Decker focused the binoculars and surveyed the site. Then he looked in the distance at the adjacent Air Force station, and the ground in between.
After about a minute she said, “See anything interesting?”
“It’s more what I’m not seeing.”
“What?” she said.
“There’s nobody working the site. It’s empty. I wonder if they’ve finished fracking it?”
“Let me see.”
She slowly surveyed the property and then lowered the binoculars. “But if they’ve finished fracking, why isn’t there a gas flare on the vent pipe sticking up over there? Remember, I noticed that before and you called it a miracle. And I don’t see any rig pumping the oil up like the other sites have, either.”
“We need to ask an expert. And I know just the person.”
THEY SKIDDED TO A STOP at the oil rig that Stan Baker was staging and jumped out of the SUV.
They hustled up to the trailer. Decker didn’t bother knocking, he just burst in with Jamison right behind.
Baker was seated in front of the computer terminals. He whirled around to stare at them. “Hey, what are you two doing here?”
“The All-American Energy Company?” said Decker.
“What about them?”
“There’s nobody working the site.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nobody there. No trucks, no people, no activity.”
“Decker thought they might have finished fracking the site, but we couldn’t be sure,” said Jamison. “So we came to see you, since you’re the expert.”
Baker shook his head. “They couldn’t have finished fracking that well. They haven’t been there long enough. They haven’t even been drilling that long, so they couldn’t have gotten down all that far.”
“Stan, how come McClellan didn’t get the rights to that parcel of land? He’s got most all the other ones around here.”
“I heard scuttlebutt that All-American kept bidding the price up to where it got crazy. Like two or three times what it was worth. I guess McClellan just thought those boys didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”
“I think they knew exactly what they were doing,” said Decker ominously.
Jamison said, “And they have one of those vent pipes like we’ve seen around, but there’s no lit flare coming off it.”
“A vent pipe!” Baker looked puzzled. “No way they could be having gas coming up at this stage.”
Decker suddenly flinched. “How far could they have gone down by now?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say no more than a couple hundred feet.”
“That’s what I was afraid you might say.”
“Afraid? Why?”
Decker looked at Jamison. “I think we just found our ticking time bomb.”
* * *
When they reached the fenced-in area at the All-American Energy Company, Decker jumped out of the SUV and tried to open the gate. It was locked.
He climbed back into the vehicle.
“Ram it, Alex,” he ordered.
“Are you—”
“Just do it. We’re out of time.”
Baker, who was in the back seat, curled his fingers around his armrest and looked nervously at his brother-in-law.
Jamison gunned the motor, put it in drive, and slammed her foot down on the gas pedal. The big SUV leapt forward and smashed through the gates.
They leapt out, with Decker leading the way to the trailer. The door was locked.
“Decker, we don’t have a warrant,” said Jamison.
“To hell with a warrant, Alex.”
He pulled his gun and shot the lock off. He kicked open the door, and they plunged inside. It was set up much like Baker’s trailer, but there was only one computer monitor on the desk with what looked to be live data covering it.
Decker looked at the screen and said, “Stan, can you make sense of this?”
Baker sat down in the chair and started studying the graphs and other information flowing over the monitor’s face.
“No, I can’t, because it doesn’t make a bit of sense,” he said.
“What doesn’t?” said Decker.
“Well, for starters, I was right. They’ve only drilled down about two hundred feet. At about the hundred-and-fifty-foot mark they’ve started to go horizontally at about a forty-five-degree angle.” He used the mouse to manipulate the screen. Another image flickered up.
“And what is that thing?”
They all stared at where he was pointing.
It was represented on the screen as large and black. “They’ve got imaging sensors in the hole, obviously. And that sucker is showing up.”
“How big do you reckon that is?” asked Decker.
“If I had to thumbnail it, based on the scales I’m used to, I’d say it’s about fifty feet square.”
“So about the size of an average house?”
“About, yeah. Wait, you don’t think there’s a house down there?”
“No. But it’s a big space and you have to wonder what’s in it. And the All-American Energy Company is obviously curious because, from the screen, it looks like they’ve drilled right into it.” He indicated a spot on the screen. “Do you see where it shows one of the walls being pierced?”
“Decker!” exclaimed Jamison. “The biochem weapons!”
“The what?” barked Baker.
“I think we found them,” said Decker. “And so did they.” He glanced out the window of the trailer. “And why do I think that whatever is down there is an airborne weapon? And that right this minute it’s being brought to the surface through that pipe?”
“Holy shit,” said Baker.
“Stan, how do we stop that from happening? As fast as possible?” Baker ran outside and they followed. He rushed over to the drill site and stopped dead. “That’s odd as hell. They’ve got the vent pipe directly attached to the drill hole.”
Decker barked, “It’s not odd if that’s how they’re bringing this shit to the surface. It’ll cover the whole area, maybe the whole state.”
“But how are they bringing it up here?” said Jamison. “It’s not like oil, and the pressure makes it move up into the pipe and to the surface like Stan described to us.”
“Do you hear that?” said Baker.
“What?” said Decker.
“That low hum from somewhere. If I had to guess they’ve got some sort of vacuum system built into their equipment. That must be how they’re bringing whatever is down there up here. They’re creating a suction line.”
“Can we turn it off?” said Decker.
Baker shook his head. “Take too long to find it and figure out how to do it. And if the suction has already been deployed, it might not matter if we turn it off. It’ll be like a siphon hose into a gas tank.”
Jamison exclaimed, “But if they stored that shit down there all those decades ago, won’t it be like in bottles or some other containers and on shelves or even in some sort of secure vault? It’s not like gas sitting in a tank that’ll just be free to come up once a suction is started.”