“I’ve only seen these on television,” he admitted.
“I’m on fuel duty,” Meechum remarked, striding for the parked vehicle with the hose and red gas can.
“Roger that,” he replied, thankful for the help. It gave him time to stretch his legs, which, he admitted, were suffering from the endless sitting.
“What’s on your mind?” Emily asked as she walked around the front of the truck.
He looked back to Kyla. She had the door open but stayed inside the SUV as she observed the prairie dogs. When she saw him, she flashed a big smile, happy to be there.
“Walk with me?” he asked, waving her along the shoulder in front of the truck.
They went about fifty feet before he stopped to look at the dogs near the road. He pretended to be interested in them, in case Meechum or Kyla wondered why he and Emily had split off.
“You have me worried,” she said quietly. “Did something happen I don’t know about?”
“No, not at all. You’re the first person I’m talking to about my thoughts.” He glanced over to her. “That bear attack did one thing for me. It made me realize we haven’t even gotten to the dangerous part of our mission. If we’re going to NORAD and if we’re planning to hurt them, I seriously don’t know how I can keep her safe.”
“So, are we changing our plans? We could go to Canada. Eventually, we’d have to run into someone, right?” Emily always impressed him in how she seemed to catch up to his line of thinking.
He made a thoughtful tapping sound with his tongue before answering. “I did have Canada in mind, but not for you and me…”
“You want Kyla to go up there alone? I don’t know—”
“No,” he replied. “Not just her. Meechum, too.”
Emily put her hands on her hips, thinking. After a short time, she seemed to arrive at a conclusion. “Okay then. We tell them what’s up, it’s for their own safety, give them provisions, and that’s that.”
He chuckled. “You don’t have any kids, do you?” She’d never mentioned children. It was a risk bringing up her family situation, but he didn’t mean anything by it. “I don’t, either, mind you, but Kyla is my niece. I’ve seen her and my sister butt heads for years. It’s never a simple matter of telling her what’s in her best interest and expecting her to do it.”
“She’s out of college, Ted. Not a kid anymore. We can be adult with her.”
Ted cracked up. “I love your optimism.”
She huffed. “Well…I could order Meechum to take her. As president and commander-in-chief, it would be a legitimate mission for a Marine.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I had a different idea…”
He explained his rationale over the next couple of minutes. When he was done, he searched her eyes for whether she thought it was going to work. He’d gotten to know her fairly well over the last several days, but even that experience didn’t provide a clue in this instance. He knew enough to guess it was because the plan wasn’t without its downsides.
“Give me some time to think about it,” she said distantly.
The barks of the prairie dogs were no longer so cute.
NORAD Black Site Sierra 7, CO
Tabby allowed herself to be led through the rocky tunnels until she and David arrived at what appeared to be a heavy metal door. David tapped a keypad before stepping back. “NORAD built everything with an eye toward nuclear strikes. It was dogma back in the days of the US versus the Soviet Union.”
She displayed only indifference.
“Through here. You’ll see the weapon responsible for wiping away your people.”
Tabby strode through, heart pounding. If she was being led into the heart of the enemy camp, perhaps there would be an opportunity to disable it. Or reverse it. That was how it went in the movies…
Lights came on, revealing a circular chamber about fifty feet across. Unlike the hallways outside, the walls and ceiling were painted white to brighten the space. A number of futuristic block fixtures glowed on the wall, reflecting light throughout the curved area. The floor was lined with non-skid metal grating, as one might find on the wet floors of a ski lodge. The central section of roof had a ten-foot-wide hole above a similar void on the floor below it…
“Come on, don’t be shy.” David walked up to a stout metal railing, which encircled the dark pit. He pushed on the rail. “See? It’s safe.”
“What am I looking at?” she said with unabashed wonder, looking up and down. The hole went up several stories before it ended in a metal barrier. Down was absolutely black after about a hundred feet.
“Part of my weapon, as I told you.” He leaned over the edge, looking below. “Far down there is one part of the device. Another was built on the roof of this NORAD bunker. And yet another is far above that.”
She reached the for the rail, distressed to learn that destroying his weapon wasn’t as simple as hitting an obvious self-destruct button. David might have mistook her displeasure as discomfort, so he tapped on a small tablet hanging on the metalwork.
“Sometimes it helps to see it.” He motioned for her to keep looking down. As she watched, lights came on in fifty-foot sections, giving her a better sense of what was in the hole. One after the next, sections of the pit lit up and stayed on, giving the impression of a drill pushing far into the core of the earth. The process went on for a couple of minutes before the
