Ground Zero

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Inside, the place was a dim and noisy dive, just the type of place she generally avoided. Mulder adored it. “Come on, Scully,” he said. “It’s historic. Read the sign.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I think I’ve even heard of this place before. Something to do with the Manhattan Project or the Trinity Test.”

  “Then we’ve stopped at the right place,” Mulder said. “Our hamburgers will be work-related.”

  Shadowy figures hunched over the counter: ranchers who had not deigned to take off their wide cowboy hats, a few truckers wearing old baseball caps, and a tourist or two. Someone played pinball in the far corner. Neon signs for various brands of low-end beer flickered over the bar and in the dining area.

  “Looks like genuine Naugahyde seats,” Mulder said. “This place is great.”

  “You would think so, Mulder.”

  A big Navajo man with long gray-black hair tied in a ponytail came around the corner to the cash register. He wore jeans, a checked cotton shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, and a turquoise bolo tie. “Take any seat,” he said, gesturing to the array of empty booths like an ambassador welcoming them into his kingdom. He went back to wiping down the Formica counter where others were eating and swapping loud unbelievable stories.

  The walls of the Owl Cafe were dotted with posters, framed photographs of White Sands experimental missile launches, along with official-looking certificates of participation in Nuclear Emergency Search Team exercises. Photographic prints of mushroom clouds from desert detonations hung framed on the paneled walls, while smaller reprints were available for sale in the small glass display case near the old cash register…as were glassy jade-green rocks—Trinitite.

  “I’d like to look around, Mulder,” Scully said. “Might be some interesting stuff here.”

  “Let me just grab us a seat,” he said, “and I’ll order for us.”

  “I don’t know if I should trust you to do that,” she said.

  He waved good-naturedly at her. “Have I ever been wrong?” He disappeared deeper into the dim labyrinth of Naugahyde booths before she could give him an honest answer.

  She waited by the display case beneath the cash register and picked up a small mimeographed brochure showing a grainy photo of the Owl Cafe. The poorly written text described the restaurant’s claims to fame. She scanned the words, refreshing her memory—and it all came back to her from when she had obsessively studied the Cold War and the arms race and the beginnings of the U.S. nuclear program.

  In the days before air-conditioned cars, the Owl Cafe had been an unofficial stopping place for Manhattan Project scientists and engineers during their frequent long drives from the northern mountains at Los Alamos down to the Trinity Test Site. They had no interstate highways, only state roads, and the trip must have been gruesome in the heat of summer in 1945.

  Technically, the crews were not allowed to stop along the way. They were ordered by the military to drive straight through. But the Owl Cafe, isolated at a desert crossroads out in the middle of nowhere, was ideal for the small automobile convoys to stop at before heading east into even more murderous terrain. The crew couldn’t help but want lunch or a cold drink before heading out to the restricted land area the government had set aside for the first atomic bomb blast.

  The big Navajo saw Scully standing by the display case and came over, speaking in a rich deep voice. “What can I get for you?”

  Startled, Scully looked down and pointed to the selection of small rocks. “I’d like one of those pieces of Trinitite, please.”

  “That five-dollar one?” Without another word the broad-shouldered man pulled out a little key and opened the rear of the display case, removing one of the smallish rocks. After a pause, he set it back down on the shelf, selecting a larger sample instead. “Here, take this one,” he said. “They’re all overpriced anyway.”

  Scully took the glassy lump and squeezed it in the palm of her hand, trying to imagine the hellish fury that had created it—not any geologic process deep in the core of the earth, but a man-made inferno that had lasted only a few seconds. The stone was cool and slick on her palm; any tingle she felt came strictly from her imagination.

  Scully paid for the rock and wandered over to the other exhibits.

  An old bottle collection covered half of one wall. Brown glass, green glass, clear glass, even a few bright blue bottles, were all on display without identifying tags—except for a single typewritten sheet of paper, yellowed with age, tacked to the wall.

  The bottle collection had been there since before World War II, the prized possession of another old Navajo who had originally owned the Owl Cafe. The former owner knew nothing of the secret nuclear project or the impending test, although he couldn’t help but notice the official government vehicles, military brass, and the suit-and-tie engineers who could never disguise themselves as local ranchers or reservation Navajos.

  In fact, Scully thought, the Manhattan Project engineers must have looked as out of place as she and Mulder did this afternoon. She continued reading.

  Several days before the actual test explosion in July 1945, one of the engineers, a regular—if unofficial—customer at the Owl Cafe, had tipped off the old owner. He gave no classified details, said only that it might be wise to take down the fragile bottles for a few days. The skeptical Navajo owner had complied…and thus the bottle collection had been saved when the Trinity blast had rattled walls as far away as Silver City and Gallup, nearly two hundred miles distant. The name of the considerate Manhattan Project engineer was not mentioned, no doubt to keep the man from getting into trouble.

  Taking her Trinitite souvenir, Scully wandered back into the dining room in search of Mulder. He was slumped back comfortably on the Naugahyde seat as he reread the fax he had received out at the White Sands testing range. He sipped iced tea from a red plastic cup.

  Scully slid into the padded seat across from him and saw that he had ordered her an ice tea as well. She set the lump of glassy rock on the Formica table in front of him. He picked it up, turning it over in his hand with curiosity.

  “You once called me a sucker for buying souvenirs at a tourist-trap cafe like this one.”

  “This is different,” she said.

  “Of course.” He gave her a wry smile.

  “It is. That’s Trinitite,” she said, “the stuff I was telling you about.”

  He studied it under the dim light cast by a flickering Coors sign. “Looks just like the stuff out at the death site.”

  She nodded.

  The waitress interrupted by bringing their meals. She gave each of them a basket of sizzling french fries and an enormous burger so juicy it had to be wrapped in paper to catch the grease.

  “You’re gonna love this, Scully,” he said. “The house specialty, a green chili cheeseburger.” Mulder held his up, took a big bite, and spoke around a dripping mouthful. “Delicious! They grind their own meat here, and the green chilis really enhance the flavor. You can’t get this stuff in Washington, D.C.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to,” Scully said, picking up her own huge burger. She inspected it to determine the best method of attack, making sure she had plenty of napkins within easy reach. Despite her skepticism, though, she found the meal absolutely delicious, the bite of green chilis unlike anything she had ever expected.

  “So, Scully,” he said, finally getting down to business, “let’s see what we can come up with. We now have two bodies—three, if you count the horse—killed by a sudden flash of heat like a miniature atomic explosion. One in an isolated weapons lab office, and another out here in the middle of the desert.”

  Scully held up one finger, saw that some ketchup had run down to her knuckle, and plucked up a napkin to wipe it clean. “The laboratory death site was being used by a nuclear weapons researcher developing a secret and intense new atomic device, and the second death occurred out in the White Sands Missile Range, where the military might be expected to test such a device. Could be a connection.”


  “Ah,” Mulder pointed out, “but Dr. Gregory’s office was not an engineering and experimental lab. In fact, it wasn’t much more than a room full of computers. You wouldn’t find a nuclear warhead stashed in his file cabinet drawer. And, if the military intended to test this Bright Anvil device, why do it out at White Sands? The government already has a perfect nuclear testing site in Nevada. It’s official and everything, with all the security they could ask for. Besides, did you get the impression that the colonel at White Sands expected this?”

  Scully had to admit he was right. “No, he didn’t seem at all prepared to deal with the situation.”

  Mulder wiped his mouth with napkin. “I think we should look for a broader connection—and it might not have anything at all to do with Bright Anvil.”

  “If not Bright Anvil, then what do you have in mind?”

  Mulder finished the last bite of his cheeseburger, then set to work on his remaining fries. “Emil Gregory and Oscar McCarron had a few obscure connections dating all the way back to World War II. Oscar McCarron was an old rancher who had probably never set foot out of New Mexico in his entire life. Dr. Gregory was also from New Mexico. He worked on the Manhattan Project more than fifty years ago, then spent time at Los Alamos before coming to the San Francisco area to work for the Teller Nuclear Research Facility.”

  “So what are you suggesting, Mulder?”

  He shrugged. “It’s only a shot in the dark, and I’m not sure I’ve come up with anything yet. Just thinking that maybe we should use our imaginations a little, consider alternative possibilities. What else could those two men have in common? We know Gregory worked on the Trinity Test, and McCarron’s family owned the land where the test took place.”

  Scully picked up a french fry and ate it quickly. “Mulder, sometimes your imagination is far too active.”

  He pointed to himself, miming Moi? “And how often are my alternative solutions proven to be correct, Scully?”

  Scully ate another fry. “That all depends on who you ask.”

  Mulder sighed. “Scully, you’re an impossible skeptic sometimes—but I like you anyway.”

  She rewarded him with a smile. “Somebody’s got to keep you in line.”

  Wiping his hands on another napkin, Mulder pulled out their map of New Mexico. “I wonder how far Roswell is from here?” he said. “It might be worth a side trip.”

  “Absolutely not,” Scully said. “We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  He looked at her with a Gotcha! expression to show that he hadn’t been serious. “Just thought I’d ask.”

  FIFTEEN

  Kamida Imports, Honolulu, Hawaii

  Friday, 2:04 P.M.

  Sitting at his impeccably neat and carefully arranged desk in the high-rise office building, four floors of which were devoted to his own imports company, Ryan Kamida carefully addressed a padded envelope.

  His calligraphic pen moved in precise strokes, and the letters came out perfectly, the wet black ink like scorched blood.

  Expansive windows covered two walls of his corner office, offering a panoramic view of Oahu. But Kamida kept the mini-blinds half-closed most of the time. He dearly loved feeling the gentle warmth of the sun, letting its heat bathe his scarred skin, soothing, caressing his body, as it had in the barely remembered idyllic days on an isolated Pacific island.

  But too much bright sunshine felt like fire to him. It reminded him of that other blaze from the sky, the searing flash so intense that it had set the air molecules themselves on fire.

  Kamida’s snow-white hair lay neatly on his head, thick and perfectly maintained. Because of the almost supernatural good fortune he had experienced during his adult life, Kamida had plenty of money for things like that: clothes, grooming, possessions.

  But his money couldn’t buy everything. He didn’t want everything.

  His lumpy, wax-textured hands gripped the polished pen as if it were a weapon—and in a sense, it was. The words resounded in his head. He filled out the address in a careful, perfect script, feeling for the right spot on the padded envelope. He could sense the accuracy of his letters.

  Satisfied, Kamida rested the pen in the familiar groove on his desk next to the ink reservoir. Then he reached out to hold the special envelope, feeling its edges, the sharp corners. He took it on faith that he had filled out the address correctly. He would never ask anyone else to double-check it, though he could not see it himself.

  Ryan Kamida was completely blind.

  The list in his mind grew shorter and shorter with each package sent, each target identified. Kamida had the names of those responsible etched clearly in his well-honed memory.

  As he sat at his desk with the warm Hawaiian sun suffusing around him through the mini-blinds, letting him feel its kind touch, he felt very alone—though he knew he had asked for this. He had sent all the workers on this floor home for the afternoon. They had objected, pointing out the work they had to do, shipping records, finders’ fees, sales commissions. Kamida simply offered them time-and-a-half pay, and they went home satisfied. They were well accustomed to his eccentricities.

  He now had the offices to himself to do his important work.

  No doubt to assuage its unacknowledged pangs of guilt, the government had assisted Ryan Kamida through the years, sometimes offering veiled handouts, at other times blatantly approving his bids and choosing him over his competitors. He was a handicapped businessman, an ethnic minority—though here in Hawaii being a Pacific Islander was hardly remarkable. Between the Japanese tourists and the Pacific Islanders who made their homes here, middle-class Caucasian families were the true minorities.

  Kamida had used every resource at his disposal to help his company succeed. His business specialized in exotic imports from little-known Pacific islands—Elugelab, Truk, Johnston Atoll, the entire Marshall chain—impressing tourists with trinkets that came from faraway places with interesting names.

  He needed the money to accomplish his true mission.

  Kamida fingered the envelope, stuffed the handwritten note and a small glass vial inside, then sealed it. That simple act of closure brought a shudder of relief to him, but it lasted only a moment.

  No matter how many such packages he sent, no matter how many of the guilty he identified, he could never make up for the loss of his people. It had been a completely successful genocide, more thorough than anything Adolf Hitler had accomplished. In a single stroke Ryan Kamida’s family, his relatives, his tribe…his island had vanished in a surge of light and flames. A small boy was the sole survivor.

  But Kamida did not consider his survival to be either a miracle or a blessing. He had been given an entire lifetime to endure the memory of those few seconds, while for all the others it had been over in an instant.

  Or so he had thought.

  The voices in his head had not stopped screaming since that day when he was ten years old.

  Setting the envelope aside, Kamida sniffed the stuffy air in his office. He tilted his burned face and blank white eyes toward the ceiling. He couldn’t see, but he could feel, could sense the gathering storm.

  A seething sea of white-hot luminescence boiled in a suspended pool against the acoustic tiles, like froth in a pot, swirling with spectral screaming faces. Though blind, he knew they were there. They wouldn’t leave him alone.

  The ghosts of his incinerated people grew more and more restless. They would strike out at their own targets if he refused to offer them a victim of his own choosing. The ghosts had waited so long, and Ryan Kamida could no longer keep them under control.

  Walking with the grace and confidence of a sighted man through the familiar offices, he picked up the hand-addressed envelope and left his room, taking it to the mail drop, from which the package would be rushed to an airplane and shipped to the United States. He deemed the expense of overnight mail delivery across the Pacific insignificant. The envelope would be delivered to a particular low-profile but very important official at the Department of Energy he
adquarters near Washington, D.C.

  It was probably already too late to stop Bright Anvil, Kamida supposed, but perhaps this would be enough to prevent the nightmare from occurring again.

  SIXTEEN

  Teller Nuclear Research Facility

  Monday, 10:16 A.M.

  After an uneventful weekend—for once—Mulder drove back to the Teller Nuclear Research Facility, whistling “California Dreaming.” Scully pretended to heave a long-suffering sigh, as if to say that since he was her partner, she would put up with his odd sense of humor. Mulder smiled at her in appreciation of her tolerance.

  The condition of the old rancher’s body at the Trinity Site had been so unmistakably similar to that of Dr. Emil Gregory that Scully couldn’t discount some sort of connection. But they had come back to the San Francisco-area nuclear weapons laboratory with more questions than before.

  They stopped at the guard gate, flashing visitor’s badges and FBI credentials. They needed to talk to the rest of Dr. Gregory’s Bright Anvil team—deputy project head Bear Dooley and the other researchers and engineers. Scully still insisted there must be some technical explanation for the deaths, a test of a small yet powerful nuclear device, something that had backfired on Dr. Gregory, something that had been tested out in New Mexico.

  That didn’t ring true, though, to Mulder. He thought there must be some reason they hadn’t considered yet, though Scully would hold onto her explanations until she found a better, more logical one.

  After they passed through the guard gate, Mulder reached over to unfold the map of the Teller Facility. He traced the access roads with his finger to find the main lab building where Dr. Gregory had died and the temporary barracks offices to which Bear Dooley and the other team members had been relocated.

  “Now that you’ve found out some details about Bright Anvil through, uh…” Mulder raised his eyebrows, “shall we say, ‘unofficial means,’ let’s see what Mr. Dooley has to say for himself. Solid information is our best weapon.”