“Don’t get anything too fancy. Remember, you’re supposed to be a secretary.” Harding belched. “I picked up some maps from the park service. There’s a wooded area in the mountains about two hours from here — around Matterhorn Peak in Humboldt National Forest. I’ll check it out first thing tomorrow. It just might do for the staging area.”
He patted his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notebook. He flipped through the pages and accidentally knocked a fork off the table. “What places are you going to hit tonight?”
“Anthony, pay attention to what you’re doing. People are starting to stare.”
“Let them.”
Vikki swirled her margarita and looked away. A sign inside the small Mexican restaurant proudly exclaimed,
Honest-to-goodness New Mexican Mexican food: TexMex We Ain’t!
It was lunchtime, and the small restaurant was jam-packed with patrons.
Vikki ran her fingers over the tabletop, tracing out small swirls in the water left from her drink. “There’s a place called Shotgun Annie’s. From the looks of it, it should be a military hangout: rock band, no cover for women, and two-for-one beers until nine. I’ll straighten the apartment tonight and hit it tomorrow.”
Harding held his hand up for another beer. “That reminds me.” They grew quiet as a couple walked past. When the waitress arrived with the beer, he drained half of it. “The security policemen: they’re the key to the whole operation.” He took a healthy sip and eyed Vikki over the salted rim. “It’s crucial you gain their confidence. Get one of the guards to trust you, and we’ll find a way into Alpha Base.”
Vikki drew in a deep breath and nodded. “I understand.” She looked up and wiped a strand of hair from her eyes. “Don’t worry about me. I can handle it. Just don’t you screw up.”
Harding grinned and held the glass up to his mouth. In the background the jukebox wailed a Mexican song. The waitress slid over and shoved the tab onto the table. The paper whirled between Vikki and Harding. Harding said, “Do whatever you have to do, Vikki.”
She stared through him, unblinking.
Do whatever you have to do, Vikki. The words came back to her.
They were younger then, and more idealistic. Anthony didn’t have his paunch, and as a post-doc at Berkeley, he had swept her off her feet the first time they met.
Vikki had lived in Berkeley since her undergraduate days, never wanting to relinquish the university crowd. It was safe, secure. One degree had led to another — Art, English, Food Sciences — and as the degrees piled up, so did the years.
It was as if she had never really found herself. She had always been looking for a cause, from her high school days in Colorado digging into the environmental issues, to the People’s Republic of Berkeley, leading the activist movement to bring socialism to the city.
But it wasn’t until the post-nuclear freeze movement, NUFA — Nuclear Free America — had caught her attention that she finally really felt part of something. She immersed herself in the activities, attended all the meetings, sat through all the inciting speakers, but still had never committed herself to anything more than just being a member.
Until she met Anthony Harding.
She fell for him, then discovered his Ph.D. from Cal Tech was in nuclear physics, and that abhorred her. She looked at him as an evil wizard, summoning up demons and unseen gargoyles. Nuclear was as inciting then as pig, the man, or the heat was in the sixties.
If it was nuclear, it was bad. It must be destroyed.
Myopic technocrats tried to push nuclear down the people’s throats. They surged past reason, circumvented rational thinking, all in the name of the almighty dollar.
It didn’t take Vikki long to introduce Harding to NUFA.
The arguments advanced by Nuclear Free America were compelling, but Harding did not quickly become a sympathetic listener. He argued he didn’t build bombs, he just did research with quarks, gluons, and other elementary particles. Researching basic physics was not the same as designing bombs, bombs that killed without prejudice, vaporizing babies as well as soldiers.
But it set Harding thinking.
The Livermore protest proved that he was sincere.
The annual protests at the nuclear weapons laboratory made for an ideal setting. Situated forty miles from Berkeley, the nuclear bomb factory permeated death. The computer center — home of the monstrous behemoths with mysterious names like Cray and ETA — whipped up a frenzy among the NUFA idealists. Weapons physicists with nicknames like the “Montana Madman,” “Raunchy Rhoades,” “T-T,” and “Jimmy L.” were the purveyors of death. And Harding knew that without their computers to design the nukes, there would be no nuclear weapons.
Harding became obsessed with the death factory; NUFA incited him to the breaking point.
So three grenades, whipped high over the fence on East Avenue, put a temporary stop to the nuclear madness, completely destroying the computer center. And drove Vikki and Harding into the underground.
There wasn’t a challenge to bring them to the surface — nothing important to make them appear. Until now.
Until Alpha Base.
Harding needed it. Vikki needed it more. And she was willing to put up with anything to see it through.
She’d slept with Harding before the Livermore protest to help bring him around to NUFA’s ways. Offering her body to him didn’t make him change his mind, change his philosophy about nuclear weapons; but it provided the motivation for him to listen.
She did it once — she could do it again.
Vikki nodded absently and murmured to Harding, “Don’t worry — I’ll do what I have to do.”
Chapter 4
Major McGriffin looked over his empire. It wasn’t much, but it was impressive as all get-out.
The darkened command post resembled a futuristic stage set. Red lights reflected off the brows of the men and women seriously going about their jobs. McGriffin leaned back in his chair and reached for his cup of decaffeinated coffee.
One hour into the first day on the job, and the boredom was already driving him bananas. Adding to it, this Wendover assignment still irked him.
As chief of the prestigious Standardization and Evaluation team at McChord Air Force Base outside of Tacoma, McGriffin was one of the “best of the best,” charged with scrutinizing the flying abilities of the other pilots. He made sure that a USAF pilot was for reaclass="underline" precise, exacting, and meticulous.
But Military Personnel Command decried that pilots couldn’t compete, and wouldn’t get promoted, unless they did something other than flying. His orders soon followed: an assignment to Wendover on a “rated supplement” tour — an assignment designed to supplement his rated, or flying, status.
Now he could compete with the other officers when it came time for promotions. And Wendover would have a rated officer to operate its command post.
Never mind that the nation would not have the use of an experienced pilot flying the Air Force’s workhorse cargo plane. And never mind that the experience level of combat-trained pilots was at an all-time low. Major William McGriffin was doing something much more important in the air force’s mind: filling a slot that anyone could do.
McGriffin darkly suspected that the people who had assigned him here, Air Force Military Personnel Command, was a clandestine arm of the Russian KGB. After all, what better way to drive experienced pilots out of the air force, and thus degrade the war-fighting ability, than to assign pilots to nonflying jobs?