Farnsworth nodded, staring down at the phone as if it smelled bad.
“Okay,” he said.
“Find Keenan. We’ll need everybody.”
Kreiss approached the bunker from the front, along the gravel road that led between one row of bunkers and the next, staying close to the mounded structures in case a security patrol popped over the hill behind him. The bunker number was still visible, black lettering on a dirty white field: 887. The ramp leading down to the heavy steel doors showed no signs of recent human activity. There was a large rusty-looking padlock on the huge steel airtight door, just like all the rest of the bunkers had.
The grass growing around the bunker was a foot deep, starting at the front face of the bunker and growing all the way around it, making it look like the bunker had grown naturally out of the ground. The building appeared to be 150 feet long.
Kreiss walked down the gravel and concrete ramp and examined the lock. It was securely made; there were no bright metal scratches to show evidence of any tampering. The steel door was blast-resistant, with heavy airtight seals overlapping its mounting. There was some Army nomenclature on the side of the lock, so it was probably part of a series set. He walked back up the ramp and around to the side of the bunker, climbing through the thick wet grass to stand at the bottom of the rounded top.
The front ventilator was still; the rear one was just barely moving, making a repetitive pinging noise as a rusty bearing complained. But it was definitely moving. Stepping softly, he climbed up the rounded concrete top of the bunker, sliding his feet instead of stepping. That concrete was probably a foot thick, but if there was someone inside, he didn’t want to be heard. When he got to the rear ventilator cowl, he smelled kerosene smoke. It was very faint, but recognizable. He put his nose to the cowl and the smell was stronger. Kerosene lantern or heater in there.
Someone was in the bunker. And since the front door was locked tight from the outside, there must be another way in. He slid back down the
roof of the bunker and walked all the way around it. It was solid, with no other entrances or exits. He checked the boundary area where the grass met the sloping concrete of the structure, looking for a trapdoor, but it was all solid ground. He looked back up at the ventilator, then went to the front of the bunker and climbed to the front cowl. He sniffed that, but there was no smell of anything but the wet grass on his boots. He studied it, then went to the back cowl to see what was different, and he found it immediately.
The base of the rear ventilator cowl was hinged. The hinges had been tack-welded on and then painted flat black to match the tar that sealed the cowl flashing to the concrete. The tarred flashing, however, was gone. He put his fingers under the base of the cowling and lifted just a tiny bit. The whole structure moved. He went back to the front cowling and tried the same thing. Solid as a rock. He shuffled back to the rear cowling, looked on the side opposite the hinges, and saw a crude latch. The latch was made so that the ventilator cowling wouldn’t move sideways if the turbine head really began to spin. He was willing to bet there was a ladder down there.
He squatted down on the roof of the bunker. Someone was hiding in there. Now who would be hiding out in the ammunition-storage area of an abandoned military facility? No, not military. Civilian. This place had been a GOCO installation—government-owned, commercially operated.
McGarand had run this whole installation as the chief chemical engineer.
He had set up his hydrogen laboratory in the most secure building on the site, the one that offered the most sound and physical insulation, the power plant. That must have taken months of effort. He had set up traps along the approach perimeter, and he had rigged the industrial area itself to destruct if anybody came around to take a serious look. Which meant he had had all the time in the world to prepare something like this, for the aftermath of his revenge bombing. If the kids hadn’t come along, he would probably still be living in Blacksburg, watching the feds reel from another bombing that, somewhat like the OK City bombing, had no clear motivations. The bunker farm was a perfect place to hide, just like the industrial area had been the perfect place for a bomb factory. It was another case of hiding in almost plain sight: The one place no one would look for McGarand would be back in the damned arsenal. It had to be McGarand.
He stood up. McGarand had held his daughter prisoner for almost a month, after allowing the other two kids to die in a flash flood like bugs.
Then he had simply walked away, leaving Lynn in the nitro building to starve. This was an opportunity for justice such as rarely had come along in his previous life in law enforcement. He walked down the bunker roof and out to the gravel lane, looking along the ditches. He finally found what he was searching for, a piece of thin steel rod, about two feet long. It was rusted but still solid. He climbed back to the top of the bunker and quietly inserted the rod through the latch at the edge of the cowling base.
Then he bent the two ends up to form a wide vee, so that the rod could not be shaken out. The hinges were solid steel and mounted on the outside.
The cowling surrounding the turbine head was heavy steel, designed to allow a controlled release of combustion gases should the ammunition that had been stored there ever cook off. Rusty, covered in bird lime, but solid steel. Then he went down and found a stick, brought it back up, and jammed it roughly into the turbine housing, stopping the motion. No motion, no reason for anyone else to notice there was anything different about this bunker. And, best of all, McGarand had locked the front steel door from the outside before climbing back in through the ventilator.
He slid back down the concrete and examined his handiwork. Then he remembered the plastic bags out on the fence line. Even better. He trotted back out to the fence line, gathered up three of the largest plastic trash bags, and returned to the bunker. He climbed back up and hooded the front vent grill with one of the bags. Then he covered the immobilized vent with the other two. Before knotting on the final piece, he fished in his backpack and extracted Lynn’s weather-beaten high school ball cap, which he had carried with him ever since recovering it from the logjam.
He pushed it through the grill, dropping it into the bunker below, and then finished wrapping plastic over the vent grill. The bunker was now sealed. In twelve hours or so, there would be no more oxygen in there, even less time if McGarand kept a kerosene lamp going.
“Burn in hell, Browne McGarand,” he said not so quietly.
At noon, Janet Carter checked through the arsenal’s main gate in a Bureau car and drove down into what was left of the industrial area. The new civilian security guards reported that an aTF forensics team was going to be on the site today, although they had not signed in yet. She told him that there would be four more vehicles with FBI agents coming behind her. She parked her Bureau car near the windowless administrative building at the top of the hill, shut it down, and opened the car’s windows. She could see what she assumed to be the aTF CSU van down near the rubble
of the power plant, but not the technicians. The hole in the main street, into which she had driven her car, was still visible. Several of the overhead pipe frames had been blown down in the blast and remained where they had fallen, looking like piles of steel spaghetti in the now-cluttered street.
The windows in the administrative building had been blown through the building and into the parking lot, which sparkled as if covered in new frost. There was a fifteen-foot-high ring of rubble surrounding the site of the power plant.