Chapter 36
Arnold Moore sat in the permanent darkness of the Yucca Mountain tunnel holding a cold compress to his temple while technicians buzzed around him, connecting cables and moving equipment, turning a double-wide trailer into their new laboratory.
He watched them work, fighting the urge to throw up as he had every ten to fifteen minutes since the incident and listening to Byron Stecker bitch so extensively that he’d actually begun looking forward to the next episode of vomiting.
With the first of the lab’s flat-screen monitors now operating, a review of the energy discharge event had been arranged, but there wasn’t much to see.
Moore stared at the screen. The playback, which was now frozen, had been paused with a line of distortion running through the left side of the frame.
It showed the pockmarked desert floor, the smoking eighteen-wheeler, and the Humvees scattered about randomly. It also took in the two Black Hawk helicopters that had crash-landed on separate sections of the route. One seemed to have come down almost normally, but the other was smoking and crumbled over on one side, its rotor blades in dark pieces all around, shattered like old LP records.
In the freeze-frame image, the shape of a man could be seen jumping from the burning hulk.
Byron Stecker, who had been waiting at Yucca for Moore to arrive, spoke. “We have no video depicting the actual event. Nothing prior to this. Despite the fact that there are cameras all over the base—including cameras designed to catch nuclear blasts—all the data feeds are blank from a moment four minutes and nineteen seconds prior to the blast until this point approximately one minute and thirty seconds after.
“But we have one eyewitness describing it as a shock wave rolling across the desert floor, a nuclear blast with everything but the mushroom cloud.”
Moore stared at the display. He’d been unconscious until several minutes later.
“At least fifteen commercial airliners were affected,” Stecker said, “including nine that lost complete electrical power and had to make emergency landings. Nellis radar and communications went down and we have extensive grid failures all along the West Coast. Vegas, Henderson, and Tahoe are completely blacked out.”
Moore tried to ignore it.
“And worst of all,” Stecker added, “both the Russians and Chinese are accusing us of breaking the test ban treaty or of creating some new superweapon. The UN is even convening a Security Council meeting on it the day after tomorrow. And it’s the damned weekend.”
Moore rubbed his head. The interest of the foreign powers certainly complicated things.
“What’s your point?” he asked, too exhausted to wait for the DCI to get around to it.
“I’ve been telling you,” Stecker said, annoyed. “This thing is dangerous.”
“Anything that has power can be dangerous,” Moore said. “A car, a gun, a bomb. Even you. The question is how you use these things and negate the dangers.”
“That’s just the point, Arnold. We don’t know how to use this thing. We don’t even know what it does. All we know is that after two years of studying it you got caught with your pants down.”
No doubt Stecker had already commissioned similar findings and sent them to the president. Moore would have to get off a response quickly and hope that the president could remain rational in the face of such a strong attack.
In the meantime, the scientific effort would kick into high gear. New equipment would be flown out to replace what had been lost in the blast and the new power-sharing arrangement would be tested.
The door to the trailer opened. An air force major came in leading three civilians. The men were scientists: Moore’s own chief analyst, who had fortunately or unfortunately not been on the truck; the CIA’s chosen expert, a stern-faced true believer of about forty-five who had apparently worked on some advanced projects for the military; and an older Native American man in his late fifties. He had tanned, wrinkled skin, thin white hair, and a billy goat’s tuft of scraggly whiskers on his chin. He wore a bolo tie, a plaid cowboy shirt with rhinestone buttons, and an oversized pocket protector stuffed full of pens. Moore recognized him as Nathanial Ahiga, a theoretical physicist who’d once been with the Sandia Labs in New Mexico and now worked for the National Academy of Sciences.
The name Ahiga was Navajo for “the one who fights” and Nathanial’s family had a pedigree in combat. His grandfather had been one of the famed Navajo Code Talkers during World War II, his father had earned medals in Korea, and his older brother had been one of the first Native Americans to join the Green Berets, earning a chest full of commendations during three tours in Vietnam.
Nathanial himself had gone to college instead of joining the military, but his contribution to the armed forces eclipsed them all, since he’d helped design the nuclear triggers used in the warheads on the Trident missile and had spent years after working with the missile-defense effort. If World War III ever did come, Ahiga’s work would be instrumental in both annihilating the enemy and saving what could be protected in the United States.
It was clear from Stecker’s speeches that the CIA wanted the stone destroyed, and Moore and his people already believed that such an action would be a mistake, unless there was truly no other choice.
That dynamic effectively turned Ahiga into the decision maker. When all was said and done, his opinion would be the only one that counted.
Moore shook his hand, then watched as Ahiga strolled around the makeshift lab and over to the viewing station. Leaning in and squinting slightly, he got his first look at the assignment and pursed his lips tightly. It could have been a sign of curiosity, or a simple mannerism the man often used, but to Moore it looked an awful lot like a display of disgust.