As the jeep jolted down the worn-out farm track, Colonel Haasterman could feel every minor increment of the damage it was doing to his 64-year-old spine.  The land for miles around seemed barren and disused, not so much from soil-banking but rather as a direct result of Reaganomics in the abstract: wheat fields reverting into dustbowl country, the life and fertility sucked from them as though by some tangible and baleful supernatural force.

'Supernatural,' Haasterman muttered to himself.  'Yeah, right.'

'Sir?' said the driver, a corporal in the State National Guard, a detachment of which had been called out to the Table City airbase to serve in an auxiliary capacity should the need arise.

'Nothing, corporal,' Haasterman told him.  'Nothing important to you.  Keep your mind on the road.'

The jeep crawled on under a flat grey sky that seemed bigger than all outdoors.  Eventually they came to a rusting chain-link fence.  With a start of something like fright, Haasterman saw the bodies of small animals strewn along the wire.  Had the overt effects of the flare radiated this far?  Then he relaxed as his mind worked it out: the fence had been electrified again after long years of disuse, and the local animal population had long since forgotten it was potentially lethal.

Like the Golgotha Project itself, Haasterman thought, if it came to that.  You build a catastrophe machine, and when you realise what you've done you try to shut it down.  And then you bury it, and try to forget about it, jettisoning any number of lives and careers in the process - it was no coincidence that Haasterman himself had been sidelined into Project Blue Book and the mills of disinformation; a glass ceiling that had left him at the level where, in dealing with the overt Military hierarchies, he was pushing it to claim the authority even of 'Colonel'...

You bury the engines of destruction, and seed the ground with salt, and they lie dormant.  Then they power themselves up again and flare.

A pair of armed guards were waiting in an insulated picket gate where the road bisected the fence.  Over their fatigues they wore airsealed polyethylene coveralls with integral life-support packs.  Duct-taped to the coveralls, seemingly random were totems of an antique-looking and strengely eclectic nature: head-shop hippie peace symbols, reproduction SS-issue swastikas, a pentagram, a Star of David, fetish-feathers and mojo bags, dog-eared minor arcana tarot cards and pristine, mylar-bag-wrapped major league baseball cards... the cumulative effect was of men built up from clotted-together scraps and junk.

Haasterman showed his ID to one of the ragged guardsmen who was eyeing him uneasily.  'The site is hot?'

The trooper shrugged.

'Not so bad, this far out.  You wouldn't want to pitch a tent for long, is all.'

He hung himself off the side of the jeep and they rode with him, past the big Sikorsky Sea King choppers that had brought in the crash team and to the modular command centre that the team had set up.