Ground Zero

by Kevin J. Anderson

  She adjusted the lamp overhead and went back to work, probing in detail for any clues the old man’s body had left for her to find. She dictated copious notes, removing the intact organs, weighing each one, giving her impression of their condition—but as she proceeded, it became clear to her that something was terribly wrong.

  Finally, still wearing her gloves, she went over to the intercom mounted on the wall, glancing back over her shoulder at the remains of Gregory’s body. She punched in the extension for the Oncology Department.

  “This is Special Agent Dana Scully,” she said, “in Autopsy Room…” she glanced up at the door, “2112. I need an oncology expert to suit up and come down here briefly for a second opinion. I’ve found something I’d like to have verified.” Though Scully had requested consultation with a specialist, she was already virtually certain as to what they would find.

  The voice on the other end of the line reluctantly acknowledged. Scully wondered how many of the specialists would suddenly disappear for lunch breaks or rush off to long-forgotten games of golf, leaving the remaining few to draw straws to see who would have to come in to the room with her and study the burned corpse.

  She went back to the body on the polished metal table and looked down, still keeping her distance. Her inhalations through the respirator packs at her mouth hissed like the steaming breath of a dragon.

  Long before Dr. Emil Gregory had died from his fatal flash burn, his entire bodily system had been ravaged from within. Tumors upon tumors permeated his system, disrupting his functions.

  Even without this bizarre and extreme death, Dr. Emil Gregory would have succumbed to terminal cancer within a month.

  FIVE

  Vandenberg Air Force Base, California

  Underground Minuteman Missile Control Bunker

  Tuesday, 3:45 P.M.

  A boring routine in a buried trash can that somebody considered an office. Some assignment.

  Captain Franklin Mesta had once thought being a missileer would be exciting, protected in an underground fortress with the controls of nuclear Armageddon at his fingertips. Dial in the coordinates, turn the keys—and the fate of the world rested in your hands, just waiting for a launch order.

  In reality, it was more like solitary confinement…only without the privacy of solitude.

  Mesta was stuck down here in a little cell, his only company a randomly assigned partner with whom he had little in common. Forty-eight straight hours without seeing the light of day, without hearing the wind or the ocean, without stretching his muscles, or getting a good workout.

  What was the point of being stationed on the spectacular central coast of California if he had to pull duty down here under a rock? He might as well have been in Minot, North Dakota. One underground control bunker looked like any other underground control bunker. They all had the same interior decorator—no doubt a low-bid government contract.

  Maybe he should have asked for EOD duty instead. At least Explosives Ordnance Disposal offered the chance that something unexpected and exciting would happen.

  From his chair he turned to look at his partner, Captain Greg Louis, who sat out of arm’s reach in an identical scuffed red Naugahyde chair. The chairs were mounted to steel rails on the floor that kept the two missileers permanently at right angles to each other. Regulations required that each man remain buckled in his seat at all times.

  A circular mirror mounted in the corner between them let the two men look into each other’s eyes, but prevented them from being able to touch physically. Captain Mesta supposed there had been instances at the end of a long shift where stir-crazy missileers had tried to strangle each other.

  “What do you suppose the weather’s like topside?” Mesta asked.

  Captain Louis worked intently on a pad of paper, scribbling calculations. Distracted, he looked up, blinking at Mesta in the round observation mirror. Though Louis’s flat face, wide set eyes, and full lips gave him a perpetually stupid expression, Mesta knew his partner was a whiz at math.

  “Do you want me to call up?” Louis asked. “They can fax us a full report.”

  Mesta shook his head and looked aimlessly around the old metal control banks. Everything was painted battleship gray or, even worse, sea-foam green, with clunky black plastic dials and analog numerical readouts—technology straight from early Cold War days.

  “No, just wondering,” he said with a sigh. Louis could be so literal. “What are you figuring out now?”

  Louis set down his pencil. “Taking the projected area of our chamber here, and our depth beneath the surface, I can estimate the volume of material in a cylinder above us. Then I’m going to use the average density of rock to calculate the mass. When I’m done, we’ll know exactly how much stone is hanging over our heads.”

  Mesta groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding, man! You’re psycho.”

  “Just occupying my mind. Aren’t you curious?”

  “Not about that.”

  Mesta slid his chair along the rail bolted to the floor, allowing him to check another station, one he had inspected only five minutes earlier. All conditions remained the same.

  He looked at the heavy black phone at his station. “I think I’m going to call up and get permission to use the head,” he said. He didn’t really have to go, but it was something to do. Besides, by the time the decision came down from the watchdogs, his bladder might well be full.

  “Go ahead,” Louis answered, intent on his calculations again.

  A single cot sat behind a heavy red curtain that provided minimal privacy—and minimal stretching space—but each man was allowed to use it only once during a shift, and Mesta figured he could stay awake a while longer.

  Then the red phone rang.

  Both men instantly transformed into crack professionals, alert and aware, snapping into the programming that had been hammered into them. They knew the drill, and they took each alarm seriously.

  Mesta picked up the phone. “Captain Franklin Mesta here. Prepare for code verification.” Grabbing the black three-ring binder, he flipped through the laminated pages, searching for the proper date and authorization phrase.

  The voice on the phone—flat, high-pitched, and oddly genderless—rattled off numbers in a crisp, precise drone. “Tango Zulu Ten Thirteen Alpha X-ray.”

  Mesta followed the digits with his finger, repeating them into the phone. “Tango Zulu One Zero One Three Alpha X-ray. Verified. Second, do you concur?”

  At an identical phone, Captain Louis studied his own three-ring binder. “Concur,” he said. “Ready to receive targeting information.”

  Mesta spoke into the handset. “We are prepared to input coordinates.”

  Mesta felt his heart pounding, the adrenaline running through his veins, though he knew this had to be just an exercise. It was the military’s strategy to keep the men from going insane with boredom—putting the teams regularly through routine drills, constant practice in aiming their missile, their personal Big Stick, housed in a silo elsewhere at Vandenberg.

  In addition to providing simple practice and relief from the tedium, Mesta knew, the constant and unforgiving drills were designed to program the missileers into following instructions without thinking. Buried under however many tons of rock Louis had calculated, the two partners were so isolated they could never know whether they were preparing for a real launch, or just going through the paces. That was exactly the way their superiors wanted it.

  But as soon as the coordinates came in, and both captains dialed them in using analog numerical wheels, Mesta knew the launch could never be real. “That’s out in the Western Pacific…somewhere in the Marshall chain,” he said. He glanced at the world map taped up on the metal wall, its edges curling from age. “Are we nuking Gilligan’s Island, or what?”

  Captain Louis answered in a terse, no-nonsense tone. “Probably in keeping with the government’s new nonthreatening posture. The Russians don’t like us even pretending to aim the birds at them.”

 
Mesta punched in the TARGET LOCK VERIFIED sequence, shaking his head. “Sounds like somebody just wants a few radioactive coconuts.”

  Still, he thought, the very possibility of an actual launch, a no-turning-back instigation of nuclear war, was enough to bring out a cold sweat—drill or no drill.

  “Ready for key insertion,” Louis prompted.

  Mesta hustled, ripping open his own envelope to pull out the metal key on its dangling plastic chain. “Ready for key insertion,” he repeated. “On my mark—three, two, one. Keys in.”

  Both men jammed their metal keys in the slots, then simultaneously let out a relieved sigh. “Exciting, isn’t it?” Mesta said, breaking through his professional demeanor. Louis blinked and looked strangely at him.

  Now it would all depend on the command station, where someone else in some other uniform would arm the missile, de-safe the warheads, the small conical cluster of atomic bombs. Each component of the MIRV, the multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicles, packed hundreds of times the wallop of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.

  The voice on the telephone spoke. “Proceed with key rotation.”

  Mesta gripped the round end of his key in the slot, feeling perspiration slick his fingertips. He glanced up at the round observation mirror to see that Captain Louis had done the same, waiting for him to give the order. Mesta began his short, careful countdown.

  At “one” they turned their keys.

  The lights went out.

  Sparks flew from the old control panels, transistors and capacitors—possibly even obsolete vacuum tubes—overloading.

  “Hey!” Mesta shouted. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Despite his bluster, he suddenly felt a primal fear of being trapped in absolute darkness, buried deep underground in a metal cave swarming with tarlike blackness. He thought he could sense every single ounce of the overlying rock Captain Louis had calculated. Mesta was glad his partner could not see the expression on his face.

  “Searching for emergency controls,” Louis’s voice called, eerily disembodied in the blackness. His voice remained pretend-calm, professional, but with a ragged edge that belied his cool demeanor.

  “Well where are they?” Mesta said. “Get the power back on.”

  Images of suffocation and doom swirled in Mesta’s mind. Without power, they wouldn’t have air, they couldn’t call up topside and request an emergency evacuation.

  What if the launch had been real? Had the United States just been obliterated in a nuclear fire? Impossible!

  “Switch on the damn lights!” Mesta shouted.

  “Here they are. No time for a self-diagnostic.” Instead, Louis’s voice howled in pain. “Aaaah! The controls are hot! I just fried the palm of my hand.”

  Mesta could make out the silhouettes of the control banks as the metal racks began to glow a deep brownish red, like a stove burner. A renewed shower of sparks skittered across the electronics. Then another, brighter glow seeped through the wall plates themselves.

  “What is going on here?” Mesta said.

  “Phone’s dead,” Louis answered, maddeningly calm again.

  Mesta swiveled back and forth in his chair, sweating, hyperventilating. “It’s like we’re in a giant microwave oven! So hot in here.”

  The seams in the steel-plate walls split. Rivets shot like bullets from one side of the enclosed chamber to the other, ricocheting and shattering glass instrument panels. Both men screamed. Blazing light poured in.

  “But we’re underground,” Louis gasped. “There should be only rock out there.”

  Mesta tried to leap to his feet, to run to the emergency ladder, or at least to the secure elevator—but the straps and seatbelts trapped him in the uncomfortable chair. Smoke began to rise from the upholstery.

  “What’s that noise?” Louis asked. “Do you hear voices out there?”

  Light and heat rushed in through the cracks in the walls, like a blinding storm from the core of the sun. The last thing Captain Mesta heard was a raging roar like a whirlwind of vengeful whispers.

  Then all the seams split in the walls as the last barrier evaporated. A tidal wave of blazing, radioactive fire flooded over them, engulfing the chamber.

  SIX

  Teller Nuclear Research Facility

  Tuesday, 3:50 P.M.

  With his visitor’s badge firmly clipped to his collar, Mulder felt like a door-to-door salesman. He followed his map of the Teller Facility on which Rosabeth Carrera had circled the building number where Dr. Gregory’s project team was temporarily stationed.

  He found the building, a dilapidated, ancient barracks, two stories tall, with windowpanes so old that the glass had begun to ripple with age. The doors and window frames were painted a putrid, yellowish tan that reminded him of the Number 2 pencils given out for standardized tests in public schools. The exterior walls were sided with composite shingles, flexible asphalt sheets slapped on in a repetitive overlapping pattern. They looked like the wings of a freakish mutant moth grown to gargantuan size.

  “Nice digs,” Mulder said to himself.

  From a brochure he had picked up in the Badge Office, Mulder knew that the Teller Nuclear Research Facility occupied the site of an old U.S. Navy weapons station. Looking at the barracks, he decided that these must be a few of the original structures that had just barely held on while others were demolished and replaced with prefabricated modular office buildings.

  He tried to guess what groups would be relegated to these forlorn places: projects winding down after losing budget battles, new employees awaiting their security clearances, or administrative staff who didn’t need the high-tech laboratories of the breadwinning nuclear researchers.

  It looked as if Dr. Gregory’s project had lost a bit of prestige.

  Mulder trudged up the old wooden stairs and yanked at the door, which stuck briefly in its frame before opening. He entered, ready to flash his visitor’s badge and his FBI ID card, even though Rosabeth Carrera had assured him this section of the research facility was open to approved visitors. The building was inside the perimeter fence and therefore remained inaccessible to the general public, but no classified work could be performed in any of these offices.

  The hall was empty. Mulder saw only a kitchenette with a coffeemaker and a big plastic jug of spring water perched on a cooler. A laser-printed sign on salmon-colored paper was tacked to the wall, and Mulder saw several other copies posted up and down the hall on doors and bulletin boards.

  * * *

  WARNING, ASBESTOS AREA.

  THE HAZARD REMOVAL TEAM WILL BE WORKING

  THE FOLLOWING DATES: ________

  * * *

  Naturally, the dates handwritten on the blank line were precisely the days he and Scully planned to be in the area.

  Beneath, in a brush-stroke script, as if someone had gotten cute changing fonts on their word-processing program:

  “Please pardon the inconvenience.”

  Mulder followed the short kitchenette-hall to where it intersected with the main corridor of offices. The ceiling creaked, and he looked up to see water-stained acoustic tiles barely hanging on to a suspended structure around fluorescent lights. Footsteps on the second floor continued; the old support beams groaned with weariness.

  He stopped at the end of the hall. The entire area to his left was swathed in plastic wrap, as if some mysterious preservation activity was underway. Workers wearing overalls and heavy, full-facepiece respirators wielded crowbars behind a translucent plastic curtain, tearing the sheetrock off the walls. Others used high-powered shop vacuums to suck away the dust that came out. They made a tremendous racket. Yellow tape blocked the corridor farther on, with another handmade sign dangling from the flimsy X barricade.

  * * *

  ASBESTOS REMOVAL OPERATIONS IN PROGRESS.

  DANGER!

  DO NOT CROSS.

  * * *

  Mulder glanced at the little yellow note of paper on which he had written Bear Dooley’s temporary office num
ber. “I hope it’s not down there,” he said, looking at the asbestos work site. He turned right instead and began checking doorways, most of which were closed—not necessarily because the rooms were empty, but because the people couldn’t work with so much noise in the halls.

  He followed the room numbers down the hall, listening to the construction workers batter away, excavating the old asbestos-contaminated insulation, which would be replaced with new approved materials. Asbestos insulation had been considered perfectly safe decades earlier. But now, because of new safety regulations, the workers seemed to be creating an even larger hazard. To fix the problem, they gutted the old building, spending huge amounts of the taxpayer’s money, and quite probably releasing far more broken asbestos fibers into the air than would ever have been released in the natural lifetime of the building during normal use.

  He wondered if, a decade or two down the road, someone would decide that the new material was also hazardous, and the entire process would repeat itself.

  Mulder remembered a joke from an old Saturday Night Live that he had considered enormously funny while sprawled out on his sofa late one Saturday evening. The Weekend Update commentator proudly announced that scientists had at last discovered that cancer was actually caused by…(drum roll) white lab rats!

  Now, though, the joke didn’t seem quite as humorous.

  He wondered how Scully was doing with her autopsy on Dr. Gregory’s body.

  He finally reached Bear Dooley’s half-closed office door, which was burdened with numerous layers of thick brown paint. Inside the dim room, a burly man wearing a denim jacket and flannel shirt and jeans stacked boxes onto tall black file cabinets, arranging items hastily retrieved from his old office.

  Mulder rapped on the door with his knuckles and pushed it farther open. “Excuse me. Dr. Dooley?”

  The broad-shouldered man turned to look at him. He had long, reddish brown hair and a shaggy beard that looked like it was made of copper wire, except for a striking shot of white down the left side of his chin, as if he had spilled a dribble of milk there. His mouth and nose were covered with a white filter mask.