These had been locked but not welded, and here he had cut down and replaced the rusty padlock with a rusty one of his own. The Ramsey Arsenal, which was really an explosives-manufacturing complex, had been in caretaker status for almost twenty years. A local industrial-security firm made periodic inspections. He had watched them often, but their people made all their security and access checks from inside the inner perimeter.
More importantly, with the exception of the main gates, they never physically got out of their truck, choosing simply to drive around and look at everything from the comfort of their air conditioning.
He shifted the backpack with the girl’s supplies down off his back and onto the ground. The water bottles made it heavy. He unlocked the inner gates, slid the right one back a few feet on its wheels, and stepped through with the pack. He closed the gate but did not lock it. Directly ahead lay the main industrial area, which covered almost one hundred acres. The complex consisted of metal and concrete buildings large and small, many connected by overhead steam and cooling water piping. There were mixing and filling sheds built down in blast-deflection pits, chemical-storage warehouses, metal liquid-storage tanks, the cracking towers of the acid plant, rail-and truckloading warehouses, and the hulking mass of a dormant power plant with its one enormous stack. The complex was the size of a small town, behind which slightly more than two thousand acres of trees concealed
the finished ammunition-storage bunkers. The rail line, a spur of the Norfolk & Western main line that ran through Christiansburg, immediately branched out into sidings that pointed into the complex in six different directions.
He checked his watch. It was almost sundown. There was just enough light to see where he was going. He did not want to use his flashlight until he was well into the maze of buildings and side streets of the industrial area. The only sounds came from his boots as he walked down the main approach road. A slight breeze stirred dead leaves in the gutters. The largest buildings flanked the main street, which ran from the admin building down to the power plant four blocks away. A series of pipe frames in the shape of inverted U’s gave the main street a tunnel-like appearance. At fifty-foot intervals, there were large hinged metal plates in the street, measuring twenty feet on a side. The plates gave access to what had been called “the Ditch,” which in reality was a concrete tunnel into which large batches of toxic liquids could be dumped quickly in the event a reaction went wrong. All the buildings were locked and shuttered, and, for the most part, empty. Each building had a white sign with a name and building designation reference number for the use of the security company.
With the exception of the power plant, all of the machinery had long since been taken away.
He reached the nitroglycerine-fixing building. He thought about the girl as he walked toward the building, trying to figure out how she played into his grand scheme. He had only mild regret about the two boys who had been killed by the flash flood. In any event, many more strangers were going to die. The girl and her friends were just a few more innocent bystanders. In the six months that he had been producing the hydrogen, no one had ever intruded into the Ramsey industrial complex. There were long-standing rumors in the nearby towns that Ramsey had produced chemical weapons during World War II. Even a hint that there might be some nerve gas still locked away in the deep bunkers tended to keep people out of the facility, and such rumors had never been officially discouraged by the Army. It was all bunk, of course. The plant had been one of several GOCO facilities: government-owned, contractor-operated by various commercial companies to manufacture artillery propellant and warhead fillers for the Army.
He could not imagine what the three kids had been doing here, but Jared’s traps had done their job. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if the flash flood had taken all three of them. But he could not bring himself to execute her, even though she had seen their faces.
In the back of his mind, he thought she might actually become useful down the road, when he got closer to Judgment Day. That was how he liked to think of it: a day of reckoning, with him and his grandson delivering those agents of Satan into God’s iron hands for summary judgment.
It was much darker now. He slowed and then moved sideways into the shadow of a loading dock and sat down to await full darkness. The concrete felt warm against his back. He always did this when he came in: sat down, listened and watched. Made very, very sure no one had followed him in. He closed his eyes and prayed for the strength to carry on, to go through with his mission of retribution. They had manufactured nearly three-quarters of the hydrogen, and the pressure in the truck was starting to register into the double digits for the first time. Not much longer. All they needed was the rest of the copper, and jared said he had found a new source. There was plenty of acid, thank God. He opened his eyes and listened.
There was nothing but the night wind and the ticking sounds of the metal roofs and the piping towers cooling in the darkness. Time to go.
There were two doors on the nitro building: one large segmented-steel hanging door big enough to admit a truck or rail car the other a human sized steel walk-through door. The building’s sign was still legible in the gloom: nitro fixing. He struck the smaller door once with his fist.
“Put on the blindfold,” he ordered.
He waited for a minute, then unlocked the padlock, removed it, and pushed the door open. The interior of the building was a single huge room, which now was in near-total darkness. With his eyes fully night adapted he could just make out the outline of the skylights far above. He could also just see the girl’s face in the middle of the room, a pale blur of white hovering above the dark pile of blankets. He pushed the base of the door with his foot so that it swung all the way back against the concrete wall and then turned on the flashlight, fixing the girl’s face in its blinding beam. She flinched but said nothing. The blindfold was in place, as he had ordered. The remains of the last food delivery were right by the door. He flipped the light around the open shop floor, illuminating each corner.
Metal foundation plates that looked like the stumps in a cut over forest glinted back at him. The room smelled of old concrete, nitric acid, and a hint of sewage. He set the flashlight onto the floor, pointing at the girl.
He slid the backpack in and emptied it out on the floor. A roll of toilet paper, six plastic bottles of water, two dell-style sandwiches, two apples, and a Gideon’s Bible. He picked up the flashlight and swept it around the building again, being careful to keep it low, away
from the skylights. He put it back down on the floor so that the beam again pointed at the girl.
Then he picked up the bag of trash by the floor and stuffed it into the backpack. She never moved, sitting cross-legged on the blankets as if she was meditating. He had never spoken to her, beyond the command to put on the blindfold, and she had never spoken to him.
He looked at her for a moment. She appeared to be well made, which was why he had stopped letting Jared bring the food. Jared was not entirely trustworthy when it came to women, a function, no doubt, of his youth. They had prayed together on Jared’s womanizing problem several times, but he kept an eye on Jared just the same. He admired the girl’s stoicism.
She had to be strong, not to whimper and beg and carry on when he came. She must have a great deal of inner fortitude, he thought. The Bible would help sustain that. He should have brought her one a long time ago.
He picked up the light, swept the room one more time, and then backed out, turning the light off before he closed the steel door. His night vision was gone, of course, but he could put the lock back on and snap it shut without seeing it. He sat down on the steps leading to the door and closed his eyes, letting his other senses scan the surrounding area. Even after all these years, the air in the complex was tainted with the acrid scent of chemicals, as if decades’ worth of nitric acid, sulfuric acid, ammonia, mercury, and a host of esters and alcohols had permanently stained the air.
It had undoubtedly stained the ground, which was why the whole place was now sealed off. He wondered if all those people fishing that creek below the arsenal had any idea of what was sleeping in the sands of the creek bed, courtesy of some frantic flushes into the Ditch.
He opened his eyes and the shadows assumed shape as buildings again in the dark. The security company’s truck would come tomorrow, even though it would be Saturday. Their contract required them to do at least two weekend checks a month, and it had been two weeks. Which is why he had doped the apples. She should be drowsy and sleep through most of the day. The security people were definitely lowest-bidder types: lazy and incompetent. They never even got out of their little truck. They just drove around the complex for an hour and looked out the windows and then went back out the main gates. He had toyed with the idea of doing something to them, perhaps just before Judgment Day. They deserved to be punished for not doing their jobs.
He got up, picked up the pack, and started back. The girl did not know anything, other than that they were here, presumably doing something
illegal, or they wouldn’t have taken her captive. He would have to decide what to do with her. In truth, if she
