The Shimmer (31 page)

The rumble of a distant explosion.

It came from the direction of the observatory.

Moments later, a second explosion followed. Lockhart searched the sky but no longer saw or heard the helicopter. What he saw instead was smoke rising.

A third explosion brought more smoke.

He reached back toward a canvas sack mounted on the rear of the motorcycle. The sack concealed his M4, along with two spare hundred-round magazines and a half-dozen boxes of ammunition--a troubling amount that the colonel had insisted on.

The sack also contained a scrambler-equipped two-way radio that Lockhart hastily withdrew.

Chapter 54.

Holding an earplug in one hand, Raleigh listened to the disturbing report that came through the two-way radio. His mouth was uncharacteristically dry.

"I can't send reinforcements until dark," he said into the radio.

"The Suburbans are the only transportation we have. They're so conspicuous, if I send men in the daytime, the crowd down the road is bound to see. We can't compromise our security. Reconnoiter as close to the observatory as you can. Keep reporting back."

Raleigh ended the transmission. When he reinserted his earplug, shutting out two-thirds of the sound in the room, he noted that some of the men in front of the monitoring equipment were glancing curiously in his direction. Even though it was after 6 in the evening, the cold overhead lights continued to make the time feel like 3 o'clock in the morning.

"Is everything adjusted?" His abrupt tone challenged one of the men, suggesting that there were more pressing things to do than eavesdrop on his radio communications.

"Just about, sir," the man quickly answered. "We're starting to amplify the signals."

Raleigh stood behind the man. A computer screen showed random dots that provided a visual correspondence to the static coming from audio monitors on a table near other glowing electronic equipment.

Shelves were filled with receivers, analyzers, and decoders. If all went as planned, soon the static would resolve itself into the alluring music he'd heard at Fort Meade, and then the computer screen before him would show the equivalent of gliding, floating, hypnotic lights.

"You're not wearing your earplugs, soldier."

"Sorry, sir. I've been so busy that I forgot."

Raleigh moved to the center of the room and raised his voice.

"All of you, listen up!"

The eight men raised their heads from the electronics they were adjusting.

"Everybody wears earplugs." Raleigh pointed toward his own. "I warned you that the audio component of this project can damage your hearing. I don't want somebody's mama crying to me because you didn't listen to orders and went deaf. Put in the earplugs now!"

They hurriedly did so.

"If necessary, add the noise-reducing headphones we brought."

When he was satisfied that everyone had obeyed, he walked toward a metal door that led to the facility's innermost room. In truth, he wasn't worried about his men going deaf. If this experiment went wrong, going deaf would be the least of their problems.

What he hoped was that the earplugs--and if necessary the noisereducing earphones--would protect their hearing enough to keep them alive.

Once inside the central chamber, he watched a closed-circuit television monitor that showed a view of the abandoned airbase that sprawled above him. Beyond the collapsed, rusted aircraft hangars, he saw the German shepherd and its trainer patrolling the fence. The crowd had spread far enough from the viewing area that some people were talking to the dog's trainer. The animal snapped at them. The people on the other side of the fence held up their hands in a we don't want a problem gesture and backed away.

Raleigh wondered if the German shepherd was normally that aggressive.

We'll soon find out. After dark, I'll bring the dog back inside. We'll see how it behaves. Its ears are more sensitive than ours. If there's trouble, it'll react before humans do--and before we need to shoot it.

He studied the room's thick metal door, assuring himself that it could withstand a grenade blast. He verified that his M4 and several loaded one-hundred-round magazines were in a corner. He opened a filing cabinet and made sure that a trauma kit and emergency rations--including water--were inside in case he was forced to barricade himself in this room for a considerable length of time.

What else do I need to plan for? There's always something.

He'd done his best to take everything into account. Nonetheless, he paused to consider the history of this place and search his memory for anything he might have missed. He knew by heart every event that had happened on this spot. He'd read all of the reports. They stretched back long before the military had established a presence here. One of the reports, however, had been passed down not from a historian or a tactician.

It had come from his great-grandmother.

Chapter 55.

January 22, 1916.

The horse became restless. It was normally so well-behaved that its rider--a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher named Dani Marie Brown--glanced warily around, assuming that coyotes were in the area.

She was riding on the dusty road that led from Rostov to Loden, a town fifteen miles away where she taught grade school on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays after teaching on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays in Rostov. Three days a week was the most that local cattlemen in each place would allow their children to be away from their ranching chores.

Dani sometimes was at school from dawn until dusk, preparing classes or grading tests when the children weren't at their desks. It was a tiring schedule, but she'd been raised in Rostov, and she hadn't liked being away from home while she'd earned her teacher's certificate in noisy, crowded El Paso. Long, quiet hours in this familiar, reassuring area were preferable to the chaos of the unknown, outside world.

During the winter, the early sunset made it necessary for Dani to bundle herself in a sheepskin coat and ride between the towns after dark. This didn't trouble her. The stars and the moon--even if only a portion of the latter was showing--provided sufficient light for her to see the road. On cloudy nights, she held a lantern to show her the way.

An experienced horsewoman, she never worried about her ability to control the chestnut-colored quarter horse her parents had bought for her. But now, as the animal became more skittish, she tugged back the reins and pressed her heels down in the stirrups while she studied the shadowy landscape with greater intensity. In the heat of summer, coyotes weren't the only threat the horse might have sensed--there would have been the risk that a rattlesnake had crawled onto the road to absorb the last of the day's warmth, but that was out of the ques tion tonight, when the temperature was cold enough to put a layer of ice on a pail of water.

Even so, Dani's stomach fluttered.

Until recently she'd felt happily isolated in this quiet corner of Texas, but then her father had ordered a wireless radio from a catalog, and now, on this particular journey, Dani's thoughts were disturbed by the escalation of the European war, which had reached new heights of atrocity and threatened to draw the United States into the fight between Germany and the Allies.

Just before beginning her ride toward Loden, she'd paid a brief visit to her parents and listened to a radio report about attacks involving chlorine and phosgene gases: the lung destroyers. There were rumors about something even more horrendous being developed:

mustard gas, a blisterer that dissolved skin both inside and outside the body. The gas remained active long after it sank into the ground, with the consequence that soldiers kicking up dust as they walked through a field could cause the equivalent of another attack.

And those weren't the only new horrors. Dani could only imagine the pain and terror produced by such recently invented weapons as tanks and flamethrowers. Thus, on this normally quiet ride, her thoughts were in greater turmoil than she would have expected.

Abruptly something on her right caught her attention. She frowned toward some sort of illumination on the southern horizon.

Lights bobbed and weaved. Her immediate suspicion was that they came from torches carried by horseback riders. However, the only direction from which those riders could be coming was Mexico.

That thought filled her with dread because Mexico, too, had become a dangerous place. The recent revolution there had turned the country into warring factions to which Germany sent soldiers, weapons, and money, hoping the United States would be so distracted by the violence south of its border that it wouldn't enter the war in Europe.

My God, Dani thought, could those be Germans?

The horse continued to resist her efforts to control it.

Calm down, she warned herself. The horse senses my fear. That's what's causing the problem.

No, those weren't Germans invading from Mexico, she decided.

Now that she paid closer attention, the lights didn't look at all like riders with torches.

If they weren't torches, though, what else could they be?

Only gradually did Dani wonder if these might be the lights she'd heard so much about when she was growing up. The stories had seemed fanciful, and she'd paid them no mind because although she knew many people in town who claimed to have seen them, she had not.

Now, on the distant horizon, the lights took the shape of luminous balls. Their colors were like segments of a rainbow. Sometimes they merged, red and blue becoming purple, or green and red becoming yellow. They drifted sideways or rose and fell as if in a current.

They got larger and brighter.

Dani became aware of a hum that gradually increased in pitch, and before she knew it, her ears were in pain.

Suddenly the horse reared up. She pressed down on its neck while tightening her legs against its flanks. Making panicked noises, the animal skittered sideways. Again it attempted to rear up, and suddenly-regardless of her expert efforts--it charged along the road.

The horse's speed would normally have made it difficult for Dani to see obstacles on the shadowy road, but as she struggled to subdue it, she realized that the road had become unnaturally bright, with vibrant colors flashing toward it. Without warning, the lights were rushing over her, spinning around her, trapping her in a whirlpool.

At once the horse bucked so violently that she flew off the saddle.

When she struck the road, pain shot through her ribs. Her vision blurred. Dizzy, she heard the horse neighing in alarm. The pounding of its hooves began again and receded into the distance.

Dani had no idea how long she lay unconscious. When she wakened, the lights were gone. Clouds had drifted in, partially concealing the stars and the moon. In the meager illumination, she squirmed to her feet. Despite the cold, the pain in her ribs made her sweat.

With a weak voice, she called for the horse, but the animal didn't return. She called again, gave up, and struggled to find her bearings.

Which way was Rostov? That was the closer town. If she made a mistake in direction, she'd walk toward Loden, and she doubted she had the strength to go that far.

She scanned the heavens in search of the North Star. The pain was so great that she feared she'd collapse.

The Big Dipper. Need to find the Big Dipper.

There. When she'd been a little girl, her father had made sure that she knew how to navigate by the stars in case she ever got lost in the dark. The two end stars on the Big Dipper pointed toward the Little Dipper, and the star at the end of the handle part of the Little Dipper was the North Star.

Now Dani could calculate which way was west, the direction that would take her to Rostov. She wavered along the increasingly dark road and stumbled. When she fell, pain jolted her into consciousness.

She crawled and finally managed to stand again.

Time lost all meaning.

She felt another jolt of intense pain and realized she'd run into the side of a building. Only then did she understand that she'd reached town. Delirious, she took two wrong turns before she pounded on her father's door.

When he opened it, she collapsed in his arms.

The next morning, word of her ordeal spread through Rostov. Numerous friends came to satisfy their curiosity.

"Germans?" the veterinarian asked. The closest that Rostov had to a doctor, he recommended that Dani wear a corset to protect her ribs while they healed.

"No," she said through the pain. "I don't think so." The corset put so much pressure on Dani's throbbing chest that she had trouble breathing.

"But you told us you saw riders with torches," Dani's father said.

"If not Germans, were they Mexicans?"

"No, I only thought--"

"It could have been a scouting expedition," Rostov's mayor decided. "Some of them got close enough to throw their torches at you.

Carranza's people are in league with the Germans. Everybody knows that. Maybe Carranza's seeing how far he can sneak into Texas before anybody makes a fuss."

"Or it might have been that bastard Villa," the town's blacksmith suggested. "He's desperate for money and supplies."