“Would it be possible for us to see this place of yours?” Veronica asked. “You know, before we make our decision?”
“Most of our potential guests will to have to accept our offer sight unseen,” Forrest said, “but if you two are willing to be blindfolded for the first fifty miles of the drive, I think it’s doable. You’ll have to stay the night with us belowground, however. I’m not making a second two-hundred-mile round trip tonight.”
She looked at Michael and he looked at Forrest.
“What you’re suggesting requires us to have a great deal of faith in what you’ve told us,” he said. “Are the blindfolds really necessary?”
“Mike, if I plan to shoot you and take your woman out there in the middle of nowhere, is it really going to make a difference whether or not you’re blindfolded?”
“We won’t tell anyone where it’s at.”
“I know you won’t,” Forrest said. “But you certainly would if you knew where it was.”
“I want to see it, Michael,” Veronica said. “We’ll probably be dead in two months anyhow. Let’s take the chance.”
Michael gave her a look.
“Listen, Mike,” Ulrich said, “if it’s any consolation, I don’t care whether you join us or not. I mean, we could probably use your psychological expertise, but we’ve already got more names on the list than we can feed long-term, and my biggest fear is that the majority of them are going to accept our offer.”
“Then why ask so many?” Veronica said.
Ulrich thumbed toward Forrest. “Because he won’t listen to reason.”
Michael had paid very close attention to the way Ulrich and Forrest comported themselves from the moment he set eyes on them, and so far neither one had said or done anything to make him believe they were being deceptive.
“Okay,” he said at length. “I guess we’ll take the chance.”
The ride to the silo was long and uneventful, and Ulrich allowed them to remove their blindfolds after they’d gotten off the interstate. In the dark, one cornfield looked exactly like another, and there were no signs along the way to betray their location because they had been removed weeks earlier under cover darkness in case it ever became necessary to show someone the installation, as they were doing now, without betraying its location. There was no point in taking chances, and the last thing the authorities were worried about at the moment was missing road signs.
“Oh, he’s beautiful,” Veronica said, seeing Laddie looking back at her from the front passenger seat. She was seated between Michael and Ulrich.
“I thought I smelled a dog,” Michael said.
“See?” said Ulrich, annoyed that he had been displaced by a dog and forced to sit in the back, though he was enjoying the proximity with Veronica, who smelled like flowers. “I told you he needs a goddamn bath.”
“He hates baths,” Forrest said, pulling a cigarette from its pack with his lips. “He fights so hard it’s not worth the trouble.” He lit the cigarette and winked at the dog.
A mile from the site, Ulrich asked them to put the blindfolds back on. After they had walked both of them into the house and down the stairs to the main blast door, Veronica and Michael were allowed to remove them.
“So there’s a house above us?” Veronica asked, looking around the basement.
“It wasn’t common practice,” Ulrich explained, “but we’re so far away from Tinker Air Force Base out here that they built an off-duty quarters for the aboveground security personnel.”
“This is blast door number one,” Forrest said. “It’s ten inches of solid steel and weighs one ton. This door alone should be more than enough to keep out anyone trying to get in, but there’s a second door just like it twenty feet down the concrete security vestibule. Remember, these installations were designed to survive a nuclear attack, not a direct hit, but anything in excess of three miles would probably have failed to disable the missiles that were installed here.”
He sealed door number one behind them and led them down the lighted tunnel to number two, lifting an eight-pound sledgehammer from the floor in the corner and banging out a code against the door.
“We’ll have to remember to change that code now,” Ulrich said with a smile.
“Whatever,” Veronica laughed. “Like either of us knows Morse code. Doesn’t the intercom work?”
“Not at the moment,” Forrest said. “There’s a short somewhere inside the conduit and we haven’t gotten around to running a new wire yet. We’ll also be installing a number of small fiber-optic cameras. We’ve had more time-sensitive issues to deal with up to now. Like stocking up on food.”
The door opened a minute later and there stood Marcus Kane, a look of surprise on his face. “Already?”
“This is just a tour,” Forrest said. “These are the prospective guests we met earlier tonight. Where are the gamers?”
“Playing Xbox down in Launch Control,” Kane said. “Where else?”
“Launch Control? I thought you said the missiles were gone,” Veronica said.
“We still refer to the chambers by their old names,” Forrest said as he led the way down five flights of stairs spanning three stories. “This way to silo number one.”
The thirty-foot steel tunnel was suspended from vibration dampeners made of coiled steel shock absorbers. The walkway itself was covered with steel grating.
“This is blast tunnel number one,” he said. “It seals at both ends to keep out the exhaust during launch.” He opened the blast door and led them into the actual missile silo. “Be careful on the catwalk,” he warned. “It’s a ten-story drop to the bottom.”
“Holy cow!” Michael said, looking around. “This thing is huge.”
“It had to be to hold a rocket, Michael,” Veronica said.
“I’m sorry, honey. I forgot you knew all about missile silos. Perhaps you’d like to give the tour?”
“Shut up,” she said, looking over the railing to the bottom, where she saw a veritable pyramid of cardboard boxes. “Is that all food down there?”
“Most of it,” Ulrich said, peering over. “Be careful of these railings. We’ve rewelded them, but some are pretty badly rusted, so don’t be overly confident.”
“Is all that food as well?” Michael asked, gesturing at the boxes and crates stacked all around the silo’s many levels, levels originally used to allow Air Force personnel access to the missile’s many systems. There were nine levels, three above where they stood and five more below.
“Most of it,” Ulrich repeated, not being overly informative.
“My God, you guys have been busy,” Michael said. “It’s like a warehouse.”
“That’s the idea,” Forrest said. “Let’s head to Launch Control.”
In Launch Control—a perfectly round room full of steel shelves filled with everything from foam cups to ammunition—they found Kane, Oscar Vasquez, and Linus Danzig all sitting in expensive office chairs before a large-screen television, playing Halo.
Forrest introduced the men around and everyone shook hands.
“This was the brains of the installation and remains so today,” Ulrich explained, showing them the main console. “Once the aboveground cameras are installed, we’ll be able to see what’s going on up there at all times, both inside and outside the house. These three monitors will run on battery power most of the time. There are large dry cell batteries down those spiral stairs, which will be kept charged by bicycle generators. So the more people we have down here, the fewer turns we’ll have to take at riding the bicycles.”