by Greg Dragon
In all of his years working situations such as the one here in China, he had never had a breach in containment. Yet, not only had there been one, there had been at least two, quite possibly three in the past twenty four hours.
That damn incompetent horse’s ass Aston.
What was worse, he’d come to find out that such breaches were becoming a theme with the damn company, with at least a half dozen other screw-ups happening before Norstrom’s team had been brought on board six weeks ago. What the hell was wrong with these incompetents? Why couldn’t they get their act together?
You warned them, he thought angrily. You told them there were too many ways things could go south. But not only did they brazenly insist that it was all under control, they put an incompetent prick in charge of calling the shots.
“Just give me leeway to do my job,” he’d told them, because he knew those fat cat corporate types would find some way to screw things up, and he didn’t want to be around when it happened. Well, it had. And boy was this one hell of a screw up. Not that they’d ever admit it. And no amount of I-told-you-so would make any difference, though it sure as hell would make him feel better.
He stopped outside the tent and braced himself for the inevitable chewing out. Then he raised his fist and rapped his knuckles sharply against the clipboard hanging outside.
“Come!”
He pulled aside the flap and ducked as he entered. Coming in from the blinding light of the day, the interior was stiflingly dark. A single lamp focused its glow downward onto a drafting table, illuminating a mess of papers strewn all over the surface, maps and manifests, names of people, who knew what else. All of it highly incriminating. The air was chokingly hot and dry from a portable gas heater that hummed softly by the entrance behind him.
“Aston?”
“Over here.”
Norstrom turned and squinted into the darkness, and in the back right corner he located the elephantine form of Mabry Aston sitting in a folding chair, his elbows on his knees and an unlit cigar between the sausage fingers of his right hand. One end was a flat gray stub, the other a sloppy, tattered mess turned nearly black by the man’s overzealous gumming.
Aston spat onto the ground beside his feet, then delicately plucked something off his tongue with fingers that reminded Norstrom of stumpy white turnips. “Got a light?” the fat man asked, his voice gurgling out of his throat.
For the briefest of moments Norstrom imagined using one of his flamethrowers on the man’s face. He’d always disliked taking orders from clueless idiots, and most of the corporate people assigned to oversee his contract operations usually were, especially the lawyer types, but he absolutely hated taking orders from soft rich pricks who romanticized the dirty work he got paid to do while fancying themselves as some sort of inscrutable character out of a ridiculous Humphrey Bogart movie, the kind of guy who always got the girl in the end.
“Sorry,” he replied, shaking his head. He had a lighter in his pocket, but he’d be damned if he was going to share a closed space with anyone exhaling that crap. His lungs still hurt from the crap he’d inhaled last night in the cockpit of the 88.
Aston sighed, pocketed the cigar stub in his two-hundred-dollar olive drab canvas shirt, which contained enough fabric to make a small pup tent, and heaved his three-hundred-pound mass out of the chair. The thing almost seemed to groan in relief. He waddled over to the table and into the puddle of light looking like a giant, vaguely human-shaped water balloon filled to bursting. His pale skin was hairless and smooth and he smelled of lavender soap, yet despite the obvious primping, his comb-over had a perpetually greasy and disheveled look to it. Norstrom looked down at the top of the man’s matted hair and privately shivered in disgust.
Aston cleared his throat. “This had better be better news than yesterday’s clusterfu—“
“Might I remind you, Mister Aston, that it never—“
“I don’t need a reminder of anything!” Aston interrupted his interrupter. He looked up with watery eyes. His chins waggled as he tried to fetch back control over his emotions. Sweat rolled down his forehead, down his cheek, into his collar. Some of it fell away from the cliffs of his jowls and spattered onto the table. “You have news about the woman then?” he demanded.
Norstrom stood motionless and stared at the short man. He waited until he began to fidget before giving him an answer. “My crew was assigned to finish the cleanup on schedule — ahead of schedule, actually, which they did — not chase after your loose ends. We still have the other site to—“
“That’s not what I asked you, Norstrom. Damn it, man!” He picked up a pen, inspected it a moment as if contemplating what to do with it, then hurled it back to the table. It made an unsatisfying clatter before disappearing into the shadows of the tent. Norstrom didn’t react to the pitiful display of indignation. “I asked about the woman!”
“We’re still dealing with that. I told you I needed unfettered access to the lab at the factory and—“
“Not without one of my men! I told you that!”
“—also your sign-off on the clean up before I can even begin to shift resources.”
“Resources?” Aston sputtered. “Is that what this is about? Money? You think you’re not getting paid enough?”
“It’s about protocol.”
“To hell with your damn protocol! This isn’t your precious military! Just do your damn job, Norstrom. Think for yourself for once, or I’ll find someone else who can!”
Norstrom didn’t answer. He simply gave his head and eyes a barely perceptible dip toward the requisition on the table.
“Christ, all right, I’ll sign. Are you absolutely sure you’ve wiped out every trace of evidence? It’s all burned away?”
Norstrom pulled a pen from his pocket and handed it over and watched as Aston scribbled his name on the paper. With the form now notarized, Norstrom tucked it away; he didn’t bother asking for his pen back.
“The crash site has been fully sterilized. So has the hill.” A muscle twitched in his cheek, the only sign that anything bothered him. “And the village has been cleared, too. You can be assured of that. I am very good at my job, very thorough.”
Aston harrumphed. “Thorough perhaps, but also careless. You allowed someone to infiltrate the crash site. You let someone break into your supply truck and steal a hazmat suit and escape in a god damn forklift! That was sloppy—“
“Mister Aston,” Norstrom said, keeping his voice low and steady, “I told you to stay away from the site until we’d finished. If you hadn’t shown up when you did, hadn’t demanded that every single one of us waste a precious hour of our time to hear you prattle on about some useless thing, that site would not have been left unguarded.”
“Prattle?” Aston squealed indignantly. “Don’t tell me it— It was not useless!”
“I am telling you, because you seem incapable of grasping what it means to let me do my job.”
“A job you may not have for much longer!”
The two men stared at each other. Aston’s face was bright red, writhing with emotion, whereas Norstrom’s showed none whatsoever. Yet despite his stoicism, the former Army Ranger managed somehow to convey the promise of violence, like a long-dormant volcano overdue for an eruption. This was one of his many attributes, a sense of agitated placidity, even at times of extreme duress.
His time as a prisoner in Syria several years back at the height of the ISIS insurgency had more than prepared him to deal with the worst anyone could imagine. He’d endured torture, both physical and mental. Yet he’d learned to hide it so as to deny his captors any satisfaction.
He had killed the bastards escaping, an act which caused him to lose no sleep whatsoever. He’d killed both before and after that incident, killed to protect himself and his men, to protect secrets. He had even slaughtered innocents, women and children and the elderly. Collateral damage, all in the course of that work. Those deaths, however, did occasionally haunt him.
But last
night had been the worst he’d ever been asked to do. It bothered him deeply. He had never been required to do anything like that before, the outright murder of so many people. It tormented him. But he would never let anyone know that it had, especially this bastard.
“You checked that there were no more . . . witnesses?”
The muscle in Norstrom’s cheek jumped. He stared hard at Aston and didn’t reply.
“Oh, don’t tell me you’re sad for those people! You knew exactly what we were paying you to do.” Aston waved a hand in disgust. “Nothing more pathetic than a mercenary with a conscience!”
When Norstrom had been given his orders days before, he’d been told that the villagers would be long gone, evacuated on some pretense to another valley far away, but of course he had always known that it was a lie. There had to be no loose ends. Then, sitting in the co-pilot seat of the World War II-era Junkers Ju 88 as it lifted into the air with a fuselage full of illegal incendiary meant for a hillside littered with hundreds of people, he’d wondered where exactly the line was that he wouldn’t cross. But it was only with a sort of inevitability and disappointment that he watched during the plane’s approach. There had been an opportunity to stop the release, but he hadn’t taken it.
“Well?”
Rarely did his heart rate tick north of seventy, but it was certainly there now.
“Gone,” he said through clenched teeth. “All of it. Everything and everyone. Just rubble.” He felt the tic in his cheek again. “My men returned for the final check soon after first light. But . . . .”
Once more, it had been because of Aston’s interference that he had been caught flatfooted, and that had opened the door to yet another piece of uncertainty. Aston had shown up at their briefing area before dawn demanding a full report, including a review of the video recording of the air bombing. That had put them more than an hour behind schedule. He’d also taken the opportunity to publicly chastise Norstrom and his crew of their screw up at the crash site, which none of them really needed after the stress of the work. He’d almost had a mutiny on his hands.
“We found fresh tire tracks at the village,” Norstrom said. “A small car. Someone went there after the bombing and before my men finally arrived this morning. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“Why the hell would I—?” Aston’s eyes widened at the accusation. “It wasn’t me!” And then, jumping to the next conclusion: “You were seen? God damn it!”
Norstrom had hoped it was him, though in his heart of hearts he knew it wasn’t. The size of the footprints was right, but he doubted the man would have gone there in such a small car with bald tires.
He didn’t bother mentioning that his men had tracked the car’s point of origin to a small outcropping a kilometer and a half or so from the center of the village. The spot where it had been parked was free of ash, so it had been there already when the burning started or had arrived soon after. The ground around it was covered in size seven footprints, which he now had to assume had been made by a woman, possibly even the American they were still not sure about. There were no tracks leading to the car, only around it, so whoever had made them had been inside it when the ash fell. They would’ve had a perfect vantage point to witness the bombing.
And now they were gone.
“The car was driven down into the village,” he said, “then around it, likely just after first light. It then vacated the area. We lost the trail when the ashfall thinned away to nothing. The car was heading northeast.
“Could it be the American?” Aston sputtered through his anger. “The owner of the parka? Is it the same person?”
“As far as we’ve been able to determine, Miss Peters didn’t own a car. None of the villagers did.”
“But you’re not sure. The parka—“
“With your man assisting, the DNA testing on the samples has been . . . . It’s still on-going. We’ve managed to rule out over ninety-two percent of the employees so far. But the reference samples we had for the last eight percent, including the American, were mishandled. The tests need to be repeated.”
Aston either ignored the implication that his own man had been responsible for the delay, or he didn’t pick up on it. He simply frowned as he struggled to understand this. Finally, his eyes narrowed and his face grew red. “So, you’re telling me that we still don’t know who the hell we’re looking for? We still can’t say with absolute certainty that every single person on that train is dead? How many are we talking about? Twenty? Thirty people? Christ! Are you actually telling me that there might be dozens of them walking around out there with—“
He stopped himself short.
“With what, Aston?” Norstrom asked.
“Nothing! Just do your job! Find out who’s nosing about!” He was practically screaming by now, except that his voice kept cracking and he was wheezing so badly that every inhale was a snort. “And if it’s that American girl, I want her ashes in a box!”
“I think we have to assume,” Norstrom calmly replied, “at least for the time being, that more than one person somehow survived the crash. We know the American was on the train. The security camera at the station at the factory confirmed that she boarded with the other passengers that day, all two hundred and eighty-seven. Unfortunately, what we don’t have is video at the crash site.”
“Well of course we don’t, you idiot! Why would we?”
“We should also move forward assuming that it may not just be survivors, either, but someone else — a member of that village or another, a passerby.” He shrugged. “At least until the remaining genetic tests have been rerun.”
He waited for Aston to tell him what to do, but the little round man just stood there, the skin on his face, save for a red patch on his cheek, gone waxy yellow again.
“I sent one of my men back to the factory for new tissue samples. Along with one of yours.”
“Oh, why not just do whatever the hell you want?” Aston snapped.
“I advise that we begin checking hospitals within a couple hundred clicks of here,” Norstrom said, ignoring the taunt. “As well as villages, known shaman, anywhere a person might go for medical help.”
Aston blinked stupidly for a moment before nodding. Then he seemed to collect himself. “Don’t bother me with the inane details! I’ve got enough on my plate dealing with your screw-ups. Just take care of this latest mess, Norstrom.” He pointed an accusing finger at the taller man. “Take care of this or so help me . . . .” He began to sputter. “Dismissed! I said get the hell out of my tent!”
Norstrom spun on his heels. The prick was lucky he didn’t make him stay any longer, as he might do something that he’d later regret. Of course, he could always make it look like an unfortunate accident, choking on a twenty-dollar cigar stub, for example. Who knows, it might still happen.
“Your fault!” Aston screeched at his back. “You hear me, Norstrom? I am not taking the blame for this! And you damn well better not forget it, so if you know what’s good for . . . .”
As Norstrom walked away, the man’s tirade descended into an inchoate babble.
Yeah, he thought. He was sure that before all this was finished, something bad was going to befall that sad little man.
Chapter Twenty Six
The loose gravel slipped from beneath Angel’s feet and she stumbled, hitting the packed ground hard with her hip and skinning the palm of her hand. She sat on the worn walking path for a moment to catch her breath, the grass on either side brushing against her shoulders. Sunlight dappled the valley and distant hills, blending golden and green and gray. Shadows raced across the face of the land like the spirit armies of the ancient khans. And in the middle of it all stood the factory, an imposing concrete fortress whose silent walls dared her to be breached.
She was shaking from hunger, yet she was not hungry. The horror of the village bombing, witnessed in the stark black and white of night and confirmed by the undeniable light of day, had stolen away her appeti
te. She didn’t think she would ever be hungry again. How many innocent lives had been lost? How many people had died to keep a secret? The factory below her seemed to taunt her with its stony arrogance.
She pushed herself off the ground and began to walk again, but her hip hurt and her head swam. She staggered and almost fell again. Whiteness crowded her vision. A dull throbbing roar pressed against her ears, and she thought she might be sick. She lowered herself once more for another rest, placing her head between her knees and taking long deep breaths until the dizziness subsided.
The break gave her another opportunity to question what she hoped to accomplish by going down there. Did she think she might find a way in? What good would it do to walk around the outside of the building? What could she possibly hope to learn?
She lay back on the trail and sucked in long, deep breaths through her mouth. The cold hurt her teeth and the glare of the brilliant sky burned her eyelids. She felt an urgency to move again, but it was a distant sort of thing, seeming as far away as the clouds streaming swiftly by high above. The winds violently shredded the shapes the clouds took and reformed them. She realized that this was how she felt, numb on the surface, yet unsettled and full of static charge.
The sound of a door slamming shut brought her immediately back to herself, and she jerked upright onto her elbows. Two men were circling the factory, walking close to the side in shadow and heading away from her. They wore faded jeans and dark windbreakers. One had a rifle strapped across his back, the other a holster on his hip. In their gloved hands, they carried shallow trays, from which a sort of white steam fell and quickly dissipated.
Dry ice?
There was no door on this side of the building, just a tall mound of construction debris about fifteen feet away.
Where did they come from?
