Ground Zero (The X-Files) (23 page)
Ives smiled faintly. “Supernatural? No, it’s just a coincidence. For all I know, it could be a common name for Japanese fishing boats. But I’m still not going to let it happen again.”
The skies darkened, and the clouds drew in around them like a noose. Before long, the
Dallas
’s forward sensors detected the fishing boat and headed 206
GROUND ZERO
directly toward it. Scully could make out the dim shape bobbing on the rough seas. She didn’t know what she expected to see. Perhaps something like the
Flying Dutchman
, a battered old hulk barely remaining afloat, a few ragged survivors clinging to the deck rails. But the
Lucky Dragon
looked perfectly intact, not even struggling much against the waves. Nevertheless Captain Ives hove the Navy destroyer close to the fishing boat. Below, two Asian fishermen stood on deck, drenched with rain and spray, waving their arms for help, while another remained in the control house.
“The boat looks sturdy enough,” Ives said. “We should be able to tow the vessel back to the atoll with us.”
Scully quickly nodded, not knowing if he was asking her opinion or just stating a fact. Ives tossed her a rain slicker and summoned a team of his crewmen. “Come on, let’s get those people on board to safety. Give them warm clothes and some soup.”
On the fishing boat two other silhouettes appeared, shadowy figures behind the rain-streaked windows of the bridge deck. As the Navy rescuers crossed over to help the stranded fishermen aboard the
Dallas
, the other figures emerged. The first was a scarred, Hawaiian-looking man who moved carefully. Judging by his milky white eyes, Scully was sure he was blind. When the second shadowy figure reached for the wet ladder that hung down from the destroyer, Scully gasped with instant recognition.
Miriel Bremen climbed up into the rain. 207
Enika Atoll
Friday, 6:05 P.M.
Mulder looked up at the angry skies. Wistfully, he thought of how beautiful the Pacific sunset should have been. Instead, oily-gray clouds that bore an unnatural yellowish-green tint had spread like gangrene through the atmosphere. He hummed the first few bars of “Stormy Weather,” but didn’t try to sing, since he wasn’t sure of the words.
“So I’m stuck with you, Agent Mulder,” Bear Dooley said, coming to stand next to him. “Did you stay behind because you have a technical interest in Bright Anvil, or because you’re afraid of the storm?”
“Yes,” Mulder answered cryptically. “That’s absolutely right.”
Dooley found the answer funny and let out a guffaw that could be heard even through the rising wind. “You’re a pain in the butt, and your investigation is getting in the way of this test—but here you are, and I can’t keep you from seeing with your own
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two eyes.” He sighed. “And I guess that partial information is more damaging than no information at all. So I may as well fill you in.”
Dooley shouted back at the other technicians just inside the bunker. “I’m going to hop on a Jeep and head off to the other side of the island to check on the device one last time.”
He turned to Mulder. “Come along, and you’ll see what this is all about.”
Victor Ogilvy came out of the control blockhouse, wiping a few spatters of light rain from his eyeglasses. “According to the reports, they checked it already, Bear,” he said. “The team and I went out there first thing after the plane landed. It’s all set.”
“Fine,” Dooley said, his hair and beard whipping around his face. “But I didn’t ask if
you
checked it. I said
I
want to see for myself. I’d like a hands-on inspection, all right?”
“We need you here, Bear,” Victor said, as if the storm and the impending test had brought him to the verge of panic.
“No you don’t, dammit!” Dooley said. “I’ve got enough trouble babysitting this FBI agent. Can’t I trust my own people to do their jobs?”
Victor looked stung, and Bear softened his voice. “Don’t worry, Victor. I won’t mess with the diagnostics, and you can handle the control blockhouse just fine by yourself. I’ll be back in an hour or so. Agent Mulder and I have to get over there and back before full dark—and that’ll be any time now, thanks to the typhoon.”
Mulder followed Dooley over to a tarp-covered Jeep sitting in the open, but sheltered from the wind by the tan igloo of the blockhouse. Dooley yanked off the thick tarp and tossed it inside a storage shed. He swung into the driver’s seat in a manner that reminded Mulder of a burly cowboy climbing onto a faithful horse.
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The bearded engineer looked Mulder over as he settled into the passenger seat. Dooley looked warm and comfortable in his denim jacket and flannel shirt. Mulder would have thought the outfit completely inappropriate for a junglecovered Pacific atoll, but the angry storm had sent a twisted chill through the air. “That fancy suit jacket of yours is going to get wet when the rain starts coming in hard,” Dooley said. Mulder brushed his hands down the fabric of his jacket and loosened his tie. “I’ve got some nice Hawaiian shirts in my suitcase on the ship, but I never got a chance to change.”
Dooley pushed the starter button on the Jeep and roared off. The vehicle jounced along the rough dirt road through the jungle, rocking and twisting like a carnival ride with every rut and root it struck.
Mulder held on, unable to talk because his teeth clicked together every time he opened his mouth. Dooley gripped the steering wheel and kept driving. Watching the road ahead, Mulder finally shouted over the roar of the Jeep and the loud sigh of the wind.
Before long the jungle opened up, and Mulder could see the sprawling ocean again. Large swells rose and fell, creating a dizzying optical illusion, as if the landscape were on some sort of drunken turntable. In a shallow, semicircular lagoon eaten into the storm side of the atoll, rugged reefs sheltered the water from incoming waves. On a raft in the middle of the shallow pool Mulder saw a strange high-tech construction, like a Rube Goldberg machine, or something out of a Dr. Seuss book.
“There’s the Bright Anvil device,” Bear Dooley said.
“Never been anything like it. Isn’t it beautiful?”
It looked to Mulder as if an alien ship had 210
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crash-landed there. He decided that the most tactful thing would be to grunt noncommittally.
“See those supports, where it’s suspended on the raft? We could have done the detonation underwater, but this way it’s easier to hook up the diagnostics.”
Long metal pipes and tubes stretched out like spiderwebs into the jungle alongside the rutted road. Substations sat at intersections of the conduits. Dooley pointed to them. “Those are light pipes, carrying optical fibers for our diagnostics. They’ll be vaporized in the first second of the blast, but the data pulse will be about a millisecond ahead of the shockwave, so our information will manage to outrun the destruction. We’ll get some good signals before the whole thing disintegrates, then some sexy analysis codes on the computers back in the blockhouse will crunch the numbers until they’re meaningful. We’ve also got cameras mounted all around the jungle. No telling how many of them will survive both the blast and the typhoon, but the photos should be spectacular.”
“A real Kodak moment,” Mulder said.
“You bet.”
Mulder stared at the contraption. “So you think nobody’s going to notice your atomic blast because any destruction will be attributed to the storm? As I understand it, some of the H-bomb explosions literally erased small islands.”
Dooley gestured with his hand, as if brushing aside Mulder’s comment. “Yeah, but those were big mothers. Bright Anvil isn’t nearly so large. In fact, its yield is only about the same as the Nagasaki bomb—really dinky, as far as warheads go.”
Mulder thought about the two Japanese cities obliterated by the atomic bombs in World War II and silently questioned Bear Dooley’s use of the word “dinky.”
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“Shoot,” Dooley said, “today’s ICBMs in their silos contain fifty or a hundred Nagasaki bombs in every single missile—multiple warheads that target independently. Sure, Fat Man and Little Boy were hefty for their time, back in the Jurassic Age, but that’s nothing compared to what we can do now.”
A splatter of warm rain rushed across the windshield. Mulder shielded his eyes to stare out at the rickety-looking structure on the raft. “Is there really a demand for small-yield nuclear weapons. For shoppers on a tight budget?”
Bear Dooley shook his head. “You’re missing the point. Bright Anvil is
fallout free
, man! Some weird technology that Dr. Gregory thought of, burns up all the dangerous daughter products in prompt secondary reactions. I have no idea where he came up with the scheme, but it removes the big political stigma of using a nuclear weapon. Bright Anvil finally makes nuclear weapons
usable
, not just bluff cards.”
Mulder looked over at him. “And that’s a good thing?”
“Look, you don’t want to drop a bomb on a city if it’s going to take half a century before the radiation dies away. You’ll get cancer deaths for decades and decades after the peace treaty is signed, and then what have you got?” He grinned and held up a finger. “With Bright Anvil, though, you can flatten an enemy city, then move in afterward, set up your headquarters, and reclaim territory. You can begin reparations immediately. It’s sort of the opposite of the neutron bomb—remember that one? All lethal radiation and little blast damage.”
“I thought the neutron bomb got canceled because of the bad PR, that it was strictly designed to slaughter civilians.”
Dooley shrugged. “Hey, I try to stay away from 212
GROUND ZERO
the politics of it all. I just do the physics. That’s my part in it.”
Mulder pressed him. “So…you created Bright Anvil, a nuclear weapon that our government can use during a conflict, without worrying about the consequences—and you’re not concerned with the politics?”
Dooley didn’t answer. He got out of the Jeep, leaving the engine running as he checked the connections on the light pipes, pushed testing buttons at the substations to make sure all LEDs on the instrument panels winked green. He was clearly not interested in the moral implications, but he seemed to sense Mulder staring quietly at him. After he had finished tinkering with the diagnostic sensors, he stood up, slowly facing into the wind as he looked back.
“Okay, Agent Mulder, I admit I think about it. I think about it a lot—but the fact is I’m not responsible. Don’t go lecturing me.”
“A convenient excuse, don’t you think?” Mulder said. He was provoking the researcher intentionally, curious to see what Bear Dooley might let slip if he got riled enough. Dooley seemed oddly calm, intense but not furious. “I read the newspapers. I watch CNN. I’m a reasonably intelligent man—but I don’t pretend to know how other governments are going to react, how foreign policy might be made in some other country that’s as alien to me as Mars. I’m a physicist and an engineer—and I’m damn good at it. I understand how to make these devices work. That’s what I do. If somebody decides that’s a good thing, they fund me, and then I do my job. I leave it to foreign policy
experts
to make the best use of what I make.”
“Okay, okay,” Mulder said. “So if you’ve created this new type of warhead, and somebody uses
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it to, say, wipe out a city in Bosnia, you wouldn’t feel the least bit guilty about all those civilian deaths?”
Dooley scratched the white streak in his beard. “Agent Mulder, is Henry Ford responsible for the deaths caused by automobile accidents? Is a gun manufacturer responsible for the people killed in convenience-store robberies? My team has created a
tool
for our government to use, a
resource
for our foreign policy experts to do their jobs.
“If some nutcase like Saddam Hussein or Moammar Khadaffi wants to lob their own home-made uranium bomb at New Jersey, I want to make sure that our country has the means either to defend itself or to strike back.
They
are the policymakers. It’s
their
job to see that the tools get used wisely. I have no more business dictating this country’s foreign policy than—than a politician has coming into my laboratory and telling me how to run my experiments. That’s ridiculous, don’t you think?”
“It’s one way to look at it,” Mulder said.
“The plain fact is none of us researchers knows enough about it,” Dooley continued. “If we went messing with things we don’t understand, following our consciences based on sketchy information, we could end up like…like Miriel Bremen, a rabid protester who doesn’t understand who’s pulling the strings and why people make the decisions that they do. And I guarantee you, man, Miriel Bremen isn’t any more qualified to run U.S. foreign policy than I am.”
Bear Dooley was on a roll, and Mulder listened with fascination, not even needing to prompt him. Dooley looked down at his big hands.
“I used to like her, you know. Miriel’s a good researcher. Always came up with innovative solutions when Emil Gregory ran into a problem. But
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then she thought too much about things that weren’t in her job description—and now look at where she is. Bright Anvil has suffered quite a few setbacks, with Miriel leaving the project and Dr. Gregory being killed. I am not about to let Bright Anvil fail now after all this work, all those careers.”
Dooley pointed a large finger at the device out on its raft.
“
That
is my responsibility, out there. I’ve got to see that it works.”
Dooley finished checking the equipment, rubbed his hands hard against his jeans to remove the worst of the dust and grime, and climbed back into the Jeep. “Now, this has been a fine debate, Agent Mulder—but the countdown is ticking even as we speak, and I’ve got a lot of work to do.
“Bright Anvil is set to go off at 5:15 A.M. tomorrow. Kind of like the Trinity Test, you know? That one was delayed by a storm that whipped up in the middle of the night out in New Mexico. But here we’re
counting
on the storm.”
