"Looks like we got two warm ones," the Major said. And Stella looked up. And saw two soldiers in full chemical warfare suits lifting the charred remains off the blackened ground. Stephen's head rolled back on a neck that was carbonized jerky and charcoal bone—and he smiled at her. Lips made of ashes, working—
This too shall pass.
A hand from behind her held something soft and cold and wet over her face, and she was allowed to forget.
12
Zane Storch only remembered two dreams from his whole adult life, and those only because he'd had them several hundred times each. Whether it was because of the gas or out of some craving for regimentation, he'd never quite lost the habit of sleeping the way he'd been trained in Rangers: controlled catnaps whenever time and enemy action allowed, seldom more than two hours, and the slightest noise jolted him into full awareness. It was for this reason as much as any other that he'd lived in Death Valley, where anything that made enough noise to wake up a soldier was probably worth waking up for.
The first was his sex dream, which was more or less the same dream he'd had since his first nocturnal emission at age eleven, and which had become the only outlet for sexual desire that Storch wanted or needed since he'd come home from the war. The contents of his sex dreams are none of your business.
The other dream was a lot stranger, although its purpose as a psychological outlet was every bit as self-evident as the first. He had first begun having it during the war, although he could not remember its details until long after.
He dreamed of the Rocky Horror Hostage Show.
When Saddam invaded Kuwait and took hostages from among the diplomatic contingent in that tiny country, they didn't just disappear into a cellar somewhere. Always hands-on and never camera-shy, Saddam wanted the world to see his hostages as his personal guests. So he set them up in a studio audience and wandered through the aisles, pressing the flesh, like some sort of Oprah-fied Hitler. It looked some kind of surreal gameshow, a totalitarian hybrid of
Let's Make A Deal
and
You Bet Your Life
with contestants competing for release or quick death at the hands of an off-camera executioner, and it had exactly the effect Saddam should've known it would. It drove American and European military personnel out of their minds with rage, as if the Butcher of Baghdad was copping a feel off their own wives and daughters, and motivated previously neutral or even antiwar television viewers the world over to believe that if Saddam wasn't evil, he was certainly rabid and needed putting down.
Storch dreamt of the Rocky Horror Hostage Show, as some clever Army pundit dubbed it, but with a difference. The show was American, with a slick gameshow host and a bevy of heavily armed chicks in Solid Gold Dancer outfits for guards. The audience were Iraqis: starved, shellshocked Republican Guardsmen with makeshift splints and bandages over awful, suppurating wounds; Kurdish peasants with the frozen faces of porcelain dolls from exposure to VX gas; veiled, robed women with arrow-slits in their veils from which flowed torrential stream of tears; the Shiite Bedouins who'd overrun Storch's squad's position in the Tigris valley. The host moved through the audience, asking them questions in English, yet almost too fast for Storch to understand; questions about American pop trivia, questions about the war, questions about their dictator's personal life, questions that provoked only blank stares and spurts of incomprehensible Arabic. When a question wasn't answered correctly, a deafening fanfare sounded and a dancer pressed a pistol to the contestant's temple and executed him or her.
Then something happened that never happened in the dream before, and Storch bolted into full wakefulness.
There was an explosion. The Hostage Show set vanished in a white blast that resolved into TV snow. Storch opened his eyes. He could still hear the snow, but now it had become the sustained, deafening roar of rocks tumbling. Storch rolled out of bed and scrambled to the camper door, peered out the window. Clouds of dust rolled past, gravel rained down from the roof. A cave-in. But he had heard a bomb. Had he dreamt it? He wanted to wait until he could see what he was diving into, but the cave-in might cut off any route to the surface, if it hadn't already. Then there was Hansen. And Sidra Sperling.
Storch rummaged through the drawers of the camper's kitchenette until he found a flashlight and a couple of dishcloths. He wrapped one over his nose and mouth, and folded the other up in his hip pocket in case Hansen needed it. A boulder slammed into the roof of the camper, rocking it on its shocks and making a dent visible from inside. Storch jumped out and ran down the tunnel, down the length of the ghostly fake-suicide traffic jam, to the mouth of Hansen's hermitage. Even running, he could feel the vibrations of the cave-in radiating outward through the earth. The wooden supports groaned, and here and there snapped like old bones in a vise. He supposed an aftershock was possible, but the ramifications of that were too paranoid, even on a day like today. Wherever Sidra Sperling's remains went, so went seismic havoc. Buggs would've loved it.
Storch stopped at the head of the tunnel, because the entrance to Hansen's grotto was now a dead end, an almost vertical wall of boulders, as if the ceiling of Hansen's cave had given in.
Or it had been blown up.
A timber directly above Storch's head cracked in half, and he heard the awful, determined grinding of huge rocks slipping out of place. He turned and sprinted back up the cave, two steps ahead of the second cave-in. His heart did its level best to leap out ahead of him, while his mind just spun in circles. He threw himself down in the berm of soft gravel at the mouth of the cave, coughing and choking on the dust that had worked its way under his makeshift gasmask. The stars were a dense powder spilled across the maddeningly big sky, the moon a gibbous lump blooming on the horizon. He rolled over on his back and stared at them, motionless.
That someone might've come for Sidra Sperling and destroyed the cave, as somebody destroyed his store, made the most sense. It was just turning out to be that kind of week. But then again, what kind of outfit would go to all the trouble to find the place, and then not search it thoroughly enough to find him?
Assuming such badasses existed, they'd probably have been crushed by the cave-in, which, like as not, was probably the result of a Hiram Hansen booby trap. Hansen wasn't one to let things get that far, though, unless he wanted them that way.
And what Hansen wanted most was to be left alone. The chill Storch felt was only half because of the wind.
Here Storch had shown up on Hansen's doorstep with a corpse, a rather remarkably weird corpse with a history, and Storch had involved Hansen in something no normal, sane person would want any part of. No, it was the simplest explanation. Hiram Hansen, who kept records of disappeared girls and obsessed about counterfeit suicides, had packed up his most irreplaceable treasures—and Sidra Sperling?—and lit out for the territories. Mexico, most likely. It was beginning to seem like the thing to do.
Whatever was going on here, Hansen's disappearance had severed his last connection to it. To his old life, such as it was. He lay there for a long time, letting the silence of the desert fill him up with blankness, until a voice swam up out of it.
"Good fucking riddance," he said out loud. He got up and stretched, picked his way back into the mine. The camper hadn't been crushed, and he got his clothes, a sleeping bag, some canned food and a warm bottle of Perrier out of the fridge. By the camper's registration stickers, he guessed the bottle had been sitting in there for fourteen years, and he normally hated mineral water. None of which made it feel any worse than heavenly when it washed the thick layer of grit down his throat. He grabbed two more bottles. It was going to take a while to find his truck.
The sun was not yet up, the wind roaring through the cab of his truck still bracingly chill, when he climbed up out of a narrow ravine and swung onto the highway, headed south. The desert outside, stripped of its associations of refuge and filial obligation, was endless rotting walls of ash, glowing mellowly in the predawn murk. He let himself shout wordless anger into the wind until his throat was hoarse and his head was clear. A more or less straight two hundred and forty miles of highway lay between him and the border. The red line down the dry hindquarters of the state unfolded in his mind's eye, becoming an exploded diagram of the journey, with likely spots (Greyhound depot in Johannesburg, Ryder truck rental in Red Mountain) to switch vehicles and gather provisions highlighted and running subroutines (disguises? Hostages?) to trump the towering obstacles that turned the open road into a gauntlet. He felt ready.
He was less than ten miles from Hansen's when a black van edged up behind him, flashing its lights to pass. He waved it on. The road ahead was a hypnotic straight line, undulating in subtle waves like a zipper in the sand. The van came alongside Storch's truck but didn't pass. His gut began to throb, as if with gas. His muscles began to ache, the humming vibration of the road penetrating him, like those ribbed contours on some turnpikes designed to awaken nodding late-night drivers. His ears ached the way they did whenever he dove too deep in a swimming pool. He looked left at the van, still pacing him. Suddenly the throb in his bowels became mailed fists wringing him out. He lunged forward into the steering wheel, starring the windshield with his forehead. He thrashed across the cab, if he could only get away from the van, get out of the truck, even at seventy-five miles an hour, he'd be okay if only he could get away from the sound that was coming from the van, that was crushing him to a pulp…
His truck leapt off the road and sailed a very long way before hitting a rock big enough to stop it. The only sound was the sizzling of steam pouring out of the ruptured radiator. The van pulled alongside him before his engine stalled, but not before he was asleep.
13
SPECIAL MEMORANDUM
FOR: Special Asst. Dir. Wendell Wyler,
Counterterrorism Section, FBI HQ, Washington D.C.
FROM: SA Martin Cundieffe,
Counterterrorism Section, Los Angeles Field Office
RE: Sgt. Zane E. Storch
I hope this is what you meant by "doing my homework." If you're already familiar with the Storch fugitive case (C99-22727A), please disregard this memo, but if not, I feel it merits your attention because it 1) is a case we are sanctioned to work, and 2) may be highly pertinent to our discussion of 5 July. If #2 invalidates #1, again, please disregard this memo, but please let me know ASAP so I don't get myself or anyone else into hot water.
This case came across my desk within hours of our meeting, and immediately struck me as highly relevant because of the suspect's background as well as the geographical significance. I won't bore you with the details, but if I may make so bold as to proffer an unsolicited analysis, I feel it incumbent upon me to forward my thoughts on this matter to you, in light of your warmly regarded trust in me on 5 July.
Sgt. Zane Ezekiel Storch served in the 5th Special Forces Group during the Gulf War. All records of his service are DOD-classified, but interviews with Furnace Creek-area residents indicate he suffered from symptoms corresponding to GWS (i.e., fatigue, aphasia, extreme chemical sensitivity), though they maintain he appeared to be in excellent physical condition, excepting a hand injury sustained in the war. His father, George Gorman Storch, a former Army Sergeant Major discharged by Section Eight, is currently a patient at Norwalk State Mental Institution, a manic with religiously oriented delusions, and potentially violent. The younger Storch would seem, then, to suffer from a psychosomatic disorder, rather than the allegedly physical suite of complaints common among Gulf War veterans, which is congruent with his questionable mental state. Storch appears to be the classic "lone nut" of whom acts such as these are sadly typical, but for a number of circumstantial factors which the agent in charge of the case fails to interpret adequately in his initial report (see Document #1, attached).
1) Thermopylae, the squatter community where Storch lived and operated his business, literally vanished on 4 July, shortly after Sgt. Storch allegedly shot one of his customers and burned down his own store. A number of anonymous and grossly contradictory tips coincide in their insistence that a government raid on Storch's place of business was staged by an unspecified agency at noon on 4 July, which precipitated the fire. One could, as the case agent has done, simply discard the tips, or one could take them at face value and begin calling round to ATF and DEA, and so on. (I have. No one has so much as surveilled Thermopylae in six months; the last contact, a DEA agent working undercover to pinpoint a supposed industrial-scale marijuana farm in the area, was made by the residents and rather savagely harassed, but came away convinced of their innocence). Or one could speculate that a militia organization affiliated with Storch posed as government agents to seize a cache of weapons in Storch's possession, either with or without Sgt. Storch's cooperation, and that his response was either a psychotic reaction to the ripoff or a preplanned bugout. If the Sheriff and his deputy were the sole witnesses to this transaction, the most likely scenario is the latter, masquerading as the former.
2) Storch was the employer of one Harley John Pettigrew (NCIC #4557439857; see Document #2, attached), a convicted illegal firearms dealer with associates in both militant anti-government and organized crime circles. Pettigrew was found dead in his motor home in Death Valley Junction at 2 PM on 4 July, an apparent suicide. A cordless phone in his hand, when auto-redialed, contacted Storch's business line.
3) Of the Special Forces A-Team in which Sgt. Storch served, three were KIA in the Gulf War; the other five received medical discharges and re-entered the private sector. Two have never collected veteran's benefits: they have no employment, financial or criminal records, and have not applied for passports. They have seemingly dropped off the face of the earth.