Fallout

CHAPTER 15

Craig kept a low profile as he joined the seven disarmament inspectors in the white van, watching, keeping his mind open. He wanted to observe personal interactions, witness how NTS personnel treated the Russians, how the Russians responded, and how they reacted to each other. He could learn plenty from a few nuances. The others would wonder exactly why an FBI investigator had come along, and it would make some of them nervous.

Mike Waterloo swung into the driver’s seat himself, gesturing for Craig to ride up front with him. Paige sat with the Russian team, politely answering their questions.

Unfolding his list of the inspectors’ names, Craig tried to see how the people fit together, who seemed subordinate to whom. Ambassador Nevsky, dead, an academician, the head of the team, replaced by his deputy, the military liaison from the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, General Gregori Ursov. Then the others: Victor Golitsyn the geologist; Nikolai Bisovka, the astronomer who smoked Marlboros; Vitali Yakolev, the redhead; Anatoli Voronin, Denis Zagorski, Alexander Novikov.… Craig worked hard to put the names to faces.

Ursov said brusquely, as much for the benefit of his team members as for Paige. “I know we have not taken time to mourn our fallen comrade, but Friday is our deadline, and we do not have the luxury of flexibility — despite the criminal lack of safety at your facility.”

Apart from his bluster about Nevsky’s death, the gruff general seemed interested in their destination — the mountainside tunnels designed to contain small-scale nuclear explosions.

Waterloo accelerated steadily along the open road across the sprawling valley. They headed north into a line of steep mesas that formed the northern boundary of NTS, beyond the even vaster expanse of the Nellis Air Force Range. Craig watched the gaunt man sitting stiffly behind the steering wheel. He seemed to have a thick wall around him.

As the elevation rose, Craig watched the landscape change from crumbly desert to dark-green piñons and junipers, and broad rock faces rippled with colors — white, gray, tan, and maroon. They passed what the map called Pahute Mesa and another boomtown-type settlement of temporary buildings, office trailers, and a big Quonset hut that had been converted to a cafeteria.

Waterloo pulled the van up a steep dirt road to a gated mine-shaft opening in the mountainside. “This is where we do our tunnel shots,” Waterloo said, then smiled in embarrassment. “Where we did them, I mean. Not much going on here lately.”

As they climbed out of the van, the Russians spoke rapidly with each other, but Craig couldn’t understand the words. He wondered if they, too, commiserated about their faded glory days.

The brisk mountain air was a good twenty degrees cooler than down in the valley. Craig turned toward the tunnel opening, where a chain of yellow spotlights extended down the shaft, illuminating narrow-gauge tracks for mine cars and personnel transport.

“Seen any suspicious behavior yet?” Paige asked him quietly as the others moved forward.

“I’m still trying to figure out what I should consider suspicious. Everything around here operates under a different set of rules. Do you think any of the Russians are suspect?” he asked.

Paige thought for a moment. “There’s one, Nikolai Bisovka, who didn’t seem to like the ambassador much — he made some crack about Nevsky’s drinking. General Ursov didn’t take that so well.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

As the tiny light of an approaching mine car grew larger inside the tunnel, Waterloo spoke briefly with a guard at the gate, pointing to the group. Turning to them, he raised his voice. “Our teams drilled shafts miles into this mountain, a network of catacombs with twists and turns and branching tunnels for diagnostic equipment, cross-connected to other test chambers.”

Rummaging in a set of lockers just inside the tunnel, he removed hardhats, goggles, boot covers, and emergency respirators, handing one set to each person. “Required safety measures,” he said.

“Just in case a crate should happen to fall on our heads?” Ursov said stonily. Waterloo looked at him with a flicker of embarrassment, then fumbled with his own outfit. Paige and Craig helped each other secure the respirator fastenings on the hardhat.

Waterloo climbed into the front car on the tracks, motioning for Paige to sit beside him. She smiled, like a little girl asked to sit in the front seat of a car with her favorite uncle. Craig glanced at his watch, then sat beside General Ursov; they maintained an uneasy silence, looking at each other warily.

The mine cars accelerated down the tracks, pulled by a diesel engine no larger than a riding lawnmower. Around them, the tunnels were dark and confining, damp with dripping water like the catacombs inside the Hoover Dam. Overhead, metal conduits contained the electrical wires for spotlights and other utilities. Though giant fans kept the air circulating, the atmosphere inside the tunnels stank of chemicals, fuel, and rock dust.

Along the central passage, work crews in hardhats stood in teams, stripping out miles of diagnostic cables from metal troughs mounted to the rock. Laboring together like teams carrying firehoses, they reeled the extracted cables onto immense spools that would be stacked on trucks and hauled somewhere else.

“Everything’s being mothballed,” Waterloo called over his shoulder, raising his voice above the rumbling background noise in the tunnel. “No more nuclear testing. Better to recycle it, so a lot of this goes up to Nellis.”

When the mine car stopped and they disembarked, Waterloo led them through enormous armored steel doors into a dead-end room — a spherical chamber the size of a small auditorium. The rough walls were studded with sensors, cameras, and fiberoptics that led back through the main tunnel. In the center of the chamber stood a steel pedestal, waiting for test apparatus.

Craig realized with a start that this chamber had been designed to contain an atomic explosion.

Waterloo’s voice echoed off the walls. “Tunnel tests are performed to study nuclear effects, how military equipment can withstand an atomic war zone. Researchers place objects such as satellites, communications equipment, even missiles at one end of a long tunnel, a thousand feet away.” He gestured out the door, down a straight-line corridor to another set of heavy doors.

“Then we set off a small nuclear explosion in here to see how the radiation alone affects the test object. Explosives trigger those doors — a pair of two-foot-thick aluminum slabs — to slam shut at precisely the right moment, within milliseconds of the blast, after the radiation front has passed but before the shockwave and blast debris can get there.”

Craig looked around and felt an involuntary shudder, remembering his experience inside the high-tech virtual reality lab at Livermore, when he had witnessed such an explosion hands-on.

He knew exactly how one of those test objects would feel.

Finally emerging from the tunnels, taking deep breaths of clean air to flush the stinging diesel exhaust vapors from his throat, Craig turned his gaze upward. He placed his hands on his hips and stared into the fathomless sky, hearing the soaring sound of nearby aircraft.

Startlingly close, a batlike B-2 Stealth bomber cruised over the mesa line. Its black body looked alien as it swept and dove over the mountaintops like a daredevil. Craig’s mouth dropped open as he stared in amazement.

“You’re lucky,” said Waterloo, standing just beside him. “Most of the time they don’t fly this far south, into the Test Site. Impressive, isn’t it?”

“Where did it come from?” Craig shaded his eyes to get a better look. The Stealth bomber skimmed low and quiet, sleek and creepy. “Nellis?”

“Groom Lake, more likely. The whole base is called the Nellis Air Force Range, but Groom Lake Auxiliary Station is inside, a highly restricted area for the temporary storage of obsolete warheads. I’m heading up there now for a new shipment. Paige will show you our down-hole testing this afternoon.”

The Russians had seen the black aircraft, too, talking amongst themselves excitedly. Paige stood next to them looking agitated.

Waterloo’s voice carried a conspiratorial hush as he spoke to Craig. “Beyond these mesas is the guard gate into Nellis, and from there, deeper inside, you get to where the Stealth program goes through its paces.” He watched as the black craft suddenly accelerated then circled back around the ridgeline, disappearing into Nellis’s restricted airspace.

“I don’t usually get to see stuff like that,” Craig said, watching the B-2 dwindle to a speck against the horizon haze.

“I worry about what you can’t see.” Waterloo lowered his voice. “Think of what else they might be working on way out in the middle of nowhere.”

Craig looked at the older man, surprised. “Such as?”

“There’s a secret facility, heavily guarded, known as ‘Dreamland.’ Area 51, the tabloids call it, part of Groom Lake. Plenty of wild speculations about it — alien cadavers, underground survival chambers, biological weapons research … Hoffa’s body.” He laughed. Craig didn’t.

“Ever been up there, sir?” Craig asked. “On your way to retrieve nukes?”

Waterloo shook his head, narrowing his eyes. “I can get into Omega Mountain and the stored nuclear warheads without much trouble — but I can’t get near Dreamland. Gives me the creeps.”

Waterloo opened the van doors to let the Russian team climb inside. He leaned closer to Craig. “Think about it, Agent Kreident. They trust me to carry around live nukes… what could be so secret, or so dangerous, that even I can’t take a peek?”