The Intercept by Dick Wolf Read Free Book Online Page B

themselves into men and women, sat up, and asked him if they could bum a cigarette. He always told them he didn’t smoke, which he didn’t, whereupon the bodies came apart again and sank down into a pool of greenish liquid.
    Boyle got over the dreams in about a month, but he still hated the job. It ate away at him like an ulcer. Two or three times a week, a giant C-17 Globemaster touched down bearing a load of brushed aluminum coffins. Each was draped with an American or English or Australian flag. Long before Boyle got to Ramstein, they had discontinued the arrival ceremonies with Class A uniforms, bands, and salutes. It had gotten to be too much to bear for everyone involved. Now they unloaded the planes with a forklift. A forklift. But respectfully.
    From the runway apron, the dead were transported by flatbed truck into a refrigerated hangar. That was where the forensic specialists took over. After the deliveries, Boyle and the other guys who worked on the ramp helped open the coffins. You never knew what you were going to get. Inside could be anything from what looked like a man or woman taking a nap, to something resembling a large, burned pot roast, to anything in between. Sometimes, there was so little left—no dog tags or labeled uniform—they could not positively identify the dead soldier in Kabul or Baghdad.
    The main task in Ramstein was figuring out who had died for his or her country. Because everybody assigned to Mortuary Affairs already had top secret security clearance, it was easy to pull out Boyle with two other guys when the contents from bin Laden’s house arrived. The assignment orders were UFN—Until Further Notice. Word was it would be three days, tops.
    Three days away from the coffins. It was a stone gift.
    The first load from Pakistan came in on a white Gulfstream jet with no markings at all, not even a tail number. The crew did not disembark. The jet sat dark on the airfield, way across at one of the grass-covered humps where they used to store nukes.
    Within the hour, a camo Marine Corps C-130 touched down and taxied over to the Gulfstream. Boyle and the others rode a cart out to facilitate the offload into the bunker.
    From the outside, the bunker looked like a World War II ruin. They entered through a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot storage locker with piles of broken machinery and aluminum sheeting all over the floor. At the far end of the clutter, a steel door opened into a ten-by-ten-foot air lock. On the side walls of the chamber, white Gen-Nex painters’ coveralls, tie-on face masks, and booties hung on hooks. Boyle suited up, pulling blue latex gloves from a box on the door rack. Tedious work, but so was popping open coffins.
    No forklifts here. Boyle and the other two men worked like movers, slogging through a long day toting sealed crates, taped cardboard boxes, steel picnic coolers, and an endless number of bags of rocks and dirt. Every time they went inside, they had to suit up; every time they went out, they had to shed the coveralls, masks, gloves, and booties.
    The room beyond the air lock was not what he had expected from looking at the grass bunker outside. It was a clean, brightly lit compartment, about fifty feet by fifty feet, with computer stations in the center and deep wall racks set against white-enameled tin walls. To Boyle’s mind it resembled a morgue for possessions.
    Perpendicular to the storage racks were metal tables, each with its own laptop computer and tray of instruments. Scalpels, scissors, tongs, piles of plastic bags, magnifying glasses, tins and vials of liquid, a dissection microscope. The interior was air-conditioned to sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit. The artificially cold air scratched his throat, and the steady hum of the blowers gave him the sensation of being airborne or underwater.
    Two guards in field armor and battle hats stood watch, each wielding an M16, making radio checks into their boom mics once every fifteen minutes. The offload took eight hours.