The door to the room opened and he saw the woman come in. He heard them talking but he didn’t understand them. Their words were not like his.
“Any luck?” she said.
“Not so far,” the man replied. “But I’ll keep at it.”
The woman came over to check on Yuri. Her face was warm; she brought warmth to them. He wasn’t sure how; she just did. When the woman touched him, Yuri was not afraid. Others who touched him made him hurt, made him afraid, but this woman helped make others feel better.
She and the important man were trying to find something, looking for something that was lost. She was nervous, afraid that they might not find it. He was not; he was certain; he expected to find it. So much difference. Yuri thought maybe they were not looking for the same thing.
Out through the glass door, in the sunlight, stood the other man. He was different than the other two. He didn’t want to find what they were looking for, but he helped anyway and he watched for things. The man outside was always looking; his eyes were always moving. He didn’t see the lights or the colors like Yuri did, and he didn’t hear the words like the important man, but he looked and looked as if he knew something was coming.
That was it, Yuri thought. The other two were looking for something and this man was helping them, but he was looking in a different way. They were expecting to find things and this man was watching for something that might find them.
The woman spoke again. She was trying to help the important man.
“What if we contact the embassy, have them reach out to some of your colleagues?”
“I don’t think it would help,” he said. “And what if it gives us away?”
“All right,” she said, opening a plastic bag she’d brought with her.
She pulled out several bottles. Yuri knew those kind of bottles; they had medicines in them. Sometimes the others had given him medicines. Not this woman, but the ones who spoke like he did. Some of the medicines made the lights darker, until he couldn’t see them dancing.
He didn’t know why, but sometimes he liked that, and sometimes they were too bright. But other times he didn’t like the medicines at all. They made him feel sick to his stomach and hurt his head. And besides, he didn’t want the lights to go away.
She took two tablets out of each bottle. “Take these,” she said.
“What are they?”
“New antibiotics.”
“Your fever is almost gone and this should knock out the infection for good. We might almost get you back to normal.”
He held out his hand and she dropped the pills into it.
“Thanks,” he said.
She nodded to him, then turned and walked away.
The important man reached for a glass of water and then stopped. He looked at the medicines and then he slipped his hand into his pocket and brought it out without the tablets. The woman didn’t see. She didn’t know. And then he took a drink of water anyway, and turned back to the hot machine.
The medicines made things go away, Yuri knew that, and the important man wanted the things he’d seen to come back.
CHAPTER 40
After a brief trip to the infirmary at the Groom Lake base, Arnold Moore returned to Yucca Mountain, riding shotgun in an air force Humvee as it rumbled toward the gaping entrance of the massive tunnel.
Off to the right lay the giant tunnel boring machine. It looked like a Saturn V booster lying on its side. The hundred-ton machine had single-handedly carved, gouged, and concreted the tunnels that penetrated Yucca Mountain. And then, too big to move without taking it apart, the machine had been parked and shrink-wrapped by the entrance in case it was needed to do further work.
The Humvee rolled past it and through the huge blast doors that fronted the tunnel. The environment went from blazing Nevada daylight to utter darkness, only partially illuminated by the lights in the walls and the Humvee’s high beams.
“You ever get used to this?” Moore asked, looking around.
“After a while,” the driver said. “We check the mountain three times a day. And we’re always here when science guys like you drop in. Not usually with this much firepower, though.”
Moore guessed he was referring to the machine-gun-toting Humvees that had been stationed near the entrance, the squads of armed men, and the hourly Black Hawk reconnaissance sorties.
Moore turned his attention to the tunnel ahead of him. The entrance section was a triple bore, meaning it was three times as wide as the individual tunnels. It ran that way for about two hundred yards before the main tunnel narrowed into what was essentially a two-lane road, walled by rock and concrete. Moore once again found himself growing claustrophobic in the long, narrow cavern.
“What happens if the walls cave in?”
He hadn’t meant the question seriously, but the driver answered anyway.
“There are a series of escape vents that go up to the surface. You have to climb a couple hundred feet of ladder but they pop you out topside.”
“Huh,” Moore grunted, not knowing which was worse: getting quickly crushed in a cave-in or climbing a hundred feet of ladder. “No elevator?”
The driver shook his head, and the Humvee continued on for just over a mile until the double-wide lab began to loom in the headlights.
The main shaft continued for another four miles. Concerns about whether they were deep enough in had already been raised. The truth was they were now in the central part of the “test” tunnel, which had been home to numerous experiments over the years, most of which were designed to tell if there was any chance of instability, seismic activity, or groundwater issues that might make the site unsuitable as a depository.
Because of that history, cables for power and data were already hardwired into place ready for the NRI/CIA teams to hook into. Going deeper meant extending the infrastructure, something they didn’t really have time for.
As a contingency, a rocket sled of sorts was being set up. The motor powering it had been liberated from a Sidewinder missile. In the event the stone appeared to be going supercritical, it would be attached as a payload and fired into the deepest heart of the mountain. A three-second journey into oblivion.
Moore jumped out of his taxi, climbed up the two steps of the trailer, and entered the makeshift lab. He was ready to launch into battle, but a more immediate problem had grabbed everyone’s attention.
The UN meeting was going badly, and the men inside the trailer were watching it all in high definition via satellite. Nation after nation stood up and took the dais to denounce the United States. Unlike the old days, when only a few enemy nations could be counted on for such outbursts, many friendly nations were demanding to know what had happened in the desert, statements that further emboldened the leaders of the lynch mob.
Unlike British parliament, where a statement was made and a rebuttal allowed, the current system in the UN permitted representatives to grab the floor and make uninterrupted speeches one after another. The U.S. ambassador could only sit there, lamely making notes and holding a hand to the translation headphones on his ear.
In general, Moore believed in the UN process, but this was turning out to be a circus.
To make matters worse, the president was also watching, albeit from the Oval Office in Washington. In a teleconference type of situation Moore could see him on one screen while watching the UN debate on the other. Mercifully, Stecker had temporarily gone back to Langley and, at least for the day, was nowhere to be found.
“How bad is it?” Moore asked.
Nathanial Ahiga had taken a break from the reams of data to watch.
“If I was a man who liked to gamble,” Ahiga said, “I wouldn’t double down.”