The trail had taken me to Fort Mitchell National
Cemetery in Georgia, where CSM Paul Bishop (the tombstone read: Somalia, Iraq,
Afghanistan HE SERVED WITH PRIDE) was no longer buried.
The name had come up a few weeks ago, unrelated to
anything else in the case, long after the investigation seemed to have run its
course, and everyone else had given up. No leads, no witnesses, no hard
evidence – just a hunch, and after the debacles of the last few years no one at
INSCOM had much patience for my hunches.
Still, I persisted – not so much because I
wanted to be proved right, but because of the catastrophic results if everyone
else was proved wrong.
I drove into the small city-state of Fort
Benning on an unseasonably mild late November afternoon, asking myself again:
What did I actually have to go on? Intercepted, encrypted emails, stolen
nuclear materials, a talkative witness doing ten years to life in the
Chesapeake Consolidated Naval brig; coded messages from page numbers and word
counts in The Turner Diaries.
I drove up the main gate, flashed my
credentials to the guard, and got a swift salute as the barrier lifted. The
reflexive military gesture of respect buoyed my sprits briefly, but a phone
call to the Intelligence and Security Command would flip that one-eighty. I had
no official business here and no clearance for what I needed to do. It would
come down to bluff and bluster. I heard my COs voice in my head again, as I so
often did: Culhane laughing: “Bullshit baffles brains, Jimmy.” And it usually
did. Anyway, I had always been good at the bullshit. The look I gave that
guard, for instance -- cold, bored and
impatient, had been pitch perfect, as was my unrushed cruise onto the base. The
car’s body language said I was in no rush and didn’t have to be. People would wait
for me – or come to me when I called them.
More bullshit of course: I’d managed to
burn the last of my credibility as the few scraps evidence had dissolved like
the last pile of dirty snow in a rainstorm. The emails were ambiguous – “dirty
bomb” was some sort of popular rap lyric, the stolen nuclear material had
apparently been accounted for, the Turner Diaries code breaking had
yielded only ambiguous hate speech about
wiping out the “towel heads” and “one cockroach in the sink meant a thousand in
the walls” -- no evident master plan, no
plan at all really, except that the people using the book would do whatever
they had to do to “not be replaced”.
“Ya can’t repair em,” Culhane had said
once. “So what the fuck else are you supposed to do with em?”
That left the witness, who it turned out
would confess anything to anyone about anything in exchange for a shorter
sentence or a bigger cell. So it was no surprise that when I came upon the name
Paul Bishop and located a Command Sergeant Major of the same name buried at
Fort Mitchell, no one had the slightest interest in digging up the grave. I
spoke to Bishop’s widow privately and explained me theory: a newly empty grave
was the best possible hiding place for contraband you didn’t want people to
find.
She hung up on me.
Not a great career week for James Devlin.
But, still – it all made sense. If the
nuclear materials were still unaccounted for, and the Army had no clear origin
point for them … and anyway, you didn’t have to steal radioactive isotopes from
a power plant to make a dirty bomb. A few grams of Polonium could be scavenged
from a dozen sources, from construction sites to food processing plants to
hospitals. You didn’t get enough for a nuclear explosion, but the dynamite
spread the radioactive particles over a good distance, and that made the
perfect surprise coda to your bomb drama, a lingering reminder of your message
and your threat.
And if the coded phrases from the book really did refer
to an actual dirty bomb, and if the emails corroborated it, and if that lowlife
scumbag convict just happened to be telling the truth for once in his life …
If, if, if.
“If I had ham, I’d have ham and eggs,” Culhane had
scoffed at me. “If I had eggs.”
So I was on my own, going rogue as usual. I had used
that phrase with Jenny once and she’d said, “I only seem like I’m ‘going rogue’
because I’m right and you won’t do what I say.’ Well, Jenny was right most of
the time, whether the subject was a lighter more expensive bit for her mare or
the unacceptability of over-head lighting. I gave her those, and she’d give me
this one, I was certain. Jenny had good instincts.
CMS Paul Bishop’s grave was full of metal tubing
dynamite and some radioactive isotope, most likely polonium 210. But I wasn’t
going to debate my theory any more. I was running out of time. It was closing
in on Duhl Hijjah, the final month in the Arabic calendar. That meant Yawm-Al-Arafat,
the holiest day of the Muslim year, was less than two weeks away. Whoever these
people were, I was sure they were going to blow a mosque on that day …
probably, given the logistics of the operation, Al-Farook Masjid, the
biggest mosque in the southern United States, located in Atlanta, just over a
hundred miles north, less than two hours by car from the cemetery. Two of the
encrypted messages supported this theory: “Let them die on their knees” and
even more alarming: “Careful when you face east. We’re gonna get you when you
turn your back on the west”.
That was my case.
I’d made as well as I could, and Culhane rejected it. So
I was on my own. Fuck it. I was used to that.
I pulled up to the Admin building, organized my story, and
walked inside. On the second floor, amid the quiet rustle of computer keys and
the distant ringing of a telephone, the Staff Judge Advocate’s assistant
greeted me. He offered bottled water and gave me the list of volunteers. The
job involved “spade work” and one of the men, private first class Caden Bowers,
had actually been a grave digger in civilian life. I had to smile at that.
Ten minutes later I was driving off the base with Bowers
riding shotgun: a square faced, squinting redneck mouth-breather more
interested in whatever he was scrolling through on his phone than the job he’d
been chosen for, or the man in charge. That was fine with me. I had no interest
in small talk.
I badged my way into the cemetery and found the grave in
a wide meadow dotted with gravestones, backed by a dense screen of forest.
“Now what?” Bowers asked me
“Now we wait for dark.”
“The fuck are we doing here, Colonel?”
I twisted in my seat to face him. “We’re digging up a
grave.”
“Hey no, that aint legal, sir! Plus it’s a sin.”
“The U.S. Army absolves you, private. And you can go to
Confession on Sunday.”
We sat in silence for a while. I rolled down my window
and let the cool evening breeze touch my face. Crows squawked. I heard a siren
dopplering into the distance. Bowers returned to his trusty iPhone.
When it was full dark I turned on the headlights to
illuminate the grave and climbed out of the car. Bowers joined me, shovel in
hand. “I don’t think we should do this, sir.”
“Noted.”
“I mean, dead bodies, you know … disturbing them and
what not …”
“Dig it up,” I said through gritted teeth. Genuine fear
moved through his eyes.
“I’m sorry, sir … dig – dig what up?”
“All of it. Dig it all up. I want it all gone. Now.”
“You mean, like body parts … because –”
“Jesus Christ! There’s no body under there, Private! If
I’m right you’ll find nothing but the components of a bomb.”
“Like a land mine? If it blows –”
“Relax, it’s disassembled.”
“I don’t know …”
Before I could answer, he swung the shovel at my head.
Pain exploded behind my eyes and I found myself on my hands and knees in the
grass. He pulled my Heckler and Koch from its holster, and stepped back. He
spoke but my ears were ringing. I couldn’t hear him.
He spoke louder. “Now you get to dig your own grave, and
I don’t have to handle all that nasty ass plutonium. Kind of a win-win,
Colonel. Doncha think?”
“Wait – who … what are you …”
“Come on college boy, time for the post graduate course.
We was on to you from jump street and my boys are coming right now to pick this
stuff up and get it to A-Town. Oh yeah. Who do you think I was texting back in
the car? Uber? Some dating app? We don’t have time for that shit. We got a
mission and we’re just a little ahead of schedule now. But you gotta roll with
shit, you know? Now start digging.”
By the time I had gotten down to the black plastic back
full of aluminum piping, ten-penny nails, Semtex and plutonium, a black Ford
F350 had pulled up beside us. I was breathing hard, feeling the stab in my
lower back and the raw blisters on my palms.
“Yo, Caden!”
“Hey, T-Bone, we got us a helper.”
T-Bone laughed. “You always was a lazy shit.”
“You AWOL now, cracker,” a third voice chimed in from
the truck
“Fuck yeah.” He turned to me, waved the gun at the truck
bed. “Start loading up, college boy.” I heaved the bag out of the grave and
scrambled after it. “Empty the bag! Get your hands on that stuff. Won’t hurt ya
unless you gopt an open blister or something Feel it hit ya. Don’t worry the
radiation’ll take a coupla days to kill ya, and you’ll be long dead by that
time. So, it’s all good!”
When I was done he shot me five times in the chest and
the close-range rounds punched me backward into the pit. The Kevlar had saved
me but I could tell some ribs were broken and I couldn’t move as the first
shovel full of dirt hit my back.
The darkness saved me. I got my jacket pulled over my
head without them seeing, and I had a pocket of air to breathe until they were
gone. The dirt was loose but it was heavy and I almost suffocated before my
legs could push me out into the air and my hands could claw the soil aside. I
stood for I don’t know how long, filthy and wounded, radiation poisoned, trying
to get my breath and my bearings. Finally, I lost consciousness for I don’t
know how long.
The voice woke me. “Sorry, son. I don’t know what you’re
doing out here, but I’m going to have to put a stop to it. Military police from
Benning are on their way right now. They can sort this out. You just get
yourself out of there, and hold tight till they get here. Won’t be long.”
I squirmed out of the dirt and pulled myself to my feet.
I was dizzy, my whole body was screaming in pain, my throat felt choked with
dirt. But I managed to disarm the old man, take his gun and club him to the
ground. His car was still running. I jumped in, dug the turf up in a three
point turn and took off. I could hear sirens in the distance.
I was a fugitive now, and probably dying from the
radiation exposure, but I still had a job to do and less than two weeks to do
it. By the time I hit interstate 185, I’d figured out my plan.
