Chaingang c-3

by Rex Miller

  Up on the service road he heard the monkey man shout something to him as he waved.

  “Thanks, pardner!” it sounded like.

  Chaingang, had Ilsa safely down the road when the south edge of Ecoworld blew into the cosmos.

  Royce braked the second he saw the olive drab sphere at the edge of the concrete drive. He was frightened of it, but he was desperate for a weapon, and the MAC-11 was useless to him without a magazine full of cartridges. No amount of money in Christendom would have sent him back into that exploding hell for ammo. He chucked the thing into the backseat and stopped.

  He prayed it wasn't a booby trap. It didn't explode when he picked it up, but he didn't start breathing again until he had it resting on the pile of blankets from the old musket. He made a nest for it, tossing the MAC-11 into the road ditch.

  “Is that a hand grenade?” Mary asked quietly. She was afraid of very little now. The worst was behind them.

  “Yeah,” he told her in a quivering voice. “It's a hand grenade. And I'm scared to death of the damn things."

  “Well then...” she wanted to know, the way women so often do ... “why did you pick it up?"

  It was a perfectly logical question. It made him lick his lips. He tasted salt.

  “What are you going to do with it?"

  “God knows,” he said.

  34

  WHITETAIL POND

  There was a three-man team in the car. There were four cars full of agents on the case, one on his cabin, one on Mary's house, one cruising, and this one at the pond. They'd been parked there since four in the afternoon, and everybody was bored, restless, and coffeed out. The replacement car would be a couple of hours more.

  “I gotta take a piss,” the man on the passenger side in the front seat said, and cracked the door, walked over to the road ditch, and urinated noisily into the weeds. They were parked on the road overlooking the Perkins cabin.

  “Any more jelly doughnuts?” the one in the backseat asked.

  “Nope,” the driver said, yawning. “Wish these fuckers would show. I'd like to whack somebody."

  “I can dig it,” the one in the backseat said, stretching.

  The man who'd had to pee got back in the car, and it was then that Royce came around the bend in the road and saw the flash of light when the car door opened.

  “Somebody's up there,” he said.

  “Where?"

  “Above the cabin.” He pointed. “I saw a light flash. We've probably got company. They're probably in the cabin, too.” He was so calm-sounding, he surprised himself.

  “Who do you think it is?"

  “The Avon lady?” he said, trying to make a joke and succeeding beyond his wildest dreams. Both of them giggled like schoolkids.

  “You're such a zany guy,” she said.

  “I really am.” There were limits to how scared you could get. Apparently they had found theirs, because he drove back around the pond and parked about 150 yards from the top of the hill.

  “What are you going to do?” she whispered.

  “Probably get my ass killed.” Mary just looked at him as he took the wire and the pliers and the grenade and quietly closed the car door. “Stay here. I'll be back."

  She didn't say anything. Be careful stuck in her throat. He was gone.

  Royce came up out of the bushes as silently as he could, very worried about his breath. It was so loud. His breathing sounded like an antique bellows. Thankful that the woods came nearly flush with the edge of the road ditch, he came out of the woods slow and low, trying to keep the left rear corner post of the car between himself and where the driver was sitting. It was pretty dark, and he was counting on luck.

  If one of them in the car turned or if the driver looked in one of his mirrors at the wrong moment ... well, what was the point in worrying? He had to force himself out of the safety of the ditch, hurting his hands and knees on the rocks and finally making it to the car. It occurred to him it would be just about his luck to have them start the engine about that time. He could hear small talk through the open windows of their vehicle.

  He got the grenade wedged between the underside of the bumper and the gas tank, feeling his hands sweat as he attached the wire to the ring that pulled the cotter pin out. He'd already put a twist in the thin wire at the other end. Now was the tough part.

  He tried to slowly peel some of the duct tape from his arm, where he had the little Legionnaire Boot Knife taped in place. It made way too much noise and he took what he had and secured the wire and the grenade as best he could.

  Taking a deep breath and clenching his jaws, he crawled back into the ditch, found a root that he trusted, and fastened the wire around it. Would this work? He had no idea. Maybe he should just throw the thing in the car. Too late for that now.

  The hairiest part of all was the four or five feet from the ditch back into the woods. It seemed to take about half an hour, and the whole time he felt the gunshot—imagining what his scream would sound like when the first bullet hit his back.

  He made it, though, and he and Mary were going to come out of the thing okay—one way or the other. He promised her that, starting the old Ranchero and heading back toward Maysburg. He didn't want to be around when they decided to move that car up on the hill. He didn't even want to know about it. He'd also found the limits of his curiosity.

  35

  MAYSBURG

  "Yellow Cab?"

  “Hi. This is Mr. Conway over at the Tennessee Motor Courts on Central. Would you send a taxi over please?"

  “Okay. What's your room number?"

  “Have the driver come to the office please."

  “Okay. Will do. Be about ten minutes."

  “Fine. Thank you.” He put another quarter in and redialed...

  “Tennessee Motor Courts, good morning."

  “Morning! This is Conway with General Discount Stores—I'm going to be checkin’ in this afternoon. Say, listen, I've got an envelope there with some cash in it, don't I?"

  “One moment, sir."

  “Sure."

  “Yes, sir. There's an envelope for you."

  “Does it have fifty dollars cash in it?"

  “I don't know sir. We haven't opened it."

  “Do me a favor please. I have a cab driver on his way over there. Would you open that? I'll take the responsibility."

  “All right ... Yes, there's money in here."

  "Fine. Would you please give the driver—no, I'll tell you what—ask him to pick up a package for me in Waterton. It's addressed to me in care of general delivery. Tell him there'll be a nice tip in it for him if he'll come back to the office with my package—save me a lot of driving around. Okay?"

  The clerk agreed. But by the time the cab made it back to the motel with the large box full of clothing and accessories, Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski, née Conway, was back on the phone, this time wanting to speak to the driver. By coincidence he'd timed the call just as the man was coming in the office—but it helped that he was dialing from across the road.

  This time he wanted the driver to bring the box to him and leave it at Discount Thrift on Central—just down the road from the motel. He instructed the office clerk to give the driver forty dollars “and keep a ten” for a gratuity.

  He asked the driver if he knew where Discount Thrift was.

  “Sure—couple blocks from here."

  “That's it. You know the stone wall to the left of the front door?"

  “Yeah?"

  “Just toss the box up on the bank there. Okay?"

  “If you say so, but don't blame me if it gets ripped off. Don't you want it left inside the door?"

  “No. Not necessary. Just throw the box up on the bank to the left of the front door. Keep the forty for your trouble. Fair enough?"

  “You got it.” People never failed to amaze him, and they kept getting loonier by the day.

  The watchers with eyeball surveillance on Chaingang saw him park his car, the same car they'd watched all alon
g, on the gravel service road that ran in back of the busy Maysburg Shopping Center.

  As always, the surveillance team leader kept a running account of movements on the battery-powered recorder all the agents carried:

  “Blue Tracker Six: subject getting out of vehicle again ... going over the fence between Taylor Chemical and the shopping center ... moving on into the wooded area there.” The two men in the front seat of the unmarked government car saw the huge man appear to unzip his pants, glance around, and then move behind some trees.

  “Looks like he's going to urinate.” They joked with each other about him going in the woods for a quick piece of fist. When he hadn't materialized in a couple of minutes, they looked at each other.

  “What dya’ think?"

  “I'll go circle around by the center. You watch the woods on the side by the plant there. Stay with the car. If he comes back and leaves before I get back, I'll catch up with you tonight. ‘Kay?"

  “Go.” The second man opened the door and jogged off around the woods. But Chaingang was long gone. That would be the penultimate observation they would make of him. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski went into the woods, and something went wrong with the monitors—"a bobble in the power,” the rural power company told them, apologetically. By the time a salesman by the name of Mr. Conway, resplendent in three-piece vested suit, tie, and wig, came out the other side, melting into the shopping center crowd, “technical difficulties” had developed. It seemed that the battery could die, after all ... in a manner of speaking.

  The lone watcher who monitored his movements only for Dr. Norman reported that the clear glass spectacles were a nice touch.

  36

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The office was beautifully done. He had been in enough CEO and directorate executive suites and boardrooms to know this one had cost serious crown jewels. Not your run-of-the-penthouse leather-and-chrome Mies van der Roe-buck barcelona knockoffs and fake Manets. There were genuine antiques and real masters on the walls.

  The two silent men who flanked him escorted him through the kings’ throne room past the most beautifully ornate Wooten desk he'd ever seen, through a plush silk-walled anteroom where a tiny but unmistakable Braque was enshrined under subtle track portrait spots.

  He was seated in the presence, across a polished cross section of rare wood approximately the size of a modular Rondesic home, and allowed a moment to gather whatever was left of his wits. A fierce neon by someone he didn't recognize, and a wonderful Larry Rivers, flanked the Man.

  “Grant Silberman?” he said, with a question on the end, but it was clearly rhetorical. He tried to look sincere, contrite, studious, and worthy of forgiveness, all without changing anything in his face. “Aka Robert Newman, aka Christopher Sinclair. Chief of Section—” he made it sound like Chief Dunderhead—"and survivor of the debacle?"

  “Yes, sir,” he answered, quietly.

  “Matters not.” He gestured, and gold winked. “You know the old saying—shoot them all and you'll always get the guilty.” The Man smiled, and poison dripped. “Not that it will have any exculpatory value, but just for some semblance of an explanation, how did Clandestine Services ever obtain the responsibility for the creation of anything as insane as a domestic-based school for hit men?"

  He decided—fuck it—he'd just give straight answers and damn the torpedoes. To a point, anyway. The brain implant and their “ace” would remain in-house secrets.

  “When the idea of a training program of this sort was first broached a quarter century ago, it was quite natural for it to come under the military intelligence umbrella. We were at war, unofficially, but at war nonetheless, and of course, it was a question of eminent domain. This would be the sphere of operations where such things should rightfully take place, so it was within Clandestine Services that the responsibility for the initial program fell."

  “Were the initial stages of the program documented, and if so, in what form?"

  “You mean memoranda from on high? Written orders?"

  “When options were discussed, when the various beginnings of the program took place, were records kept?"

  “Yes. There were many special memoranda, minutes of meetings, and general notes—which in turn would become support documents and position papers. The sensitivity of such documentation was such that many records were limited to only one copy, with a carefully monitored ‘subscription’ list. The lab people and the R & D people had their own records, naturally, so all we really saw would be the memos—their projections or appreciations of program development and personnel."

  “Do you know if such records are still extant, and if so, where?"

  “No, sir."

  “An educated guess as to where such records might exist?"

  “The head of the research and development for the project was a doctor who was working for the government, but I believe he is deceased. I have no idea. Presumably all records were destroyed due to the nature of the matter."

  “How could such a program be put into play, given the enormity of horror with which most of us would receive anything along these lines?"

  “It's difficult to explain how it all developed—these things develop over time and—"

  “To play with human lives as if they were tokens on a game board! How could any of you live with yourselves?"

  “I was following orders. In the military and in other—"

  “The Nazis said the same thing. How does that excuse the killing you personally sanctioned?"

  “I was doing my job. Nothing more. We were responsible to our government to create a team of expert, professional killers. Individuals capable of the most sensitive assassinations. We did not have such men. We had people with martial skills, law enforcement skills, men who could go to war for their country or things of this nature, but we did not have what the Committee for State Security or the SDECE—or for that matter, the Mossad—had. We were mandated to structure a program and get it rolling, and that's what we did. Many of us might have shared your horror at the idea of it, but we did our job. We were good soldiers."

  “What made you think you could get away with it? What were the precedents for such a thing?"

  “Well, there were precedents. There were parallel programs such as MK ULTRA, and the top secret STAR RACER. Those were programs created by the United States government to create killing machines, robot assassins, whatever you want to call them. But in our case we didn't want robot, we wanted experts. And it was ... extremely difficult. But as to what made us think we could get away with it—we were building the program around a man who'd done just that for twenty years. He'd killed, again and again, and clearly he'd been able to get away with it. We wanted to learn what he knew, to study him, and to apply what we could learn to similar persons whom the government would employ for that work."

  “So you decided to study a mass murderer?"

  “Yes, Sir."

  “And no one in Clandestine Services demurred? Everybody thought this was perfectly okay, this madness your superiors were proposing?"

  “No, sir. There were many who thought it was evil, that it would be an awful disaster. But the program was going to be put in place over the protests of any analyst or tactical adviser or researcher. And when you're in an explosive program and under time constraints, the bureaucracy is even more quick to find scapegoats than usual. The ones who didn't see the program as workable, or who were too critical, they had a way of becoming part of the problem, and suddenly being transferred or demoted. There were only one or two appropriate responses—when you were asked if the thing would work, you said ‘yes’ or ‘can do.’”

  “Who was the force behind this program? There must have a guiding maniac who shoved this massacre through the bureaucracy?"

  “There were many people who were forces behind the program, both in the military and out of it. Generals. People in intelligence. Admirals. Think-tank people. I'd say the doctor who ran the primary subject was the main person in the civilian
sector. Everyone was looking to him to make it work, to establish control parameters and so on."

  “Did this doctor, and we presume you mean Dr. Norman, answer to anyone higher up?"

  “Yes, sir. He would have answered to the NSC and to the president, and to the director."

  “The director of Clandestine Services?"

  “Yes, sir."

  “But presumably he directed that the subject be freed, and be encouraged to murder civilians, is that correct?"

  “Yes."

  “As chief of section, you were responsible for carrying out the orders of putting this killer in place, and of restraining his activities within a certain area?"

  “Yes, sir."

  “What resources were brought into the area to see that those activities would be confined to the specific area of operations?"

  “We had over two hundred covert operations officers in place, over a hundred hunter-killer teams armed with silenced M3A1 machine guns, every high-tech air-land-sea surveillance device imaginable, any equipment or communications or transport mode we could wish for."

  “And you thought this would be enough to keep a mass murderer within a certain geographical area?” The man asking the questions was incredulous.

  “No, sir. We thought that because of the controls involved—the information the subject had been given free access to—that he'd operate in that zone for a minimal time, but when he attempted to escape, that he would be terminated."

  “Uh-huh. That's what we're getting at. What made you think you could stop him—just because you had manpower and equipment?"

  “We had him tracked every minute of the time the subject was in the killing zone. Overflights, satellite technology, infrared—we had the subject under a microscope ... It seemed like he could be contained.” The temptation to tell this bureaucratic stuffed shirt about the implant was almost overwhelming, but both the need-to-know criteria and the knowledge that he'd have to invent a plausible reason for OMEGASTAR malfunctioning were sufficient incentive to dissemble.