“Shannon, are you sure you don’t want her?” Erin said, suddenly sad for the infant. “She’s your daughter, honey. Your flesh and blood.”
“I like her,” Shannon said, holding her gently. “She’s cool. But she’s yours. I don’t want to be a mother. Tell her, Marty.”
“She’s given this a lot of thought,” Marty said quietly. “It’s for the best, Erin.”
“You’ll need to nurse her for as long as possible,” West said. “In this environment, she’ll need every advantage she can get.”
Emory sat against the pillow with the baby in her arms, looking dolefully at him.
“I’m serious, Shannon. It’s really very important. We don’t have any baby formula down here, and powdered milk isn’t going to do at all. Not to mention she needs the immunities only you can give her.”
“All right,” Emory said reluctantly. “You can go now, Marty. I don’t need you staring at my tits.” She bared one of her breasts, and West helped her cradle the baby and position the nipple in her mouth. The infant took to the nipple at once and began to suckle like a hungry puppy.
“That’s a small mercy,” West said with a glance at Erin. “They don’t always take to it this fast.”
“Hey, that feels pretty good,” Emory said with a grin. “It’s been a while. Maybe this won’t be so bad.”
Erin couldn’t help laughing. “Shannon, really.”
“Well that’s it,” Ulrich said, rising from his chair as the last outside camera was discovered on the roof of the house and wrapped around with tape. “They’ve blinded us.”
“I wonder why they taped them off instead of destroying them,” Michael said.
“This way they can communicate with us later on,” Forrest said, drinking from another cup of coffee. “Threaten us with imminent destruction.” He looked at his watch. “Be dark soon. We can raise the antenna just before sunup, maybe get a quick look at first light and then lower it again before they spot it. It’s far enough away, they may not notice.”
“I’ve got an idea I like better,” Kane said.
“Which is?”
“Call Broken Arrow about 0400 then go up and finish the job by hand. We’re bound to catch a lot of ’em asleep in the house.”
“That’s what Broken Arrow is?” Michael said. “Engaging them hand-to-hand?”
“Partly,” Forrest said. “But I don’t like it yet. Those trailers are out of range. We can’t risk a protracted firefight.”
“But how soon before we’re in a use-it-or-lose-it situation?” Ulrich said. “We won’t know where they’re snooping around up there now. What if they find the lift?”
“I’m not too worried,” Forrest said. “Tactically speaking, Moriarty’s already fucked up.” He set the coffee cup down and shook another cigarette loose. “He could have played this like they didn’t know about the cameras. They could have pretended to prepare for something he didn’t really intend to do… make us prepare for something that was never going to happen. But this idiot’s no tactician. He’s a fucking supply officer, and he doesn’t scare me. So no Broken Arrow except as a last resort… unless you’d like to call for another vote there, Wayne.”
“Jack,” Ulrich said, pausing before stepping into the hall. “Go fuck yourself.”
Fifty-Two
“What if we flood the basement?” suggested a member of Moriarty’s staff. “Flood the tunnel and set the charges underwater.”
Moriarty sat looking at the man, glancing at Edelstein before sitting forward in his chair. “That’s a pretty good idea, Howard—except for the fact we’ve got no water and no goddamn scuba gear.” He pointed at the door. “Get the hell out of here, you moron!”
Howard stood from his chair, saluted and left the trailer.
Moriarty looked at the other four. “The next one of you who comes up with an idea like that, just shoot yourself and save me the trouble. Flood the goddamn basement!”
One of the cooks came in later and set a mess tray of blackish meat on the table. “I put a lot of cayenne on it this time. I think it’s better.”
Moriarty picked up a piece of the meat and took a bite. “A little spicy but not bad. Who is this?”
“It’s Lieutenant Ford, sir.”
“Poor fucker,” Moriarty said, licking his fingers. “He was a good man.”
“Have you come up with a way of getting into the complex?” the cook asked.
“No.”
“Too bad we don’t have any way of getting that Cat out here,” the cook said, turning for the door.
“What Cat?” Moriarty said.
“There was a D-8 along the highway on the way here. We could dig right down to the main complex with it. Blow our way in.”
Moriarty looked at Edelstein. “Would that work?”
“The concrete shell is six feet thick,” Edelstein said. “It would take a while, but with the explosives we have and a couple of jackhammers… yeah, I think it would work. It’s worth a try.”
“That’s it, then,” Moriarty said, getting to his feet. “Take a company of men and go get that goddamn bulldozer!”
Fifty-Three
It was late and Melissa sat in the hall with Laddie asleep beside her on the deck, her laptop against her knees as she stared at a simple cipher on the computer screen.
A B C D E FG H I J K LM N O P Q RS T U V W Y1-1 (Line 1, first letter) = A
4-6 (Line 4, sixth letter) = Y
etc.
The first numeral of a set denoted which line to reference, and the second numeral denoted which specific letter within that line to reference. This was the rudimentary alphabetic cipher Ulrich had shown her months earlier when she first expressed an interest in trying to decipher the code they were now listening in on as many as four nights a week. She had since tried dozens of variations on it, most recently:
A B C DE F G H I J K LM N O P Q R S T U V W YShe always attempted to match them against the same string of code that one of the telegraphers signed on with at the beginning of each transmission:
924913024024812824012924811636025913013011404925036712036824824
And always came up with nothing but gibberish.
One of her notable problems—among many others—was the numeral 9. No matter how she arranged the letters, she couldn’t come up with a workable alphabetical value for the numeral 9. She asked Ulrich about it, but he hadn’t been very helpful. He told her the 9s could have any one of a million different values—or even be complete gibberish to throw off a cryptologist.
She was frustrated with Ulrich, firmly believing that if he would just help her, they could crack the code.
“Okay, listen,” he said to her late one night in Launch Control when she had resumed work on the code at the console. “Do you know the Lord’s Prayer? ‘Yea, though I walk’… and all that.”
“That’s not the Lord’s Prayer,” she said, laughing. “That’s the Twenty-third Psalm. The Lord’s Prayer is ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven…’”
“Whatever. Go get a Bible and copy it down, a line at a time.”
“Which one? The Lord’s Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm?”
He looked at her and narrowed his eyes, not having the patience with her that Forrest had. “‘Yea, though I walk…’”