The field this time was Oklahoma, where a flurry of wire service copy about motorists sighting strange objects in the sky brought him running. But in two days he had not been able to locate any one of these people. That was bad. Without interviews, he couldn't write articles for any of the various magazines that published his work under his various pen names. It didn't matter who he interviewed, so long as that person could be quoted as having seen something. Thad Screiber was not paid to judge the reliability of those he interviewed.
Instead, frustrated, he drove his Firebird along the highways south of Oklahoma City. He had just decided to return home when he pulled into a roadside gas station.
"Ten bucks, regular," Thad instructed the attendant, and turned on his pocket tape recorder just in case. "Lot of people claiming to see some strange sights around this area, I hear," Thad remarked casually.
"Could be," the attendant said absently, running the hose to the car. "But I ain't one of 'em."
"No? To hear some people tell it, the air is thick with flying saucers here."
"Well, about the only funny thing I've seen lately was one of those jazzed-up vans come barreling down the road not twenty minutes back. Come to think of it, it had flyin' saucers and such stuff painted on the sides."
"That so?" asked Thad, who decided that "Mystery Van Linked to Oklahoma UFO Sightings" might make an article. "Could you describe it?"
"Well... it was brown, had one of them bubble tops, lots of doodads and the like. Goin' pretty darn fast, too."
"That's interesting," Thad said as he tendered a $10 bill. "What's your name?"
"Bill."
"Okay, Bill. Thanks a lot."
Thad drove off, dictating into the recorder: "While no one knows the true motives of the mystery van, a gas company official who fearfully declined to give his full name, described the vehicle as brown and covered with cryptic designs. More importantly, his description mysteriously lacked any references to wheels or the driver of this 'van,' which he claimed, in awestruck tones, was traveling unusually fast. Was this phantom really an earthly van, or could it have been a drone scouting craft disguised to resemble..."
A roadblock interrupted his narrative. Thad had only to see the sawhorses and military vehicles and uniforms down the road before he hung a U-turn and went back the way he came. A detour brought him west of the roadblock, where trees were thick.
Something tall and metallic glittered beyond those trees and, his curiosity aroused, Thad pulled over, dug out his high-powered binoculars, and clambered to the roof of his car.
What he saw through those binoculars made him forget about Unidentified Flying Objects.
Thad Screiber saw the sun reflecting off a giant crane, which held up what was left of a Titan II missile, while a team of men attempted to maneuver the burnt weapon into one end of a giant canister. The canister was part of an eight-wheeled truck, and Thad recognized it as the kind of truck they used to ferry rockets to launching pads for NASA. Except that this missile was being secretly handled in an Oklahoma wheat field and was shattered beyond repair. Whatever had happened here, Thad knew, the world should know about.
?Chapter Eleven
"It's awful big," Martin Cannell said for the seventh or eighth time.
"It's bigger than big," Ethel Sump breathed. "It's humongous!"
"Shut up, both of you! I'm thinking."
"Well, I hope you can think of a way to steal that missile without anyone being killed," Martin said ruefully. "Especially us. The tires on that missile-carrying thing are about as big as our whole van, Amanda."
For hours, they had watched the missile-loading operation from a safe distance. They had known something was happening at the SAC base when they were turned away from a military roadblock, so they turned back, stashed the van in a clump of foliage, and infiltrated the cordoned-off area on foot. It had not been difficult because the government had simply blocked all approach routes to the base to discourage traffic. They hadn't expected foot traffic in such a sparsely populated area.
Amanda had felt good about that, but now she was nervous, contemplating the task of commandeering something the size of a missile-carrier. But now, with the missile loaded and the carrier getting ready to trundle its cargo onto the highway, she was at a total loss for an idea that might work. The truck's diesel engine sounded like faraway thunder.
"Look! It's leaving," Ethel said.
Laboriously, the carrier got underway, its massive tires gouging and chewing the soft earth. A smaller truck followed in its wake, and was in turn tailed by an unobtrusive stepvan. The three vehicles joined up with a number of others on the main road and formed a slow column.
"Wait a minute!" Martin said, grabbing Amanda's field glasses. "Let me— Hah! I was right. Look— on the side of the thing like a delivery truck."
Amanda looked. "So? It's some symbol or some—"
"That's the symbol for nuclear stuff. You see them on fallout shelters all the time."
"So what?" Amanda snapped, pulling at her nose.
"I'll bet the warhead is in that small truck! Sure, they wouldn't load the whole missile if the warhead was still attached. It would be too dangerous."
"I think Martin is right, Amanda," Ethel said loudly. She was beginning to like Martin. And he was single.
"Quiet," said Amanda, who didn't like the idea of Martin being right about something for the second time in two days. "Even if that's true, we're still going to have to take on that whole group of trucks and soldiers."
But a moment later, they all saw the moving column divide, with the small truck that presumably bore the warhead taking another fork.
"This is our chance, everyone!" Amanda shouted. "Back to the van. We're going to head that truck off."
Even at a dead run, it took a while to return to the waiting van, which was outside the military cordon. Then they had to figure out where the truck was going in order to intercept it.
"Go south, and take the second exit," Martin told Amanda. "That should take us exactly where we want to be. You know, I'll bet they deliberately sent the warhead off in another direction. You know, that missile truck is so big, it's bound to attract attention. But who's going to notice a dinky little truck?"
Amanda pushed the accelerator to 80. "Maybe," she said.
There was no sign of the truck in question when they reached the road where they expected it to show up. Amanda stopped, and swerved the van so it blocked the road.
"Okay," she said. "Weapons at the ready. We'll just wait for it."
"I've a better idea," Martin said.
"I don't want to hear it," Amanda growled.
"But what's to stop the truck from backing up and going the other way when they see us?"
That made sense even to Amanda, who was doing a slow burn. Why were men such egotists, she asked herself. Always showing off and grabbing at the credit for everything.
"We'll split up and hide on either side of the road," Amanda said quickly, before anyone could make another suggestion, "then jump out and surround them when they stop."
"I was going to suggest that," Martin said.
"I'll bet you were," Amanda said sarcastically. "C'mon, let's get to it."
They got to it, and before long the stepvan with the black-circle-and-three-yellow-triangle symbol for nuclear energy rolled into sight. It stopped close to the gaudy FOES van, and the driver honked his horn twice sharply.
When half a dozen armed commandos jumped out of the trees, he stopped honking and threw the gears into reverse. A bullet knocked the passenger window all over the cab, and he ceased that effort, too. He threw up his hands as the black-clad group surrounded him.