Ground Zero

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Miriel became more animated, waving her hands in front of her like captive birds. “But Bright Anvil gives us precise annihilation, clean destruction. It terrifies me to think that the United States may have a brand new warhead it won’t be afraid to use.”

  “Miriel,” Dooley said sharply, cutting off her lecture, “I wouldn’t want anyone but a professional mechanic to try to fix my car. I wouldn’t want anyone but a surgeon to do brain surgery on me—and I wouldn’t want anyone but a well-versed diplomat to make decisions on nuclear policy. I know I’m not a professional diplomat…but neither are you.”

  She frowned at his outburst, but Dooley continued. “It’s the government’s job to use these weapons responsibly,” he said, blinking his eyes rapidly as if grains of sand had gotten in them. “You have to trust the government,” he repeated. “They know what’s best for us.”

  Mulder looked at Scully with his eyebrows raised, an expression of amazement on his face.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Enika Atoll

  Saturday, 4:25 A.M.

  Mulder watched Bear Dooley stride over to the countdown clock bolted to the uneven wall. The bearded engineer squinted, peering at it as if he could barely make out the regularly descending numbers.

  “Fifty minutes,” he said. “Everything still check out? I want a verification on each subsystem.” He looked around, scanning the faces of his team. The technicians all agreed, studying their own stations, checking instrument racks.

  “Good. Countdown’s proceeding without a hitch,” Dooley said to no one in particular, rubbing his hands together as he stated the obvious.

  Just then the heavy door to the blockhouse ripped open with a siren blast of wind. Howling rain pelted in at a nearly horizontal angle, like bullets of water in a shotgun spray. Two bedraggled and shellshocked sailors staggered in, gasping; they worked together to swing the door shut, bolting it into its jamb. They were sopping wet, their uniforms yanked and disarrayed by the violence of the typhoon. In the incandescent light inside the sheltered bunker, their skin had a pasty, grayish appearance, reflecting their deep fear. Even seasoned seamen rarely saw a storm of such incredible magnitude.

  “Okay, everybody’s inside,” one of them shouted, as if he thought the storm would still drown out his words…or perhaps the throbbing gale had partially deafened him.

  “Generator’s functioning properly,” said the other sailor. “It’s sheltered from the rain and wind, and it should hold up even if the typhoon gets worse. The center of the wind wall will be here soon.”

  Dooley nodded, speaking gruffly. “Generator damn well better keep functioning—that power source is running all our diagnostics. If that fails, this whole test will be a bust even if Bright Anvil does go off as planned.”

  “Don’t forget, we’ve got the secondary generator, Bear,” Victor Ogilvy pointed out.

  “I’m sure you’ll get your data,” Miriel Bremen said sourly. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  As if to taunt them, the lightbulbs overhead flickered briefly, then came back on with full strength.

  “What was that?” Dooley said, looking up at the ceiling. “Check it!”

  “Power fluctuation,” Victor answered. “The backup UPS modulated it, though. We’re fine.”

  Dooley strutted around like a tiger in a cage. He glanced at the wall clock. “Forty-three more minutes,” he said.

  While the technicians focused intently on their stations, Mulder watched the scarred blind man who had told them such an unbelievable story only hours earlier.

  After adding Ryan Kamida’s tale to the details of the mystery as he saw it, Mulder began formulating a hypothesis that fit all the information. It began to make complete, if fantastic, sense to him. He pondered how best to broach the subject with Scully. She would no doubt find the explanation preposterous…but then she often did.

  Scully considered it her purpose in life to be Mulder’s devil’s advocate, to convince him of the logical explanations behind the incredible events they had witnessed in their many cases together…just as Mulder himself accepted it as his goal to make Scully believe.

  He leaned closer to his partner, speaking in a low voice near her ear, though the roar of the typhoon whipping around the concrete beehive was enough to drown out the words for any eavesdropper.

  “I’ve been thinking, Scully—and I’ve got an idea. If what Mr. Kamida says is true, then we could be dealing with some sort of…psychic shockwave, a burst of energy that was transformed into something half-sentient during the original H-bomb blast that took place on this island.”

  Scully looked at him, blinking her blue eyes. “What are you talking about, Mulder?”

  “Let’s take a look at this, Scully. Imagine the entire population of islanders here, all together, unsuspecting, living out their normal lives—and then suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted across the brink of death by one of the most powerful instantaneous blasts ever recorded on this planet. Isn’t it possible that such a blast could have acted as some sort of boost to a…a higher level of existence, crossing some sort of energetic barrier.”

  “That’s not how I see it, Mulder,” Scully said.

  “Just think about it,” he insisted. “Every single one of Kamida’s people, all screaming at once, all of them not just killed, but utterly annihilated, practically disintegrated down to their last cells.”

  “Mulder, if the energy of an atomic blast can somehow turn its victims into—” she searched for words, then shrugged— “into a vengeful collection of radioactive ghosts with superpowers, then how come there aren’t a hundred thousand phantom juggernauts running around after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts?”

  “I thought of that,” Mulder said, “but those were the first atomic weapons. Even though those bombs were powerful, the Fat Man and Little Boy warheads produced just a fraction of the power that was unleashed in the hydrogen bombs that were detonated out here on the Pacific Islands. The test assemblies in the fifties reached ten or fifteen megatons, whereas the Hiroshima blast was only twelve point five kilotons. That’s a big difference—a factor of a thousand.

  “Maybe the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts weren’t quite enough to cross that threshold. And, as far as I know, nobody else was killed directly in any of the other H-bomb blasts.”

  Scully looked at him seriously. “And you think that this collection of ghosts is hunting down people originally involved in the development of nuclear weapons, as well as individuals in charge of the Bright Anvil test, and…assassinating them out of revenge?”

  “Maybe revenge,” Mulder said, “or maybe they’re just trying to prevent the tests from continuing. Everything points toward stopping the Bright Anvil test, which could well be the start of a whole new series of aboveground blasts, not to mention fallout-free warheads that might be readily used in combat. What if these ghosts are trying to prevent what happened to them from ever happening again?”

  Scully shuddered. Mulder supposed that if he had made the same proposal in the light of day in the cool shelter of their offices at FBI Headquarters—or anyplace else that seemed safe—she might have scoffed at his reasoning. But here, in the darkest hour before dawn, surrounded by brooding hurricane-force winds out on a deserted Pacific island, any sort of creepy story had a greater ring of truth.

  Mulder suddenly had another thought. “The ashes!” He spun around to see that Ryan Kamida sat placidly at the analysis table, his scarred hands folded atop the smooth Formica surface. His ravaged face was directed toward them. His lips were quirked in a mysterious smile, as if amused at Mulder’s explanation; he looked as if he had heard every word.

  Mulder hurried over to him. “The ashes—what were the ashes all about, Mr. Kamida?”

  The blind man nodded in deference. “I think you know the answer, Agent Mulder.”

  “Those were the ashes of the victims from your island, weren’t they? You’re using them as…as signal flags, or magnets to draw the attention of the ghosts.”
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  Kamida turned his face down toward his folded hands. “When I grew older and accustomed to my blindness, after I had developed connections and earned plenty of money, I came back here to Enika Atoll. The spirits of my people had told me their story, told me my life, told me over and over again what had happened here until I was mad with the repetition. I had to come home, for my own sanity.”

  He quieted and raised his blind gaze to both Mulder and Scully. “Some entrepreneurs will do strange things for eccentric people without asking questions, so long as the money is sufficient.

  “I spent many days here on the reefs, crawling over this abandoned atoll that had grown its jungle back again. I was blind, but I knew where to go, I knew where to look, because the voices guided me. With a knife and a trowel and a barrel, I spent days in the hot Pacific sun, working, scraping a few bits at a time. I found the scant ashes of my people who had been incinerated in a flash and burned into mere shadows on the rock.

  “Much time had passed, and one might have expected the stains to have been weathered away, returned to the coral and the sand, to be eaten away by rainstorms and the surf. But they were still there waiting for me, like shadows in human form outlined against the sheltered reefs. I collected them one at a time as the spirits guided me.

  “I gathered as much of the ash as I could. It seemed a pitifully small amount, all that remained of an entire island population. But it was enough for my purposes…and theirs. When I was ready, I sent samples of the ash, like calling cards, to those people who needed to receive them.”

  “You sent a vial to Nancy Scheck?” Scully asked.

  Ryan Kamida nodded. “And a packet to Emil Gregory. And to Oscar McCarron in New Mexico. The spirits didn’t really need the ash. Left to themselves, they could find their own targets. But it helped…and it helped me to direct them.”

  Mulder felt sick with horror. “Nancy Scheck and the others each received only a tiny sample of that ash—but you brought an entire barrel with you here to this island.”

  He suddenly recalled the three fishermen, terrified, unloading their ominous cargo and setting it on the beach, where it now sat unprotected, because Bear Dooley wouldn’t allow it inside the blockhouse.

  “It is everything I have left,” Kamida said. “It will bring them here. All of them. Finally.”

  Just then the phone rang. Victor Ogilvy grabbed it. His eyes widened as he pressed the phone headset tight against his head, as if he had difficulty making out distinct words from the transmission.

  “Bear!” Victor said, clinging to the telephone, staring at it with his mouth partially open. “Bear, that was a communication from Captain Ives. He said their radar systems aboard the Dallas just picked up something big and powerful approaching the atoll. Not a storm. He doesn’t know what it is—like nothing he’s ever seen before!”

  Victor swallowed, waving the phone headset. “And then his transmission cut off entirely. I can’t raise him.”

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Dooley bellowed. “We’ve only got thirty-five minutes until detonation. We can’t afford screwups now!”

  Then all of the power went out in the blockhouse, plunging them entirely into blackness.

  THIRTY-SIX

  USS Dallas

  Saturday, 4:30 A.M.

  Captain Robert Ives didn’t know how he could possibly remain standing in the turmoil—but a captain wasn’t supposed to fall on his butt on the bridge of his own ship, not even at the height of a typhoon. With his muscular legs planted widely apart and feet braced firmly on the deck, he rode the churning roller-coaster of waves. Loose objects on the bridge deck, from pencils to notepads to crates, slid back and forth.

  Fists of rain pummeled the bridge windows, and the sickly sky was filled with an unnatural greenish light. Ives checked his wristwatch, knowing it couldn’t possibly be dawn—not yet. The eerie glow made his skin crawl. He had seen hurricanes before, and they always seemed otherworldly, but none more so than this one.

  “Wind wall levels reaching one hundred fifteen miles per hour, sir,” Lee Klantze shouted from his exec officer station. A three-ring binder that listed international signals and codes popped off its shelf and crashed to the deck, making Klantze jump. “That’s well beyond the maximum expected levels for this storm. Something’s pumping it.”

  “How far away is the eye?” Ives asked.

  “We don’t expect it to come through for another half hour, and then we’ll get a little coffee break. For the time being, we just have to hold on.”

  Ives gripped the rail at the captain’s station with white knuckles. The tendons in his neck stood out like steel cords. “Brace yourselves. I expect it’ll get much worse.”

  Klantze looked at him, amazed. “Worse than these levels?” He glanced down at his weather readouts again, then grabbed for balance as the deck lurched. “On what do you base that, sir?”

  “On the sense of unrelenting dread building in my gut, Mr. Klantze. Run a check,” Ives said crisply. “Make sure every station is secure. Get all nonessential crew belowdecks.”

  “Already done, sir,” Klantze said.

  “Do it again!” Ives snapped, and the young executive officer staggered on rubbery legs across the bucking deck to carry out his captain’s orders.

  “How much longer until Bright Anvil goes off?” Ives said without taking his gaze from the writhing whitecaps in front of the Dallas. Though he could look at the chronometer himself, he knew he needed to keep his crew busy doing routine tasks they could understand; otherwise they would spend too much time fearing the damage the typhoon might inflict upon them.

  “About half an hour sir,” answered one of the tactical crewmen.

  “Thirty-eight minutes,” said another simultaneously.

  “Thank you,” he answered. Ives left unspoken his thoughts of how insane these weapons designers must be even to consider conducting a delicate test shot under such circumstances.

  A foamy wall of water slammed into the side of the Dallas, making the entire hull ring like a struck gong. The destroyer listed to starboard, then slowly righted herself, like a killer whale regaining its balance. Captain Ives held on, riding the motion. He was glad the Lucky Dragon was no longer tied to their hull.

  Executive Officer Klantze staggered back up to the front of the bridge, leaving behind the intercom station from which he had spoken to various parts of the destroyer. “All stations have checked in secure, Captain,” he said. “We’re lashed down and ready to withstand anything.”

  Ives looked at him, forehead furrowed above his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “Anything, Mr. Klantze? You’re an optimist.”

  “I’m in the Navy, sir.” Klantze must have thought his ridiculous answer would impress Ives.

  “Captain!” the tactical officer shouted. “I’m picking up something on forward radar. There’s—my God, I can’t believe it! It’s so big.”

  “What is it?” Ives said swiveling around and nearly losing his balance as another large wave slammed into the side of the destroyer. “Give me details.”

  The tactical officer remained at his station, peering down at the flickering screen. His eyes were wide and disbelieving. “The thing is huge—and it has extremely high energy. It’s heading this way. Other sensors are picking it up as well—even sonar shows a great turmoil in the surface layers of the water, far exceeding the storm disturbance. I don’t understand these readings, sir. An electrical storm? A power surge?”

  “Contact the Bright Anvil team on shore,” Ives said, with a deep foreboding. “Let them know.” He lowered his voice so that no one else heard his words. “Maybe it’ll give them time to prepare.”

  “Could it be a glitch in the instruments?” Klantze asked, making his way over to the tactical officer’s station.

  “Not likely,” the officer said. “It’s consistent…and the speed—the thing is getting closer and closer, just like we’re in a targeting cross.”

  Ives whirled to look through the rain-splatt
ered bridge windshield. He saw a sickening, washed-out glow across the waves, like a fire far out on the water. It reminded him of a high-intensity miniature sunrise coming out of nowhere.

  “There it is,” Klantze said, pointing—as if Ives couldn’t see it. “What is that thing? It’s like an inferno.”

  As the bridge crew watched, the wall of light grew into an incandescent sphere that rushed toward them, brighter and brighter, even through the murky air of the hurricane.

  Ives had seen something very much like this several times at nuclear tests back in the 1950s. The light and the shape of an H-bomb explosion was something he would never forget—and now it came toward him again.

  Ives grabbed the ship’s intercom at his station and switched it to all decks. “All hands! Brace for impact.”

  The blaze of radioactive light hurtled toward them, riding the crest of a sharp, boiling wave, a line of angry seawater that churned up and vaporized with the hot blast of a holocaust.

  Ives stood at the captain’s station staring helplessly out the window. He had no eye protection, but he knew from the depths of his clenched stomach that nothing would make any difference at the moment. So he stared and kept staring as the force slammed into them.

  The last thing his eyes registered before his optic nerves surrendered to the onslaught was the sharp bow of his heavily armored Navy destroyer slumping, melting, as the steel plate vaporized.

  Then the wall of light and fire swallowed the Dallas whole.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Enika Atoll

  Saturday, 4:40 A.M.

  In the sudden black chaos following the power outage in the blockhouse, Mulder grabbed one of the emergency flashlights mounted on the wall. He switched on the beam, shining it around the control bunker like a bright spear, hoping that its illumination would restore calm and order to the seamen and technicians there.