Eastern Europe. Watt searches his memory for the man’s name. Straub, Winston Straub. Yes. Just in case he’s tempted to give his buddy a hand, someone’s going to warn Straub it’s something he’d better not stick his nose into.
Watt is fairly confident that by the end of the day he’ll have the situation contained. The last thing he wants is to stand up in front of a hostile audience of Vector Eleven members and field questions about Howard Collyer and a lost nuke.
But for some reason, as Watt looks out at the cars leaving South Parking, their headlights already on at four-thirty in the afternoon, his intuition tells him the search for Collyer might not be quite as easy as he’s hoping it will be.
He sets the stew receiver back in its cradle, thinking, This feels like one of those damn times where you just sit back and wait for the other shoe to drop.
12
Rutgers campus, Saturday morning
Mehran quietly slides out from under the covers, stands, stretches and looks down at Melanie, who’s sound asleep, snoring lightly. He checks the clock. 1:15. Just what I planned. Quietly climbing into his sweats, he tiptoes into his tiny study, closes the door, turns on his computer and logs onto the Net. One of the windows looking out on the quad is open slightly, a draft of chilly air sneaking into the room. Good, that will keep me alert.
Sleeping Dogs Page 9