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.
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 bal- loon. 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, screw- drivers, 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 Cessnaforced 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. During his long approach, he heard from only one other pilot, a woman with a deep Texas accent who reported that she was heading in the opposite direction.
The aerial map made clear where the prohibited airspace of the observatory was located, but even without a map, Page couldn’t have missed the installation. The large white dishes reflected the sun and were awesome to behold. They resembled giant versions of the satellite dish on the roof of his Santa Fe home. Incongruous with the flat landscape in which they were situated, they radiated a feeling of sheer power that made them appear huge, even when seen from a distance.
He was puzzled that the observatory was located on comparatively low ground, especially when compared to the distant mountains. Didn’t observatories work best when placed at as high an altitude as possible? But his musings came to an end when the practical concerns inherent to flying replaced his curiosity. Careful to stay clear of the dishes, he continued along his course toward Rostov.
Small communities were usually hard to spot from the air, and Rostov was no exception, blending with the seemingly boundless ranchland that stretched everywhere. For a moment, Page felt an eerie sense that he’d been here before, that he’d flown over this exact area on an earlier occasion and had seen these same cattle spread out, grazing. He was particularly struck by a picturesque windmill next to a pond at which cattle drank, a view he was positive he’d seen before. But he’d never before been in this area of Texas.