The Shimmer (3 page)

At the road ten miles away, a similar warning sign was attached to a locked gate that prevented access to the lane. People who stopped their cars to stare toward the far-off dishes usually lingered for only a short time until boredom prompted them to resume their journey.

The chain-link fence was one of three around the dishes. It wasn't electrified--nobody at the installation wanted the nuisance of dealing with ranchers whose cattle happened to wander up to the fence and get barbecued. Even so, there had never been a case of anyone being foolish enough to climb it. The second fence was constructed entirely of razor wire, and the third fence was electrified, its numerous prominent signs warning, DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE!

Halloway could have sat in an air-conditioned security room and watched monitors that would show any intruder's futile attempt to get over the third fence. If such a thing ever happened, he and the other guards would go out afterward to clean up the mess. No smoking was permitted in the sterile facility, so his cigarette break was the only reason he ever needed to step outside. He justified his addiction by telling himself that cameras and monitors were no substitute for eyeballing the landscape in person to make sure everything was as peaceful as it seemed. After all, one of his fellow Army Rangers in Iraq had been a sniper who could disguise himself so well that an enemy could walk across a field and not know the sniper was there unless the enemy stepped on him.

This line of thought made Halloway uncomfortable. All he'd wanted was a peaceful smoke, and now he'd gotten himself brooding about snipers. Time to get back inside, he decided. After taking a final satisfying drag from his cigarette, he dropped it to the ground, crushed it with his boot, and gave the bleak vista a final assessment.

Twenty miles to the southeast was a town called Rostov, but he'd never been to it--no one from the facility had ever been there. It was strictly off-limits. We don't want them thinking about us, he'd been told emphatically when he'd signed on for what was supposed to be easy duty.

But after three months of being confined here, Halloway couldn't wait for his replacement to arrive--an event that was set to occur in just two weeks. Sure, the food was better than what he'd been given in Iraq. Plus the installation had alcohol, which he hadn't been able to get in Iraq. He couldn't complain about the Internet downloads of the latest movies, some of which weren't yet available on DVD.

But what he really wanted was to get laid.

Thinking again about snipers, he tapped the security-code buttons on a pad next to the entrance. When he heard a buzz that indicated the lock had been freed, he opened the metal door and stepped inside. Immediately the observatory's filtered, cooled, sterile air encircled him. He shoved the heavy door back into place, making sure the electronic lock engaged. Then he unlocked a secondary door, stepped through, secured that one as well, and descended metal stairs that ended at a long corridor lit by a row of overhead lights.

Chapter 9.

The underground facility was large. A subtle vibration filled it.

When Halloway had arrived three months earlier, he'd thought nothing of the vibration, but as the days had accumulated, he'd become increasingly sensitive to the faint, omnipresent hum that he suspected had something to do with the installation's electrical generator--or else with the activity of the huge radio dishes. No one else seemed aware of it, but for him it had become distracting enough that, even though he'd taken to wearing earplugs when he went to bed, he wasn't able to sleep soundly.

He passed two doors on the left and turned right into a large room filled with numerous closed-circuit television monitors that showed every approach to the installation. The images were in color and displayed excellent definition. At night they had a green tint as heat sensors registered the difference between the rapidly cooling grassland and the constant temperature of animals or human beings.

His counterpart on this shift, a man with large, strong hands, sat in a metal chair and flipped through a sports magazine, occasionally glancing at the screens. It was poor discipline, but after months of inactivity, Halloway understood how hard it was to keep staring at those damned monitors.

"Smoking's bad for your health," the man said without looking up.

His name was Taggard.

"So's getting shot at. I figured a bullet was more to worry about than a cigarette."

"This isn't Iraq."

"Thanks for the geography lesson. Putting on weight isn't good for you, either, but that hasn't stopped you from mainlining those candy bars you keep in your desk. How many do you eat a day? Ten? Fifteen?"

Taggard chuckled. With so little to do, they'd taken to ribbing each other constantly. "Yeah, I really ought to be on the Stairmaster instead of reading these magazines. I'll get on that first thing tomorrow."

"I'm going to take a leak," Halloway said.

"After that, maybe you could sit here a while and let me wander around."

Now it was Halloway's turn to chuckle.

He stepped back out into the corridor and went farther along. On the left, an open door was marked DATA ANALYSIS. Through the opening, he heard static and peered in at a bored, bald, bespectacled researcher who studied a computer screen. All kinds of electronic equipment occupied the numerous shelves that lined the walls around the room. Red indicator lights glowed, and needles pulsed.

One device provided a visual depiction of the static, which looked like chaotically shifting dots. The sound was harsh and brittle and reminded Halloway of a radio searching for a hard-to-find station.

Which is pretty much what's going on, he concluded.

The subtle vibration intensified, giving Halloway the start of a headache.

"It sounds a little different than yesterday," he said, causing the man with the glasses to look up.

"Hello, Earl," the researcher answered. "Yes, there's more activity, and it's getting louder. There's been a general increase all week."

"What do you figure is going on?"

"Probably nothing. Sometimes the static seems to be accumulating toward something. Then it backs off. According to the computer, that's been the rhythm ever since this observatory was built fifteen years ago." The researcher turned toward a sequence of knobs. "I'll realign the dish and see if the pattern gains any definition. Monitoring local ambient electrical discharge is a good way to see if the equipment's functioning properly."

Halloway was aware that the dish the scientist referred to was the one tilted toward the horizon, as if undergoing repairs. He had no doubt, however, that the dish was pointed exactly where it was supposed to be--southeast, toward an area near Rostov.

In theory, the dishes gathered radio pulses from deep space and coordinated them. A lot of heavenly bodies generated them, the researcher had explained, and a lot were still echoing from the Big Bang. A complex computer program translated the signals into images that looked like photographs, depicting nebulae, novas, black holes, and other astronomical wonders.

Halloway hadn't known what any of that meant when he'd arrived at the installation three months earlier, but the sameness of each day had bored the researcher enough that he was happy to explain how a radio observatory worked. Despite the explanations, Halloway had no illusions about what was really going on. A radio observatory didn't need razor wire and high-voltage fences. The M4 with which he and the other guards were equipped was one of the best assault carbines on the planet, complete with a grenade launcher and a laser sighting system. That was a hell of a lot of security to protect a facility that studied black holes.

Even before a helicopter had transported him to this remote area of west Texas, Halloway had been convinced that this felt like a spook operation rather than a project for the National Science Foundation.

Within days of his arrival, he'd seen enough to use his laptop to Google information about how radio observatories could be employed by espionage agencies. He'd become convinced that the dishes above this huge bunker weren't pointed at nebulae, novas, and black holes. They were aimed at satellites that scooped radio signals from the atmosphere.

They were also aimed at the moon. Radio signals all over the world "leaked" into outer space, his Internet research had informed him.

The moon intercepted many of those signals, however, and a properly focused radio observatory could collect them as they bounced back to Earth. By sorting through the various frequencies and choosing those favored by major terrorist organizations or foreign governments hostile to the United States, a facility like this could relay valuable information to intelligence analysts in places such as Fort Meade, near Washington, D. C.

Halloway hadn't picked that location at random. Fort Meade, he knew, was the headquarters of the National Security Agency. Yes, this was a damned spook operation, he was sure of it, but if the technician--whose name was Gordon--wanted to keep lying, claiming it was a scientific project that mapped deep space, Halloway was fine with that. The little game they played was about the only thing that interested him. That and the mystery of why one dish was aimed horizontally toward Rostov. The technician could jabber all he wanted to about "monitoring local ambient electrical discharge."

Give me a fucking break, Halloway thought. Something's going on near Rostov, and a lot of this billion-dollar facility is being used to try to figure out what it is.

Chapter 10.

Page landed midroute at the airport outside Roswell, New Mexico. The sun-baked area was where the American UFO craze had begun in 1947, when a rancher had discovered debris from a large fallen object that the military described first as a flying disc and then as a weather balloon. The different explanations may simply have been an example of flawed communication, but conspiracy theorists had seized on those differences to claim a government cover-up. Ever since then, Roswell had become the unofficial UFO capital of the world, so much so that every Fourth of July the town had a UFO Festival where skeptics and so-called experts debated while actors from science fiction movies signed autographs and enthusiasts dressed up as "little green men."

Page and Tori had flown to the festival a few years earlier and enjoyed the carnival atmosphere of the parades, the costume contest, and the concerts, one of which had featured a band interpreting music from Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon. They rarely found opportunities to vacation together--his job was too demanding--and he remembered how she had laughed as they watched a group of "Klingons" earnestly performing a wedding ceremony.

The bittersweet memory made Page feel even more anxious to reach Tori. He watched as a fuel truck filled his plane's tanks. He verified that the fuel had the correct color--blue--for the type he needed and that there weren't any contaminants. Then he climbed back into the plane, took off, and continued southeast.

His carefully chosen route allowed him to follow a corridor that passed among large military areas to the north, east, south, and west.

These were boldly marked on his aerial map and indicated where fighter jets practiced combat maneuvers. Farther west an even more serious military area was located over the White Sands Missile Range, formerly known as the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, where the first atomic bomb had been detonated in 1945.

The rugged vista was breathtaking. Nonpilots often assumed that the appeal of flying involved appreciating the scenery. But Page had become a pilot because he enjoyed the sensation of moving in three dimensions. The truth was that maintaining altitude and speed while staying on course, monitoring radio transmissions, and comparing a sectional map to actual features on the ground required so much concentration that a pilot had little time for sightseeing.

There was another element to flying, though, and it was a lot like the drinking that took place at after-shift decompression sessions with his fellow officers. Page enjoyed flying because it helped him not to think about the terrible pain people inflicted on one another. He'd seen too many lives destroyed by guns, knives, beer bottles, screwdrivers, baseball bats, and even a nail gun. Six months earlier, he'd been the first officer to arrive at the scene of a car accident in which a drunken driver had hit an oncoming vehicle and killed five children along with the woman who was taking them to a birthday party.

There'd been so much blood that Page still had nightmares about it.

His friends thought he was joking when he said the reward of flying was "getting above it all," but he was serious. The various activities involved in controlling an aircraft shut out what he was determined not to remember.

That helped Page now. His confusion, his urgency, his need to have answers--on the ground, these emotions had thrown him off balance, but once he was in the air, the discipline of controlling the Cessna forced him to feel as level as the aircraft. In the calm sky, amid the monotonous, muffled drone of the engine, the plane created a floating sensation. He welcomed it yet couldn't help dreading what he might discover on the ground.

When he entered Texas, the Davis Mountains extended to his left as far as he could see. They were hardly typical of the rest of the state and in fact reminded him of the aspen- and pinon-covered peaks he was accustomed to seeing in New Mexico.

He monitored the radio frequency for the Rostov airport. He knew from his preflight research that there wasn't a control tower and that he needed to broadcast his intentions directly to any aircraft that might be in the vicinity to make certain no flight paths intersected.