Gnash (5 page)

“We had engine trouble, that’s why we’re crammed in here with the sweets sir,” the on-site delivery manager said.

“Man, that sucks,” the officer empathized.  “Okay, go straight through here to the loading dock at corridor three,” he finished as he waved the large white catering van through.

“Allah Akbar.  Allah Akbar!” the driver exclaimed after they’d driven past the checkpoint. 

“Quiet, you fool,” the leader of the ten-man crew said.  “We will have time soon enough to rejoice in the light of the Lord.”

The van slowly rolled to a halt and they opened the doors.  Another catering van, marked with the same logo,
Henderson’s Bakery and Catering Inc
., pulled up behind the first.  Five men disembarked from each van and began draping tablecloths over the carts that the building guards had brought out for them.  After the carts were covered they began placing trays of pastries and sheet cakes on them.  One of the guards, his nametag said Johnson, sauntered over.  “Hey, can I get one of those danishes?” 

“Yes sir, here you go,” one of the thin men said with just the tiniest hint of an unrecognizable accent, “But please do not tell your friends, we don’t have enough to go around for all the guards and still support the ceremony.”

“No worries man, I can keep my mouth shut.  Thanks, uh, Bob,” he said reading the nametag of the caterer who had given him the pastry.  “Hey, that’s an interesting accent, are you British or something?”

“No, no, no sir,” the on-site manager said as he hurried over.  “My brother and I are Indian.  Our education system was modeled after the British and we even have British instructors teach our children to speak English in our primary schools.  That is the mingling of dialects that you detect, our traditional Majhi Punjab dialect mixed together with the Cockney accent of our English instructor.  Sometimes it is very confusing for people to understand.”

“Nah, I understand y’all just fine.  I was just interested in your accent,” the officer said.

“Oh, very well sir.  Thank you.  We must be getting back to our work,” he said placing his right hand over his heart and bowing his head.

“Alright.  Hey, thanks again Bob,” he said holding up the Danish as he turned and walked back to his post.

Once everything was unloaded, the crew was escorted into the building by a pair of guards.  Each of the caterers was given a yellow badge that labeled them as visitors and that an escort was required at all times.  They wound their way through the first floor until they reached A-E Drive
[6]
, which they followed to the 6
corridor.  They went inside and walked the E ring to the elevators.  They took the elevators down past the mezzanine level to the basement and pushed their carts along the walkway to the underground Pentagon Auditorium. 

At the auditorium they began setting up the pastries and the cakes on the tables that were in the reception area.  A young sailor brought over a sign that had large blown-up pictures of a young Navy Ensign and the same man many years later as a full Admiral.  A caption underneath stated that this was a retirement ceremony for Admiral Vince J. Goodwin, Chief of Naval Operations beginning at 1600.  The catering crew worked quickly to get everything set up before the guests started to filter in.

“We are supposed to take these to the Admiral’s office,” Bob the caterer told two guards holding up a large fruit platter and pointing at a smaller cake. 

“Alright, you two come with me and Tony will stay here with the rest of the crew.”

Tony, the other police officer, nodded and stood with his thumbs hooked into his belt watching the crew as they fussed over the pastries, rearranging them so that they looked perfect.  One man even placed a small discreet placard that said the catering was provided by
Henderson’s Bakery and Catering Inc.
with their phone number and address so the guests could have the bakery’s contact information if they ever needed catering services.

The guard walking Bob and his partner pushed the button on the elevator to take them upstairs.  As soon as the doors closed the second caterer pulled a syringe from his coat and jabbed it into the officer’s jugular, injecting a dark brown liquid.  Then he grabbed him in a bear hug while he convulsed uncontrollably.  Bob stripped off the white catering jacket quickly revealing a Pentagon Police uniform underneath, complete with an unescorted badge attached to it.  He unhooked the real guard’s belt with the radio and pistol and buckled it around himself while his accomplice still held on to the real police officer.

The cocktail of drugs that they’d injected into the man was extremely lethal and the guard stopped shuddering after only a few seconds. They muscled him under the cart and used tape hidden underneath to secure the body to the cart so no arms or legs would flop out at an inopportune time.  Then they fluffed up the tablecloth that covered the lower shelf and hid the dead police officer just as the doors opened.  Bob, now attired in a Pentagon Police uniform, and the caterer he was escorting stepped out of the elevator and walked to the nearest bathroom. The caterer went inside while Bob stayed with the cart and thirty seconds later returned from the latrine wearing a similar police uniform and unescorted badge. 

They wheeled the cart down a hallway to an area under renovation and entered a closed doorway.  It was empty since the company that was installing the wiring failed to show up to work that day.  When the Defense Department contracting office had called the business office, no one had answered the phone since the men from the bakery had killed them that morning.  The two men pulled out shoulder-length plastic gloves, like the kind farmers wore when they artificially inseminated livestock, and put them on.  Then they dug through the cake until they found all ten vials that were hidden between the different layers of the dessert.

Nine of the vials held multiple different viruses and diseases that they’d spent a decade engineering.  The group’s very first virus had been stolen from Fort Dietrich, Maryland.  In early 2009, the Army finally admitted to losing the three vials of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis.  The official investigation determined that when a freezer containing the samples broke down, everything had to be destroyed but no one kept a record of what was destroyed.  Anyone familiar with laboratory procedures knew that meticulous records are kept concerning everything that happens with a specimen and everyone knew that the military kept excessively detailed records.  It was a shoddy cover-up at best, but the media believed it and moved on to more exciting stories.

That virus came from horses and could be spread to humans by mosquitoes.  It was deadly in only 1 of 100 human cases.  The strain developed in the Pennsylvania lab was mixed with several other similar viruses stolen over the years from pharmaceutical labs, including the dreaded H5N1 virus, or the Avian Flu as it was commonly called.  The group’s scientists believed they had the perfect biological weapon, but when their initial trial run was released in a backwater Mexican town, it mutated too quickly to be effective for concentrated use. 

The media called the resulting disease the Swine Flu because of the town’s large number of pig farms.  When it mutated, it became less lethal and most of the townspeople survived because their bodies had developed antibodies to various flu strains over the years.  In a fairly short period of time, the Western medical establishment was able to develop a vaccine and the terrorist’s scientists went back to work to develop something more useful.

The current generation, and the
coup de grace,
contained a little known ancient disease called Septicemic Plague that the Russians had been able to weaponize during the Cold War and after the country’s collapse, sold to the highest bidder.  All of these extremely contagious diseases were mixed together and stabilized to work together instead of the viruses attacking and killing each other off in the lab.  The cocktail proved 100% lethal in every test animal they’d used. 

Then, the call went out from the Brotherhood for action and human trials were skipped in favor of planning the attack.  This cell had the vital mission to cripple the military of the United States by annihilating all the top leaders at the Pentagon.  It had been tried before, in 2001, but that attack wasn’t planned well enough to do much more than cosmetic damages and kill a small number of people.  This attack would kill every one of them.

With the exception of the coward Navi, who fled with their third delivery truck last night, every one of the men present for this mission had made their peace with Allah at dawn.  Tonight, they would be in
Jannah
[7]
,
treated like kings for the rest of their eternal existence and celebrated by the faithful worldwide. 

The tenth vial contained a simple chemical compound known as VX Nerve Agent, stolen from the U.S. Army when they were clearing chemical weapons stockpiles in Utah.  That agent, when released near the chemical agent monitors, would trigger impenetrable locks to engage across the entire building and no one would get in or out.  With the detection of the nerve agent, even the secret escape tunnel running from the second sub-basement to Fort Myer would be sealed.  It was a very secure system for all the U.S.A.’s top generals and it would keep them safe from any outside attack, except this attack would be from the inside and when the life support systems began pumping oxygen into every floor, every corridor of the building, it would be spreading the virus, one vial for all eight floors of the Pentagon and an extra one to drop into the gym’s air supply system.

The two members of the terrorist cell dressed as policemen split up and went in opposite directions.  One of them carried a small satchel with all the vials of the super virus in it and headed towards the first sub-basement.  Once there, he would systematically release the virus into the air circulation ducts for each of the floors.  By using an entire vial for each floor, the entire building would be flooded with the deadly toxin in a matter of minutes. 

The other radical had the nerve gas in his pocket and headed towards the main entrance to the Pentagon where there was a chemical monitor linked to the security system.  Just as the retirement ceremony was set to begin at 4 p.m., the chemical would be released.  Bob smiled to himself; the retirement of the highest ranking man in the U.S. Navy was a very big occasion.  There was no telling who would be in attendance.   

***

15 April, 1556 hrs local

FADT-Development Conference Room

Fort Sill, Oklahoma 

Colonel Ulrich had been right, this was
extremely
boring
, Grayson thought as he tried to find an area on his notebook that wasn’t covered in doodles and little drawings.  The meeting was well into its second hour and showed no signs of ending anytime soon.  Currently the artillery system development engineer was going over mathematical equations and where the new howitzer was in relation to the established thresholds for the project.  He’d taken the required algebra and statistics in college, but that was where he’d stopped.  At this point, the engineers were talking over his head in calculus and operational research modeling terms.

Several of the artillerymen in the room had calculators and were running their fingers over the keypad double-checking the math that was being briefed.  That’s why Grayson had chosen the Infantry versus Artillery as a job, way too much math involved in making a 95-pound projectile land on target several miles away.  Since he’d been hired on as a civilian, he’d been the Field Artillery point of contact for all the new systems and the establishment of new artillery organizations within the Army.  He’d come to learn just how right he’d been to stay away from the artillery when he asked one of them to explain the process to him so he could do a better job as an HQDA organizational integrator.

Every artillery officer had to learn how to do all sorts of manual calculations to get that round to where it needed to go.  They had to take into account the different weight of the projectiles, how much gun powder was used to propel the round downrange, the wind speed, temperature, humidity and direction at the different levels of the atmosphere that the round would travel through along its trajectory, the weather conditions both at the gun and at the target, they had to account for every individual howitzer because each gun had a different shooting strength based on the condition and age of the gun tube, and even the temperature of the gun powder itself had to be taken into account because it made a difference in how explosive and powerful the powder was.  Hell, they even had to correct for the rotation of the earth because the round was in the air so long that the target had literally spun away from the point in space that it was when the shot was fired!  It got even more complicated when the target was moving.  One of the guys had tried to teach him one time, but his head hurt as soon as more than four equations were written down to
start
the process of adjusting fire onto a moving target.  The guys controlling the firing of the cannons were smart, make no mistake.

Of course now they had automated systems to account for all of that, but each one of the officers had to learn it manually first in case of computer outage and then pass some serious testing on the manual calculations.  They also had to understand how to go into the lines of computer calculations and check the code as it was computing to ensure the data was correct. 
No, Thank You!
he thought as he made a solid black blob on his paper by scribbling in a circle over and over. 
I’ll take hiking over the mountains with 140 pounds of gear in the cold rain any day of the week instead of doing math problems
.

The engineer switched to another slide with more numbers and fractions and a bell-curve representing something or other at the bottom of the slide.  Apparently it made sense to the artillery guys because they started flipping back and forth between previous page’s calculations.

The briefer was interrupted when Carolynn, the director’s secretary, burst into the room.  “The president has been shot!” she exclaimed as she turned the television on in the room.  “It just happened, they think he’s dead!”