Chaingang

“It was at the edge of the Poindexter farm—just over the property line on Ecoworld's ground. They're throwing chemicals and stuff out there, I guess."

“Let's go look at it."

“Okay. We could try. If it's still there. I don't know what we'd learn that the EPA guy doesn't already know, but—"

“Where did Alberta hear all this stuff, did she say?"

“Her hairdresser."

“That figures.” In a small town the local hairdresser is the rough equivalent of “60 Minutes.” He should have known.

“Royce, wouldn't we have a chance of finding out a lot more by concentrating on getting inside that office out there? Couldn't we create some kind of a diversion and try to get it while—"

“Mary, those guys aren't doughnut-gobbling rent-a-cops we saw. I recognized the weapons they were carrying. The riflelike thing is called a Steyr AUG. It's a specialized assault weapon. This one was silenced and had a night-action scope on it. That's the sort of modification they use on a countersniper rifle. The other guy had what looked like a Heckler & Koch MP 5. This is serious, major-league armament. They've probably got another team asleep nearby—maybe in the office or the tool trailer. Two on, two off—revolving shifts, maybe—so they don't get tired. Working ‘em four out of eight hours and then a new set of teams comes in.

“We could create a diversion. Let's say we'd rent the services of a crop duster and he'd make believe like he was strafing the office—okay? Make a whole gang of noise. The guy with the Steyr would pop a 40-mm MECAR rifle grenade attachment over the muzzle, and if that didn't work, they've probably got a Stinger missile in the office. It'd be a diversion, all right."

“What are we gonna do?” she asked in helpless tone.

“Whatever we can. Come on, kid. Let's go see if we can figure out what Jimmie Gallagher's dog got into.” He turned the ignition key and they headed across the river, behind an old clunker with “UT” and “Go Vols!” stickers on the bumper, replete with a fake license plate in the rear window reading, “I M 1. R U 1 2? O, I C, U 1 2 B 1!"

Royce realized it had been a good while since he'd packed his sinuses with nose candy. He passed the UT car on the Missouri side, getting in back of a dirty truck whose mud flaps warned about his wide turns. On the back of the filthy truck the moving finger had writ: “FUQ IRAQ.” Everywhere you looked, there was a joker waiting.

The vista was bleak and cold, with wintry tendrils of cirrocumulus woven through the pale gray sky. Intermittently clinquant glitters of sunlight flashed on the grimy windshield. There was corn stubble to the left, remnants of milo stalks to the right, and a muddy brown stretch of tractor and combine turnrow between.

They saw the garbage dump and the newly erected concrete construction work at about the same time. The concrete foundations were now complete over the three-hundred-acre building site, and many walls were already up. Near the southeastern edge of the property there were areas that already wore thick ceilings of reinforced concrete. The interiors of these sections appeared to have had their doors and passage entrances boarded up. A pair of guards could be seen in the distance.

Here, far away from the new construction, impedimenta and refuse from Ecoworld had been dumped unceremoniously into a kind of landfill hole, and hastily covered with earth. Here, it seemed, a pack of dogs had decided to dig for buried treasure, and Jimmie Gallagher's dog had been one of them. He'd been one dumb pup to wallow here.

Royce parked and they walked to the center of the unearthed garbage and trash pit, shaking their heads the minute they got out of the vehicle. The smell was incredible.

“My God!” Mary whispered.

“Yeah.” The guards could not see them where they'd parked, and the landfill was below the slope of a bordering tree line. “You know what I keep thinking?” he said to her, sotto voce.

“Hnn?"

“Jeezus!” He saw the first of the containers. A group of colorful outer shells giving a tessellated, almost coherent pattern to the mosaic of industrial trash.

“What is it?"

“Hazardous materials—see?” He swallowed. Everything he saw only confirmed what he'd been about to say to her.

“I—” She was fighting to make sense out of this. The lettering was government-style yellow stenciling.

“When I said toxic waste—” It stuck in his throat. His mind was racing. Hydriodic acid. Potassium compounds. Sulfuric acid.

“Come on. Let's go.” He had to pull her away from the landfill.

“Toxic waste. You mean radioactive stuff? Plutonium and—” She had partially shut down. Too much information. Sam. Ecoworld. Poisons. Her system had reached Data Overload.

“Come on, Mary, move,” he said, in a voice that was several decibels louder than he meant it to be.