Nuclear Winter

by Td Barnes

After Bradley told her to prepare for a trip to the small mining town of Tonopah, she also packed a supply of blue jeans, their boots, and western hats. Having the opportunity to dress Western provided a brief escape from the military culture that denied them many opportunities to dress like they did growing up on ranches. They usually wore western on weekends while enjoying their horses stabled south of town, but the chance to combine their weekend setting into a week vacation to the frontiers of Nevada raised the level of excitement nonetheless.

  Bradley looked forward his first-ever trip to Nevada’s Tonopah Test Range to witness a demonstration of the GBU-57A bunker buster bomb first hand rather than in a video. He wanted to feel that sucker, hear it, and see the earth implode with its detonation. This trip would also take him to his favorite place, the Remote Sensing Laboratory at Nellis Air Force Base where many of his Intel gadgets originated. Also, he hoped to visit the Nevada National Security Site where their daughter worked on something that even he lacked the need-to-know what she did. A bonus to the trip was seeing their son who followed his sister to Nevada to attend the University of Nevada Las Vegas also. They timed their trip to spring break starting this week at UNLV for their son now in his junior year.

  The Bradley’s arrived at McCarran International Airport a little after dark where he used his DIA government credit card to rent a car for the duration of their stay. He peered through the windshield, finding it impossible to ignore the bright laser beams piercing the night, their sweeping multicolored lights searching the heavens above the Rio and Luxor hotel and casinos. An intense laser penetrating the sky from eighteen hundred feet at the top of the Stratosphere Tower dwarfed them all. The slashing, crisscrossing battle of the laser beams merely provided a topping to the millions of neon lights that artificially brightened the sky above Las Vegas.

  They fought through heavy traffic on the southern section of the Las Vegas Strip — mostly taxicabs and limousines carrying arriving gamblers to the mega-resort hotel and casinos. They passed the pyramid-shaped Luxor Hotel and Casino appearing like a dark void in the glittering Las Vegas neon-lit skyline, its black color contrasting with the brightly lit medieval towers of the Excalibur and the massive MGM Hotel. Bradley turned left on Flamingo St where they crossed over Interstate 15 to the Gold Coast Hotel and Casino where their daughter Samantha recommended they stay.

  Samantha and their son Jeremy joined them for dinner that night where they pigged out on crab legs at the seafood buffet. Both kids left early with Samantha, who went by Sammie, begging out of the trip to Tonopah the next day with the excuse that she needed to stay over at the Site the next day for reasons she did not and could not share. She also broke the news to her dad that despite his position in the DIA, he could not visit the Homeland Security Site now due to a secret activity that she could not disclose.

  Jeremy, who went by Jer or Jez, could not accompany them to Tonopah either because of having made earlier plans to escape the city with an overnight trip to Death Valley with his classmate girlfriend. They agreed to have a family get together before Tom and Stacey headed back to Alabama. Tom and Stacey played video poker until near midnight before going to their room, both exhausted — it is near 0300 hours Alabama time.

  The next morning, Tom and Stacey friskily showed off to each other their western garb that they choose to wear to Tonopah. Dressing western today provided them a treat equal to their coming to Las Vegas.

  The dry heat of the high Mojave Desert hit them the moment they walked out of their air-conditioned hotel-casino following a hearty breakfast at the coffee shop. They headed north on the Tonopah Highway, State Highway 95 while enjoying an aero experience watching military planes taking off from Nellis Air Force Base lying in the northeast corner of the Las Vegas Valley. Coincidentally, they had arrived in Nevada during the scheduled and controversial Red Flag Exercise where Air Force planes departed one after another to head northeast over the Sheep Range into the Nevada Test and Training Range.

  Passing through Creech Air Force Base, forty-five miles north on Highway 95 from Las Vegas, the aero show changed to RPV remotely piloted vehicles conducting training flights for future deployment around the world. Fortunately, they caught Creech busily launching the unmanned planes participating in the Red Flag Exercise that had half the world in a tizzy for fear of provoking Iran into future retaliation against any country siding with the United States or Israel. Everyone knew that this exercise was specially themed on fighting Iran.

  Stacey listened with amusement while Bradley told her about how crews stationed at Creech and Nellis Air Force Base flew combat missions around the world without ever leaving the ground in Nevada. She listened to his running dialog on military activities, but having heard similar stories throughout most of their married life, she acted interested, but frankly could have cared less. Her mind was on her equestrian activities, a hobby started long ago to sustain her while Bradley deployed around the world dealing with bad guys.

  Instead of seeing the barren desert with no end in sight a military playground, she wondered how many acres it would take to support a cow, or what her horse in Alabama could find to eat here in the desert. She saw Nevada the worse ranch land imaginable where Tom saw it a great place to play with military toys. She could not recall having seen a stock pond since they left Alabama.

  “Look, there is a herd of mustangs,” she exclaimed when they passed 12 wild horses grazing peacefully in the distance. “I wonder what they eat and where do they find water to drink?” She glanced back to the front. “Have you noticed that we have seen hardly any vehicles? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a tree since we left Las Vegas.”

  “Highway 95 is a freeway compared with some of the roads in this state,” Bradley remarked. “Are you aware that this road used to be called the widow maker while testing atomic bombs at Mercury? Up to 110 buses made the trip each day carrying workers to the Atomic Testing Range.”

  Stacey intensely stared at him, lowered her chin, and drew back her head in a mocking gesture as though saying, "No shit — how do you know all these trivia?" Looking back to the road ahead, she said. “But it’s so straight. There’s not a bend in the road.”

  “What? Don't you believe me? The straight road is the problem. Drivers become mesmerized or fall asleep and drift off the road.”

  Stacey focused on locating a radio station at the thought of being mesmerized. She failed to find a country and western station and finally turned the radio off in disgust. “I can’t believe they rented us a car without Sirius satellite radio — especially out here in the boondocks.”

  Forty-five minutes later, with nothing but desert, a vast sign finally appeared on the right side of the road advertising the Area 51 Alien Travel Center and Brothel. Two miles later, they entered Lathrop Wells, gateway to Death Valley to the west and to the Nuclear Rocket Development Station and Yucca Mountain to the east.

  A Deli, large gas station and a pink colored stucco building behind them advertised it as the Shamrock brothel. A large, red glowing sign announced an Alien Bar & Grill, free Wi-Fi, jerky, nuts, liquor, and Cathouse souvenirs. Another declared the gas station being the last gas before Area 51. At the front entrance to the brothel stood a male, female standup with a circle cut out for showing one's face in photos, and on the side of the building, a sign advertised adult entertainment. Bradley exited and parked in front of the Deli to refill his thermos with coffee for the remainder of the trip.

  Stacey had escaped Tom’s addiction to coffee —preferring a soft drink instead, usually a Coke. While he filled his thermos, she plucked a can out of the cooler and wandered around the little store packed with tourist items much like a truck stop. Here the store differed in that it offered all sorts of Area 51 and alien keepsakes. “Look, Tom,” she exclaimed. She pointed up at a shelf on the wall at some female mannequins advertised to be Alien prostitutes like some Bradley noticed painted on the outside wall the brothel when they drove in.

  “Hubba, Hubba. What do they cost
?” He asked in the closest that he could get to a grin that his scarred chin allowed.

  “More money than you can afford on a colonel’s pay, buster,” she said with a laugh. She saw no one looking and followed that by wrinkling her cute, freckled nose and giving him the finger. Bradley chuckled. He placed his arm around her shoulders and forcefully guided her towards the cashier. He squeezed her breast, and they playfully bumped hips before emerging into the open from among the aisles to the checkout managed by a clerk missing two front teeth.

  Bradley glanced into the desert on their right while leaving the establishment. “Do you recall the theater newsreels showing nuclear rocket engine tests at Jackass Flats? It is on the other side of that mountain range. It is also the site of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. I assume you have kept up with the fuss in Washington concerning this project. The local people wanted the repository to create jobs and tax revenue, but the politicians in Washington won out and blocked appropriations in Congress. So now, the used uranium rods are stored at the reactor sites near the larger cities. It presents a major concern for us at DIA. Everyone will wish they had them stored here in Nevada when a group of terrorists steals some rods from one of our reactor sites to build a dirty bomb to use against us.”

  Before leaving their hotel, Bradley had reserved a room at the El Portal Motel in Beatty for this evening, preferring to stay in the town known for its once hosting World’s Championship Wild Burro Races. He wanted this to be a frontier experience like what he and Stacey enjoyed in their ranching childhood. The timing would work out great for him to finish at the TTR and return to Beatty only a two-hour drive from Tonopah.

  They entered the little frontier town of Beatty thirty minutes later. “This is the little oasis of Beatty and once home to the crew of the Beatty tracking station of the NASA High Range. Here they tracked test flights of the X-15, XB-70, and about anything flying above the speed of sound,” Bradley said informatively. He saw the sign on a large vacant building, identifying the Exchange Club on the corner at the intersection in the center of the town. “This is where the X-15 crew celebrated many a successful flight mission on the NASA High Range. The same applied to a successful run of the NERVA rocket engine or a window-rattling atomic bomb detonation on the atomic testing range.”

  “Boy, are you ever a living encyclopedia, today,” Stacey teased. “I am referring to your knowledge of everything from cathouses to space flight, my dear.”

  “Intel, my dear, intelligence. That is my line of work.” He said in his raspy laugh. “Bite me.” He laughingly joked.

  Stacey turned her head to look out her window. She smiled. She could not recall the last time Tom appeared this relaxed and to be enjoying himself. The last few hours seemed to have lifted the weight of the world off his shoulders.

  They passed straight through town expecting to be back in a few hours. For the next hour and a half, they entertained themselves with looking for remote ranches, desert wildlife, and dirt roads mysteriously leading into classified locations somewhere at the mountains.

  Between driving miles with no sign of human life, an occasional isolated road sign appeared out in the desert advertising something — the dreamlike El Sueno casino, rundown brothels — the Shady Lay, and wooden shacks with placards featuring curious spelling flourishes, one selling “a-reeks.”

  Standing out amid the cactus and sagebrush appeared the occasional weather-beaten sign advertising a cathouse long abandoned and boarded up. A few miles further along, a lighted sign with a red revolving light on top pointed to a remotely located cathouse doing a booming business.

  They crept the 25 mph speed limit through the old mining town of Goldfield. Stacey waved at the hidden town cop manning his speed trap. They topped a ridge and finally saw the sight of massive — military and only God knows what — antenna and microwave dish farms on the mountains around Tonopah, the Queen of the Silver Camps of the Silver State of Nevada.

  Bradley immediately noted the drop in temperature at Tonopah due to its high altitude. A slight breeze whipped through the mountains to make the climate a bit less hostile. He dropped Stacey off at the Mizpah Hotel and Casino in Tonopah, a grand old lodge where Howard Hughes married Jean Peters and boxing legend Jack Dempsey once worked the job of a bouncer.

  Since she lacked a security clearance to accompany him to NTTR, she could enjoy touring this very historic town dating back to a prosperous mining era, while he visited the National Tonopah Test Range a few miles southeast of the town past some old World War II bomber hangars one could visit. Any further out required restricted access to some classified projects.

  He headed out, leaving behind the mountainous town to venture back into the desert to where the F-117 Nighthawks stealth bombers once winged through the night like bats while Soviet MiGs flown by Nevada’s Red Eagle Aggressor squadron engaged Red Flag pilots from this shared runway.

  He came upon a security gate where a uniformed Wackenhut guard closely checked his name and military ID against an authorized visitor’s manifest before issuing him a visitor’s security badge.

  A young Air Force female second lieutenant from the Nellis Air Force Base Public Affairs Office escorted him from there to the small military airstrip where he noted a group of solid-white Boeing 737 planes with a long red stripe along the length of their fuselage with no other markings. They bore no company insignia, no numbers, letters, or identification markings whatsoever. This did not surprise him.

  Bradley wore civilian attire today because he did not want anyone wondering about an Army colonel wandering about this highly-classified test range. This fit right in. Those assigned here always wore civilian attire to minimize the appearance of an Air Force presence in the small community.

  Although Bradley arrived out of uniform, the military apparently expected him, judging from the stares he received from the scattering of Air Force officers in uniform when word spread of him being a 06, a colonel among those visiting the facility. His having an escort and a visitor’s badge further identified him being more than merely a colonel — as being someone important.

  Most possessed no idea of his identity or his reason for being here, most likely assuming him an Air Force colonel since the Air Force operated the facility owned by the Department of Energy. If introduced at all, those he met used a code name or call sign. None of this came new to Bradley since he too operated in this need-to-know fashion at DIA.

  No one offered to take Bradley into any of the hangars or buildings, nor did he expect them to do so. They made small talk, but no one spoke of anything having to do with the activities going on in this facility or inside the range. Bradley understood and expected no less. Some of the others and he loaded into an Air Force bus that transported them a few miles into the desert to some observation benches overlooking some vehicles, tanks, missile sites, and bunkers scattered across the barren wilderness range for targets. There remained nothing more to see once the B-2 dropped the bunker buster bomb, plunging it into the hardened concrete target, blowing smoke, concrete, and dust high into the sky. He left shortly after arriving back in his vehicle and headed back to Tonopah to pick up Stacey where he grabbed some coffee to go at a McDonalds on the south end of town on the way to Beatty.

  Tom and Stacey chatted with each other while revisiting the sightings of a few hours earlier, marveling at the unique features of the different mountains bare of vegetation between Tonopah and Beatty. “Look at the burros,” Stacey said while they passed the Fleur De Lis ranch on their left. “They are so cute. Let’s take a couple of them home with us to run with the horses.”

  Bradley laughed. “They look cute, but believe me; you do not want to care for one of those ornery things. Excuse the pun, but they become a real pain in the ass when they get older. Everything here in the desert stays sheltered from the hot sun and comes out at night, so you should see some desert wildlife this late in the day. I imagine those barren hills are home to all sorts of mountain lions, bobcats, and such wit
h fangs, prickly spines, or thorns.”

  The two of them entertained themselves watching for desert wildlife the rest of the way into Beatty where the sunset cast long shadows over the airstrip at Frans Star Ranch brothel two miles outside the dusty little desert oasis. Stacey remarked about a large number of automobiles in the parking lot when they drove past the Stagecoach Hotel and Casino.

  “That is why I chose the El Portal. It does not have a casino, and I expect it to be much quieter. I saw a marquee on the sign announcing a Lion’s Club meeting tonight when we passed by here on the way to Tonopah. I have some calls to make, and then we’ll come back here for dinner.”

  Without a secure line, Bradley could only give his office voicemail a safe arrival call and leave the motel phone number to call should his cell phone be out of signal range. After a buffet dinner at the Stagecoach Casino, they returned to the casino to watch the western clientele dancing to the strumming of a strained tune by the “Beatty Cowpokes” country and western band.

  They wandered around the casino to amuse themselves by watching the tourists and bored locals losing their money on the slots and a lone blackjack table. Bradley felt sunburned and chapped from being in the sun all day and suggested to Stacey that they stop for the day. They returned to their motel where he showered and fell asleep watching cable TV in bed and wishing for an Intel update on the occurrences in the Middle East and the status of two more Chinese freighters suspected of delivering additional nuke missiles to Iran.

  ****

  T minus Six Hours, Five Minutes.

  Off the coast of Taiwan:

  After embarking from its base on the Chinese Island of Hainan, the Chinese 094 Jin class submarine’s secret missions took it through heavily patrolled waters and the supposedly impregnable antisubmarine warfare detection systems of the United States at a time the United States concentrated on events happening in the Middle East.