Radiant Dawn

by Cody Goodfellow

  "Mr. Sperling, does the name Radiant Dawn mean anything to you?"

  The line went dead.

  Storch walked into the Sunnyvale Public Library and had to stop, had to grab at his temples and tell himself he hadn't walked into a giant beehive. Everywhere, beneath every hushed sound, the sinister buzzing of fluorescent lights, like the all-pervading, susurrant voice of the library's secret custodians. Like a tuning fork, it set up a resonance in the fillings in his teeth, like his mouth was full of hornets. His eyes took several moments to adjust to the darkness; in the meantime, all he could see was a sickly sea-green murk out of which flashing shapes swam, like the emerging details of an overexposed Polaroid.

  Storch stopped just short of the security portal, ignoring a woman who ran into his back as he considered the automatic still concealed in his waistband. It took a moment before he recognized that the portal wasn't a metal detector at all, only a screening device for detecting the foil security strips in the library books. By then, everyone at the circulation desk was staring at him, and he moved as quickly as he could across to the periodicals room. He found a computer in a shadowy alcove and set about trying to get some answers.

  The computer offered a keyword search feature for local and national newspapers. First, he tried 'Radiant Dawn.' Three hits, one each from the San Jose Mercury News, the Fresno Bee, and the Sacramento Bee. All three articles were more or less the same sort of fluffy human-interest story that leads the local news section on a Sunday morning. He read only the first few paragraphs of each.

  RADIANT DAWN HOSPICE OUTREACH SERVICE OFFERS RAY OF HOPE FOR TERMINAL CANCER PATIENTS

  Georgette Kassel, 13, loves to paint with watercolors. Her bright, cheery renderings of the flower garden outside her window cover every inch of wall-space in her room at the secluded Radiant Dawn Hospice Village, near Convict Lake. As she puts the finishing touches to her latest creation, she tells me that the sunflowers are her favorites.

  Georgette has had a harder row to hoe in life than most. Already an orphan and a ward of the state, she understands that she has less than three months to live. She has an especially aggressive brain tumor known as a Grade IV glioblastoma multiforme, which has spread through most of the tissue of her cerebrum. Radiation and chemotherapy have failed to stem the cancer's growth, and surgery was never an option. A massive regimen of medications keep her seizures under control, but doctors have written off Georgette, and hope only to sustain her quality of life for the time she has left. But Georgette smiles as she signs her sunflower picture and hangs it up to dry. "I still have hope," she says, in her soft, shy voice. "The counselors here have told me that with every new sunrise, there's the chance that something wonderful will happen."

  Storch scratched at the irritable stubble on his scalp. It had to be a coincidence. There was nothing in the fluff pieces that smacked of child abduction or genetic terrorism. Still, something nagged at him. If only they'd turn down those lights.

  He tried a search on Sidra Sperling. Twelve hits, the first few stories carried on UPI, the rest merely regional as interest and hope dwindled. He called up the listing for the first article, from Christmas Day, 1990, two days after the girl was taken.

  LOCAL GIRL MISSING, FEARED ABDUCTED

  Donald Sperling, 38, and his wife, Marie, 36, were en route to visit Donald's parents in Southern California, for the Christmas holiday when they pulled in to the Inyokern rest stop along Highway 395. What happened then shattered their plans, their Christmas, and their family.

  "She just went in to wash her hands," Sperling said through tears at an Inyo County Sheriff's Dept. press conference last night. "We didn't turn our backs on her for but a moment, while Marie was getting drinks and I checked the map. We never saw her come out."

  Inyo County's Sheriff Mavoli has formed a joint task force with the Kern County Sheriff and has asked for the FBI's help in picking up the trail of the missing girl…

  Storch rubbed his hands over his skull, cupped his ears. A few moments away from the lights, and it came to him. He ordered another search of Radiant Dawn, this time going back to the time of the kidnapping. Nothing new. He tried again, this time going back to the time of the girl's birth, the only other milestone he had. One hit, from December 12, 1981.

  UTOPIAN DESERT COMMUNE FOUND ABANDONED

  This morning, Sheriff's Deputies led reporters through the clapboard ghost town that lies in the nameless, bowl-shaped valley a mile east of the 395, and two miles south of Convict Lake. With windows knocked out, doors hanging ajar and tumbleweeds piling up against the exterior walls, it resembles most ghost towns of the Old West, but with a chilling difference. Only a few months ago, deputies say, this was a living, breathing community, albeit one you'd be hard-pressed to find on any map, and one where visitors were never welcome.

  Very little is known about the apparently defunct "New Age" commune that called itself Radiant Dawn…

  The same fucking name. In the same fucking place.

  A connection between the things he'd read nattered at him like the noise of the fluorescents, but he couldn't make out what it was trying to tell him for all the buzzing. Unable to stand it anymore, he lurched up and ran out.

  As he wandered the city, first on foot, and then on a bus, Storch tried to put together what he'd read. Maybe it was stupid, trying to get a handle on some secret organization fighting a covert war in California by reading old newspapers, but something about both groups irritated him, made him do something he hadn't been able to do properly since the war. It made him think deeply.

  Neither of the two organizations seemed to tie in to the abduction. One was a utopian hippie dream almost twenty years dead, the other a charitable organization for cheering up the doomed. But Donald Sperling, who still lived in the same house from which his daughter was taken and in which his wife had died, had bolted at the mention of the name.

  He found it passing strange that a bunch of weirdos living out in the desert should've been able to keep such a low profile until they disappeared. True, a commune was hardly cause for alarm in California in the 1970's, but Jim Jones' Peoples' Temple and the Manson Family were still raw wounds in the mass psyche back then, and a large group in the middle of nowhere under the leadership of a fringe religious guru should've attracted more attention. That they broke up four or five months before the girl's birth, that she was snatched from a rest stop that was practically their front door, compounded his certainty that this was the link. Indeed, it was the only thing that tied Sidra Sperling to Radiant Dawn. That and the say-so of a star-chamber of paramilitary lunatics. What had he fallen into, and when would he hit bottom?

  20

  Lt. Col. Mort Greenaway hated civilians. He hated SCUD hunts even more. His immediate future looked to be chockfilled with both.

  Never one to command from the rear, Greenaway had spent most of the last three days riding shotgun in a small, unarmed Navy TH-57 Sea Ranger helicopter, tracing the ever-expanding perimeter of their search field, watching the chopper's shadow sliding over a million different varieties of godforsaken wasteland, shepherding each of the motley assortment of search teams the Navy and FBI had mustered.

  To say they were a mixed bag was putting it mildly. The FBI agents he'd been sent, under a dickbrain named Hunt, were in charge of bracing the locals, coordinating with local law enforcement to perform house-tohouse interviews and surveillance. Fourteen teams of Navy SEALS swept the ground, from Joshua Tree National Monument to the Owens Valley. Greenaway was fast becoming disgusted with their lack of initiative. Their reports came more and more frequently and offered less and less in the way of useful data. They were freaked out, sent on a search when they were told only that it was not a drill, and placed under a strange commander. Like hunting dogs tracking a scentless fox for a new master, they were chasing their tails, especially after the accident.

  On the first day of the search, a SEAL team in the Panamint Range had come across an abandoned borax mineshaft out of which a copious
amount of smoke was pouring. The medic in the group had provoked the ribbing of his comrades when he identified the scent of marijuana in the smoke. Greenaway thought it sounded wrong, but ordered them into the mine before the park rangers or the local law enforcement took over. Four went in, and almost immediately tripped an explosive charge which collapsed the whole shaft, killing three of them. The rest of the SEALs took a negative shine to him thereafter, blaming him, rather than themselves, for exposing the team's ineptitude. Several near-fatal friendly fire exchanges had further enlivened the search into an exercise in logistical clusterfucking that would be studied by scholars of covert ops for generations to come. In another day, he hoped, his own people would be totally mobilized and could step into the main search, and things would go more smoothly.

  Greenaway hunted Scud missiles in Kuwait and western Iraq, and had come up empty, unless the hundred-odd wooden decoys they destroyed counted. The British SAS had run circles around them, picking off four launchers in their sector. No matter how well-schooled at taking down actors and mannequins, Delta Force was still a relatively green outfit, with only the Desert One debacle in Iran to their credit, while the SAS had been honed on countless anti-terrorist assignments, from Ireland to Hong Kong. Greenaway had earned his reputation for taking advice from nobody and paid for it in assault charges, but if he never seemed to learn, he could adapt. The lessons were not lost on him, and within a year, he had thoroughly drilled his teams to sweep hostile territory and isolate offensive forces, no matter how small or how well dug in. He had made zealots of his men, martyrs to the code of SpecWar. Greenaway silently hoped that the SEALs would continue fumbling and shooting at each other until he could replace them. His men wouldn't stand out; half of them would recon the entire eastern half of the state undercover as bikers, truckers, traveling salesmen, even wetbacks. His people would root out the group. It was a strange feeling not to be looking forward to that event. Now that Greenaway had been told who they probably were, he was more confident that he could find them, but the thought of actually neutralizing them almost reminded him of what it felt like to be afraid.

  Because he wasn't looking for terrorists.

  When the early morning meeting on the fifth of July had gotten out, Lt. Col. Greenaway had found himself invited to join the meeting's inner circle for a "corollary briefing" with the CIA, DIA, NSA and Rear Admiral Meinsen. Sibley, the CIA rep, looking freshly terrorized, took the floor and laid out an amended shortlist of suspects. Greenaway was familiar with more than a few of the names, and for once, he'd been stunned to silence rather than bored. There followed a lot of explaining, after which Greenaway took his leave with a Zip disk filled with photographs and scanned documents requiring a Top Secret clearance to review.

  Now, Sibley sat opposite him on the bench seats usually occupied by pilot trainees on this outdated old helicopter, sniping animatedly at one of his colleagues into a cell phone. Greenaway eyed Sibley's geek junior partner, clattering away on a laptop, and his own lieutenant, watching a small convoy of Navy trucks thread a condemned two-lane highway below. He tapped the lieutenant, who passed him a folded Geology Survey map on which he'd been marking their position.

  They were on the outskirts of Baker, a wide spot on the road to Las Vegas. The trucks were bound for an abandoned industrial park that a spotter plane had found to be occupied by a large group of people. Guards with small arms had been observed outside. Greenaway had seen the thermo shots the spotter chopper had taken last night, and had no interest in setting down. The groupings of the bodies inside the rusted out warehouses had been huddled together for warmth. They were illegal Mexican immigrants who'd paid the wrong people to get them across the border. Greenaway rubbed his temples, tugged at his beard until brittle red and silver hairs came out in his hands. In a week of searching the hottest, most desolate place in North America, they'd only succeeded in rooting out drug kitchens, smugglers, and well-armed hermits who'd been scattered from their squat-town by a crazed Gulf War vet who'd shot up the local law and set fire to a store. Greenaway had been out of the world entirely too long, but decided now that he'd missed absolutely nothing.

  Sibley was tapping his knee. Touching him. The urge to seize him by the lapels of his double-breasted blazer and heave him out into the noonday sun was overwhelming. The pleasure of the fantasy would have to do, for now.

  "There's a junkyard about two klicks south of our present position that merits a quick look, we think," Sibley said, his tone defensive in anticipation of another argument. The morning's sweep had amounted to a lively exchange of ideas on search methodologies, which had accomplished nothing, but put a lot of mileage on Greenaway's flying-lesson fantasy. Every trailer park, every burned-out gas station, every solitary derelict propane tank in the middle of an empty lot became a bone of contention, and here was Sibley with yet another, throwing around the royal we like Queen fucking Victoria and putting his sweat-slimed little pink rat-paw on his knee. At least Hunt wasn't here. He would've tried to bring a newscrew along.

  "What, are there a couple of helicopters parked out front?" Greenaway asked. "How many military reconnaissance missions have you overseen in the field, Mr. Sibley?"

  "How many Scud launchers did you and your teams find in Desert Storm, Lieutenant Colonel?"

  Greenaway just stared, then, while Sibley studied something fascinating on the empty desert floor, he switched on his headset and ordered the pilot to turn south and find the CIA's precious fucking junkyard.

  As it turned out, Sibley's junkyard had once served as the town drive-in, and the huge screen of whitewashed sheet metal still loomed over the lot like a shuttered window into another world, the cars stacked before it seemingly having gone to rot and rust waiting for it to open again. The marquee rose up out of a mound of tumbleweeds outside the yard. On one side, in faded red paint, LIBERTY SALVAGE YARD. On the other, the last drive-in features: RED DAWN and MOTE HELL, and a message: GOD LESS ERICA. Amen, Greenaway said in his heart.

  The Sea Ranger swept over the junkyard at about a hundred feet, banking so Greenaway could survey the interior at a glance. A cinderblock bunker, which once housed the projection booth and the snack bar, still stood in the center, and he spotted two Hispanic males in ragged flannel coats and jeans picking through the wreckage. They looked up and backed out of the blasting wash from the props, but didn't bolt.

  "Looks promising, Mr. Sibley," Greenaway said with syrupy contempt. "What's up your ass about this place?"

  Sibley looked absurdly proud of himself as he answered, "Going over Agent Cundieffe's files on activity in the region—"

  Cundieffe. The junior G-man behavioral scientist. The little paper-pushing eunuch had bothered Greenaway more than made any logical sense, not least because every speculation he'd offered at the meeting had dovetailed neatly with what the spook subcommittee had briefed him on later.

  "Remarkably exhaustive," Sibley went on. "Cundieffe's quite the overachiever. He covers reported incidents the local cops never even followed up on. About four years ago trucks came and went out of this yard at odd hours, and passersby thought they saw aircraft landing. The Baker sheriff investigated, staked the place out for two weeks, but never found anything. It was dismissed as a onetime illegal immigrant smuggling operation, and no further reports were ever filed. I think maybe your men should comb the area, check for underground bunkers, that sort of thing." He smiled, then turned the page. "Moving along, there's an old railyard just over the Cal-Neva border—"

  Greenaway raised the pilot. "Set down anywhere."

  Sibley went white. "What? We're not prepared for—"

  "Three SEALs died reconning a hole in the ground on my watch. You want to call searches? Fine. Do this one."

  The helicopter set down just outside the front gate, throwing up a sandstorm into which Greenaway and his lieutenant leapt readily, but Sibley had to be dragged.

  "This isn't how it's done, Lieutenant Colonel. We're putting ourselves at risk—"

&nbs
p; "Then you're beginning to see how much confidence I have in you and your tip sheet," Greenaway shouted back, and made for the gate. The four Delta operatives sitting in the back row of seats sprang out and took up a perimeter around the chopper.

  A sun-bleached plastic sign hung from the chain-link fence of the gate, TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN, but there was no sign of dogs, and the pair of Mexicans who met them at the gate seemed none too eager to talk, let alone devour them. Greenaway ordered his lieutenant to take the patrol group and walk the yard, with both eyes on the ground, and shouted at Sibley's lackey to do the same. The milquetoast little creep looked at Sibley for a countermand, but Sibley was wary of pushing Greenaway any further. The group of them went off at right angles, eyes glued to the oil-spattered sand, while Greenaway and Sibley rushed to brace the Mexicans. The pair of them stood looking sheepish

  "Buenos dias, amigos," Sibley stammered in Yale Spanish, "Donde esta el jefe?"

  "Shut up, shithead," Greenaway hissed in Sibley's ear. He turned to the workers and said, in unaccented peasant Spanish, "The United States needs your help today, gentlemen. The United States helps its friends, yes?"

  The Mexicans looked at each other, then back at Greenaway. "You looking for smugglers?" one of them asked at last. "This is a clean place. No drugs here." Greenaway pegged a noticeable Salvadoran accent in the man's mumbled response.

  "You are from El Salvador, yes?" the man nodded. "Came here to get away from the troubles, yes?" The man nodded again. "Then you know how the US Army feels about guerrillas. That's what we're looking for today. Guerrillas."

  "Salvadoran guerrillas?" the man asked, then smiled. "No, no, no. We love this country. America number one!"

  "Yes indeed," Greenaway answered, smiling. "My stupid colleague here," he pointed at Sibley, who'd retreated back into his cell phone, "thinks there's an ammunition dump here, or close by. Many big barrels of bad chemicals, maybe stored in a cave or a truck trailer, maybe buried in the sand. Have you seen anything like that around here?"