Deep Fire Rising Page 5

Sensing a change in lighting as he neared the exit, Mercer paused, gave Sykes’s warning a half second’s consideration, and pulled the helmet from his head.

  What he saw took his breath away.

  The hangar was several orders of magnitude larger than the one at Andrews, lit with powerful lights recessed in the ceiling ten stories over his head. The huge doors, easily large enough to accommodate a commercial airliner, had already closed behind the Gulfstream. It wasn’t the building’s multiacre dimensions that caught his attention; they barely made an impression. Nor did the matte-black snout of a B-2 Stealth bomber as it loomed like some nightmare creature, its knife-edge silhouette interrupted only by the integrated engine nacelles and her two-man cockpit.

  What drew his attention was the saucer-shaped aircraft hovering a short distance to his left. The craft floated soundlessly a couple feet above the concrete floor. It was just there, impossibly hanging in space. The saucer was roughly thirty feet in diameter and maybe eight feet tall, composed of a silvery material with a sleek texture.

  Then Mercer did a double take and burst out laughing even as Sykes came bundling up behind him. What he thought was alien writing on the side of the aircraft was actually a very stylized font that spelled out ACME SAUCER COMPANY. The hovering disc was an elaborate model, some technician’s idea of a joke. The cables suspending it from the ceiling became apparent when Mercer looked for them.

  There was no sign of the armed security Sykes had warned him about.

  Who was waiting there made Mercer do his second double take. Ira Lasko stood off to the side with a woman in a white lab coat. They were beyond easy conversation range, so Mercer turned his head to address Sykes. “Thought you’d never met Ira.”

  Sykes shrugged. “Hell, I’m not really your escort either. Admiral Lasko sent me to D.C. yesterday and I just happened to catch this flight back.”

  Mercer descended the boarding stairs and crossed the fifty feet to Ira. The deputy national security advisor was in his mid-fifties, painfully thin, but with unbelievable strength for his size. He kept his head completely shaved in a tactical retreat from pattern baldness. It leant him a determined air that augmented his pugnacious jaw and penetrating mind. His eyes were a watchful brown under silvering brows. He wasn’t particularly tall at five feet seven, but his authority was not in doubt.

  Ira wore khaki pants, a matching shirt and a Navy bomber jacket. The temperature in the hangar barely reached fifty degrees. Despite its desert location, Area 51 lay nearly five thousand feet above sea level.

  “I told the security chief that you wouldn’t wear the helmet if the plane had to park in here.” Ira waved toward the far side of the hangar, where futuristic-looking shapes—aircraft, no doubt—were hidden under large tarps. “That’s why the really interesting stuff was covered up.”

  Mercer’s anger at the tactics to get him here had been replaced by a sense of awe. He was being granted a peek at the innermost sanctum of government secrecy. If the conspiracy nuts were correct, things went on here even the president didn’t know about. Still, he wouldn’t give Ira the satisfaction of showing that the surroundings had shaken his composure. He took Ira’s proffered hand. “Are you going to explain why you felt it necessary to have me shanghaied? A phone call and a plane ticket to Vegas would have sufficed.”

  “I’ve been calling your place for two days,” Ira replied. “I didn’t leave a message because Harry kept answering the phone.” He and Harry had swapped war stories on several occasions. Ira had spent his early naval career aboard submarines, and Harry had spent his dodging them in the Pacific. “You think if I let on that you were coming here that he wouldn’t be on the next plane out?”

  Mercer couldn’t deny that possibility, no, inevitability. “Maybe he should be out here. Don’t forget, he saved my ass in Panama last fall.”

  “And ran up about six grand in gambling debts on your credit card.”

  Mercer’s smile turned to a frown. Ten thousand was closer to the truth.

  “Besides,” Ira continued, “you won’t need him watching your back. You’re out here for a straightforward job. Nothing fancy, but something you’re eminently qualified for. A job that we consider vital.”

  Mercer cocked an eyebrow. “We?”

  Ira turned to the woman standing at his side. “This is Dr. Briana Marie. She’s heading the project. She’ll explain everything.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Doctor.” Mercer shook the petite brunette’s hand. She wore no makeup; her girl-next-door appeal didn’t need any. He laughed to himself when she used her left hand to unnecessarily wipe at the lapel of her lab coat. Her wedding ring flashed in the bright light. Then he considered the situation from her perspective. There were probably a hundred men for every woman here and an early declaration of her marital status must have become habit. “Are you an M.D.?”

  “Nuclear physicist,” she replied in a remarkably deep voice.

  The answer surprised Mercer. He looked to Ira.

  “A lot more than testing aircraft takes place here,” the admiral explained. “All of it under complete compartmentalization. Hell, I only know a few things under development and I’m on the president’s staff.”

  “A case of the right hand not knowing what the left is up to?” Mercer joked.

  “The personnel here don’t even know there is a left hand,” Dr. Marie deadpanned.

  “Even with your top secret clearance,” Ira went on, “I had to pull some strings so you’d know the details of this operation. The men you’ll be working with have no idea.”

  Mercer got a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the weather. He’d spent enough time with Ira to fairly judge his moods. The stress lines around his eyes and on his forehead hadn’t been there the last time they’d shared a drink at Tiny’s. And his pallor went far beyond a normal end-of-winter hue. “What’s going on here, Ira?”

  Briana Marie answered, “There’s been an accident. People are dead. We need you to carry on with their work.”

  The whistle of wind beyond the hangar doors sounded like a mourning dirge.

  Mercer learned he’d be spending the night at the main complex. Tomorrow he’d be taken to an even more secret base on the Area 51 grounds, a place Ira called DS-Two. Ira asked Captain Sykes to show him to his billet in a building behind the hangar. A metal roof covered the walkway, presumably to hide foot traffic from orbital observation.

  The room was like any hotel Mercer had ever stayed at, only the door locked from the outside. To leave, he had to buzz a uniformed staffer seated in the barracks’ reception area. He took his first shower since Canada, thirty-six hours and roughly five thousand air miles ago. Returning west had fortunately nullified his jet lag. As the scalding water sluiced across his body, he thought of the old joke about a harried tourist on a package tour. “Oh, it’s Monday. Then this must be Rome.”

  By the time he’d toweled dry, he’d figured out what Dr. Marie was working on. With Yucca Mountain only a short distance away, the answer was obvious.

  Sykes was waiting for him at the reception desk when the corporal on duty allowed him out of his room.

  “Is this your regular posting?” Mercer asked as Sykes led him across the facility.

  “Nah,” Sykes drawled. “Me and my team have been here a month.”

  “Team?”

  “Delta Force.” This was the army’s elite hostage rescue team. “If you don’t mind a little free advice, Doc, I’ve learned you get along better out here if you don’t ask too many questions.”

  Despite their awkward introduction, Mercer found he liked the soldier. He’d already realized his slow demeanor wasn’t laziness. Rather, Sykes possessed a cool deliberation, as if he knew when he woke each morning every action his body would take and every word he’d need to speak. It was only a matter of doling them out at the right time.

  “And let me guess,” Mercer commented, “one question is too many?”

  Sykes grinned. “You’re catching on.”


  Sykes led him to a nondescript building, a slab-sided office cube with the architectural flair of a Soviet apartment house. Most of the base had been built in the 1960s and substantially expanded in the ’80s, yet it retained the Cold War sterility of its roots. The buildings Mercer could see were laid out in geometric blocs. There was no ornamentation, no landscaping and certainly no streetlights.

  Nor, he noticed, were there any people. It was like walking around a postapocalyptic ghost town.

  “Kinda creepy, huh?” Sykes seemed to be reading Mercer’s thoughts as they reached the building’s door. “I guess the isolation really gets to some of the people out here, having to live under cover all the time. A couple days after I got here, a bunch of the younger soldiers were given permission to put on a show for a Chinese spy satellite.”

  “What’d they do?” Mercer followed Sykes to a flight of stairs. The building’s interior was as drab as the outside.

  “They laid themselves out on the runway in nothing but their birthday suits. They used their bodies to spell out ‘Up yours, Mao.’ ”

  Mercer laughed. “Would the Chinese be able to see it?”

  “Shit, they’ve stolen enough of our technology to be able to tell which ones were circumcised.”

  At the head of the stairs, Sykes opened a paneled door into a conference room, then told Mercer that Ira would escort him back to his room. The two men shook hands at their parting.

  Heavy drapes were drawn over the room’s picture window, and banker’s lamps reflected puddles of cherry light off the burnished table. Along one wall were photographs of the U-2 spy plane. Ira sat at the head of the table, his jacket draped over his chair. He’d had the foresight to bring a bottle of his favorite Scotch and a bucket of ice.

  Mercer accepted a glass gratefully. Though not a Scotch drinker, this had shaped up to be one of those days. Dr. Marie, on Ira’s left, drank from a bottle of water.

  Sitting opposite the physicist, Mercer saluted them both with his drink, knocked it back in two quick swallows then shredded their veil of secrecy with his accurate hypothesis. “You’re building a subterranean repository for undocumented nuclear waste, like what the Department of Energy is constructing at Yucca Mountain.”

  The silence had the weight of lead.

  Dr. Marie finally managed to stammer, “How did you . . . ,” before her voice failed her.

  Ira merely laughed.

  For half a century America’s nuclear power plants had been splitting untold tons of radioactive material to extract its energy. The result was a vastly more concentrated product than what went into the reactors, a deadly waste that wouldn’t lose its lethality for millennia. The short-term solution had been to store this waste in cooling pools at the plants. The only viable long-term disposal method was to find a suitable place to bury it and hope to God that they could put a heavy enough cork on it to keep the nuclear genie in its bottle.

  Work was currently under way to construct a pair of fourteen-mile tunnels a thousand feet below Yucca Mountain. The waste would be stored in rooms excavated off these tunnels. Even with the water table lying a further thousand feet below the repository, extraordinary measures were to be taken to prevent seepage from coming into contact with the impenetrable casks that would contain the radioactive materials.

  The forty thousand tons of nuclear waste currently stockpiled would be moved to the facility over the next two decades. When the repository reached its seventy-seven-thousand-ton capacity, there would be a century of additional monitoring before the complex was completely sealed in 2116.

  Mercer gave Dr. Marie an ironic smile. “To answer your almost asked question, it’s the only thing that makes sense. We’re maybe forty miles from Yucca Mountain, you’re a nuclear engineer and my principal job is digging tunnels. That adds up to only one thing. Throwing Ira’s presence into the mix just gives this situation the right touch of subterfuge.”

  “I resent that defamation of my character,” Ira grumbled without malice. “And your assessment is a bit off. The waste we plan to store here is documented. What we want to do is bring in most of the really nasty stuff before anyone knows it’s on the move.”

  “By nasty you mean the waste left over from our weapons program and by anyone you mean terrorists?”

  “Exactly.” Ira recharged Mercer’s glass. “We want to do the same thing they did when they transported the Hope Diamond.”

  Mercer knew that story well. The last time the fabled diamond was moved from its home at the Smithsonian to New York City for a thorough examination and cleaning the security had been unprecedented—armored cars, police escorts and a large contingent of guards. Yet when they arrived at Harry Winston’s Jewelers in Manhattan, the box containing the fabulous gem was empty. What no one knew, not the guards, not the media or the public, was that the security entourage had been a ruse to throw off potential thieves. The stone had actually been sent in a nondescript package through the regular mail.

  Dr. Marie leaned forward in her chair. “We’ll use standard shipping casks and all the regular safety devices, but we want to avoid the media attention that would tip off terrorists or anyone else who wants to derail the operation. By shipping material in secret, we eliminate the temptation.”

  “How long do you plan to keep the waste here?” Mercer asked.

  “It’ll be moved into the permanent repository over time. Because of the heat generated by the material we’ll be storing here, it has to be spread out all through the Yucca Mountain facility.”

  “What we’re looking to build,” Ira interrupted, “is a temporary holding area away from media attention and out of reach of terrorists. Nothing will remain here by the time the main site is sealed.”

  Leaning back, Mercer digested what he’d learned. He grasped the need for what Ira wanted to do. He knew that a great deal of nuclear policy was based on emotion rather than science, although he didn’t discount the horror if there ever was a major catastrophe, or even a minor one. By moving the worst of the waste before anyone knew it was happening, Dr. Marie felt she could cut the nation’s anxiety levels as well as better protect the shipments. It made sense because one way or the other the material would be transported.

  He understood the need for secrecy. What they hadn’t explained is the urgency, and he was willing to wait for hours before asking that question. While it was Ira’s nature not to divulge any more than necessary, Mercer wouldn’t agree to help until he knew the whole truth. He didn’t take it personally. It was the price he paid for his friendship with a professional spy.

  Neither Ira nor Mercer showed the least discomfort sitting next to each other in silence. Dr. Marie, however, felt the urge to fill the lull. “We had an accident two days ago. A cave-in. We’ve been running twenty-four hours a day in three shifts, ten men per shift. The collapse occurred during a shift change. Fifteen men, including two shift supervisors, were killed.”

  “The other five?” Mercer asked.

  “Escaped unharmed,” she replied. “For security reasons, we don’t want to bring in any more miners. However, we all felt that we needed a second engineer. When our request reached Admiral Lasko, he said he had the right person. You’re a mine engineer who already has a high enough security clearance to work here.”

  Again, Mercer noticed, nothing was said about the urgency.

  “Listen, Mercer.” Ira’s voice deepened. “We’re already two months behind schedule. The tunnels should already be done and contractors brought in to handle water seepage problems. The first load of waste will be arriving in one hundred twenty-one days.”

  “Why so precise?”

  “Because a storage pool at Oak Ridge won’t be able to take any more spent fuel rods and they’re scheduled to replace the current fuel assemblies in an experimental fast-breeder reactor in a hundred twenty-one days. We want to bring what’s in the pool here rather than shuffle it to another facility.”

  Satisfied with the answer, Mercer asked the next question that was
bothering him. “I was told I’d be here for a week. Obviously that’s bull. I’m in the middle of a contract with De Beers. How long do I have to put them off? Am I here for the two months you said you’re behind?”

  Marie shook her head. “Our remaining shift boss says we’re no more than two weeks from breaking into the subterranean chamber we’re planning on using. It’s a natural pocket in the rock. Our original geologic survey said it’s a hollow space left behind after an intrusive magma dike subsided.”

  That’s where the seepage Ira mentioned came into play, Mercer thought. Though not common, such a dike—basically a tongue of molten rock injected into the surrounding strata—can drain back into the central magma chamber that spawned it. In this situation, it leaves an empty cavity in the earth that often fills with water. Once they got the hydrology handled, it made sense to use this natural chamber for their short-term repository.

  “Who did the original survey?” he asked, doubting they’d found a drained dike. It was more likely a sill or laccolith, which ran with the grain of sedimentary layering rather than against it.

  “Gregor Hood.”

  Mercer nodded. “I know him. He takes a while, but he’s good. What about the other shift supervisor? Who have you got?”

  “Donald Randall, he’s a professional miner from Kentucky.”

  It took a moment for the name to sink in. “Donny Randall?”

  “He prefers Donald,” Dr. Marie said primly, as if maintaining such niceties could somehow lessen the feeling of loathing Randall created.

  Mercer’s eyes bored into Ira’s. His voice went flint-hard and accusatory. “You hired Randall the Handle? Do you know what an effing psychopath he is?”

  Ira looked away. “We’ve had some complaints about him, but it’s too late. He’s already here and we can’t bring in anyone else.”

  Donny Randall, Randall the Handle, got his nickname in South Africa before the end of apartheid. He’d gone there because his reputation for quick violence had gotten him booted from the United Mine Workers and blackballed from every mine in the States. South Africa became a perfect place for him. It wasn’t so much that he was racist, he was simply sadistic. Back then the black miners had no way to redress labor issues so he could be as brutal as he wanted without fear of retribution.