It took all five men to heave the thing up and over. It landed on the gravel with a crunching thump.
‘Weighs more than my wife,’ Camel grumbled.
‘Nah, she’s got a few more L-Bs on her,’ Meat said, as if to imply intimate knowledge. ‘More to love.’
The others chuckled. Camel’s chewing came to grinding halt.
‘Cool it,’ Jason said as he squatted to resume the analysis. The door’s reverse side was clearly what would have faced inward. The twisted hinges looked like they’d been lifted from a bank vault. The turn-crank was bent into a pretzel shape. No telling marks. Not even on the edges.
‘That’s definitely military construction,’ Meat observed.
‘You’re a genius,’ Camel said under his breath.
Meat ignored him. ‘I’m guessing that’s one of the old regime’s hideouts. A fallout shelter, maybe.’
‘Shit, maybe we’ll finally find some WMDs squirrelled away up there,’ Jam added.
Jason got to his feet. ‘Whatever’s inside that mountain must be mighty important to have been covered up like this.’
‘Hey wait. You missed something there, Sarge,’ Jam said, pointing to the corner where some camouflage netting had melted into the metal. ‘Here …’ He moved closer and tapped it with his knife. Then he stood and began cutting away the good half of his beard in large tufts.
Jason crouched and leaned in for a better look. Sure enough, there was a rectangular object caught up in the netting, slightly bigger than a credit card, thicker too. ‘Good eye.’
Whatever it was, it had taken a beating, just like the door. Curling his fingers under its edges, Jason tried to pry it free. But it had a plastic casing that had glued to the hot metal. He felt a tap on his shoulder.
‘Here,’ Jam said, handing over his Rambo-sized beard trimmer.
‘Thanks.’ Working the blade under the object, Jason managed to cut it away. Strings of melted plastic stretched behind it - like a shoe stepping off a wad of gum on a hot day. He let the strings cool before shaving them off.
‘You should put that stuff on your face, Jam,’ Camel said. ‘Be a good look for you.’
Handing the knife back to Jam, Jason turned the object over a couple of times. It was taupe, lightweight, with a now indiscernible picture on its topside - what might have been a passport photo. There was a long keyhole slit centred on its short edge where a clip or strap could be affixed. ‘Looks like a library card, or something.’
‘ID badge,’ Meat said.
Jason nodded. ‘Um.’
‘There’s probably a chip inside that casing,’ Meat added. ‘You know, like a swipe card.’
Jason proffered the card to Meat, who moonlighted as the group’s all-round techie. ‘Think you can open it up … see if there’s any useful data that might tell us who this belonged to?’
Meat took the card, flipped it over a couple of times. ‘Looks fried. I’ll see what I can do,’ he replied non- committally.
‘Make it happen,’ Jason said. ‘Now, we need to get into that cave. Fast. Unfortunately, as I see it, we’re going to need some help to make that happen.’
Everyone knew what he meant. None was thrilled about the proposition, yet no man could find adequate reason to oppose it. Autonomy went only so far.
Reluctantly, Jason pulled out his sat-com and radioed the command operator with instructions to immediately dispatch a marine platoon to his position.
3
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
Wrapping up a business call, Pastor Randall Stokes discreetly passed his eyes over the attractive female reporter from the
‘Look, a cathedral without a carillon is like an angel without wings …’ he told the caller ‘… or a four-cylinder engine in a Corvette.’ Pause. ‘I know, I know. We’ve been through all that …’
He noticed that Ms Peters was jotting copious notes with a mother-of-pearl pen as her shrewd gaze swept the bookshelves on one wall that brimmed with treatises on world peace and Evangelicalism, biographies of military generals including Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Patton. When she spotted
Smiling, she stood up and went to take a look at the impressive photo montage. It took only a moment before the pen began moving rhythmically across the notepad.
‘You tell the architect that’s how it’s going to be. Remind him that
She continued along the wall to the portrait of a teenaged marine cadet in dress blues. Then came the photos of a twenty-something, more fit Randall Stokes with his war buddies, grinning and armed to the teeth amid the ravaged backdrop of half a dozen battle zones - Kuwait, Bosnia and Baghdad among them. She admired his glinting marine officer’s Mameluke sword mounted on a hook, then finished with the impassioned stills capturing Stokes in his most familiar role: preaching to the masses - his ever-swelling evangelical flock. In two other frames, those photos had morphed into
‘Don’t be afraid to use a little backbone, all right?’ Pause. ‘God bless you too.’ As he cradled the phone, he let out an exasperated sigh and folded his hands over his chest. ‘My apologies,’ he said to the reporter. ‘Been wearing too many hats lately.’ He rolled his eyes.
‘Not a problem,’ she said, and made her way back to the chair. ‘Still okay to use this?’ She pointed to the slim digital micro-recorder she’d set on the end of his desk.
‘Sure.’
She hit the device’s record button.
‘Where were we?’ Stokes asked.
‘The megachurch,’ she reminded him, pointing with her pen out the wide plate-glass window at the nearly complete gleaming glass, steel and stone construction superimposed over the distant backdrop of the Mojave Desert Valley’s sprawling casino metropolis. ‘How most confuse it for a sports arena,’ she reminded.
Stokes chuckled. ‘There will be no monster truck rallies or hockey games here, I assure you.’
‘Many call you a modern-day Joseph Smith - the proselytizing, the temple in the desert …’ she said, almost accusatorily with a tip of her left eyebrow.
Stokes made a dismissive gesture and grinned. ‘Ms Peters, I didn’t transcribe the Word of God from golden tablets scrawled in hieroglyphics.’ Not exactly the truth, he thought. ‘We’ll let the Mormons make those proclamations.’
The interview continued with innocent questions about the church’s tremendous growth and Stokes’s ambitious mission to transform faith not only in America, but in countries around the world - to ‘baptize the world in the name of the saviour, Jesus Christ - the only path to redemption and salvation’. She then asked probing questions about his ‘retirement’ from the military, which went largely unanswered. Next, the reporter tactfully solicited his perspective on the motivational lecture series he’d parlayed into a global ministry, and why his fresh message of revelation proved so timely for Christians who saw the US invasion of Iraq as fulfilment of End Times’ prophecy heralding Christ’s return.
As Stokes anticipated, things soon turned serious when Ms Peters turned her queries to the contributions that funded both his global mission and this extraordinary construction project. Venturing into the minefield, the reporter had smartly turned up her charm. It began with some innocent nibbling on the tip of her pen - a mildly seductive act that Stokes had to admit was a potent distraction.
