“You must go for the radio. Send out a mayday. In case I fail.”
Or God help me, if I lose my nerve.
She nodded, her eyes trying to hide her pain. What he was asking her to do would likely end in her death. “I’ll try,” she said, looking terrified.
Burning with regret, he tore the door open and pushed her toward the radio room. “Run!”
The truck bumped hard from the paved road onto a gravel track.
Leaning heavily on the gas pedal, Jenna took less than twenty minutes to climb from Mono Lake to the eight-thousand-foot elevation of Bodie State Historic Park. But she wasn’t heading to the neighboring park. Her destination was even higher and more remote.
With the sun a mere glimmer on the horizon, she bounced down the dark road, rattling gravel up into her wheel wells. Only a handful of people outside of law enforcement knew about this military site. It had been rapidly established, with barely a word raised about it. Even the building materials and personnel had been airlifted into place by military helicopters, while defense contractors handled all the construction.
Still, that didn’t stop some information from leaking out.
The site was part of the U.S. Developmental Test Command. The installation was somehow connected with the Dugway Proving Grounds outside of Salt Lake City. She had looked up that place herself on the Internet and didn’t like what she had found. Dugway was a nuclear, chemical, and biological test facility. Back in the sixties, thousands of sheep near the place had died from a deadly nerve gas leakage. Since then, the facility continued to expand its borders. It now covered almost a million acres, twice the size of Los Angeles.
So why did they need this extra facility up here in the middle of nowhere?
Of course, there was speculation: how the military scientists needed the depths of the abandoned mines found here, how their research was too dangerous to be near a major metropolis like Salt Lake City. Other minds concocted wilder theories, proposing the site was being used for secret extraterrestrial research — perhaps because Area 51 had become too much of a tourist attraction.
Unfortunately this last conjecture gained support when a group of scientists had ventured down to Mono Lake to take some deep core samples of the lake’s bottom. They had been astrobiologists associated with NASA’s National Space Science and Technology Center.
But what they had been searching for was far from extraterrestrial; in fact, it was very terrestrial. She had been able to have a brief chat with one of the researchers, Dr. Kendall Hess, a cordial silver-haired biologist, at Bodie Mike’s. It seemed no one came to Mono Lake who didn’t enjoy at least one meal at the diner. Over a cup of coffee, he had told her about his team’s interest in the lake’s extremophiles, those rare bacterial species thriving in toxic and hostile environments.
Such research allows us to better understand how life might exist on foreign worlds, he had explained.
Yet even then she had sensed that he had been holding back. She saw it in his face, a wariness and excitement.
Then again, this wasn’t the first secret military site set up at Mono Lake. During the cold war, the government established several remote facilities in the area to test weapons systems and carry out various research projects. Even the lake’s most famous beach — Navy Beach — was named after a former installation once set up along its south shore.
So what was one more secret lab?
After a few more teeth-rattling minutes, she noted the fence cutting across the hills ahead. A moment later, her headlights swept over a roadside sign, faded and pebbled with bullet holes. It read:
DEAD END ROAD
NO TRESPASSING
GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
From here, a gate normally blocked the road, but instead it stood open. Suspicious, she slowed her truck and stopped at the threshold. By now, the sun had vanished behind the hills, and a heavy twilight had fallen over the rolling meadows.
“What do you think, Nikko? It’s not trespassing if they leave the door open, is it?”
Nikko cocked his head, his ears up quizzically.
She lifted the handset and radioed park dispatch. “Bill, I’ve reached the base’s gates.”
“Any sign of problems?”
“Not that I can tell from here. Except someone left the gate open. What do you think I should do?”
“While you were en route, I placed a few calls up the chain of military command. I’ve still not heard any word back.”
“So it’s up to me.”
“We don’t have jurisdiction to—”
“Sorry.” She bobbled the radio’s feed. “Can’t make out what you were saying, Bill.”
She ended the call and re-hooked the radio.
“I’m just saying… we came all the way out here, didn’t we, Nikko?”
So let’s see what all the fuss is about.
She pressed the accelerator and eased past the gate and headed toward a cluster of illuminated buildings crowning the shadowed hill ahead. The small installation appeared to be a handful of Quonset-style huts and hastily constructed concrete-block bunkers. She suspected those buildings were nothing more than the tip of a buried pyramid, especially from the number of satellite dishes and antenna arrays sprouting from those rooftops.
Nikko growled as a low thumping reached her.
She braked and instinctively punched off her headlights, respecting her own intuition as much as her dog’s.
From behind one of the Quonset huts, a small black helicopter rose into view, climbing high enough to find the last rays of the setting sun. She held her breath, hoping the sun’s glare and the shadows below the hill kept her hidden. What especially stood the hairs on the nape of her neck was the fact that she noted no insignia on the bird. Its sleek predatory black shape definitely didn’t look military.
She slowly let her breath out as the helicopter headed away from her position, whisking over the hills and vanishing from sight.
The squawk of the radio made her jump. She grabbed the handset.
“Jenna!” Bill sounded frantic. “Are you on your way back?”
She sighed. “Not yet. I thought I’d hang at the gate for a bit to see if anyone came out to say hello.”
It was a lie, but it was better than the truth.
“Then get the hell out of there!”
“Why?”
“I received another call, relayed through military command. It was radioed by someone at the site. Listen.” After a pause, a woman’s voice faintly came through, but there was no mistaking the panic and urgency. “This is sierra, victor, whiskey. There’s been a breach. Fail-safe initiated. No matter the outcome: Kill us… kill us all.”
Jenna stared toward the cluster of buildings — when the entire hilltop erupted into a cloud of fire and smoke. The ground under her bucked hard, bouncing and rattling the truck.
Oh my God…
After a hard swallow to get breathing again, she slammed the pickup into reverse and pounded the accelerator, sending the truck careening backward.
A wall of smoke billowed toward her.
Even in her desperation, she knew she must not let that cloud reach her. She remembered all those sheep killed outside of Dugway. Her caution proved wise when a moment later a jackrabbit burst from that pall, took a couple of bounding hops, then collapsed on its side in a writhing seizure.
“Hang on, Nikko!”
She couldn’t get enough speed in reverse, so she threw the truck into a fishtailing spin to right herself, sending gravel flying — then gunned the engine and tore past the open gate. In her rearview mirrors, she watched the cloud pursuing her.