Craig Kreident #2 Fallout (32 page)

“Megatons,” Paige said.
 
“You know that if you detonate that, even way out here, you’ll be killing millions.
 
This storm will spread the radioactive fallout for thousands of miles, maybe even worse than if you had planted it in an underground parking garage in Las Vegas.
 
Here, there’s nothing to stop it — how can that help our country?”

Mike looked over at her, then gestured toward the Area 51 facility.
 
“You’re not blind, Paige.
 
You’re a smart little girl.
 
What do you think that place is?
 
Do you believe it’s a hangar for a crashed UFO and alien cadavers?
 
A chemical weapons plant?
 
A biological warfare research station?
 
No way.”
 

He snorted in disbelief.
 
“Think about it — I’m cleared to handle nuclear warheads.
 
Any day of the week, I can make a few phone calls, get all the approvals, sign a form, and take five megatons from Omega Mountain back to the DAF.
 
I’ve been in the weapons industry my entire professional career . . . but no one gives me more than a blank stare when I try to find out what’s up here.”
 

He narrowed his eyes, squinting through the rover’s dusty windshield.
 
“That isn’t any weapons manufacturing station.
 
That is no research laboratory.
 
You’ve been in research laboratories yourself.
 
Look
at the place!”

“It doesn’t look like Livermore,” Paige admitted, “but that doesn’t mean it’s anything more sinister.
 
It could well be a stockpile storage site.
 
Sure, the U.S. might be hiding some of its nuclear weapons up our sleeves, despite what the treaties say.
 
Maybe this is where they keep their ace in the hole.
 
It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“If that’s the case, then
I
would know about it,” Mike said, his face flushed.
 
“Believe me, I’m one of the few people they
would
inform if they’re going to divert items out of the stockpile — and they refuse to tell me squat about Area 51!”
 
He shook his head.
 
“This is something beyond the pale of normal defense activities.
 
This is outside the control of our elected government and the rights we as citizens have given to our representatives.”

Paige saw his bright eyes, his flushed face.
 
“So what do
you
think it is, then?
 
And why do you need a nuke to get rid of it?
 
Why is it worth contaminating the southwestern United States?”

He answered instantly, as if he’d been desperately waiting for her to ask.
 
“Dreamland is the training ground for an insidious United Nations Strike Force, whose mission is to absorb the government of the United States into a sanitized and compromised worldwide political organization.
 
I’ve seen the planes without markings, the troops.
 
Their efforts are already underway in Third World countries — the UN Peacekeeping Force is just a front.”
 
He made a raspberry sound.
 
“Peacekeeping!
 
‘Culture destroying,’ more like.
 

“Other countries can fight their own struggles for freedom.
 
America had to.
 
We have our freedom because we
earned
it.
 
Nobody just handed it to us for free.
 
It was part of our growing pains, but it was also a learning process.

“During the Cold War we achieved a level of maturity to handle the responsibility of nuclear weapons.
 
But do you think other countries, the North Koreans and Bosnians, the Irans or Iraqs, are
mature
enough to handle that terrible responsibility?
 
I don’t believe it for a minute.
 

“Despite the flaws and despite all the political arguing between the President and Congress, the Supreme Court, the state legislatures — our government is
ours
!
 
I can’t stand by when an insidious UN effort is being put in place with the cooperation of elements of our own society.
 
They mean to swallow up the best parts of what we’ve achieved and then combine it with other things from other countries, compromises, so that the entire system becomes one giant worldwide average — mediocrity!”

He extended his hand so briskly that he rapped his knuckles against the windshield.
 
“Inside that facility is a UN Command Center, large numbers of troops, weapons, computer systems, plans for a massive takeover of our national infrastructure, our government.
 
We have to eradicate it
all.

“They’ve already infiltrated people into high government positions, even the military.
 
They think it’ll be a bloodless takeover — but the Eagle’s Claw plans to shed plenty of blood.
 
Their blood.
 
Necessary blood for our freedom.”
 
The pleading look had returned to his hangdog eyes.
 
“I know this in my heart, Paige, and if you would open your mind, you’d believe it too.”

She stared at the vast building, but heard no sound, saw no movement.
 
Isolated for so long in Nevada, working in the nuclear weapons industry, Mike Waterloo had been forced to cooperate with his former enemies to dismantle everything he had built during his career, and it must have driven him over the edge.
 
He’d also had to contend with the shock of his wife’s death — not to mention the loss of Paige’s own father a year later . . . Paige’s father, who would have been a pressure-release valve for him, a sounding board to calm his paranoid delusions.

Mike’s expression remained so confident, so frozen in his convictions that Paige knew she had no chance to talk him out of it.
 
He didn’t seem to hear her.
 
“So what do we do now?” she said.
 
“Just wait here all day until somebody gives us a parking ticket?”

“Nobody will come out after us,” Mike said.
 
“We’re camouflaged, and sheltered in this gully.
 
The storm is already covering our tracks.
 
We arrived in darkness, and this vehicle is broadcasting an IFF signal.
 
The sensors automatically ignore us.
 
We’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Why don’t you just get it over with, if you want to blow us all to hell?”

“I
don’t
want to blow us all to hell,” he said.
 
“I didn’t want you in this at all.
 
If you’d only stayed away another few hours, you could have been out of this entirely . . . but I don’t know how I’m going to set you free now.”
 
His sad face looked intensely troubled, but Paige didn’t allow her heart to soften.

As they sat in continued silence, Paige heard the faint humming of a vehicle approaching in the dark, audible even over the increasing rumbles of thunder.
 
She turned to look just as Mike noticed it too.
 
Her heart surged with hope — perhaps an Air Force security squadron would apprehend them.
 

But when she saw the second camouflaged land rover barely visible against the broken landscape, she realized the vehicle was identical to what Mike had driven, also approaching from the south, as if it had picked its way through the night from the Test Site, through Nellis, here to Area 51.

Mike glanced at his watch.
 
“About time.
 
I’m sure
I
would have been reprimanded if I’d been this late.”
 
He climbed out of the rover to stand waiting.
 

Paige wondered if she should leap out and make a run toward Dreamland.
 
If she climbed the fence, no doubt alarms inside would summon an instant full-force response — but she also knew that Mike or the newcomer could shoot her down easily . . . and if she did manage to reach the fence, it was probably electrified, unless Groom Lake security teams gunned her down before they bothered to check her story.

Out of her own need to know, she turned to see the identity of Mike’s other militia accomplice.

His secretary, Sally Montry, stepped out of the second vehicle, dressed in casual clothes and wearing a murderous look on her face.

CHAPTER 39

Friday, October 24

5:23 A.M.

Rio Hotel and Casino

Las Vegas

Craig used his FBI badge and ID to convince the Rio’s night manager to let him into Paige Mitchell’s room.
 
But the suite was empty, the bed made, showing no signs of a struggle.
 
She had left no sign of where she had gone or what she meant to do.

Had she for some reason gone out to see her Uncle Mike . . . gotten herself involved in a dangerous situation while Craig was distracted with NEST searching for the warhead in Las Vegas?

In a daze, Craig rushed back through the Rio lobby, not hearing the slot machines or the buzz of gamblers, not seeing the lush jungle decor or the flashing lights and mirrors.
 
He felt grimy, tired, sore, and hungry, and he couldn’t see any chance for relief in sight.

Especially not now, not if Paige was in trouble.

He thought again of the paraphernalia Waterloo had left in his house, wishing the DAF Manager had given some inadvertent indication of where the stolen nuclear device was hidden.
 
But he had found no Las Vegas street maps, no diagrams of the downtown area, no target zone in the city.
 
Only those maps of NTS and Nellis and Groom Lake.

Unless the warhead wasn’t in Las Vegas at all.
 
Unless it had never been taken from NTS.
 

What if the bomb still remained on the vast reservation . . . hidden in the test range that covered thousands of acres?
 
Perhaps the militia had simply smuggled the weapon out to an isolated gully, waiting for their chance.
 
Who would think to look for the missing nuke out on the test range itself?

If Paige had figured it out for herself, figured out the connection with Waterloo, he could well believe that she would have made her own way out to the Test Site, snooping around, confronting her Uncle Mike at the DAF and getting herself in trouble. . . .

As he hustled out of the casino, his cellular phone rang.
 
Craig stood at the front doorway, waiting under the bright lights as he flipped open the antenna.
 
Goldfarb’s voice came in a rush.

“Craig, we’ve got the guy who blew up the railroad bridge yesterday!
 
Staff Sergeant John Marlo.
 
Found him in Dennisons, just like your tip said — but there’s no nuclear device here.
 
Our guy says it’s in a place no one will ever find in time, somewhere isolated, somewhere with lots of security checkpoints.
 
He also seemed baffled when I brought up the President’s layover.
 
Chances are he didn’t even know about it.
 
His papers say he was stationed at Nellis Air Force Range, north of the Test Site.”

Craig suddenly remembered his day up touring the test tunnels, and Waterloo’s weird fascination with the secret Groom Lake facility, Area 51 — and he connected that with the sketched map he had found in Waterloo’s house.
 

The Eagle’s Claw might have wanted to expose the suspicious testing programs, the covert activities at Groom Lake — or destroy them.
 
He felt cold as all of his assumptions fell into place.
 

“Dreamland,” he whispered.
 
If Waterloo could slip past all the security, it would be the perfect place to hide a nuclear warhead.

“I guess it’s good news then,” Goldfarb said.
 
“It doesn’t look like the bomb is in Las Vegas after all.”

“Don’t celebrate yet,” he said, remembering what Paige had told him, “with the size of that bomb, and with this storm blowing, the radioactive cloud is going to still make half of Nevada uninhabitable.”

“Go ahead, rain on my parade.”

Craig scanned for where he had parked his car in the Registration Only spots.
 
He spoke quickly into the phone.
 
“I’m heading out to the Test Site right now.
 
I just found out that Mike Waterloo is involved in the militia, some kind of big wheel.”

“
Waterloo’s
in the militia?” Goldfarb squawked.
 
“Holy cow, who’s next?”

“I’ll explain later — but he’s disappeared, and he might even have taken Paige hostage.
 
Meanwhile, have a helicopter meet me at the DAF — there’s a pad only a mile away — from there, we’ll need to head north into the desert.
 
See if you can convince Major Braden or June Atwood to get me into Nellis Air Force base.
 
I think Waterloo’s got the stolen bomb, and I think he’s hauling it to Groom Lake.
 
That’s where he’ll set it off.”

“The militia is going to
Area 51
?” said Goldfarb, sounding incredulous.
 
“What, they want to kidnap the aliens?”

“I’ll let you know when I get there.”
 
He switched off the phone as he raced for his rental car — and then he felt a strong hand grab him by the forearm.
 
Craig whirled, instantly alert, ready to struggle.
 

General Ursov stood there in his immaculate brown military uniform, dressed and ready to go.
 
“I have found you, Agent Kreident, and I know something is going on!” the Russian said stonily.
 
He stepped in front of the car door and waited, arms crossed, refusing to move.