“No problem. I’d prefer to take my chances on the outside with the riffraff.”
Lambert approached the door and pressed his thumb into a biometric reader. A control panel was revealed as a thick piece of metal slid upward. He keyed in a code and the hydraulic-powered door swung silently open surprisingly fast.
Lambert said, “The shield over the control panel will withstand pretty much anything you can throw at it. But even if it is disabled we have redundant controls inside. And that blast door can take a direct nuke hit, so forget about trying to get through it with conventional explosives. Isn’t going to happen.”
Robie looked over the width and depth of the gigantic door. “I can see that.”
“Now, what you’re about to see is the pinnacle response to prepping short of owning an island and employing your own army. I also refer to it as the extreme end of the survivalist’s spectrum. On doomsday this is where you want to be.”
He led them inside.
CHAPTER
40
Lambert walked them over to a bank of elevators. “In the silo we’ve got a dozen floors and private apartments on each. Some are half-floor units that go for about two mill, but most of the owners have taken the whole floor for around four million.”
“How many people total can you support in here?” asked Malloy.
“Around a hundred, but we’re looking at ways to stretch that number a bit to allow some flexibility with staff and such.”
“You mean pilots, guards, and their families,” said Reel curtly.
“Well, yeah. Immediate families. I mean, we can’t take cousins and nephews and in-laws. We just don’t have the room. Now, we have enough food and fuel for five years, but we also have renewable energy capabilities that we keep improving upon, along with raising our own food, so we could possibly stay in here indefinitely.”
“Who pays for all the guns and food, upkeep, security guards, the improvements you’re talking about, and all that?”
“Monthly fee tacked onto the purchase price, like a condo fee. It’s paid into an escrow starting from day one. So we have a nice buffer already built in. If doomsday happens and the monetary system goes down, well, we’ll all be in survivalist mode. I don’t think anyone will be worrying about a paycheck. They’ll just want to stay in here and get by until it’s okay to leave. But with that said, private security ain’t cheap. Hell, none of this is cheap. That’s sort of the point. Separating the wheat from the chaff.”
“Or the clamshells from the pearls,” amended Reel.
Lambert pointed at her and chuckled. “I might use that analogy in my future marketing materials.”
“Was Walton interested in anything in particular here?” asked Robie.
“He asked questions about the silo’s configuration, entry points, square footage, defensive mechanisms, even where I got the workers to do the job. Told him as much as I could.”
“And where did you get the workers?” Reel wanted to know.
“Some local, some not. And no, I didn’t use any illegals. This is specialized work. I needed trained folks who knew what they were doing.”
“Illegal status doesn’t mean they’re untrained,” pointed out Robie.
“Yeah, but you can get into a lot of legal hassles if you do use them, and I couldn’t afford the headache.”
They rode the elevator down to the bottom of the silo.
Getting off, Lambert said, “We’ll work our way back up. In addition to the apartments we built out in the silo, we converted the launch operations area and part of the missile launch section into the public use areas. As you’ll see, they’re pretty extensive.”
They climbed on a golf cart parked near a raised overhead door and Lambert drove them down a long tunnel that was well lighted and had a concrete floor. “This was the connecting tunnel I told you about.” They arrived at the other end of the tunnel and climbed off the golf cart. Lambert led them into a space filled with raised wooden boxes with plants growing in them. Special lighting illuminated the room.
“Our hydroponic gardens. We grow vegetables with special lamps. We also will be raising fish for proteins. And we’re thinking about having a chicken coop for eggs and the occasional white meat. No room for cattle down here,” he added, grinning. “Behind those doors are our food storage areas. No perishables but nutritionally balanced provisions. We hired an expert to help us put the mix together. We also have state-of-the-art water, and NBC, or nuclear, biological, and chemical, air filtration systems. If the outside gets radiated, we’ll be fine in here.”
He led them through various other rooms containing a bowling alley, spa, gym, swimming pool, theater, and medical wing with a dentist chair and an operating room.
“Two of our owners are health-care execs and also doctors, so we lucked out there. They can perform any necessary medical procedures for the rest of the population.”
He led them next to a wine cellar. “Some of our owners are collectors and they’ve brought some of their stock here. One of the perks of owning here. Some of the bottles in there are worth tens of thousands of dollars. Me, I’m a beer man, but I could be tempted.”
“I’m sure you could,” noted Reel.
He unlocked one room and they passed through.
“This is our armory.”
On the walls and secured by chains and padlocks was an impressive arsenal of pistols, rifles, and submachine guns as well as grenades, RPG launchers, and boxes of ammo.
“Even though we have professional guards, you never know, so this is just in case we’re breached or our guards go down during an assault. Each owner has been trained with these weapons. Next to the armory is a shooting range. One requirement of purchasing a property was that every adult had to be certified in weaponry.”
Reel eyed the guns. “You’re loaded for bear here.”
“Well, bears might be coming,” said Lambert quite seriously. “We’ve also got sniper posts outside in certain locations that I can’t show you.” He paused and added, “You can never be too careful around here.”
“Have you had any threats?” asked Malloy.
Lambert seemed to choose his words carefully. “We have received some… communications from certain elements hereabouts that they’ll be coming for us if the sky falls. Poor-versus-rich sort of thing.”
“Are we talking the white supremacists, the motorcycle gangs, the Nazis, assorted others?” asked Malloy.
“Yes we are, but I can’t elaborate further. But now you can see why we have the armory and the requirement that every owner here be willing to defend the silo. That’s just the way it has to be. One for all and all for one.”
“Did Walton ask you about that issue?” said Reel.
Lambert paused at the door and looked at her. “Am I missing something here? Why do you keep asking about what Walton wanted to know about this place?”
Malloy said, “Because maybe it had something to do with his disappearance.”
“Now hold on, I had nothing to do with the man going missing.”
Reel, scowling at Malloy, said, “We weren’t suggesting that you did. We were just interested in why he wanted to see the silo at that exact moment in time. He must have had other opportunities.”
“Well, I suppose he did. But he never asked before this trip out.”
“How did he seem?” asked Robie.
“Tight-lipped, like I said before,” replied Lambert. “Any conversation with that man you can guarantee that he found out more about you than you ever did about him. Except you had no idea he did until long after it happened.”
Robie and Reel exchanged a brief smile. That description fit Blue Man perfectly.
The room next to the armory was padlocked.