only a small part of the devastation. The CISGa think-tank of
physicists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, theologists,
economists, educators, and other learned people-had pondered precisely
this crisis at great length and depth, years before it had arisen here
in Nevada. The CISG had issued a 1220-page top-secret report on its
conclusions, a document that offered some disturbing reading. Leland
knew that report by heart, for he was the military representative to the
CISG and had helped write several position papers included in the final
text. Within the CISG, the opinion was unanimous that the world would
never be the same if such an event were to occur. All societies, all
cultures would be radically changed forever. Projected deaths over the
first two years ranged in the millions.
Lieutenant Horner, who was driving the Wagoneer, braked twenty feet in
front of the giant blast doors that were set in the sudden steep upper
slope of the meadow. He didn't wait for the huge barriers to open, for
he was not driving directly into Thunder Hill. Horner turned right,
into a small parking lot, where three minibuses, four Jeep wagons, a
Land Rover, and several other vehicles stood side by side.
The twin blast doors, each thirty feet high and twenty feet wide, were
so thick they could be opened only at a ponderous pace, producing a
rumble that could be heard a mile away and felt in the air and in the
ground at least half as far. When a truck-loaded with ammunition,
weapons, or suppliespulled up in front of the drive-in entrance, the
doors required five minutes to roll apart. Opening those hangar-sized
portals every time a lone man needed to walk in or out was unthinkably
inefficient, so a second, man-sized door-nearly as formidable-was set in
the hillside thirty feet to the right of the main entrance.
There was no better vault than Thunder Hill in which to keep the secret
of July 6. It was an impregnable fortress.
Leland and Lieutenant Horner hurried through the bitter air to the
walk-in entrance. The small steel door, almost as blastproof as the
massive versions to the left, had an electronic lock that could be
disengaged only by tapping the proper four numbers on a keyboard. The
code changed every two weeks, and those entrusted with it were required
to commit it to memory. Leland punched in the code, and the
fourteen-inchthick, lead-core door slid aside with a sudden pneumatic
whoosh.
They stepped into a twelve-foot-long concrete tunnel about nine feet in
diameter and brightly lit. It angled to the left. At the end was
another door identical to the first, but it could not be opened until
the outer door was closed. Leland touched a heat-sensitive switch just
inside the tunnel entrance, and the outer door hissed shut behind him
and Lieutenant Horner.
Immediately, a pair of video cameras, mounted on the ceiling at opposite
ends of the chamber, clicked on. The cameras tracked the two men as
they walked to the inner door.
No human eyes were watching the colonel and lieutenant on any video
display, for the system was operated entirely by VIGILANT, the security
computer, as a precaution against the possibility that a traitor within
Thunder Hill's own guard unit might open the facility to hostile forces.
VIGILANT was not linked to the installation's main computer or to the
outside world; therefore, it was invulnerable to saboteurs seeking to
take control of it by means of a modern or other electronic tap.
The guard at the perimeter fence had notified VIGILANT that Colonel
Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Thomas Homer would be arriving. Now, as
they approached the inner door under the gazes of video cameras, the
computer compared their appearance to stored holographic images of them,
rapidly matching forty-two points of facial resemblance. It was
impossible to deceive VIGILANT either with makeup or with a look-alike
for an approved visitor. If Leland or Horner had been an imposter or
unauthorized visitor, VIGILANT would have sounded an alarm,
simultaneously filling the entrance tunnel with a sedative gas.
The lock on the inner door had no keyboard; no code would open it.
Instead, a one-foot-square panel of glass was set in the wall beside the
door. Leland almost pressed his right hand palm-down against the panel,
hesitated, then used his left, and the glass lit, and a faint humming
arose. VIGILANT scanned his palmprint and fingerprints, comparing them
to the prints in its files.
Lieutenant Horner said, "Almost as hard to get in here as into heaven."
"Harder," Leland said.
The light behind the milky glass winked out, and Leland took his hand
away. The inner door opened.
They stepped into a huge natural tunnel that had been improved by human
hands. The domed rock overhead was lost in darkness because the
lighting fixtures were suspended from black metal scaffolding, creating
the illusion of a ceiling perhaps twenty or thirty feet below the true
ceiling. The tunnel was sixty feet across and led into the mountain
about a hundred and twenty yards. In some places the rock walls had
natural contours, but in other places they carried the imprints of
dynamite blasts and jackhammers and other tools that had been used to
widen the narrow portions of the passageway. Incoming trucks could drive
along the concrete floor to unloading bays beside immense cargo
elevators that went down into deeper regions of the facility.
A guard sat at a table beyond the door by which Leland and Horner
entered. Considering the remoteness of Thunder Hill, the extent of
sophisticated defenses, and the thoroughness with which VIGILANT
examined all visitors, a lone sentry seemed superfluous to Leland.
Evidently, the sentry was of that same opinion, for he was not prepared
for trouble. His revolver was holstered. He was eating a candy bar.
Reluctantly, he looked up from an old novel by Jack Finney.
He wore a coat because the open areas of the Depository were never
heated; only the enclosed living quarters and work areas were kept warm.
An enormous power supply was provided by a mini hydroelectric plant that
harnessed an underground river, plus backup diesel generators, but there
was not enough to warm the mammoth caverns. The subterranean
temperature was a stable fifty-five degrees, quite bearable if one
dressed for long work periods in the chilly air, as the guard had done.
He saluted. "Colonel Falkirk, Lieutenant Horner, you're cleared to see
Dr. Bennell. You know how to find him, of course."
"Of course," Falkirk said.
Ten feet to the left, the burnished steel surface of the giant blast
doors glimmered softly in the fluorescent light, looking rather like the
sheer face of a great glacier. Leland and Lieutenant Horner turned
right, away from the big doors, and walked deeper into the mountain,
toward the elevators.
Thunder Hill Depository was equipped with hydraulic lifts of three
sizes, the largest of which rivaled the enormous elevators on aircraft
carriers. A ca
rrier's lifts were used to bring planes from the ship's
hold onto the flight deck, and Thunder Hill's also lowered and raised
planes, among other things. In addition to 2.4 billion dollars of
equipment and materielfreeze-dried food, medicine, portable field
hospitals, clothing, blankets, tents, handguns, rifles, mortars, field
artillery, ammunition, light military vehicles such as Jeeps and armored
personnel carriers, and twenty backpack nukes-the vast storage dump
contained a variety of useful aircraft. First, the helicopters: thirty
Sikorsky S-67 Blackhawk antitank gunships; twenty Bell Kingcobras; eight
Anglo-French Westland Pumas, general purpose transports; and three big
Medevac choppers. No conventional aircraft were stored at Thunder Hill,
but there were twelve vertical takeoff jets of the type manufactured in
England by Hawker Siddeley and known there as Harriers, but which were
called AV-8As when in U S. service. Because the Harriers were equipped
with powerful vectored-thrust engines, the craft could land and take off
vertically, without need of a runway. In a grave crisisfor example,
subsequent to a limited nuclear strike and a land invasion by enemy
troops-the aircraft of Thunder Hill, both choppers and Harriers, could
be lifted to the top level, rolled out through the massive blast doors,
and sent hurtling into the sky.
However, the current crisis did not involve war or require the
unleashing of the Depository's aircraft, so Leland and the lieutenant
bypassed the two immense elevators. They also passed the two smaller
but still oversize cargo elevators, their footsteps echoing off the
stone walls, and took one of the three smallest cabs-about the size of a
standard lift in a hotel-down into the bowels of Thunder Hill.
Medical supplies, food, guns, and all ammunition were stored on the
third level, the bottom floor of the complex, in a network of chambers
which had been caulked, equipped with pressure-release bores, and fitted
with doors for the purpose of blast containment. On the second-the
middle-level, all the vehicles and aircraft were kept in other huge
caverns, and it was there, too, that the staff lived and worked.
Leland and Lieutenant Horner got off the lift at the second level. They
stepped into a lighted, circular, rock-wall chamber three hundred feet
in diameter. It served as a hub-in fact, persofinel called it The
Hub-from which four other caverns opened; and still more rooms lay
beyond those four. The larger of those deep vaults contained-among
other thingsthe aircraft, Jeeps, and armored personnel carriers.
There were no doors on three of the four caverns which led off The Hub,
for there was no serious danger of fire or explosion on that level. But
the fourth chamber did, indeed, have doors, for it contained the secret
of July 6, which Leland and many others had conspired to conceal. He
stopped now, a few steps out of the elevator, to study those portals,
which were twenty-six feet high and sixty-four feet wide. They were
made of cross-braced two-by-fours rather than steel, because they had
been jerry-built to meet an emergency situation; there had been no time
to order a fabricated metal door to close off the cavern. They reminded
the colonel of the enormous wooden doors in the wall that had protected
the frightened natives from the beast on the other half of their island
in the original King Kong. Considering what lay behind these doors,
that horror-movie image did not inspire confidence. Leland shuddered.
Lieutenant Horner said, "Still gives you the creeps, huh?"
"You mean you're comfortable with it now?"
"Hell, no, sir. Hell, no."
Inset in the bottom of one of those huge wooden barriers was a much
smaller, man-sized door through which researchers entered and exited the
room beyond. An armed guard was positioned there to allow entrance only
to those with the proper pass. The activities in that forbidden chamber
had nothing to do with the other-primary-functions of the Depository,
and ninety percent of the personnel were not permitted access to the
area. Indeed, ninety percent did not know what was in that cavern.
Around the circumference of The Hub, between the openings to other
caverns, buildings had been erected along the walls and anchored to the
rock. The structures dated to the first year of the Depository's
construction, back in the early 1960s. Then, they had served as offices
for engineers, superintendents, and the Army's project officers. Over
the years, an entire subterranean town had been erected in other
caverns-sleeping quarters, cafeteria, recreation rooms, laboratories,
machine shops, vehicle service center, computer rooms, even a PX, among
other things. They were now occupied by the military and government
personnel who were doing one- and two-year tours of duty at Thunder
Hill. In the buildings, there was heat, better lighting, inside and
outside telephone lines, kitchens, bathrooms, and all the myriad
comforts of home. They were constructed of metal panels coated with
baked blue or white or gray enamel, with only small windows and narrow
metal doors. Though they had no wheels, they somewhat resembled motor
homes or house trailers drawn in a circle, as if they were the property
of a modern-day encampment of gypsies who had found their way to this
snug haven, 240 feet below the winter snows.
Now, turning from the forbidden chamber with the wooden doors, Leland
walked across The Hub toward a white metal structure-Dr. Miles
Bennell's offices. Lieutenant Horner fell in dutifully at his side.
The summer before last, Miles Bennell (whom Leland Falkirk loathed) had
moved into Thunder Hill to head all scientific inquiry into the events
of that fateful July night. He'd only been out of the Depository on
three occasions since then, never for longer than two weeks. He was
obsessed with his assignment. Or something worse than obsessed.
A dozen officers, enlisted men, and civilians were in sight within The
Hub, some crossing from one adjoining cavern to another, some just
standing in conversation with one another. Leland looked them over as he
passed them, unable to understand what kind of person would volunteer to
work underground for weeks and months at a stretch. They were paid a
thirty percent hardship bonus, but to Leland's way of thinking, that was
inadequate compensation. The Depository was less oppressive than
Shenkfield's small, windowless warrens, but not by much.
Leland supposed he was slightly claustrophobic. Being underground made
him feel as if he were buried alive. As an admitted masochist, he
should have relished his discomfort, but this was one kind of pain he
did not seek or enjoy.
Dr. Miles Bennell looked ill. Like nearly everyone in Thunder Hill, he
was pasty-faced from being too long beyond the reach of sunlight. His
curly black hair and beard only made his pallor more pronounced. In the
fluorescent glare of his office, he looked almost like a ghost. He
greeted Leland and Lieutenant Horner curtly, and he did not offer to
shake hands wit
h either of them.
That suited the colonel fine. He was no friend of Bennell's. A
handshake would have been sheer hypocrisy. Besides, Leland was
half-afraid that Miles Bennell had been compromised, that the scientist
was no longer who or what he appeared to be ... was no longer entirely
human. And if that crazy, paranoid possibility was in fact true, he
wanted no physical contact with Bennell, not even a quick handshake.
"Dr. Bennell," Leland said coldly, using the hard tone of voice and icy
demeanor that always elicited quaverous obedience, "your handling of
this security breach has been either criminally inept, or you're the
traitor we're looking for. Now, hear me loud and clear: this time,
we're going to find the bastard who sent those Polaroid snapshots-no
more broken lie detectors, no more botched interrogations-and we're
going to find out if he's the one who teased Jack Twist into returning,
and we're going to come down on him so hard he'll wish he'd been born a
fly and spent his life in a stable sucking up horseshit."
Utterly unruffled, Miles Bennell smiled and said, "Colonel, that was the
best Richard Jaeckel impression I've ever seen, but entirely
unnecessary. I'm as anxious as you to find the leak and plug it."
Leland wanted to punch the son of a bitch. This was one reason he
loathed Miles Bennell: The bastard could not be intimidated.
Calvin Sharkle lived on O'Bannon Lane in a pleasant middleclass
residential neighborhood in Evanston. Father Wycazik had to stop twice
at service stations to ask directions. When he got to the corner of
O'Bannon and Scott Avenue, only two blocks from Sharkle's address, he
was turned back by policemen manning an emergency barricade formed by
two black-and-white cruisers and one paramedic van. There were also
television crews running around with minicams.
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 73
