Page 63 of Dead Mountain

He continued hiking briskly, taking long steps. The ridge was scoured of snow and it was easy going. Lagarto Peak loomed up. They were making good time. O’Hara was glad he stayed in good shape. Bellamy, on the other hand, was falling behind, and he could hear the agent breathing hard.

The ridge descended gradually to a saddle. At the bottom, he paused to look up, Lagarto Peak rising like a pyramid above him. He now had a clear view of the ridgeline to the summit. He stopped to survey it with his binoculars.

“See anything?” Bellamy asked.

O’Hara, ignoring his partner, could see no good route up the ridge of Lagarto. There was no trail, and various bands of rock along the ridge would have to be scrambled up, some looking fairly serious, maybe class 3 or even 4. And trying to climb them at night, in a blizzard . . . ? No. There was no way O’Connell could have scrambled up that. Which meant one of two things: either he had perished before he got to Lagarto, or he had gone some other way. The eastward-curving ridge was the only other way he could have gone. It was a relatively gentle route until it ended abruptly in those canyons.

There was no point in continuing up Lagarto Peak. It would be a bear of a climb, and O’Connell hadn’t gone that way. That warren of canyons to the east might be an area to search later.

“We’re not going to climb that son of a bitch, are we?” Bellamy asked, looking up at the peak.

“No,” said O’Hara. “It’s getting late. We’re going back.”

“About fucking time.”

34

THE JEEP APPROACHED the foothills of the Manzanos along a straight dirt road, Colonel Abecassis at the wheel and driving fast—too fast. Corrie had a whole list of questions she wanted to ask, but she was finding it hard to focus as the Jeep tore across the desert at sixty miles an hour. Meanwhile, Abecassis was reciting the history of Kirtland and the role it played in the nation’s nuclear defense, occupying fifty-two thousand acres and employing twenty-three thousand people, including forty-two hundred on active duty, home to the 377th Air Base Wing—her wing—the 498th Nuclear Systems Wing, the 58th Special Operations Wing, ten groups and seven squadrons, and on and on, with Corrie nodding and murmuring encouraging words and gripping the armrests with white knuckles.

In their initial meeting, Corrie had been surprised to find the vice commander a woman, and then she chided herself for holding the same unconscious assumptions she decried in others. She had written in her notebook her tongue-twisting name and title: Colonel Maryam Abecassis, Vice Commander, 377th Air Base Wing. She was the person at Kirtland in charge of, among many other things, base security.

Abecassis had insisted on driving the Jeep herself, dismissing the notion of a driver. She put Corrie in the seat next to her—openly impressed that such a young woman was an FBI agent—while sticking Sharp in the back with a master sergeant named Brickell, whom she’d chosen to come along because he knew the remote areas of the base and had been there almost seventeen years—which would have included the Manzano tragedy.

Colonel Abecassis was a physically imposing presence—six feet tall, athletic, hair pulled back in a bun, wearing desert camo and a maroon beret at a jaunty angle, with the full-bird colonel’s eagle stitched on the front. Despite the intimidating look, she proved to be friendly and relaxed—and talkative to the point of garrulousness.

Corrie had almost canceled the tour after getting O’Hara’s report on the difficulty the ninth victim would have faced in reaching the Kirtland AFB fence. But she didn’t, if only because she was certain the radiation contamination must have something to do with Kirtland and its store of nuclear weapons. While there were other possible sources of radiation contamination—medical uses, for example—the FBI lab in Quantico had reported that the radioisotopes found on the clothing included trace amounts of plutonium and uranium that could only have come from a nuclear weapon or a reactor. It seemed obvious that nearby Kirtland, the world’s largest depository of nuclear weapons, must have been the source.

As the foothills loomed up, Abecassis slowed down slightly, to Corrie’s relief. She managed to insert a question during a brief lull in the flow of history. “I understand you store a lot of nuclear weapons here.”

“Yes. In the Underground Munitions and Maintenance Storage Complex. It’s not something we talk about, but everyone knows. Exactly what’s stored there, how much—that’s all classified.”

“There was radioactive contamination on the clothing of the two victims found in the cave.” Just like on the other six, she thought but did not say. “Do you have any idea where that might have come from?”

“What kind of contamination?”

“The lab at Quantico tells us plutonium, uranium, and tritium, among others. Very trace amounts.”

“Oh boy. That’s not good.”

“The report says it can only have come from a nuclear weapon or reactor.”

“That’s correct.” She hesitated. “Let’s be honest. In the days of the Manhattan Project—which we were part of—people weren’t careful. Quite a lot of minor contamination occurred. People just didn’t know how dangerous radioactivity was or how to handle it properly. Sometimes they disposed of radioisotopes like you would garbage. Up at Los Alamos, I hear they just tossed the stuff into the canyons. Incredible, right? That seems to have happened here as well, to a much lesser extent. We’ve had to conduct some remedial efforts cleaning up stuff on the base.”

“What about outside the base? In the mountains where the victims were found?”

“That’s highly unlikely. I’d say impossible, in fact. We receive and ship nuclear weapons, of course, but they’re completely sealed.”

“No idea, then, how contamination might have gotten into the mountains south of here, where the bodies were found?”

“None at all. But if I had to guess, I’d say the bodies brought the contamination to the mountains—not the other way around.”

They had now reached the base of the foothills, and the Jeep slowed further as the road wound up a draw.

“What can you tell me about the history of weapon storage here?” Corrie asked.

“The first bombs were sent here in 1945 and guarded by Manhattan Project military police, at a place then called the Manzano Base. Kirtland absorbed the base as it expanded. In 1947, they excavated a storage facility in the Manzano Mountains and moved the weapons inside. They were stored in steel bunkers. Those early Mark V bombs had to be assembled in case of war. They also created an emergency relocation center for President Eisenhower in 1953, where he could retreat in case of nuclear war—a command and control bunker complex, specially built for him and select military staff.”

“Really?” Corrie was surprised by this. “A presidential bunker? Here in New Mexico? Is that generally known?”

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