Friday night. Which meant that choppers full of soldiers had been
dispatched from distant Shenkfield at least half an hour earlier, and
that the Army knew in advance the "accident" was going to happen.
Tearing a crescent roll, Dom said, "If Falkirk and a DERO company flew
in and took over security on the quarantine line so soon after the
crisis hit . . . well, it means the Army must've had advance
warning."
"But then why didn't they stop it from happening?" Jorja Monatella asked
as she cut her daughter's serving of turkey into bite-size pieces.
"Apparently, they couldn't stop it," Dom said.
"Maybe there was a terrorist attack on the truck, and maybe Army
Intelligence only got wind of it just before it went down," Ernie said.
"Maybe," Dom said doubtfully. "But they would've gone public with that
kind of story if it happened. So it must've been something else.
Something involving top-secret data of such importance that only DERO
troops could be trusted to keep quiet about it."
Brendan Cronin had a heartier appetite than anyone at the table, but his
temporal appetite did not diminish the spiritual air that had surrounded
him. He swallowed some baked corn and said, "This explains why there
weren't hundreds of people on those ten miles of interstate when the
thing happened, as there should've been at that hour. If the Army
sealed it off ahead of the event, they had time to get most traffic out
of the danger zone before anything actually happened."
Dom said, "Some didn't get out, saw too much, and were held and
brainwashed with the rest of us who were already here at the motel."
For a while everyone joined in the discussion and arrived at all the
same theories and unanswerable questions that had occurred to Dom and
Ginger at the newspaper offices earlier in the day.
Finally, Dom told them about the important discovery he and Ginger had
made when, as an afterthought, they had looked through issues of the
Sentinel published during the weeks following the toxic spill. When
they had finished poring through editions for the week of the crisis,
Ginger had suggested that clues to the secret of what really happened on
the closed highway that night might be hidden in other news, in unusual
stories that appeared to have nothing to do with the crisis but were, in
fact, related to it. They pulled more issues from the files, and by
studying every story from a paranoid perspective, they soon found what
they hoped for. One place in particular figured in the news in such a
way that it seemed linked to the closure of I-80.
"Thunder Hill," Dom said. "We believe that's where our trouble came
from. Shenkfield was just a ruse, a clever misdirection to focus
attention away from the real source of the crisis. Thunder Hill."
Faye and Ernie looked up from their plates in surprise, and Faye said,
"Thunder Hill's ten or twelve miles northnortheast of here, in the
mountains. The Army has an installation up there, too-the Thunder Hill
Depository. There're natural limestone caves in those hills, where they
store copies of service records and a lot of other important files, so
they won't lose all copies if military bases in other parts of the
country are wiped out in a disaster ... nuclear war, like that."
Ernie said, "The Depository was here before Faye and me. Twenty years or
more. Rumors have it that files and records aren't the only things in
storage there. Some believe there's also huge supplies of food,
medicines, weapons, ammunition. Which makes sense. In case a big war
breaks out, the Army wouldn't want all its weapons and supplies on
ordinary military bases because those would be the first nuked. They've
surely got fallback caches, and I guess Thunder Hill is one of those."
"Then anything might be up there," Jorja Monatella said uneasily.
"Anything," Ned Sarver said.
"Is it possible the place isn't just a storage dump?" Sandy asked.
"Could they also maybe be doing some kind of experiments up there?"
"What kind of experiments?" Brendan asked, leaning over to look past
Ned, beside whom he was seated.
Sandy shrugged. "Any kind."
"It's possible," Dom said. The same thought had occurred to him.
"But if there wasn't a toxic spill on I-80, if it was something at
Thunder Hill that went wrong," Ginger said, "how could it have affected
us, more than ten miles to the south?"
No one could think of an answer.
Marcie, who had been preoccupied with her moon collection for most of
the evening and who had said nothing during dinner, put down her fork
and piped up with a question of her own: "Why's it called Thunder Hill?"
"Sweetie," Faye said, "that's one I can answer. Thunder Hill's really
one of four huge, connecting mountain meadows, a long sloping piece of
high pastureland. It's surrounded by a great many high peaks, and
during a storm, the place acts like a sort of . . . well, a sort of
funnel for sound. The Indians named it Thunder Hill hundreds of years
ago because thunder echoes between those peaks and rolls down the
mountainsides, and it all pours in on that one particular meadow in a
most peculiar way, so that it seems as if the roar isn't coming out of
the sky, but as if it's coming right up out of the ground around you."
"Wow," Marcie said softly. "I'd probably pee my pants."
"Marcie!" Jorja said as everyone broke into laughter.
"Well, gee, I probably would," the child replied. "You member when
Grandma and Grandpa came over to dinner at our place, and there was a
big storm, really big, and some lightning struck the tree in our yard,
and there was this boom!
and I peed my pants?" Looking around the table at her new extended
family, she said, "I was soooo embarrassed."
Everyone laughed again, and Jorja said, "That was more than two years
ago. You're a bigger girl now."
To Dom, Ernie said, "You haven't told us yet why Thunder Hill is the
place, rather than Shenkfield. What'd you find in the newspaper?"
In the Sentinel for Friday, July 13, exactly one week after the closure
of I-80 and three days after its reopening, there was a report of two
county ranchers-Norvil Brust and Jake Dirkson-who were having trouble
with the Federal Bureau of Land Management. A disagreement between
ranchers and the BLM was not unusual. The government owned half of
Nevada, not merely deserts but a lot of the best grazing land, some of
which it leased to cattlemen for their herds. Ranchers were always
complaining that the BLM kept too much good land out of use, that the
government ought to sell off part of its holdings to private interests,
and that leases were too expensive. But Brust and Dirkson had a new
complaint. For years they leased BLM land surrounding a
three-hundredacre Army installation, the Thunder Hill Depository. Brust
held eight hundred acres to the west and south, and Dirkson was using
over seven hundred acres on the east side of Thunder Hill. Suddenly, on
Saturday morning, July 7, though four years remained on Brust's and
Dirkson's leases, the BLM took five h
undred acres from Brust, three
hundred from Dirkson; and at the request of the Army, those eight
hundred acres were incorporated into the boundaries of the Thunder Hill
Depository.
"Which just happens to be the very morning after the toxic spill and the
closure of I-80," Faye observed.
"Brust and Dirkson showed up Saturday morning to inspect their herds,
per their usual routine," Dom said, "and both discovered that their
livestock had been driven off most of the leased pasture. A temporary
barbed-wire fence was being thrown into place along the new perimeter of
the Thunder Hill Depository."
Having finished dinner, Ginger pushed her plate aside and said, "The BLM
simply told Brust and Dirkson it was unilaterally abrogating their
leases, without compensation. But they didn't receive an official
written notice till the following Wednesday, which is extremely unusual.
Ordinarily, a notice of termination comes sixty days in advance."
"Was that kind of treatment legal?" Brendan Cronin asked.
"Right there's the problem of doing business with the government," Ernie
told the priest. "You're dealing with the very people who decide what's
legal and what isn't. It's like playing poker with God."
Faye said, "The BLM's despised around these parts. No bunch of
bureaucrats is more high-handed."
"That's what we gathered from reading the Sentinel, " Dom said. "Now,
Ginger and I might've figured the Thunder Hill business was just
coincidental, that the BLM just happened to go after that land the same
time as the crisis on I-80. But the way the government dealt with Brust
and Dirkson after the land was seized was so extraordinary it made us
suspicious. When the ranchers hired attorneys, when stories about the
cancellation of their leases began appearing in the Sentinel, the BLM
did a sudden about-face and offered compensation, after all."
"That's not a bit like the BLM!" Ernie said. "They'll always make you
drag them into court, hoping litigation will wear you down."
"How much were they willing to pay Brust and Dirkson?" Faye asked.
"The figure wasn't revealed," Ginger said. "But it was evidently darned
good, because Brust and Dirkson accepted it overnight."
"So the BLM bought their silence," Jorja said.
"I think it was the Army working secretly through the BLM," Dom said.
"They realized the longer the story was in the news, the more chance
there was of someone wondering about a link between the crisis on I-80
that Friday night and the unorthodox seizure of land the very next
morning, even if the two events were ten or twelve miles apart."
"Surprises me somebody didn't make the connection," Jorja said. "If you
and Ginger could spot it this long after the fact, why didn't anyone
think of it then?"
"For one thing," Ginger said, "Dom and I had the enormous benefit of
hindsight. We know there was a lot more going on during the days of the
crisis than anyone suspected at the time. So we were specifically
looking for connections. But that July, all the hoopla about a toxic
spill diverted attention from Thunder Hill. Furthermore, there was
nothing extraordinary about ranchers fighting the BLM, so nothing in the
situation linked it in anyone's mind with the I-80 quarantine. In fact,
when the BLM made that totally out-of-character offer to Brust and
Dirkson, a Sentinel editorial praised the repentant attitude of the
government and prophesied a new age of reason."
"But from what you've told us," Dom said to Faye and Ernie, "and from
what else we've read, that was the first and last time the Bureau of
Land Management dealt reasonably with ranchers. So it wasn't a new
policy-just a one-time response to a crisis. And it's too coincidental
to believe that the crisis evolving at Thunder Hill was unrelated to the
crisis simultaneously under way here along the interstate."
"Besides," Ginger said, "once our suspicion was aroused, we got to
thinking that if the trouble that night had been related to Shenkfield,
there'd have been no need for the Army to use DERO troops for security.
Because the soldiers stationed at Shenkfield would already have full
security clearance in all matters related to that base, and there
would've been nothing about a Shenkfield crisis too sensitive for them
to see. The only reason DERO would've been called in is if the crisis
was utterly unrelated to Shenkfield, involving something the soldiers at
that base were not cleared for."
"So if there're answers to our problems," Brendan said, "we'll most
likely find them at the Thunder Hill Depository."
"We already suspected the story about a spill was less than half true,"
Dom said. "Maybe there was no truth to it at all. Maybe the crisis had
nothing to do with Shenkfield. If the real source was Thunder Hill, the
"It sure feels right," Ernie said. He had finished dinner, too. His
silverware was neatly arranged on the plate, which was almost as clean
as before dinner, evidence that his military discipline and order had
not departed him. "You know, part of my service career was in Marine
Intelligence, so I'm speaking with some experience when I say this
Shenkfield stuff truly does smack of an elaborate cover-story."
Ned's frown exaggerated his pronounced widow's peak. "There're a couple
of things I don't understand. The quarantine didn't extend from Thunder
Hill all the way down here. There were miles of territory in between
that weren't sealed off. So how did the effects of an accident on
Thunder Hill leap-frog over all that distance and come down on our
heads, without causing trouble between there and here?"
"You're not dull-witted," Dom said. "I can't explain it, either."
Still frowning, Ned said, "Another thing: The Depository doesn't need a
lot of land, does it? From what I've heard, it's underground. They've
got a couple of big blast-doors in the side of the hill, a road leading
up to the doors, maybe a guard post, and that's it. The three hundred
acres you mentioned-the area around the entrance-is plenty big enough
for a security zone. So why the land-grab?"
Dom shrugged. "Beats me. But whatever the hell happened up there on
July sixth, it prompted two emergency actions on the part of the Army:
first, a temporary quarantine down here, ten or twelve miles away, until
we witnesses could be dealt with; second, an immediate enlargement of
the security zone around the Depository, up there in the mountains; a
secondary quarantine that's still in effect. I have a hunch ... if
we're ever going to find out what happened to us-what's still
happening-we're going to have to dig into the activities up on Thunder
Hill."
They were all silent. Though everyone was finished with dinner, no one
was ready for dessert. Marcie was using her spoon to draw circles in
the greasy residue of turkey gravy on her plate, creating fluid and
temporary moon-forms. No one moved to clear away the dirty dishes, for
at this point in the discussion, no one wanted to miss a word. They
were at the crux of their dilemma: How were they to move against enemies
as mighty as the U S. Government and Army? How were they to penetrate
an iron wall of secrecy that had been forged in the name of national
security, with the full power of the state and the law behind it?
"We've put together enough to go public," Jorja Monatella said. "The
deaths of Zebediah Lomack and Alan, the murder of Pablo Jackson. The
similar nightmares that many of you have shared. The Polaroids. It's
the kind of sensational stuff the media thrives on. If we let the world
know what we think happened to us, we'll have the power of the press and
public opinion on our side. We won't be alone."
"No good," Ernie said. "That kind of pressure'll just make the military
stonewall like hell. They'll construct an even more confusing and
impenetrable cover-up. They don't crack under pressure the way
politicians do. On the other hand, as long as they see us stumbling
around on our own, fumbling for explanations, they'll be confident-which
might give us time to probe for their weak spots."
"And don't forget," Ginger warned, "apparently Colonel Falkirk advocated
killing us instead of just blocking our memories, and we've no reason to
believe he's mellowed since then. He was obviously overruled, but if we
tried to go public, he might be able to persuade his superiors that a
final solution is required, after all."
"But even if it's dangerous, maybe we've got to go public," Sandy said.
"Maybe Jorja's right. I mean, there's no way we can get inside the
Thunder Hill Depository to see what's going on. They've got lots of