Ground Zero

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Your message told me that much,” she said. “But what for?”

  “We’ve got a pair of front row seats at the Bright Anvil test. I asked for season tickets to the New York Knicks, but this was the best they could do.”

  She blinked her blue eyes in astonishment. “The test? How did you manage that? I thought—”

  “Connections in certain high places,” he said. “One very frightened brigadier general who was willing to go out on a limb for us. I picked up some Chinese carry-out for a quick dinner before we head to the airport.” He indicated the extra paper plate. “I got an order of kung-pao chicken—your favorite.”

  Scully set her duffel bag on an empty chair and looked at him curiously. “Mulder, I don’t recall that we’ve ever gone out for Chinese food together. How would you know what my favorite meal is?”

  He favored her with a reproachful look. “Now what kind of FBI agent would I be if I couldn’t find out a simple thing like that?”

  She pulled up a chair at the small dining room table and scooped out some of the chicken chunks laden with red Szechuan peppers. Taking an appreciative whiff of the aromatic spices, she snagged the extra pair of disposable chopsticks next to the napkins.

  Mulder came out of the bedroom, lugging his packed suitcase. He secured the locks, then placed his briefcase on top of it. “I think I told you once, Scully, that if you stuck with me I’d show you exciting lands and exotic places.”

  Scully shot him a wry look. “You mean like an island about to be flattened by a secret nuclear weapons test?”

  Mulder placed his hands in front of him. “I was thinking more of coral reefs, blue lagoons, the warm Pacific sun.”

  “I thought it was hurricane season out there,” she said. “That’s what Bear Dooley and the Bright Anvil scientists kept studying on their weather maps.”

  Mulder sat across from her to eat his food, lukewarm by now. “I’m trying to be optimistic,” he said. “Besides General Bradoukis said something about us going on a ‘three-hour tour.’”

  Scully finished her meal and checked her watch. She reached inside her jacket to pull out the two airplane tickets. “I picked these up from the Bureau travel office on my way over, as you requested,” she said. “Our plane leaves Dulles in about ninety minutes.”

  Mulder tossed their plates in the wastepaper basket, looked at the remains of the Chinese food in the white boxes, and without a thought dumped the remnants of all three dishes together into a single container. Scully watched him in astonishment. “It’s good for breakfast that way,” he said. “Add a few scrambled eggs—delicious.” He placed the container in the refrigerator.

  Scully picked up her duffel. “Sometimes you really are spooky, Mulder.”

  After switching off the television—the giant ants had been superseded by a gargantuan tarantula out in the Mojave Desert—he followed her out.

  He noticed that the metal “2” of the “42” on his apartment number had fallen off again onto the floor. “Just a second, Scully,” he said, picking up the number.

  He ran back in to the junk drawer in his kitchen, where he pulled out a screwdriver. “This number keeps coming off. Very suspicious, don’t you think?” He checked it for listening devices on the inside, rubbing his finger along the curve of the thin metal. At one time he’d been certain someone was spying on him, so he had removed every detachable thing in his apartment including the numbers on his door. Now the “2” refused to stay where it belonged.

  “Mulder, you’re paranoid,” Scully said with wry amusement.

  “Only because everybody’s out to get me,” he said.

  After reassuring himself that the metal number was clean, he used a spare set of screws to attach it tightly to the door. “Okay. Now we can go. I hope you brought your suntan lotion.”

  She shouldered her duffel. “Yeah, and my lead umbrella for the radioactive fallout.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Enika Atoll, Marshall Islands,

  Western Pacific,

  Wednesday (across the International Date Line),

  11:01 A.M.

  The atoll had recovered remarkably well in forty years. The low, flat island, little more than a massive coral reef with a shallow dusting of topsoil, was once again burgeoning with lush tropical vegetation, breadfruit and coconut palms, vines, ferns, tall grasses, and low taro plants and yams. The reefs and lagoons swarmed with fish; birds and butterflies thronged in the foliage above.

  When Captain Robert Ives had left here four decades earlier, he had been a young seaman recruit who had barely learned to shut up and do as he was told. The spectacular Sawtooth nuclear test had been the most awe-inspiring sight his slate-gray eyes had ever witnessed. It had reduced Enika Atoll to a hot, blasted scab, its entire surface sterilized, its coral outcroppings sheared off in the boiling froth of the sea, vegetation crisped, wildlife exterminated.

  The intricate network of reefs extended far past the portion of the atoll that actually rose above the surface, in many places lurking only a few feet beneath the water. With amazing recuperative powers, Nature had reclaimed the territory that humans had so swiftly and violently snatched away. Once again, Enika Atoll looked like an isolated island paradise, pristine and uninhabited.

  At least Captain Ives hoped it was uninhabited this time.

  On the shore of the atoll, sheltered behind the rugged coral rocks that formed the highest point of the island, Bear Dooley and his team of researchers used sailors and Navy engineers to help make preparations for their secret test.

  A small landing strip had been cleared along a straight stretch of beach. Bulldozers, off-loaded from the Dallas, plowed through the jungle, scratching narrow access roads from the sheltered control bunker to the lagoon on the far side of the atoll, where the Bright Anvil device would be set up and detonated.

  Trapped aboard drab gray ships for so much of their tours of duty, the Navy engineers enjoyed the work, riding heavy machinery and knocking down palms and breadfruit trees, leaving naked paths of churned-up coral dirt like raw wounds on the island.

  They needed to construct a bunker to house the controls that would run the small warhead detonation. Because the control bunker would be so close to the detonation, it had to be incredibly sturdy. Captain Ives instructed his engineers in an old trick.

  After laying down electrical troughs and pathways to a backup generator in a shielded substation next to the blockhouse, the engineers stacked bags of concrete mix and sand around and around a bowed wooden frame in a shrinking circle, creating a structure that looked like an igloo or beehive. Then, with pumps hooked up to clunky ship firehoses thrust into the ocean, the engineers sprayed the outside of the structure, soaking the sand and concrete mixture. After a day or two of hardening in the warm Pacific sunshine, the bunker would be virtually indestructible.

  NASA engineers had used the same technique at Cape Canaveral to erect protective bunkers for control systems and observers close to the early rocket launchpads. Such bunkers had withstood the explosive stresses inflicted upon them—and in fact had survived so well that the Corps of Engineers had abandoned the old structures in place out in the Florida swamps because they could think of no way to demolish them!

  As the sandbags dried against the reinforced parabolic frames that held them in place, Bear Dooley supervised the installation of his test equipment inside. The broad-shouldered deputy project leader helped install the control racks that had been carefully crated and stored down in the Navy destroyer’s hold. He was willing to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty to speed up the work.

  The bearlike man sweated in the tropical heat, but he refused to wear cooler clothes, treating his flannel shirt and denim pants as required dress. Dooley listened in on the shortwave radio to regular weather updates for the Marshall Islands. Every time the announcement tracked the approaching tropical depression, now nearly a full-fledged hurricane, he grew ecstatic.

  “It’s coming,” Dooley had said to Ives the las
t time he received such news. “And we’ve got a lot of work to do. Timing is crucial.”

  Ives let the man have his way. He had his orders, after all.

  He didn’t think Bear Dooley was even aware of the previous H-bomb test that had taken place in this same area. Dooley didn’t seem the type of man who wasted time studying history or worrying where things came from.

  For the rest of his life, though, Robert Ives would be haunted by the knowledge that they had made a horrendous, tragic mistake here at Enika Atoll.

  By now Ives had seen the Bikini Islanders repatriated, after the government had stripped the topsoil from their blasted island and replaced it with fresh dirt, replanted the jungles, restocked the lagoons.

  The mysterious islanders on Enika, though, had not enjoyed such solicitous treatment.

  Sawtooth had been one of the first H-bomb tests, kept quiet at the time, just in case the device failed. During those Cold War years the U.S. couldn’t afford to let anyone see that its thermonuclear devices didn’t function well enough to keep the Commies awake at night.

  But Sawtooth had worked—spectacularly well.

  It was in the days before spy satellites, and the perimeter of the atoll had been ringed with gunboats, calmly confident that they wouldn’t be seen. These waters were infrequently traveled, and the captains of the cutters had instructions to chase off any fishing boats or sightseers. Even so, the anticipated flash of the Sawtooth device was visible for hundreds of miles across the open water, rising like the brief glow of sunrise in the wrong part of the sky at the wrong time of day.

  Everyone had been so naive then. They had assumed that the small, barely charted atoll was uninhabited, and so the scientists and sailors had not looked too hard to find any indigenous islanders.

  The Navy expected to find no one on Enika, and so no one had ever really searched.

  During preparations for the Sawtooth explosion, the engineers and sailors had not bothered to report signs of encampments, tools, nets found washed up on the rough reefs. They dismissed the junk as old artifacts and looked no farther, because they didn’t particularly want to find anything else. Such information might cause problems.

  The perimeter boats had all pulled back and the main destroyer, the USS Yorktown, had moved out to a safe distance beyond the reef line. Those lucky few observers who had been assigned welding glasses stood on deck to see, while the others promised not to open their eyes at the critical point. Still, when the Sawtooth detonation went off, several dozen crewmen suffered from brief flash blindness.

  Ives remembered. Some things were impossible to forget. The roar sounded like the world cracking open, and the mushroom cloud rose like Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone—only about a million times as big—sucking up vaporized coral and sand along with an immense volume of seawater. The incandescent plume towered like an awesome thunderhead heralding Armageddon. The shockwaves slamming through the water caused the Yorktown to rock like a toy boat in a bathtub….

  Several hours later, after it was all over and the sea had grown calm again, initial inspection teams from the Yorktown suited up and took their small cutters back to the atoll to plant radiation counters and to map out the effects of the fallout. A seaplane drifted overhead, taking photographs for before-and-after images to determine how the atoll’s topography had changed.

  Being one of the most junior seamen, Ives had been “volunteered” to be part of a small group on a perimeter cruise around Enika to study any anomalies in the aftermath. What they found proved even more astonishing than the detonation itself.

  Standing out in open water more than two miles from shore was a boy about ten years old. All alone. Just waiting.

  At first young Robert Ives had quailed in terror, thinking that some vengeful angel had come to punish them for what they had done to the pristine island. The boy appeared to be standing right on the surface of the water like a marker buoy, aimless and lost. Only later did the rescuers remember that the low reefs stretched in a labyrinth just beneath the surface far from the actual island. The boy had somehow walked on them, following the submerged reefs away from what had once been his island.

  They hauled him aboard. He was speechless and shaking, horribly burned, his face puckered, his eyes sunken and sightless from the glare of the blast. Most of his hair had been scalded away, and his skin was an angry red, as if he had been boiled alive. The agony of the boy’s burns must have been even greater due to the constant lapping of saltwater that drenched him.

  No one expected him to live when they brought him back to the Yorktown. In fact, the ship’s doctor seemed ambivalent, as if he didn’t want the boy to survive, because he would be blind and hideously scarred for his entire life…and because the very existence of a survivor was an accusing finger, proof that natives had lived on Enika Atoll. An entire tribe had been wiped out in the Sawtooth blast, save for this sole survivor.

  But to everyone’s surprise the boy had recovered, despite his festering injuries. He remained utterly silent for days, and then finally croaked out words in a strange language that none of the crew could understand.

  The data obtained from the Sawtooth test were filed away with the Defense Department, and the Navy placed the entire event under the strictest order of silence.

  When the Yorktown finally docked again at Pearl Harbor, the horribly burned boy was taken quietly to an orphanage in Honolulu. Official records showed that he was the only survivor of a terrible house fire that had killed the rest of his family. Having no other living relatives, the boy was raised as a ward of the state, although he received a generous (and mysterious) allowance from the Navy.

  Ives had never seen or heard of the boy again, and he wondered how the poor victim had managed to fare in life. He had not thought of the boy in some time, but now all those memories had come flooding back with nightmare intensity—ever since Ives received his orders to take the Dallas out to the Marshall Islands.

  Captain Robert Ives had hoped never to see Enika Atoll again. But now he had returned…for yet another secret nuclear test.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Alameda Naval Air Station,

  Alameda, California

  Thursday, 2:22 P.M.

  Mulder and Scully arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area, red-eyed and exhausted from the non-stop travel, knowing they had a much longer trip still in front of them.

  Mulder rented a car, and they drove toward the Alameda Naval Air Station, then spent the better part of an hour at the gates showing their paperwork, answering questions, and finally arguing with a stoic military policeman who made repeated phone calls to his superiors inside.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the MP came back for the third time, “but your story doesn’t check out. We have no C-5 transport plane leaving for Hawaii this afternoon. We have no record of you coming, or of your place on board such a plane, if one existed.”

  Mulder wearily pulled out the paperwork again. “This was signed by Brigadier General Bradoukis, directly from the Pentagon. It’s regarding a classified project out in the Marshall Islands. I know you don’t have the authorization sitting on the top of your desk, because they wouldn’t make it so blatant—but my partner and I are authorized to go on this flight.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but there is no flight,” the MP insisted.

  Mulder heaved an angry sigh, and Scully squeezed his arm to calm him. Before he could speak again, Scully broke in, “Why don’t you talk to your superior again, Sergeant,” she said, “and this time mention two words to him: Bright Anvil. We’ll wait here until you come back.”

  The MP retreated to his guard shack wearing a skeptical expression and shaking his head. Mulder turned to Scully in surprise. She smiled at him. “You rarely accomplish anything by getting angry.”

  Mulder sighed, then forced a chuckle. “Sometimes I wonder if I ever accomplish anything—period.”

  Within minutes, the MP came back and opened the gate for them. He offered no apologies or any explanations whatsoe
ver. He simply handed them a map of the base and directed them where to go.

  “Wasn’t your father stationed here at one time?” Mulder asked. He knew how deeply the death of her father had affected her.

  “Briefly,” Scully said, “around the time I started college at Berkeley.”

  Mulder looked over at her. “I didn’t know you went to Berkeley. As an undergrad?”

  “Just for my first year.”

  “Ah,” he said and waited for her to continue. But Scully seemed uncomfortable about the subject, so he didn’t press her for details.

  Exactly where the guard had directed them, they found the whale-sized C-5 transport. Small hydraulic vehicles hauled cargo, stuffing crates into the swollen, olive-colored belly of the plane. Forklifts raised pallets filled with the final loads of equipment, while civilian passengers and military personnel climbed aboard, using a set of steps that had been hastily rolled up against the plane.

  “See, Scully,” he said, “they have no C-5 transport plane here on the base, and nothing whatsoever is scheduled to depart.” He opened his hands in a helpless gesture. “But then, a tiny aircraft like this must get misplaced all the time.”

  Scully, who had long ago accepted the secrecy and the denials surrounding classified projects, made no rejoinder. Carrying his suitcase and briefcase, Mulder bounded up the metal steps that led up to the aircraft passenger compartment. “I hope we can get ourselves a window seat,” he said. “Nonsmoking.”

  “I think I’ll try to take a nap on the way,” Scully answered.

  Inside the no-frills transport plane, Mulder looked around the sharply shadowed interior, which was lit from behind and below by the open cargo doors. Other passengers—naval officers and enlisted men, as well as half a dozen nonmilitary types—milled about, finding places to sit.

  Mulder saw no baggage compartment, only webbing stretched across the metal wall panels, where others had already secured their personal baggage. He went back to tuck his suitcase into an empty spot, then returned to take Scully’s bag, securing it next to his own. He kept his briefcase with him so that the two of them could look over notes and discuss the case during the long flight to Pearl Harbor; after a brief stopover, they would change to a much smaller plane and head out to the Western Pacific.