Pyramid Lake (22 page)

I hadn’t had any reason to spend much time in this part of the base before, so I had never gone into any of these buildings. Roger stopped us just inside the door, alongside a thirty-foot-high wall of stacked, age-discolored wooden crates.

“I might be a few minutes,” he said. “But you two stay right here. Don’t go wandering around.” He ducked between two rows of crates, and his footsteps receded into the distance.

A row of caged fluorescent tubes ran along the highest part of the curved ceiling, fifty feet above, lighting the space around us. Row after row of dusty, stacked wooden crates and pallets receded into the distance in each direction.

Cassie laughed and leaned close to my ear. “This is where they hid the Lost Ark at the end of
Raiders.
”

I poked a finger through the dusty plastic shrink-wrapping on the nearest pallet of cardboard boxes, then wiped my finger on my pants. “Or the rest of Linebaugh’s missing eighteen billion.”

“Not funny.”

Ahead of us, the block-walled corridor of crates opened out into vacant floor space. Curious, I walked closer, emerging into a wide corridor of empty floor that ran down the middle of the warehouse. A pair of ankle-height steel rails—train tracks—were embedded in the concrete along the centerline, paralleling the lights above. The tracks ran the length of the building, continuing out the aircraft-hangar double doors at the far end. I looked up.

A crane gantry rose overhead like a smaller version of a shipyard derrick, nearly reaching the ceiling.

“What is that?” Cassie whispered.

I followed her gaze to a massive cylinder twenty-five feet in diameter and half a football field long, draped in heavy canvas tarp that had been tied down with guy wires. Stretching a quarter of the length of the warehouse, it looked like a decommissioned subway train, only bigger.

“It’s too big to be a missile,” I said, frowning. “An orbital booster rocket might be this size. But that makes no sense…”

I went over to the nearest side, untwisted a guy wire, and grabbed a flap of canvas. Pulling the tarp with me, I walked around the cylinder’s flat end.

The canvas slid away and fell, puddling on the far side, to reveal a vast circular end cap of scraped and battered metal, like a giant manhole cover almost four times my height.

From dozens of holes in its face, dark circular blades jutted edge-on, each the size of a truck tire with a mesh of steel teeth for treads. The cutting blades formed a pattern like a giant asterisk.

Now I knew what I was looking at.

“TBM,” I said. “Tunnel-boring machine, left over from when they dug out the geothermal plant’s extraction and injection wells. Now mothballed.”

Cassie stared at it, speechless.

I couldn’t pull the tarp back over it again, so I turned and walked away. Stopping in the middle of the vast, echoing space, I turned in a circle, taking in the silence.

Sixty years ago, when the Navy base and the Pyramid Lake bomb range had been in full swing, this part of the base would have bustled with activity. Now it stood eerily empty, like a shuttered steel mill. Used to store old stuff no one needed anymore.

Still, I knew, supplies did still occasionally come in by train. Dropping to one knee, I slid a finger along one of the rails that ran through the center of the warehouse. The grease looked fresh.

“Weird,” Cassie’s hushed voice breathed from nearby.

Rising from my crouch, I walked over to join her, a hundred feet beyond the crane, in front of a pair of heavy armored-steel doors. The shiny new doors were big enough to drive a truck through. They fronted a windowless two-story concrete structure, which was set back into one of the walls of stacked crates. The crates rose high above it on all sides, so that it looked like a half-filled rack in the middle of a row of server cabinets.

Stepping into the six-foot gap separating the wall of crates from the bizarre concrete building-inside-a-building, I quickly walked all the way around its fifty-by-fifty perimeter. It was a freestanding structure, unconnected to anything else. I slid my hand along the concrete wall, which was high-tensile-strength modern stuff without pocks or dings—clearly poured within the past few years.

Coming out of the gap on the other side of the little building, I rejoined Cassie.

“What the fuck?” I said. “This is brand-new. They built it here, inside the warehouse so no one would see it.”

She walked over to the far side of the steel doors to inspect the access mechanism: a modern-looking combination of biometric sensors, numeric keypad, and card lock.

Something else caught my eye: a row of black, gym-style metal lockers that ran alongside the wall near the steel door. I started toward them, but Cassie’s voice pulled me away.

“I think we should go, Trevor.” She pointed to the corner of the small building, above my head, where a camera was angled down toward the steel doors. “Right now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We should go.”

Following her back toward the side door, I heard a distant creaking, rolling sound from the row of crates Roger had disappeared into. Cassie and I took up our positions by the side door of the warehouse again.

A moment later, Roger emerged, pushing a huge flatbed cart in front of him. The cart, riding high on thick, knobby tires, supported a single wooden packing crate the width of a refrigerator but longer.

Sliding the top off the crate, Roger pointed at the empty interior. “Hop in.”

“You can’t be serious,” Cassie said.

“How else are we going to get into our own building?” I asked, holding out a hand to help her over the side. A minute later, the two of us were bracing ourselves against the crate’s plywood walls, hearing the cart wheels creak below us as we swayed in darkness lit only by the bright rectangle of joints running around the edges of the crate’s top.

In my head, I tracked the turns we made and calculated distances, making sure we were actually headed to the lab. We heard Roger talking to the MPs briefly, then the swish of the lab building’s doors.

I knew already that I would be going back into the big Quonset-hut warehouse, alone, for a closer look at that strange concrete building-inside-a-building.

Tonight.

• • •

Roger turned to face us, grinning through his goatee. The oversize round black lenses of his blast goggles hid his eyes, making him like the stereotypical mad scientist from a black-and-white 1930s monster movie. His lips moved, forming silent words.

I couldn’t hear him because of my protective earmuffs. I yanked one of the oversize cans away from my ear. “What?”

“Put on your goggles, man.”

“I don’t need ’em.”

“But they look cool.”

I glanced at Cassie, standing beside me, wearing her own earmuffs and blast goggles. She seemed amused.

“Just light it up,” I said, annoyed, letting the padded ear can snap into place against my head again.

The three of us stood in front of a thick pane of tempered glass, staring into the auditorium-size inner chamber of Roger’s lab. The chamber’s sides were lined with twin rows of furnace chambers, melters, and sintering ovens, but we didn’t spare them a glance. It was impossible to look away from the black monstrosity that squatted in the center of the chamber, waist high, anchored to steel mounting-plates in the concrete floor.

Roger’s new toy.

Twin foot-wide, flexible-belted ammunition guides swooped like wings from the gun’s breech to a massive cylindrical ammunition drum mounted lengthwise behind it. An eight-foot-long rotating Gatling-style cannon—seven individual barrels in a tight cylinder, aimed down the length of the chamber. The whole thing looked like a giant black dragonfly.

“Thirty-millimeter GAU-Eight Avenger,” Roger shouted, his voice muffled by our earmuffs. He handed Cassie a single round of blue-tipped ammunition, the size of a Corona bottle. “It can fire seventy of these a second at Mach three, and destroy a tank from two miles away.”

Turning back to the waist-height console in front of him, he hit a button. On the other side of the glass, the barrels spun to life with a grinding metal whine we could hear even through our earmuffs. Cassie took a step back from the glass, and so did I.

Roger’s grin only widened. He pressed another button, unleashing a half-second burst.

The roar of the Gatling was deafening even with the ear protection. It shook the concrete floor beneath us and rattled our teeth like a speeded-up, amplified jackhammer hitting steel plate. Beer-bottle rounds blurred through the flexing ammunition guides, and a five-foot jet of solid white flame stretched away from us, dancing at the end of the spinning, wastebasket-size multibarrel muzzle crown.

At the far end of the lab, the target—a six-foot-wide, twelve-foot-tall cylinder of shiny dark-gray concrete standing upright—erupted into arc-welder-bright drizzles of sparks and billowing smoke.

Cassie took another step back as the seven barrels of the 30mm cannon spun down, coming to a halt again.

Ears ringing, I pulled the cans from my head. Roger was laughing like a lunatic. He slapped me on the shoulder.

“Seek help,” I said. “Really.”

Cassie raised her goggles to her forehead. “Why on earth would the Navy let you have something like this here?” she asked.

Roger grinned at her. “I told them I needed it.”

“But for what possible purpose?”

His grin widened. “Destructive testing.”

She shook her head, looking flabbergasted.

I stared at the target, half-obscured by smoke now. Its shiny, dark concretelike surface was badly chipped, but still looked more or less intact. I was surprised to see that the powerful multibarreled aircraft cannon—normally mounted beneath an A-10 Warthog to kill tanks and knock down buildings—hadn’t demolished the six-foot-wide cylinder. It was made of tough stuff—another of Roger’s “special materials” projects, no doubt.

My gaze roamed the inside of the chamber, where a row of similar cylinders stood along one wall. Apparently made of the same material, they were flanged at both ends like giant thread spools. In the corner, an even bigger cylinder lay on its side, shattered and cracked. It was the same length as the others, but made of lighter-colored concrete, and so wide that its dimensions were almost square. The end cap had broken off this one to reveal a doughnut cross-section: a narrow hollow interior space surrounded by four-foot-thick walls, now crumbling and fragmented.

Roger hadn’t been kidding about “destructive testing.”

“What are those?” I asked. “They don’t look like ship armor.”

Roger glanced at the cylinders. “Some other crap I’m helping the Navy out with. Space-efficient ordnance disposal, for getting rid of old torpedoes and shit. But you know what?” Glancing around and lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he pointed at the monster Gatling. “In a few months, they’re going to forget I even have this thing. Then I’m going to mount it up on top of the Beast.”

I laughed out loud. “That’s the dumbest, most clown-assed idea I ever heard in my life. You should run away and join the circus instead, if they feel sorry enough for you to hire you.”

He looked hurt. “I’m not an idiot, Trev. I’m going to get one of those rooftop cargo pods—you know, for carrying skis and surfboards and shit—then cut out the bottom and use that to conceal it.”

I shook my head at Cassie. Then the phone buzzed in my pocket.

“Come on,” I told her. “We have to go.”

“What?” Roger’s face registered dismay, like a kid whose playdate has just been cut short.

“Don’t burn through all your ammo too quick,” I told him.

“But I’m getting more tonight.”

“Then make what you have now last all day. Cassie and I are going to be a while, and I don’t want you to get bored.”

Roger followed Cassie and me to the door of his lab. I swung it open to let in Ricky, the lead facilities engineer, who had texted me to let me know he was ready. Ricky had brought three of his guys with him. After the four of us exchanged a round of fist bumps and pound hugs, Ricky handed me two pairs of folded gray mechanic’s coveralls like the ones they were wearing. Tossing a pair to Cassie, I quickly slipped the other on over my clothes. Then I took the white hard hat Ricky was holding, and put it on, snugging it onto my scalp.

“This is so juvenile,” Cassie said, zipping up her coveralls. “I’m embarrassed.” She was grinning, though. I figured that having a senator ready to go to bat for you at any time meant you didn’t have to sweat the small stuff, like getting caught for security infractions.

Even with her hair tucked up underneath the hardhat, Cassie’s earrings were a problem. They were just too recognizable.

Roger was frozen in place, staring at us with a stunned expression. I reached over, lifted the earmuffs off his head, and handed them to Cassie.

“Wear these underneath.”

Ricky handed us two key-card holders. “Emerson and DuChenne, from my team. They were planning to take a long weekend in Vegas, but it seems they came in to work, instead.”

“Nice of them,” I said.

Cassie and I clipped the borrowed key cards onto the belts of our coveralls. At the door, I turned back toward Roger, who was still wandering after us in a daze with his jaw hanging open, and I yanked his key-card holder off his belt, too.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I said. “We’ll need a ride home.”

I
nside the server room, Cassie and I helped Ricky and his three guys slot server blades into the newly assembled rack enclosures and connect them to power and cooling lines beneath the frosted-glass raised floor.

During a lull in the action, she leaned toward me. “Is Roger always like that?”

“No. He’s usually worse.”

“The way he looks at me makes me uncomfortable,” she said.

“Roger lacks social skills,” I said. “And you’re very attractive. I’m sure lots of guys look at you.”

“Not like
that,
Trevor.” She shoved a server blade into place with more force than necessary. “Sometimes I wish I
couldn’t
read faces so well.”

I felt a pang of sympathy, remembering what she had said last night about not being ready to live in a world without lies. Because, far more than most people, Cassie already did.