[b]La Cabeza, Spanish Morocco[/b]

Fluorescent light fixtures hung from the ceiling of the stone-hewn tunnel lit Julio's way with a cold, industrial light as he drove the buggy ever deeper beneath the mountain of La Cabeza. It didn't just seem cold down here - it [i]was[/i] cold. Compared against the Saharan heat that Julio and his fellow infiltrators had just left behind, the air in this tunnel seemed as if it were freezing. Julio recalled from his last foray underground - a tour of the medieval gold mines at Las Medulas in college - that the temperature underground was always somewhere around 12-14 degrees centigrade no matter the location or time of the year. Here, beneath the Sahara Desert, that temperature change was quite jarring. Graciela was shivering slightly - but it was unclear weather or not that was because of the cool air or the fact that they had made an unauthorized visit to the most secretive and heavily defended place in the entirety of the Second Spanish Republic.

"Places everyone," Joaquin said from the buggy's rear seat. "We've got company up ahead."

The tunnel's downward slope leveled out a hundred meters ahead where an artificial grotto had been carved out of the granite. In this chamber, a pair of cinderblock huts on either side of the entrance formed a secondary checkpoint. A pair of soldiers with assault rifles slung behind their shoulders stood vigil at a traffic barrier whose boom was positioned upright to allow the stream of vehicles through. Julio briefly feared they might be stopped for another inspection, but his fear was allayed when one of the bored-looking guards simply waved the infiltrators through. Beyond the gate was a cluster of buildings constructed from cinderblock and prefabricated concrete slabs. Several tanker trucks idled on a tarmac lot outside the largest of the buildings.

"I have a feeling that we'll need to check in there," Julio suggested once out of earshot of the solitary guard. "They'll tell us where that Guijon fellow can be found."

"To Hell with him," Graciela hissed. "We got in this place, now we need to find where they're taking the captives. We don't need to be wasting any time talking with this asshole."

"On the contrary, this man expecting us is an asset we mustn't throw away." Dejene's muffled voice drew their attention to the pinewood crates on the buggy's bed. "He seems to be high-ranking personnel here. He can show us where they're taking the Tuaregs and the political prisoners, and he may serve as a hostage if things go badly."

"I'm surprised that things haven't already gone badly for us," Joaquin added. "I'm with Dejene. Let's keep our streak of good luck going for as long as possible and not do anything brash." With their course of action decided, Julio pulled up to a concrete parking curb outside the largest of the bunker-like edifices and twisted the key out of the ignition.

"Stay with the vehicle, Joaquin. Make sure nobody bothers the crates," Graciela said as she stepped out. Joaquin nodded in accord as Julio and Graciela left the buggy and made their way through a metal door labelled [i]RECEPCIÓN[/i] in blocky stenciled type. Inside the door, they found a drab, stuffy lobby that seemed more like a warehouse breakroom than the reception for a secret military base. Fluorescent lights buzzed from fixtures embedded in the asbestos ceiling tiles. Beneath them, an office desk occupied by a fatigue-clad clerk with a receding hairline tapped away at a typewriter. Considering the security measures required to get this far, the establishment had likely figured that militarizing this lobby was redundant.

"State your business," the aging Spaniard graveled when Julio and Graciela approached the desk, neglecting to look up from the document he was busy punching away at.

"I am Captain... Sandoval," Graciela reported, taking a moment to remind herself of the name the soldiers at the checkpoint had called her. "My associates and I are here to meet with Doctor Guijon for the... facility's audit process."

"Oh, excellent!" The clerk finally looked up from his work and pushed a pair of glasses up onto his nosebridge to check the clock behind them - the only indication of the time of day this far underground. "Madrid called ahead of you to advise us you'd be arriving late. Good thing you're here now; he's been pestering me for the past [i]three[/i] hours asking me if I knew when you'd get here."

"I apologize for our tardiness," Julio chimed in, playing along.

"Don't you worry about it." The clerk said as he dialed in a series of numbers on the desk's phone. After a brief exchange with a party on the other end, the clerk hung up and reverted his attention to Julio and Graciela.

"Doctor Guijon will be down momentarily. Go ahead and take a seat while he makes his way down."

As requested, Julio and Graciela stepped away from the desk to a collection of chairs in the far corner of the lobby, far removed from a tanker driver and a cluster of three soldiers conversing in a loose huddle. Julio saw a wrinkled copy of [i]El Pais[/i] laid in one of the seats and made a beeline for it. Julio and Graciela - having been away from Spain and the mainstream news cycle for long - were anxious to catch up on any word from the homeland and the war in Ethiopia. Julio's eyes widened as he read the month-old headline: [i]EJERCITO FORCES FACE STIFF RESISTANCE AT DJIBOUTI[/i]. Julio and Graciela had scarcely read the first line of the article before a door on the opposite side of the office was thrown open by what might have been the palest-skinned Spaniard Julio had ever seen.

"Captain Sandoval!" He exclaimed cordially as he threw a stained laboratory coat over his checkerboard button-down shirt. "So glad you could make it!"

Graciela bolted to her feet and offered the man a salute as he approached, which prompting Julio to do the same. The lab-coat clad man could not help but laugh at the display.

"At ease, at ease! A handshake will do just fine." The man chuckled, extending an outreached hand to both Graciela and Julio, prompting them to immediately relax and return his handshakes. "Even though the Ministry lets me do whatever I want, I'm still just a civilian and there's no need for such formalities with me. I am Doctor Juan Guijon - and it is my pleasure to make your acquaintances."

Julio could believe that. Guijon hardly looked like a military man. A thin patch of beard and a wiry mustache adorned the doctor's pudgy face. A head of thick hair was combed up neatly - displaying a prominent widows peak against his pale forehead. He did not seem to possess the muscle nor the humorless attitude of an Ejercito officer. Julio shot Graciela a nervous glance before looking over to the soldiers standing nearby. Their raised eyebrows demonstrated that giving the doctor a salute was serious faux-pas. Even so, Guijon did not seem to be bothered by the display, and that offered some reassurance.

"Forgive us, Doctor," Graciela apologized. "Very little was explained to us prior to our arrival. My associates and I know little of what we are to expect here."

"Typical," Doctor Guijon sighed. "Nobody tells anyone anything in the Ministry of War; Compartmentalization is their new favorite buzzword. Information about everything is restricted to a need-to-know basis, especially here. Everyone is so afraid of a leak, and to an extent I understand the concern behind it. We wouldn't want anything we do at La Cabeza getting whispered into Chairman Hou's ears. But at the same time, people like you ought to know enough to do your jobs correctly. Unfortunately, nobody wants my opinion on the matter."

"About this audit..." Graciela said, steering Guijon back to a more pertinent topic.

"Right, right, of course. We're already behind on all this, aren't we," Guijon set about buttoning up his labcoat. "Let's get you up to speed. Come with me."

Graciela and Julio followed Doctor Guijon out of the reception office to the buggy parked outside. Julio surrendered the vehicle's keys to Guijon and took the seat behind him next to Joaquin - who exchanged a brief handshake with the doctor as well.

"So, let me make sure I understand this correctly," Guijon began as he turned the buggy's engine over and reversed out onto the tarmac. "Your job here today is to report back to Madrid and the Ministry that our work here is coming along properly, but the Ministry neglected to tell you anything about the La Cabeza facility?"

"Exactly," said Graciela.

"Idiocy," Guijon groaned as he threw the shift out of reverse. "These audits exist to make sure Ministry of War funds are not being misappropriated, I understand that. But to combat wasteful spending, they fritter away so much more time and money getting auditors out here, and on top of it all it turns out that the personnel that they send us haven't been told anything. I almost think it's comical."

Julio and Joaquin exchanged anxious glances with one another. Had this ruse been found out?

"Ours is not the place to question." Graciela replied.

"Oh, certainly not," Guijon agreed as he cruised down the tarmac roadway leading out of the office chamber and into an arched tunnel up ahead. "It's not your fault that the Ministry of War has this set of counter-productive rules in place. But I'm not about to have you report back to Madrid with nothing to show for it."

"So what exactly is La Cabeza's purpose?" Julio asked.

"Our work here started more than a decade ago, back in July of 1969," Guijon began, keeping his eyes on the seemingly endless tunnel stretching before them. "The Pacific northwest of North America experienced a severe outbreak of pine bark beetles that summer. Thousands of hectares of very valuable timberland were threatened throughout western states and provinces. The Canadians, seeking to mitigate the destruction caused by the beetles, tasked a British chemist - one Lawrence Williams - with developing an effective fumigant to control the outbreak. Señor Williams focused his research on developing a neurotoxic agent - a substance that was highly lethal to animal life but would leave plants unscathed.

"Williams' efforts were more productive than he could have ever anticipated. In 1973, he conducted a trial on series of compounds whose median lethal dosage for the pine beetles was so minute that his instruments couldn't even measure its quantity. As a fumigant, it was far too lethal to be safely used, and Williams moved on with his research. Soon after this development, the Northwest Coalition became independent of Canada and the new government confiscated his research materials. Upon reading his notes, the Coalition approached Williams and tasked him with a new project: [i]enhance[/i] the lethality of his fumigant. Over the next three years, Williams and his colleagues honed the lethality of the compound. That compound, as we know, comes to be known to the world as the VX Nerve Agent."

Julio was so engrossed with Dr. Guijon's history that he nearly failed to notice the piping that ran along the wall this far down the tunnel. The hewn-walls of of solid rock were starting to give way to a matrix of ducts and vents along the wall. As Guijon drove ever deeper into the tunnel, he could see where the tunnel terminated in a wall of solid concrete. A bulkhead door of steel was embedded within the concrete facade, around which a cadre of ever more soldiers stood watch. Painted onto the door upon a field of solid yellow were the interlacing circles of the biohazard symbol in jet black. Julio could feel the color drain from his face when he realized what lay beyond that door.

"Of course, during Prime Minister Tejero's attempt to affect a regime change in the United State's socialist administration, an alliance was brokered between Spain, Canada, the New England states, and the Northwest Coalition. The use of VX in the Seattle Incident, as we know, caused international condemnation. The alliance against the United States buckled, and the Northwest Coalition was left to its fate. But, on the eve of the American invasion of the Northwest Coalition, the Spanish Air Forces were called upon by the remnants of the Coalition government to assume responsibility of the remaining VX stockpiles and keep VX out of American hands. That stockpile was flown from the Cold Lake Facility in Alberta to southern Morocco and housed within a colonial French iron mine. Over the course of four years, that mine has been expanded into [i]this[/i]."

Guijon drove up to the bulkhead where the guards immediately recognized him. Without a moment's hesitation, a switch was flipped, allowing the massive bulkhead to rise with a whirring, mechanical sound. The metal door was lifted upward on revolving arms, giving the bulkhead the appearance of a mouth opening up. As Guijon drove through into La Cabeza's open maw, Julio felt as if he were being swallowed whole.

Just beyond the door, Julio, Graciela, and Joaquin were driven into a relatively small chamber. On either side of the tarmac driveway were bombs stacked positioned upon their tail fins. Pointed tips rose up to meet a ceiling of hewn granite. If they were inside La Cabeza's maw, then the bombs were its teeth.

"These are the original bombs that were taken from Coalition custody in August of 1976. While the fuzes and explosive components of these bombs have been removed from these weapons, each contains 650 kilograms of the original VX-series compound developed by Lawrence Williams," Guijon explained with the same demeanor and enthusiasm as a tour guide.

"These were the bombs used at Seattle?" A sobered Julio asked.

"Yes. Save for the removed explosive components, these bombs are identical to the eight 1,000 kg bombs used by the Northwest Coalition on Seattle. These bombs have been preserved to give us a benchmark for the purity and lethality of current product."

"Current product?" Joaquin chimed in. "You [i]make[/i] VX here?" 

Doctor Guijon could not help but laugh. "You have no idea." 

Guijon drove through the bomb room to another guarded bulkhead. Again, Guijon was permitted through without question. Beyond this door, a sprawling cavern opened up before them. A small zeppelin could fit comfortably within this space. Housed within this space was nothing less than a VX factory. The space was dominated by dozens of silvery-chrome pressure vats the size of a grain silo, each one connected to a complex network of ducts, pipelines, pumps, scaffolding structures, and more. Labcoat-clad technicians walked above the driveways between each pressure vat on scaffold bridges. Clipboards in hand, they checked an assortment of instruments embedded into the walls of each vat. On the driveways beneath the vats, tanker drivers led thick hoses from the bottom of the tanks and mated them with ports in the ducts and pipes running across the floor. Julio watched as hundreds of gallons of chemical reagent were siphoned from a tanker into one of the massive vats.

"This is the only place in the world where VX is made, and we make a lot of it," Doctor Guijon declared proudly over the sound of a pump drawing raw materials into a vat. "The Cold Lake facility that produced the VX in those bombs we just saw needed a period of five months to synthesize their nerve agent. La Cabeza can produce the same quantity in 36 hours. The molecular structure of our current product is exactly the same as Lawrence William's, but we have developed newer and more efficient means of synthesis. Good thing too, because the Prime Minister has recently acquired a voracious appetite for nerve agent."

The reminder that all of this belonged to Alfonso Sotelo was a punch to Julio's gut. VX was frightening enough as it was. But an unlimited supply of it in Alfonso Sotelo's possession was a recipe for tragedy on a global scale. A stolen glance at Graciela affirmed that she too was distraught by the revelation of what La Cabeza truly was, but for a different reason. Julio recalled her father, the leader of the Spanish partisans before Sotelo had captured them, had likely been taken to La Cabeza as a prisoner. They had seen no sign of any captives within the facility itself, and one could only wonder what fate befell the hundreds of prisoners and Tuareg captives that were being transported here.

"I'd like to see the look on the Chairman's face when he finally gets a whiff of the shit you're cooking." Joaquin commented jokingly in an attempt to distract Guijon's attention from the look of abject horror on Julio and Graciela's faces.

"Ever since the war in Ethiopia began, the Prime Minister and Commander Velazquez just can't get enough of it. If their demand is any indication, I suspect our nerve agent will be used on the battlefield soon. We have facilities at La Cabeza where the VX is injected into every munition you can think of. Artillery shells, naval shells, landmines, rockets. They've even developed flechette shot for the Prometeos that fire a hundred of these little darts laced with nerve agent."

"And there's no antidote? No cure?" Asked Julio.

"None." Doctor Guijon said with a grim certainty.

"VX doesn't distinguish between friend and foe, it kills our men just as readily as the communists." Joaquin added, once again playing the jingoism card. "I thought that this shit was only good for wiping a city off the map, because it doesn't break down. Even today, nobody can go into the Seattle ruins without a rubber suit. If the Ejercito tries to use VX in combat in Ethiopia, then they're just going to end up making East Africa uninhabitable for the next decade. That doesn't seem like a winning strategy to me."

"A clever observation," Guijon agreed with a wag of his index finger. "That is a major reason that we - at least to my knowledge- have never used nerve agent in combat. But as I said, we have learned a great deal about VX since inheriting it from the Northwest Coalition. The Prime Minister doesn't want a city-destroyer, but a battle-winner. In the interest of creating a weapon that can be used readily against tactical targets, I've identified an additive - a catalyst - to nerve agent formulations that can induce VX to loose its lethality upon exposure to the air by breaking it down into harmless intermediate compounds after perhaps a week to a month, depending upon the ambient temperature. Catalyzed VX eliminates the prohibitive properties that make the battlefield use of nerve agent undesirable."

Graciela, who had been silent for as long as anyone could recall, galvanized herself from her silence at last. "I understand you are in possession of a number of prisoners here," she said to Doctor Guijon. "Where are they?"

Julio immediately cringed. Without warning, Graciela had sabotaged their good luck. She knew her captive father had been taken to this awful place, and she had lost the ability to hold in her fear for him. She given them away; the ruse was surely up. Julio prepared to seize Doctor Guijon by the neck and take him as a hostage.

But Doctor Guijon's reaction was not one of recoil or fear. Instead, a wry grin crawled across his pudgy face.

"So you are aware that there is another project underway at La Cabeza?" Graciela nodded in agreement, though she knew nothing of what Doctor Guijon spoke.

"Very well," Doctor Guijon said with a measure of satisfaction as he let off the buggy's brake and continued driving. He steered the buggy through the maze of vats and machines to the far side of the production chamber where an open cargo elevator waited. Guijon parked the buggy into the lift's yawning gate in and produced a key from within his labcoat's pocket. He inserted the key into and pressed a combination onto the lift's keypad, causing the chain-link gate of the elevator to close around them. A yellow siren light on the lift's ceiling turned on and spun about, illuminating the lift with pulses of yellow light as it descended deep below La Cabeza.

"Captain Sandoval, gentlemen," Guijon said as the elevator lowered itself into the darkness of the shaft, "I'd like to show you all my true passion."