Astride a Pink Horse

I would like to offer my appreciation to Francis Newman for his valuable insights into radiation physics and to Jane and Norb Olind for providing me with important information about the Laramie River Station power plant near Wheatland, Wyoming.

To my longtime editor, Emily Boyd, and to Kathleen Deckler, as always, thanks for your support, patience, and willingness to help.

To Kathleen Woodley, my secretary for more than a quarter century, I can only say, “What would I do without you?”

Finally, to Connie Oehring and Adrienne Armstrong, I offer my deepest thanks for bringing their keen editorial skills to the manuscript.

The characters, events, and places that are depicted in
Astride a Pink Horse
are spawned from the author’s imagination. Certain Denver and Western locales are used fictitiously, and any resemblance between the novel’s fictional inhabitants and actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

If Lyle Sudderman had been paying attention to his surroundings instead of twisting his grease-stained U.S. Postal Service letter carrier’s cap nervously from side to side on his head and muttering obscenities to himself, he might have realized sooner that the brown lump lying between a knot of sagebrush and a small boulder just inside a sagging cyclone fence fifty yards away wasn’t a dead steer or a mule deer that had somehow nosed its way onto the fenced-off patch of government land. Despite his current state of fluster, Sudderman, a longtime poacher, decided that the high cost of store-bought meat required at least a quick peek.

It occurred to him that the mysterious lump lying amid several industrial-looking steel-and-concrete structures could also be a human body. He swallowed hard, eased his postal truck onto the highway shoulder, and stared at the mile-square fenced-off parcel of Wyoming heartland just off Grayrocks Road, six miles northeast of the small farming and ranching community of Wheatland.

It was windless and a sweltering 98 degrees. He was a little ahead of schedule, it was almost time for lunch, and he needed to think for a moment. He stared at the lump in the field once again and realized that it hadn’t moved in all the time he’d been watching it. Thinking,
God forbid I should get accused of letting my freaking engine idle and use one extra ounce of precious
U.S. government gas
, he killed the truck’s engine and jammed his bulky key ring with its fifteen keys, a penlight, and a Moose Lodge medallion into a pants pocket. He sat back in his seat, glanced across the highway at the Laramie River Station power plant with its sixty-story-high smokestacks, smiled, and muttered, “Been here before.”

Over a quarter century as a faithful government servant, and what was he about to get as a reward for his loyalty? A fucking cut in pay. Come October, the Postal Service planned to eliminate a day of mail delivery from his route, and that meant a smaller paycheck. This time around, his twenty-six-year membership in the National Association of Letter Carriers wouldn’t help, nor would his ass-kissing and glad-handing. Word had come down from the postmaster general himself, and Lyle knew he wouldn’t be able to avoid being part of the cuts. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so quick to buy the twenty acres he’d purchased in the Laramie Mountains the previous winter.

Turning his attention back to the mysterious lump, Lyle stepped out of his truck after making certain that the warning flashers were on and headed across the thirty-acre patch of swampy river-bottom grass.

A two-mile-long stretch of finger canyons marked the northern edge of the river bottom. Rolling, treeless, tobacco-brown hills, seared by the August heat, rose above the canyons. Thinking that for some reason the mosquitoes seemed to be less pesky than usual, Lyle worked his way toward the fence that marked the northern boundary of the government parcel. When he was a few yards from the fence, a swirling wind tunneled its way from the river
bottom through willows and cottonwoods until every tree and shrub seemed to quiver.

Lyle glanced over his shoulder toward the power plant before jogging the rest of the way to the fence and scaling it, as he had many times with friends during his boyhood.

Inside the compound, he found himself staring at what was mostly vacant land—land that in his youth, he and his friends had laughingly dubbed “ground zero.” He glanced around at the half-dozen “No Trespassing” signs wired to the fence until his eyes found a single rusted metal sign that defined with certainty where he was. The sign simply read, “T-11.”

Making his way past a three-foot-high flat concrete structure that had always reminded him of a home-plate-shaped foundation for a home, he paused for a moment to glance around at the compound’s seven telephone poles. Once during his teens, he and several friends, on a dare, had climbed every telephone pole inside the boundaries of Tango-11, laughing and challenging one another as the power-plant smokestacks across the highway belched clouds of orange smoke and steam. Even then, they knew what the government had at one time housed behind the cyclone fences.

Lyle looked at the concrete pad and rail spur that had once been the heart of T-11, then swallowed hard before walking to within a few feet of what had brought him there. Suddenly he was laughing, fidgeting with his cap, and stamping his feet as he realized that what he was looking down on was neither a dead man, a steer, nor an antelope but simply a knotted-up, buckskin-colored blanket with a mass of tumbleweeds trapped inside. The Wyoming wind had blown the ratty old bedcover against a tire-sized piece of concrete.

Shaking his head and wondering how he could have mistaken a blanket and a bunch of tumbleweeds for any kind of animal, he mumbled, “Shit,” tugged at the bill of his cap, and turned to leave. He’d retrieved his keys from his pocket when it occurred to him that, though his poaching venture had come to nothing, there nonetheless was something oddly out of place in Tango-11. It took him a while to zero in on it, although he realized later it should have been obvious to him the second his feet had landed inside the fence. As the azure sky seemed to swallow the entire abandoned Tango-11 nuclear-missile site, he could see that, less than thirty paces from where he stood, the hatch cover over the personnel-access tube, a twenty-four-inch-diameter shaft that rose from deep in the ground to poke its head three feet in the air, was propped partially open. The adjacent fifty-by-fifty-foot concrete slab that covered the site’s more important nuclear-missile payload bore looked undisturbed.