Last Gasp

Everyone ought to try this, he told himself, flying toward the bars of light, which parted before hirn in glittering splendor as he crashed through the window headfirst taking the tangled Venetian blind with him and soared ecstatically all the way down to the multicolored concrete paving four floors below.

When his blond secretary came back with his senior aide they found an empty office filled with a humid breeze. One complete window had disappeared from its aluminum frame and sunlight streamed like a golden searchlight onto the pastel green carpet. The senior aide approached the window. The blond secretary hung back, white except for her garish lips.

Thomas Lebasse, ex-secretary of defense, lay mangled and twisted on the concrete paving. The images invoked by having chosen the one capsule containing a large dose of LSD-25 were wiped clean from his brain.

Nothing surer.

10

The research laboratories of Advanced Strategic Projects were situated some thirty miles southeast of Washington, D.C., along highway 301, down an unmarked road leading nowhere.

A few fishermen did use the road to get to Patuxent Creek, which meandered northward until it lost itself in young plantations of spruce and firs, though none could have been aware of the square gray single-story building with smoke-blue windows that blended in with the picturesque Maryland landscape.

Unobtrusive as it was to the casual eye, the installation kept its real secret even more closely guarded. Belowground it extended to five sub-levels containing offices, recreation and living quarters, laboratories and test chambers, the latter being the size of football fields.

The 230 acres of grounds were patrolled by guards dressed as hunters in check shirts and Windbreakers. They patrolled with Alsatian dogs, double-barreled shotguns, and shortwave transceivers attached to throat mikes. Infrared scanners planted in the trunks of trees detected every form of life down to the size of a dormouse. A web of lasers crisscrossed the approach to the building, trapping the unwary in a deadly electronic maze.

Inside the building, security was equally as strict. Two elevators, monitored by closed-circuit TV, were the only means of access below. Every visitor had to present an electrosensitized identification disk whose microchip circuitry held a record of the holder's unique physiological profile: fingerprints, voiceprint, biorhythms, and ECG trace. Should anyone attempt the subterfuge of presenting another's disk, the system would automatically seal the elevator doors, locking the intruder inside a titanium-steel vault.

So far no one had tried.

The deepest and most extensive sublevels housed the laboratories and test chambers, equivalent in size and facilities to a medium-size university. Here in the main test chamber a series of rubber-lined stainless-steel tanks contained a profusion of marine animal and plant life. Temperature and salinity varied from tank to tank, ranging from subzero to equatorial with all the graduations in between. Ultraviolet panels mimicked the action of sunlight and sprinklers supplied calibrated amounts of rainfall. Oceanic and climatic conditions were replicated as faithfully as science knew how and technology could achieve.

From the observation booth behind the yellow gantry rail, Dr. Jeremiah Rolsom, scientific director of ASP, watched three masked and rubber-suited operatives manhandling a drum along the gantry to the feeder chute of tank 9. The drum was painted bright pink with a large black N on its side.

'Is this the last of the batch?' Rolsom asked a technician seated at the instrument console.

'Yes, sir.'

'What concentration?'

'Thirty-four percent.'

Rolsom nodded and nibbled his lower lip, his round black face bearing the reflection of the arc lights high up in the vaulted ceiling of the chamber. He said over his white-coated shoulder, 'We're trying inorganic nitrogen in varying concentrations. It's pretty much the same as the fertilizer used by farmers, except the proportion is what a lake might receive in runoff over five years.' He turned to face Major Madden, who was standing with his arms behind his back, pointed chin slightly raised. 'Essentially it's the same process, only speeded up by a factor of several thousand.'

'How soon before you get results?'

'Three to four weeks. We're trying to duplicate the Lake Erie experience.' Rolsom used his large strong hands to illustrate his explanation. 'Rainwater draining from the farmlands of the Middle West'-- the hands swept down, the pink pads of his fingers outspread--'took with it the nitrogen from the soil equivalent to the sewage of about twenty million people, which was double the population of the Lake Erie hinterland at that time. What happened? The nitrogen balance of the lake was disturbed. You got these huge algae blooms, which grew unchecked. As the blooms decayed the bacterial action consumed most of the lake's free oxygen, killing off fish and plants. Result? The classic case of eutrophication--and one dead lake.'

Madden looked past him into the chamber. 'It might work with a lake, but will it work with an ocean?'

'Sure, given time, plus vast amounts of nitrogen-rich fertilizer.' Rolsom stuffed tobacco into an old briar pipe and pointed the stem at the rows of tanks through the window. 'But don't forget--that's only one option open to us. Out there you've got just about every conceivable combination of herbicidal overkill. It all depends what you want to happen and how quickly.'

The sharp angles of Madden's face were softened by the booth's dim lighting. He looked like a boy, except for his eyes, black and hard and shiny. 'Are we talking about months or years?' he asked.

The director puffed his pipe into life before answering. 'Everything depends on deployment and whether you're going for land or sea targets. Now take Bloomingdale's--the chloraphenoxy acid group. That acts as a plant hormone, causing metabolic changes so that the plant grows at a phenomenal and uncontrolled rate. It grows itself to death.'

'More suited to land vegetation.'

'That's right,' Rolsom affirmed. 'Our other main group, symmetrical triazines--Macy's--interferes with photosynthesis. The plant's biochemical processes are halted and eventually it dies of starvation. Macy's would be more effective in the oceans, killing off the phytoplankton. But speed of deployment is the key.'

'Well, we've got missiles and supertankers,' Madden said. 'We've tested Bloomingdale's at the range in Colorado and it's looking good. A single payload targeted on South America could wipe out fifty square miles of rain forest. As for the oceans, supertankers at strategic locations could dump Macy's within hours. As far as anyone knew they'd be commercial vessels on regular trade routes. Not a nuke to be seen.'

Rolsom led the way into the corridor, trailing aromatic blue smoke.

'You'll want to see the bacteriological section while you're here.'

'How's it coming along?'

'We're experimenting with a number of mutant strains of bacteria that consume oxygen at a far greater rate than normal.' Rolsom was using his hands for more graphic displays. 'The bacteria don't actually interfere with photosynthesis but rather eat up the oxygen as fast as the phytoplankton can produce it. In two, maybe three months with that rate of growth you could turn the whole of the Pacific into bacterial soup.'

The image was arresting and Lloyd Madden felt a pleasurable shudder down the length of his spine. As a kid he'd gone around with an imaginary machine gun wiping out everything that moved, rat-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta- ta-ta-tat! Seeing gaping bloody holes everywhere. Headless corpses. Guts spilling out. It had been a harmless pastime for a lonely boy. He still vividly remembered seeing a Vietnamese rebel being shot in the head on a newscast and had experienced his first proper erection. Emaciated yellow corpses strewn about a paddy field excited the same reaction.

This was nearly as good. They took the elevator up to sublevel D and entered the laboratory, lit by glareless ceiling panels. He felt an almost sensual pleasure. This was his achievement! All these people working away to realize his ambition! While it was true that General Wolfe was ostensibly head of ASP and it had been Blindeye's rank and prestige that had persuaded the Pentagon to fund the establishment, the real motive force had come from him, from the kid with the imaginary machine gun.

That assignment in the Antarctic and the interrogation of the Russian scientist had started it all. Here was the warfare of the future. Here was a way of terrorizing not just a country or a continent but an entire planet. As the idea grew and took shape and assumed an independent existence, so his covert power had gone from strength to strength. Now, looking around at what he had created, Lloyd Madden felt an ecstatic thrill and the deepest satisfaction.