Fade Out (16 page)

‘That was quite a fight,' said Bodell.

His wife Sarah got up from the table, went behind one of the curtained partitions and brought back a bundle of red cloth.

Bodell carefully unwrapped it and it became a tattered, blood-stained Japanese flag. Connors found himself hoping that he wasn't in for a rerun of World War Two, then hated himself for thinking that, and thought of how to short-circuit the conversation. All he wanted was to get Bodell on the hook, and up and out of there. The President would do his snow job, and the way would be clear to get at Crusoe.

Inside the flag were two medal cases, a folded photograph and a string necklace of dog tags. Bodell opened the cases. One was the Medal of Honor, the other the Purple Heart with cluster. They gleamed on the velvet like newly-minted coins, the ribbon colours bright and clear, untouched by time.

‘Harry Truman handed them to me,' said Bodell.

‘He was a good man,' said Connors.

‘Yes, he was. They had good men around then.'

Mrs Bodell had been looking at the photograph. She put it back on the table. It was a news syndicate picture of a young soldier and a girl on the grounds of the White House. A young marine holding an open medal case. The smiling girl, in a shoulder-padded dress and Andrews Sisters haircut, holding another. The medals were the only thing Connors could recognize.

Bodell fingered the necklace of dog tags like a rosary. ‘They was all my buddies,' he said. ‘Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima. Okinawa… I was the only one who made it.'

‘I know it's short notice,' said Connors. ‘But if you'd like to accept his invitation, I could arrange for a car to pick you up tomorrow. There'll be a plane standing by to fly you to Washington.'

He gave them both his look of statesmanlike concern. ‘As you and your wife will no doubt appreciate, the President's schedule is pretty tight. But one thing I can promise you –' Connors touched the folded photograph. ‘The President will be in the picture with you this time.'

Bodell looked at his wife for a long moment, then closed the medal cases. ‘Should I take these along with me?'

‘Yes,' said Connors. ‘I think you should.'

As Bodell rolled his souvenirs back into the folded flag, Connors knew he had it all wrapped up. Tomorrow, Bodell and his wife would be on their way to Washington, and on Monday, the Corporation would be up on Crow Ridge.

Volkert took Connors back from Bodell's house to Broken Mill with the speedometer needle wavering between fifty and sixty. Pebbles from the loose, gravelly surface spurted from under the tyres and whacked against the arches and subframe like machine-gun fire. Behind them, a trail of dust hung in the air. Volkert drove with his left elbow out of the window and his right hand resting on the bottom of the rocking steering wheel. Several times Connors thought they were going to bounce out of the ruts and into the ditch on his side of the car.

‘Do you have to take it this close?'

Volkert looked across at him with a grin. ‘If you're plannin' on drivin' round here, Rule One is to git yourself
just as far over to the right as she'll go without cuttin' hay.'

‘Why's that?' asked Connors.

“Cause the cowboys take their half out of the middle.”

Having conjured up the spectre of a head-on collision with a speeding car hidden in a dip in the road, Volkert put his foot on the floor and surged towards the next rise at over sixty.

Connors, who had made the mistake of watching all the slow-motion crash tests on TV, tightened his safety belt into a tourniquet across his stomach and tried not to think of himself curving through an exploding windscreen like those chamois-leather-faced dummies.

Volkert's twentieth-century trail lore was sound. As they crested yet another rise, Connors suddenly found himself looking down the throat of a red GMC pickup coming at them up the slope, right out of nowhere. Five seconds slower coming over the top and one foot over to the left and they'd have taken him right in the kisser.

‘Whoo-eee…' said Volkert laconically. His left elbow was still hanging out of the window as they ploughed back on to the road. ‘See what I mean?'

Connors did – and could have done without the demonstration. This was obviously a Montana version of Russian roulette – probably played for his benefit. It was only four more miles back to Broken Mill but it seemed like four hundred.

They found the waiting Air Force helicopter surrounded by a small crowd of young kids. The two pilots were doing a great recruiting job.

Volkert shepherded the kids back out of the way as Connors climbed gratefully into the cabin. Up front, the pilot wound up the rotors to takeoff speed, then lifted off, nose down over the patrol car and away in a steep climbing turn towards the north.

Connors saw the kids wave to him and waved back. When he'd been young, it was always something he'd wanted people in aeroplanes to do.

Greg Mitchell was waiting by the landing pad when the helicopter touched down at Glasgow AFB. He ducked in under the whirling blades and escorted Connors over to the same Air Force Chevy.

‘General Clayson's over in the Base Commander's office with a couple of aides.'

‘Have you talked to him?'

‘No, but Arnold's over there.'

‘Did that guy Volkert get through to you with my message about Bodell?'

‘Yes. I've fixed up transportation. We'll have them out on schedule.'

They rode the rest of the way to the Base Commander's office in silence. The two-man KP detail sweeping the path stood aside to let them through. Connors shook his head. ‘We've barely started and already there are more people involved than on de Mille's
Ten Commandments.
How are we going to keep them all from sounding off?'

‘We could always recruit them on to the project.'

‘That's not a bad idea,' said Connors. ‘Maybe we could work on that. What about the Crash and Rescue Team?'

‘They've been reassigned to Thule in Greenland. Flew out this morning. That still leaves another twenty or so up at Glasgow with some peripheral involvement – and that deputy who was up on Crow Ridge at the time of the crash. Volkert.'

‘I don't think we need worry too much about him,' said Connors.

‘You mean he's too dumb to realize what's going on?'

‘No, I wouldn't call him dumb,' said Connors, ‘but he's certainly not about to rush out and discover gravity. What about those other guys from the county sheriffs office who were up on Crow Ridge the day after the crash?'

‘They're covered.'

‘What about the local newspapers? If they're like the ones back home, you only have to sneeze and they print your name and address and where you bought the Kleenex. If they pick it up, the wire services may – '

‘Don't worry,' said Greg. ‘The Corporation is taking care of all that.'

The outer office was secured by a captain from the base and Clayson's two Air Force aides. The captain bore the look of someone who had expected to have the whole of the weekend off. One of Clayson's aides took them on through.

‘Bob. Nice to see you.' Clayson got up from behind the Base Commander's desk. Wedderkind was sitting over on the sofa. ‘Arnold's been telling me about the legal problem you ran into.'

‘We should have the all clear on that by midday Monday. Right now, we've got a bigger problem. Has Arnold told you about the cutoff zone round the crater?'

‘He's told me he thinks it's an alternating magnetic field, generated by whatever is buried down there.'

‘Right.'

‘And that it has a neutralizing effect on electrical current.'

‘That's it. As soon as any electrical system enters the field, a surge starts to build up in the current. This overloads the circuit to the point where – depending on the system – it burns out, blows a fuse, or trips the circuit breaker that automatically shuts off the power when the circuit becomes overloaded. Which is great, because all you have to do is reset the cutout to switch everything
back on. But as fast as you do that, the surge builds up and the circuit cuts out again.'

‘We haven't tested the field exhaustively,' said Wedderkind. ‘But the preliminary experiments carried out along the access road indicate that the effect of the surge is weakest on the extreme edge of the field – about a quarter of a mile from the crater. As you move inward, there's a rapid, and rather dramatic, buildup. The magnetometer we took with us wasn't calibrated far enough. The reading went right off the dial.'

‘And we're also screwed for transportation,' said Connors. ‘If we want to move any heavy equipment into the cutout zone, we'll have to use diesel-engine trucks. We'll have to pull out the electric starters, and fit cartridge starters like the Air Force uses on their jet engines. That's going to need some snappy conversion work. I don't quite know what we'll do for lighting.'

‘Acetylene lamps,' said Greg. ‘Beyond that quarter-mile radius, of course, you should be able to use all the normal equipment.'

‘I hope you can.' Clayson looked worried. ‘Communications are getting to be a big problem. The radar wavelengths are still jammed, the fade-out on the TV and radio wavelengths has got worse. And we're starting to get some bad line interference too.'

Connors looked at Wedderkind, then back at Clayson. ‘How's the world taking that?'

Clayson shrugged. ‘It's hard to get the whole picture from Washington, but we seem to be building towards a global-sized jam in the telecommunications network. If we don't get a break soon, the wires are going to burn out.'

‘We're going to need some lines of communication ourselves,' said Connors. ‘Can the Air Force get us hooked up to Washington?'

‘The Air Force has troubles of its own,' said Clayson. ‘Hell, have you forgotten? We've lost contact with all our military navigation, and communications satellites as well. We've got a major operational crisis on our hands.'

‘You'll be able to handle it,' said Connors.

‘Yes… I'll see what I can do.'

‘Give it top priority, Chuck. We could find ourselves in a situation that needs a fast call to the White House. I want to be able to pick up a phone and get straight through.'

‘Right now, I can only guarantee one thing,' said Clayson. ‘If it's urgent, we'll fly you there.'

‘Great,' said Connors. ‘I'm going to end my life as a carrier pigeon.'

‘There's one other thing worrying me. How is this solar radiation theory going to hold up? We've had over a week of intense fade-out and my people tell me that there's no observable flare activity on the sun at the moment. Everyone with a telescope is going to know that too. Aren't they going to start asking questions?'

‘They already are,' said Wedderkind. ‘But the marvellous thing is they're already coming up with answers. There's nothing scientists like more than proving that their colleagues have got hold of the wrong end of the theoretical stick. Right now, the freak-solar-flare school is standing around with egg on their faces. The current theory is that the fade-out is caused by a prolonged burst of deep-space radiation.'

‘Where from?' asked Clayson.

‘No one knows. All our radio telescopes are out. But there's some talk that a quasar might have gone supernova.'

Connors grinned. ‘That's not a bad theory. Crusoe is the source of the interference and he is from deep space.'

‘Yes, but there's one thing that worries me,' said
Wedderkind. ‘Fraser used the times that the radar stations broke down to prove that Crusoe wrapped a residual band of interference clear around the globe while he was in orbit. If he's under Crow Ridge, and if he is the cause of the fade-out, then he must be doing it in a different way.'

‘Do I gather you no longer think Crusoe's propulsion unit is the cause of the interference?' asked Clayson.

‘That idea still holds, but only just. What's beating me is how the interference is spread so evenly through the whole atmosphere. I would have expected some falloff the further you got from Montana.'

‘Maybe he's beaming it right through the Earth and out the other side,' said Greg.

‘I'll go one better than that,' said Connors. ‘Maybe there's still a mother ship in orbit.'

‘Don't,' said Clayson. ‘Don't make it any worse. Are we any nearer knowing what causes the fade-out, Arnold?'

‘Well, advance reports indicated tremendous disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field. This data takes time to filter through so we don't have a complete picture yet. The Telluric currents – that's a measurable electric current flowing through the Earth itself – this week reached the highest level ever recorded. This rise indicates an intense – and continuing – magnetic storm. There have also been some extraordinary displays of northern lights. I don't need to tell you about the thunderstorms and lightning. Today we got the first data back from the small research rockets we sent into space. The measurements show that the ionosphere is saturated with negatively-charged particles, and there's been a fivefold increase in the amount of cosmic radiation in the two Van Allen belts. Any new satellite we put up would be knocked out immediately…'

‘Well, at least that's one thing we have going for us,' said Greg.

‘A communications fade-out makes it a whole lot easier to keep this project under wraps.'

‘What about this place called Broken Mill?' asked Clayson.

‘There are only a dozen people down there,' said Connors. ‘The Corporation is going to check their mail and outside calls.'

‘And once you've set up shop, what happens if any of them come looking for a job?'

‘The plan is to set up a “front office” operation at the junction of the dirt road with Highway 22. It will also act as base camp for the Ridge. There aren't going to be any vacancies but we plan to use local suppliers for minor services and part of our food. We want it to look as though there's only a handful of people involved.'