Garcia said, “The strike force did worse to their own. Blew their heads apart with shotgun blasts. No facial or dental identification there. Then they cut their hands off and took them away with them. No fingerprint ID. We don’t know if they did it just to their dead or if they killed the wounded, too.”
Jack said, “Delay. There it is again. Some if not all of the bodies will eventually be identified by their DNA, height, weight, and age, distinguishing body marks such as scars and tattoos, but it’ll take time. Time enough for them to accomplish their purpose.”
“Which is?”
“Something massive with the Round Table on the receiving end.”
Dr. Norbert cleared his throat, said, “You were lucky to get out alive, Jack.”
Jack nodded. “I thought the green gas was some kind of knockout gas but it’s not. It’s a hallucinogen. I got a whiff of it and it sent me rocketing clear out of this world for a while. Anybody that got a lungful of it would’ve been knocked flat, too tripped out to do anything but lie there and look at the pretty color.
“That must be what happened at Red Notch. A strike force — maybe the one at Silvertop, maybe another, I don’t know — bombed the compound with gas grenades and rounded the cultists up while they were helplessly tripping out. Some might have tried to resist or been too crazed to control so they were killed there. That explains the seemingly random dispersion of bloodstains at Red Notch. I don’t think they were all killed there, not enough blood, but who knows? Dead or alive, the Zealots were loaded onto the blue bus and taken to Silvertop where they were finished off. They were thrown down the shaft and covered with dirt, not to be found until after whatever is supposed to happen at Sky Mount happens. That was the plan, anyway.”
Garcia said, “You’re making a lot of sense for a guy that was blitzed with a psychedelic bomb not too long ago.”
Jack grinned. “You should’ve seen me earlier, I was flying like a moon bat. Before that I made my break by going over a ridgetop and tumbled into next valley. I climbed the next hill and went into a forest.”
“Pine Ridge.”
“If that’s what it’s called. The strike force must’ve seen me get away because the leader and one of his sidemen came after me. I wandered around the pines in a daze, not knowing what I was doing. I didn’t know Reb and his buddy were dogging me. The stuff started to wear off but I was still pretty wasted. I stumbled into a clearing and came across a mama bear and her cub. I guess it was a mama bear but I don’t know for sure.
“That’s where Reb and his pal found me. I didn’t even know they were there. One of them stepped on a twig and broke it. Mama bear charged me and I dodged right when Reb’s pal tried to shoot me in the back. He missed, but the gunshot spooked the bear into going for the shooter instead.” Jack shook his head. “Frith was right.”
Garcia said, “The tac squad leader? Where’s he fit in with all this?”
“Earlier he said that bears were fast. He was right. That bear moved like an express train. It knocked the shooter down and ripped him up like he’d fallen into a threshing machine. He cried for help to his partner — once. Called him Reb. Reb was busy hightailing it out of there.
“I got out, too. The bear didn’t bother with Reb or me. It had what it wanted and was slicing and dicing him with those wicked claws. Seeing that pretty well straightened me up and brought me to my senses. I followed Reb out of the woods. He didn’t know I was there. Once he started running he never looked back. I lost sight of him but could hear him in the distance up ahead, crashing through the brush. Good thing, too. I’d lost my bearings, and without his lead I’d have had a tough time finding my way out.
“He emerged from the pine forest and went down the hill. I hung back under cover, watching him. A pickup truck was cruising the valley looking for him and picked him up. They drove south out of the valley and must have come out on Dixon Cutoff. I stuck to the cover of the tree line, making my way south along the hilltop, figuring to make my way to the highway.
“I was in the valley near the roadway when a Humvee turned in and saw me. I didn’t know if it was the killers coming back to look for me or not, but when they got closer I saw they were too military to be part of the gang. Even with civvies on you can’t disguise the look. I know; I was Army myself.
“They picked me up and brought me back here to Pike’s Ford. The rest you know. Dr. Norbert gave me some shots that neutralized what was left of the drug in my system, and he and his nurse patched me up.”
Jack turned his face to the doctor. “That’s my story. Now it’s your turn, Doc. You knew what that stuff was in me and had a hypodermic full of the antidote before I said a word. What’s it all about? What is that green gas? And where do you and the Army come in?”
14. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 P.M. AND 5 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME
Dr. Norbert said, “The drug to which you were exposed is called BZ.”
Jack said, “Never heard of it.”
The medic nodded. “I’m not surprised. Few people have, and for good reason. BZ is an incredibly potent psychedelic. It’s a byproduct of the LSD craze of the 1960s. BZ is like LSD on steroids. In its unadulterated form it can produce ‘trips’ lasting up to a week. Luckily for you, you got it in a diluted form. One that was diluted by close to forty years. I’ll explain why in a moment.
“Even in the sixties with its ‘anything goes’ mentality, BZ never caught on with the drug-taking public. It’s too strong for the most hard-core ‘recreational’ drug user. Which is why it was of interest to the military. The research was, in a sense, benignly motivated. The thinking was that BZ could be used as a nonlethal weapon to incapacitate enemy forces, allowing our troops to achieve a bloodless victory.
“Before judging the attempt too harshly, keep in mind the spirit of the times. It’s no secret that the CIA conducted its own extensive research into the use of LSD for interrogation, hypnosis, and mind control. See the files on Project Artichoke if you’re interested. The Army experimented with BZ for possible battlefield use. It was found that BZ could be delivered in the form of a gas. The drug itself was present in microscopic amounts in an inert aerosolized carrier format of highly compressed vaporous gas. The gas would be contained in artillery shells, grenades, and canisters.”
Jack said dryly, “Obviously the research progressed beyond the theoretical stage.”
Norbert said, “Ah, quite. The BZ experiments reached a dead end for the same reason as CIA’s work with LSD as a mind-controlling drug. It doesn’t work, not in that way. Psychedelics are too unpredictable in their effects on human subjects to be depended on. They work on different people in different ways, depending on the individual’s psychological makeup and the setting in which the drug is administered. Some react violently, others are incapacitated. The same subject can have wildly different reactions to identical doses taken at different times.
“The hope was that enemy troops hit with a BZ bomb would be rendered pacified and incapable of resistance. The reality was that it was just as likely to transform them into a horde of raving maniacs, maniacs with guns.”
Dr. Norbert tilted his head, the overhead lights reflecting off the lenses of his spectacles to render them temporarily opaque. “Apart from the practical side, there were political considerations weighing against BZ’s use in combat conditions. It would have been a propaganda coup of the highest magnitude if the other side could prove that we used a psycho-chemical gas bomb in the field. That’s why it was never used by either side, since the Cold War Soviets conducted similar lines of research and could have disseminated their versions of BZ bombs to their client states for use against our troops.
“The BZ research was filed under ‘Project Canceled’ and forgotten as the world moved on. Unfortunately a number of prototype delivery systems had already been made, including a BZ gas grenade. Grenades are used in relatively close combat conditions, so the gas incorporated a green coloring agent that made it highly visible. Our troops would have been wearing gas masks or nose filters when using the weapon; the green coloring would allow them to see where the grenades had landed on a battlefield and react accordingly in real time.
“When the project was canceled, the BZ weaponry was ordered destroyed. The vast majority of stocks were. However, a certain number escaped destruction due to bureaucratic oversight, misfiling, snafus, and just plain human error. The BZ gas grenade was produced in 1970 and a handful of crates of it have been sitting in chemical warehouse arsenals for almost forty years now.
