Джозеф Нассис - SNAFU - Heroes [An Anthology of Military Horror]

It was a smell.

A mingled combination of scents, pleasant and unpleasant.

A hint of perfume, the sulfur stink of a burned match, old sweat and spoiled meat.

The movement of the swinging door somehow wafted that olio of scents to me, but it didn’t last. It was there and gone.

It was such an odd combination of smells. They didn’t seem to fit this place. And they were transient smells that should long ago have faded into the general background stink of dust and disuses. Except for the rotten meat smell. That, I knew all too well, could linger. But this was a research facility not a meat packing plant. There shouldn’t be a smell like that in here.

My brain immediately started cooking up rationalizations for it.

An animal came in here and died.

The staff left food in the fridge when the place was raided.

And…

And.

And what ?

I tapped the earbud.

“Bug, what’s the status on those damn lights?”

There was a short burst of static, then Bug said, “—er company.”

“You’re breaking up. Repeat message.”

“The power is on according to a representative of the power company.”

I moved through the swinging doors and found a whole row of light switches. Threw them.

Stood in the dark.

“Negative on the power, Bug. Call someone who doesn’t have his dick in his hand and get me some lights.”

He paused, then said, “On it, Cowboy.”

The storage room had two interior doors, one of which opened into a bathroom that was so sparkling clean it looked like it had never been used. The only mark was a smudged handprint on the wall above the toilet. The smell hadn’t come from here.

The other door opened onto another jagged hallway that snaked through the building. The walls were lined with closed doors on either side. A lot of doors. This was going to take a while.

Dark and spooky as the place was, it seemed pretty clear that nobody was home but me. I snugged the Beretta into the padded holster, but left my Orioles shirt open in case I needed to get to it in a hurry.

For the next half hour I poked into a variety of rooms that included storage closets of various sizes, a copy center, a staff lunchroom, offices for executives of various wattage, and labs. Lots and lots of labs.

I entered one at random and stood in the doorway, doing what cops do, letting the room speak to me. There were rows of black file cabinets sealed with yellow tape that had an ominous-looking federal seal from the Department of Justice. A dozen tables were crowded with computers and a variety of scientific instrumentation so sophisticated and arcane that I had almost no idea what I was looking at. The floor was littered with papers, and here and there were fragments of footprints on the debris.

Watching the room told me nothing.

I backed into the hall and did a quick recount of the laboratories just in this wing of the building. Nine.

“Bug,” I said, tapping the earbud.

“Cowboy, the power company insists that there is no interruption to the Koenig Group facility. They are showing active meters.”

I grunted and filed that away. Maybe it was something simpler, like breakers. To Bug I said, “How many labs are there in this place?”

“Twenty-two separate rooms designated on the blueprints as laboratory workspaces.”

“Jeez…”

“And one designated as a proving station.”

“Proving what?”

“Unknown. None of the employees interviewed by the task force had ever been in there, and the three executives under indictment aren’t talking.”

“So we have no real idea what they were doing there?”

“Not really,” he said, and he sounded wistful about it. “I wish we could have gotten those computer records. I’ll bet there was some cool stuff there.”

Cool.

Much as I like Bug, he shares a single characteristic with Dr William Hu. The two of them have an absolutely unsavoury delight for any kind of bizarre or extreme technology. For Hu, the head of our Special Sciences Division, it bordered on ghoulishness. Hu loved to get his hands on any kind of world-threatening designer plague or exotic weapon of mass destruction. A few months ago, when Blackjack Team out of Vegas took down a Chechnyan kill squad who had a hyper-contagious version of weaponized Spanish Flu and were planning on releasing it into the water supply of a large Russian community near Reno, Hu was delighted. A total of fifty-three people dead and an entire water supply totally polluted for God knows how many decades, and he was like a kid with a new stack of comics. He actually admired the kind of damaged or twisted minds that could create ethnic-specific diseases, build super dirty-bombs, and create weapons capable of annihilating whole populations. I’ve wondered for years how much of a push it would take to shove Hu over to the dark side of the Force.

Bug, though, didn’t have a mean bone in his body. For him it was a by-product of a life so insulated from the real world that nothing was particularly real to him. Only his beloved computers and the endless data streams. Something like this lab was probably no more real to him than a level in the latest edition of Gears of War or Resident Evil .

For my part, I am not a fan of anyone that would put extreme weapons into the hands of people so corrupt or so driven by fanaticism that they would turn the world into a pestilential wasteland just to make an ideological point.

Fuck that. For two pennies I’d call the Black Hawk and see what twelve Hellfire missiles and a six-pack of Hydra-70 rockets could do to sponge this place clean.

“Where’s that proving station?” I asked. He sent a step-by-step to my mobile phone.

As I made my way along corridors lit only by the narrow beam of my flashlight, I thought about the work that went on here. During the flight I’d had time to go over some of the background on the Koenig Group. They were originally a deeply integrated division of DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is an agency of the Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. Koenig Group people worked on every aspect of DARPA before they went private, and that meant they had the opportunity to see not only what was currently in development for modern warfare and defense, but also what was being looked at for future exploration.

Of late, I’ve come to realize that when it comes to keeping out in front of the global arms race, there is virtually no line of exploration that’s definitely off the table.

So, without government oversight, where had the twisted minds here at Koenig gone?

I reached the end of one hallway and passed through a security door that led to another corridor lined with doorways that looked exactly like the one I’d just come from. So much so that I actually went out the door and stood looking at the previous doors and then turned around and looked at the new set. The absolute similarity was unnerving and disorienting.

I called up the floor plan on my mobile and studied it.

“Bug,” I said, “somehow I made a wrong turn.”

Bug didn’t answer.

I tapped the earbud.

“Cowboy to Bug, do you copy?”

Nothing. Not even static.

I tapped my way over to the command channel. “Cowboy to Deacon,” I said, trying to reach Church.

Still nothing.

I turned around and looked down the hall. The beam cut a pale line that pushed the shadows back, but not much.

Suddenly I caught the smell again.

Sulphur, human waste, and spoiled meat. And the aroma of perfume.

I don’t remember moving or pulling open my shirt, but suddenly my gun was in my hand. Even though the whole place was absolutely still and quiet, I yelled into the darkness.