Radiant Dawn (19 page)

"Listen, I'm not going anywhere, so I'd appreciate it if somebody could tell me why I'm in this box."

When the doctor turned back, her face was carefully composed to flat neutrality. She switched on the intercom outside Stella's cell and, taking a deep breath, began firing off questions. "You visited the Radiant Dawn Hospice Community. Why?"

Stella suppressed the urge to answer back with her own questions. She'd told no one about the visit, so they had the place, had her, under surveillance. Her greatest fear was of others holding her life in their own hands. She knew only a patient's meek, forthright demeanor would earn her any points here, but she wasn't prepared to give them any more control over her than they already had. "One of their residents was brought into the ER. He was hit by a train. They came and took him back. I was just following up. What was wrong with him?"

"Why did Seth Napier contact you instead of the police?" Stella gathered from the line of questioning that they'd seen her at Radiant Dawn, followed her, tapped her phone, and sent out their commando teams to collect Napier and her. Because they'd had contact with Stephen, who ran away from Radiant Dawn…

The doctor tapped on the glass. "You still awake? Answer the question."

"I spoke to him at the hospital. He trusted me. This is about Radiant Dawn, isn't it? They're doing something to people."

Silently, the doctor nodded once.

"You're with the government, right? Army? CIA? That's what this place is, isn't it? A secret government installation out in the desert, to keep people from finding out what they're doing there?"

The doctor heaved a mighty sigh and closed in on Stella, looking, really looking, at her for the first time. Stella tried to appear to lay herself bare for inspection, felt her defenses pushing her face into the fierce scowl with which it always met the scrutiny of strangers, especially strangers in authority. Perhaps that was exactly what the doctor was looking for in her, because she let slip half a smile. "We're not with the government, and we're not trying to protect Radiant Dawn. You went to Radiant Dawn to apply for treatment."

It wasn't a question, and there was no denying it. Anyone who could tap her phones and spirit her away to a hermetically sealed hole in the earth could easily have ferreted out the news of her cancer. She nodded. "They turned me away. I don't want to die, doctor. I don't want to die from cancer, and I sure as hell don't want to die here."

"Your quarantine will last twenty-four hours. If you show no sign of infection—"

"You'll let me go?" The sneer in her voice would've shut up a lesser woman. The doctor didn't flinch.

"When this is over."

"You can't just keep me here! You're not the goddamn government! It got out earlier, right? You were exposed to it too, you and that jarhead. Why aren't you in a can?"

"I'm not going anywhere." The doctor pointed to the outer door. It was like a bank vault or a hatch on a submarine, set into a massive collar of steel, with double-paned, wire-reinforced glass in a porthole, through which Stella could just glimpse another hatch just like the first. An airlock. This sick bay was designed to deal with contagious diseases. To deal with…this.

"My name's Stella. Stella Orozco, but I guess you found that out when you tapped my phone."

The doctor released a chuckle, as pained by it as if she'd farted. "Delores Mrachek. We're going to be here together for awhile, but I'm not very good company, I'm afraid." Mrachek turned and busied herself with a stack of files on a countertop. She began laying them out as if she were playing solitaire, noting the color-coded tabs on the edge of each before laying it down.

On the well-founded principle that few people are too busy or introverted to argue, Stella pressed. "So, what is this gang you're in? Are you a militia? Paramilitary Nazis? KKK? What?"

Mrachek didn't look up from her busy work as she answered. "We are an army, a very small one, fighting a very big war."

"Against a cancer treatment hospice. Against terminally ill people."

"They aren't people anymore. You saw that much."

"Whatever they are, they aren't dying of cancer anymore."

"No. They don't
have
cancer anymore."

Stella gave a barking laugh as she thought now that she understood. "Is that all this is, then? Two tribes of crazy white assholes fighting over the cure for cancer?"

Mrachek did look up now, a dogmatic fire in her eyes. "No, dear, we're fighting to cure the world of
them
. They've ceased to have cancer. They've
become
cancer."

Her hand went up to forestall any further questions. "Now if we're going to be together for twenty-four hours, we shouldn't exhaust the only conversation we're liable to have in the first hour, should we?" And she got up and shut off the intercom, then returned to her files.

Stella shouted at her for awhile, indifferent that the intercom was off; just trying to be heard gave her anger somewhere to go besides back into her head, where she'd kept it in check for far too long.

About an hour after she'd yelled herself hoarse, Mrachek came back over. Stella went to the intercom, thinking she was going to reopen the lines of communication, but she merely fiddled with something beside the door, and Stella suddenly felt very cold and dizzy. In the time it took for her to realize what she'd done, it was too late to rip out the IV, the cell was spinning, and she staggered into the only stable axis, the barren anchor of her cot, and flopped onto it. Her anger spilled out of her even as her bladder let loose, but she was already asleep.

SPECIAL MEMORANDUM

FOR: Special Asst. Dir. Wendell Wyler,

Counterterrorism Section, FBI HQ, Washington D.C.

FROM: SA Martin Cundieffe,

Counterterrorism Section, Los Angeles Field Office

RE: Softkill Technology

Attached please find the requested comprehensive list of private contractors with softkill weapons development programs (File Document OC171-08A). I have separated domestic from foreign corporations, as well as those with electromagnetic antipersonnel programs. As I perused them, I was disturbed by the large number of contracts with foreign powers of a totalitarian or otherwise ideologically oppressive nature. While a foreign power would have little motive for an act such as China Lake, it would be well within the bailiwick of an extremist group, perhaps with foreign or radical third party domestic financial backing, which might have purchased the technology from a corporation, perhaps even an American one. With SA Hunt's approval still pending due to his disposition in the field, I took the liberty of assigning twelve division and main force Bureau personnel to further investigate the research and financial records of the domestic, and a short list of the most suspect foreign, corporations.

For myself, I endeavored to learn as much as I could about the Pentagon's own softkill programs (see Special Memo #3, re: Theories, intramilitary terrorism), both current and defunct. Upon reviewing the rather sparse Pentagon webpage on the subject (see attached Document Packet #1), I concluded that little more than lip service is being paid to the matter currently, with appropriations for the office providing for only theoretical models of potential softkill projects. (The mostly civilian staff of the division staunchly endorse the term "nonlethal", despite its countermilitary appeal. Small wonder they're broke.) Upon cross-referencing the Pentagon's contractors with domestic corporations with foreign contracts, I found several possible instances of abuse of federal contracts. (For instance, a quick-hardening "riot control foam" compound, synthesized with Pentagon funding by the Syndecon Corporation of Cincinnati, Ohio, 9/94, but never implemented or tested, was offered to the South Korean military and the Japanese Self-Defense Force. Syndecon has yet to notify either the Pentagon or the Federal Trade Commission, and has taken steps to obfuscate their attempts to market the government-owned compound.)

However, no ultrasonic or magnetic projects have passed the preliminary research stage. Several companies (see attached document #2, Short List of Ultrasonic, Infrasonic & Electromagnetic Anti-Personnel Technology Manufacturers) make somewhat effective infrasonic disabling devices which incapacitate by low frequency, high amplitude sonic bombardment. This induces extreme physical discomfort and high probability of incontinence, but seldom induces unconsciousness. While local and federal police forces have yet to secure funds to purchase such weapons, countries such as Taiwan and Peru have used them effectively in riot control and resolution of hostage situations.

I spoke briefly this morning with a civilian consulting supervisor of the Pentagon Nonlethal Defense Projects Office, a Richard Tuttle, who is also a committee chairman for the International Strategic Nonproliferation Center, a privately funded research group and lobby for softkill conflict resolution (see attached document #3, Tuttle's background file, and Document #4, Radical Leftist Environmental Groups). Mr. Tuttle was tolerably cooperative after certain facts about his background status were established, and he provided me with an insider's overview of the state of softkill technology. (All of Mr. Tuttle's information was independently verified by a surreptitious entry into the ISNC's local area network database.)

Mr. Tuttle and others of his ilk are bullish on the substitution of nonlethal weapons in warfare, but are suspicious and fearful that they could become powerful tools for civil control in the hands of an unscrupulous law enforcement agency. He told me that very few top-notch scientists are involved in softkill research at present, but that there was a mini-boom in the program in 1983. Under the lavish patronage of the Reagan administration, a relatively large-scale directed energy softkill research project was conducted under the aegis of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, by a handful of the best scientists in the field, many of whom had worked the atomic weapons programs and become "ethically burned out" (Tuttle's words). According to Tuttle, the White House asked for a weapon for civil control in the event of worst-case scenarios with regard to the escalating homeless population. After less than a year, however, the team was diverted to an SDI project on which no records are available, or believed to exist. By 1985, at least three members of the research team had died under sudden and unforeseen circumstances which should have aroused far more suspicion among local and federal authorities than they did. (See attached Documents #5, #6 and #7, Death Certificates and Police Reports for the Deaths of Dr. Cornelius Darwin Armitage and Dr. Calvin Wittrock, and DoD records for Maj. Delores Mrachek.) Armitage was atomized in an explosion and fire at his home. A defective tank of pure hydrogen was blamed, but no lawsuit or finding of fault was brought to bear on the manufacturer. Wittrock was abducted and executed in Bogota, Colombia, allegedly by narcoguerrilas. Allegedly, his mutilated head and hands were delivered via post to the US consulate there. (Strangely, it never even made the news.) Dr. Mrachek died of an unidentified viral infection while on medical relief mission in the Sudan. Her remains were cremated there in direct contravention of US and United Nations policy. Tuttle went so far as to infer that the deaths were "awfully convenient for the Administration", a suggestion odious in the extreme, but highly provocative (see Conclusions, below).

The contacts and codes with which you graciously provided me expedited the fulfillment of my FOIA request on the DARPA documents pertaining to the scientists working on this "shadow project" (again, Tuttle's words), but I was able to glean very little from them, as they consisted of a small sheaf of unnumbered printouts, with all but a dozen or fewer words blacked out on each. From this skeletal record, I was able to construct the following:

1) A small team of scientists, primarily physicists from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, but including a group of biologists conscripted from projects at NIH and USAMRID, was assembled for a DARPA directed energy weapons project, code named RADIANT, in September of 1983. Authority over the project is blacked out, but the chain of oversight is distressingly short, and probably included only the DARPA Appropriations Committee and the Joint Chiefs. One wonders if the President was aware of the project at all.

2) Only a few names of RADIANT researchers are disclosed: Dr. Cornelius Darwin Armitage, and Dr. Calvin Wittrock, both attached to Livermore Labs, both of whom retained security clearances from Los Alamos and Alamagordo Research Facilities, and Major Delores Mrachek, MD, a cellular biologist from USAMRID. All three are deceased. Armitage had headed the last six projects on which he worked for the government, but was attached to RADIANT in a "consultative capacity." I was unable to identify just who was in charge of RADIANT, but presume that it would have included reps from NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office.

3) Funding for the project was appropriated from the SDI budget; though the amount is undisclosed, it was somewhere in the low seven-figure range (a paltry sum for a Reagan-era defense research grant, let alone one under the high-profile SDI aegis), and provided for an "independent research facility" at an undisclosed location. The goals of the project, though almost universally blacked out, hint at an extremely short-term expectation of result: funding was acquired on a one-time basis, and the facility is specifically designated a "temporary" installation, though whether this is an appeal to economy or plausible deniability remains unclear.

4) Liaisons with the Office of Naval Intelligence, Joint Special Operations Command and the 5th US Naval Fleet Command are stipulated, from which one may infer that provisions were made for testing RADIANT overseas.

5) RADIANT was discontinued in April of 1984, with the vague statement that the project had "failed to yield repeatable results," but had opened "promising avenues for further research under different auspices." Just what they actually tried to achieve, and what became of the project, is beyond our reach at this time. CONCLUSIONS: