Fallout

CHAPTER 38

With the land rover parked beyond the razor-wire perimeter fence surrounding the ominous Dreamland facility, Paige remained a captive, helpless.

Waiting.

Mike Waterloo switched off the vehicle and sat patiently in the driver’s seat. The clouds remained gray-black even in the dawn, and sprinkles of rain dotted the windshield. He spoke distractedly. “You know, the Trinity Test back in 1945 was postponed for a few hours because of a heavy early morning thunderstorm. The first atomic bomb, with a yield in kilotons… not much more than a toy compared to the warheads we make now.” He glanced at the back of the rover.

“Megatons,” Paige said. “You know that if you detonate that, even way out here, you’ll be killing millions. This storm will spread the radioactive fallout for thousands of miles, maybe even worse than if you had planted it in an underground parking garage in Las Vegas. Here, there’s nothing to stop it — how can that help our country?”

Mike looked over at her, then gestured toward the Area 51 facility. “You’re not blind, Paige. You’re a smart little girl. What do you think that place is? Do you believe it’s a hangar for a crashed UFO and alien cadavers? A chemical weapons plant? A biological warfare research station? No way.”

He snorted in disbelief. “Think about it — I’m cleared to handle nuclear warheads. Any day of the week, I can make a few phone calls, get all the approvals, sign a form, and take five megatons from Omega Mountain back to the DAF. I’ve been in the weapons industry my entire professional career… but no one gives me more than a blank stare when I try to find out what’s up here.”

He narrowed his eyes, squinting through the rover’s dusty windshield. “That isn’t any weapons manufacturing station. That is no research laboratory. You’ve been in research laboratories yourself. Look at the place!”

“It doesn’t look like Livermore,” Paige admitted, “but that doesn’t mean it’s anything more sinister. It could well be a stockpile storage site. Sure, the U.S. might be hiding some of its nuclear weapons up our sleeves, despite what the treaties say. Maybe this is where they keep their ace in the hole. It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“If that’s the case, then I would know about it,” Mike said, his face flushed. “Believe me, I’m one of the few people they would inform if they’re going to divert items out of the stockpile — and they refuse to tell me squat about Area 51!” He shook his head. “This is something beyond the pale of normal defense activities. This is outside the control of our elected government and the rights we as citizens have given to our representatives.”

Paige saw his bright eyes, his flushed face. “So what do you think it is, then? And why do you need a nuke to get rid of it? Why is it worth contaminating the southwestern United States?”

He answered instantly, as if he’d been desperately waiting for her to ask. “Dreamland is the training ground for an insidious United Nations Strike Force, whose mission is to absorb the government of the United States into a sanitized and compromised worldwide political organization. I’ve seen the planes without markings, the troops. Their efforts are already underway in Third World countries — the UN Peacekeeping Force is just a front.” He made a raspberry sound. “Peacekeeping! ‘Culture destroying,’ more like.

“Other countries can fight their own struggles for freedom. America had to. We have our freedom because we earned it. Nobody just handed it to us for free. It was part of our growing pains, but it was also a learning process.

“During the Cold War we achieved a level of maturity to handle the responsibility of nuclear weapons. But do you think other countries, the North Koreans and Bosnians, the Irans or Iraqs, are mature enough to handle that terrible responsibility? I don’t believe it for a minute.

“Despite the flaws and despite all the political arguing between the President and Congress, the Supreme Court, the state legislatures — our government is ours! I can’t stand by when an insidious UN effort is being put in place with the cooperation of elements of our own society. They mean to swallow up the best parts of what we’ve achieved and then combine it with other things from other countries, compromises, so that the entire system becomes one giant worldwide average — mediocrity!”

He extended his hand so briskly that he rapped his knuckles against the windshield. “Inside that facility is a UN Command Center, large numbers of troops, weapons, computer systems, plans for a massive takeover of our national infrastructure, our government. We have to eradicate it all.

“They’ve already infiltrated people into high government positions, even the military. They think it’ll be a bloodless takeover — but the Eagle’s Claw plans to shed plenty of blood. Their blood. Necessary blood for our freedom.” The pleading look had returned to his hangdog eyes. “I know this in my heart, Paige, and if you would open your mind, you’d believe it too.”

She stared at the vast building, but heard no sound, saw no movement. Isolated for so long in Nevada, working in the nuclear weapons industry, Mike Waterloo had been forced to cooperate with his former enemies to dismantle everything he had built during his career, and it must have driven him over the edge. He’d also had to contend with the shock of his wife’s death — not to mention the loss of Paige’s own father a year later… Paige’s father, who would have been a pressure-release valve for him, a sounding board to calm his paranoid delusions.

Mike’s expression remained so confident, so frozen in his convictions that Paige knew she had no chance to talk him out of it. He didn’t seem to hear her. “So what do we do now?” she said. “Just wait here all day until somebody gives us a parking ticket?”

“Nobody will come out after us,” Mike said. “We’re camouflaged, and sheltered in this gully. The storm is already covering our tracks. We arrived in darkness, and this vehicle is broadcasting an IFF signal. The sensors automatically ignore us. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Why don’t you just get it over with, if you want to blow us all to hell?”

“I don’t want to blow us all to hell,” he said. “I didn’t want you in this at all. If you’d only stayed away another few hours, you could have been out of this entirely… but I don’t know how I’m going to set you free now.” His sad face looked intensely troubled, but Paige didn’t allow her heart to soften.

As they sat in continued silence, Paige heard the faint humming of a vehicle approaching in the dark, audible even over the increasing rumbles of thunder. She turned to look just as Mike noticed it too. Her heart surged with hope — perhaps an Air Force security squadron would apprehend them.

But when she saw the second camouflaged land rover barely visible against the broken landscape, she realized the vehicle was identical to what Mike had driven, also approaching from the south, as if it had picked its way through the night from the Test Site, through Nellis, here to Area 51.

Mike glanced at his watch. “About time. I’m sure I would have been reprimanded if I’d been this late.” He climbed out of the rover to stand waiting.

Paige wondered if she should leap out and make a run toward Dreamland. If she climbed the fence, no doubt alarms inside would summon an instant full-force response — but she also knew that Mike or the newcomer could shoot her down easily… and if she did manage to reach the fence, it was probably electrified, unless Groom Lake security teams gunned her down before they bothered to check her story.

Out of her own need to know, she turned to see the identity of Mike’s other militia accomplice.

His secretary, Sally Montry, stepped out of the second vehicle, dressed in casual clothes and wearing a murderous look on her face.