Project Cain (15 page)

3. Ten years later, these same military scientists were dropping light-bulbs filled with
Bacillus subtilis
(a common flu) in the New York subway system, just to see how effective biological weapons would
work on a large population. Within four days, a million New Yorkers were infected. It was just for practice. (Ox said the military loves to practice.) Later the Senate confirmed that more than two hundred populated areas in America were deliberately contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Places like San Francisco, DC, Key West, Minneapolis, St. Louis. The CIA had forty
different
universities and drug companies working on this.

4. Something called MK-ULTRA. A covert drug test secretly given to military personnel, mental patients, prostitutes, and the general public to study if psychotic drugs could be a potential weapon: LSD, heroin, morphine, pot, whatever. They kept people stoned 24/7 for weeks, just to “see what would happen.”

That’s when Ox asked me if they’d taught anything about Tuskegee in school. I told him I didn’t go to
school
-school but that I still knew what the Tuskegee experiment was. My father might not have cared much about baseball, but we had talked about science and its history a lot. Between him and my various camps and science tutors, I knew my scientific facts pretty well.

Ox looked at me, curious. Told me to go for it. So I told him what I knew.

That American government scientists got a bunch of poor farmers, African-Americans, in the South and gave them fake treatments for some disease. They could have cured them but let more than a hundred die just to see how the disease progressed.

Ox nodded in approval and asked how I knew all that. I told him my dad was a scientist. There was still a touch of pride when I said it. I did not add that this same scientist had maybe engineered six killers
and somehow helped them escape and had maybe been involved in the murder of a dozen people.

His dad’s most definitely a scientist, Castillo said. HE, however, was not saying it like it was a good thing. It was clear that Castillo knew my dad as only one thing.

Ox thought about that a long while. I think he was still trying to figure out how I fit into all of this. What exactly my father DID as a scientist. He knew he wasn’t here to discuss food dyes or plastics or the weather.

Ox told me it wasn’t just any old scientists at Tuskegee. It was the US Public Health Service, and they infected hundreds in Guatemala also, which America had invaded in 1901. Mostly institutionalized mental patients, with diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis without the patients’ knowledge or permission. The infected were even encouraged to pass the disease on to others as part of the study.

Again, just to SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN.

It was sounding all too familiar.

•  •  •

Ox then gave this huge list of secret tests the US military had conducted over the years. He’d put his beer down between his feet and was ticking them off on his fingers faster than I could even count: Project Artichoke. Project Paperclip. Third Chance. QK-Hilltop. Project Derby Hat. The names were almost hysterical. But when I looked them up later on Google, I learned how many people had maybe died and it didn’t seem so silly anymore. Project Chatter. Camelot. Operation Whitecoat. Montauk. MK-SEARCH. MK-NAOMI. MK-OFTEN. Project 112. Project SHAD. DTC Test 69-12. H.R. 15090. Big Tom. Fearless Johnny. The Philadelphia Experiment. Program F. (Have fun brushing your teeth tonight, he added. He’d grinned at me with that
last, and I had no idea what the heck he was talking about, but it was the first one I looked up later.)

And now he could add PROJECT CAIN to his list.

•  •  •

Ox warned that we wouldn’t find out the real truth about any of these projects (not even Project Cain, it turns out) until years and years from now. When it was finally declassified. When people were too old to worry about being silenced or punished for talking. When there were worse things to think about. He said it wasn’t until 1995 that Americans learned that four hundred people had been injected with plutonium fifty years earlier. With the admission decades after the fact, there was also an apology. Apparently the government
always
did it that way. The US apologized for the experimentations on Pedro Campos in 1994. Apologized for the LSD tests in 1995. Apologized for Tuskegee in 1997. Apologized for Guatemala in 2010.

Ox asked Castillo how long before the government apologized for what they’d done to the US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vets like they are. He was referring to all sorts of dangerous chemicals American troops had been exposed to, chemicals almost entirely provided courtesy of the US military. Various injections and radiated bullets and toxins. I could tell from Castillo’s face that there was enough truth to the claims Ox was making. It seemed to me that some of this was accepted and well known and some of it was still totally hush-hush.

Ox asked: When will the government admit to all of it in public? When will they officially apologize to
us
?

Or to us? I wondered out loud, the words just escaping.

I was thinking about ALL the kids at Massey. Those that’d been murdered, those still on the run. And, well, me too.

Ox looked at me. We’ll all be dead first, he said.

And he wasn’t just talking old age.

•  •  •

Ox told us more about the government’s top secret MK-ULTRA/LSD tests, and about Dr. Frank Olson.

Frank Olson was the scientist in charge of the whole MK-ULTRA project. During the project, he’d directed a covert test in 1951 done on a small French village called Pont-Saint-Esprit, where LSD-derived toxins were dispensed throughout the town by American scientists. Ten people died and thirty spent the rest of their lives in a mental institution.

Olson knew the experiment was WRONG and so he quit. Maybe he’d planned to go to the
New York Times
or
60 Minutes
or something with the whole story, right? No one ever found out. A few days later it was reported in all the papers that Olson had committed suicide by jumping out a thirteenth-story window. That there’d been LSD in his system.

His family didn’t believe ANY of this and fought for the truth for the next forty years. And when Olson’s body was finally exhumed in 1994, the medical examiner termed the death a “homicide” and pointed to cranial injuries that indicated Olson had been knocked unconscious
before
he’d exited the window.

The United States apologized for that too and then paid his family $750,000.

•  •  •

Ox said: You understand yet? What they’re willing to do? These fucking people.

Ox said: You think a dozen, a hundred, kids matter to these guys?

They don’t, Castillo agreed. So tell me about Shardhara.

•  •  •

Ox had gotten this story from a soldier he’d met through some doctor he’d known at a veterans hospital in Miami. Ox had gotten talking about secret government tests one day, and the doctor had kinda laughed it all off and mentioned this one guy who’d once hinted at some pretty wild claims. Ox got the guy’s name, and when they met, he could tell this second guy had just been waiting/begging to tell someone,
anyone
, who just might believe.

To get it off his conscience. To finally let Shardhara out.

This guy was Sergeant First Class Hollyman.

In 2008 (as Hollyman had told it to Ox and Ox told it to us), Hollyman and five other soldiers escorted a couple of Defense Department agents on some secret mission into northern Afghanistan. They were always doing “secret” missions so it was no big deal at the time. Shardhara was a typical remote Afghanistan village. No electricity or running water. Depopulated. Overrun and controlled by the Taliban. Hollyman figured it was a standard operation: capture some weapons, maybe shoot a couple of Bad Guys, done. Then he was ordered to pull on an NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) suit, like a hazmat suit for biological weapons like sarin or mustard gas. And a biological weapon is exactly what they found.

The village had been destroyed. Everyone dead.
Everyone
. The bodies apparently shredded by a hundred bullets, folk hacked to bits. Missing limbs. Ripped apart. Bitten. Men and women stripped naked and attacked. Hollyman and the other soldiers couldn’t make sense of it. Some kind of Taliban reprisal, they thought, but the twenty Taliban soldiers there were just as dead as the villagers. They found kids dead with knives, what looked like self-inflicted wounds. They
found only one survivor. An old crazy woman they located in one of the huts. Hollyman told Ox that she’d been eating the dead. Just sitting on the floor, eating the bodies that surrounded her.

Zombies, I said out loud. It’s all I could imagine.

Wasn’t
that
crazy, Ox said. The dead were dead. The old woman was just insane. Hollyman said he wanted to pull the trigger himself but the Defense Department agents wouldn’t let him. They took the woman away, lifted her out by one of the copters, and then started collecting samples. Air samples. Dirt. Water. Tissue and blood from the dead. You name it. Apparently they spent half the day collecting what they needed, then burned it all. The bodies, fields, livestock, dogs, everything.

What did Hollyman think it was? Castillo asked.

What do
you
think it was? Ox challenged. He knew he’d just revealed a heck of a lot more about what was going on than Castillo had. Still, Ox continued. Hollyman knew only that the Defense Department had tested
something
. Something biological had been used on these people. He didn’t know what it was, but he said he’d never seen nothing like it in his whole life. Said the crazy woman, the woman’s eyes . . . Not even in his nightmares. Hollyman was his detachment’s senior medical sergeant. He’d seen plenty to have nightmares about. Said he’d burned
things
that day. Not people.
Things
.

Castillo asked if he could get ahold of Hollyman, but then Ox said the guy killed himself with a shotgun two years ago.

Suicide? Castillo questioned suspiciously.

Ox agreed it was a shady death and then noted it’d been open season on scientists for years.

More than three hundred Iraqi scientists have been killed since the war began—in accidents, bombings, and suicides. More recently it’s
been the Iranians. Check and see yourself which Iranian scientist was mysteriously blown up, misplaced, or poisoned this month.

But that’s our enemy, Castillo argued. If Hollyman’s death was somehow faked, now you’re talking about the United States government eliminating US civilians.

Civilians, Ox said, and laughed. Hollyman was ex-military, not a civilian. Then he asked: And, what’s that word even mean to a country that’s been at continual war for sixty years? You want dead Americans, dead ‘civilians,’ go to bioweapons. It’d been a decade of “DNA guys” dying mysteriously, and he found Castillo’s naïveté on all this almost funny. Or perhaps he was only trying to hide how terrified he really was by making light of it.

Just like the LSD guy who’d died so peculiarly. Ox was talking about the government actively killing American scientists to cover its tracks. American scientists who specialized in bioweapons and DNA research. American scientists like my own father.

•  •  •

•
 DNA expert Dr. David Schwartz stabbed to death in Virginia.

•
 DNA expert Dr. Don Wiley, a Harvard teacher, shows up floating in the Mississippi.

•
 DNA expert Dr. David Kelly worked for the Navy—found dead after somehow slashing his wrists
and
throat and then dragging himself a mile away from his home.

•
 DNA expert Dr. Franco Cerrina found dead in his lab at Boston University. Cause of death still unknown.

•
 DNA expert Dr. John Clark, the guy who ran the lab that made Dolly the sheep, and spoke out against cloning afterward, was found hanging in a remote cottage.

•
 Bioweapons expert Dr. John Wheeler found dead in a Delaware landfill.

•
 Bioweapons expert Dr. Robert Schwartz found murdered in his home in Virginia.

•
 Bioweapons expert Bruce Edwards Ivins, of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, found dead from an apparent overdose. Of
TYLENOL
! No autopsy was permitted.

•  •  •

Look these names up yourself. Until I did, I didn’t believe it either.

It’s an American egghead bloodbath.

•  •  •

For the record, DNA expert Dr. Gregory Jacobson, my father, is officially listed as the victim of a workplace shooting rampage.

For the record, this is a total lie.

He died another way.

•  •  •

Castillo thanked Ox and apologized for not being able give him any more information in return yet but hoped to someday.

Ox seemed cool with that and told Castillo to check in anytime. Then he asked Castillo about someone named Kristin, and Castillo got all weird. You could tell right away he didn’t like talking about her. Whoever she was. (I, of course, had not met her yet but soon would. Turns out she meant an awful lot to Castillo. To all of us, really.)

I was pretty damn curious about this girl now. This Kristin. I think at this point it was the only piece of personal information I had about Castillo. I’d just learned that he may or may not have once dated a girl named Kristin. Wow. The full extent of how close we now were.

Before I had time to learn anything more, Ox said something strange. Something about “GHOSTS.” Some kind of “exercise” that Kristin had taught the two of them. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and Castillo shut down the conversation pretty quick.

We’ll leave first, Castillo said, and stood to go. I followed him.

Ox tipped his red Senators hat at the two of us. Wished us well.

Castillo nodded. I kept quiet. When we were down the steps and about to vanish into the tunnels that led out of the stadium, I turned for a last look at Ox.