Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  Friday night. Which meant that choppers full of soldiers had been

  dispatched from distant Shenkfield at least half an hour earlier, and

  that the Army knew in advance the "accident" was going to happen.

  Tearing a crescent roll, Dom said, "If Falkirk and a DERO company flew

  in and took over security on the quarantine line so soon after the

  crisis hit . . . well, it means the Army must've had advance

  warning."

  "But then why didn't they stop it from happening?" Jorja Monatella asked

  as she cut her daughter's serving of turkey into bite-size pieces.

  "Apparently, they couldn't stop it," Dom said.

  "Maybe there was a terrorist attack on the truck, and maybe Army

  Intelligence only got wind of it just before it went down," Ernie said.

  "Maybe," Dom said doubtfully. "But they would've gone public with that

  kind of story if it happened. So it must've been something else.

  Something involving top-secret data of such importance that only DERO

  troops could be trusted to keep quiet about it."

  Brendan Cronin had a heartier appetite than anyone at the table, but his

  temporal appetite did not diminish the spiritual air that had surrounded

  him. He swallowed some baked corn and said, "This explains why there

  weren't hundreds of people on those ten miles of interstate when the

  thing happened, as there should've been at that hour. If the Army

  sealed it off ahead of the event, they had time to get most traffic out

  of the danger zone before anything actually happened."

  Dom said, "Some didn't get out, saw too much, and were held and

  brainwashed with the rest of us who were already here at the motel."

  For a while everyone joined in the discussion and arrived at all the

  same theories and unanswerable questions that had occurred to Dom and

  Ginger at the newspaper offices earlier in the day.

  Finally, Dom told them about the important discovery he and Ginger had

  made when, as an afterthought, they had looked through issues of the

  Sentinel published during the weeks following the toxic spill. When

  they had finished poring through editions for the week of the crisis,

  Ginger had suggested that clues to the secret of what really happened on

  the closed highway that night might be hidden in other news, in unusual

  stories that appeared to have nothing to do with the crisis but were, in

  fact, related to it. They pulled more issues from the files, and by

  studying every story from a paranoid perspective, they soon found what

  they hoped for. One place in particular figured in the news in such a

  way that it seemed linked to the closure of I-80.

  "Thunder Hill," Dom said. "We believe that's where our trouble came

  from. Shenkfield was just a ruse, a clever misdirection to focus

  attention away from the real source of the crisis. Thunder Hill."

  Faye and Ernie looked up from their plates in surprise, and Faye said,

  "Thunder Hill's ten or twelve miles northnortheast of here, in the

  mountains. The Army has an installation up there, too-the Thunder Hill

  Depository. There're natural limestone caves in those hills, where they

  store copies of service records and a lot of other important files, so

  they won't lose all copies if military bases in other parts of the

  country are wiped out in a disaster ... nuclear war, like that."

  Ernie said, "The Depository was here before Faye and me. Twenty years or

  more. Rumors have it that files and records aren't the only things in

  storage there. Some believe there's also huge supplies of food,

  medicines, weapons, ammunition. Which makes sense. In case a big war

  breaks out, the Army wouldn't want all its weapons and supplies on

  ordinary military bases because those would be the first nuked. They've

  surely got fallback caches, and I guess Thunder Hill is one of those."

  "Then anything might be up there," Jorja Monatella said uneasily.

  "Anything," Ned Sarver said.

  "Is it possible the place isn't just a storage dump?" Sandy asked.

  "Could they also maybe be doing some kind of experiments up there?"

  "What kind of experiments?" Brendan asked, leaning over to look past

  Ned, beside whom he was seated.

  Sandy shrugged. "Any kind."

  "It's possible," Dom said. The same thought had occurred to him.

  "But if there wasn't a toxic spill on I-80, if it was something at

  Thunder Hill that went wrong," Ginger said, "how could it have affected

  us, more than ten miles to the south?"

  No one could think of an answer.

  Marcie, who had been preoccupied with her moon collection for most of

  the evening and who had said nothing during dinner, put down her fork

  and piped up with a question of her own: "Why's it called Thunder Hill?"

  "Sweetie," Faye said, "that's one I can answer. Thunder Hill's really

  one of four huge, connecting mountain meadows, a long sloping piece of

  high pastureland. It's surrounded by a great many high peaks, and

  during a storm, the place acts like a sort of . . . well, a sort of

  funnel for sound. The Indians named it Thunder Hill hundreds of years

  ago because thunder echoes between those peaks and rolls down the

  mountainsides, and it all pours in on that one particular meadow in a

  most peculiar way, so that it seems as if the roar isn't coming out of

  the sky, but as if it's coming right up out of the ground around you."

  "Wow," Marcie said softly. "I'd probably pee my pants."

  "Marcie!" Jorja said as everyone broke into laughter.

  "Well, gee, I probably would," the child replied. "You member when

  Grandma and Grandpa came over to dinner at our place, and there was a

  big storm, really big, and some lightning struck the tree in our yard,

  and there was this boom!

  and I peed my pants?" Looking around the table at her new extended

  family, she said, "I was soooo embarrassed."

  Everyone laughed again, and Jorja said, "That was more than two years

  ago. You're a bigger girl now."

  To Dom, Ernie said, "You haven't told us yet why Thunder Hill is the

  place, rather than Shenkfield. What'd you find in the newspaper?"

  In the Sentinel for Friday, July 13, exactly one week after the closure

  of I-80 and three days after its reopening, there was a report of two

  county ranchers-Norvil Brust and Jake Dirkson-who were having trouble

  with the Federal Bureau of Land Management. A disagreement between

  ranchers and the BLM was not unusual. The government owned half of

  Nevada, not merely deserts but a lot of the best grazing land, some of

  which it leased to cattlemen for their herds. Ranchers were always

  complaining that the BLM kept too much good land out of use, that the

  government ought to sell off part of its holdings to private interests,

  and that leases were too expensive. But Brust and Dirkson had a new

  complaint. For years they leased BLM land surrounding a

  three-hundredacre Army installation, the Thunder Hill Depository. Brust

  held eight hundred acres to the west and south, and Dirkson was using

  over seven hundred acres on the east side of Thunder Hill. Suddenly, on

  Saturday morning, July 7, though four years remained on Brust's and

  Dirkson's leases, the BLM took five h
undred acres from Brust, three

  hundred from Dirkson; and at the request of the Army, those eight

  hundred acres were incorporated into the boundaries of the Thunder Hill

  Depository.

  "Which just happens to be the very morning after the toxic spill and the

  closure of I-80," Faye observed.

  "Brust and Dirkson showed up Saturday morning to inspect their herds,

  per their usual routine," Dom said, "and both discovered that their

  livestock had been driven off most of the leased pasture. A temporary

  barbed-wire fence was being thrown into place along the new perimeter of

  the Thunder Hill Depository."

  Having finished dinner, Ginger pushed her plate aside and said, "The BLM

  simply told Brust and Dirkson it was unilaterally abrogating their

  leases, without compensation. But they didn't receive an official

  written notice till the following Wednesday, which is extremely unusual.

  Ordinarily, a notice of termination comes sixty days in advance."

  "Was that kind of treatment legal?" Brendan Cronin asked.

  "Right there's the problem of doing business with the government," Ernie

  told the priest. "You're dealing with the very people who decide what's

  legal and what isn't. It's like playing poker with God."

  Faye said, "The BLM's despised around these parts. No bunch of

  bureaucrats is more high-handed."

  "That's what we gathered from reading the Sentinel, " Dom said. "Now,

  Ginger and I might've figured the Thunder Hill business was just

  coincidental, that the BLM just happened to go after that land the same

  time as the crisis on I-80. But the way the government dealt with Brust

  and Dirkson after the land was seized was so extraordinary it made us

  suspicious. When the ranchers hired attorneys, when stories about the

  cancellation of their leases began appearing in the Sentinel, the BLM

  did a sudden about-face and offered compensation, after all."

  "That's not a bit like the BLM!" Ernie said. "They'll always make you

  drag them into court, hoping litigation will wear you down."

  "How much were they willing to pay Brust and Dirkson?" Faye asked.

  "The figure wasn't revealed," Ginger said. "But it was evidently darned

  good, because Brust and Dirkson accepted it overnight."

  "So the BLM bought their silence," Jorja said.

  "I think it was the Army working secretly through the BLM," Dom said.

  "They realized the longer the story was in the news, the more chance

  there was of someone wondering about a link between the crisis on I-80

  that Friday night and the unorthodox seizure of land the very next

  morning, even if the two events were ten or twelve miles apart."

  "Surprises me somebody didn't make the connection," Jorja said. "If you

  and Ginger could spot it this long after the fact, why didn't anyone

  think of it then?"

  "For one thing," Ginger said, "Dom and I had the enormous benefit of

  hindsight. We know there was a lot more going on during the days of the

  crisis than anyone suspected at the time. So we were specifically

  looking for connections. But that July, all the hoopla about a toxic

  spill diverted attention from Thunder Hill. Furthermore, there was

  nothing extraordinary about ranchers fighting the BLM, so nothing in the

  situation linked it in anyone's mind with the I-80 quarantine. In fact,

  when the BLM made that totally out-of-character offer to Brust and

  Dirkson, a Sentinel editorial praised the repentant attitude of the

  government and prophesied a new age of reason."

  "But from what you've told us," Dom said to Faye and Ernie, "and from

  what else we've read, that was the first and last time the Bureau of

  Land Management dealt reasonably with ranchers. So it wasn't a new

  policy-just a one-time response to a crisis. And it's too coincidental

  to believe that the crisis evolving at Thunder Hill was unrelated to the

  crisis simultaneously under way here along the interstate."

  "Besides," Ginger said, "once our suspicion was aroused, we got to

  thinking that if the trouble that night had been related to Shenkfield,

  there'd have been no need for the Army to use DERO troops for security.

  Because the soldiers stationed at Shenkfield would already have full

  security clearance in all matters related to that base, and there

  would've been nothing about a Shenkfield crisis too sensitive for them

  to see. The only reason DERO would've been called in is if the crisis

  was utterly unrelated to Shenkfield, involving something the soldiers at

  that base were not cleared for."

  "So if there're answers to our problems," Brendan said, "we'll most

  likely find them at the Thunder Hill Depository."

  "We already suspected the story about a spill was less than half true,"

  Dom said. "Maybe there was no truth to it at all. Maybe the crisis had

  nothing to do with Shenkfield. If the real source was Thunder Hill, the

  rest was just smoke they blew in the public's eyes."

  "It sure feels right," Ernie said. He had finished dinner, too. His

  silverware was neatly arranged on the plate, which was almost as clean

  as before dinner, evidence that his military discipline and order had

  not departed him. "You know, part of my service career was in Marine

  Intelligence, so I'm speaking with some experience when I say this

  Shenkfield stuff truly does smack of an elaborate cover-story."

  Ned's frown exaggerated his pronounced widow's peak. "There're a couple

  of things I don't understand. The quarantine didn't extend from Thunder

  Hill all the way down here. There were miles of territory in between

  that weren't sealed off. So how did the effects of an accident on

  Thunder Hill leap-frog over all that distance and come down on our

  heads, without causing trouble between there and here?"

  "You're not dull-witted," Dom said. "I can't explain it, either."

  Still frowning, Ned said, "Another thing: The Depository doesn't need a

  lot of land, does it? From what I've heard, it's underground. They've

  got a couple of big blast-doors in the side of the hill, a road leading

  up to the doors, maybe a guard post, and that's it. The three hundred

  acres you mentioned-the area around the entrance-is plenty big enough

  for a security zone. So why the land-grab?"

  Dom shrugged. "Beats me. But whatever the hell happened up there on

  July sixth, it prompted two emergency actions on the part of the Army:

  first, a temporary quarantine down here, ten or twelve miles away, until

  we witnesses could be dealt with; second, an immediate enlargement of

  the security zone around the Depository, up there in the mountains; a

  secondary quarantine that's still in effect. I have a hunch ... if

  we're ever going to find out what happened to us-what's still

  happening-we're going to have to dig into the activities up on Thunder

  Hill."

  They were all silent. Though everyone was finished with dinner, no one

  was ready for dessert. Marcie was using her spoon to draw circles in

  the greasy residue of turkey gravy on her plate, creating fluid and

  temporary moon-forms. No one moved to clear away the dirty dishes, for

  at this point in the discussion, no one wanted to miss a word. They<
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  were at the crux of their dilemma: How were they to move against enemies

  as mighty as the U S. Government and Army? How were they to penetrate

  an iron wall of secrecy that had been forged in the name of national

  security, with the full power of the state and the law behind it?

  "We've put together enough to go public," Jorja Monatella said. "The

  deaths of Zebediah Lomack and Alan, the murder of Pablo Jackson. The

  similar nightmares that many of you have shared. The Polaroids. It's

  the kind of sensational stuff the media thrives on. If we let the world

  know what we think happened to us, we'll have the power of the press and

  public opinion on our side. We won't be alone."

  "No good," Ernie said. "That kind of pressure'll just make the military

  stonewall like hell. They'll construct an even more confusing and

  impenetrable cover-up. They don't crack under pressure the way

  politicians do. On the other hand, as long as they see us stumbling

  around on our own, fumbling for explanations, they'll be confident-which

  might give us time to probe for their weak spots."

  "And don't forget," Ginger warned, "apparently Colonel Falkirk advocated

  killing us instead of just blocking our memories, and we've no reason to

  believe he's mellowed since then. He was obviously overruled, but if we

  tried to go public, he might be able to persuade his superiors that a

  final solution is required, after all."

  "But even if it's dangerous, maybe we've got to go public," Sandy said.

  "Maybe Jorja's right. I mean, there's no way we can get inside the

  Thunder Hill Depository to see what's going on. They've got lots of