Strangers (78 page)

The political destruction wrought by the release of the secret would be only a small part of the devastation. The CISG—a think-tank of physicists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, theologists, economists, educators, and other learned people—had pondered precisely this crisis at great length and depth, years before it had arisen here in Nevada. The CISG had issued a 1220-page top-secret report on its conclusions, a document that offered some disturbing reading. Leland knew that report by heart, for he was the military representative to the CISG and had helped
write several position papers included in the final text. Within the CISG, the opinion was unanimous that the world would never be the same if such an event were to occur. All societies, all cultures would be radically changed forever. Projected deaths over the first two years ranged in the millions.

Lieutenant Horner, who was driving the Wagoneer, braked twenty feet in front of the giant blast doors that were set in the sudden steep upper slope of the meadow. He didn’t wait for the huge barriers to open, for he was not driving directly into Thunder Hill. Horner turned right, into a small parking lot, where three minibuses, four Jeep wagons, a Land Rover, and several other vehicles stood side by side.

The twin blast doors, each thirty feet high and twenty feet wide, were so thick they could be opened only at a ponderous pace, producing a rumble that could be heard a mile away and
felt
in the air and in the ground at least half as far. When a truck—loaded with ammunition, weapons, or supplies—pulled up in front of the drive-in entrance, the doors required five minutes to roll apart. Opening those hangar-sized portals every time a lone man needed to walk in or out was unthinkably inefficient, so a second, man-sized door—nearly as formidable—was set in the hillside thirty feet to the right of the main entrance.

There was no better vault than Thunder Hill in which to keep the secret of July 6. It was an impregnable fortress.

Leland and Lieutenant Horner hurried through the bitter air to the walk-in entrance. The small steel door, almost as blastproof as the massive versions to the left, had an electronic lock that could be disengaged only by tapping the proper four numbers on a keyboard. The code changed every two weeks, and those entrusted with it were required to commit it to memory. Leland punched in the code, and the fourteen-inch-thick, lead-core door slid aside with a sudden pneumatic
whoosh.

They stepped into a twelve-foot-long concrete tunnel about nine feet in diameter and brightly lit. It angled to the left. At the end was another door identical to the first, but it could not be opened until the outer door was closed. Leland touched a heat-sensitive switch just inside the tunnel entrance, and the outer door hissed shut behind him and Lieutenant Horner.

Immediately, a pair of video cameras, mounted on the ceiling at opposite ends of the chamber, clicked on. The cameras tracked the two men as they walked to the inner door.

No human eyes were watching the colonel and lieutenant on any video display, for the system was operated entirely by
VIGILANT,
the security computer, as a precaution against the possibility that a traitor within Thunder Hill’s own guard unit might open the facility to hostile forces.
VIGILANT
was not linked to the installation’s main computer or to the outside world; therefore, it was invulnerable to saboteurs seeking to take control of it by means of a modem or other electronic tap.

The guard at the perimeter fence had notified
VIGILANT
that Colonel Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Thomas Horner would be arriving. Now, as they approached the inner door under the gazes of video cameras, the computer compared their appearance to stored holographic images of them, rapidly matching forty-two points of facial resemblance. It was impossible to deceive
VIGILANT
either with makeup or with a look-alike for an approved visitor. If Leland or Horner had been an imposter or unauthorized visitor,
VIGILANT
would have sounded an alarm, simultaneously filling the entrance tunnel with a sedative gas.

The lock on the inner door had no keyboard; no code would open it. Instead, a one-foot-square panel of glass was set in the wall beside the door. Leland almost pressed his right hand palm-down against the panel, hesitated, then used his left, and the glass lit, and a faint humming arose.
VIGILANT
scanned his palmprint and fingerprints, comparing them to the prints in its files.

Lieutenant Horner said, “Almost as hard to get in here as into heaven.”

“Harder,” Leland said.

The light behind the milky glass winked out, and Leland took his hand away. The inner door opened.

They stepped into a huge natural tunnel that had been improved by human hands. The domed rock overhead was lost in darkness because the lighting fixtures were suspended from black metal scaffolding, creating the illusion of a ceiling perhaps twenty or thirty feet below the true ceiling. The tunnel was sixty feet across and led into the mountain about a hundred and twenty yards. In some places the rock walls had natural contours, but in other places they carried the imprints of dynamite blasts and jackhammers and other tools that had been used to widen the narrow portions of the passageway. Incoming trucks could drive along the concrete floor to unloading bays beside immense cargo elevators that went down into deeper regions of the facility.

A guard sat at a table beyond the door by which Leland and Horner entered. Considering the remoteness of Thunder Hill, the extent of sophisticated defenses, and the thoroughness with which
VIGILANT
examined all visitors, a lone sentry seemed superfluous to Leland.

Evidently, the sentry was of that same opinion, for he was not prepared for trouble. His revolver was holstered. He was eating a candy bar. Reluctantly, he looked up from an old novel by Jack Finney.

He wore a coat because the open areas of the Depository were never
heated; only the enclosed living quarters and work areas were kept warm. An enormous power supply was provided by a mini hydroelectric plant that harnessed an underground river, plus backup diesel generators, but there was not enough to warm the mammoth caverns. The subterranean temperature was a stable fifty-five degrees, quite bearable if one dressed for long work periods in the chilly air, as the guard had done.

He saluted. “Colonel Falkirk, Lieutenant Horner, you’re cleared to see Dr. Bennell. You know how to find him, of course.”

“Of course,” Falkirk said.

Ten feet to the left, the burnished steel surface of the giant blast doors glimmered softly in the fluorescent light, looking rather like the sheer face of a great glacier. Leland and Lieutenant Horner turned right, away from the big doors, and walked deeper into the mountain, toward the elevators.

Thunder Hill Depository was equipped with hydraulic lifts of three sizes, the largest of which rivaled the enormous elevators on aircraft carriers. A carrier’s lifts were used to bring planes from the ship’s hold onto the flight deck, and Thunder Hill’s also lowered and raised planes, among other things. In addition to 2.4 billion dollars of equipment and materiel—freeze-dried food, medicine, portable field hospitals, clothing, blankets, tents, handguns, rifles, mortars, field artillery, ammunition, light military vehicles such as Jeeps and armored personnel carriers, and twenty backpack nukes—the vast storage dump contained a variety of useful aircraft. First, the helicopters: thirty Sikorsky S-67 Blackhawk antitank gunships; twenty Bell Kingcobras; eight Anglo-French Westland Pumas, general purpose transports; and three big Medevac choppers. No conventional aircraft were stored at Thunder Hill, but there were twelve vertical takeoff jets of the type manufactured in England by Hawker Siddeley and known there as Harriers, but which were called AV-8As when in U.S. service. Because the Harriers were equipped with powerful vectored-thrust engines, the craft could land and take off vertically, without need of a runway. In a grave crisis—for example, subsequent to a limited nuclear strike and a land invasion by enemy troops—the aircraft of Thunder Hill, both choppers and Harriers, could be lifted to the top level, rolled out through the massive blast doors, and sent hurtling into the sky.

However, the current crisis did not involve war or require the unleashing of the Depository’s aircraft, so Leland and the lieutenant bypassed the two immense elevators. They also passed the two smaller but still oversize cargo elevators, their footsteps echoing off the stone walls, and took one of the three smallest cabs—about the size of a standard lift in a hotel—down into the bowels of Thunder Hill.

Medical supplies, food, guns, and all ammunition were stored on the
third level, the bottom floor of the complex, in a network of chambers which had been caulked, equipped with pressure-release bores, and fitted with doors for the purpose of blast containment. On the second—the middle—level, all the vehicles and aircraft were kept in other huge caverns, and it was there, too, that the staff lived and worked.

Leland and Lieutenant Horner got off the lift at the second level. They stepped into a lighted, circular, rock-wall chamber three hundred feet in diameter. It served as a hub—in fact, personnel called it The Hub—from which four other caverns opened; and still more rooms lay beyond those four. The larger of those deep vaults contained—among other things—the aircraft, Jeeps, and armored personnel carriers.

There were no doors on three of the four caverns which led off The Hub, for there was no serious danger of fire or explosion on that level. But the fourth chamber did, indeed, have doors, for it contained the secret of July 6, which Leland and many others had conspired to conceal. He stopped now, a few steps out of the elevator, to study those portals, which were twenty-six feet high and sixty-four feet wide. They were made of cross-braced two-by-fours rather than steel, because they had been jerry-built to meet an emergency situation; there had been no time to order a fabricated metal door to close off the cavern. They reminded the colonel of the enormous wooden doors in the wall that had protected the frightened natives from the beast on the other half of their island in the original
King Kong.
Considering what lay behind these doors, that horror-movie image did not inspire confidence. Leland shuddered.

Lieutenant Horner said, “Still gives you the creeps, huh?”

“You mean you’re comfortable with it now?”

“Hell, no, sir. Hell, no.”

Inset in the bottom of one of those huge wooden barriers was a much smaller, man-sized door through which researchers entered and exited the room beyond. An armed guard was positioned there to allow entrance only to those with the proper pass. The activities in that forbidden chamber had nothing to do with the other—primary—functions of the Depository, and ninety percent of the personnel were not permitted access to the area. Indeed, ninety percent did not know what was in that cavern.

Around the circumference of The Hub, between the openings to other caverns, buildings had been erected along the walls and anchored to the rock. The structures dated to the first year of the Depository’s construction, back in the early 1960s. Then, they had served as offices for engineers, superintendents, and the Army’s project officers. Over the years, an entire subterranean town had been erected in other caverns—sleeping quarters, cafeteria, recreation rooms, laboratories, machine shops, vehicle service center, computer rooms, even a PX, among other things. They
were now occupied by the military and government personnel who were doing one-and two-year tours of duty at Thunder Hill. In the buildings, there was heat, better lighting, inside and outside telephone lines, kitchens, bathrooms, and all the myriad comforts of home. They were constructed of metal panels coated with baked blue or white or gray enamel, with only small windows and narrow metal doors. Though they had no wheels, they somewhat resembled motor homes or house trailers drawn in a circle, as if they were the property of a modern-day encampment of gypsies who had found their way to this snug haven, 240 feet below the winter snows.

Now, turning from the forbidden chamber with the wooden doors, Leland walked across The Hub toward a white metal structure—Dr. Miles Bennell’s offices. Lieutenant Horner fell in dutifully at his side.

The summer before last, Miles Bennell (whom Leland Falkirk loathed) had moved into Thunder Hill to head all scientific inquiry into the events of that fateful July night. He’d only been out of the Depository on three occasions since then, never for longer than two weeks. He was obsessed with his assignment. Or something worse than obsessed.

A dozen officers, enlisted men, and civilians were in sight within The Hub, some crossing from one adjoining cavern to another, some just standing in conversation with one another. Leland looked them over as he passed them, unable to understand what kind of person would volunteer to work underground for weeks and months at a stretch. They were paid a thirty percent hardship bonus, but to Leland’s way of thinking, that was inadequate compensation. The Depository was less oppressive than Shenkfield’s small, windowless warrens, but not by much.

Leland supposed he was slightly claustrophobic. Being underground made him feel as if he were buried alive. As an admitted masochist, he should have relished his discomfort, but this was one kind of pain he did not seek or enjoy.

Dr. Miles Bennell looked ill. Like nearly everyone in Thunder Hill, he was pasty-faced from being too long beyond the reach of sunlight. His curly black hair and beard only made his pallor more pronounced. In the fluorescent glare of his office, he looked almost like a ghost. He greeted Leland and Lieutenant Horner curtly, and he did not offer to shake hands with either of them.

That suited the colonel fine. He was no friend of Bennell’s. A handshake would have been sheer hypocrisy. Besides, Leland was half-afraid that Miles Bennell had been compromised, that the scientist was no longer who or what he appeared to be…was no longer entirely human. And if that crazy, paranoid possibility was in fact true, he wanted no physical contact with Bennell, not even a quick handshake.