As Page descended farther toward the darkness, all at once he did see the lights. It was as if a veil had dissolved, but the colors weren’t rippling the way Tori had described.
They writhed in anger.
“Something’s wrong.” Page shoved in the throttle and raised the nose.
A yellow filament shot up, like a flare from a solar storm. It lengthened until it snapped free, condensing into a twisting mass that sped higher.
Climbing, Page banked to the right.
The light kept coming.
He banked to the left.
The light did the same.
Transparent, iridescent, pulsing, it suddenly filled the cockpit. Page could no longer hear the plane’s engine. Instead he heard a rushing wind. Shades of yellow swirled around him. Images flickered.
He saw an aquarium filled with wavering plants and a model of a shipwreck, but the plants were actually cuttlefish, their tentacles resembling ferns, and parts of the shipwreck were more cuttlefish that had cleverly camouflaged themselves to match their surroundings.
And now his father was pointing toward more and more cuttlefish, and his mother, who would die from breast cancer within the year, was smiling because her husband and son were getting along for a change.
And Page heard a voice within the rushing air. It was his father.
“Sometimes we need to learn to see in a new way.”
The engine stopped.
The yellow vanished.
Without warning, Page found himself in darkness, his night vision blunted by the residual image of the light. He strained his eyes, desperate to see out through the canopy. With relief, he found that the difference between the glow of the stars and moon above him and the darkness below him was enough for him at least to identify the horizon.
The ground straight ahead seemed darker than the areas around it. Lumpy.
Page frantically realized that, trying to escape the pursuing light, he’d become disoriented and turned the aircraft toward the Bad- lands. The silence was dismaying. Normally his headphones muffled the sound of the engine, reducing it to a drone. But now he heard nothing.
The instrument panel was dark. The radio was dead.
His father had told him repeatedly what to do in case of an engine failure. The first thing was to put the aircraft into a glide. At a speed of sixty-five knots, the Cessna would lose a thousand feet for every nine thousand feet that it glided. In theory, this provided enough time to choose a location for an emergency touchdown-ideally a field, or even a road. During the day, the options would be visible, but in the dark, it wasn’t possible to know if a stretch of blackness was grass or rocks or a chasm.
At least the moon and the stars made the dark lumps of the Bad- lands look different from the flatness around them. Page kept the Cessna gliding at what he could only estimate was sixty-five knots. With the airspeed indicator not visible, he needed to rely on the feel of the aircraft, on thousands of hours of judging how it handled at various speeds.
They continued to drop.
“Tori, make sure your seat belt’s tight! Just before we touch down, open your door! The impact of landing might twist the fuselage and wedge the door shut!”
He decided not to add, And trap you inside.
To minimize the possibility of a fire, Page twisted the fuel selector dial to the off position, sealing the fuel lines. The closer they got to the ground, the more his eyes worked sufficiently for him to distinguish the lumps of the Badlands.
Tori saw them, too.
“Will we clear them?” she shouted.
“That’s the plan.”
“A damned good one.”
The Cessna glided lower. Time stretched. A minute felt like forever.
“My skin feels burned,” Tori said.
Page frowned, touching his cheek. “So does mine.”
“I saw my father,” she said.
“What?”
“When the light swirled around us, I saw my father. I was a little girl. He was dragging me to the car. I hit him, trying to get away so I could look at the lights.”
“I saw my father, too.”
The dark ground sped closer.
“I love you,” Tori said.
“I love you.”
The boulders loomed.
“Brace yourself.”
Skimming over the Badlands, Page thought he felt a wheel strike something. At once the uneven darkness was gone, replaced by what seemed to be grassland. But anything could be under the Cessna- rocks that would snap the wheels and flip the aircraft, or a fence that could do the same thing.
They were over the old military airbase, Page realized. Floating, he tried to hold off landing as long as possible, not only because that made for a theoretically softer impact but because as long as they were still in the air, they remained alive.
He couldn’t help thinking about the unexploded bombs below him.
70
Blood dripped from Halloway’s nostrils. He stopped dancing long enough to wipe the back of his right hand across his mouth. Seeing the red liquid on his knuckles, he felt troubled, but only for a moment. That blood didn’t matter anymore than the blood trickling from his ears did.
The woman in his arms mattered.
The glass of vodka and orange juice, always full-that mattered.
Most of all, the music mattered. Halloway remembered his youthful dreams of becoming a rock star, of having the world at his feet, of being able to give orders and do anything he wanted. He’d practiced with his guitar until his fingers had calluses. He’d written song after song. He’d followed rock bands from city to city, doing his best to be indispensable, buying drugs for them, getting girls for them, trying to persuade them to listen to his songs and maybe record them and maybe even let him sing in the background because good buddy Earl deserved repayment for all the favors he’d done.
Pretty soon, he’d be the guy people followed and got girls and drugs for.
But one city became another and another, just as one band became another and another, and one day Halloway realized that nobody was ever going to record his songs, just as they damned sure weren’t going to let him sing. What was he, some kind of moron, that he didn’t grasp that they were laughing at him and using him?
He went back to Providence, worked as a busboy in a restaurant, got his girlfriend pregnant, and joined the Army. The next thing he knew, he was killing people instead of singing to them.
The sadness of his life spilled over him as he danced to the heart- breaking music. His eyes blurred with tears. When he used his right hand to wipe them, he managed to see that there was a lot more blood on his knuckles than there’d been a minute ago. Frowning, he used his left hand to wipe his eyes. Seeing red liquid on those knuckles, he realized that blood was streaming from his tear ducts as well as his ears and his nose, but that didn’t matter, either-because then it occurred to him that his eyes were blurred for another reason.
He smelled something other than the cinnamon hair of the woman. Coughing, he looked toward the hallway beyond the open door, but he couldn’t actually see the hallway.
A haze filled it.
71
Lockhart piled more dead grass and tumbleweeds on the fire he’d built over the air-circulation pipes. The area around him blazed from spot- lights that had been activated at sunset, casting a grotesque glare over the huge dishes. The lights were so powerful that he felt their heat.
Or maybe it was the heat from the fire, which rose about five feet into the air now. After shooting every surveillance camera Lockhart could find, he’d searched the area for another way to get into the complex.
Damn it, the place is airtight, he’d thought.
Immediately he’d realized that of course the facility couldn’t possibly be airtight. There had to be pipes to pump the air in and out. Otherwise people inside would suffocate.
In the end, Lockhart discovered three sets of them, hidden among the dishes.
He didn’t have mat
ches. Muzzle flashes from his M4 had done just fine, however. First he’d piled dead grass and tumbleweeds over the pipes. Then, shooting into them, he’d had no trouble starting fires.
The trick was to keep hurrying from one fire to another, constantly adding more brush. It quickly became obvious which pipes were which. Smoke was sucked into one and blown upward from another. Even though the night air was pleasantly cool, the effort soaked his shirt with sweat, but he’d never felt more satisfied by exertion.
Thinking of the corpses in the truck and the threat the bastard in- side was to the mission, he inwardly chanted, Come on, baby, burn.
He imagined the crazy prick trying to breathe through a wet towel while he coughed his guts out. Sooner or later, the outside door would open. Lockhart had a distant view of it as he rushed from fire to fire, focusing exclusively on the intake vents, throwing on more dead brush. Lumber left over from a construction project made the flames dance higher. He kept looking at the door. The moment Halloway showed himself, Lockhart would teach him why it was a bad idea to ruin things for the colonel.
The fires roared. But Lockhart now heard a louder sound. Staring toward the west, he saw the lights of a swiftly approaching Black Hawk helicopter. Finally, he thought. The colonel said the equipment would arrive that would get me through that door.
He grabbed his M4 and ran. The landing pad had been destroyed by the wreckage of the exploding chopper. He stood under a flood- light and waved both arms to get the pilot’s attention, then motioned toward the area just beyond the open gates. Soon the Black Hawk settled onto the lane, its nose pointed through the gates toward the steel door of the concrete-block shed.
“What took that chopper down?” the pilot shouted as the Black Hawk’s rotors whistled to a stop.
His face tightened as Lockhart explained.
A special-ops team leaped from the side hatch, assault rifles in hand.
“You’re telling me that truck has corpses piled in the back?” the pi- lot demanded. Seeing three coyotes leap from the truck, things dangling from their mouths, he shook his head in disgust.
“The colonel said you’d bring equipment we could use to get through that door,” Lockhart said. “What have you got? Claymores? Detonator cord?”
“For this guy, I’ve got something better.”
A minute later, the chopper lifted off, hovered a hundred feet above the lane, and fired a rocket.
From a safe distance, Lockhart watched with joy. He’d wanted something to get him through the door. But this was so much better. With a satisfying roar, the rocket blew the whole damned concrete shed into pieces.
72
Brent stood on the motor home, describing the chaos of the crowd below him. Mindful of what had happened the night before, he’d al- most decided to do his commentary from the ground or from some- thing modestly higher.
But how the hell would that look? I’m supposed to be the toughest re- porter in the business, and I do my spot on a picnic table?
Even so, every time the crowd jostled the motor home and forced him to correct his balance, he remembered what it had felt like to plummet to the ground. No camera operator had enough of Anita’s determination to be willing to get on the roof with him. The producer had finally put a remote camera up there. It and the handheld cameras among the crowd, as well as the nose camera on the chopper, would provide ample coverage. But there wasn’t any question where the viewers’ attention would be-with the guy risking his life on the mo- tor home’s roof while all the other television reporters looked like wimps, doing their spots from the ground.
When the floodlights went out, Brent made a dramatic moment of it.
“Did somebody sabotage the lights?” he asked before realizing that his own lights had gone out, also-not to mention the lights on the cameras, the cars, and the choppers.
Jesus, don’t tell me I’m off the air.
Blinded by the sudden darkness, he groped toward the ladder at the side of the motor home. People banged against the vehicle, shouting in panic. He wavered, reached the ladder, started down, and froze as helicopters plummeted to the ground, bursting into flames.
Shrapnel flying past him, Brent hugged the ladder and waited for the shock waves to subside. His eyes were level with the motor home’s roof. He looked directly over the concrete barrier toward the field beyond the viewing area.
A glow approached.
At first Brent thought it was the residual image that the broadcast lights had imprinted on his eyes. But then he realized that what he saw stretched a hundred yards from right to left. The glow got bigger and closer, so strong that it dispelled the darkness, a tidal wave of colors rushing angrily across the grassland toward him.
Maybe the microphone is still working!
He spoke frantically into it. “Tonight this reporter is seeing the most powerful manifestation yet of the Rostov lights, stretching across my field of vision and approaching the crowd that has gathered here.”
The glow became harsh.
“Lightning appears to be flashing inside it! The effect on the spectators is tremendous.”
People in the crowd wept, wailed, and prayed. But the sounds they made weren’t loud enough to shut out the growing hum of the lights speeding toward them.
“The air’s getting hotter!” Brent shouted. “Grass is catching fire! Wait a minute, something’s racing from the lights! The microphone’s almost too hot to hold! My face is…”
He screamed.
73
When the Black Hawk blew the concrete shed apart, Lockhart and the assault team whistled in approval. A hole gaped, pointing the way downward.
“Now let’s toast the son of a bitch!” Lockhart said.
Without warning, all the floodlights went off, plunging the area into darkness. Tensing, he told himself it was only because of the damage the explosion had inflicted. But before the chopper could land, its lights went off, also.
So did its engine.
Abruptly losing altitude, it walloped fifty feet onto the ground, rotors whistling, skids snapping. The only illumination was from the fires.
No, I’m wrong, Lockhart thought. To the southeast, where the abandoned military base was located, a glow attracted his attention. Even with his eyes straining to adjust to the darkness, it was impossible to ignore.
“What the hell is that?” a member of the special-ops team shouted.
“I don’t know, but it’s getting brighter! And it’s coming this way!”
“Hit the ground!”
For an instant, Lockhart thought it was a missile streaking toward them, but as he landed on his chest, he realized it was a beam of light. The light was composed of spinning colors-red, green, yellow, blue. It shot from the horizon, hissed across the ground, and radiated heat as it passed over him. He smelled smoke from his hair and swatted out embers.
Throwing sparks, the light struck a satellite dish that was tilted sideways in the direction of the airbase. At once the light was redirected so that it rocketed upward from a dish pointed toward the sky. It reminded Lockhart of World War II movies in which powerful spotlights searched the sky for enemy bombers making a night raid.
Though it was only one beam of light, the multicolored radiance hurt his eyes. It soared higher, stretching toward heaven until it reached something up there and threw off sparks before it suddenly blazed on a downward angle, streaking toward something on the ground far away to the northwest. It left a tube of pulsing light that continued to crackle over the ground and pointed upward from the dishes.
“I’m on fire!” somebody yelled. His teammates hurried to swat at the man’s flaming clothes.
Lockhart held his hands over his ears. The beam of light hissed and crackled, but there was another sound-static that might have been a hum that might have been high-pitched music, threatening to split his eardrums.
74
July 16, 1945.
Just before dawn, the first atomic bomb was detonated outside Alamogordo in remote south
ern New Mexico. As the blinding, mushroom-shaped fireball rose thirty-eight thousand feet into the air and burned ten thousand times more fiercely than the exterior of the sun, the project’s director, Robert Oppenheimer, recited a passage from the Bhagavad Gita in which God reveals his true, awesome, terrifying form to a disciple.
“‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one,’” Oppenheimer quoted. “‘Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’”
At the same time, all telephone and radio messages ceased to be acknowledged by or sent from the military airbase outside Rostov, Texas, two hundred and fifty miles southeast of Alamogordo. Of particular concern was the status of the facility beneath the airbase, where research on an alternative weapon of mass destruction had been in progress since 1943.
After six hours of attempts to reestablish communication, the Army sent a P-40 Warhawk fighter plane on a reconnaissance mission from Fort Bliss. It arrived at 2 in the afternoon. Flying over the airfield, the pilot reported no activity whatsoever.
“I see open hangars. Trucks and aircraft at the side of the runway. A B-24’s at the end of the runway, looking as if it’s about to take off, but the propellers aren’t moving. In fact, nothing’s moving. I don’t see any people.”
Ordered to land and investigate, the pilot banked into a final approach. At two hundred feet, he finally did see something moving- a man in uniform staggering down the runway’s centerline. The pilot performed an emergency go-around and watched the man in uniform continue staggering until he collapsed at the end of the runway.
After landing, the pilot did a quick scan of the area but still didn’t see any people among the motionless trucks and aircraft. He rushed to the man he’d seen collapse. The man was semiconscious, moaning. His uniform had a colonel’s insignia and was covered with blood. His face was burned. Identification in a pocket revealed that his name was Edward Raleigh.
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