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  Willie flashed her a smile so big she could see his gums. “This is old-school defensive military engineering at its best. You cannot access the launch complex without passing through this chamber. There are limit switches on this door and the door over there. You can’t open both doors at the same time. You cannot open this door unless that door is closed and vice versa. See that window in the other door?”

  The metal door eight feet away had a one-foot square glass window at eye level framed in the steel.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s laminate glass. Bulletproof and blastproof,” he said. “See that rectangular box built into the wall beside the doorframe?”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “There’s a camera and a murder hole in there.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that. “What’s a murder hole?”

  “A space you can fire a weapon through. It allows you to shoot into the enclosure from the safety of the other side. Anyone wanting to gain access to the LCC and the silo has to come through this chamber. Back when this complex was operational, the control room would be notified when someone entered. With the camera system, they could visually identify the person or persons who were trying to gain access. Only authorized personnel were granted access through the second door. Intruders, on the other hand, would be trapped in this chamber. By modern security standards, this might seem primitive, but sometimes there’s no substitute for brute-force simplicity.”

  She looked at him and cocked an eyebrow.

  “Well, go on,” he said with a chuckle. “I told you, we can’t open the other door until we close this one.”

  With a slightly queasy stomach, she stepped into the intruder-entrapment enclosure. Willie stepped in behind her, and the first door slammed shut on spring-loaded hinges. She eyed the murder hole warily as they crossed the small chamber to the other door. Willie once again pressed his thumb to the biometric scanner, but this time he also had to enter a four-digit code. The lock clicked, and he opened the second door for her. She stepped past him into another tunnel. Eight feet away, the tunnel turned ninety degrees right. She walked to the bend and peered around and saw a massive steel door—much thicker than the first two she’d just passed—hanging fully open on correspondingly massive hinges.

  “What’s that door?” she asked, staring at it.

  “That is a blast door. There’s two of them, one on each side of the vestibule ahead.”

  “Why do you leave it open?”

  “I’m seventy-six years old,” he said. “I can move it, but it takes a toll.”

  She followed him into the “vestibule,” which was simply another lockout-style chamber, this one enclosed by matching blast doors. “I think I’m sensing a theme here.”

  “Yeah, redundancy was the guiding design principle for this facility. These double blast doors were designed to protect the LCC from a direct hit from a nuclear strike topside.”

  “What’s the LCC?”

  “The LCC stands for launch control center. That’s where we’re headed. The complex is divided into two separate but interconnected structures: the LCC, which served as the operations and communications center, and the silo proper, where the missile was stored.”

  She paused a moment to look at the black-and-white framed pictures hanging on the walls in the vestibule. The first was a picture of five young men, two seated and three standing, in a room with control panels in the background. Another was a photograph of a missile raised completely out of the silo and ready for launch. A third was an illustrated schematic of the facility, drawn in the three-dimensional cutaway perspective. She stopped at this one and studied it, trying to take in as much information as possible before he moved her along.

  “C’mon, we don’t have all day,” he said.

  Technically, we do have all day, she thought. It’s not like you have a queue of visitors waiting outside.

  She lingered a beat longer, making sure the lens of her body cam—which was pinned to her jacket just above her left breast—recorded the illustration before she turned to follow after him. He led her through the second blast door and down yet another set of steps. At the next landing, they could either enter an open door to a room beyond or turn 180 degrees and take a switchback staircase down farther. Willie went straight, taking her into a large circular room with a thick round column in the middle, almost like a vertical axle bisecting a donut lying flat.

  “Welcome to the LCC,” he said, grinning like a schoolboy. “This is level one. It’s still a work in progress, as you can see . . . I’m doing all the work myself, so it’s slow going.”

  Josie scanned the space, walking in a slow arc around the room as he talked, taking in everything she saw. The erstwhile launch control center looked like it was in the final stages of being converted into modern living quarters. The ceiling was freshly painted white and the walls a light gray. The floor was covered with a nondescript but handsome commercial-grade carpet in most areas, linoleum tile in others. The room was windowless, of course, but well lit thanks to a generous number of LED work lights installed overhead, oriented like wheel spokes all the way around the room.

  “There used to be divider walls, but I took those out. I prefer it nice and open like this. No dark corners. Good sight lines.”

  No place for an intruder to hide and no way for old Willie to get snuck up on, she mused.

  “Over there was where the communication room used to be,” he continued. “Over there was the battery room and an office area. Where we’re standing right now used to be one of two launch control rooms. There’s another one on level two. Over there was where our bunk room used to be . . .”

  She stopped and turned to look at him. “Our bunk room? Wait a second—did you used to work here?”

  Willie’s expression went sour, like he’d just taken a bite out of a lemon. “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

  “Wow,” she said, looking at him in a new light. Come to think of it, one of the young men in the black-and-white photographs she’d seen had looked familiar—a much younger, beardless, and, dare she admit, handsome version of the Willie Barnes standing in front of her. “So you actually bought the missile silo where you used to work? You must know this place like nobody’s business.”

  “Not many Atlas Missileers left these days” was all he said. Then, gesturing to a small kitchen area, he added, “This over here was the kitchen.”

  “And apparently still is,” she said with a smile. “How many people lived down here at any given time?”

  “The Atlas F complex, which is what this facility is, had a complement of five.”

  “How long was each watch—is that the correct term, watch?”

  “Watch is more of a Navy term; Missileers use the term alert. We were on a twenty-four-hour alert, which meant we were on for twenty-four hours, then off for seventy-two. A fresh crew turned over each morning at 0600.”

  “How long could you stay down here, you know, if you had to?”

  “This silo was designed to take a hit from an incoming nuclear missile and survive. We’d have up to two months’ provisions at any given time, but, eh, that’s nothing compared to my current inventory. I have seven years’ worth of provisions, plus medicine, plus fully redundant water-reclamation and air-recirculation systems.”

  She eyed what looked like his security and communications suite, which contained an amalgam of ancient-looking and cutting-edge technology. “That your comms area?”

  He nodded.

  A bank of flat-screen monitors streamed live video feeds from dozens of locations both topside and inside the silo. “How many camera feeds do you have?”

  “One hundred and two,” he said.

  “One hundred and two? Are you kidding me?”

  “No. I monitor a two-mile radius of forest around the silo, plus the cabin and every room and passage in the silo.”

  “Wow, okay then . . . Looks like you’ve also got some old-school radio equipment in addition
to your satellite news and internet feeds.”

  “Cellular service will be the first thing to go when it happens. Satellites will be next, then the hard lines. Once the internet is taken down and the world gets knocked back into the Stone Age, shortwave radio will be the only viable communication option.”

  This was not new information to her. She knew most doomsday preppers were proficient radio talkers and tuners and one of the last enclaves able to communicate using Morse code. “I’ve been wondering, what is that big column in the middle of the room?” she asked, pointing at the giant concrete pillar.

  “Believe it or not, the entire LCC is built on a metal crib and supported by suspension struts equipped with giant shock absorbers. If you look closely, there’s a one-foot gap between the center pillar and floor. There’s also a one-foot gap between the outside perimeter of the room and the concrete foundation along the entire circumference.”

  “You mean this level is actually floating?”

  He nodded. “Both level one and level two are floating on a metal crib. The entire missile-launch and support structure is also built as a floating crib, suspended inside the concrete silo.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know what kind of a shock wave a direct nuclear hit would create outside? The engineers had to design this place to withstand that shock wave and maintain operational readiness. By mounting all the critical equipment on the crib decking, the interconnecting piping and wiring all moves as a unit. If everything was hard mounted to the silo, it would deform, crack, or rip apart.”

  “Wow. That’s impressive,” she said, staring down the gap between the center column and the level-one deck into the room below. “How deep are we right now, by the way?”

  “Level one is thirty feet down. Level two, which you’re looking down into, is at the minus-forty-foot elevation.”

  “How do you access the missile silo itself?” she asked, turning around to face him.

  “Through a utility tunnel, which is located on level two below us. Do you want to see it now?”

  “Yes, very much so.”

  He led her out of the LCC back the way they’d come and into the switchback stairwell. They took two half flights down and were once again at a decision point. Go right to enter level two of the LCC, or go left to take the tunnel to the silo. In keeping with the design theme, the tunnel was secured by two more blast doors, one on the LCC side and one on the silo side. The LCC-side blast door was open, and Willie strolled through it into the tunnel. Unlike the earlier tunnels, which were rectangular in shape with flat concrete walls, floor, and ceiling, this tunnel was round and had overlapping corrugated-steel plating lining the inside circumference. At the end of the tunnel, they came to a green blast door stenciled with the words MISSILE SILO ACCESS, except this blast door was shut.

  “Here, help me open this,” he said, grabbing the top end of a long vertical metal handle.

  “I thought you said you left these open,” she said, grabbing the same handle just below his hands.

  “Not all of them.” He grunted, pulling on the handle. “C’mon, Josie, put those young muscles to work.”

  She strained against the dead mass of solid metal, pulling with her back and arms, but letting her legs do most of the work. Once they got a little momentum, the door swung open the rest of the way without too much effort, creaking on its eight hinges. “Aw, c’mon, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, looking at another closed blast door eight feet away. “How many more are there?”

  Willie laughed. “This is the last one; I promise.”

  They repeated the exercise, working together to open the final green-painted blast door to reveal the inside of the silo. Unlike the LCC, the silo appeared to have undergone very little in the way of renovations—at least cosmetic renovations. The hulking metal structure was rusting and at least fifty years past its last paint job. She stepped out on the metal grating and paused at the railing to look down into the abyss. Somewhere below, she heard the gurgling of moving water, but she couldn’t make out what it was coming from.

  “Careful,” he said behind her, a strange timbre in his voice. “It’s a long way down.”

  “How deep is the shaft?”

  “One hundred and eighty-five feet from the surface. One hundred and forty feet from here, give or take,” he said, stepping up beside her.

  The platform creaked under their combined weight, sending a miniature lightning bolt of nerves through her abdomen. She clutched the handrail and attempted to count the levels, but the structure disappeared into shadow well before the bottom. “How many levels are there?”

  “Eight,” he said. “Labeled in reverse order, with one at the top and eight at the bottom. We’re on level two. There used to be a service elevator in that corner over there, but it was removed along with all the other equipment when the facility was decommissioned. They stripped her clean, salvaging everything they could. I jerry-rigged a winch-and-pulley system over the shaft, which is how I move materials up and down between levels.”

  “What do you use this for?” she asked.

  A devious little smile spread across his face. “Food production and storage,” he said, turning to walk back to a lighting panel on the wall behind them. He flipped on a series of breakers, and the sound echoed in the silo: click, click, click, click, click, click. Light flooded the silo, sequentially illuminating level by level, top to bottom. On the level below her, level three, she saw the same hydroponic systems she’d seen in the outbuilding topside, fish tanks and duckweed beds, only on a much greater scale. In addition to duckweed, here she saw fruits and vegetables, including splashes of color that looked like peppers, tomatoes, and strawberries growing in the hydroponic beds.

  “Whoa” was all she could manage to say, looking at the enormity of it all.

  “That little rig topside is just for sampling and fish-stock quarantine. This is the real operation.”

  “What do you mean by quarantine?”

  “Before I introduce any new stock, I need to make sure they are disease-free. I have a nursery program down here to replenish my stock, but I’m always tinkering with the gene pool. I need my fish to be as robust, nutritious, and disease resistant as possible.”

  She felt a chill creeping past the fabric of her jeans. “It’s chilly in here.”

  “Yeah, and it gets colder the lower you go. Bit of a thermocline in here. It’s cold enough at the bottom, I can raise salmon without need for any cooling system. Down at level seven I have natural refrigeration year-round at forty-three degrees. I can keep eggs and dairy down there if I want. Plus, it dramatically extends the shelf life of all food rations canned, jarred, and bagged. Wanna see?”

  “You mean, go down there?”

  “Well, sure,” he said. “Don’t tell me a young, healthy girl like yourself is afraid of a few stairs.”

  “A few stairs?” she said, eyeing him. “Looks like a couple hundred to me.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said and sighed. “If you want to be lazy and miss out on the only chance you’ll ever have to explore an Atlas F missile silo, that’s fine with me.” He turned back to the lighting panel and was about to flip off the lights when she stopped him.

  “Fine,” she groaned. “I’ll do it.” Her acquiescence seemed to please him because she saw a glint of pride in his eyes. He led her to a narrow spiral staircase that wound all the way down to the bottom of the silo. To climb 140 feet down and back on a spiral staircase seemed akin to torture. “We have to take that?”

  “It’s that or ladders,” he said simply. “Your pick.”

  “Fine,” she said, staring down the eerie ten-story-deep hole disappearing into the floor. “And don’t you dare say, ‘Ladies first.’”

  CHAPTER 5

  0937 Local Time

  Office 231

  Department of Technology Integration, Management, and Security (TIMS)

  The Pentagon

  Arlington, Virginia

  Everyone kno
ws someone like Major Legend Tyree.

  Someone whom God and fate and nature all smiled upon in utero. Someone whose deck seemingly got stacked with an unlimited supply of kings and aces. Someone whom people envy profoundly and want desperately to hate but fail to because the object of their resentment is so likable, charming, and noble that all their negative feelings morph into admiration. Legend had been his high school’s valedictorian and homecoming king and a star athlete. He had been accepted to West Point and graduated top of his class. As a junior officer, he had excelled in combat, leadership, and strategy. But in the Pentagon, his physical prowess, male-model good looks, and quick, capable mind were the wrong tools of the trade. In the crush of bureaucracy, red tape, and military politics, he found himself stymied, eroded, and, for the first time in his life, performing at a level below his expectations. He needed a new opportunity to exploit.

  He needed a win.

  The desk phone rang.

  He glanced at the incoming caller ID on the secure line but didn’t recognize it. “Major Tyree,” he said after picking up the receiver.

  “Major, this is General Kane, the Deputy Commander at Bagram. We’ve never met,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Yes, sir, how can I be of service?” he asked, his heart rate ticking up.

  “I’ve been told you’re the guy to call when there’s a technology mystery nobody else can solve,” Kane said. “General Troy said your office is the Pentagon’s equivalent of the X-files division and that whenever something weird pops up on the radar, they send you and some lady from DARPA to check it out.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s both classified and true.”

  “He also said they call you The Legend of Zelda at the Puzzle Palace, whatever the hell that means.”

  He hated the nickname. It really was an awkward fit, in his opinion. Yes, his first name was Legend. Yes, there was a video game called The Legend of Zelda. And yes, his job was investigating and acquiring new technology for the DOD—a job that required him to travel extensively to far-off kingdoms (Europe, the Middle East, and Asia), gather and collect treasure and weapons (innovative technology for the military’s next-generation weapons systems), and meet with esoteric characters (inventors and IP lawyers) . . . but it really was a stretch. And yet it had stuck. Pretty much everyone at the Pentagon called him Zelda, and now people at DARPA, ONR, and DS&T had started using the moniker too. He’d liked it better when they called him by the department’s acronym, TIMS. He even preferred when they called him “the dude from 231.”