Page 80 of Dead Mountain

Corrie gathered up her stuff, rose, and followed him to the door. He opened it for her and she offered him her card. “Sergeant Brickell, I’m available if you ever want to talk.”

He took it and eased the door shut. As she turned to go, she heard the bolt shoot home.

42

BEFORE GETTING ON the freeway, Corrie stopped at a 7-Eleven for coffee. Twilight had fallen over Albuquerque, the sky a sickly hue of mauve as she pulled into a space in front of the garishly lighted store. As she parked and went inside, she went over the interview with Brickell in her mind. She was bitterly disappointed he wouldn’t talk—and at the same time, convinced he knew more than he was saying. Something had happened at Kirtland the night the nine hikers died . . . but the business about security clearances had tripped her up. What she needed to do was talk to Sharp about this, arrange for the required security clearance, then force Brickell to talk, with a subpoena if necessary. But how long would that take? And given his stolid façade, how could he be forced to say anything, when she had no idea what, exactly, there was to tell?

As she came out of the store carrying a large coffee, a car pulled up next to hers and the door swung open. Brickell got out. She froze as he came around to her.

“Let’s get in your car.”

She slid into the driver’s side while he got in the passenger seat.

“What’s this about?” she asked evenly.

“Let’s get one thing straight: I was never in this car. We never spoke. Nothing I tell you can be attributed to me. Can we proceed like that?”

Corrie hesitated. At Quantico, they had been taught all about handling confidential informants. It was a tricky area and there were endless rules.

“Sergeant Brickell, whatever you say I have to share with my immediate superior.”

“No. You’ve got to swear on your word of honor that you won’t tell anyone where you heard this. You’re free to go out and corroborate the information elsewhere, and I hope you will. But I can’t be named. Is this understood?”

Christ, how was she going to deal with this? “Um, I don’t think I can agree to that.”

He put his hand on the door and started to get out.

“Wait,” said Corrie. She couldn’t let him go. He suddenly felt like the key to everything.

He paused.

“All right. You have my word.”

He got back in, took a deep breath, and let it out. He began to speak, slowly and in measured tones.

“We called it the Hallowe’en Incident,” he said.

She waited.

“It happened the night of October 31, 2008. An accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“What I’m about to tell you is classified at the highest level. I doubt the current Kirtland command even knows about it. The whole business was hushed up—not to protect national security, but to cover gross incompetence by certain high-ranking officers. That’s never sat well with me.”

“Please tell me, sir, what happened.”

He leaned back in the seat and looked straight ahead. “On the night of October 31, 2008, a B-52H Stratofortress flew out of Kirtland carrying a decommissioned Mark 17 thermonuclear warhead, en route to North Carolina for disassembly. This was an obsolete device with a yield of ten megatons—the largest in our arsenal. Most of those Mark 17s had been retired in the sixties, but there were certain commanders who wanted to keep a few around, just in case. This was one of them—but by 2008 it had deteriorated beyond any possible use. So that evening, it was placed in a special cradle in the bay of the B-52. It was heavy—twenty-one tons. The overloaded plane should never have taken off in that weather, but the order was given and the pilots obeyed. About four and a half miles south of the Kirtland control tower, at approximately six thirty PM local time, the plane encountered severe turbulence. The pilots lost control and, in a desperate attempt to lighten the aircraft, released the bomb. The plane climbed, narrowly cleared the mountain in its path, and the pilots managed to return to Kirtland.”

“And the bomb?”

“The bomb fell seventeen hundred feet into the mountains. The impact set off the high-explosive shell around the primary, but not, thank God, in the way necessary to detonate the warhead. Nevertheless, there was one hell of an explosion. The resulting fire sent up a plume of smoke carrying plutonium and other radionuclides into the storm.”

He paused, breathing hard. Corrie could hardly believe what she was hearing. “What happened then?”

“Kirtland immediately sent recovery teams into the mountains. The site of the drop was quickly located. Everything was covered up, the crater filled and camouflaged, the debris recovered, and over time the area was secretly decontaminated.”

“And who was notified?”

---