“Exactly,” Caroline said. “You can have part of the split and we keep the rest to fund the construction of a brand new, Tauber Tube.”
Dwayne sprayed Morris with a generous mouthful of Harp.
5
The Recon
“A solar energy farm?” the helicopter pilot asked through their headsets.
“Lots of sun out here year-round,” Dwayne said back. “And our investors sure like the per acre prices.” The Bell-Huey was buzzing over the scrub and sand at a thousand feet. Chaz had the bay door open and aimed a camera at the passing scenery while Dwayne fed the pilot bullshit.
“You’re a couple hundred miles from anything out here,” the pilot said. “You’re going to lose major wattage over any lines you run.”
“Uh-huh,” Dwayne said. They hoped paying this dope in cash would tamp down his curiosity. But they had to pick the one chopper jockey in Tonopah who had an interest in alternative energy. Dwayne decided to change the subject.
“You learn to drive a helo in the Army?”
“Navy,” the pilot said. “I was at San Diego on the Reagan.”
“What’s a swabbie doing in the middle of all this sand?”
“Well, I didn’t care if I never saw water again after eight years.” and the pilot was off on the story of the glories of his military career and forgot all the questions he had about solar collectors and power loss ratios.
Chaz interrupted after a while.
“Can you take us over that mesa to our three o’clock?” Chaz pointed to a table of land jutting over the desert floor ten klicks to their south. The pilot banked the Huey in a lazy arc and put them on a course to cross the mesa on a north-south path.
Chaz aimed the camera at the compound they called home only a few weeks ago. It looked mostly unchanged, the Q-huts, the partly buried Tube building. But the tower was gone. The only sign of the Tesla tower that the Taubers built was the concrete foundation it was once bolted down on. The steel framework and the big steel plate ball were missing. Chaz fired away with the camera taking high res pictures in a long series of clicks.
“Can you turn us around?” Dwayne said and held his finger down and twirled it for the pilot. “We were looking at some parcels to the north of here. You can follow that service road.”
The pilot brought the chopper to a stop and worked the cyclic to auto-rotate around and point them in the opposite direction. The helo buzzed back over the compound in the opposite direction, and Chaz took more shots from the new angle. Deep tire tracks were visible leading to the service road and to the helipad. The new tenants had trucked all they needed out of here. It was a ghost town.
The pilot returned to his story about his miserable life aboard the world’s largest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier right where he had left off. Dwayne turned back to Chaz. Chaz nodded.
They directed the pilot on a random tour of the desert for another thirty minutes until he told them the disappointing news that he’d have to head back to the barn and refuel. They assured him they’d seen what they came to see and would settle up with him when they landed.
“Looks like they’re gone for good,” Chaz said. “And they took all your shit with them.”
Caroline scrolled through the pictures taken from the flyover of the compound on a laptop set on a desk. They were in a suite at the Marriott Courtyard in Carson City. Her brother stood looking over her shoulder.
“Well, then they won’t be there to interfere,” she said.
“I’d still rather err on the side of caution,” Dwayne said. “We watch ourselves going into the area. Your former employer still owns the surrounding land. He may be keeping an eye on it somehow.”
“Is that really necessary?” Morris asked. “They have the Tube. God knows where they’ve moved it.”
“Yeah,” Chaz said. “But you said someone’s been asking questions about you. Maybe they’re having second thoughts about letting us all walk away.”
“We want to excavate in a cave within ten miles of the compound,” Dwayne said. “And carry away a ton of material. If it’s still there. Wheeled transport is out. At least going in. They’d see our dust and come looking. And I’d bet the house that you two are on some kind of watch list.” He pointed at the Taubers.
“So, we hike in from maybe four miles distance,” Jimbo said from where he reclined on a sofa, channel surfing between ESPN and FOX News.
“But gold is heavy,” Caroline said. “We can’t back-pack it out.”
“We’ll work through that,” Dwayne said. “But first you’re going to tell us more about this Sir Neal.”
6
At University
Life started early for Caroline Tauber. She never looked back to see what she might have missed.
When most twenty-year-olds were entering their junior year of college, Caroline was already an associate professor teaching theoretical physics at University College, London and was well on her way to a doctorate with the completion and acceptance of her thesis. She was the youngest member ever invited to join the prestigious Thamos group, a collection of astrophysicists, cosmologists and quantum physicists representing the best in their fields.
She began her career at the University of Chicago with early admission at the age of sixteen and practically coasted through their programs with a double major in anthropology and physics. Caroline’s interest in the study of man was actually sparked by her infatuation with one male specimen in particular, Shane Douglas, an anthro major with the deepest brown eyes she’d ever seen. Her studies of mankind in general paralleled her interest in men in particular to bring her to the conclusion that all men were driven by urges their minds could not overcome. In simpler terms, men were a collection of assholes separated from Neanderthals only by their interest in professional sports.
Shane could not explain away the
