Fallout

CHAPTER 12

The straight desert roads made speed limits meaningless, but Craig kept his eyes nervously on the needle hovering at ninety miles per hour. Paige drove with one hand on the steering wheel, as if her government pickup were a sporty MG convertible.

She filled him in on what she’d been doing since they had last worked together. She described her previous week with the Russian disarmament team and tried to establish a foundation for him to begin his investigation.

Highway 95 stretched north to the horizon, and the desert opened up like a bottomless pit with huge skies above, huge horizons around them, and rugged mountains like distant guardians on all sides.

After nearly an hour of crossing barren wasteland, Paige gestured through the windshield. “Here we are, Craig — paradise on Earth.” He saw only a single green road sign marking a highway exit. It declared forlornly, Mercury — No Services. Paige drove toward a cluster of low buildings several miles away. Large white signs with stenciled black letters warned:

Electrical wires criss-crossed the road overhead, strung from creosote-covered utility poles. Orange balls hung suspended in the middle of the wires, and prominent signs indicated the vertical clearance. Other signs admonished Caution — Desert Tortoises.

Paige pulled next to a Badge Office blockhouse and hustled Craig inside. Another sign warned that loaded weapons were not allowed on the site; a large sealed trashbin provided an opportunity for those carrying guns to unload their ammunition before entering the site.

At the counter Paige led him through the steps required to sign in. “Not quite as daunting as Livermore,” she said.

“But just as much paperwork.” He filled out a form, stating his Social Security number, his employer, and the reason for his visit. Finally, the guard handed Craig a Visitor’s badge and a heavy plastic-encased dosimeter that felt like a license plate dangling from the collar of his gray suit jacket.

Back in the truck again, Paige stopped at a line of guard kiosks across the road like toll booths spanning a bridge. Most of the kiosks remained empty, hinting at busier times during active nuclear testing. Now, only weathered signs announced “All Traffic Stop For Special Convoys Displaying Flashing Blue Lights.” Craig wondered when the last convoy had gone through.

Paige drove toward Mercury, the central village that housed the NTS administrative and employee offices. Mercury looked like a dehydrated settlement, an industrial ghost town: government trailers, huts, and supply sheds, not to mention a bowling alley, cafeteria, and library. He saw no other signs of civilization. “People actually live out here?”

Paige shook her head. “They used to, but most of the workers moved to Las Vegas, even though it’s an hour away. Out in the desert, distances don’t mean much.”

Flat clearings had become heavy-equipment parking lots, transportainer storage areas, and waste dumps. One lot on the northern edge of town was a graveyard of cable spools, round wooden holders for electrical wire, telephone cables, diagnostic fiber optics, coaxial cables.

Rows of white government cars and trucks were parked together outside the buildings. “See why I keep this air freshener hanging here?” Paige said, touching the pine tree dangling from her rear-view mirror. “It’s the only way I can tell my own truck from all those others.”

After passing through Mercury, Paige headed uphill over a ridge that opened into a valley so vast it seemed capable of swallowing up an entire Eastern state. Ahead, the road went downhill for a dozen miles. Barren mountains encircling the wide valley looked like mounds of gravel and sand, reminding him of folds on an iguana’s back.

As she drove down the long slope, Paige stared wistfully into the distance. Fidgeting, Craig looked at her through his sunglasses, watching the expression on her face, seeing how the sunlight gave a golden cast to her skin.

“My dad used to come out here all the time,” she said. “Flying back and forth from Livermore right to Mercury, the Desert Rock Airstrip. The Livermore Lab had a dedicated airplane called AMI, a tan two-propeller F-27 that seated forty people. AMI took off from the Livermore Municipal Airport every morning at six-thirty and came back every day at five. When I was a little girl I could go outside late after school and watch it flying home over the Livermore Valley, carrying my dad.”

Craig looked across the flat, imagining the activity during the Cold War. Random lines of roads had been scraped across the dry lakebed, for transport of equipment, trailers, and technicians out to individual test shots. After each underground nuclear test was completed, the obsolete roads were left to slowly grow over again. But the desert was not quick to reclaim its territory.

“We’ve got another fifteen miles until we reach the Device Assembly Facility,” Paige said, “where the murder happened.”

She continued to watch the side of the road, studying the mesquite shrubs and the occasional ferocious-looking Joshua tree. Then she pulled abruptly off to the shoulder, the wide tires of the Ford pickup crunching gravel. She flashed him a glance. “I want to show you something.”

“We don’t have a lot of time to kill,” he said, anxious to get started on the case, feeling the deadline pressure before his first day had even begun. He hoped Goldfarb and Jackson would make progress on the Eagle’s Claw case today as well. They planned to head out early to the home of the missing Hoover Dam worker to see if they could pick up any clues.

“This spot will do more to give you a perspective of what NTS is about than any other place I can think of.” Paige picked her way over the rocks, climbing a small rise ten yards from the road. She looked comfortable in her jeans and short-sleeved cotton shirt. “Before you start questioning people, you need to understand the test program. It’s a whole different mindset.”

Craig followed her, feeling totally out of place in his formal business suit, too warm, feeling a tingle of sweat, but not yet so uncomfortable that he might need to loosen his maroon tie. He glanced at his watch.

The cleared area gave an unobstructed view of what seemed to be the entire state of Nevada. Two startlingly out-of-place rows of splintered wooden bleachers sat abandoned and alone. The wood had turned gray from decades of exposure to the desert.

Craig blinked in disbelief. “What are these doing out here?”

“These were the press bleachers, official observation stands.” Paige gestured toward the dry brown lakebed. “Back in the late fifties, above-ground tests took place out there on Frenchmen Flat. The press corps and other VIP guests would sit here and watch the mushroom cloud, clicking pictures, looking through darkened glasses. Also, somewhere out there, soldier volunteers crouched in foxholes, unwittingly exposed to massive amounts of radiation.”

“You’re kidding,” he said. “How could they be so — “ he searched for the right word.

“Naive?” she suggested. “They honestly didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t understand the real nature of the dragon they were tempting. Reporters would sit here with their big cameras, notepads on their knees, applauding the fireball, the mushroom cloud. It was exciting.”

“And they did it willingly?” Craig asked.

“They fought each other for the chance.” She crossed her arms, tossing her blond hair away from her face. “Remember, back then technology was supposed to solve all the world’s problems. Scientists were revered celebrities.” She brushed her hands on her jeans. “The above-ground tests took place before 1963. After that, nuclear shots were conducted underground to prevent environmental contamination — if we did a ground burst of one of our modern multi-megaton bombs, instead of the little ones they used in the Fifties, radioactive fallout would cover half the state.”

Craig shaded his eyes. Even with the sunglasses, the bright glare across the desert made him squint. He shuffled his feet, kicking at small stones. “But nothing leaks when you explode them underground?”

Paige’s forehead furrowed. “The last time we had an appreciable radioactive release was in 1970, the Baneberry Test. My dad worked on that one.” She smiled wistfully. “It was a major turning point for containment technology. Of course now, with the total testing moratorium…”

Standing beside the rickety press benches, Craig put his hands on his hips and continued to stare. The vast, open spaces made everything hushed and silent. Far off he could hear the thunder of jet aircraft roaring across the sky, and then a double shotgun crack of a sonic boom.

“This place has a lot of history behind it,” Paige said, leading him back toward the truck. “The people who still work here are what you might call Good Old Boys. They used to run everything by the seat of their pants and the backs of envelopes — but over the past few years the rug has been pulled out from under their feet.

“I’ll introduce you to my Uncle Mike, who’s in charge of the DAF. He’s had to open his doors for this Russian disarmament team, showing them all the secrets he’d been told to hide for decades. The Soviets were the reason NTS was formed in the first place, and Uncle Mike — along with a lot of other workers around here — is having a difficult time rolling with the changes.”

Back at the truck, Craig walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door for her. He heaved himself into the other side of the pickup, then looked sharply at her. “Are you suggesting that one of the old workers might be responsible for the murder of Ambassador Nevsky? Someone who thinks the Cold War is still going on?”

Paige pulled the pickup back onto the long highway and accelerated down the road. “You’re the detective, Craig,” she said. “I’m just giving you the background you need. None of this stuff happens in a vacuum.”

“Nothing ever does,” Craig said.