“This is where we store our chemical explosives,” Dirks said, reaching inside to flick on the lights. He puffed his chubby cheeks, making his beard bristle out. He gestured for the Russians to enter the claustrophobic building.
Ursov said, “A bunker looks like a bunker, looks like a bunker.”
“Maybe they keep more flying saucers out here,” Anatoli Voronin muttered, spreading his thick lips in a grin.
Paige had just closed the van door when her cellular phone rang. As she plucked the unit from her belt, Dirks waved to her. “I’ll take them in, ma’am.” He ushered the Russians inside the bunker as Paige pressed the phone against her ear.
“This is Chief Medical Examiner Adams,” said a voice, reedy but firm. Her heart beat more rapidly as she prepared to receive the report about Nevsky’s death. “Are you someplace you can talk, Ms. Mitchell? The report is worse than you might have imagined.”
Paige braced herself. “Worse than him being dead?”
“Trouble is,” the coroner said, “the ambassador was dead long before that crate fell on his head — by at least half an hour. We can tell by the splash pattern and by chemical analysis of the blood. His heart wasn’t beating at the time of the massive trauma to his skull and vertebrae. It would seem that the falling crate was a cover-up to hide a major blow to the cranium.”
Paige stiffened as the words sunk in. “You’re suggesting this was a murder and coverup, not just an industrial accident.”
“No question in my mind. You’ve got a problem on your hands, and I don’t envy you the political hot potato. Not at all.” Adams cleared his throat, then continued as if reading from a dry report. “We’ll do a full autopsy and chemical workup, but facts are facts.”
Paige stared across the wide-open desert, aghast. “Mr. Adams, I’d like to get guidance from the State Department and the DOE.” At the back fringes of her shock, she began to feel the impending political implications to Nevsky’s death. Murder… In a flash of panic she hoped no one was listening on this cellular band. “You know about the President’s upcoming disarmament summit, the whole reason for the visit of this Russian inspection team. How long can we keep this information from the press?”
“I’ve got to complete a lot of tests and document the formal autopsy,” Adams answered. “Besides, in a sensitive case like this, I’m going to double- and triple-check every result. In the meantime, if people want to assume it was an industrial accident, there’s no reason we have to change their minds.”
“I understand,” Paige said. “I’ll get the FBI on it right away.”
Paige continued with the formal briefing. “The Nevada Test Site was chosen as a nuclear proving ground in December 1950, to reduce the expense and logistics of conducting U.S. nuclear tests out on Pacific Islands.” Speaking the familiar words helped her to wash away the settling numbness. She tried to focus on the task at hand, to keep the Russians from suspecting anything. She took a deep breath. “Our first nuclear detonation occurred a month later, dropped from an Air Force plane onto Frenchman Flat.”
“Here?” Vitali Yakolev said excitedly, scratching his flame-red hair and looking around the barren lakebed. The team members seemed fascinated by the wreckage around them, like a Hollywood set depicting a city in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
PK Dirks answered, hands on hips. “You’re standing on ground zero.”
Paige said, “President Eisenhower declared a moratorium in 1958, but testing started again three years later, after the Soviet Union resumed testing.”
Smiling broadly, Dirks tossed a pebble into the distance. “All told, we conducted about eight hundred tests out here, most of them underground.” He trudged across the dried mud toward the town ruins just off the road. “Don’t worry,” Dirks said jokingly, “it’s not too radioactive any more. You hardly notice the glow at night.”
Paige knew the background levels were barely higher than anywhere else on the site. She had checked for clearance before putting the mock towns on their schedule; the ruined buildings and bomb shelters were some of the most impressive sights at NTS.
Her mind still whirling about what she had learned from the ME, Paige continued the charade of the tour, waiting for a return call from DOE Headquarters, playing the attentive hostess and tourguide… a good protocol officer even in jeans and a denim shirt. She followed the group onto Frenchman Flat, into an uninhabited city that never was.
To study the blast effects of an atomic strike, samples of different architecture and construction materials, arranged in varying orientations, were erected at incremental distances from ground zero. Paige had seen films of the test explosions, how the flame front swept through the artificial town, scattering buildings like matchsticks, igniting rubble as if it were gunpowder.
Cameras planted inside the buildings showed mannequins seated on the furniture, play-doll families engaged in typical household activities, eating TV dinners in front of their black-and-white television sets. The blast wave swept them aside like chaff.
“So this was a town,” Nikolai Bisovka said, lighting up another Marlboro. He had grown immensely fond of American cigarettes. “But where is the saloon? Academician Nevsky would have felt right at home.” General Ursov glared as Bisovka blew a puff of smoke. The other Russians exchanged nervous glances.
The tour group crunched through the shattered rubble, the stumps of buildings, thick walls knocked down or caved in… twisted ends where steel doors had been torn free. Broken bricks littered the ground, but low, gray-green vegetation thrived. They walked under a steel railroad bridge whose immense girders had been twisted and bent like a pretzel.
“You can see where we tested different designs for bomb shelters,” PK Dirks said. “For a while it was a status symbol in this country to have your very own bomb shelter. My parents built one when I was a kid.”
“In former Soviet Union, everyone had bomb shelter,” Bisovka said, blowing away a cloud of smoke. “But our shelters were also called subway tunnels.” The other Russian team members chuckled.
Ranks and ranks of low structures protruded from the sands — reinforced-concrete domes and rectangular bunkers covered with dirt. Many had collapsed like eggshells, while others remained unscathed decades later.
Ursov nodded, his interest finally piqued. “I am curious to see if your successful designs look similar to ours.”
Dirks laughed. “Come on — we can look inside the intact ones.”
Paige’s cellular phone rang again, and she stepped back toward the van, trying to conceal her expression as the rest of the group continued into the abandoned ghost town. A pair of fighter jets roared overhead, streaking low then pulling up in a high-G climb, performing aerial maneuvers that caught the Russians’ attention. They stood outside the rows of crumbling bomb shelter domes, pointing at the criss-crossed contrails of the jets.
On her phone, Paige listened to the filtered voice of Madeleine Jenkins, an Undersecretary at the Department of Energy who did not mince words. “It was already an international incident when Nevsky was found dead, but now the State Department is reeling. We’ve got a summit in a couple of days to celebrate the successful completion of this work, to show off our bilateral cooperation. The President is scheduled to meet the team on Friday — what’s he going to say?” She sighed. “If this was a premeditated assassination, is it your belief that the other members of the team may be in danger as well?”