of it. I’m not saying I’m against it. Being here, seeing this —” he waved an arm to encompass the passage we were sitting in and the missile “— intrigues me. That’s all.”
“What does that mean?” Willow asked.
Edward smiled.
“No can do,” Jay declared.
“Why not?” Remi asked.
“I’m not going to fool around with a missile anywhere near one of those nukes.”
“Hey, man, Eddie’s got a point,” Pump said. “You know it’s got to be armed before it can detonate. Even if the bird blew up, there’s no chance —”
“Go ahead if you want. Count me out.”
Silence hung in the air.
“Suppose . . . suppose we move the thing out of the silo completely?” Edward stated.
“How?” Willow asked.
“There has to be a procedure,” Phil said. “They got them in here.”
“Would that satisfy you, Jay?” Edward asked.
“Judging by the rig on the dolly,” Phil continued, “it looks like the warhead weighs under a ton. We could rig a winch over the silo’s edge on top and haul the thing out.”
“Sounds right,” Remi said. “Hoist it up to ground level, load it on a trailer, and tow it someplace.”
Phil nodded. “Yeah.”
“But where would we tow it to?” Willow asked.
“The house,” Edward suggested. “We’ll stick it in the garage with our other junk.”
Jay waved away the notion impatiently. “You’re uptight about having a few secret documents around the Bay? But you don’t mind stashing a hydrogen bomb in the garage?”
“They know the launch manuals are here,” Edward reasoned. “If they ever figured out where the missile was launched from, they’ll scour this place to see if anything has been ripped off.”
“Besides the rocket,” Remi added.
“If nothing else is missing, maybe after ten or twenty years they’ll stop looking for the culprits. From what you and Pump say, they don’t know an H-bomb was left behind. So they won’t freak about one of their toys being unaccounted for.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Phil declared.
“What would we do with it, man?” Pump asked. “Leave it in the garage for whoever rents the house next?”
“You’re assuming we could lift it out of this hole without dropping it,” Jay said, “either trashing the bird or blowing up half of Southern California.”
“Man, that’s not how these are detonated,” Pump protested. “You know that. They can fall out of planes and absolutely nothing —”
Jay raised his hands. “All right, all right.”
“Once it’s safe in the garage, we’ll worry about how to dispose of it,” Edward said.
“Maybe we can get the neighbour’s kid to enter it in the high-school science fair,” Willow joked.
Remi laughed. “Or sell it to the Tijuana border guards, so Mexico can have the bomb.”
Willow grinned. “Paint it psychedelic and leave it on consignment at the Mystic Arts World boutique.”
“We could rent a boat and dump it at sea,” Phil proposed, more serious.
Edward stood. “Abandon it along the freeway like a junked car.” He shrugged. “If nobody discovers where the missile was launched from, we might be able to sneak it back later.”
I had experienced a wave of relief when Jay pronounced the satellite scheme finished. Now that the crisis appeared to have been weathered, I also rose to my feet. “If we’re going to keep on keeping on, don’t we need to record the payload area size? Wasn’t that the last chore tonight?”
“Jay?” Pump asked.
His friend leaned over to fumble inside the pack and extracted the measuring tape. He and Pump moved out toward the platform together, and a few minutes later rejoined us by the elevator. Nobody had brought a pen, so we descended to the command bunker again and I typed the dimensions onto our list and again wiped away my prints. Then we returned to the entrance level, where Jay powered everything down. We stood in blackness at the bottom of the ladder. Phil climbed up first.
I heard the cover click open, and a moment or two later snap shut. Phil was clambering back. “Somebody’s out there,” he hissed.
My heart flipped over. I had been feeling a little more relaxed every second, cocky even, thinking, We’ve done it: broken in, looked around, and in a few minutes we’ll be outside and scot-free. Anxiety now roared back. The small room in which we were shoulder to shoulder felt claustrophobic; I was having trouble catching a full breath.
“Quit fucking around,” Edward ordered, shining a light at Phil.
“You sure, Phil?” Remi asked.
“Goddamn sure! I saw someone out there, watching.”
I sensed tension rise in the others around me. With the antechamber lit by the thin beams of flashlights, the thought struck me that the scene resembled a dramatic moment in a submarine movie, with everybody clustered around the ladder to the conning tower while under attack or with water pouring in.
“Let me take a look, man,” Pump insisted.
“Did they spot you?” Willow whispered. “Maybe we should just stay here until whoever it is goes away.”
“Be my guest,” Phil said to Pump, jumping down.
Pump pushed past him.
“Whoever is there probably saw my light,” Phil said. “I was checking around before leaving the hole.”
“Careful,” Willow urged.
“Everybody shut off their lights when I open the hatch,” demanded Pump from up the ladder.
We waited in the dark. Seconds crawled by.
“It’s a cow,” Pump called down. “Beyond the fence. A fucking cow!”
“Cow?”
“A little paranoid, Phil?” Edward needled.
“Shut up.”
Then I was out in the chilly morning, with streaks of dawn brightening the sky above the ridges to the east. Phil and Jay kicked gravel over the manhole cover. As we exited through the site gate, Pump replaced the sprung padlock so that it appeared functional. Before he
