The facility map had the location of the outer fence, buildings, and its relation to the main Los Alamos complex. As the translator fed the information into John’s memory, he selected the optimal entry location and logged off the Web.
As he drove south on Highway 68 out of Taos, he wished the information had contained security details.
CHAPTER 27
The storm had dumped six inches of wet snow in the Jemez Mountains by the time John backed the Navigator off the highway onto the service road.
He killed the engine and doused the lights, then sat quietly in the vehicle. The big V-6 engine pinged as it cooled. The research facility was hidden both by ponderosa and lodge pole pines that hung heavy with snow and by the swirling clouds of snow that limited visibility to a few yards.
There was only one entrance to the isolated facility and it was at the north end. There the narrow arm of the mesa joined the rest of the plateau at the edge of the Jemez Mountains. In better weather, if he had been uninjured, John would have preferred to infiltrate the facility by climbing the rock face of the mesa. It would have been the less obvious route and his rock climbing skills were adequate.
But since that was no longer an option, he’d picked the shallow arroyo that he’d passed a hundred yards back up the road as the most likely point of penetration. He’d come prepared to defeat electronic surveillance and the storm would make that part of his task easier.
He removed the key from the ignition and slipped it under the floor mat. There wasn’t much chance of a car thief coming along in the next hour, but you could never tell. He opened the door and the strong wind billowed out his jacket. He ran the zipper up to his neck and then trudged through the snow to the rear of the Navigator. At the rear hatch, John slipped night goggles over his eyes and adjusted them. In the greenish cast of the vision, his equipment bags were dark shapes.
John opened the first, removed the tracker, and activated it. In a few seconds, its LCD screen illuminated and pointed the direction of Caitlin’s signal. As agreed, she was keeping up a continuous chatter over the translator without expecting a reply from John. If he replied, Holdren’s men would quickly locate him. After he was inside the complex, it would be another story. Their triangulation equipment might pick him up miles away, but at close range, the signals would merge together into a single source. Unless they were being clever. If they were expecting him then they could run the signals through a computer to separate out the encoding and decipher which was which. But that was one of the chances he’d have to take. One of many.
First, he had to get inside.
John draped a bag over each shoulder. Then he took out the poncho he’d sprayed with an inch thick layer of open cell foam and pulled it over his head and shoulders. He closed the rear hatch, and then followed his tire tracks back to the pavement.
John didn’t see the arroyo until he was almost on it. He paused at the steel guardrail and caught his breath. His exertion was low level, so far, but already he felt tired, drained. He fished in his pocket for a Hershey’s chocolate bar, ate it ravenously as he descended the steep bank, and then crammed the wrapper back into the pocket. Fifty yards up the arroyo, he saw the fence. It was a typical chain link fence, but it was ten feet high and topped by a single helix of concertina razor wire, just what you’d expect to find at the edge of a national forest.
John crouched beside a boulder and studied the fence. It ran horizontally across the top of the arroyo. Spanning the walls of the arroyo, between the bottom of the fence and the snow-covered floor, was six feet of steel grating. The bars were spaced wide enough to let normal water flows pass unhindered and yet narrow enough to keep even a child from sliding between them. But the narrow bars would act as a dam on the rare occasions when a summer storm would send an avalanche of water screaming down the arroyo. For those times, the massive grating had been hinged to fold back away from the torrent and allow whatever flotsam the water carried to pass beneath the fence without tearing it away.
Microwave motion detectors would provide the outer perimeter security for the fence. Here at the arroyo, John could see one aimed to cover the base of the fence between the banks. The next detector would be located to cover this one so no one could sneak up and disable one of the sensors without triggering another. Somewhere, there would also be a camera. Security cameras were usually monitored at random intervals and a human guard’s attention would wander, particularly at three in the morning when the cameras all showed a swirling mass of snow blowing across the lenses.
However, if anything triggered one of the microwave sensors the adjacent cameras would activate and focus on the trouble spot. That always warranted the guard’s full attention.
In order to get past the fence John would have to transverse the microwave field without triggering an alarm. The fence was probably motion sensitive, so any movement would trigger another alarm. But with any luck, the guards would have disabled the fence motion detector because of the wind. Fence detectors were notorious for giving false alarms during a strong wind. Debris, paper, bits of plastic, even tumbleweeds would strike the fence and each successive gust would cause the fence to alarm.
There. A camera was mounted opposite the microwave detector. Its focus was the center of the arroyo and the opposite bank.
