Part One
The men were moving as fast as they could in their bulky flame-retardant gear. Each of the suits was similar to a “ref-co” (RFHCO—Rocket Fuel Handler’s Clothing Outfit), but they contained so much additional padding and insulation they were often called “puffy suits” or “cocoon coats” by those who had to wear them. Obeying mandatory safety procedures, the men checked and double-checked the seals on their unwieldy garments.
Throughout the lab facility, everyone could feel a mixture of excitement and trepidation surrounding the experiment about to be conducted. A tense voice came through the speakers mounted inside each of their high-tech helmets: “This is not a drill. Everyone, shields down.”
All but one of the men complied.
The anxious voice rose a bit in volume. “Walters!”
“What?”
“Shield.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” The man quickly pulled down and nervously fastened the quarter-inch-thick multi-layer polymer see-through faceplate of his helmet.
“Okay, everybody, settle down. Begin sequence check.”
“Element in place and sparking unit ready.”
“Video is a go.”
“Med Team in position.”
“Fire Suppression set.”
“Geologic set.”
“Logistics set.”
There was a pause and all helmeted heads turned to look at one of their group.
“Larry! Are we all set!?” Several of the men were waving their arms at the still silent scientist. It looked like he was speaking but nothing was coming through the built-in communication device.
The nearest scientist stepped over and both men fiddled with the electronic switches. A sudden loud burst of static made everyone flinch.
“-hrist! Sorry, sorry! Damn thing wouldn’t turn on.”
“Technology, ain’t it grand.”
“All right, let’s focus, people.”
“Sorry, Dr. Michaelson.”
“We’re all plugged in and switched on then?”
“Hearing you loud and clear.”
“Yes, all good.”
“Roger that.”
“All set.”
“Coming through fine.”
“All right, let’s proceed.” The head scientist cleared his throat and began speaking in a stentorian manner for the recording. “This is Project Sunburn, X-Lab Four-Bravo, Burn Test Number... Oh hell, what number is this, anyway?”
“Hundred and thirty-nine.”
“Yes, thank you, Dr. Sandusky. All right: Burn Test Number One Three Niner. Experiment will begin on the slab inside the main structure and will expand for our first test on the open desert. Planned output of 15 seconds. ‘Go’ on video.”
“Video activated.”
“All right, starting in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and igniting.”
There was a blinding spark and then a tiny white-blue cyclone of flame sprang up on the floor where wood chips had been carefully arranged. The flames began crawling across the pieces of wood that formed a trail leading to the door of the lab.
“Open ‘er up.”
One man pulled down on a large steel lever so that gears could release huge dead-bolts on the reinforced hangar-sized entryway. With grunts and groans, three of the men began sliding open the massive door. The rapidly swirling flames seemed to hesitate just a second before shooting through the opening and onto the blistering hot desert sands right outside the lab building.
“Time?”
“Nine seconds...ten seconds...”
“Right. It’s in the sand. Should begin smoldering now.”
But the flames did not begin smoldering. They began spreading in every direction at once.
“That’s not right, it’s supposed to—”
“Look out!”
The flames were not only headed away from the building but also back into the lab and up the sides of the structure.
“Use the extinguishers!”
“The foam! Give it the foam!”
Several techs and scientists grabbed fire extinguishers and began spraying the flames. And the flames behaved unnaturally, rapidly traveling up the streams of foam to engulf the canisters and the suits of the men.
“Holy shit!”
“Hit the FS!”
One of the men leaped to the wall-mounted Fire Suppression activation alarm, punched it, and then swiveled his head up to see if the system activated because in the past it hadn’t always worked properly. To his relief, the four dozen nozzles on the ceiling and the two dozen more mounted at floorboard level all burst forth with the mixture of chemicals designed to suck the life out of any flames.
“Thank God,” the man thought, just before it was apparent that this particular set of flames appeared to like the fire suppression chemicals. “No,” he said aloud, and then “No!” he screamed.
The high-resolution video cameras mounted throughout the lab captured everything, impassively watching the blaze, sending the imagery via encrypted broadcast to various top secret databases, silently recording until they, too, were confronted by the incandescence and then went dark from the smoke.
Inside the lab structure, the firestorms grew brighter and larger. The flames waltzed across the floor of the lab, tangoed up the walls of the building, and jitterbugged onto the lab equipment and the ceiling and the door and the protective suits and the men inside, all of whom were burned alive.
On one level, the experiment in what was called “FireWars” was a success. Scientists and the Army had created a weapon for which there was no defense: fire that burned anything and everything. Indeed, it was still burning even after consuming the scientists, the technicians, the soldiers, the laboratory, the Quonset huts, the automobiles, the helicopter, and all the weapons and gear of the outpost. And now it was burning the desert sand and moving outward across the Playa in this remote part of Nevada. Yes, it was on its way toward the location of the annual Burning Man festival.
Then, just as unexpectedly, the fire stopped. Not a fifteen-second controlled experimental burn as had been predicted, but a 120-minute conflagration that left nothing but ash on the earth’s surface. Nothing but ash covering 610,727 cubits of desert.
“There’s no living thing in that area of 30 acres,” one investigator said a week later when the Army thought it safe to send in a team to inspect the barren ground.
“Works out to 31.4 acres,” said one man.
“Nothing alive anywhere,” said another.
“This thing is the fire of god.”
“The devil, you mean.”
“Either way, the Joint Chiefs have got to be pleased.”
“How so?”
“That their new weapon is so powerful and effective. Plus, it turns out to be very inexpensive to produce.”
“Yeah, and all they have to do now is figure out how to control the damned thing.”
Part Two
Twenty-four hundred miles across the country from the site of the torch-and-scorch experiment, a group of men congregated within a five-sided building. Heavily guarded by man and machine, the Pentagon was the war capital of the world. It was here that talks, meetings, presentations, confabs, and secret conversations took place among the leaders, movers, and shakers of all branches of the United States military.
Their discussions were wide-ranging, running all the way from ka-blam to ka-boom, meaning that their topics included warfare, weapons, tactics, schemes, scenarios, plans, intelligence, counter-intelligence, command-and-control, troop strength, deployment, logistics, kill ratios, survivability, explosives, drones, body disposal, and so forth. The work was never-ending and there was a steady hum of activity within the structure’s six-and-a-half million square feet of floor space, not counting the secret steel-lined and titanium-lined and lead-lined rooms beneath the basement of the edifice.
Waves of malevolence wafted outward from the hundreds of meetings taking place in the vast building. The strongest emanations, by far, were from some of the hidden rooms far below the earth’s surface. Even now, a meeting was in progress involving nine Senators, eleven members of the House of Representatives, and a dozen uniformed military men, all officers above the rank of colonel.
“What you’re suggesting, General, will mortify the world.”
“Yes, Senator, there will be some protests, but—”
“Protests? There will be a shitstorm. Why, this will—”
“If you’ll permit me to interrupt, Senator? Thank you. We have determined that the ramifications of the proposed action will fall into five categories: political, military, geopolitical, economic, and public opinion.”
“Public opinion will be excoriating.”
“Only in the rest of the world.”
“You don’t think the press will go ballistic here?”
“Of course they will, but public opinion will come around once the consequences are experienced.”
“The consequences look like a hundred million dead people.”
“That figure is low at least by half.”
“Jesus!”
“Remember, this is something most of you in Congress wanted.”
“Something we wanted?”
“Every one of you has said, sometimes more than once, that you’d like to wipe the Middle East off the face of the earth—”
“Well, we may have said it privately but—”
“—and here’s how you’ll get your wish.”
“—we weren’t being literal!”
“Well, someone thought you were and so here’s the plan.”
“Jesus!”
“And the plan is good. It’s solid. It’s a good plan.”
“Two hundred million dead and maybe twice that many maimed and dying is a good plan?”
“Well, we believe we have a way to avoid the maimed and the dying. The design of the plan achieves a PK of 94.”
“What the hell is a pea kay of ninety-four?”
“Sorry, Senator. PK stands for Probability of Kill. A PK of 94 means a probability of kill factor of ninety-four percent.”
“Ninety-four percent dead! So you’re going to kill everyone in the Middle East?”
“Well, ninety-four percent.”
“How will you protect Israel?”
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“What?!?”
“Small price to pay.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“Congressman, focus on the big picture. We have some very encouraging reports from our JFSWD research in the—”
“The what?”
“The Joint Forces Special Weapons Development venture in the Nevada desert. It’s part of the GWCCS, as you know, and —”
“Wait, goddam it, what is a CWCCS?”
“No, sir, not CWCCS: GWCCS. Global Weapons Command Control System.”
“For Christ sake...”
“Anyway, our boys have come up with something called Project Sunburn. Could we roll the tape on the burn?”
“It’s not called tape any longer, General.”
“Aw shit, just run the goddam movie.”
“Yes sir. Activating the file. It will be on the monitors...”
“Will you narrate, General?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it. All right, so you see that there’s this self-generating high-intensity combustion. Burns anything. Concrete, steel, titanium...”
“That’s chemical warfare!”
“No, no, it’s not chemical so much as it is, uh, scientific. It’s scientific warfare. Now, there’s an amazing shot coming up right about... there! See? Even the desert sand is on fire. Always burns for 120 minutes. Leaves ashes behind. It’s a perfect weapon.”
“But that’s, that’s—”
“Terminates the enemy and—”
“—heinous!”
“—disposes of the corpse all in one fell swoop. No evidence left.”
“I’ll not be party to the U.S. use of chemical weapons!”
“Naw, the man said it ain’t no chemical weapon.”
“What the hell do you call it?!”
“It’s just fire. Artificially manufactured fire.”
“That is the most ridiculous—”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen! Please. Let’s set aside discussion of the type of weaponry it might or might not be and focus on the strategy that the military has placed before us. Now look, what’s being proposed, is it all scientific fire or does it use conventional weaponry?”
“I think I can answer that, Representative. The answer is that there will be a combination of approaches. The plan calls for the use of nuclear for the large cities, conventional weaponry everywhere else, and then the controlled burn.”
“Wait, the U.S. is going to go nuclear?!”
“Well, Senator, it’s a precautionary measure.”
“It’s a preemptive strike!”
“Yes, yes it is.”
“That’s unheard of!”
“Yes, well, Senator, that’s one reason why it will be so effective. No one is expecting it.”
“That’s outrageous!”
“On the plus side, this plan requires hardly any boots on the ground at all. As you can see in Strategic Initiative 10257SB, the classified document which you have in front of you—”
“There’s a lot of papers here. We all have a bushel of papers in front of us. Which one of them do we—”
“It’s the one titled Deterrence, Destruction, Decimation and Determinism Exercised via Joint Armed Forces Coordinated Action, Middle East Security Achieved.”
“The fuck?”
“Um, it’s the one with the red cover.”
“The red... Okay, I have it, I have it...”
“Everybody looking at it?”
“Yes.”
“Got it.”
“What page are we on?”
“Well, you can all read through the hundred or so pages but you’ll see in the summary that the Initiative calls for—”
“The summary at the front or the summary at the back?”
“Uh, there’s a preface at the front and a summary at the back.”
“Do we need both?”
“Let’s just get to the point, can we?”
“Certainly. In the summary at the back of the report, you’ll see that the Initiative calls for the following five steps: 1) explosives planted at key industrial sites; 2) missile strikes on all high-value targets; 3) high-altitude bombing runs for all areas of suspected suspicious activity, which, uh, is basically everywhere in that area; 4) drone attacks for every known or suspected terrorist, which, uh, is basically everyone in the area; and 5) the Project Sunburn purification device.”
“Did you say purification?”
“Yes sir.”
“Jesus Fucking Christ, that’s a word the Nazis used.”
“Oh, well, we’ll look into changing the word. But you’ll be pleased to know there’s no bacteriological weaponry involved.”
“Excuse me, general...”
“Yes, Admiral?”
“I believe that the CIA has contingency plans involving bacteriological methodologies as well.”
“Jesus Fucking Christ.”
“Senator, please.”
“You’re proposing to kill upwards of a quarter billion people!”
“Middle-Eastern people.”
“They’re still people!”
“Well, yes, technically, I suppose...”
“Jesus Fucking Christ.”
“Senator, please stop saying that! We’re doing the world a favor.”
“A favor?!”
“All the battles, the terrorism, the agitation, the attacks, the horror, all the shit of these people—all of that would be gone. Nothing would be left but peaceful desert breezes. Besides, we’re just speeding things up because the whole region is going to be an arid wasteland in less than two decades.”
“‘Going to be?’ It looks pretty wastelandy right now.”
“The point is that the Middle East is running out of water.”
“That may be, but this plan involves wiping the entire Middle East off the face of the earth.”
“Yes.”
“Killing all those people.”
“Yes.”
“And then what? We just roll our tanks in there and take over?”
“Well, then the plan expands to include North Korea, Somalia, Russia—all the disreputable places around the globe.”
“Jesus Fucking—”
“Stop saying that!!!”
There was a moment of silence that was bloated with bile and pain.
“Gentlemen, I think we all have conflicting feelings about this but we all know which way we have to go with our recommendation.”
The men exchanged heavy glances. Some of those in the room were eager to affirm the decision, some were vehemently opposed, and many others were ready to go along with whatever faction was in the majority.
“So, gentlemen, are we agreed?”
“Yes. Yes, we are.”
“Well I should hope so, because—”
“We have to go through with it for the good of humanity.”
“Wait, what?”
“Obliterate the fuckers.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“We’re deadly serious. Are you going to sit there and tell me that you actually want the American taxpayers to go on pouring money down the drain in this disgusting place? Besides, it’s kill or be killed.”
“Come on, everybody, cheer up, this will bring the power structure of the globe back into some semblance of balance. We’ll be righting the ship, so to speak. Getting things back on track. And don’t worry, the burn won’t destroy one drop of the oil in the ground. And after the purifica— I mean the, uh, uh, the cleansing—”
“That word’s just as bad!”
“All right! After the fire rapture or whatever, we’ll be poised to scoop up the oil. Gonna be great for the petrochemical companies. And great for America.”
“This would obliterate every living creature in that region of the world!”
“God willing.”
“God is willing no such thing!”
“Maybe not your god.”
“The American people will not—"
“The American people will thank us!”
“No! And I will not countenance such an action!”
“It’s not up to you!” came shouts from around the room.
“God damn it!!!” shouted the most senior general. “It’s not up to any one man to decide! Every officer here should know that. You congressmen and senators should know it, too. We do this as a group. We do this together. Do we all understand that?”
There were a few murmurs of assent.
“Do we understand that?!”
“Yes!”
“Yes, General.”
“Yes, we do, General.”
“All right then. It will be our mutual decision! This is the time, gentlemen! Now! Right now, in this place, together, we are able to make this momentous decision in which world peace, stability, and order hang in the balance.” The General surveyed the anxious faces around the room. “The hour of our country’s need requires an answer and it is fortunate that providence brought us all together in this room so we can insure the proper result. Now, gentlemen, once and for all, who is with us on moving forward to put this plan into action?”
From the collection, Armageddon, Next Exit.