Chapter Ten
SLEEPY YANK TOWN WAKES TO MURDER! Selkirk, KS “Scene of Carnage” as Motorcycle Enthusiast Retreat Attacked by Locals [thesun.co.uk, 3/22/05]
Three helicopters keeping station around the prison seemed to hover on pillars of radiance as their searchlights scanned the terrain around ADX-Florence. Their shivering noise had replaced the normal night sounds of cicadas and frogs. A fourth helicopter, bigger and darker, came in for a landing and Bannerman Clark was waiting.
“Welcome to Colorado,” he said, saluting the young men and women who emerged. These were researchers from USAMRIID, the Army’s primary biological weapons defense facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland. They looked as if they’d rather lick each others’ boot soles then come any closer. Clark had removed his cover and replaced it with a plastic shower cap. He had latex gloves on his hands and a surgical mask dangling around his neck. “We don’t know our parameters yet so we’re being careful,” he explained. “We have to assume everyone in this facility is compromised. Please follow the sergeant here.”
The researchers dutifully filed through a sallyport defined by two barbed-wire fences and into their new home. The 8th Civil Support Team hadn’t wasted any time setting up temporary lab facilities for the biowar people, taking over the prison grounds to set up ten double-wide trailers swathed in positive-pressure tents and installing decontamination stations at every access point. The USAMRIID contingent was used to this kind of confinement, all of them being certified for level four biosafety precautions, and they kept their heads down as they were taken through basic orientation.
One man remained inside the big helicopter and Clark looked to see who it might be. “Hello, Bannerman, is that you, my old buddy?” he asked, stepping into the illumination of the vehicle’s exit ramp. He wore an army uniform with a turban and a bushy black beard and his eyes twinkled in the half-light.
“Vikram, Vikram, how have you been?” Clark laughed, happy despite the grim setting to see an old friend. Major Vickram Singh Nanda and Bannerman Clark had come up through the ranks together, starting in the Engineers during Vietnam. They had gone from Green to Gold together, as the saying went, receiving their commissions in the same ceremony. They had fallen out of touch over the years but Clark had heard that Vikram had ended up at Fort Detrick and he’d been hoping they would have a chance to resume contact. He’d never expected his old partner to show up personally.
“I heard you had a very, very serious problem here in your Colorado, so I have come. How could I do less? I requested this duty.” Clark couldn’t believe his luck—to get Vikram Singh Nanda in charge of the biowar team was a definite card up his sleeve. His smile must not have lasted, though, because a moment later Vikram’s face fell. “It is bad, isn’t it?”
Clark shook his head. “I’ll tell you all about it en route. I’m running out to California tonight and you can come with me if you don’t mind the jet lag. It’s a virus, we think. The symptoms are ataxia, aphasia, and severe dementia. Aggressive behaviors including cannibalism.” Vikram gasped and Clark nodded in agreement. “It’s also got an incubation period of just a few minutes. Yes, it’s bad.”
“I have never heard of such a thing happening in nature. That kind of effect should take months to manifest. God simply does not create something so virulent unless… you think it has been weaponized.”
Bannerman Clark knew he could count on his friend’s razor intellect. He nodded discretely, because he didn’t want to say it out loud yet. He’d come to the same conclusion. A pathogen that could destroy a man’s mind and turn him against his friends and co-workers with homicidal intent in a span of minutes would be the ultimate terrorist weapon.
“We’ve got a lid on this place and it’s tight enough for now,” Clark said, pointing out the double-layer cyclone fence the 8th CST had erected around the entire prison compound, in addition to the prison’s own fences. “I’ve got digital topographic imaging and satellite support so vigilant I can see every acorn hidden by every squirrel in a twenty mile radius. I’ve got air and ground troops watching every corner of this site.”
“Then why, my friend, do you look so frightened?” Vikram asked quietly.
Clark kicked the dirt in frustration. Not a terribly efficient way to get out his anger but he was running on twenty-four hours without food and it was starting to get to him. “Because the warden of this prison may very well have been carrying the virus when he took off on vacation three days ago. All of this,” Clark said, gesturing around at the fences, the helicopters, the mobile labs, “might just be my way of locking the barn door when the horse has already run away.”
Where is your family’s Emergency Meet-Up Point? Where is your personal Go Bag, at work, at school, in the car? How many days worth of water do you have in the house right now? [Emergency Preparedness Update #7, published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 1/05]
The kerosene lamp whoofed into life and threw some yellow around the bare plank walls of Bleu’s root cellar. Dick could still see moonlight coming through the slats and he wondered how long it would take one of the homicidal climbers to break in. Bleu didn’t seem particularly scared. Just anxious to get the job over with. “What happened to them?” Dick asked. “What makes people act like that?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. It has to be some kind of government germ warfare thing gone wrong, doesn’t it?” Bleu lifted the lantern and clomped down a narrow flight of stairs cut into the earth. They came into a low space with bowed walls and Bleu hung the lantern on a four-by-four that held up the ceiling like a toothpick holding open the mouth of a predatory cat in a cartoon. Stacks of cardboard boxes and bags full of potatoes and radishes filled most of the space. At the far end from the stairs sat a door wrapped in black plastic of the kind contractors use. Bleu went to the door and stopped. “I reckoned if anybody would know about that it would be you. Hell, kid, that’s what I called you down here for.”
Dick’s eyes went wide. “Me? I’m just a low-level bureaucrat. A livestock inspector! I don’t know anything about biowarfare.” He thought about it a second. He was with the government, which must be all that mattered to Bleu. “Look, I’m on your side, you know,” he said, trying to remember what hippies stood for. Flower power, sure, and they didn’t like the Vietnam War. “Um, peace and love, right? Love is all you need.”
Bleu opened the waterproof door and light spilled over its contents. Five racked hunting rifles, most of them .22 caliber rimfire weapons but also a good old-fashioned thirty-ought-six. Even more insane: one was a heavy-duty big game rifle, a centerfire, bolt-action Weatherby Mark V Safari Custom, something Dick had only ever seen in gun magazines. An elephant gun, to be blunt about it, though most likely the Skye family had planned on using it against bears when they bought it.
Below the rack of rifles hung three shotguns in various gauges and below that pistols and revolvers, high-powered enough to cut a man and half. At the bottom of the closet sat box after box of ammunition, cleaning supplies for the weapons, and sheaves of paper targets, some of them used. On the back of the door someone had taped up one target showing a human silhouette with the bullseye where the man’s heart would be. Dick saw an almost perfect grouping, six narrow holes right in the center. In the white space of the target someone had written NICE SHOOTING STORMY and OCTOBER 17 2002, STORMY’S BIG DAY.
Dick couldn’t help but stare. He was looking at an arsenal, a survivalist’s wet dream, enough guns to hold off an invasion of ATF and FBI agents for a week. He had thought he had been sent back through a time warp to Woodstock. Instead he’d wandered into Ruby Ridge.
