Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  With the exception of the power plant, all of the machinery had long since been taken away.

  He reached the nitroglycerine-fixing building. He thought about the girl as he walked toward the building, trying to figure out how she played into his grand scheme. He had only mild regret about the two boys who had been killed by the flash flood. In any event, many more strangers were going to die. The girl and her friends were just a few more innocent bystanders. In the six months that he had been producing the hydrogen, no one had ever intruded into the Ramsey industrial complex. There were long-standing rumors in the nearby towns that Ramsey had produced chemical weapons during World War II. Even a hint that there might be some nerve gas still locked away in the deep bunkers tended to keep people out of the facility, and such rumors had never been officially discouraged by the Army. It was all bunk, of course. The plant had been one of several GOCO facilities: government-owned, contractor-operated by various commercial companies to manufacture artillery propellant and warhead fillers for the Army.

  He could not imagine what the three kids had been doing here, but Jared’s traps had done their job. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if the flash flood had taken all three of them. But he could not bring himself to execute her, even though she had seen their faces.

  In the back of his mind, he thought she might actually become useful down the road, when he got closer to Judgment Day. That was how he liked to think of it: a day of reckoning, with him and his grandson delivering those agents of Satan into God’s iron hands for summary judgment.

  It was much darker now. He slowed and then moved sideways into the shadow of a loading dock and sat down to await full darkness. The concrete felt warm against his back. He always did this when he came in: sat down, listened and watched. Made very, very sure no one had followed him in. He closed his eyes and prayed for the strength to carry on, to go through with his mission of retribution. They had manufactured nearly three-quarters of the hydrogen, and the pressure in the truck was starting to register into the double digits for the first time. Not much longer. All they needed was the rest of the copper, and jared said he had found a new source. There was plenty of acid, thank God. He opened his eyes and listened.

  There was nothing but the night wind and the ticking sounds of the metal roofs and the piping towers cooling in the darkness. Time to go.

  There were two doors on the nitro building: one large segmented-steel hanging door big enough to admit a truck or rail car the other a human sized steel walk-through door. The building’s sign was still legible in the gloom: nitro fixing. He struck the smaller door once with his fist.

  “Put on the blindfold,” he ordered.

  He waited for a minute, then unlocked the padlock, removed it, and pushed the door open. The interior of the building was a single huge room, which now was in near-total darkness. With his eyes fully night adapted he could just make out the outline of the skylights far above. He could also just see the girl’s face in the middle of the room, a pale blur of white hovering above the dark pile of blankets. He pushed the base of the door with his foot so that it swung all the way back against the concrete wall and then turned on the flashlight, fixing the girl’s face in its blinding beam. She flinched but said nothing. The blindfold was in place, as he had ordered. The remains of the last food delivery were right by the door. He flipped the light around the open shop floor, illuminating each corner.

  Metal foundation plates that looked like the stumps in a cut over forest glinted back at him. The room smelled of old concrete, nitric acid, and a hint of sewage. He set the flashlight onto the floor, pointing at the girl.

  He slid the backpack in and emptied it out on the floor. A roll of toilet paper, six plastic bottles of water, two dell-style sandwiches, two apples, and a Gideon’s Bible. He picked up the flashlight and swept it around the building again, being careful to keep it low, away

  from the skylights. He put it back down on the floor so that the beam again pointed at the girl.

  Then he picked up the bag of trash by the floor and stuffed it into the backpack. She never moved, sitting cross-legged on the blankets as if she was meditating. He had never spoken to her, beyond the command to put on the blindfold, and she had never spoken to him.

  He looked at her for a moment. She appeared to be well made, which was why he had stopped letting Jared bring the food. Jared was not entirely trustworthy when it came to women, a function, no doubt, of his youth. They had prayed together on Jared’s womanizing problem several times, but he kept an eye on Jared just the same. He admired the girl’s stoicism.

  She had to be strong, not to whimper and beg and carry on when he came. She must have a great deal of inner fortitude, he thought. The Bible would help sustain that. He should have brought her one a long time ago.

  He picked up the light, swept the room one more time, and then backed out, turning the light off before he closed the steel door. His night vision was gone, of course, but he could put the lock back on and snap it shut without seeing it. He sat down on the steps leading to the door and closed his eyes, letting his other senses scan the surrounding area. Even after all these years, the air in the complex was tainted with the acrid scent of chemicals, as if decades’ worth of nitric acid, sulfuric acid, ammonia, mercury, and a host of esters and alcohols had permanently stained the air.

  It had undoubtedly stained the ground, which was why the whole place was now sealed off. He wondered if all those people fishing that creek below the arsenal had any idea of what was sleeping in the sands of the creek bed, courtesy of some frantic flushes into the Ditch.

  He opened his eyes and the shadows assumed shape as buildings again in the dark. The security company’s truck would come tomorrow, even though it would be Saturday. Their contract required them to do at least two weekend checks a month, and it had been two weeks. Which is why he had doped the apples. She should be drowsy and sleep through most of the day. The security people were definitely lowest-bidder types: lazy and incompetent. They never even got out of their little truck. They just drove around the complex for an hour and looked out the windows and then went back out the main gates. He had toyed with the idea of doing something to them, perhaps just before Judgment Day. They deserved to be punished for not doing their jobs.

  He got up, picked up the pack, and started back. The girl did not know anything, other than that they were here, presumably doing something

  illegal, or they wouldn’t have taken her captive. He would have to decide what to do with her. In truth, if she could not contribute to the mission in some way, before or after, he could always just leave her. The walls of the nitro building were three feet thick, reinforced concrete. She would never be found.

  Just before dawn on Saturday, Edwin Kreiss parked his pickup truck at the end of a fire road on the eastern edge of the Ramsey Army Arsenal.

  He shut it down, slid down the windows to listen, and waited. He had spent most of Friday looking for the arsenal, which, considering that it took up a couple of thousand acres, had not been as easy as he had anticipated.

  The state road map, which showed the installation fronting 1-81 east of Christiansburg, was wrong. Unwilling to be remembered in Christiansburg for asking questions, he’d gone to the public library in the town of Ramsey and found a single book on the history of the arsenal. The reference librarian had told him the Ramsey Arsenal had been shut down for nearly twenty years.

  He’d then found the main entrance south of town, but the intersection that led to what he assumed was a main gate was blocked off with concrete-filled barrels that had obviously been there for a long time. After that, he had followed every paved road, dirt road, and fire lane that seemed to point in toward the installation, trying to construct his own map. Every access that ran up against the arsenal ended the same way—in a firebreak and a tall double chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top, festooned with signs warning that this was a U.S. government restricted area and also a federal toxic-waste site. When h
e found what he assumed was a rail spur into the installation, he parked the truck out of sight and walked along the rusting rails for nearly two miles before seeing double gates. Assuming there would be surveillance, he had not approached the gates, but backtracked to his truck and continued with his mapmaking of the perimeter.

  Now he was parked within two hundred yards of the spot he felt was the most discreet way into the reservation, the intersection of the security fences and a wide, quiet creek flowing out of the interior of

  the installation The creek had been routed under the fences through a concrete conduit five feet in diameter that slanted down from the higher ground of the installation. There had been a heavy re bar grating out on the exterior side of the tunnel. It had looked intact, until he inspected it and found that the part below the surface of the water had long since rusted away.

  The creek widened considerably when it came out of the reservation, and the deep pool below the conduit showed evidence of being a local fishing hole, despite all the toxic-waste SITE signs decorating the fences.

  According to the book, the arsenal encompassed about 2,400 acres, but the industrial heart of it appeared to be much smaller than that, if the pictures in the book were accurate. The bulk of the installation’s acreage was occupied by the extensive bunker fields, where the Army’s freshly minted ammunition had been stored. At least that’s what the book implied; one never knew what other things the government might have secreted out here on a restricted area in the southwestern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The place was sufficiently remote and secure as to contain damn near anything. He didn’t care about munitions; he wanted to know if the kids had ever come here. There had been no mention in the book of any Site R. He had considered walking the entire perimeter, to see if he could find any better prospects for easy access, but doing that covertly would entail at least several days. No, he had concluded, it was more important to get inside and do his looking there, where, if the kids had run into trouble, he might find signs of it. 7/’this was the place, of course.

  Knowing his chances were slim to begin with, he sighed and got out. It was better than brooding in the cabin, and a lot more than the Bureau had done.

  Birds were beginning to stir in the trees, but there was still little light.

  The mountains to the east would mask the direct sunrise for another hour and a half yet. The sky was clear and it was almost cold, in the low fifties.

  If there were Saturday fishermen coming, he should have at least an hour to get through the one very visible access point: the tunnel. He stripped off his shoes, jeans, and shirt and slipped into the wet suit: bottom, top, hood, mask, and boots. He put his street clothes back into the truck and took out a sealed waterproof duffel bag, which had a short lanyard ending in a snap attached to one end. He locked up the truck, put the keys in the exhaust pipe, and then headed for the pool.

  The water was slightly colder than the air, but his only exposure was the skin of his face. He paddled out to the lip of the tunnel, towing the bag behind him. It was dark in the tunnel as he pushed the bag

  under the rusting teeth of the re bar grate, and then he ducked under and pulled himself up into the stream flowing over the lip of the tunnel. The concrete was slippery with old moss and he immediately found himself sliding backward, catching himself at the last moment against the top half of the grating. The structure swayed ominously, dropping bits of rusted metal all over him. He got one arm onto dry concrete on the side of the tunnel and worked his way back in, away from the grate. He then crawled on all fours through the stream, towing the bag behind him. The other end of the tunnel was about 150 feet away, visible as a pale circle of light against the blackness in the tunnel. He had to fight his way past a tree snag that was jammed across the tunnel about halfway in. Something dropped from the snag and went slithering past him in the dark water, but he pressed on.

  He knew that a snake’s first instinct would be to get away from him. What he didn’t know was whether or not the grate on the other end was intact.

  There wasn’t a grate at all. The tunnel opening gave onto a concrete sided high-walled penstock shaped like a broad funnel in reverse. The creek came into the penstock via a waterfall at the far end. He spied a set of rusting steel rungs embedded in the concrete to one side, and he sloshed across the shallow water to get to the ladder. Once up on dry ground, he sat quietly for ten minutes, absorbing his surroundings. He was in a densely wooded area inside the security perimeter. The penstock appeared to be the only manmade structure other than the fences. He scanned the fences in the dawn light for cameras, but did not see any. He had checked the external fence during his reconnaissance yesterday for signs of electrification but had found no evidence of any wiring, not even alarm wires.

  He pulled the duffel bag closer. He extracted a towel and a smaller, camouflaged bag. He stripped out of the diving gear, toweled off, and put all the diving gear into the smaller bag. Since he planned to make his daylight surveillance of the arsenal covertly, he had brought a crawl suit, into which he slipped quickly to avoid becoming chilled. The crawl suit was a one-piece camouflaged jumpsuit, which had padded knees, shoulders, and elbows, a wide elasticized waist, and elasticized arm and leg joints. The fabric at the back of his knees and under his arms was a breathable nylon mesh. The chest and upper back areas had segmented black plastic bands running vertically from just below his collarbone to a line level with his rib cage. The bands were made of Kevlar body armor and were separated by raised vertical strips of Velcro. There were tiny penlights sewn into the wrist cuffs on each arm.

  Next, he pulled on a set of dark green high-topped boots, which were lined outside with Kevlar filament mesh to guard against snakebite. They had articulated steel ridges running vertically over a layer of rubber reaching all the way to the top of his calves. The soles were also rubber, with built-in steel shanks and heel cups. The boots were secured with four Velcro straps, and there was a built-in covered knife sheath on the left boot and a covered holster for wire cutters on the right. There were climbing studs embedded into heavy leather pads on the inside of each boot.

  Next out of the bag came two flat mottled green packs, one for his chest and one for his back. Each pack was constructed of nylon netting with Velcro attachment pads. One contained two days’ worth of food, the other his trekking equipment. He put on the backpack first, then the chest pack. The two packs were connected with Velcro straps under his armpits, preventing them from hobbling around.

  He then pulled a lightweight camouflaged hunter’s hood over his head, face, and neck. The hood was also mottled black and green, and heavily padded on top. It revealed only his eyes. His gloves were dark gray gauntlets that were made of cotton, lined outside with Kevlar mesh. He used a built-in bladder pump to inflate partially a two-inch cuff around both forearms, and then he attached a water bladder around his waist. He had not brought a gun; he rarely ever carried or used a gun. The last item out of the bag was a dull black telescoping titanium rod, which he extended to four feet in length before setting the locks. The rod had a broad hook topped by a black bulb on one end and a sharp spear point on the other.

  He took the bags a hundred yards upstream of the penstock, then climbed up the bank to a knoll above the stream. The larger bag contained a low-profile camouflaged one-man tent, a lightweight sleeping bag, four military long-storage rations, a water-purification tube, and some cooking gear if he needed to stay longer. He sealed and then hid both bags in the middle branches of the largest pine tree on the knoll, then melted back into the woods and sat down to watch and listen for a few minutes. He could see the far edges of the fishing pool through the fences in the growing light, but he was confident that no one around the pool would be able to see him, even once the sun came up. He had seen no evidence around the inside penstock area that anyone else had come through the tunnel recently. Besides, Lynn hated confined spaces, so if the kids had come to the arsenal, it wasn’t likely they had come

  thr
ough that tunnel. On the other hand, a creek this big probably did not originate within the restricted area, which meant there had to be another water cut through the fence, perhaps over on the higher, western side of the reservation.

  The creek appeared to run east-west.

  His plan was to follow the south bank of the creek all the way across the arsenal and to look for signs of recent human intrusion along the way.

  If that effort turned up nothing, he would follow the north bank back and then cut over into the industrial area, which was north of the creek. He wasn’t even puffing after the exertion of getting through the tunnel and getting set up in the crawl suit, which was a good sign. He was not in the shape he’d been when he was active, but he hadn’t gone entirely soft, either. Except in the head, maybe, he thought. Those two agents had warned him against interfering, and he knew they were right. But since they weren’t actually doing anything, he didn’t feel too bad about it. He also knew that he might not like what he found. He took one last look around the pool area and then started west into the woods.

  Browne McGarand sat in what had been the main control room of the power plant, watching the band of morning sunlight advance across the control room’s wall from the skylights. He was keeping an eye on the pressure gauge of the operating hydrogen generator, which was a five foot-high glass-lined stainless-steel retort into which he had put a sponge of copper metal. Suspended above the retort was a glass container of nitric acid, which was dripping down a glass tube at a controlled rate into the retort. The nitric acid combined with the copper to produce a slag of copper-nitrite and pure hydrogen gas. The reaction was exothermic, which required that the bottom of the retort be encased in a large tub of cold water to draw off heat. When the pressure in the retort rose to five pounds per square inch, a check valve lifted in its discharge line. The physical movement of the check valve activated a pressure switch, which, in turn, closed a contact connecting a small gas-transfer pump to its power supply. The pump drew the hydrogen gas out of the retort and pumped it through the wall into the tank of a propane truck that was parked in the maintenance bay next to the control room. When the pressure in the retort dropped back down to three pounds, the check valve reseated, shutting off the transfer pump, and then the whole process would wait for hydrogen pressure to rebuild in the retort.