Ground Zero

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Fine,” Dooley said, his hair and beard whipping around his face. “But I didn’t ask if you checked it. I said I want to see for myself. I’d like a hands-on inspection, all right?”

  “We need you here, Bear,” Victor said, as if the storm and the impending test had brought him to the verge of panic.

  “No you don’t, dammit!” Dooley said. “I’ve got enough trouble babysitting this FBI agent. Can’t I trust my own people to do their jobs?”

  Victor looked stung, and Bear softened his voice. “Don’t worry, Victor. I won’t mess with the diagnostics, and you can handle the control blockhouse just fine by yourself. I’ll be back in an hour or so. Agent Mulder and I have to get over there and back before full dark—and that’ll be any time now, thanks to the typhoon.”

  Mulder followed Dooley over to a tarp-covered Jeep sitting in the open, but sheltered from the wind by the tan igloo of the blockhouse. Dooley yanked off the thick tarp and tossed it inside a storage shed. He swung into the driver’s seat in a manner that reminded Mulder of a burly cowboy climbing onto a faithful horse.

  The bearded engineer looked Mulder over as he settled into the passenger seat. Dooley looked warm and comfortable in his denim jacket and flannel shirt. Mulder would have thought the outfit completely inappropriate for a jungle-covered Pacific atoll, but the angry storm had sent a twisted chill through the air. “That fancy suit jacket of yours is going to get wet when the rain starts coming in hard,” Dooley said.

  Mulder brushed his hands down the fabric of his jacket and loosened his tie. “I’ve got some nice Hawaiian shirts in my suitcase on the ship, but I never got a chance to change.”

  Dooley pushed the starter button on the Jeep and roared off. The vehicle jounced along the rough dirt road through the jungle, rocking and twisting like a carnival ride with every rut and root it struck.

  Mulder held on, unable to talk because his teeth clicked together every time he opened his mouth. Dooley gripped the steering wheel and kept driving. Watching the road ahead, Mulder finally shouted over the roar of the Jeep and the loud sigh of the wind.

  Before long the jungle opened up, and Mulder could see the sprawling ocean again. Large swells rose and fell, creating a dizzying optical illusion, as if the landscape were on some sort of drunken turntable. In a shallow, semicircular lagoon eaten into the storm side of the atoll, rugged reefs sheltered the water from incoming waves. On a raft in the middle of the shallow pool Mulder saw a strange high-tech construction, like a Rube Goldberg machine, or something out of a Dr. Seuss book.

  “There’s the Bright Anvil device,” Bear Dooley said. “Never been anything like it. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  It looked to Mulder as if an alien ship had crash-landed there. He decided that the most tactful thing would be to grunt noncommittally.

  “See those supports, where it’s suspended on the raft? We could have done the detonation underwater, but this way it’s easier to hook up the diagnostics.”

  Long metal pipes and tubes stretched out like spiderwebs into the jungle alongside the rutted road. Substations sat at intersections of the conduits. Dooley pointed to them. “Those are light pipes, carrying optical fibers for our diagnostics. They’ll be vaporized in the first second of the blast, but the data pulse will be about a millisecond ahead of the shockwave, so our information will manage to outrun the destruction. We’ll get some good signals before the whole thing disintegrates, then some sexy analysis codes on the computers back in the blockhouse will crunch the numbers until they’re meaningful. We’ve also got cameras mounted all around the jungle. No telling how many of them will survive both the blast and the typhoon, but the photos should be spectacular.”

  “A real Kodak moment,” Mulder said.

  “You bet.”

  Mulder stared at the contraption. “So you think nobody’s going to notice your atomic blast because any destruction will be attributed to the storm? As I understand it, some of the H-bomb explosions literally erased small islands.”

  Dooley gestured with his hand, as if brushing aside Mulder’s comment. “Yeah, but those were big mothers. Bright Anvil isn’t nearly so large. In fact, its yield is only about the same as the Nagasaki bomb—really dinky, as far as warheads go.”

  Mulder thought about the two Japanese cities obliterated by the atomic bombs in World War II and silently questioned Bear Dooley’s use of the word “dinky.”

  “Shoot,” Dooley said, “today’s ICBMs in their silos contain fifty or a hundred Nagasaki bombs in every single missile—multiple warheads that target independently. Sure, Fat Man and Little Boy were hefty for their time, back in the Jurassic Age, but that’s nothing compared to what we can do now.”

  A splatter of warm rain rushed across the windshield. Mulder shielded his eyes to stare out at the rickety-looking structure on the raft. “Is there really a demand for small-yield nuclear weapons. For shoppers on a tight budget?”

  Bear Dooley shook his head. “You’re missing the point. Bright Anvil is fallout free, man! Some weird technology that Dr. Gregory thought of, burns up all the dangerous daughter products in prompt secondary reactions. I have no idea where he came up with the scheme, but it removes the big political stigma of using a nuclear weapon. Bright Anvil finally makes nuclear weapons usable, not just bluff cards.”

  Mulder looked over at him. “And that’s a good thing?”

  “Look, you don’t want to drop a bomb on a city if it’s going to take half a century before the radiation dies away. You’ll get cancer deaths for decades and decades after the peace treaty is signed, and then what have you got?” He grinned and held up a finger. “With Bright Anvil, though, you can flatten an enemy city, then move in afterward, set up your headquarters, and reclaim territory. You can begin reparations immediately. It’s sort of the opposite of the neutron bomb—remember that one? All lethal radiation and little blast damage.”

  “I thought the neutron bomb got canceled because of the bad PR, that it was strictly designed to slaughter civilians.”

  Dooley shrugged. “Hey, I try to stay away from the politics of it all. I just do the physics. That’s my part in it.”

  Mulder pressed him. “So…you created Bright Anvil, a nuclear weapon that our government can use during a conflict, without worrying about the consequences—and you’re not concerned with the politics?”

  Dooley didn’t answer. He got out of the Jeep, leaving the engine running as he checked the connections on the light pipes, pushed testing buttons at the substations to make sure all LEDs on the instrument panels winked green. He was clearly not interested in the moral implications, but he seemed to sense Mulder staring quietly at him. After he had finished tinkering with the diagnostic sensors, he stood up, slowly facing into the wind as he looked back.

  “Okay, Agent Mulder, I admit I think about it. I think about it a lot—but the fact is I’m not responsible. Don’t go lecturing me.”

  “A convenient excuse, don’t you think?” Mulder said. He was provoking the researcher intentionally, curious to see what Bear Dooley might let slip if he got riled enough.

  Dooley seemed oddly calm, intense but not furious. “I read the newspapers. I watch CNN. I’m a reasonably intelligent man—but I don’t pretend to know how other governments are going to react, how foreign policy might be made in some other country that’s as alien to me as Mars. I’m a physicist and an engineer—and I’m damn good at it. I understand how to make these devices work. That’s what I do. If somebody decides that’s a good thing, they fund me, and then I do my job. I leave it to foreign policy experts to make the best use of what I make.”

  “Okay, okay,” Mulder said. “So if you’ve created this new type of warhead, and somebody uses it to, say, wipe out a city in Bosnia, you wouldn’t feel the least bit guilty about all those civilian deaths?”

  Dooley scratched the white streak in his beard. “Agent Mulder, is Henry Ford responsible for the deaths caused by automobile accidents? Is a gun manufacturer responsible for
the people killed in convenience-store robberies? My team has created a tool for our government to use, a resource for our foreign policy experts to do their jobs.

  “If some nutcase like Saddam Hussein or Moammar Khadaffi wants to lob their own home-made uranium bomb at New Jersey, I want to make sure that our country has the means either to defend itself or to strike back. They are the policymakers. It’s their job to see that the tools get used wisely. I have no more business dictating this country’s foreign policy than—than a politician has coming into my laboratory and telling me how to run my experiments. That’s ridiculous, don’t you think?”

  “It’s one way to look at it,” Mulder said.

  “The plain fact is none of us researchers knows enough about it,” Dooley continued. “If we went messing with things we don’t understand, following our consciences based on sketchy information, we could end up like…like Miriel Bremen, a rabid protester who doesn’t understand who’s pulling the strings and why people make the decisions that they do. And I guarantee you, man, Miriel Bremen isn’t any more qualified to run U.S. foreign policy than I am.”

  Bear Dooley was on a roll, and Mulder listened with fascination, not even needing to prompt him. Dooley looked down at his big hands.

  “I used to like her, you know. Miriel’s a good researcher. Always came up with innovative solutions when Emil Gregory ran into a problem. But then she thought too much about things that weren’t in her job description—and now look at where she is. Bright Anvil has suffered quite a few setbacks, with Miriel leaving the project and Dr. Gregory being killed. I am not about to let Bright Anvil fail now after all this work, all those careers.” Dooley pointed a large finger at the device out on its raft. “That is my responsibility, out there. I’ve got to see that it works.”

  Dooley finished checking the equipment, rubbed his hands hard against his jeans to remove the worst of the dust and grime, and climbed back into the Jeep. “Now, this has been a fine debate, Agent Mulder—but the countdown is ticking even as we speak, and I’ve got a lot of work to do.

  “Bright Anvil is set to go off at 5:15 A.M. tomorrow. Kind of like the Trinity Test, you know? That one was delayed by a storm that whipped up in the middle of the night out in New Mexico. But here we’re counting on the storm.”

  He tromped his booted foot down on the accelerator, and the Jeep sprayed a rooster tail of sand as they spun around and accelerated back toward the control blockhouse.

  Mulder glanced at his watch. Only ten hours remained.

  THIRTY-ONE

  USS Dallas

  Friday, 8:09 P.M.

  In the full darkness of early night, the roiling ocean had a greasy cast. No moonlight penetrated the barrier of clouds high above. The wind whistled with a cold metallic tang.

  Scully shivered as she held the deck rail of the Dallas, gray-painted ropes cross-woven to look like a chain-link fence. She watched the recovery operations on the Lucky Dragon as seamen swarmed aboard the rescued fishing boat. A team of strong young sailors, wet with spray and perspiration, assisted the three fishermen, the scarred blind man, and Miriel Bremen as they reached the relative safety aboard the destroyer.

  Captain Ives stared in stunned amazement at the blind passenger, unable to tear his gaze from the blistered scars on the man’s face, the blank look in the refugee’s dead eye sockets as he worked his way up the rattling ladder. The blind man reached the deck, seemingly impervious to the gathering hurricane-force winds. He slowly turned and faced Ives, exactly as if he knew the captain was staring at him. A faint smile rippled across his scarred face.

  Scully watched the silent encounter curiously, but then turned her attention to Miriel Bremen as the protester came aboard the Dallas. For some odd reason Scully felt betrayed, that Miriel had led her along. Scully’s stomach tightened with a sinking feeling, and she wondered just what the other woman might have been up to.

  Miriel hadn’t noticed her yet, and Scully spoke sharply into the sound of the wind and waves, “You don’t expect us to believe this is a complete coincidence, do you, Ms. Bremen?”

  Surprised, Miriel Bremen turned toward the voice. Then her long-chinned face compressed with sour anger. “So, Agent Scully—it looks like you knew more about Bright Anvil all along. What a sucker I am. You were playing me for a patsy, seeing how much I would tell you.”

  Scully was taken aback. “That’s not true at all. I—”

  Miriel just scowled and pushed her glasses more firmly onto her face as the wind whipped her mousy brown hair. “I should have known better than to believe an FBI agent.”

  Captain Ives stood next to Scully, looking at Miriel’s bedraggled form. “You know this person?”

  “Yes, Captain. She’s a radical antinuclear protester from Berkeley. She was near the scene of the murder of Dr. Emil Gregory, who was originally in charge of the Bright Anvil project.”

  Captain Ives narrowed his gaze, his eyebrows clenched together as his forehead furrowed. “You chose a convenient place for a pleasure cruise.”

  Scully frowned again. “And you can bet they selected the name of their vessel quite specifically. The Lucky Dragon—that was no accident. Even if they couldn’t be sure somebody would recognize it, they must have thought it an amusing joke.”

  Ives gestured for several of the crewmen to come over. “Take them all below to one of the empty staterooms each. Get their names and make sure they’re comfortable, but don’t let them cause any trouble. Things might not be exactly what they seem.”

  He turned sideways to glance at the blind stranger again. The other man stood rigid, with that faint, contented smile on his scarred face. “We’ll contact Mr. Dooley and ask his opinion on the subject.”

  “I think he might be surprised to hear he has more visitors,” Scully said. “Especially these.”

  “Probably,” Ives said.

  The three fishermen seemed delighted and relieved to be aboard the large and stable Navy destroyer, while Miriel and the blind man seemed to consider themselves prisoners of war. Miriel walked proudly between the sailors as they escorted her to shelter belowdecks.

  One of the sailors called up from the deck of the Lucky Dragon. “Captain Ives? Sir, I think you should come down here. We found some interesting items on board that you may wish to inspect.”

  “Very well,” Ives answered. “Coming down.”

  “I’d like to go with you, Captain,” Scully said.

  “By all means,” Ives answered. “You seem to know as many scattered details of these circumstances as I do. It just gets weirder and weirder.”

  “Unfortunately, none of us has the whole picture,” Scully said.

  They lowered themselves over the side and climbed down the slick metal ladder to the deck of the fishing boat lashed to the Dallas. Scully gripped the rungs against unpredictable gusts of wind from the storm.

  Below, the Lucky Dragon pitched and rocked, though the large destroyer blocked the worst of the waves. From what Scully could tell, the fishing boat did not appear damaged: its equipment seemed intact, its deck and its hull unscarred—but then she didn’t know enough about small marine craft to be a good judge of its seaworthiness.

  One crewman came forward to meet Captain Ives and Scully; he rapidly began pointing out some of the anomalies they had found on the Lucky Dragon. “All systems appear operational, sir,” the young sailor said, raising his voice over the roar of the ocean. “No damage that I can see, nothing that should have caused them to send out such an urgent distress call. This ship wasn’t in any trouble.”

  “Maybe they were just spooked by the storm,” Ives said.

  Scully shook her head quickly. “I don’t believe they were in distress at all,” she said. “They wanted us to go out and pick them up. It was the only way they could be certain of getting to the Bright Anvil test site.”

  Captain Ives worked his jaw and ran his hand over his mustache, but said nothing.

  Another sailor popped his head out from belowdecks. “Very
unusual hull construction, sir,” he said. “I’ve never seen a small craft designed like this. She’s practically armored. I’ll bet there’s never been a stronger ship this size built.”

  “Specially constructed,” Scully muttered. “I wonder if they were planning to take it into a hurricane?”

  “Typhoon,” Captain Ives corrected.

  “A big storm,” Scully said. “You’d need a special design if that was the purpose of your boat.”

  “But it’s a fishing boat,” the seaman standing next to them said.

  “It’s supposed to look like a fishing boat,” Scully said.

  Ives shook his head. “Look at this equipment, the nets—all brand new. Those nets have never even been dropped into water. They’re all props…just for show. I think you’re right, Agent Scully—something goes deeper here.”

  Another sailor emerged from the rear cargo compartment. “No fish down here, sir. No cargo at all, just a few supplies and one storage barrel.”

  “Storage barrel,” Ives said. “What’s in it?”

  “I thought you might want to take the top off yourself, sir. Just in case it turns out to be something important.”

  He and Scully descended into the shelter under the deck, to where a single drum had been chained to the hull wall. Seeing it, Scully’s mind raced, thinking of Miriel Bremen and her radical protest activities, the suspicion of her involvement in Dr. Gregory’s death—and her arrival out here, which was almost certainly to sabotage the Bright Anvil test. Miriel would take whatever measures she deemed necessary….

  Ives took a screwdriver from the sailor and began prying up the top of the barrel. Scully looked again at the drum and suddenly cried out. “Wait! It might be a bomb!”

  But Ives had already popped the lid off. He froze, as if expecting to be blasted. When nothing happened, he raised the metal lid higher.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just powdery dirt. Black ash of some kind.”

  Scully’s heart was pounding as she approached the barrel. One of the crewmen gave her a flashlight, which she shone down into the barrel, illuminating the glittering, powdery black residue. The barrel was nearly two-thirds full of it.