out loud, but except for Pump his words didn’t mean anything to us.
“Cool,” people said, though.
“We’ll have to take this sucker home,” Pump said. “The data’s all here, but it’s going to take a little figuring.”
“Afraid not,” declared Edward. “There’s something about having top-secret documents lying around the house that I don’t like.”
“We’ve violated about a dozen major federal felony laws now, man. What’s an op manual or two going to matter? We’ll put them back when we’re done.”
“Eddie has a point, Pump,” Jay said. “Let’s leave it for now. You and I need to come back, anyway, and sort through a ton of details. Maybe tomorrow night? No reason for everybody to hang around while you and I get it straight.”
Edward smirked. “You two haven’t been straight since July.”
Jay slid the binder back onto the shelf. “Here’s Launch.” He indicated another manual. “That’ll show us how to assess the bird’s readiness status.”
“And checklist procedures,” Pump said.
“We can cross that off our list then?” Phil asked.
“It’s still in the typewriter,” I reminded him, and we trooped back into the bunker. Nobody had anything to add when I read our items aloud for review, so I retrieved the piece of paper from the machine and passed it to Pump. I used my handkerchief to wipe down the keys, and somebody borrowed the cloth to rub over the chairs we had shifted.
“Want to see the ready room?” Jay asked. “We should scope it out. Then we’ll come back to this side and get the dimensions of the payload compartment. That’ll do us for tonight.”
Pump cut power to the command area, and we returned to the elevator. Dropping to the silo bottom, we filed across the concrete top of the blast deflectors. The vast bulk of the missile became even more apparent as we walked around its base. At the opposite wall a short hallway led to a similar elevator.
The ready room was a small-scale version of the command bunker. A number of TV monitors hung from the ceiling. A blast door, however, gave access to a retractable platform that allowed instrumentation to be removed from or installed into the rocket. Beyond the ready room, Jay ushered us down a corridor where we could peer through windows at a white-painted enclosure resembling a hospital operating theatre.
“The instrument lab,” Jay said. “Here’s where we’ll assemble the satellite, keeping it hygienic and dust-free and all that good stuff.”
“Weird,” Phil said.
We retraced our route to the silo floor, back across the deflectors, and ascended to the arming area, several feet higher in the silo than the ready room across the well of the facility. Another metal-mesh platform, currently extended to the missile, provided access to the nose cone. From the entrance to this ramp, I could appreciate the very long plunge to the cavern floor. A dozen feet above the platform was the steel of the silo’s roof.
Pump conducted us through two blast doors and along a passage to the warhead storage room: a small, echoing vault that boasted an empty bomb rack and a wheeled metal carriage that ran on tracks set into the concrete and the platform out to the rocket. A winch and movable boom were attached to the carriage’s sturdy frame, obviously to assist the loading process. While Pump was providing this tour of the staging area of megadeaths, Jay had taken a tape measure and assorted screwdrivers from Pump’s backpack and departed to measure the bird’s payload chamber.
We met Jay returning down the corridor. His face looked stern. “It’s all off.”
“What?” Edward said.
“We’re finished. Let’s split.”
“Why?” Willow asked.
“What’s happening?” Pump added.
Jay stepped behind Pump and slipped the tape measure into his pack. “There’s a fucking hydrogen bomb in that missile. That’s what’s happening.”
We dashed by Jay in a clump onto the ramp, with me careful to stay in the middle of the group. A large panel had been swung open in the nosecone of the rocket. When we bent one by one to peer in, I saw a squat black canister secured by a cradle in the confines of the missile’s top. On the canister, which resembled a large barrel perhaps four feet in diameter and five feet high, was painted in white: U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY. Under that were some numbers, the radiation warning sign, and the words NUCLEAR MUNITION, followed by more numbers.
“You sure it’s the bomb?” Phil blurted.
“Oh, my God!” Willow cried.
“What’s it doing here?” Edward demanded.
Remi straightened from studying the object, then turned to Jay, who had followed us out onto thin air. “Didn’t you say they removed these?”
“It can’t be here then,” Willow insisted.
“It’s here,” Jay said.
“It can’t be.”
Pump shrugged. “We were told the warheads were removed from the sites even before we started decommissioning them.”
“They don’t just leave hydrogen bombs lying around,” Phil declared.
“No?” Edward countered. “Remember that B-52 in Spain? Dropped one in the drink, and they were going to forget it until they noticed the Russkies were doing some fishing nearby.”
Willow sighed. “I guess we do have a lot of them.”
Pump nodded toward the opened compartment. “Heav-vy!”
We filed back onto solid ground, with me in the lead. At the elevator, we slumped down in a row against the wall to evaluate the situation. Pump produced a doobie, which circulated despite Willow’s voiced concern about whether we were endangering ourselves by smoking too near a warhead.
Nobody else spoke. A couple of times somebody passed the joint to a neighbour, heaved himself to his feet, walked out onto the ramp again, and leaned in to peer at the bomb. Then he returned, shaking his head. “Bummer.”
Pump eventually sucked the last smoke out of the roach and ate it. “Let’s roll.”
“Hold on,” Edward said. “Why does this have to wreck the whole plan?”
Edward’s question startled me. I stared at him. Others did the same.
“What do you mean?” Phil asked.
“That’s a hydrogen bomb in there, Eddie,” Jay said. “I’m not going to fuck around with a nuke. Can you relate to that?”
“Cool it, Jay,” Pump said.
“Can’t we run it back into the armoury?” Edward asked. “How is it secured? If it’s just bolted in, we could wheel out the dolly and store it behind those blast doors, safe and sound.”
