The Rift (14 page)

As he did so, the power came back on.

He went into the parking lot. Her car was easy to find. Burns keyed the radio and spoke in an excited voice: “Hello? Hello? This woman has been hurt! She needs help.”

As he waited, he walked around the car, head cocked as if listening, and then reached under the right front wheel panel and grabbed the tracker. He removed it and stomped on it. He heard a helicopter inbound.

The Nighthawk came racing in just above the tree line when the golden light flashed from Burns’s eyes and hit it, shutting everything on board down.

The pilots never had a chance to react; they were too low. The helicopter hit like a rock, tumbling, ripping apart, blades churning, breaking, flying through the air, and then the chopper exploded.

Burns got in the car and drove off.

Back inside the facility, Nurse Washington threw open the door to room 116. She immediately saw that the old man in the bed was dead; she’d seen a lot of dead old people from the doorway of rooms in this place and she knew dead.

The woman, the FBI special agent, confirmed as legitimate by the local field office, wasn’t breathing either. But she was fresh dead. Nurse Washington had seen that enough also.

Washington yelled, a voice that carried throughout the entire facility. “Crash cart to one-one-six!” She knelt next to Neeley. “Knew that man was a servant of the devil the minute he came through the door. And knew you were trouble, too, the moment you walked in. And I still don’t believe you are what you say you are.”

Then she began to perform CPR.

Iris Watkins was five feet tall if she really stretched and dripping wet didn’t break three figures on the scale. And she had twenty pounds of baby in a halter on her chest and two kids under five fighting her for control of the grocery cart. She tried to grab some 2 percent milk without banging the baby’s head into the cooler door when one of those grandmother types stopped her and started going on about how cute the kids were. And then, of course: “My! What a big baby for such a teeny little thing like you.”

Why don’t you hand me some milk or hold the door for me?
Iris thought. As if she didn’t hear that all the time. Of course, they’d never seen the father, and he hadn’t been a tiny little thing. He hadn’t even been a normal thing. He’d been huge, thus the large baby, but that also probably contributed to him being such a large target and getting hit fourteen times covering his team’s withdrawal in Afghanistan last year.

But he’d kept firing, up until the last bullet hit him just under the left eye.

Watkins had asked for every single detail from the SEAL teammates who’d accompanied the body back to the States. She had to know and it gave her comfort to understand he’d died fighting, doing what he was trained to, and he died on the battlefield, not in a medevac or in surgery.

It was the way a warrior should die and her husband had been a warrior. He’d died like the Viking he was, weapon in hand, fighting until he gave his last breath.

One of the girls had wandered off and grabbed a box of no-you-can’t-have-that cereal loaded with sugar, as if she wasn’t hyper enough, and the other was now clinging to Watkins’s leg complaining about something, voice working its way up to a squall.

Iris forced a smile to her lips for the old woman, who was doing nothing but getting in the way. She thought how pleasant menopause must be and imagined herself one day shopping all alone without the usual quiz questions: How old, how much does he weigh, he doesn’t have your eyes so it must be the father, what does his dad do? The innocent questions, some of which could cause a stab of pain so hard in her chest she thought she’d just collapse into the empty void that was there.

What she held on to was mirroring his courage, in the more subtle, but sometimes even more challenging field of negotiating everyday life, being a war widow in a country that barely remembered it was at war and taking care of their three children.

Then she heard, buried deep in her purse, the ringtone that she could never ignore. She grabbed for the phone, swinging the baby accidently into the cart handle, which brought a shriek. Watkins ignored even that in the call of duty and pulled the phone out as the old woman huffed and puffed away, talking about these young mothers these days.

Watkins typed in the new destination for the encrypted message and sent it.

Then she dumped the phone back into the bag and held her baby tight, murmuring an apology. She was grateful for the check the Loop sent every month, because the death benefits just weren’t enough to cover three kids.

And it made her feel a part of…

What exactly, she wasn’t sure.

She looked in her baby’s eyes and she saw his eyes and she felt that searing clash of joy over the life she held and agony over the life she’d lost.

Then she couraged up and got the milk.

The Archives elicited more excitement from Ivar than the Can had, perhaps because the Can reminded him of “bench time,” which some physicists loved but others avoided.

“Somebody saw this and thought of the ending for
Raiders of the Lost Ark
,” Ivar said as they walked in the yawning steel doors in the front of the Area 51 Archive. As far as one could see were rows and rows of crates, vehicles, planes, boats, and weird-shaped objects covered in tarps, until it all faded into a haze. There was a far end; one could barely make it out in the distance. Ivar estimated it was over a half mile away.

“It’s bigger than the Boeing Everett Factory,” Doc said proudly, as if he’d put in most of the rivets himself. He was beginning to really get on Ivar’s nerves, with his “I’ve been here longer than you and know more than you and am smarter than you and have more PhDs than you” attitude.

Doc blithely continued. “People think the Boeing factory is the biggest building in the world.
And
,” he added, quite unnecessarily—Doc was well known among the Nightstalkers for adding the unnecessary, which on occasion had turned out to be necessary—“the Archives are underground, enclosed in this cavern inside Groom Mountain.”

Ivar bit back his sarcastic reply that he hadn’t known they’d been inside the mountain for over an hour now. He’d worked under a lot of professors like Doc and sarcasm rarely worked. Most scientists took things quite literally.
The Big Bang Theory
was funny; Doc wasn’t.

They stepped across the metal rail on which the huge doors rolled shut and entered the Archives, only after having their retinas scanned for the umpteenth time by a pair of guards who looked so bored, they might shoot someone just to watch them die, aka Johnny Cash style.

“
Warehouse 13
,” Ivar said, choosing another approach. “Someone definitely took the last scene of
Raiders
as the idea for that.”

“This is real,” Doc said, obviously not a TV or movie person. He pointed down. “The entire Archives is on large springs to absorb the impact if a nuke hit the mountain above us. They built this long before they built NORAD. The first building was just a World War Two prefab hut, but as you can see, it’s expanded considerably since then.”

“Why?” Ivar asked.

“During the Cold War—” Doc began, but Ivar cut him off when he was heading for the wrong pass.

“I mean, why did Area 51 need an archive?”

Doc sighed as they strolled down the main aisle. A golf cart came whizzing by, two men in white coats on it, one of them staring at a map, giving directions. It sped around a corner and was gone. Somewhere in the distance it sounded like someone was pounding a sledgehammer on a pipe, a distinct sound, occurring every twenty seconds or so.

“World War Two,” Doc said. He, too, had a map, an actual paper map, in his hand and he consulted it. He pointed left. “The earliest stuff gathered is in that corner. From Operation Paperclip.”

“Sounds innocent enough,” Ivar said, more interested to learn whether they had the Ark of the Covenant in here or at least some crystal skulls.

“You have no idea what Operation Paperclip was.” Doc stopped, carefully folded the map, and placed it in his breast pocket. He adjusted his spectacles and looked Ivar up and down, as if he were a specimen that had crawled out from under some rock. “Very few things we deal with here are innocent. Innocence is something one leaves behind when coming to Area 51. Let me tell you about innocence and this great country we call our own. Do you know what the OSS was?”

Ivar shook his head, surprised at Doc’s intensity. It wasn’t like they were talking about particle physics or quantum mechanics.

“As the Second World War was coming to a close,” Doc said, “there were those in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA and Special Forces, who were looking ahead. In a way, they were also
our
predecessors here in the Nightstalkers. They were already looking past the war to the next war. There’s always a next war,” Doc added.

That struck a chord with Ivar because war had struck close to him just four years ago. “As Plato said a long, long time ago, ‘only the dead have seen the end of war.
’
”

“You didn’t get the full in-brief from Moms and Nada,” Doc said. “But you get Moms talking, she’ll tell you the Nightstalkers were founded the day guys like you and me, scientists, split the atom and then learned how to turn that into a weapon.”

“‘I am become—’”

Doc’s tolerance for Ivar’s deep well of quotes was on a tight leash. “Yes, yes. I know what Oppenheimer said. Moms quotes it all the time. But World War Two changed warfare. We not only saw our own country invent, and use, the atomic bomb, but we also saw other weapons of mass destruction developed to even more lethal levels by scientists. All these weapon races got, and continue to be, despite proclamations otherwise, out of control.” Doc pulled the map out of his pocket and unfolded it. He nodded. “Follow me. Let me show you something.”

They walked down a side aisle, high rows of heavy metal shelving towering over them on each side, as if they were in a super-super-Costco. Doc halted in front of a house-sized white square. Power lines looped down to the top of it and machinery was humming. Doc went up to a window and wiped away frost on a piece of thick glass.

“Take a look,” Doc said.

Ivar, who had spent a lot of time in labs, had a hard time figuring out what the contraption was inside the container.

“It’s a nuclear weapon,” Doc said. “Once the Russians showed they had their bomb, President Truman, who I’ll get back to, demanded we build bigger bombs. Of course, he meant larger yield, but back in the late forties, larger yield literally meant a larger bomb. They used liquid deuterium as the fusion fuel—”

“Thus the requirement for it to be kept refrigerated.” Ivar couldn’t help resorting to playing a physics card.

“Of course,” Doc said. “This one was called Ivy Mike. Pretty much impractical as a weapon, as you can obviously see. But it had a big yield. Ten-point-four megatons.” He moved on to what was stored next to it. A large, cylindrical bomb, twenty-four feet long and six feet in diameter, rested in a metal cradle.

“They worked on making the bomb smaller,” Doc said, “and this was the first deployable, large-yield one they came up with. A Mark-17 thermonuclear bomb. It remains to this date the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built by the United States. Estimated yield around twenty-five to thirty megatons.”

“And we’re keeping one here in the Archives for…?” Ivar asked. “Isn’t that as stupid as the labs that keep the smallpox virus around?”

“And we keep this around for the same reason,” Doc said. “To study and understand. We keep a lot of deadly things in the Archives. Which answers your earlier question of why we need an Archive. Which brings me back to Operation Paperclip. While we led the way in developing, and using, nuclear weapons, the Germans and the Japanese led the way in other scientific fields associated with killing, particularly chemical and biological weapons.”

Doc tapped his chest as he led Ivar farther into the Archives. “We’ve faced down not only Rifts, but also nuclear weapons and some pretty serious biological and chemical mishaps over the years, including one or two cases of the smallpox virus you mentioned being played with in ways that weren’t smart or secure. You worked in a lab and look what happened there because your professor had visions of a Nobel Prize dancing in his head. He threw all caution to the wind and opened a Rift.

“You need to know the history of all of this. And you can come in here and study a lot of the things we, and our predecessors, have run into over the decades. I know Nada gave you a binder, but that has just an overview. The details, and they are important, are in here. In the original documents.”

Doc stopped in front of a missile pointing toward the roof. “A V-2 rocket. Mint condition. The Germans were the leaders in rocket development and if they’d had another year or so, the East Coast might have seen an advanced version of the V-2 rocket raining down from the skies. If the Nazi scientists had another two or three years, some of those rockets could have had nuclear warheads on them. Think about that. I like to think that every soldier who died storming those beaches in Normandy gave his life so we could stop that from happening.

“Of course, that’s the noble side of warfare. There’s another side.” Doc plinked one of the metal fins. “So at the end of World War Two, OSS operatives, along with intelligence officers from the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a mouthful like many military organizations are, were sent into Japan and Germany. Sometimes they were actually snatching scientists away from army war crimes units. Sometimes they got in firefights with similar units from the Russian Army. The Brits also were in on it, although their efforts came nothing close to us and the Soviets.”