Zemlya Test Site, and divided into zones: A, Chyornaya Guba; B, Matochkin Shar; and C, Sukhoy Nos, where the fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba was detonated in 1961.
During its lifespan, Novaya Zemlya had been home to nearly three hundred nuclear detonations, the last one in 1990. Since then it had become many things to many people—a curiosity, a tragedy, a grim reminder. . . . But for the cash-poor Russian government after the dissolution, the island had become a dumping ground, a place to abandon their abominations.
What was that American phrase? Adnan wondered. Ah, yes . . . One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
They were interested in the new line, Cassiano saw. Where it crossed roads, how far off the ground it was, how many support pylons per mile ... An interesting request, and of course he would do his best to acquire the information.
They were also interested in trains, which puzzled him. It was true that trains came and went on a daily basis, but their entry into the facility was strictly limited and monitored. If they were looking to gain access to the facility, there were easier ways. Perhaps that was the answer. They weren’t interested in the trains as a means of infiltration but rather as a measurement tool. The facility’s output was a closely kept secret, but if the trains coming and going were monitored and their specifications known, one could make a good guess as to the output levels.
Very smart, he thought. And it did fit with what he knew about his employers. Competition was a healthy thing, he’d been told, and nothing could be done about a newly discovered oil field. What could be controlled, however, were prices and output capacity, which is what he suspected his employer planned to do. The OPEC nations (Islamic nations) had been the world’s largest supplier of oil for decades upon decades, and if Cassiano could help maintain that supremacy, he would happily do so.
42
IN RETROSPECT, Jenkins realized he should have seen it coming, this “promotion” that was in fact nothing more than a grade-A pain in the ass. The facility got regular visits from a plethora of government agencies and officials, from the Environmental Protection Agency and Homeland Security to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Army Corps of Engineers, all of which had thus far been handled by a Department of Energy spokesperson. The recently reheated battle in Washington over the future of the facility had changed all that, and it seemed every pol or bureaucrat who could find his or her way here was showing up, armed with probing questions generated by underpaid staffers and a deep desire to understand every nuance of the facility.
“What they want, Steve,” his boss had told him, “is a peek behind the curtain, and you’re just unpolished enough to make ’em think they’re getting it.”
Backhanded compliment notwithstanding, Steve had to admit he knew the facility inside and out, backward and forward, having started here just three years out of college, which was, in the lifespan of the project, nineteen years after the site had been initially identified as a possible candidate, along with ten others in six states; twelve years after it was nominated for intensive “site-characterization” studies; and ten years after it was crowned the winner of the beauty contest. He’d worked at this not-so-little patch of desert for most of his adult life, and at a current cost of $11 billion, it was one of the most extensively studied chunks of land in the world. And depending on who won the battle in Washington, that $11 billion might be written off as a loss. How did one do that? he wondered. In what column on the federal balance sheet did such a sum fall?
The project’s completion had become a point of pride for the nine hundred or so members of the team, and while opinion varied from employee to employee whether they would want to live next to it, their collective investment in its success was enormous. Though only thirty-seven, Steve was considered one of the site’s old hands, along with a hundred or so others who’d been here since the project had gone from a notion on a piece of paper to a shovel-in-the-dirt concern. Unfortunately, he could tell no one much about what he did, a restriction he hadn’t minded until he’d met Allison. She was keenly and genuinely interested in his work, about how he spent his days, a trait neither of his previous two