Strangers

had not seen the memory as vividly as Dom had seen it, but had merely recalled it.
        "Jets," Jack said again, keeping one foot on the brake and one on the clutch, gripping the steering wheel hard with both hands, staring out at the snow but trying to look back into time. "One, two, roaring high up, the way you said, Dom. And then another, low over the diner, and right after that one… a fourth…
        "I didn't remember a fourth," Dom said excitedly.
        Hunching over the wheel, Jack said, "The fourth jet came just as I rushed out of the motel. I wasn't over there in the diner with you. There was this tremendous shaking and roaring, and I rushed out of my room in time to see the third fighter - an F-16, I think. It virtually exploded out of nowhere, out of the darkness, over the roof of the diner. You're right: Its altitude couldn't have been more than forty or fifty feet. And while I was still taking that in, a fourth came straight over the motel, from behind the place, and it was even lower. Maybe ten feet lower than the other one, and the window behind me burst when it passed…"
        "And then?" Ginger asked in a whisper, as if a louder tone would shake the emerging memory back down into Jack's subconscious.
        Jack said, "The third and fourth fighters, the low ones, roared down toward the interstate, about twenty feet above the goddamn power lines, you could see right into the redhot intakes of their engines, and they went screaming out over the plains beyond I-80, one of them peeling up and out to the east, the other to the west, both swinging around and coming back… and I started running toward you… toward the group of you who'd come out of the diner over there… "cause I thought maybe you'd know what was going on… "
        Snow tapped on the windshield.
        The wind whispered susurrant secrets at the tightly shut windows. At last Jack Twist said, "That's all. I can't remember any more."
        "You will," Dom said. "We all will. The blocks are crumbling."
        Jack slipped the pickup into gear again and started up the next slope, continuing their roundabout trek to Thunder Hill.
        

        
        Colonel Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Horner, accompanied by two heavily armed DERO corporals, took one of Shenkfield's Jeep Wagoneers to the roadblock at the western end of the quarantine zone. Two large Army transports had been parked across the wide eastbound lanes of I-80, effectively blocking them. (The westbound lanes were blocked on the other side of the Tranquility, ten miles from this point.) Emergency beacons mounted on sawhorses flashed in profusion. Half a dozen DERO men were in sight, dressed in Artic issue. Three of them were leaning down to the open windows of halted automobiles, talking to motorists, courteously explaining the situation.
        Telling Horner and the two corporals to wait in the car, Leland got out and walked to the center of the blockade, to have a brief word with Sergeant Vince Bidakian, who was in charge of this aspect of the operation. "How's it going so far?" Leland asked.
        "Good, sir," Bidakian said, raising his voice slightly to compete with the wind. "Not too many people on the road. The storm hit to the west of here earlier, so most motorists with any common sense at all stopped earlier at Battle Mountain or even back at Winnemucca, until things clear. And it looks like virtually all the truckers decided to hole up rather than try to make it through to Elko. It'll take us an hour, I bet, before we've got even two hundred vehicles in line."
        They were not turning the motorists back to Battle Mountain. They were telling everyone that the closure was expected to last only an hour and that the wait would not be insufferable.
        A longer closure would have meant a massive backup even with the reduction in traffic brought by the storm. To deal with that larger number of inconvenienced travelers and to enforce a longer quarantine, Leland would have had to alert the Nevada State Police and the county sheriff by now. But he did not want to bring the police into it until that was unavoidable, for they would quickly seek confirmation of his authority from higher Army officials - and would soon learn that he had gone rogue. If the cops could be kept in the dark about the closure for just half an hour, and if they could be stalled for another few minutes once they did find out about it, no one would discover