Wounded Earth (5 page)

So she did. Then she went and took a shower because she felt so dirty.

* * *

Mac MacGowan flew low over the cornfields. His plane sprayed a light mist behind him. He traced a precise pattern under the great bowl of the Nebraska sky, spreading his cargo as evenly over the fields as possible.

The corn looked good. It was maybe knee-high, and its very greenness seemed to breathe. Mac amused himself during long flights by thinking of his part in growing the crops. He rained protection down on the plants like God poured rain and sun. Since nobody else seemed to think a crop duster was a very important guy, there wasn't much harm in his having occasional delusions of grandeur. He knew he wasn't God, but he did take pride in his work. Why, American cornfields fed the world and he helped feed the cornfields.

Mac wheeled the one-seater back toward the airport. He'd delivered forty loads today, since he picked up his usual order from the Happy Farmer's Wholesale Store. Tomorrow was Friday and, if the weather held, he'd deliver another forty loads before the weekend. Not bad for a sixty-year-old man.

The sun was low when he pulled his pickup truck out of the airport parking lot. He looked forward to the drive home. The evening before, he had seen a doe and her fawn gingerly pick their way across the braided shallows and sand bars of the Platte River. He was hoping to see them again.

* * *

Mac MaGowan had picked up his usual order from the Happy Farmer's Wholesale Store early Thursday morning. Forty times, he diluted the concentrated product. Forty times, he delivered his payload. Forty times, he had no idea that he was feeding "his" cornfields a different poison than usual.

The drums had all looked alike. They had all come from the Happy Farmer's warehouse in Gretna, Louisiana. They had all held a nondescript liquid. The odor might have been different than usual, but a hangarful of agricultural chemicals can easily overcome a normal person's sense of smell. Besides, Mac had worn out his sniffer when he was just a chap, back before the EPA outlawed
real
pesticides.

A full day's cargo of cacodylic acid—known by Vietnam troops as Agent Blue—can defoliate 1500 acres, more if the wind is blowing right.

When Mac crossed the Platte, the deer were nowhere in sight. A warm breeze was stirring, signaling a late afternoon shower. There was no way Mac could have known the magnitude of the destruction he left behind him.

* * *

The sinking sun had never been so intensely interesting. Larabeth waited impatiently for darkness to fall, because she wanted to be invisible. She would never let this man see her again. She had a right to that much privacy.

The neighborhood was shabby and the house they were watching was shabbier still. J.D. said it was rented, but that its occupant was employed for the moment. He lived there alone, this man who had shattered her life and given her a daughter he must never know existed.

“Here the sorry S.O.B. comes,” J.D. said, lifting his binoculars. “He's late. Reckon he stoped at a bar or two one the way home?”

J.D. had learned more about this man in a few hours than she had ever known. He knew about the marriages and the divorces and the latest girlfriend, the one who had fled to a shelter for battered women. Everything felt wrong. This drunk didn't match the intelligent, assured voice of her latest tormentor. No, Babykiller didn't live in this neighborhood. She was sure of it.

The loser parked in front of his shabby house. He crawled out of his beat-up car, lurching up the front walk and into the house. J.D. let a moment pass and handed her his cell phone.

“Give him a call and see if he's your babykiller.”

She dialed and waited. Someone answered with a surly “Yeah?” and she said exactly what J.D. had told her to say.

“This is Barbara with the Lottery Bureau. Have you recently bought a lottery ticket, sir?”

She heard the chair squeak as he sat up and paid attention. “Yeah, I did. I'll get it so I can read you the numbers.”

“That's not necessary. I just need to ask you some questions.”

He was eating out of her hand, just as J.D. had said he would be, but it didn't matter. This voice was clearly not Babykiller's. She'd ask this loser the short list of questions and get off the phone.

“Where do you prefer to buy your lottery—” Her own cell phone interrupted her and she gestured to J.D. to answer it. “Where do you buy your lottery tickets?”

J.D. shook her shoulder. He held out her phone and the look on his face made her hang up the phone she was using.

She took it and said, “Hello?”

The voice that whispered, “Hello, Doc,” was not the voice of a loser.

* * *

Cynthia Parker said good-night and slammed the car door shut. There was something about Thursday night happy hour with a carload of girlfriends that lifted her spirits. It was a good thing, because there was something about the men she had met lately that depressed the hell out of her. These last few weeks in particular, it seemed that every loser in South Carolina had tried to hit on her. North Georgia, too. She was tired of being alone, but she wasn't that desperate.

She climbed the steps to her second-floor apartment. As she rounded the landing and headed up the last flight of stairs, a movement on the balcony flickered in her peripheral vision. She cursed herself for letting her friends drive away before she was safely into her apartment. As she turned to flee, her basketball knee gave way and she fell down two stairs onto the landing. She was nearly on her feet when a dark figure ran down the steps and grasped her elbow.

Cynthia's breath caught in her throat. She had taken a seven-week class on self-defense for women, but she hadn't counted on her legs turning to jelly. She was surrendering to panic, and it was humiliating.

The man was tugging her elbow, trying to move her into the light at the top of the stairs. She jerked the arm he held, jamming his elbow into the banister. The training took over like a delayed reflex. Without her consciously ordering it, the heel of her palm was headed for his nose, with the intention of crushing it and, if possible, driving the bone into his brain.

He dodged the blow. “Cindy.”

The voice was unexpectedly soft. Almost sweet. “It's been a long time, but you haven't forgotten me. You couldn't.”

She let him drag her into the light. He was older. There were faint lines around his eyes. He had added a second earring and his tank top revealed a tattoo she didn't remember. She tried to forget all the things she did remember. She hadn't seen Ricky since she left for college and nobody had called her Cindy since then. She hadn't thought of him in years. At least, she hadn't thought of him often.

Cynthia knew what Ricky was. It had been a long time since she could be seduced by a sweet voice and a deft line. She didn't want to think about why he had come back to her, so she didn't. She didn't want to let him in her house, but she did. She didn't want to let him spend the night, but she had loved him once and she was lonely.

* * *

Babykiller dialed another number. Things were heating up.

Gerald answered and Babykiller didn't pause for amenities. “I need a helicopter pilot in eastern Washington state, one who will live and die for me. Can you do it?”

“I've done it before.”

“Yes, you have. And tell your people that it's time for the drugs to really flow at the Hanford and Savannah River nuclear sites. I don't care if you have to give the stuff away. I want the entrance guards at both sites to be as impaired as possible. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good. And impress your dealers with the importance of taking as many people out of commission as possible. There will always be straight arrows who stay clean on the job. We have to impair as many of the others as we can. At the least, they'll be no help during an emergency. In the best case, they'll be actual hindrances. If we're lucky, the security forces will be shooting at each other while our people waltz onto the sites and accomplish their missions unmolested. Good luck, Gerald.”

* * *

Cynthia spent her Friday morning in a small auditorium which, like everything else at the Savannah River Site, had the drab institutional look of an early Cold War government facility. The speaker was droning on about the environmental cleanup at the Department of Energy's Hanford Site in Richland, Washington. She took copious notes, partly to keep herself awake. The speaker, a high-ranking DOE staffer, was knowledgeable. He was presenting excellent information. It was just too bad that he never found time to take a speech class in college. Perhaps he could have squeezed it in between Reactor Design and Transport Phenomena.

Despite the speaker's monotone delivery, Cynthia was excited about what she was learning. The Hanford site was the DOE's number one cleanup priority and, as the speaker had said, eighty percent of the DOE's inventory of spent nuclear fuel was stored at Hanford. The Atomic Age was birthed there. The first Bomb, the test blast exploded at Alamagordo, was built there. So was the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. And God only knew how much plutonium was made there to fuel the Cold War arms race.

The Hanford site was a huge, radioactive reminder that nobody changes the face of human history without leaving an unintended legacy or two. Now, five decades into the Atomic Age, Hanford was sitting on a contaminated area half the size of Rhode Island. Cynthia managed BioHeal's cleanup contract for a small portion of the Savannah River Site. The scope of her work paled in comparison to the things going on at Hanford, but Cynthia had been with BioHeal long enough to know that her company thought big. Maybe one day they would steal the Hanford contract right out from under Westinghouse's nose.

“Our top priority at Hanford is securing the infamous K-basins,” the speaker said. ”I'm sure many of you have heard of them—two forty-year-old concrete vaults which store 2,100 tons of nuclear fuel slugs in submerged steel casks. Did I mention that these basins are located two hundred feet from the Columbia River?”

The speaker was finally warming up to his subject and it was about time. The K-basins apparently made his heart race.

“Cleanup of the K-basin area is important to DOE. They were not designed for this type of storage and they were not intended to last this long. They are known to have leaked at least fifteen million gallons of contaminated water. These figures are shocking, but removal of these wastes is critical for an even more urgent reason, because there is concern that the corroding fuel could spontaneously ignite.”

As it turned out, the potentially ignitable wastes were scheduled for removal within five to seven years, breakneck speed for a government-managed cleanup. Cynthia was sure that the people of nearby Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick—the Tri-cities area—were grateful for such swift action.

She caught the eye of the Westinghouse representative, a trim woman a few years her senior. They worked for competitors, it was true, but it never hurt to network. Besides, sometimes it was awkward to be virtually alone in a sea of men. They might as well close ranks and present a united front.

Cynthia rarely wasted time, so she used her mid-morning break well. She called Ricky to tell him she'd be home for supper. He wasn't there. She hoped he'd taken her ultimatum seriously and gone job-hunting. Then, she made a lunch date with the Westinghouse woman and, in the final minutes before the seminar resumed, she compiled a list of questions for the DOE's Hanford people. God, she loved her job.

* * *

Babykiller wanted to throw the phone to the floor. Realizing that the idiot on the other end of the line had pushed him to such an extreme of temper upset him further. He, Babykiller, never lost his cool and he always retained the upper hand. Of course, he also usually had an assistant deal with people who had no brains, but these plans were too important to leave to others.

He summoned the control to speak calmly to the idiot on the phone. “Do you and your people understand the plan? Do you have sufficient firepower to carry it out? How are you conducting your training?”

“Sir. We understand the plan. We had more than sufficient firepower for this mission before you contacted us, sir. And our training has been conducted by two of our most experienced members. Both of whom served two tours-of-duty in Vietnam, sir.”

Babykiller hated being called 'sir' almost as much as he hated saying 'sir' to some powermad SOB. He tolerated it because he understood this guy. He was a pimply-faced twenty-seven-year-old with no social skills and no hope of ever having a girlfriend, but he was commander-in-chief of a ragtag ultra-conservative militia. The General and his army would soon prove very useful, so if playacting made the imbecile feel important, Babykiller would play along. That didn't mean he had to like it.

“Very good. General.” Babykiller took a deep breath and said the words slowly, feigning respect. “You'll be working in terrain similar to that in Vietnam, so continue training until you receive the signal to go. Remember, you'll be up against a security team of some kind. I don't expect them to be very formidable, but they may have a couple of veterans of their own. Don't underestimate them.”

“Sir. No, sir.”

Babykiller gritted his teeth. “You'll hear from me when the time is right, General. Continue with your training.”

He broke the connection and set the phone down as if it had become distasteful by association. The General was indeed a cretin, but he headed a large organization of eager, warm bodies. More importantly, they had a humongous stockpile of weapons at their headquarters in east Georgia. The sheer size of it startled even him.