Threatcon Delta

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It was the kind of dusk that made millennia melt away.

Sitting on a boulder on the side of the cliff, 2,100 feet above the Temecula Valley, it didn’t feel to Victor Yerby like it was December 4, 2014. A mild wind blowing at his back from the west made the palm fronds rustle above him, a low and lazy, slightly brittle sound. The chill in the clean air was common to nighttime on the edge of a desert, but warmer than usual for December. There was the slightest musky taste to it, the remains of a late-afternoon dust storm that blew through the fringes of the Inland Empire. Yerby had just been waking up when he saw it rolling below, big and billowy, just like it was pictured in the movies.

Now the cloudless black sky was already showing crisply marked stars. He could not hear the sounds of the thinning traffic on the distant Highway 15. On one end of the freeway, about ninety minutes west, was San Diego. Travel three and a half hours east and you were in Las Vegas. Here, well south of Los Angeles in mountains close to the border with Mexico, there was nothing but horse country and remnants of the Old West. Just now there were no planes, civilian or military, passing overhead. There were no sounds on the private road that dead-ended at a cliff. It seemed to him that this dark night could have been plucked from the pioneer days or even further back. It could just as easily have been 2014 B.C.E. in some Middle Eastern desert. The few lights could easily be torches or campfires instead of homes.

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