Whisper Death (20 page)

“Air-conditioner, my ass!” McGuire muttered. He flung the tracking transmitter in the air, watched it careen off the rocky ground and stood with his eyes closed, willing himself to be more careful, more alert, goddamn it.

McGuire chose a nondescript motel in Baker. After registering, he bought takeout food at a restaurant across the road: burgers and coffee for him and Littleton, a tuna-salad sandwich for Lafaro.

“It's happening,” Littleton said when McGuire returned to the motel room, locking the door behind him. Littleton's small, bony body was stretched prone on the floor, and he was staring up at the face of a network newscaster on the television screen. “Listen!”

“. . . which onlookers said appeared to be an atomic explosion,” the television news anchorman was saying with appropriate seriousness. “Our correspondent Fred Cherington reports from Nevada.”

McGuire settled himself on the edge of a bed and watched the story unfold on the network evening news.

The television picture cut to a slow, sweeping view of the landscape beyond the blood-red gate at the end of Littleton's laneway, now guarded by several armed men. “This ranch, near Beatty, Nevada, was owned by a mysterious and reclusive resident named Sam Littleton,” a new voice said. The camera zoomed in, beyond the gully where McGuire and Littleton had crouched, until it found the massive crater blasted out of the desert. “And this was where the home was located. The home of the man local residents knew only as Little Sam.”

The view cut to a close-up of a rancher in cowboy hat and open shirt, his face lit by the afternoon sun, pointing off in the distance. “I was drivin' outta the mine back there maybe three miles,” the man said. “First, I thought it was an earthquake, then I saw the most godawful explosion from over there. There was a big flash and fire and smoke and stuff and it all went up in a mushroom cloud. I'm tellin' you, if that weren't an atomic explosion, that's as damn close as I wanta get to one.”

Another man's face appeared, this one Hollywood handsome with perfectly coiffed hair. The news correspondent was wearing a lightweight suit, striped tie and button-down collar. “Many residents of the area had the same reaction,” the television news reporter said into the camera. “Representatives of the federal government, speaking for both the military and the Atomic Energy Commission, were on the scene quickly to quell fears and rumours.”

Another new face on the screen: older, not nearly as handsome, wearing an open-necked shirt and a casual smile. “We are working on the theory that the gentleman in question had either an illegal cache of dynamite in his possession,” the man said in a vaguely southern accent, “or perhaps an over-sized propane tank with a faulty valve. Certainly, either one could have created the kind of devastation we see behind us here.” The camera cut to a new view of the crater as a group of men circled its rim. “But we can state emphatically that what the residents of the area saw was most certainly
not
the result of a nuclear device.”

Another scene: the news correspondent was back at the gate again, his chin tucked low and his voice carefully modulated. “Local people say they hardly knew the man known as Little Sam Littleton, who resided here on this homestead for more than twenty years. He was considered eccentric and perhaps mildly deranged, but harmless.” The camera zoomed beyond the news correspondent to find the crater again. “Whatever he used to create such widespread destruction, extensive enough to launch rumours of a nuclear explosion here on the edge of Death Valley, may never be known. No trace of Little Sam Littleton or his homestead has been found.” He paused significantly. Someone at the edge of the crater retrieved a scrap of material from the ground and placed it in a yellow plastic bag. “This is Fred Cherington near Beatty, Nevada.”

The screen faded to black before coming alive again with a commercial for a denture adhesive. McGuire walked to the television set and turned it off.

Littleton stared at the carpet. “It's happening,” he mumbled. “Just as I knew it would. The lies. They're spreading lies they know must be believed.”

“So tell me the truth,” McGuire said, handing Littleton a burger and the tuna sandwich. “What the hell did you and Bunkie Crawford do back then?”

McGuire positioned himself in a small chair in the corner of the room where he could watch the door. He wished he had a gun. Even the Beretta.

Littleton sat on the carpeted floor, his back against the bed, his spindly legs stretched in front of him. The cat Lafaro blinked and yawned up at its master's face as he recited his life story in long, detailed descriptions.

He had been born forty-five years ago somewhere in California to a migrating couple from Oklahoma who, despairing of finding work, left him on the doorstep of a Glendale orphanage, a note scrawled in pencil and pinned to his nightshirt: “Please take care of little Sam, as we are too poor to care for him. Thank you.”

The orphanage administrator's name was Garnett Littleton. “We shall give him a home,” he said, when all efforts to locate the parents failed. “And I'll give him my name.”

Growing through childhood and adolescence, Sam Littleton bore the classic birthmarks of abandonment: a feeling that his life meant nothing to anyone except himself, and the need for someone or something to make a commitment to him. There were a few early efforts at adoption. But he had become a sullen child, quick to cry and withdraw, sickly and small in stature. Not an all-American little boy to play baseball with on Saturday mornings, or even a dedicated scholar to carry his parents' pride on a college mortarboard. There were other children more promising, more physically attractive, more charming. By the time he was eight years old, it was clear the orphanage would remain his home.

By adolescence, he boasted a lively mind stimulated by extensive reading, and his life and views of the world remained distant from those of his high school classmates, who took for granted the family connections he yearned for and knew he would never find.

A week after his eighteenth birthday and just three months before graduating from high school, he joined the US Army.

The army provided all the joys and terrors of a true family taken to bureaucratic extremes. He was cared for and abused, approved and rejected, threatened and rewarded, stripped of his meagre identity and equipped with a new personality.

He made his most critical decision at the end of basic training. It was the height of the Vietnam War.

“As an enlistee, you have a choice not permitted to draftees,” an army major told him. The major had reviewed Little Sam's exemplary record and obvious intelligence. “You can choose to experience battle and grow as a man. Or you can choose to avoid it and remain here in America, performing other vital defence services.”

“What kind of vital defence services?” Little Sam asked.

The major smiled in anticipation. “Strategic,” he said. “Very strategic.”

They sent Little Sam to armourer's school, where he quickly absorbed the chemistry and physics involved in designing and activating explosive weapons. His intelligence was keen and his attitude was attentive. Most impressive of all, he exhibited the passive demeanour necessary for work dedicated to handling the means of efficient mass annihilation.

“They transferred me to Mercury,” Little Sam said to McGuire, feeding the last morsel of tuna salad to his crippled cat.

“The nuclear-weapons testing centre,” McGuire nodded.

“On the map, it's a town. Where you might expect high school cheerleaders and lovers in the park. Or maybe just porno movies downtown and incest in the suburbs. Something typical like that. But no, those are elements of life, as putrid as some may be. And Mercury is a scabby settlement of death.”

Corporal Sam Littleton received six months of training in the arming of nuclear weapons before being assigned to one of six teams attached to the Mercury-based testing unit, all under the direct command of Colonel Ross Amos. Each team included three members whose responsibilities matched those of a nuclear-arms unit in battle. The armourer assembled the device; the link man controlled the firing mechanism. The group leader, a sergeant, held the key needed to unlock the mechanism and prepare it for firing.

In the special tactical group assigned to carry out an underground test of tactical nuclear device 68–139 twenty-three years earlier, Little Sam Littleton was the armourer; Bunker Crawford was the link man; and Sergeant Rocco Salvatore Lafaro was the group leader.

“Lafaro was a hun,” Little Sam muttered as he stroked the neck of his sleeping cat. “An animal of a man, hairy as a badger, tough as carpet tacks. He loved performing battlefield simulations, when we were sent to locate the test site, sometimes in the dark of night, and position the device at the mouth of a hole drilled down into the test cavern. Then we would camp above it and wait for dawn and the brass to arrive.”

“They sent three enlisted men into the desert with an armed atomic bomb?” frowned McGuire.

“No, no, no,” Little Sam replied. “Dumb as doorknobs the military may be, but prescient and paranoid they are as well. We were restricted to the test compound north of Las Vegas. There were many safety precautions. The firing officer would arrive out of the sun at dawn, in a blaze of descending helicopters, with the actual trigger portion in his kit. No trigger, no bomb. Lacking a trigger, the device was only a witless microwave oven.”

The test site for device 68–139, one of the smallest nuclear weapons in the army's arsenal, was located along the Amargosa Valley twenty miles north of the highway to Las Vegas. Lafaro and his team arrived in the late afternoon, set up their tents and confirmed their orders.

“We drove two trucks,” Little Sam explained. “Lafaro and me in one with the device in the back. Bunkie in the other, carrying our tents, rigging equipment, all that. Simulating battlefield conditions, that was the idea. We had coordinates, that was all. But the difference, McGuire . . . the difference was that we would be tapping a dry sinkhole with the bomb, and the explosion would merely disturb a few lizards on the surface. In battle, we would have loaded the device on a rocket platform, aimed it at advancing armoured columns or reinforced strongholds and atomized them. The columns, the enemy, whatever. Never humans, of course. Never people. There are no people in an army, McGuire. Ever notice that? The military will refer to the enemy, to casualties, to personnel, to anything but people.”

He removed his glasses, wiped his eyes and continued the story.

Lafaro ordered Crawford and Littleton to establish the base camp in his absence. “I've got something to do first,” he had growled at them. He called the security gate from the truck radio to clear the way for his departure.

Driving the now-empty supply truck, he drove west out of the nuclear firing range and through two security posts. Lafaro was a familiar figure to the MPs manning the check posts. As a master sergeant, he could easily intimidate the enlisted men assigned as guards to control access to the firing range, and move on and off the site at will.

An hour later, when the sun had almost set, Lafaro returned. He slid the army truck to a halt next to the tents pitched by Crawford and Littleton, jumped out and opened the rear door of the vehicle.

“He brought a girl,” Littleton recalled. “Hidden among tarpaulins in the back of the truck. Maybe eighteen years old. A woman such as I had never seen before. Flawless. Have you ever known a woman whose beauty is her power, a power she exerts by simply being? Have you ever known a woman like that, McGuire?”

“Yes,” McGuire answered.

Littleton smiled. “Yes, I believe you have,” he nodded.

Lafaro introduced the girl as Barbie, laughing uproariously while she stood hesitantly a step behind him, holding her small overnight bag in front of her and huddled against the chill of the desert in a denim jacket and jeans. Crawford and Littleton were astonished. Bringing an unauthorized civilian to a restricted firing site was serious; all three soldiers could be sentenced to long terms in the stockade if she were discovered.

Lafaro, who was clearly drunk by now, assured them that no one would ever know; the girl would be carried off the test site in the supply truck the next morning after the actual firing team arrived and Lafaro's crew was dismissed, free to leave the site and spend the afternoon on their own time.

“This is one night my ass won't be freezing alone in my tent,” Lafaro boasted as he led the girl away.

“Where did she come from?” McGuire asked.

Littleton shook his head. “We never knew. Maybe a hitchhiker. Or a dancer at one of the highway bars. A runaway. But oh, such a beauty, McGuire. ‘She had such beauty that would make a king vacate his throne and discard his crown in the dust where it might be scuffled for by slaves.' That kind of beauty, McGuire. Poetic beauty.”

Crawford and Littleton settled in their tents nervously. There was never a plan to challenge Lafaro. Aside from his rank, Lafaro intimidated everyone by the force of his personality. Rumours revolved around the man, rumours of roadhouse brawls and barracks fights that left Lafaro's opponents crippled and fearful of laying charges against him. So Crawford and Littleton remained silent, hearing only animal noises drifting across the sand from Lafaro's tent.

Soon, the groans were replaced by new sounds. The scream of a woman in pain. The shouts of an angry drunk. Crawford and Littleton crawled out of their sleeping bags just as the interior of Lafaro's tent was lit with a flash of gunfire.

The girl burst from the tent, naked and hysterical, holding Lafaro's sidearm pistol in her hands, pursued by the master sergeant whose body glistened in the pale light of the desert sky, his voice raging incoherently.

“She ran to the top of a low rise, losing ground to him,” Littleton recalled. “Then she stopped and turned to face him. No expression on her face, McGuire. Her visage became as blank as a clean sheet of paper. And she pumped three bullets into that raving hairy maniac. One, two, three. Bunkie and I, we stood counting them.
Un
,
deux
,
trois.
I tell you, McGuire, Lafaro's death was the only thing that could have tugged our eyes from that Venusian body of hers.”

As Lafaro lay dying on the ground, the girl tossed the gun away and began sobbing uncontrollably. Littleton and Crawford emerged from their tent to watch Lafaro's body shudder a final time before lying motionless.

“She wouldn't tell us what he had tried to do,” Littleton recalled for McGuire. “It didn't matter. She was alive. He was dead. We wrapped her in a blanket and sat her down to talk.”

What they talked about, Littleton explained, was how to save themselves. There were no regrets about Lafaro's death. But the girl faced a murder charge, while Littleton and Crawford could, at the very least, see their military careers destroyed. Charged as accessories the two men would face court martials, demotions and various charges followed by possible years in a stockade.

“It was the girl who suggested the idea,” Littleton said. “I held back, but Bunkie got excited about it. Because she promised to see him later when it was all over. And thank him in a carnal way. He had raw lust in his eyes over her, over that sight of her naked in the desert moonlight. It fogged even his fear of imprisonment.”

Littleton argued against it, but weakly, knowing the army would presume some degree of conspiracy in Lafaro's smuggling of the girl into a restricted area—no matter how innocent he and Crawford may be.

“The army does not believe in individual action,” Littleton explained. “It preaches against it. If one man in a unit is guilty, the guilt permeates everyone. Without exception. Understand that, McGuire. Understand it, and the rest becomes comprehensible.”

And so the idea grew appealing, and Littleton was caught up in the excitement.

The plan involved disposing of Lafaro's naked body and concealing evidence of his murder. This was easy; several probe holes had been drilled in the vicinity of the test site to evaluate the stability of the soil. Each was wide enough to lower Lafaro's body into them vertically, his arms raised above his head. Released, he would drop several hundred feet to the bottom.

“Like he was bestowing a blessing, McGuire,” Littleton described Lafaro. “Like the pope blessing the sky as he dropped into hell.”

But not before the girl had unfastened Lafaro's dog tags from around his neck.

“Even then, I believe she knew,” Littleton said in wonder. He lifted the cat from his lap and sat it gently on the bed, positioning its crippled hind legs for comfort. “I believe she knew,” he repeated.

Blood-soaked sand, empty cartridges and other evidence were dropped down the same drill hole before Bunker Crawford switched on the radio transmitter, identified himself as Lafaro and called the gate to announce that he would be leaving the test site to retrieve some missing equipment from Mercury.

The girl dressed herself in Lafaro's army fatigues, pulling his slouch hat low over her eyes. She tied Littleton and Crawford securely back to back in their tent and kissed them each, promising to meet Crawford at an abandoned ranch near Beatty, at the last private land site before Death Valley.

“I could feel Bunkie's pulse jump when he thought about it,” Littleton said. “The girl, McGuire. The girl was a wonder.”

Then, seizing the keys to the truck, she drove away through the darkness.

“We screamed and shouted after her,” Littleton said, “when we realized she had taken the wrong truck.”

“You hadn't unloaded the bomb,” McGuire said.

“It was in the truck she took. Not the supply truck, as we had agreed.”

“She drove off the site with the bomb in the back? Just like that?”

“Routine it was, McGuire. To have trucks leave and arrive. At three in the morning on a lazy night in the desert, even the most vigilant become slipshod, lethargic. She drove straight through the first gate as we told her to do. As Lafaro would have done after having alerted the guards. There was, after all, little interest in who was leaving the site. The emphasis was on who entered.”