Paige touched his shoulder. “I can help you go through this stuff later today, Craig. Uncle Mike and I have to take the Russian team up to our tunnel test area at the northern end of the site. It’s next on their schedule.”
On sudden inspiration, Craig said, “I think I’ll go with you. Give me a chance to meet the disarmament team personally, before I go over the paperwork. Mr. Waterloo, you’ll be coming along as well?”
Waterloo gave Craig a strange look. “For a while. Then I’ll be on my way up to Nellis at the north end of the Site. We’re bringing a new shipment of decommissioned warheads out of temporary storage this afternoon. As DAF Manager, I have to be there to fill out the paperwork.”
Craig glanced at the table piled high with technical documents. At the moment, he didn’t even want to think about paperwork.
Next step was to meet with the Russians.
CHAPTER 15
Craig kept a low profile as he joined the seven disarmament inspectors in the white van, watching, keeping his mind open. He wanted to observe personal interactions, witness how NTS personnel treated the Russians, how the Russians responded, and how they reacted to each other. He could learn plenty from a few nuances. The others would wonder exactly why an FBI investigator had come along, and it would make some of them nervous.
Mike Waterloo swung into the driver’s seat himself, gesturing for Craig to ride up front with him. Paige sat with the Russian team, politely answering their questions.
Unfolding his list of the inspectors’ names, Craig tried to see how the people fit together, who seemed subordinate to whom. Ambassador Nevsky, dead, an academician, the head of the team, replaced by his deputy, the military liaison from the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, General Gregori Ursov. Then the others: Victor Golitsyn the geologist; Nikolai Bisovka, the astronomer who smoked Marlboros; Vitali Yakolev, the redhead; Anatoli Voronin, Denis Zagorski, Alexander Novikov.… Craig worked hard to put the names to faces.
Ursov said brusquely, as much for the benefit of his team members as for Paige. “I know we have not taken time to mourn our fallen comrade, but Friday is our deadline, and we do not have the luxury of flexibility — despite the criminal lack of safety at your facility.”
Apart from his bluster about Nevsky’s death, the gruff general seemed interested in their destination — the mountainside tunnels designed to contain small-scale nuclear explosions.
Waterloo accelerated steadily along the open road across the sprawling valley. They headed north into a line of steep mesas that formed the northern boundary of NTS, beyond the even vaster expanse of the Nellis Air Force Range. Craig watched the gaunt man sitting stiffly behind the steering wheel. He seemed to have a thick wall around him.
As the elevation rose, Craig watched the landscape change from crumbly desert to dark-green piñons and junipers, and broad rock faces rippled with colors — white, gray, tan, and maroon. They passed what the map called Pahute Mesa and another boomtown-type settlement of temporary buildings, office trailers, and a big Quonset hut that had been converted to a cafeteria.
Waterloo pulled the van up a steep dirt road to a gated mine-shaft opening in the mountainside. “This is where we do our tunnel shots,” Waterloo said, then smiled in embarrassment. “Where we did them, I mean. Not much going on here lately.”
As they climbed out of the van, the Russians spoke rapidly with each other, but Craig couldn’t understand the words. He wondered if they, too, commiserated about their faded glory days.
The brisk mountain air was a good twenty degrees cooler than down in the valley. Craig turned toward the tunnel opening, where a chain of yellow spotlights extended down the shaft, illuminating narrow-gauge tracks for mine cars and personnel transport.
“Seen any suspicious behavior yet?” Paige asked him quietly as the others moved forward.
“I’m still trying to figure out what I should consider suspicious. Everything around here operates under a different set of rules. Do you think any of the Russians are suspect?” he asked.
Paige thought for a moment. “There’s one, Nikolai Bisovka, who didn’t seem to like the ambassador much — he made some crack about Nevsky’s drinking. General Ursov didn’t take that so well.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
As the tiny light of an approaching mine car grew larger inside the tunnel, Waterloo spoke briefly with a guard at the gate, pointing to the group. Turning to them, he raised his voice. “Our teams drilled shafts miles into this mountain, a network of catacombs with twists and turns and branching tunnels for diagnostic equipment, cross-connected to other test chambers.”
Rummaging in a set of lockers just inside the tunnel, he removed hardhats, goggles, boot covers, and emergency respirators, handing one set to each person. “Required safety measures,” he said.
“Just in case a crate should happen to fall on our heads?” Ursov said stonily. Waterloo looked at him with a flicker of embarrassment, then fumbled with his own outfit. Paige and Craig helped each other secure the respirator fastenings on the hardhat.
Waterloo climbed into the front car on the tracks, motioning for Paige to sit beside him. She smiled, like a little girl asked to sit in the front seat of a car with her favorite uncle. Craig glanced at his watch, then sat beside General Ursov; they maintained an uneasy silence, looking at each other warily.
The mine cars accelerated down the tracks, pulled by a diesel engine no larger than a riding lawnmower. Around them, the tunnels were dark and confining, damp with dripping water like the catacombs inside the Hoover Dam. Overhead, metal conduits contained the electrical wires for spotlights and other utilities. Though giant fans kept the air circulating, the atmosphere inside the tunnels stank of chemicals, fuel, and rock dust.
Along the central passage, work crews in hardhats stood in teams, stripping out miles of diagnostic cables from metal troughs mounted to the rock. Laboring together like teams carrying firehoses, they reeled the extracted cables onto immense spools that would be stacked on trucks and hauled somewhere else.
“Everything’s being mothballed,” Waterloo called over his shoulder, raising his voice above the rumbling background noise in the tunnel. “No more nuclear testing. Better to recycle it, so a lot of this goes up to Nellis.”
When the mine car stopped and they disembarked, Waterloo led them through enormous armored steel doors into a dead-end room — a spherical chamber the size of a small auditorium. The rough walls were studded with sensors, cameras, and fiberoptics that led back through the main tunnel. In the center of the chamber stood a steel pedestal, waiting for test apparatus.
Craig realized with a start that this chamber had been designed to contain an atomic explosion.
Waterloo’s voice echoed off the walls. “Tunnel tests are performed to study nuclear effects, how military equipment can withstand an atomic war zone. Researchers place objects such as satellites, communications equipment, even missiles at one end of a long tunnel, a thousand feet away.” He gestured out the door, down a straight-line corridor to another set of heavy doors.
“Then we set off a small nuclear explosion in here to see how the radiation alone affects the test object. Explosives trigger those doors — a pair of two-foot-thick aluminum slabs — to slam shut at precisely the right moment, within milliseconds of the blast, after the radiation front has passed but before the shockwave and blast debris can get there.”