Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  Since his capture, Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch had been held at a nameless stockade on the Avon Military Reservation in Florida, a highly classified prison for military criminals so heinous the outside world has never heard of its existence. The CIA's interrogation specialists had made a playground of Storch night and day for the last five months. So far Storch had given up nothing. Cundieffe could hardly blame him.

  Held in secret by the military, Storch had no rights, no legal advocate, no witnesses, no one who knew he was even alive. When he told what he knew about the Mission and Radiant Dawn, he had to know that he would be quietly executed. Despite the CIA's best efforts to make him look forward to this event, he had remained silent. Cundieffe had hoped to reach him with a different approach, but up until last week, those in power had only wanted him to feed facts to the torturers. Cundieffe had been able to research Storch in excruciating detail, and believed that while he probably knew very little about the Mission, he knew more than anyone else was willing to tell him about Radiant Dawn.

  Nonetheless, Cundieffe had been shocked two days ago when Wyler called him into his office and told him he was to see Storch the following morning.

  He had made his ethical misgivings known at the outset, even as he pressed for it. This was not how justice was carried out in the United States. This was not what the FBI and the Army were for. This kind of thing never happened in America.

  Wyler had turned and risen from his desk and gone to his window. Cundieffe had wondered that all the windows in the building were so narrow, as if Hoover built it to withstand a siege. He knew there'd be war with the outside world, and he built us a fortress.

  "You have a lot to learn about America," Wyler had told him. "You know why you are being allowed to do this?"

  "Sir?" he began too loudly, then, almost whispering, "I was the Supervisory Agent on the primary investigation, and my background profile on Sgt. Storch was a principal factor in stringing together several seemingly unrelated events in the case, and—"

  "No. They're letting you talk to him because you are one of us, and we have forced them. To them, you are an instrument of our will. They have failed, completely and utterly, to gather anything meaningful out of him, and they only half-hope you'll succeed before he is executed. They are making this out to be a very big favor, one for which we will have to pay dearly. But all of this is academic, because if they haven't made him talk in five months, you haven't got a prayer of getting anything out of him in half an hour. That's what they believe. Are they wrong?"

  Cundieffe had felt his pulse quicken and his brain squeezing out endorphins and adrenaline in generous dosages, and there had been no doubt, no hesitation in his voice. "I was born to prove them wrong, sir."

  Cundieffe knew that the Pentagon was a big building. He had toured it once as a child and twice as an adult, and it never failed to stun him with its sheer mass, and its titanic network of human effort. FBI Headquarters, with its streamlined, centralized hierarchy, flowed mostly along conduits invisible or at least discrete. The military had far more duties, but with its myriad gargantuan bureaucracies and multiple heads, with its masculine fetish for ritual and compartmentalization, it demanded all the superfluous layers of human machinery that symbolize a great enterprise: legions of racing couriers with sealed folders, flocks of staff officers migrating through their cycles of briefings, and sentries at every juncture, with sentries watching the sentries, and cameras watching them all. He was now educated enough to understand that very little of substance was ever decided here.

  In the early morning rush to fill the largest government building in human history, the lines filing through the metal detectors and the ID checkpoints flowed quickly, but three MP's escorted Cundieffe past them and into the aortic superhighway of the outer ring corridors. Clerks and couriers on three-wheeled scooters passed them, and Cundieffe noticed the kind of electric courtesy carts that airlines use to shuttle passengers to faraway terminal connections.

  They passed through a blank door with no knob, no placard. He followed them immediately down a narrow spiral staircase which opened on a long empty corridor, watching the walls change color from mint to forest green, to red, to rose marble. There were only more blank doors and equally empty branching halls leading off this corridor and heavy steel blast doors recessed into the walls at every intersection. They took two more flights of stairs down and threaded a maze of basement corridors lined with basket carts filled with packages, mail and folders. When they finally stopped, they stood on a subway platform unlike any Cundieffe had ever seen before. The track terminated here, and ran off into a barrel-vaulted tunnel that curved away to the left, in which direction Cundieffe couldn't begin to guess. A single electric, open-topped car waited, and there was an Army officer waiting on it.

  There were several similar underground lines reserved for government personnel, which connected the Pentagon with other facilities, like Crystal City or Washington National Airport, just as there were private subway lines connecting the Capitol with the various congressional office buildings. But this tramway was older than those, and yet more modern. He barely noticed the red eyeblinks of scanners reading his temporary badge as he passed through the turnstile. The MP's saluted the officer and marched into an elevator that opened for them at the end of the platform. Cundieffe climbed onto the car. Immediately, silently, it began to glide down the tunnel, Cundieffe noticed a station placard on the wall as they pulled away, but it was in barcode.

  The officer turned and faced him, looking him pointedly up and down and not saluting. Cundieffe tried not to wince as he looked at the man's face. "You must be Col. Nye," he said.

  "'S'what it says on the fucking uniform, isn't it?" Col. Nye answered, and blew smoke in Cundieffe's face. It came in a thick cone that caught him off guard, because Col. Nye had no nose.

  From Wyler's classified briefing, Cundieffe knew that Col. Nye was the commandant of Avon's Special Stockade. Before that, he served four tours in Vietnam, first as a commando, then as a Special Forces liaison with the CIA. During the last, desperate days of the war, he lost most of his face to a grenade in an action the United States government could not acknowledge, because its forces were supposed to have left the country three months before. The legend was that he'd gone into Hanoi to assassinate Ho Chi Minh himself, on his own and supposedly without orders. He never got within ten miles of Hanoi, but he allegedly killed well over one hundred NVA regulars getting in and out before he was exfiltrated out of Laos. He was discharged in 1975 with a Purple Heart for an "accident," which he'd refused. He wore no medals and no insignia other than the bare minimum to establish rank and national affiliation, but every serviceman who recognized him saluted him as he would God or the ghost of Patton. Even so, if Sgt. Storch so much as opened his mouth, Col. Nye was not cleared to hear what Cundieffe would hear. This gave him the nerve to look the Colonel in the eye.

  Nye also refused to wear prosthetic facial appliances, apparently preferring to use his ghastly appearance as a motivational weapon. To Cundieffe, he looked more than a little like Ross Perot with no nose or upper lip, a hand-rolled cigarette clenched in his naked yellow dentures, yawning nasal cavity gushing out ribbons of smoke like an idling locomotive, flinty green eyes taking Cundieffe's measure like they were going somewhere dark and deep together, and only one was coming back.

  It was a strange feeling being looked at like that, the way Lt. Col. Greenaway had looked at him, the way former Special Agent Lane Hunt had looked at him as he'd been hauled away. Like they possessed an animal sense that Cundieffe lacked, that told them he was not one of them. It did not surprise him so much now that he'd never suspected the Mules, or himself, while the neighborhood children had felt instinctively compelled to ostracize and beat him senseless at every opportunity until he became an FBI agent. He hesitated to use the Mules' terms for it, but it fit the way they made him feel: gendered humans still responded largely to chemical, pheromonal cues in all dealings with each other. The
absence of such often incited animal hostility, contempt and fear. He hoped he would fare better with Sgt. Storch than he was with Col. Nye.

  "You've been briefed on the extent of my responsibilities for the duration of the meeting?" Nye demanded.

  "Yes, I have. I understand everything except for the lack of any medical file materials. Are there any you could make available to me before I sit down with him?"

  "None whatsoever!"

  Cundieffe blinked, but it was at least half from the smoke. "Pardon?"

  "Did I speak French? I am not aware of any such cockeyed bullshit, nor would I be fucking well disposed to disclose a single fucking thing I did know about said cockeyed bullshit, were I aware of such. Asshole."

  "Col. Nye, you have been directly ordered to cooperate fully, have you not?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Then if there's anything you can tell me yourself that you are withholding, you would be in violation of a direct order. If you're afraid of compromising security—"

  "I don't give a one-eyed flying fuck about that bullshit," Nye growled back. He turned and got up in Cundieffe's face, so close his cigarette singed Cundieffe's chin. "I know what you are," he said. Cundieffe took stock of the fact that he was alone in the subway car with the Colonel. He stood a head taller than the officer, and he was armed, but Nye's hand rested on his holster so steadily that he was either preparing to draw down at any moment, or his arm was paralyzed, or a prosthetic fake.

  This was an absurd train of thought. He understood Col. Nye's type. If he couldn't interrogate a hostile party on the same side, what chance did he stand with a radical enemy of the state? "And we know you, Col. Nye. We know your real name, and how you really lost your face, and we know things that even you've forgotten that would cost you even this pathetic little shadow-commission you've managed to hold onto. Now, how much contact have you had with the prisoner?"

  Col. Nye seemed to shrink a little. "Too fucking much," he finally answered. "None at all. He's a goddamned vegetable now, anyway. You're wasting everybody's time."

  "Yes, I understand they're eager to dissect him up at Ft. Detrick."

  Nye chuffed smoke rings out his blowhole. "I don't need to know about any of that shit, shithead. I only run the goddamned stockade. He's forgotten once he's transferred."

  In doing his homework, Cundieffe had learned a bit about how prisoners were "transferred" from Avon. He read about a previous guest— a Marine-trained sniper who became a radical Christian and took up picking off abortion doctors and genetic researchers from extraordinary distances. He went to ground in the forbidding wilderness of the Appalachian range, but Army Rangers caught him and quietly brought him to Avon for "debriefing." Apparently, he'd done a number of assassinations of Palestinian Hammas and Party of God terrorists for them, and couldn't be trusted not to talk if turned out alive. His remains were discovered a month later in the wooded mountains of West Virginia, apparently starved and frozen to death. The following week brought crushingly efficient ATF raids on three weapons stockpiles of a Christian Fundamentalist terrorist group, with an anonymous informant credited with the tips. Then there were the stories of the prisoners for whom the facility had originally been built, the refugees of a seaside New England town, now nameless and long-since demolished: wretchedly inbred mutants who were shipped to Avon in 1928, gassed, vivisected and ultimately starved to death.

  "He never made any attempt to communicate with you or anyone else, during his stay with you?"

  "None whatsoever! He disabled two guards who got a little fresh with him when he rotated in, but otherwise he's been in solitary. He's had plenty of opportunity to speak up, but he has never done so, not even under extreme duress."

  "Has he been examined by a medical doctor?"

  "He's been treated more than a few times for injuries—mostly self-inflicted, mind you. In between, he got medical doctors, shrinks, neurosurgeons, biochemists, Agency torturers, whores, the works. Their diagnosis is, he didn't want to talk, and he'd put a hurt on anyone who touched him. And he's got cancer."

  "What? What kind of cancer?"

  "Cancer of the every goddamned thing. How the fuck should I know what kind? Yeah, he's gonna die any day now, anyway. Be a mercy, shooting him. Whatever he did, no soldier deserves to die like that."

  The car smoothly glided to a stop and Col. Nye hopped off, moving between a brace of MP's who were dead ringers for the ones at the other end, except they wore no unit markings. There was no sign that Cundieffe could discern telling him where they were, but judging by the distance traveled underground, they could be underneath Arlington or Alexandria; for that matter, they could have gone under the Potomac to Bolling Air Force Base.

  They went deeper. They boarded an elevator, went down four levels, and debarked in a red brick cavern that looked like a nineteenth century military prison. Arched cell doorways ran around all four walls, with vertical iron bars set into them. All the doors hung open save one. A cordon of MP's stood at attention before the bars, screening the prisoner from view. Cundieffe approached, and they gave no acknowledgment except for tightening their grips on their assault rifles.

  Col. Nye's nasal wheezing crept up behind him. "Come meet some people," he honked. Cundieffe turned around and let himself be led to a cell opposite Sgt. Storch's, this one unlit except for the red and green lights of computers and recording equipment. Two men sat in the shadows behind the gear. They both rose and walked over to Cundieffe. He shook hands with them both. "Duncan Showalter, technical consultant," the first man said, his eyes looking over Cundieffe's shoulder. Cundieffe took the other man's hand and the moment he looked into his eyes, he knew. The other man was a Mule.

  "Brady Hoecker, Associate Director, National Security Agency," he said, and he nodded to Cundieffe and his eyes sparked the message that he knew, too. "We're just here to listen in, so don't let us cramp your style."

  "You pencil-necks can suck each other's dicks on your own time," Nye cut in, dragging Cundieffe back across the gallery to Storch's cell.

  Hoecker and Showalter retreated back into the dark and the sentries parted.

  "One more thing," Col. Nye said, and smoothly lifted Cundieffe's sidearm out of its shoulder holster.

  "I have no intention of harming the prisoner, Colonel," Cundieffe murmured.

  "Don't think you could if you tried, but it's not you I'm worried about." He swiped a card through a reader slot and handed the card to one of the MP's as the gate popped open.

  A second gate inside the first, and Col. Nye opened this one with a key, which he presented to another MP who stood his post in the antechamber between the gates. The guard hung the key around his neck and aimed his rifle squarely at the back of the man sitting in the cell.

  Cundieffe stood in the antechamber until Col. Nye shoved him into the cell and slammed the inner gate behind him. "Give a shout when you're done. You have twenty seven minutes." The outside MP opened the card gate for him and slammed it. Col. Nye disappeared behind a wall of guards with their backs turned.

  Sgt. Storch sat at a hardwood table with his hands shackled behind his back and bolted to the floor. He wore a collar of plastic with blinking LED's on it: some sort of shock deterrent device, most likely. When the gate shut, he inclined his head slightly; not in surprise, but, Cundieffe thought, to brace for an attack. He stepped into the cell, the greasy crinkle of plastic dropcloth underfoot. He wondered if they intended to execute him here, and wanted to have it clean for the tourists by this afternoon. He gave Storch a wide berth, walking against the brick wall to the far side of the table. He avoided making eye contact until he was sitting opposite the prisoner. Slowly, he laid his briefcase on the table and, slower still, unsnapped the hasps and laid it open before him. Trying to remember that he was here as an interrogator, when he felt like Storch's lawyer. Only then did he stop and look up at Sgt. Storch.

  Up until now, Cundieffe had only seen Storch in ID photos, old family snapshots, surveillance imagery and on tapes
of closed-circuit security video. That man had looked haunted by some kind of illness which gave his otherwise unremarkable features a harsh, fanatical cast. Here was the illness wearing the smoldering ruin of the man he'd hoped to meet. Storch looked to have lost about fifty pounds in captivity, most of it muscle. His eyes were recessed so far into his head that he looked like a Neanderthal, with his beetling brow and knife-blade cheekbones. His mouth was clamped so tightly shut it was only another wrinkle in his crumpled face. Patches of hair so black it was almost blue stood out from Storch's skull, the rest of it scabbed and bleeding where he'd apparently ripped it out by the roots.

  Mostly self-inflicted

  Storch's skin hung on him like wet pajamas the color and texture of an onion, and scars crisscrossed it—the inflamed grid pattern of chemical exposure tests, the purple welts of cattle prods, neat seams from surgeries, many more whose causes Cundieffe couldn't begin to guess.

  Storch didn't look up from the table, but he didn't seem to be focusing on the things Cundieffe laid out from the briefcase.

  "Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch, Fifth Special Forces Group, Retired. I'm Special Agent Martin Cundieffe from the FBI. I realize that the circumstances are not what they could be, but I've come here to talk to you about your role in the Mission's activities of July Fourth through the Tenth, 1999. Am I speaking to Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch?"

  No response.

  "I don't expect many answers from you, Sgt. Storch. I've read your file, and I know your record in detail. Enlisted, 1983, Basic, then Airborne. You earned your Ranger tab in '84, and served with the First of the Seventy-Fifth Regiment, at Ft. Benning. In 1986, you took the Q Course to become a Green Beret. You stress-fractured your right forearm during an exercise, but concealed it for the remaining week, so you wouldn't be sent back. Did you know they were going to flunk you, Sergeant? You received excellent marks in everything but initiative. It was felt that while you had the will to fight and think as a soldier, you lacked the capability to think for yourself, and would make a superb Ranger. Good soldier, good weapon, but not a warrior. You passed because you wouldn't break, and they needed warm bodies, but the question remains: can you think for yourself, Sgt. Storch?"