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1
THE ZONE
 
THE DREAM FADED, AND MEL RILEY AWOKE. SIX O’CLOCK; THE SUN was not yet up. Brigitte, his wife, still lay asleep beside him. But the birds outside were awake and chattering, and they were Riley’s usual alarm clock. He rose, showered, shaved, and dressed.
 
Riley was a morning person. He liked the dark calm of the predawn hours, the unsleeping stillness, half in this world, half in that. Downstairs in the kitchen he sat quietly, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, listening to his thoughts, watching through the window as the light changed on the trees and in the sky.
 
Riley was five feet eight, slim and fit, with wavy blond hair and an Irish, vaguely leprechaunish face. He had a tattoo on each arm—an eagle, a rabbit—and a large winged dragon across his chest. But it was Riley’s eyes that people tended to notice. Sometimes with surprise, or merely concentration, they would open widely, intensely, as if Riley were about to hypnotize someone—or had already hypnotized himself and were staring inward at his own soul.
 
Thirty-three years old, Mel Riley was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army. He and his wife and their two young daughters lived in a town house at Fort Meade, Maryland, about twenty-five miles northeast of Washington, D.C. “Meade,” as its inhabitants abbreviated it, was the sprawling, town-like base for, among other things, the National Security Agency, the U.S. First Army, and a part of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). Until recently, Riley had been a photo-interpreter at INSCOM, studying reconnaissance imagery from satellites and spy planes. But just now the Army was using him for something else.
 
Dressed in civilian clothes, which his new job required for security reasons, Riley drove the mile or so to work, past a golf course, parade grounds, a convenience store, and dozens of low buildings. Some of the buildings were brick, some were wood, some were named for dead generals, and some were simply numbered; many had obvious purposes, while others would always remain obscure. Riley’s unit worked in two single-story wooden structures numbered 2560 and 2561. They were secluded beneath trees on a large open lot on the north side of Llewellyn Street, a quarter mile from Kimbrough Army Community Hospital. There beneath the trees, the buildings seemed strangely lonely and rural, almost forgotten. On the far end of 2560, the smaller building to the east, the land sloped down to an open field with a creek that ran south, under the road, into a park and a lake. To the north of the buildings was a field with sparse trees, photogenically bleak in winter. The two buildings were remnants of the great military construction boom of the Second World War, and had once housed a bakery school and mess hall. Here in September 1979, they looked like two cottages huddling together in the woods.
 
Riley parked in the driveway between the buildings. He walked up a set of wooden steps to a porchlike entrance near the right corner of 2561. He opened a heavy forest green metal door and went inside.
 
To a visitor, 2561 might have looked like a normal if somewhat makeshift military office. There was an entrance room, or foyer, with a secretary’s desk, a refrigerator, a table with a coffeepot and mugs, and doors to two outer offices for the unit’s commander and operations officer. Behind the secretary’s desk, a narrow corridor led west, past half a dozen small cubicles with desks. The corridor terminated in a conference room.
 
There were still a few signs of the building’s original function. Two large metal chimneys jutted from the roof of an old furnace room next to the entrance, and in the un-carpeted foyer the floor was covered with red heavy-duty tiles. Across the outer wall of the commander’s office, next to the secretary’s desk, lay a quarter-inch steel plate, a heat shield where a large oven had once stood. In the only hint of the current goings-on, someone had covered the plate with a painted mural, a dream of deep space: a supernova unfolding silently, in slow motion, across dark light-years.
 
The unit was known, formally, as “Special Action Branch,” and was ostensibly attached to INSCOM headquarters. But it took its orders from the Pentagon office of the Army’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, and its tasking requests originated from a variety of offices throughout the U.S. intelligence community: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, even the President’s National Security Council. The orders that came into the office, and the information that went out, were stamped not only with the standard Army intelligence SECRET, but with the Pentagon code word, GRILL FLAME. Only a few dozen officials in the intelligence community had been briefed on the existence of the Grill Flame project. “Access is limited,” an Army memorandum of the time would note, “to those personnel approved on a ‘by name’ basis.”
 
Riley was often the first to arrive at the unit in the morning; he would then go through the solitary routine of opening doors and safes, and making coffee. He had an office to himself in 2560, the operations building next door, but he would usually linger in 2561, where the rest of the unit had their offices. The nature of the unit’s mission was such that he seldom had deskwork to do anyway.
 
On this morning, Riley had not been the first to arrive. Lieutenant Skip Atwater, the unit’s operations officer, and Lieutenant Colonel Murray B. “Scotty” Watt, the unit’s commander, were there waiting for him. Atwater was sandy-haired, droll and paunchy, a former enlisted man now in his late twenties. Watt was two decades older, a tall and husky man with a bulbous nose and a Boston accent. A new tasking had come in, they explained to Riley. It was a big one.
 
Riley walked over to the operations building. Atwater followed, carrying a large folder. After an entrance room—Riley’s seldom-used office—there was a narrow hallway; the two men walked along it and into another small room. The room had a comfortable leather couch, with pillows and a blanket, and next to it a chair. The window had been bricked, plastered, and painted over.
 
Riley lay down on the couch. Atwater fastened a small microphone to his shirt, then turned off the light, and waited. This was Riley’s cooling-off period, a time for him to settle his thoughts. The mental images he soon would seek—not just images but sounds, smells, tastes, textures, emotions, vestibular sensations—would be like faint, flickering signals from a faraway TV station, bent and bounced by the ionosphere, drowning in a storm of electronic noise. Now was the time to mute that noise.
 
Riley lay on his back in the dark. He felt his breathing slow, his heart rate drop. He imagined a large and empty suitcase lying open before him. In a heap, to one side of the suitcase, were all his anxieties and distractions. Riley began to place them into the suitcase, at first one by one and then by the armful. When they all had been put away, he closed the suitcase, locked it, and turned his back on it. For the next hour, he hoped, those distracting thoughts would stay locked inside that imaginary suitcase.
 
“After the suitcase ritual came the diving ritual. Conjuring a new scene within his mind, Riley donned scuba gear and slipped from an evanescent boat into warm turquoise waters, fifty feet above a coral sand bottom. He drifted down, breathing slowly. He had a belt with small lead weights attached, and as he neared the bottom, he began to release the weights, slowing his descent. When he began to rise again, he released a trickle of air from his life vest. In this way he tried to stay motionless, in neutral buoyancy, ten feet above the bottom. The bottom was sleep. The mirrored, rippling surface far above him was full waking alertness. Each was an extreme to be avoided; Riley sought instead a narrow intermediate zone. He drifted up and down through it, now shedding weights, now shedding buoyant air, and each time he passed through this magical zone, he felt his mind connect to something, as if tuning in to that distant station.
 
Lieutenant Atwater meanwhile sat quietly, holding the folder. The outside of the folder was blank, except for a white label with a tasking reference number. Inside the folder was a piece of paper with a brief description of the target.
 
The target, sent in by Air Force intelligence, was a nuclear device that the Chinese had just developed and were evaluating at a remote facility in their western desert, near a dry lake known as Lop Nor. Foreign nuclear weapons programs were among the highest-priority targets for the U.S. intelligence community. The community evidently had word that the new device at Lop Nor existed, but it wanted to know much more: What was its design? Had it been tested? Air Force officials, anxious to supplement their more conventional intelligence efforts, had decided to task the men and women of Grill Flame.
 
“Are you ready, Mel?” asked Atwater.
 
“Uh-huh.” Barely a murmur.
 
In a control room next door, Scotty Watt sat listening in with headphones. Atwater threw a switch near his chair, and inside the control room, a tape recorder began to roll.
 
“The target is an object,” Atwater said to Riley. He neither opened the target folder nor gave Riley any further information. The folder itself, he knew, was only a prop, symbolizing that out there was a target, one that Riley should focus his mind on and should describe in as much detail as possible.
 
“Tell me what your impressions are,” said Atwater.
 
Riley was floating in the turquoise waters, drifting down slowly, and now the signal grew and the static faded and there were glimpses and clipped sensations of metal and wires, electronics … a slender steel egg with a tritium yolk … And despite these dark impressions, with their aura of dread, Riley knew he was in the zone again, where he wanted to be, where he needed to be, and it was just about the best feeling in the world.