the Devil's Workshop (1999)

by Stephen Cannell

  She went back to her cottage and tried to dial Wendell at the University of Southern California. Her phone wouldn't work--she couldn't even get a dial tone. She tried her cellphone, snapping in a ftesh battery. Again ... nothing.

  "Shit," she said softly, realizing that they had already cut off communications. She figured she wouldn't be able to drive out either. The one road out would be blocked. She grabbed her backpack and her science notebook and began throwing everything she thought she would need on her bed. She found a few Power Bars she had kept in the room for snacks. She fished an empty Evian bottle out of her wastebasket, rinsed it, filled it, and screwed the plastic cap back on. She grabbed her nylon windbreaker and last, but not least, her long-lens camera and all of her unshot film. She put everything in the backpack and then stripped the blanket off her bed, rolled it as tight as she could, and lashed it to the backpack with her extra leather belt.

  "Max, what did you get us into?" she said softly. Then she checked the room one last time for anything that might be useful. She could see nothing else to take, so she slipped out of the cottage.

  She took the wooded path that led up to the trash area, behind the restaurant. Once there, she set off across the hillside, staying in the trees, making her own trail. She went around the lake, moving toward the old prison. She didn't know whether she would die from deadly mosquito bites or at the hands of the cold-eyed soldiers. All she knew was that these were the same pricks who had killed Max, and they were about to kill more innocent people.

  Stacy Richardson intended to make a photographic record of their crimes.

  Chapter 11

  APOCALYPSE

  Asshole!" Dale Cole screamed. He was pointing his side-by-side twelve-gauge at the overweight, sweating Douglas Ballard. They were in front of the Vanishing Lake Hardware Store. Douglas turned and made a desperate, lumbering run up the steps toward the door. Dale fired one barrel, blowing away part of Doug's right arm and shoulder before he got to the threshold. Douglas slumped against the dooijamb, groaning in pain. Then Dale stalked his old fishing buddy like a predatory animal, moving slowly and deliberately up the steps, screaming at him. He aimed the weapon and fired again, turning Doug Ballard's head into a blood mist, then Dale started digging in his pocket for a reload.

  Barney saw it from the front window of the Bucket a' Bait. "I've had enough of this," he said, and grabbed a meat tenderizer off the counter. He grabbed Stu Marshall, one of his customers, "Come on, let's stop this," he said. Barney and Stu ran out of the restaurant and tackled Dale Cole just as he was snapping the reloaded barrels shut. They drove him back against the wall of the wooden front porch.

  Like Sid Saunders, he fought them insanely, his eyes rimmed with red, shining with madness. While Stu tried to hold Dale, Barney hit him with the meat tenderizer, knocking him down. They both finally subdued him, tying him with their belts, as they had seen the soldiers do earlier. Barney and Stu then stood over Dale Cole. Both were shaking.

  "What's going on? Why is this happening?" Barney asked, bewildered.

  Stu couldn't speak, unable to grasp it.

  "I'm gettin' outta here. Gonna go get us some help," Barney said. He moved off toward his car and, without even a look back, he jumped behind the wheel of his pickup and drove out of Vanishing Lake.

  He was doing over seventy when he came around a bend and saw three fallen trees across the highway. He slammed on the brakes, going sideways in a free-wheel skid, stopping just a few feet from the massive trunks. Then two uniformed soldiers in bio-containment gear moved up to him, appearing almost from out of nowhere. They looked to Barney like a NASA flight crew, with their canvas suits and oxygen-fed helmets.

  "You've got to go back," one of them said, his voice tinny through his filtered HEPA mask.

  "What the fuck are you doing at that prison? What got loose up here? People I've known all my life are shooting each other in the streets!" he shouted. "People are going crazy!" The adrenaline was coursing through him, making him rage with anger.

  The two soldiers took several steps back and pulled their side arms from web-gear holsters strapped over their bio-suits. "Go back," they said to him.

  Barney didn't see how he could get around the armed soldiers and the fallen trees. After a minute of frustrated deliberation, he returned to his vehicle. "You people are gonna burn in hell for this!" he shouted. Then he got back into his idling truck, slammed it into reverse, and backed up fast. He spun the pickup around, burning rubber as he headed back to town.

  "Two more cases," Nick Zingo reported. "One in town, one out on Lake Road. A few civilians are trying to run."

  Admiral Zoll was seated in the parole boardroom, listening. It was dusk and he was looking out the window, trying to organize a new containment plan.

  "These civilians are going to start hiking out. We're gonna need a strong N. P. D.," Nick Zingo said, referring to a night perimeter defense.

  Admiral Zoll stood up. Out the window, in the fading orange sunset, he could dimly see the prison tower and shimmering lake beyond. He couldn't believe this was happening. He had been nurturing this program for twenty-seven years. He had fought to save it when Nixon had ordered it shut down in 1972. Zoll was just a Naval Commander then. He was recently back from Vietnam, had been the liaison to Fort Detrick, and was stationed at the Pentagon. He had quickly become a total believer in the work being done at the Devil's Workshop.

  A strategic weapon was defined as anything capable of killing large numbers of people with a single strike. Zoll realized that in this category, bio-weapons far outperformed nuclear weapons. First, they were much cheaper. The huge Sums of money that were spent on nuclear armaments could be redirected to more practical conventional military operations. Second, bio-weapons didn't destroy the enemy's infrastructure. They didn't turn captured cities into smoking piles of radioactive rubble. Twenty-four hours after a toxic event, occupation forces could secure an area, and the telephones still worked. Third, devastating as they were, they attacked only people, not the environment.

  He convinced several members of the Joint Chiefs and had quietly pursued a covert bio-weapons program at Fort Detrick, under the guise of running a defense against chemical and biological terrorist attacks. He had carefully masked it from Congress, setting up Pentagon funding through colleges and universities, disguising it all as research grants. He had brought troubled scientific geniuses, like Dexter DeMille, into the program at Fort Detrick to do the R&D. When the CIA had sniffed his program out, he had been forced to include Agency spooks, and had skillfully steered the program through the dangerous white-water rapids of multiple Congressional hearings caused by unauthorized CIA cowboy tactics. They'd brought heat on the program with their mosquito tests at Carver Village, the asinine San Francisco and Minnesota open-air experiments, and the incredibly foolish subway debacle in New York, when CIA agents had attempted to determine if germs placed in one subway tunnel could be spread by the trains' backdraft, eventually leaking out of air vents all through the city.

  He had been dragged to Washington, but had managed to convince a wary Congress that despite a few lapses, the work being done at Fort Detrick fell inside the Presidential Order, allowing for the development of anti-terrorist science.

  Now, all these years later, on the eve of their greatest bio-weapon triumph, because of a few escaped mosquitoes, the entire program might come crashing down. Worse still, despite his patriotic motives, he knew he would be vilified. He would be categorized with monsters like Adolf Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, who practiced wholesale genocide. The politicians and the American public would not accept the truth in his arguments. They would insanely prefer nuclear armaments, with their world-ending potential, to the far more practical bio-weapons.

  Admiral Zoll knew this situation at Vanishing Lake was probably not going to be fully contained. Someone would slip out and tell the story. He needed a scapegoat to pin it on. Dexter DeMille was the obvious choice. He was the scientist who had designed the killer P
rion in the first place.

  DeMille was a temperamental, suicidal genius who often broke up his own lab in fits of uncontrollable rage and had been under constant suicide watch. It wasn't too big a stretch to believe that he had developed this bio-weapon without Admiral Zoll's approval, and that when his unsolicited research had been turned down and condemned, he had cracked and set his killer insects loose, and then, in a final self-destructive act, killed himself.

  "I want you to get Dr. DeMille and put him in one of the jail cells over in C-Block," Zoll finally said to Captain Zingo, who touched his shoulder mike and gave the order. "It's sunset. How're we doing locating the mosquitoes?" the Admiral asked, turning his thoughts back to tactics.

  "We have two sites so far," Zingo said, pointing to marshy areas on the map.

  "Okay, let's get started. We can't wait. Put two of the Black-hawks up there and burn 'em out."

  "Yes sir," Captain Zingo said, and moved out of the parole boardroom, leaving the Admiral in the dusky space alone.

  The last rays of sun were now barely lighting the edges of the tables and chairs. Zoll stood for several moments, lost in thought. After a while, he heard the "helos" winding up and taking off. Then he saw them fly across the prison yard and over the lake. He watched them until they became small specks in the diminishing light.

  "Dash Two, this is Dash One. Our time over target is just ten minutes," Zingo said, going air-to-air on the rocking-horse band. He was talking to the Blackhawk flying just off his starboard side.

  "Dash Two, roger," he heard Captain Don Abrams respond woodenly from the second helicopter. Nick Zingo was in the passenger seat of the lead bird. They were flying low over the lake. Silver-blue water tinged with late-afternoon sun was flashing by under them. He had decided to limit their T. O. T. to avoid problems with civilians. The mission plan was to fly just two passes over the coastal marsh, dumping the JP-5 jet fuel into the water and along the shore on the first pass. Then both zippo gunners, who were strapped in the waist door amidships of each Blackhawk, would lean out at the end of their tethers, holding machine guns that shot explosive white phosphorus-tipped bullets, called "Willy Petes." Once they were over the target area, they would fire them into the fuel-soaked grass as they flew the second sweep. The phosphorus-tipped bullets would ignite the gas-soaked marsh, flaring white-hot, even underwater. Their total Time Over Target was supposed to be less than ten minutes.

  Nick had done this once before on an illegal CIA ground op in Panama. He knew that they had to be ready to grab altitude quickly, because the jet fuel would go up fast, causing an updraft, which could scorch or even break the bird. He glanced at the second Blackhawk, forty feet to starboard, and grabbed the mike.

  "Okay, Dash Two, let's cover the tires and light the fires," he said, as they approached the marsh. The second Blackhawk peeled off and headed right. For some strange reason, Don Abrams didn't roger the transmission.

  Zingo's bird made its first slow pass over the marshy area, while the tail gunner opened the pump valve and dropped thousands of gallons of JP-5 into the water and onto the reed marsh. They all felt the helo lift slightly as they lightened their load. Then they made a turn and started the torch run. The waist gunner, holding his weapon loaded with Willy Petes, leaned out the door on his tether as they flashed back over the Drop Zone. He triggered the W. P. S. Phosphorus-tipped bullets shot toward the marshy ground and exploded on impact. The fuel ignited with a terrible whomp. A huge ball of orange fire rolled up, singeing the underbelly of the Blackhawk as it climbed fast and to the right, then flew back along the quickly spreading fire line at the perimeter of the lake.

  In the cockpit of the second Blackhawk, Captain Don Abrams was performing the same operation a half mile to the north. Captain Abrams was a solid combat pilot. He had flown countless ground-pounding missions during the Gulf War. He had an easygoing disposition, which kept his crew calm even on low nut-pucker sorties, but he had been feeling very strange all afternoon. Occasional waves of intense anger had swept over him for things that he would usually laugh off. He had had two or three dizzy spells, which had come and gone quickly. He found himself questioning this mission, something he had never done before. He was a strict chain-of-command officer, but all afternoon he had been wondering angrily, What the hell am I doing up here?

  He looked over at Zingo's Blackhawk less than a thousand yards away. It was flying low, and he could see the vapor trail of the Willy Pete, streaming out of the waist door, followed by huge "ca-whumps" that, seconds later, would send concussive shock waves across the water that bounced against the side of his own chopper, rattling his plastic radome pod, which covered his sensitive radar equipment. The turbulence from the concussions shot unreasoning venomous anger through him.

  "Okay, we're ready for the fire pass," his zippo gunner said over the crackling ear mike.

  "I'm in fucking charge here, Deek," Captain Abrams snapped, uncharacteristically. "I'll fly the mission plan on my timetable, not yours."

  "We gotta light the fires, Sonar," his waist gunner said, using the nickname his crew had hung on him because of his huge ears.

  "Shut the fuck up, and let's use rank designation, Corporal," Don Abrams shot back, feeling a flash of anger so intense his hands shook. It was followed by a frightening momentary loss of equilibrium. For a second he could barely control the Blackhawk.

  "Have it your way, Captain," his waist gunner snapped.

  Don Abrams was feeling increasingly strange. He felt "out of it," almost as if he were somewhere else. Why was he so angry?

  What was this dizziness? Then he heard Nick Zingo's voice on the rocking-horse band: "Let's go, Sonar. Your T. O. T. is half gone. Get it shakin'."

  Suddenly, Don Abrams snapped. He pushed the collective forward and peeled unexpectedly left, heading directly at the other Blackhawk. Somewhere in his mind he wondered why he was doing this, but that one sane thought was immediately lost in a rage that swamped all reason.

  "What the hell is Abrams doing?" Zingo said, as he saw the Blackhawk swerve and head at them, flying at attack angle.

  Then before Zingo could get on the radio, they saw the nose cannons on the approaching Blackhawk winking fifty-caliber death.

  "He's got his fangs out!" Zingo's pilot shouted. A second later they heard the rounds tearing into the side of their helicopter.

  "The motherfucker has us padlocked!" Zingo screamed, as more rounds slammed into the Blackhawk, rocking it badly.

  His pilot abruptly spun left, pointing his nose into Don Abrams's charging Blackhawk to present a smaller target, then he began a zigzag evasive action as the attacking helicopter flew directly at them, all of its nose cannons firing.

  "Splash the motherfucker!" Zingo yelled at his pilot, as Captain Abrams flashed directly over them. What happened next was hard to understand.

  Suddenly, Don Abrams aborted his attack on Zingo's helicopter and turned toward Vanishing Lake Village. He flew low, at full throttle. Moments later he flashed across the treetops at the lake's edge and turned toward the center of town. He hit his stick "hot button" and his nose cannons started tearing up chunks of asphalt and blowing cars over, killing the drivers with explosive beehive rounds. Then, without hesitation, the fourteen-ton Blackhawk flew directly at the Bucket a' Bait restaurant and, diving low, crashed through the front window. The entire building exploded, going up in a huge ball of white fire. The concussion from the explosion rocked the town and shattered glass windows two blocks away.

  Drums of outboard fuel started exploding on the dock from the white-hot heat.

  "This is Dash One to Firebase," Nick Zingo said into his mike. "Dash Two just crashed. Sonar went nuts--he attacked us, strafed the town, and then boltered into the restaurant. We've got a major situation over here."

  "Roger, Dash One. Stand by," the firebase R. T. O. said quickly.

  Zingo's Blackhawk hovered over the town, and they watched in amazement. Building after building caught fire from the intense heat. Men a
nd women ran into the street, their clothes and bodies burning.

  "Mother-grabber," the pilot said in dismay.

  Admiral Zoll had heard the explosion and had climbed up into the gas chamber tower in Center Block. He looked out of the window, and with binoculars he could see the huge fire burning across the lake. Occasionally something over there would explode. He listened to Zingo describe the devastation on the radio. He knew he had no choice.

  Admiral Zoll had wiped out entire Cong villages from behind the joystick of his Intruder. He hadn't liked it, but back then, he came to accept the fact that some missions were ethically more difficult than others. He triggered his handset and came on the radio; his voice was surprisingly calm. "Dash One, this is Firebase. The situation has progressed beyond contain," he said, slowly. "Collateralize the area, begin Charlie Fox-trot."

  Nick Zingo had never turned down an order, but now he hesitated. There was a moment of static on the radio, followed by a squelch. Then he heard Zoll's sandpapery voice. "I know," the Admiral said sadly, responding to Zingo's silence, "but do it anyway, goddammit!"

  Chapter 12

  RUNNING

  They had left Vanishing Lake quickly when the soldiers poured in. They found a footpath in the hills, and climbed up into a wooded valley a few miles beyond. It had taken several hours. It was just after dusk, and for the last ten minutes, they had heard the sound of the two Blackhawks miles away. The engines alternately roared and whined, while the distant rotor blades changed pitch as the helicopters turned.

  The two hobos were sitting on their bedrolls, resting, to catch their breath before moving on. Lucky still hadn't been able to get a bottle since he'd been thrown off the train, and he was beginning to feel the onset of delirium tremens. Colors seemed too bright, his skin felt crawly. He could always feel things walking on his skin before he saw the bugs and spiders with their probing antennae and spindly legs making the hair on his body stand on end. While his flesh crawled, he sat very still, awash in a wave of self-pity. "Shit," Lucky said. "We need some money for wine."