Stafford looked at Jake, a puzzled look on his face.
“What?”
“I was just wondering. If you needed to stash something off a road to an exit, how would you keep it from being damaged? I mean you can’t bury it in a sack, can you?”
“No.”
“So metal or wood?”
“Too damn many insects for wood. It’d have to be metal, or plastic.”
Stafford smiled. “We have an entire company of mine sweepers here. If it’s got metal in it, we’re going to find it.”
Jake and Honi approached the lead CID agent. “How’s the search going?” Jake asked.
“So far, nothing too unusual, we did find three cell phones hidden in the back of a drawer.”
“I need them,” Honi said quickly. She checked the phones. “No batteries. Did you find any cell phone batteries?”
“Let me check. Yes, in a box with eighteen other batteries, other side of the house.”
“Show me.”
The two of them headed off.
Jake turned to Stafford, eyebrows raised. “Mine sweepers?”
“On their way. Hellova lot faster than the ground-penetrating radar machine. Time counts.”
Honi returned. “Password protected. It doesn’t stop us. It just slows down the process.” She called Brett at the NSA. “Three more cell phones to add to the new program, I’m sending you the numbers.”
Jake stood at the window and watched the army tech run the ground-penetrating radar machine over the property, row after row.
For sure, time counts, Jake thought. Time left… He looked at the strange watch: 21 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes and 22 seconds. With a missing nuclear weapon at this particular time, Jake’s gut was telling him the two were intimately connected. But how, and why?
Sylvia Cuthbert finally calmed down enough to fall asleep, only to be awakened by the sound of the jail cell door opening. Her heart pounded, fear raced through her chest. Are they coming for me?!
“Get up,” the security guard demanded.
She slowly sat up and then stood.
“Turn around, hands behind your back.”
She complied, wincing as he tightened the handcuffs around her wrists. He pushed her out of the cell door into the hall, pointing her to where she had heard the awful sounds during the night.
“Don’t move.”
She stood, weakened and wobbly from the lack of sleep. The sound of water sloshing behind her drove a new wave of panic through her body. She turned her head slowly to see what it was. A maintenance man pushed a large bucket of soapy water with a ringer attached and a mop standing up into the air. The man slowly cleaned her jail cell, wiped everything down, stripped the sheets from the cot and placed clean folded ones on the bare mattress.
When he was done, the guard guided her back into the cell, removed the handcuffs, closed and locked the cell door. She made her bed and laid down to rest. The noises of the daily operation of the security office made sleep difficult. She tried, but some loud noise always disturbed her. Her exhaustion deepened as the day wore on.
Three hours later, Jake’s phone buzzed. He looked at the text message.
“Okay, we’ve got six pieces of property connected to General Teague.”
“Where do you want to start?” Honi asked.
Jake breathed out slowly and studied the list.
Major Stafford rushed into the room. “Mine sweepers found this plastic box. It contains a gun, money, keys and a map. Just like you thought.”
“Which road?” Jake asked.
“Northwest exit.”
Jake looked at the list of properties again. Northwest. Probably something close. Someplace he could get to overnight. There it was. Just across the state line into Oklahoma.
“This one first. Get the ground-penetrating radar and the tech. We gotta go.”
“I’ve got a helicopter on standby,” Stafford said. “We’ll be at Teague’s Oklahoma property in an hour.”
The dust swirled out from the downwash of the helicopter blades, lifted up into the air and was caught up again in the downwash. It looked like they were landing in the hole of a giant dust donut. As the blades wound down, the dust subsided, mostly.
The house was small, maybe a vacation home, plain wood plank side boards and a cedar shingle roof. Jake looked around at the rural landscape: Scrub brush and pale soil for as far as he could see. The general could have come here hunting, Jake thought. Certainly secluded. A perfect place to begin a trek into obscurity, and another identity, maybe another country. But with what? There has to be something here worth the stop.
A search of the house revealed a few rifles, some canned food, clothes; the usual items. Jake and Honi followed a narrow stairway down from a slanted wood door mounted next to the outside of the house. Looks like a storm shelter, Jake thought. He checked the walls: They were solid.
“Set up the ground-penetrating radar,” Jake said. “Start close to the house and work your way out.”
The army tech wheeled the machine over to the side of the house and began the search. Twenty minutes later, he came running into the house.
“Agent Hunter! There’s something buried by the storm shelter. It’s huge.”
They all ran to the back of the house.
“It’s right under here,” the army tech pointed out. “And it runs out to here.”
“How wide?”
“About six, maybe seven feet.”
Under the stairs, Jake thought.
Stafford looked at the stair steps. “They’re screwed down. Torx bit drive.” He ran back into the house and emerged a minute later with a cordless drill in his hand. “Torx bit in the drill, extra battery, all charged and ready to go.”
Stafford unscrewed the steps and tossed them into the small storm cellar. Under the steps was a panel of plywood, also screwed on the edges. He removed the screws, hooked his finger into a half-inch hole at the top, and lifted the panel up and out. Jake pulled the plywood panel out into the back yard. Honi emerged from the house with a flashlight and tossed it down to Stafford.
“More steps going down,” Stafford called out. He stepped down out of sight into the darkness. “There’s a buried shipping container down here. You guys need to see this.”
Jake grimaced in pain as he jumped across the open space and landed in the storm cellar. The bullet wound on his right side hadn’t healed yet. Honi followed him.
“You alright?”
“Mostly,” he replied, holding his right side.
They walked down the steps. Twelve feet underground the concrete block walls and steps opened up and framed the double doors to a standard shipping container. Stafford was pulling the doors open as they arrived. The flashlight illumined the open end of the container.
“Light switch,” Jake said. He reached over and flipped the switch mounted in an electrical box on the left.
Fluorescent lights flickered to life. The container was twenty feet long, lined on both sides with wood shelves, two feet deep.
“Holy mother of God,” Stafford said softly.
As they looked down the center aisle, it was obvious that every shelf was stacked full with something, right out to the edge of the shelf and up to the bottom of the next shelf up. Stafford had pulled a packet from the shelf. It was a banded pack of hundred dollar bills, and the shelves were stuffed with them. Jake took a packet from the shelf and thumbed through the bills.
“These packets are ten grand a piece. How many packets are there?”