“I’m well aware of that.”
“Do you think Robie—?”
“That’s why I want to see the photos.”
Jamison gazed around. “It looks like a war zone.”
Decker nodded. “Kelly and his team have searched the building and it’s empty, but there are signs out back of another gunfight and a rope dangling from a balcony.”
“Have you tried to call Robie on that phone he left you?”
“To tell the truth, I’m afraid to try.”
“You’ll know soon enough. Here comes Kelly.”
Kelly rejoined them and handed over an iPad on which were loaded photos of all the dead men. It took about a minute to go through them. Decker and Jamison exchanged a relieved glance when they saw that Robie was not among the pictures.
“I don’t recognize any of these guys, but like you said, most of them seem foreign. Eastern Europe, the Middle East. A couple of Asians.”
Kelly took the iPad back. “It’s a hodgepodge all right.”
“Have you spoken with Mark Sumter?” asked Decker.
“Sumter, why?”
“Well, he heads up the military presence here. This might be something the Pentagon wants to know about.”
“Okay. But it’s not like the people under Sumter came here and had a pitched battle and left all these dead guys.”
“Well, you won’t know for sure till you ask him,” retorted Decker. “The government likes its secrets.”
Kelly shook his head. “It’ll take us weeks to process this scene. You think the Bureau will send up more agents now?”
“Maybe,” said Decker. “If we can show there’s a terrorist angle to this.”
“Terrorists!” exclaimed Kelly. “What would they be doing in North Dakota?”
“Well, that’s our job to figure out.”
They left Kelly and walked back to their SUV.
“You going to call Robie? I mean, he has to be involved in this.”
“The probabilities lie there.”
“But do you think he killed all those men? I mean, that seems impossible.”
“Nothing about that guy seems impossible to me.”
As they reached their vehicle Decker’s phone buzzed.
“It’s Harper Brown,” he said, checking the screen.
“Hopefully, she has some news for us.”
Decker answered the phone and Harper Brown, their friend at the DIA, said, “What the hell are you mixed up in out there, Decker?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. And how’s Melvin?”
Melvin Mars was one of Decker’s best friends. A former college football star convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Texas, Decker had proved his innocence. Mars and Brown were now dating.
“He’s great. He sends his best and told me to tell you that if you need him as a bodyguard again, don’t hesitate to call.”
“I don’t think I want him anywhere near this place. Besides, I think I have a pretty good bodyguard already.”
“Don’t let Alex hear you call her a bodyguard.”
“I wasn’t talking about her. So what do you have for us?”
“I’m thinking time is of the essence?”
“Your thinking is spot-on.”
“First things first, anyone I could find with firsthand knowledge of the Douglas S. George Defense Complex provided nothing helpful. It’s been under Air Force control since the Korean War era when it was built.”
“Has it been a radar array looking for missiles all that time?”
Strangely, she didn’t answer right away. “Well, it’s hard to tell. From what I could find out, it didn’t come online as an eye in the sky until the late sixties, well into the Cold War.”
“The Korean War was in the early fifties. What was it used for back then?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t find out.”
“How is that possible? Don’t you have every security clearance they give out?”
“I thought I did, until I started asking questions about the place, particularly what it was doing back in the fifties. There I ran into a stone wall.”
“I understand there’s another eye in the sky around here.”
“That’s the other funny thing. The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex is on the eastern side of the state and is part of the Twenty-First Space Wing, and designated Cavalier Air Force Station. It’s near Grand Forks, North Dakota, and was deactivated in 1976, but it has a PARCS radar array and keeps watch out for incoming missiles and also tracks objects in space.”
“Which was how the commanding officer at the facility here described what they do. A pair of eyes in North Dakota? Isn’t that a bit of overkill, especially considering the Cold War is long dead?”
“You would think, Decker, you would think.” She paused. “What do you believe is going on up there?”
“I think the answer to that would scare the crap out of even somebody like you.”
“THINGS ARE ACCELERATING,” said Blue Man.
He, Robie, and Reel were sitting in Reel’s black SUV on a quiet road about a mile outside of London. In the distance they could see oil rigs and crews pecking at the earth with drill bits and detonation guns.
“The police are all over the property,” noted Robie.
“Well, there was no way we had the resources to clean up something like that. But that was a big loss for them, thanks to you.”
Robie glanced at Reel. “Thanks to me and Jess. I thought you were on the other side of the world on assignment.”
“I was.” Reel was a female version of Robie, tall, lean, rock hard, with the calm and resolute features of a fighter pilot. “But then I got the call to come to wonderful North Dakota, where there were pressing matters that needed my attention.”
“You were following me?” said Robie, his features troubled.
“I knew your itinerary, otherwise I would not have been able to. Don’t worry, you’re not losing a step.”
“Your timing was impeccable, I understand,” noted Blue Man.
“I’m six feet under if she was a second later,” added Robie. “Jess and I checked some of the bodies out before we left the scene.”
“They weren’t members of our military,” said Reel. “They weren’t even from this country.”
“Foreigners on domestic soil,” murmured Blue Man.
“Which begs the question of why,” said Reel.
Robie said, “Decker told us about the farmer who saw the man trying to escape. Speaking gibberish?”
“A foreign language, possibly Arabic or perhaps Farsi. I believe Mr. Decker would have already come to a similar conclusion.”
“So it’s a prison, then,” said Robie.
Reel interjected, “It’s no secret that some of the prisoners at Gitmo have been transferred to federal prisons across the country. But that Air Force facility is not a prison, at least not that anyone’s told me.”
“Perhaps they haven’t told anyone,” suggested Blue Man.
“What’s going on with Gitmo now?” asked Robie.
“Past administrations either tried to keep it open or shut it down. The latter turned out to be harder than it looked. It now costs about thirteen million dollars per prisoner. Currently, there are roughly one hundred prisoners there.”