What he hoped was that the earplugs-and if necessary the noise- reducing earphones-would protect their hearing enough to keep them alive.
Once inside the central chamber, he watched a closed-circuit television monitor that showed a view of the abandoned airbase that sprawled above him. Beyond the collapsed, rusted aircraft hangars, he saw the German shepherd and its trainer patrolling the fence. The crowd had spread far enough from the viewing area that some people were talking to the dog’s trainer. The animal snapped at them. The people on the other side of the fence held up their hands in a we don’t want a problem gesture and backed away.
Raleigh wondered if the German shepherd was normally that aggressive.
We’ll soon find out. After dark, I’ll bring the dog back inside. We’ll see how it behaves. Its ears are more sensitive than ours. If there’s trouble, it’ll react before humans do-and before we need to shoot it.
He studied the room’s thick metal door, assuring himself that it could withstand a grenade blast. He verified that his M4 and several loaded one-hundred-round magazines were in a corner. He opened a filing cabinet and made sure that a trauma kit and emergency rations-including water-were inside in case he was forced to barricade himself in this room for a considerable length of time.
What else do I need to plan for? There’s always something.
He’d done his best to take everything into account. Nonetheless, he paused to consider the history of this place and search his memory for anything he might have missed. He knew by heart every event that had happened on this spot. He’d read all of the reports. They stretched back long before the military had established a presence here. One of the reports, however, had been passed down not from a historian or a tactician.
It had come from his great-grandmother.
55
January 22, 1916.
The horse became restless. It was normally so well-behaved that its rider-a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher named Dani Marie Brown-glanced warily around, assuming that coyotes were in the area.
She was riding on the dusty road that led from Rostov to Loden, a town fifteen miles away where she taught grade school on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays after teaching on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays in Rostov. Three days a week was the most that local cat- tlemen in each place would allow their children to be away from their ranching chores.
Dani sometimes was at school from dawn until dusk, preparing classes or grading tests when the children weren’t at their desks. It was a tiring schedule, but she’d been raised in Rostov, and she hadn’t liked being away from home while she’d earned her teacher’s certificate in noisy, crowded El Paso. Long, quiet hours in this familiar, re- assuring area were preferable to the chaos of the unknown, outside world.
During the winter, the early sunset made it necessary for Dani to bundle herself in a sheepskin coat and ride between the towns after dark. This didn’t trouble her. The stars and the moon-even if only a portion of the latter was showing-provided sufficient light for her to see the road. On cloudy nights, she held a lantern to show her the way.
An experienced horsewoman, she never worried about her ability to control the chestnut-colored quarter horse her parents had bought for her. But now, as the animal became more skittish, she tugged back the reins and pressed her heels down in the stirrups while she studied the shadowy landscape with greater intensity. In the heat of summer, coyotes weren’t the only threat the horse might have sensed-there would have been the risk that a rattlesnake had crawled onto the road to absorb the last of the day’s warmth, but that was out of the question tonight, when the temperature was cold enough to put a layer of ice on a pail of water.
Even so, Dani’s stomach fluttered.
Until recently she’d felt happily isolated in this quiet corner of Texas, but then her father had ordered a wireless radio from a catalog, and now, on this particular journey, Dani’s thoughts were disturbed by the escalation of the European war, which had reached new heights of atrocity and threatened to draw the United States into the fight between Germany and the Allies.
Just before beginning her ride toward Loden, she’d paid a brief visit to her parents and listened to a radio report about attacks involving chlorine and phosgene gases: the lung destroyers. There were rumors about something even more horrendous being developed: mustard gas, a blisterer that dissolved skin both inside and outside the body. The gas remained active long after it sank into the ground, with the consequence that soldiers kicking up dust as they walked through a field could cause the equivalent of another attack.
And those weren’t the only new horrors. Dani could only imagine the pain and terror produced by such recently invented weapons as tanks and flamethrowers. Thus, on this normally quiet ride, her thoughts were in greater turmoil than she would have expected.
Abruptly something on her right caught her attention. She frowned toward some sort of illumination on the southern horizon. Lights bobbed and weaved. Her immediate suspicion was that they came from torches carried by horseback riders. However, the only direction from which those riders could be coming was Mexico.
That thought filled her with dread because Mexico, too, had become a dangerous place. The recent revolution there had turned the country into warring factions to which Germany sent soldiers, weapons, and money, hoping the United States would be so distracted by the violence south of its border that it wouldn’t enter the war in Europe.
My God, Dani thought, could those be Germans?
The horse continued to resist her efforts to control it.
Calm down, she warned herself. The horse senses my fear. That’s what’s causing the problem.
No, those weren’t Germans invading from Mexico, she decided. Now that she paid closer attention, the lights didn’t look at all like riders with torches.
If they weren’t torches, though, what else could they be?
Only gradually did Dani wonder if these might be the lights she’d heard so much about when she was growing up. The stories had seemed fanciful, and she’d paid them no mind because although she knew many people in town who claimed to have seen them, she had not.
Now, on the distant horizon, the lights took the shape of luminous balls. Their colors were like segments of a rainbow. Sometimes they merged, red and blue becoming purple, or green and red becoming yellow. They drifted sideways or rose and fell as if in a current.
They got larger and brighter.
Dani became aware of a hum that gradually increased in pitch, and before she knew it, her ears were in pain.
Suddenly the horse reared up. She pressed down on its neck while tightening her legs against its flanks. Making panicked noises, the animal skittered sideways. Again it attempted to rear up, and suddenly- regardless of her expert efforts-it charged along the road.
The horse’s speed would normally have made it difficult for Dani to see obstacles on the shadowy road, but as she struggled to subdue it, she realized that the road had become unnaturally bright, with vibrant colors flashing toward it. Without warning, the lights were rushing over her, spinning around her, trapping her in a whirlpool.
At once the horse bucked so violently that she flew off the saddle. When she struck the road, pain shot through her ribs. Her vision blurred. Dizzy, she heard the horse neighing in alarm. The pounding of its hooves began again and receded into the distance.
Dani had no idea how long she lay unconscious. When she wakened, the lights were gone. Clouds had drifted in, partially concealing the stars and the moon. In the meager illumination, she squirmed to her feet. Despite the cold, the pain in her ribs made her sweat.