Ironic. He was going to wake her up early again.
CHAPTER
80
SAM C COLE ROLLED OVER, opened her eyes, and nearly screamed. opened her eyes, and nearly screamed.
Puller was sitting next to her in a chair he'd drawn up to the bed.
"What the hell are you doing here?" she said, sitting up.
"Waiting for you to wake up."
"Why didn't you just wake me up?"
"You were sleeping so peacefully."
"I didn't think that mattered to you. You woke me up before from a sound sleep."
"It was nice watching you sleep."
She started to say something and then stopped. "Oh," she said.
Puller looked down.
Flustered, she said, "So you decided to wait and scare me to death?"
"Wasn't my plan, but it sort of worked out that way."
Before she could say anything else he held up his camera.
"You want to take my picture?" she said in a confused tone.
"I want you to look at some pictures."
"What am I looking at?"
"Stay here. I'll make some coffee and we can look at it together."
Thirty minutes and two cups of coffee later, Cole sat back against her pillow. "Okay. What does all this mean?"
"It means we have a lot more digging to do. And not a lot of time to do it."
"And you're sure this is important?"
"It's why they broke into Strauss's safe. And I think it was why the Reynoldses and Treadwell and Bitner were killed. So, yes, it's important."
"But I thought they were killed because of the soil report."
"I did too. But there was nothing on it that would raise any alarm. They were killed because somehow it was found out that these plans had been taken from Strauss's safe. And they also discovered that Bitner and Treadwell had told Reynolds about it. So they had to die too."
"So what happened to the soil report?"
"Remember the pieces of the certified mail delivery we found under the couch?"
"Yes."
"I think the killers planted them there. As a red herring."
"Why? And why not just leave the whole thing for us to find?"
"Then we don't waste any time running that lead down. But if we had thought about it some, it was pretty convenient that they left the green pieces of the certified mail receipt for us to find."
"And Larry Wellman?"
"Was on patrol when they showed up. He had to be silenced."
"Damn, Puller, it makes sense." Her features became troubled. "So they killed Larry just to plant pieces of paper to throw us off?"
"Way I see it."
"And Dickie?"
"In way over his head. I don't think he knew anything about the killings. When he found out, it was only a matter of time. And when I enlisted his help I pretty much signed his death warrant."
She looked at him quizzically. "When did you think of all this?"
"When I was back in Afghanistan."
"What?"
"In my head only," he said. "My brain tends to work faster when I'm there," he added in a low voice.
"I can understand that," Cole said slowly.
She looked at the pictures on his camera. "So what do we do with these?"
"I'm going to download it to my computer and then print out pages. But the bottom line is we need to go there."
"Go there? You mean just to look?"
"No, I mean more than that." He checked his watch. "It's still dark outside. You game?"
"It wouldn't matter if I am or not. We don't have any time to waste. Now get out of my bedroom so I can change."
CHAPTER
81
PULLER AND C COLE neared the edge of the woods, knelt, and did a quick scan of what was up ahead. Puller shifted the rucksack on his back from his left shoulder to his right. neared the edge of the woods, knelt, and did a quick scan of what was up ahead. Puller shifted the rucksack on his back from his left shoulder to his right.
He did another look around. They didn't have a margin of error on this and he could afford no mistakes. Dawn was coming.
Cole copied him and did a long look around too.
No lights.
Homes dark.
No cars passed by.
They could have been the only ones left on the planet.
He looked right, left, and then at his target and gave Cole a nod.
They stepped out.
Puller had on his fatigues and his face was blackened. M11 pistols forward and back. His strapped MP5 rested against his chest.
Cole was dressed in black pants and a dark shirt. Her face was blackened like Puller's. She had her Cobra, and a throwaway in a belt holster.
Sweat stained Puller's undershirt. The humidity level was off the charts. The combination of the heat and air moisture was debilitating. He could imagine the people in the old homes with no electricity sweltering in the oppressiveness. Or maybe they felt lucky to have a roof over their heads.
He eyed the dome of concrete. It rose up into the night sky like a solid tumor among otherwise healthy organs. He used metal clippers to cut a hole in the fencing, and a few minutes later he and Cole were next to the tumor.
Cole pulled some pages from a knapsack she carried and they studied them under a penlight Puller had in one of the pockets on his pants.
"We need to get an approximate size on this thing," he said, and she nodded.
While Cole waited where she was, he turned west and stepped off. A hundred long strides later he stopped. He'd been doing roughly four-foot exaggerated pacing. It was difficult in the undergrowth, but he managed as best he could. Four hundred feet. Longer than a football field.
He next stepped off the width of the dome.
Two hundred strides later he stopped. It was eight hundred feet wide. Nearly a sixth of a mile. He calculated roughly the square footage inside and came away impressed. The Feds rarely did anything in a small way, particularly back then when they actually had money to burn.
A large facility. Large enough for what?
The blueprints he'd found in Strauss's safe hadn't revealed that.
The plans had contained a warning from the federal government that no blasting could take place within two miles of the dome. In addition, various spots on the blueprints had been marked with the symbol for danger. There had been no date on the document. There had been no explanatory notes. Puller and Cole had scanned every inch of the plans and still didn't know what the place had been used for.
Clandestine. Top secret. Probably why they picked Drake. Today it was a massive lump in the middle of nowhere.
Puller rejoined Cole. She said, "How big?"
"Bigger than it looks," he replied quietly.
He looked back through the woods at the neighborhood. Late 1950s style. Over half a century old. A lot going on back then in the world.
He turned to her. "What else did your parents tell you about this place?"
"Not that much. There was a siren one time that went off. No one was ever told what happened, my dad said. The police were never called here, that I know of. Sheriff Lindemann's predecessor was sheriff back then. I talked to him about it long after he retired. It was totally out of his jurisdiction, he said."
Puller slipped the paper he'd taken from the firehouse out of his pocket. A fire plan. The numbers 92 and 94 written into the margins.
"So did you figure out what those numbers mean?" Cole asked.
"Maybe."
"What then?"
If it was referring to what he thought it was, this case was about to take on an entirely new and potentially catastrophic angle.
"I'll tell you when I'm sure."
"Why not now? You've been speculating to me before."
"Not like this. I want to be sure. I don't want to cause a panic if it turns out I'm wrong."
She licked her lips. "I'm already panicked, Puller. I mean, pipeline, nuke reactor. How much worse could it get?"
"It could get a lot worse."
"Okay, you officially panicked me right past my maximum level."
He knelt in the woods, listened to the sounds of the wildlife passing close to him. Dawn was breaking. He heard a rattle from a nearby snake. He knew there were copperheads in here as well. The swamps in Florida had been filled with aggressive water moccasins. During the last stage of Ranger training some injuries came from snakebites. Some of his fellow Rangers had been afraid of snakes, but they could never show that fear. One had almost died from a deadly bite from a coral snake, but he'd recovered. Only to die four years later in Afghanistan when an IED had exploded under his feet.
Snakebites were bad. IEDs were worse.