Stephen Cannell - The Devil_s Workshop

"What was it?"

"Tell ya later," Lucky said grimly, as he grabbed up his backpack and bedroll. "C'mon, I wanna get outta here before the spaceship lands."

The towering flames had spread all along the east side of the lake, and Stacy had to move fast to stay ahead of the inferno. In the darkness, she heard the rustle of animals fleeing from the fire. She was afraid she would run into the soldiers in the hills. She had caught occasional glimpses of the patrols before sunset. The dust plumed up from their speeding jeeps, marking their positions in the distance.

Her camera was banging against her chest, her heavy backpack cutting into her shoulders as she grabbed onto rocks and pulled herself up a mountainous slope, to a spot where she could get a better look at the prison.

She finally found a protected area, and was shocked when she looked back at the blaze. It now consumed hundreds of acres, burning out of control all over the mountains around the lake. Flames and glowing embers lit the night sky. She could feel the strange fire-induced winds swirling. In her nose was the heavy, sooty smell of burning trees.

From where she was, she could look down into the prison. She put her Nikon up to her eye and, through the five-hundred-millimeter lens, she could see men moving around down there in the darkness. Two soldiers had huge canisters strapped to their backs. Others were moving in and out of the temporary low building in the center yard, carrying boxes out and putting them into trucks.

She watched them for almost forty minutes. It was obvious to her that they were emptying the labs of any evidence. Stacy knew that this was going to be a huge national news story. There was no way they could cover it up-a whole town burned, a Blackhawk and its crew crashed, thirty or forty civilians killed, a raging forest fire out of control in East Texas. She wondered how Admiral Zoll and his team would attempt to spin it.

She took a roll of long-lens shots of the men as they loaded the boxes of files and research onto the trucks. She hoped if she "pushed" the film in the lab, she would be able to get exposures in the low light. After the trucks were loaded, the men with the canisters on their backs moved up. Suddenly, streams of liquid flame shot out of the nozzles in their hands and into the buildings. The men deliberately moved around the structures, setting fire to all of them. She used another roll as the buildings burned.

Then Stacy moved off the rocks and started to pick her way down, getting closer. She wanted faces. She wanted to get pictures that would allow the authorities to identify these people.

Twenty minutes later, she was close enough to the prison to feel the increased heat from the fires burning in the yard. She could see the flames through a double razor-wired chain-link fence. She kneeled down in the dark, hoping she was out of sight of the soldiers. They had driven the trucks out of the yard and were now packing the crates that they removed from the center buildings into the remaining two Blackhawks, which were still parked on the makeshift baseball diamond.

It was then that she saw Dexter DeMille. Admiral Zoll was leading him out of the prison's front gate. Dr. DeMille was walking on stiff knees, holding his left hand painfully. She thought he looked like a man being led to his own execution.

They had come to his room at six o'clock in the evening. Without speaking to him, the two soldiers had put him in handcuffs, then moved him out of his living quarters across the yard to the huge tower in C-Block. Dexter had been forced to climb the metal stairs to the fifth tier, where Sylvester Swift and Troy Lee Williams had been held two days before.

"Why are you doing this?" he had asked the stone-faced Rangers several times, but they refused to speak. He felt their strong hands on his arms, propelling him along the metal walkway and into one of the cells. The door was slammed and the lock buzzed shut.

He sat there on the cold steel bunk with no mattress, and waited in fear. He had heard a huge explosion around eight o'clock and then the distant clatter of machine guns. He knew the whole thing was coming apart, and that he would probably die before the night was over. He sat there in the dark and cursed himself for the waste he had made of his once-promising life. Depression circled him like a cold, gray mist.

At ten-thirty he looked up and saw Admiral Zoll standing in the corridor. It surprised him that he had not heard the huge man approach. The Admiral was in a tan uniform and a Navy flight jacket. His gold Navy wings glistened in the naked overhead light.

"Dexter, I need your signature on something," Admiral Zoll said.

Dr. DeMille looked up, fear gripping him. Admiral Zoll handed a single sheet of paper through the bars. Dexter took it, and held it up to the light to read:

/, Dr. Dexter DeMille, take full responsibility for my actions. I cannot live with the consequences my research has brought. I know now my illegal work with Prions is ungodly and that I should never have pursued it. The accident here at Vanishing Lake was entirely my fault. Mosquitoes carrying PHpr got loose from my lab. Nobody at Fort Detrick knew of my work, and I take full responsibility. May God, and my country, one day see fit to forgive me.

Dexter looked up at Admiral Zoll. "I don't think so," he said, handing the letter back.

"Dr. DeMille, you are going to die tonight. The only question is whether you die easily or in great pain. Your time here is over. This paper will have no effect on you once you're gone, but I promise you, sooner or later you will end up signing it. Sooner would be easier."

Dexter got up from the bed and backed up until he was standing against the far wall of the cell. "I won't sign it," he stammered. "It's a lie. This whole program is your doing."

The Admiral nodded to Captain Zingo, who stepped forward and opened the door of Dexter's cell. He grabbed the frail scientist by his left hand and, finding a pressure point on the nerve between his thumb and index finger, pressed down hard and shot a bolt of agonizing pain up Dexter's arm to his shoulder.

Dexter screamed.

"Captain Zingo knows every nerve point in the body." Then Zoll nodded, and Zingo repeated the pressure.

This time Dexter's knees collapsed; the agony it caused was so excruciating he could barely stay conscious. He withstood the torture for only three minutes before he begged them to stop.

He was sobbing as he signed his name to the document.

Admiral Zoll, Nick Zingo, and the two Delta Rangers led Dexter DeMille out the front gate of the prison. He walked on rubbery legs. Over his shoulder, he could see his labs on fire in the main yard. Then Admiral Zoll got into one of the loaded helicopters, and without saying another word to Dexter, closed the hatch. The Blackhawk started. The blades began stirring the air around them. As the rotors spun faster, several of the soldiers covered their eyes from the flying dust and small rocks. The huge helo lifted off. Once airborne, it dropped its nose and whisked Admiral Zoll away into the firelit night.

Stacy was down to her last roll of film. Besides Dexter DeMille, there were only five men and one Blackhawk left on the baseball diamond. She moved along behind the brush line, crouching in the dark, shooting as many shots as she could through the tall grass.

Then she watched in horror as Nick Zingo pulled his nine-millimeter Beretta and pointed it at Dexter. She could hear Dr. DeMille pleading as he stood there helpless, his voice tinny and shrill as it came across the baseball diamond. Stacy froze, the camera forgotten for a moment in her hand. Suddenly gunfire erupted from the third-base side of the diamond. Captain Zingo's chest was instantly riddled with red blots.

Dexter spun around in confusion as gunfire erupted from behind home plate. One by one, the soldiers in the compound fell, clutching at their wounds, unable to even get their weapons free.