Strangers (67 page)

Now Jack walked. Ragged tears in the clouds disrobed the moon, and the few widely scattered patches of snow shone brightly, as if they were shards of bone glimpsed in the darker carcass of the hump-backed hills; the bare earth, rock formations, sagebrush, and plentiful dry grass accepted the caress of moonlight and were limned in a vague milky-blond hue. But when the moon slipped behind the clouds, deep rich darkness flooded forth.

At last he reached a suitable observation point on the southern slope of a hill, only a quarter of a mile behind the Tranquility Motel. He sat down, putting the Uzi and his rucksack aside.

The Star Tron night-vision device took available light—starlight, moonlight, the natural phosphorescence of snow and of certain plants, meager electric light if any—and amplified it eighty-five thousand times. With the gadget’s single lens, Jack could transform all but the very blackest nights into gray daylight or better.

He propped his elbows on his knees, held the Star Tron in both hands, and focused on the Tranquility. The rear of the structure popped into view with sufficient clarity for him to determine that no lookouts were posted in any shadowed niches. None of the motel units had windows along the back wall, so no guards could be watching from those rooms. The center third of the motel had a second floor, probably the owner’s apartment, and light shone at most of those windows. However, he could not see into the apartment because the drapes and blinds were drawn.

He put the Star Tron in the rucksack and picked up the battery-powered, hand-held, directional microphone, which resembled a futuristic gun. Only a few years ago, “rifle mikes” were effective to a distance of only two hundred yards. But these days, a good power-amplified unit could suck in a conversation up to a quarter of a mile, much farther if conditions were ideal. The device included a pair of compact earphones, which he put on. He aimed the mike at a window shielded by drapes, and at once heard animated voices. However, he got only scraps of their conversation because he was trying to pull their voices out of a closed room
and
through a quarter-mile of blustery wind.

With great caution, he grabbed the Uzi and other gear, and moved closer, choosing a second observation point less than a hundred yards from the building. When he aimed the mike at the window again, he picked up every word spoken beyond the glass, in spite of the muffling draperies. He heard six voices, maybe more. They were eating dinner and complimenting the cook (someone named Ned) and his helper (Sandy) on the turkey, the pecan stuffing, and other dishes.

They’re not just eating dinner, Jack thought enviously, they’re having a damned banquet in there.

He’d eaten a light lunch on the Lear but had taken nothing since. He was still on Eastern Standard Time, so for him it was almost eleven o’clock. He would probably be eavesdropping for hours, piecing together these people’s identities, gradually determining if they were his adversaries. He was too hungry to wait that long for his own dinner, such as it was. With a few rocks, he made a brace for the microphone to keep it angled toward the window. He unwrapped the Hamwich and bit into that “pulverized, blended, and remolded” treat. It tasted like sawdust soaked in rancid bacon fat. He spat out the gummy mouthful and settled down to a meager meal of dried beef and doughnuts, which would have
been more satisfying if he had not had to listen to those strangers indulging in a modern version of a harvest feast.

Soon, Jack had heard enough of the conversation in the apartment to know these people were not his enemies. Strangely, one way or another, they had been drawn or summoned here, as he’d been. Monitoring them, he began to think their voices were curiously familiar, and he was overcome with the feeling that he belonged among them as a brother among family.

A woman named Ginger and a man—either Don or Dom—began to tell the others about research they’d done earlier in the offices of the Elko
Sentinel.
Listening to talk of toxic spills, roadblocks, and highly trained DERO troops, Jack felt his appetite fading. DERO! Shit, he’d heard about the DERO companies, though they’d been formed after he’d left the service. They were gung-ho types who’d happily accept an order to go into a pit against a grizzly bear, armed only with a meat grinder; and they were tough enough to make sausages out of the bear. Forced to choose between a quick, painless suicide and hand-to-hand combat with a DERO, the ordinary man would be well-advised to blow his own brains out and save himself pain. Jack realized he was involved in something far bigger and more dangerous than
fratellanza
revenge or any of the other things he had hypothesized during his flight from New York.

Although the picture he got from eavesdropping was full of holes, he began to grasp that these people had come together to discover what had happened to them the summer before last, the same weekend Jack had stayed here. They’d made considerable headway in their investigation, and Jack winced as they openly discussed their progress. They were so naïve that they thought closed doors and covered windows ensured privacy. He wanted to shout:
Hey, for God’s sake, shut up already! If I can hear you,
they
can hear you.

DERO. That bit of news made him even sicker than the Hamwich.

In the motel they continued to chatter, revealing their strategy to the enemy even as they worked it out, and at last Jack tore off the earphones, frantically grabbed his guns and equipment, and hurried down through the darkness toward the Tranquility Motel.

•

The apartment had no dining room, just the alcove in the kitchen, but that area was too small to seat nine. In the living room, they moved the furniture against the walls, brought in the kitchen table, and used both extra leaves to extend it, accommodating everyone. To Dom, the impromptu arrangements contributed to the feeling of a family gathering and to the mood of cautious festivity.

Rather than have to repeat themselves, Dom and Ginger had waited until dinner, when the group was gathered, to report on their research at the newspaper in Elko. Now, over the clinking of silverware, they revealed that the Army had blockaded I-80 minutes
before
the toxic spill that Friday night. Which meant that choppers full of soldiers had been dispatched from distant Shenkfield at least half an hour earlier, and that the Army knew in advance the “accident” was going to happen.

Tearing a crescent roll, Dom said, “If Falkirk and a DERO company flew in and took over security on the quarantine line so soon after the crisis hit…well, it means the Army must’ve had advance warning.”

“But then why didn’t they stop it from happening?” Jorja Monatella asked as she cut her daughter’s serving of turkey into bite-size pieces.

“Apparently, they
couldn’t
stop it,” Dom said.

“Maybe there was a terrorist attack on the truck, and maybe Army Intelligence only got wind of it just before it went down,” Ernie said.

“Maybe,” Dom said doubtfully. “But they would’ve gone public with that kind of story if it happened. So it must’ve been something else. Something involving top-secret data of such importance that only DERO troops could be trusted to keep quiet about it.”

Brendan Cronin had a heartier appetite than anyone at the table, but his temporal appetite did not diminish the spiritual air that had surrounded him. He swallowed some baked corn and said, “This explains why there weren’t hundreds of people on those ten miles of interstate when the thing happened, as there should’ve been at that hour. If the Army sealed it off ahead of the event, they had time to get most traffic out of the danger zone before anything actually happened.”

Dom said, “Some didn’t get out, saw too much, and were held and brainwashed with the rest of us who were already here at the motel.”

For a while everyone joined in the discussion and arrived at all the same theories and unanswerable questions that had occurred to Dom and Ginger at the newspaper offices earlier in the day.

Finally, Dom told them about the important discovery he and Ginger had made when, as an afterthought, they had looked through issues of the
Sentinel
published during the weeks
following
the toxic spill. When they had finished poring through editions for the week of the crisis, Ginger had suggested that clues to the secret of what really happened on the closed highway that night might be hidden in other news, in unusual stories that appeared to have nothing to do with the crisis but were, in fact, related to it. They pulled more issues from the files, and by studying every story from a paranoid perspective, they soon found what they hoped for. One place in particular figured in the news in such a way that it seemed linked to the closure of I-80.

“Thunder Hill,” Dom said. “We believe that’s where our trouble came from. Shenkfield was just a ruse, a clever misdirection to focus attention away from the
real
source of the crisis. Thunder Hill.”

Faye and Ernie looked up from their plates in surprise, and Faye said, “Thunder Hill’s ten or twelve miles north-northeast of here, in the mountains. The Army has an installation up there, too—the Thunder Hill Depository. There’re natural limestone caves in those hills, where they store copies of service records and a lot of other important files, so they won’t lose all copies if military bases in other parts of the country are wiped out in a disaster…nuclear war, like that.”

Ernie said, “The Depository was here before Faye and me. Twenty years or more. Rumors have it that files and records aren’t the only things in storage there. Some believe there’s also huge supplies of food, medicines, weapons, ammunition. Which makes sense. In case a big war breaks out, the Army wouldn’t want all its weapons and supplies on ordinary military bases because those would be the first nuked. They’ve surely got fallback caches, and I guess Thunder Hill is one of those.”

“Then
anything
might be up there,” Jorja Monatella said uneasily.

“Anything,” Ned Sarver said.

“Is it possible the place isn’t just a storage dump?” Sandy asked. “Could they also maybe be doing some kind of experiments up there?”

“What kind of experiments?” Brendan asked, leaning over to look past Ned, beside whom he was seated.

Sandy shrugged. “Any kind.”

“It’s possible,” Dom said. The same thought had occurred to him.

“But if there wasn’t a toxic spill on I-80, if it was something at Thunder Hill that went wrong,” Ginger said, “how could it have affected us, more than ten miles to the south?”

No one could think of an answer.

Marcie, who had been preoccupied with her moon collection for most of the evening and who had said nothing during dinner, put down her fork and piped up with a question of her own: “Why’s it called Thunder Hill?”

“Sweetie,” Faye said, “that’s one I
can
answer. Thunder Hill’s really one of four huge, connecting mountain meadows, a long sloping piece of high pastureland. It’s surrounded by a great many high peaks, and during a storm, the place acts like a sort of…well, a sort of funnel for sound. The Indians named it Thunder Hill hundreds of years ago because thunder echoes between those peaks and rolls down the mountainsides, and it all pours in on that one particular meadow in a most peculiar way, so that it seems as if the roar isn’t coming out of the sky, but as if it’s coming right up out of the ground around you.”

“Wow,” Marcie said softly. “I’d probably pee my pants.”

“Marcie!” Jorja said as everyone broke into laughter.

“Well, gee, I probably would,” the child replied. “You ’member when Grandma and Grandpa came over to dinner at our place, and there was a big storm, really big, and some lightning struck the tree in our yard, and there was this
boom!
and I peed my pants?” Looking around the table at her new extended family, she said, “I was
soooo
embarrassed.”

Everyone laughed again, and Jorja said, “That was more than two years ago. You’re a bigger girl now.”

To Dom, Ernie said, “You haven’t told us yet why Thunder Hill is the place, rather than Shenkfield. What’d you find in the newspaper?”

In the
Sentinel
for Friday, July 13, exactly one week after the closure of I-80 and three days after its reopening, there was a report of two county ranchers—Norvil Brust and Jake Dirkson—who were having trouble with the Federal Bureau of Land Management. A disagreement between ranchers and the BLM was not unusual. The government owned half of Nevada, not merely deserts but a lot of the best grazing land, some of which it leased to cattlemen for their herds. Ranchers were always complaining that the BLM kept too much good land out of use, that the government ought to sell off part of its holdings to private interests, and that leases were too expensive. But Brust and Dirkson had a new complaint. For years they leased BLM land surrounding a three-hundred-acre Army installation, the Thunder Hill Depository. Brust held eight hundred acres to the west and south, and Dirkson was using over seven hundred acres on the east side of Thunder Hill. Suddenly, on Saturday morning, July 7, though four years remained on Brust’s and Dirkson’s leases, the BLM took five hundred acres from Brust, three hundred from Dirkson; and at the request of the Army, those eight hundred acres were incorporated into the boundaries of the Thunder Hill Depository.

“Which just happens to be the very morning after the toxic spill and the closure of I-80,” Faye observed.

“Brust and Dirkson showed up Saturday morning to inspect their herds, per their usual routine,” Dom said, “and both discovered that their livestock had been driven off most of the leased pasture. A temporary barbed-wire fence was being thrown into place along the new perimeter of the Thunder Hill Depository.”

Having finished dinner, Ginger pushed her plate aside and said, “The BLM simply told Brust and Dirkson it was unilaterally abrogating their leases, without compensation. But they didn’t receive an official written notice till the following Wednesday, which is extremely unusual. Ordinarily, a notice of termination comes sixty days in advance.”

“Was that kind of treatment legal?” Brendan Cronin asked.