Craig Kreident #2 Fallout (29 page)

Craig extended the folded papers.
 
“Mr. Dirks, I have a warrant here for your arrest and authorization to search your premises for suspected involvement in the Eagle’s Claw and for the murder of Ambassador Kosimo Nevsky.”
 

Craig had insufficient evidence to arrest PK Dirks under normal circumstances, but the laid-back technician was one of the only men who could have been involved in both the diversion of a nuclear weapon as well as the Russian’s death.
 
After receiving special phone calls from June Atwood as well as personnel from State, DoD, the Secret Service, the Defense Nuclear Agency, and FEMA, the judge had given Craig greater leeway in questioning potential suspects.
 
They didn’t have much time left.

“The Eagle’s Claw?” Dirks spluttered.
 
“Those fuckheads!
 
Why would I have anything to do with them?
 
And Nevsky — I already explained that.”
 
Then the rest of the news finally sank in.
 
“You’re
arresting
me?”
 
It took him a moment to gather his wits.
 
Finally, he growled, “Shoot, let me change my shirt.”
 
He staggered back inside while the policemen swarmed into the building to begin their search.

Hour after hour, past midnight and into the darkness of early morning, PK Dirks raggedly insisted on his innocence and protested that if they found anything at all that connected him to the militia group, then they’d better show him first.
 

Judging from the pile of aluminum cans stacked in a wobbly pyramid beside his lounge chair, Dirks had been drinking one Coors after another while watching
Lost in Space
reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel.
 
The man had been settling in for a long night of doing nothing . . . which concerned Craig.
 

Those were not the actions of someone who knew a nuclear device was soon set to go off somewhere in the city.

At the same time, in a different interrogation chamber, Bryce Connors and Deputy Mahon pleaded ignorance as well.
 

After the other agents took Dirks away for questioning, Craig had stayed behind to help ransack the place, desperately hoping to find some clue.
 
But the man’s cluttered apartment showed no evidence of anything except perhaps criminal lack of housekeeping. . . .

Craig had been working non-stop since their arrival — but by three o’clock in the morning they had found nothing.
 
And it was already Friday, October 24th.
 
Deadline day.
 
Time was running out.

Back in the warehouse command center, he rubbed his temples, knuckled his burning and bloodshot eyes, and hung his head with a sigh.
 
If only he had gone to the DAF early the morning before, spent hours going through the paperwork as he had intended to, he might have made the connection about the nuclear weapon
then
, which would have given NEST another entire day to find the stolen device.

At least he had accomplished something during the diversion yesterday.
 
He had saved the passengers on the Amtrak train — he could not ignore that.

He thought about calling Paige — he had not seen her since that afternoon, when he had initiated the nuclear search.
 
If it hadn’t been for her help, he would never have gotten this far on the case.
 
Glancing at his watch, though, he saw what time it was.
 
She must already be back in her room at the Rio, sound asleep.

Alone, he paced the bustling NEST command post, past the maps and tables, telephones that did not ring nearly often enough.
 
Search teams continued to comb the streets, but so far they had found nothing.
 
Nothing.
 
His head ached, his temples pounded, spinning wheels in his brain.

What if he was wrong about PK Dirks?
 
What if the technician was not a member of the militia cell after all?
 
Then who else could divulge the location of the warhead?
 

His mind ran through all the possibilities.
 
Who else had access to the weapons and knew the authorizing procedures cold?
 
Who else could have been in the signature loop?
 
Craig had seen the list of personnel, and only a few people were in critical positions at the Test Site, critical enough to know how to go about diverting a nuclear weapon.

He kept coming up with another possible connection, and he didn’t like the answer — DAF manager Mike Waterloo.
 
It was the only idea he had left.

Grabbing one of the command center phones, Craig attempted to call Waterloo — but the DAF manager wasn’t at home, nor did he answer his pager.
 
Of course, at 3:30 A.M. any sensible person would have his pager shut off, and maybe even the ringer on the phone disengaged.

Or perhaps he wasn’t there.
 
Perhaps he had run . . . fleeing an impending nuclear detonation.
 
Craig couldn’t afford to pass up any possibility.
 
Not now.

No possibility at all.

Suddenly remembering, he turned to Goldfarb, who sat red-eyed, gulping what must have been his thirtieth cup of coffee for the day.
 
“Hey Ben, did you and Jackson follow up on that lead I gave you yesterday morning — Dennisons Machine Repair?”

The short, curly-haired agent snapped up in surprise.
 
“Oh, cripes.
 
No, we never got there, Craig.
 
With the Laughlin bridge explosion and getting shot at in Jorgenson’s trailer and now this NEST exercise, it got shuffled to the bottom of the stack.”
 
He jumped to his feet, angry at himself for letting the task go undone.
 
“Should we head over there now?”

Craig pulled his own jacket back on.
 
“Have Major Braden drive one of their detector vans by the repair shop to check if the weapon is there.
 
You and Jackson get a warrant and be prepared to make an armed entry.”

“An armed entry?”
 
Goldfarb said skeptically.
 
“Are you sure about this?”

“Am I sure?
 
Hardly!”
 
Craig didn’t want to bring up the fact that so far they had not managed to confirm that a warhead was even
missing
, much less set for imminent detonation.
 
The NEST team and the FBI response had swung into action, the President’s stopover had been placed on hold, all on Craig’s call because he had made a convincing case.
 
He had been right about the Amtrak bridge explosion — just barely — and he hoped this whole incident wasn’t another example of crying wolf.
 
“But we don’t have time to do things cautiously anymore.
 
Today is the day!”

“Okay, you’ve got the intuition — I’m not going to argue with it.
 
We’re grasping at straws, so we may as well grab with all we’ve got.”
 
Goldfarb slid his arms into his jacket, gingerly keeping his bandaged little finger from bumping against anything.
 
“What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“Mike Waterloo doesn’t answer his home phone, so I’m going to go over there and wake him up.
 
Besides telling him we’ve arrested PK Dirks, I want to poke around.
 
Something’s just a little fishy.”

Goldfarb went looking for Jackson, but tossed a glance over his shoulder.
 
“You keep having these hunches, Craig, sooner or later you’re going to be right.”

CHAPTER 35

Friday, October 24

2:10 A.M.

Land Rover

Far Northeastern Border, Nevada Test Site

Sitting helplessly in the passenger seat of the camouflaged land rover, Paige pressed her lips together to trap her despair and anger inside.
 
She didn’t want to grant Mike Waterloo the benefit of conversation, and her coldness disturbed him greatly.
 

They’d headed overland in his car from the DAF, driving north across the darkened flats, using abandoned dirt roads that had been carved for test shots completed in years past.
 
Pulling up to an old ammo bunker that had been abandoned in place, Mike had held the gun on her as they switched to a hidden land rover.
 
They left his car inside the old bunker and drove the rover out of the musty-smelling storage place, off to their grim destination.

He kept the land rover’s headlights switched off as he crept across the broken land.
 
Overhead, the soup of storm clouds made the desert a murky wasteland.
 
The rugged vehicle bounced and rattled.
 
Paige felt her internal organs jostling, her teeth chattering — but she stared ahead, not wanting to look at Mike and his grim expression, not wanting to look in the back of the rover.

The missing nuclear device lay in the rear cargo bed.
 

Mike risked the paved roads again as he drove up into the mesas, where only two days earlier he had taken the Russian team on a casual tour of the tunnel tests.
 
He had been such a hypocrite, informative and chatty, when all the while he had been arranging a wave of violence and nuclear destruction.
 
How long had the warhead been hidden in the old bunker, waiting for the Eagle’s Claw to decide how best to use it
?

Mike wound up into the higher lands that separated the Nevada Test Site from the vast spaces of the Nellis Air Force Range.
 
Once he descended out of the mountains and down to the open basin of Gold Flat, Mike veered away from the roads and struck out overland again.
 
The land rover didn’t mind the lack of pavement, but once the storm broke and desert rain sheeted down, the ground would become a quagmire.

Upon crossing into Nellis, he reached over to a squarish box he had installed next to the four-wheel-drive shift lever.
 
He flicked on the gadget, some kind of transmitter, and lights winked green on its panel.
 
Though Paige heard nothing, noticed no difference, Mike visibly relaxed.

“I don’t suppose you just came to your senses and surrendered to the authorities,” Paige said coldly.

Desperate to engage her in conversation, Mike looked at the blinking lights on the box.
 
“That’s an IFF transmitter — Identify Friend or Foe.
 
We’ve just passed into Nellis’s security net, but now their sensors will ignore us.
 
Every motion detector, sonic transducer, and microwave relay they have won’t matter any more.
 
The computers will log our entry but won’t raise any alarms.
 
We can thank another friend of the Eagle’s Claw, a Staff Sergeant Marlo, for this marvel of technology.
 
Our members can be found all over the area — in NTS, in Las Vegas, even in some parts of Nellis.”

“You sure know how to be sneaky in the name of mass destruction,” Paige said bitterly.
 
“I always admired you for being so smart, but this whole militia thing is so preposterous.”

Mike frowned, taken aback.
 
“The evidence is there for anyone to see, Paige — but they all refuse.
 
I
have seen reality, and I’ve got to do what’s necessary.
 
My conscience demands it.”

Paige rolled her eyes, making it clear she did not believe him.

He drove across Gold Flat, picking up speed.
 
Paige hoped he would strike a sharp rock and damage the vehicle, leaving them stranded with no hope of reaching his target, whatever it was.
 
Lost in the desert with a flat tire and a stolen nuclear warhead in back!

They drove for hours and hours through the darkest part of the night, after the moon set.
 
Paige had no idea where they were, but she would not give Mike any satisfaction by asking him.
 
She had not seen so much as a dirt road in some time.
 
She recalled how the band of hippie protesters had wandered into NTS on Tuesday, aimlessly hiking around the desert looking for the warehouses that hid UFOs.
 
Now Uncle Mike was chasing his own elusive phantom.

“We’re almost there, Paige, and then you’ll see what I mean.
 
I love my country.
 
Your dad loved it, and my wife loved it as well.”
 
Uncle Mike checked his notes, a Magellan GPS indicator, a map, then a sheaf of aerial photographs in a three-ring folder.

“Genny and I planned to join those caravans of senior citizen retirees with large RVs driving around to see the country for once in their lives.
 
We wanted to spend our golden years being gypsies, visiting the mountains, the plains, all the things American anthems are about.”
 
His hands tensed on the steering wheel, gripping it tightly.
 
“But she died first, and I don’t want to see America all alone.
 
So instead I’ll help to preserve it for future generations.”
 

“By spreading a cloud of radioactive fallout across four or five states,” she said with an angry snort.

Mike’s face wore a grim but passionate expression.
 
“My heart is good, Paige.
 
You know that.”
 
He reached over to touch her arm, but she drew away.
 
“Remember the bicycle?
 
Remember the coloring book I gave you when you were sick getting your tonsils out in the hospital?”
 
His voice carried an edge of desperation.
 
“Remember how I helped you with your math because you wanted to go to college and make something of your life?”