The wind was gusting to fifty knots or more. Rain flew horizontally and lashed the windshield of the U.S. Army Humvee that Sampson, Mahoney, and I were riding in. Major Frank Lacey was at the wheel.
Major Lacey was the duty officer that night at Aberdeen. He’d been waiting with the Humvee at the main gate on Hartford Boulevard when we arrived.
“What do you think Whitaker’s after?” Lacey asked as we drove into the proving ground itself.
“What do you have here?” Sampson said.
“It’s more like what don’t we have here,” Lacey said. “We’ve got everything from small arms to ship cannons, and even some real nasty stuff in labs and storage facilities spread out over one hundred and fourteen square miles of terrain.”
I was riding in the backseat with Mahoney. “What’s the nastiest stuff you’ve got here?”
“The chemicals,” the major said without hesitation. “Left over from the old Edgewood Arsenal—the mustard gas, the chloropicrin, and the phosgene—all the way up to Agent Orange and the deadliest nerve agents.”
I thought about Whitaker following in John Brown’s footsteps, trying to arm a rebellion. He could be going for light automatic weapons, .50-caliber machine guns, maybe even rocket grenades and launchers.
But they were all awkward to move in any great quantity, and Whitaker and his followers wouldn’t be able to steal or carry enough of those weapons to make it worth infiltrating a U.S. Army facility. So the colonel must be going for something portable and—
“What’s the deadliest nerve agent here?” I asked.
Lacey said, “Probably a toss-up between VX and sarin.”
Then the major looked at me hard over his shoulder. “You don’t think he’s…”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling sick. “I do.”
“He’ll never get in. That place is a fortress,” Lacey said, but he floored the Humvee and grabbed the mike to a shortwave radio.
He asked to be put through to the shift commander at Edgewater 9.
A few moments later, Lieutenant Curtis, duty officer at base headquarters, reported, “We’re getting no answer from Edgewater Nine, Major.”
“They’re already in,” Sampson said.
“That’s impossible,” Major Lacey snapped, but then he triggered the microphone. “Curtis, ASAP move five platoons in chemical gear south to the Edgewater Nine access off the Old Baltimore Road. Call the Coast Guard. I want Romney, Cold, and Bush Creeks sealed. I want—”
The radio began beeping loud and long, sounding like the beginning of one of those emergency-alert-system drills.
The army major stared at it. “Sonofabitch!”
“What the hell is that?” Mahoney demanded.
The major ignored him. Wrenching the Humvee onto the Michaelsville Road heading south, Lacey barked into the radio, “Report.”
Curtis came back, “Storage bays one, three, and four at Edgewater Nine just opened without authorization, sir.”
Lac
ey hesitated, and then shouted, “Go to lockdown, Curtis. I repeat, go to lockdown. No one in or out. Alert command of breach and intrusion into chemical sector. Move MPs to block the Old Baltimore Road at Abbey Point and Palmer Roads. And all personnel in that sector are ordered to move north immediately.”
“Sound the general alarm, Major?”
“Affirmative,” Lacey said.
“What’s in those open bays?” I asked.
“The nerve gas VX,” Lacey said. “Think of it as a pesticide for humans.”
The Aberdeen Proving Ground’s alert system began to groan and bray around us. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, a two-tone blast and blare from the deepest and loudest trumpet you can imagine. Large amplifiers set up across the military base took up the alert. The sound seemed to vibrate through the Humvee and our bodies as we reached Palmer and then the Old Baltimore Road.