“The personnel here don’t even know there is a left hand,” Dr. Marie deadpanned.
“Even with your top secret clearance,” Ira went on, “I had to pull some strings so you’d know the details of this operation. The men you’ll be working with have no idea.”
Mercer got a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the weather. He’d spent enough time with Ira to fairly judge his moods. The stress lines around his eyes and on his forehead hadn’t been there the last time they’d shared a drink at Tiny’s. And his pallor went far beyond a normal end-of-winter hue. “What’s going on here, Ira?”
Briana Marie answered, “There’s been an accident. People are dead. We need you to carry on with their work.”
The whistle of wind beyond the hangar doors sounded like a mourning dirge.
Mercer learned he’d be spending the night at the main complex. Tomorrow he’d be taken to an even more secret base on the Area 51 grounds, a place Ira called DS-Two. Ira asked Captain Sykes to show him to his billet in a building behind the hangar. A metal roof covered the walkway, presumably to hide foot traffic from orbital observation.
The room was like any hotel Mercer had ever stayed at, only the door locked from the outside. To leave, he had to buzz a uniformed staffer seated in the barracks’ reception area. He took his first shower since Canada, thirty-six hours and roughly five thousand air miles ago. Returning west had fortunately nullified his jet lag. As the scalding water sluiced across his body, he thought of the old joke about a harried tourist on a package tour. “Oh, it’s Monday. Then this must be Rome.”
By the time he’d toweled dry, he’d figured out what Dr. Marie was working on. With Yucca Mountain only a short distance away, the answer was obvious.
Sykes was waiting for him at the reception desk when the corporal on duty allowed him out of his room.
“Is this your regular posting?” Mercer asked as Sykes led him across the facility.
“Nah,” Sykes drawled. “Me and my team have been here a month.”
“Team?”
“Delta Force.” This was the army’s elite hostage rescue team. “If you don’t mind a little free advice, Doc, I’ve learned you get along better out here if you don’t ask too many questions.”
Despite their awkward introduction, Mercer found he liked the soldier. He’d already realized his slow demeanor wasn’t laziness. Rather, Sykes possessed a cool deliberation, as if he knew when he woke each morning every action his body would take and every word he’d need to speak. It was only a matter of doling them out at the right time.
“And let me guess,” Mercer commented, “one question is too many?”
Sykes grinned. “You’re catching on.”
Sykes led him to a nondescript building, a slab-sided office cube with the architectural flair of a Soviet apartment house. Most of the base had been built in the 1960s and substantially expanded in the ’80s, yet it retained the Cold War sterility of its roots. The buildings Mercer could see were laid out in geometric blocs. There was no ornamentation, no landscaping and certainly no streetlights.
Nor, he noticed, were there any people. It was like walking around a postapocalyptic ghost town.
“Kinda creepy, huh?” Sykes seemed to be reading Mercer’s thoughts as they reached the building’s door. “I guess the isolation really gets to some of the people out here, having to live under cover all the time. A couple days after I got here, a bunch of the younger soldiers were given permission to put on a show for a Chinese spy satellite.”
“What’d they do?” Mercer followed Sykes to a flight of stairs. The building’s interior was as drab as the outside.
“They laid themselves out on the runway in nothing but their birthday suits. They used their bodies to spell out ‘Up yours, Mao.’ ”
Mercer laughed. “Would the Chinese be able to see it?”
“Shit, they’ve stolen enough of our technology to be able to tell which ones were circumcised.”
At the head of the stairs, Sykes opened a paneled door into a conference room, then told Mercer that Ira would escort him back to his room. The two men shook hands at their parting.
Heavy drapes were drawn over the room’s picture window, and banker’s lamps reflected puddles of cherry light off the burnished table. Along one wall were photographs of the U-2 spy plane. Ira sat at the head of the table, his jacket draped over his chair. He’d had the foresight to bring a bottle of his favorite Scotch and a bucket of ice.
Mercer accepted a glass gratefully. Though not a Scotch drinker, this had shaped up to be one of those days. Dr. Marie, on Ira’s left, drank from a bottle of water.
Sitting opposite the physicist, Mercer saluted them both with his drink, knocked it back in two quick swallows then shredded their veil of secrecy with his accurate hypothesis. “You’re building a subterranean repository for undocumented nuclear waste, like what the Department of Energy is constructing at Yucca Mountain.”
The silence had the weight of lead.
Dr. Marie finally managed to stammer, “How did you…,” before her voice failed her.
Ira merely laughed.
For half a century America’s nuclear power plants had been splitting untold tons of radioactive material to extract its energy. The result was a vastly more concentrated product than what went into the reactors, a deadly waste that wouldn’t lose its lethality for millennia. The short-term solution had been to store this waste in cooling pools at the plants. The only viable long-term disposal method was to find a suitable place to bury it and hope to God that they could put a heavy enough cork on it to keep the nuclear genie in its bottle.
Work was currently under way to construct a pair of fourteen-mile tunnels a thousand feet below Yucca Mountain. The waste would be stored in rooms excavated off these tunnels. Even with the water table lying a further thousand feet below the repository, extraordinary measures were to be taken to prevent seepage from coming into contact with the impenetrable casks that would contain the radioactive materials.
The forty thousand tons of nuclear waste currently stockpiled would be moved to the facility over the next two decades. When the repository reached its seventy-seven-thousand-ton capacity, there would be a century of additional monitoring before the complex was completely sealed in 2116.
Mercer gave Dr. Marie an ironic smile. “To answer your almost asked question, it’s the only thing that makes sense. We’re maybe forty miles from Yucca Mountain, you’re a nuclear engineer and my principal job is digging tunnels. That adds up to only one thing. Throwing Ira’s presence into the mix just gives this situation the right touch of subterfuge.”
“I resent that defamation of my character,” Ira grumbled without malice. “And your assessment is a bit off. The waste we plan to store here is documented. What we want to do is bring in most of the really nasty stuff before anyone knows it’s on the move.”
“By nasty you mean the waste left over from our weapons program and by anyone you mean terrorists?”
“Exactly.” Ira recharged Mercer’s glass. “We want to do the same thing they did when they transported the Hope Diamond.”
Mercer knew that story well. The last time the fabled diamond was moved from its home at the Smithsonian to New York City for a thorough examination and cleaning the security had been unprecedented — armored cars, police escorts and a large contingent of guards. Yet when they arrived at Harry Winston’s Jewelers in Manhattan, the box containing the fabulous gem was empty. What no one knew, not the guards, not the media or the public, was that the security entourage had been a ruse to throw off potential thieves. The stone had actually been sent in a nondescript package through the regular mail.
Dr. Marie leaned forward in her chair. “We’ll use standard shipping casks and all the regular safety devices, but we want to avoid the media attention that would tip off terrorists or anyone else who wants to derail the operation. By shipping material in secret, we eliminate the temptation.”
“How long do you plan to keep the waste here?” Mercer asked.
“It’ll be moved into the permanent repository over time. Because of the heat generated by the material we’ll be storing here, it has to be spread out all through the Yucca Mountain facility.”
“What we’re looking to build,” Ira interrupted, “is a temporary holding area away from media attention and out of reach of terrorists. Nothing will remain here by the time the main site is sealed.”
Leaning back, Mercer digested what he’d learned. He grasped the need for what Ira wanted to do. He knew
