Two guards stood at the front of the trailer across from them, and the door was open. A third guard was inside, shouting something to another person, and after a minute of arguing, a man was shoved outside and thrown into the arms of the two guards standing at the bottom of the door.
All three guards whisked the man away, whose face was covered in bruises.
“We need to get inside that trailer,” Jackson said.
“We don’t know if there’s anybody else inside,” Ben said. “And we don’t know when those guards are going to come back.”
“All the more reason to figure out what was inside and to do it quickly,” Jackson said. “I’m going in there with or without you. If you want to stay here, then go ahead, just don’t get yourself caught or killed.”
Ben removed his hand from the door, and Jackson opened it. Knowing that it would be better if he saw whatever was inside firsthand, Ben followed Jackson into the second trailer.
Unlike the other trailers they had seen, there were no spare parts on tables, but instead, they found a series of drawings on large sheets of paper.
“What the hell are these?” Ben asked.
Jackson reached for the nearest sheet of paper. “Schematics. Technical readouts for something very advanced.
There were dozens of similar schematics posted all around the room, and on the end of the trailer was a desk, a big one like an architect would use to draw up a new building.
Jackson walked over to the table and saw the drawings the man had been working on. He flipped through them quickly, and by the time Ben stood by his side, he flattened all of them back on the table. He leaned forward, pressing his palm against the top stack of the papers, and closed his eyes.
“What is it?” Ben asked.
Jackson looked like he was about to vomit. “When I first joined the military, I was with a marine unit specializing in nuclear cleanup. We would be a first response team in the event of a nuclear fallout event to help clear and evacuated the area. Part of our training was to recognize other devices that could be still in the area and mark them to be defused.” He opened his eyes and pressed his finger into the center of the schematics on the table. “This is a drawing of a nuclear device. Probably at least one-megaton blast. Small by today’s modern standards, but still big enough to level a city. And still with enough radiation to poison entire state or several states if the wind is strong enough.”
Ben stared at the schematics. “Do you think the man they took out of here is some type of nuclear scientist?”
“I can’t imagine him being anything else,” Jackson answered. “We need to take these, burn them, and then get that guy out of here.”
Jackson started gathering the schematics before Ben could protest, and he reached for the colonel’s arm, stopping him.
“Wait,” Ben said. “Let’s just think about this for a second.”
“What is there to think about?” Jackson asked. “These people are building a nuke to blow a city off the face of the earth. They could be building multiple devices. I need to get this intelligence back to my commanding officers as quickly as possible. There is no higher priority than this.”
“I agree with you that this is a top priority,” Ben said. “But if we take all the stuff now, we’re going to alert them to our presence. We need to take a minute and think about what we’re trying to do. Because if we’re caught, then nobody ever learns about what we found.”
Jackson hesitated, and Ben could tell he didn’t enjoy the prospect of waiting around. But the colonel wasn’t an idiot. He recognized that coming up with a plan was better than flying by the seat-of-their-pants.
“What do you have in mind?” Jackson asked.
Ben knew that they didn’t have time to wait for nightfall and the cover of darkness. For he knew Mark was already marching back to Asheville with more men to wipe them out.
Ben walked back to the front door, peered outside for a moment, and then closed the door. “This place isn’t very big, right?”
“From what we saw, yeah,” Jackson answered.
“That means they probably took that guy into one of the other trailers nearby,” Ben replied. “If we can get him out of here without causing too much of a distraction, then we can come back to this trailer, grab all the schematics, then escape before they realize he’s gone.”
“Okay,” Jackson said. “But what if we can’t get him out?”
“Then we go with your plan,” Ben answered. “We burn as much of this place as we can to the ground.”
Jackson nodded and glanced back to the schematics on the desk. “No offense, but I hope we get to do my plan.”
11
The moment word got out that food was missing, the entire camp was buzzing with concern. Liz had hoped her plan of searching everything all at once would mitigate some of the fallout, but it didn’t do as much good as she had hoped.
The gathering crowd outside the main building where the food was stored was growing restless. Liz was still waiting to hear back from Nancy and Cole about their searches, but Liz and Sarah had found nothing.
“Who would take our food?” Shelby asked.
“And what happens if we don’t get it back?” another asked.
The majority of the worry came from the women Nancy and Sarah had brought back from the clinic outside of Asheville. But some of Liz’s closest friends were also expressing concern.
Susan and Kurt Johnson were standing outside, baby in their arms, and everyone felt the tension rising. “What about us? We were here before all
