That was it. When Bartello talked about hot, he wasn't speaking about the Florida weather. They slid past level one, then moved to level two.
"Equipment and weapons storage," Bartello said. "We've even got some tanks down here. If necessary, this level can also be abandoned."
They continued downward, passing level four. "Food and water storage. This is where it all stops. Our researchers at Grolier tell us that the surface of the base could take a direct hit of twenty megatons and levels three and four would still remain intact and functional. Of course, who's going to put twenty megatons into the Everglades, right?"
Bartello laughed loudly. Largent, shaking inside with rage and gut fear, forced himself to laugh with the son of a bitch. God, they were anticipating a nuclear attack — and laughing about it! He had come down here prepared to deal with a coup of some kind, but this was monstrous beyond understanding. Leland was apparently happily plotting the end of civilization.
The elevator jerked to a stop, Largent barely even noticing it. He looked through the cutout and found himself staring into the guts of a huge communications and operations center, a deep underground bunker from which to wage a total, all-out war. But how? How? There was no way that Leland could coordinate an attack or retaliation. What about NORAD? What about the President, and the Joint Chiefs and the NSC? How in God's name did they intend to make this thing work?
"Here we are," Bartello said, and the door slid open. But before Largent could step out, the man put a hand on his chest and pushed the button to close the door.
"I can't stand it any longer," the man said. "You're a coy bastard, but you're going to have to tell me."
"Tell you what?"
"We've been put on red alert," Bartello stated. "We've begun sealing-off procedures, and now here you are with sealed orders."
Largent stared at the man. He seemed excited, highly agitated.
"You've got to tell me," he said. "Is GOG on or not? Is this the real thing?"
The Fed's mouth was dry, but somehow he managed to choke out, "It's go."
"All right!" The colonel laughed loudly, clenching his fists and thrusting them above his head. "Finally!"
Oscar Largent felt as if he had to throw up.
* * *
"God," Julie said, "I never knew there were so many stars."
Bolan smiled down at her, the soft curves of her face glowing gently in the orange haze of the firelight. She lay on her back, wrapped in a sleeping bag, staring up into the Arizona night.
"Amazing what you can see away from city lights," he replied, throwing some more sagebrush on the fire, listening to the crackle as the dried twigs gave over to the blaze.
He moved to sit beside her, staring down from the sandstone ridge where they had set up camp just at the edge of the Sauceda range, twenty miles south of Gila Bend. "All things being equal," he said, "I wouldn't mind settling in a place like this sometime. The peace of it could really work to make you feel whole inside."
Julie smiled. "It's odd...hearing talk like that from you. I thought you were the original hard ass."
"You're not the first person who's ever been wrong about me," he said.
"I didn't mean that the way it sounded." She sat up to wrap her arms around herself. "It's cold."
"Nothing to stop the wind," he said. "No cloud cover to seal in the heat."
"There must be some clouds." She pointed farther south. "We've got lightning down there."
Bolan looked. Miles distant, through a maze of small mountains, he could see the sky light up. A small static rumble, barely discernible, reached them seconds later.
"Summer lightning," he said. "Static electricity."
"What time is it?" she asked, unfolding one of the blankets they'd purchased in town and wrapping it around her shoulders.
He looked at the watch. "Nearly eleven. We've still got a few hours left. If you want to sleep, I'll wake you when it's time."
"You sure he'll come this way?"
Bolan shrugged. "If he travels the direction Mike Rear-don said he does, we'll be able to see his headlights from a distance. I don't think they'll be any trouble."
"I still think it's a wild-goose chase," she said.
"Humor me," he replied. "Enjoy a night of peace and solitude."
"I can't argue with that." She stared out over a magnificent vista of mountains and sandstone monuments, desert and arroyos, all calmed to stillness by the blanket of night that covered and preserved it, and watched over by a brilliant star field, a million eyes to savor the beauty.
Bolan wore his black suit, a jacket covering the combat harness. Chilly himself, he zipped the jacket up to his neck. "How did you come to marry Harry Arnold?" he asked, something he had been wondering ever since he'd met her.
"There's a question," she said, reaching out for a stand of the sagebrush and pulling it to herself. She began to tear it apart, a twig at a time, tossing the individual sticks into the all-consuming flame.
"I was young and hungry for knowledge...I guess maybe I was really hungry for the power that knowledge brings. Anyway, for all his pettiness, Harry was a genius in his field and a bona fide research scientist. I was attracted to that, and, I guess, Harry was attracted to me.
"I'd graduated from Brandeis, then met Harry at Penn State where I'd gone for my master's. Harry invited me to be his research assistant, a job I would have killed for. After I worked with him for a year, he told me he couldn't live without me and wanted to marry me. I turned him down at first, even then knowing it was the work that I loved, not Harry. He got... I don't know, sullen, I guess, and told me that if I wouldn't marry him, he couldn't continue working with me. It was an either-or situation."
"And you picked either," Bolan concluded.
"Is that so wrong?" she asked. "Over the years I've learned that people marry for a variety of reasons... and I haven't seen a great deal of validity to any of them."
"I wouldn't know," he said. "I've never been married."
"Any close shaves?"
"Yeah, once," he said, reluctantly dragging up old memories.
"What happened?"
"Nothing. She... died."
"Like Harry," she said, her voice catching in her throat.
"Yeah."
They sat there in silence for a moment, both acutely aware of the presence of the other, and of private pain. A meteor flashed across the sky, brilliantly burning through the atmosphere before winking out the eastern horizon.
"That was beautiful," she whispered.
"It's like life, searing fast, then disappearing without a trace."
She leaned against him, his arm instinctively going around her. "Oh, Mack," she said. "What's brought us here together? What fate is screwing with our lives... our feelings?"
"If we met at a party," he said, "we'd have nothing to talk about."
She turned and looked up at him, her eyes filling with tears. "If we'd met at a party, I'd want you just the way I want you right now."
He had no words, only intense, burning need. He pulled her roughly to him, and she held on desperately, her ferocity a match for his own.
He released her and took her face in his large, callused hands, planting kisses all over it as her trembling hands worked the buttons of her checkered shirt.
"Oh, God, Mack," she rasped. "I'm so lonely, so goddamned lonely."
He pulled away from her, staring. "You think I don't know that? You think I don't understand exactly how you feel?"
And in that instant they hit upon the force that had driven them together and continued to hold them. Because though their lives were worlds, if not light-years, apart, their hearts were alike. In their loneliness, in their need, they were one.
Julie removed her shirt, black lace beneath highlighted against her pale skin in the firelight. Bolan stood and took off his jacket, then the combat harness, tossing them both to the ground. Then he knelt to her, taking her in his arms again, gently this time, as if she were as fragile as glass.
Julie looked into his eyes, fully and completely, and trusted the man who looked back without shame.
Then he was moving against her, her hands on his back tracing scar lines, trying to empathize the pain he had lived with for so long. Their bodies sought release and would not be denied, and after, they lay in each other's arms, under the sleeping bag for warmth, not wanting to let go for fear of breaking the spell.
"Let's forget about all this," she said, her head settled in the crook of his shoulder. "Just go somewhere and sit the rest of this out."
"Can't do it. You know we can't."
"It's a good dream, though."
"The best."
They lay together, listening to the distant thunder, drifting for once with their guard down, the scent of her hair wrapping Bolan in a sweet cocoon that held back the outside world. He watched her slowly drifting off to sleep, her eyes coming halfway open as she kissed him softly.
"I love you, Mack Bolan," she whispered, her eyes closing again, her breathing shifting into regular patterns as sleep finally overtook her.
He didn't move until he was sure she was sleeping deeply, then he slowly extricated himself from the sleeping bag, covering her warmly after he'd risen. He put his clothes on, then threw more sagebrush on the dying fire.
He bent to pick up the combat harness, but instead decided to leave it for a while. Since they were working so hard at pretending right now, he'd pretend for just a little longer that the world wasn't coming apart around them.
He walked back to where Julie lay sleeping, alternately staring at her and at the roadway far below. He reached out and pushed an errant lock of sleek black hair out of her face. She stirred in her sleep, smiling, and he knew that the smile was for him.
It was a feeling, a memory, that he knew he'd carry with him for the rest of his life.
However short that life might be.
Chapter Twenty
"Come on," Bolan said, gently shaking Julie awake. "It's time to get moving."
She rolled onto her back, smiling through sleepy eyes. "Why don't you call down for room service?"
He smiled despite himself. "We've really got to go," he said when she tried to pull him down with her.
"Party pooper," she said, then struggled to her elbows to watch him stamp out the fire. "Is he coming?"
Bolan pointed past her to the flatland below and the two headlights that were relentlessly moving closer to their position.
Bolan tossed her clothes to her. "Better put these on or we'll give ol’ Tater more of a surprise than he bargained for."
She stretched, then climbed out of the bag, totally casual about her nakedness. She dressed hurriedly, though, once out in the chill air.
"Do we pack up the gear?" she asked, as she tucked her shirttail into her jeans.
He slipped into the combat harness, then the jacket. "We'll get it on the way back. Listen."
She stood still drinking in the sounds of the dark. "An engine."
"He's close," Bolan said, striding purposefully toward the car. "Let's follow."
She hurried to the Cougar, getting into the passenger side and buckling the seat belt, Bolan climbing in behind the wheel. He started the engine as quietly as possible, though he doubted that a jet engine would have been any louder than Tater's flatbed. He'd be an easy man to follow.
The sandstone ridge they occupied sloped gently downward on the side hidden from the road. Bolan made the trip quickly, without headlights, and drove around the base of the ridge, coming out no more than two hundred yards behind the flatbed's taillights.
Leaving the headlights off, they followed at that distance, Tater's dust cloud obscuring the man's view of his pursuers. After a mile, the flatbed left what little road there was and trekked overland, ducking in and out of the myriad small mountain passes that were scattered across the desert floor, the peaks rising around them hundreds of feet in the air.
"Just what do we expect to find out here?" she asked.
"If I knew that," he replied, "I wouldn't have to come."
"It's odd," she said. "He seems to be driving right toward those lightning flashes."
"I've noticed." The warrior's gaze was focused on the desert floor, trying to catch the hazards that headlights would normally pick up. "Don't you think it's strange that the lightning hasn't moved? It's been flashing on and off for hours, but always from the same place."
She looked over at him, her lips drawn tight, jaw muscles working. "I'm beginning to think you might not be so crazy after all."
"I kind of hoped you would've been right the first time."
They drove for another five miles, ducking in and out of mountains and dodging cactus, drawing closer to the occasionally flashing lights, the sound, now that they were closer, more like an electric hum, the stentorian wail of a transformer blowing.
Suddenly the old man's truck disappeared behind a stand of boulders that seemed to block the entrance to a ring of sandstone cliffs. Bolan slowed the Cougar, then stopped.
"Strange," Julie said. "He went in but didn't come out."
"Strange is right. Look at the way those peaks are placed. They're protected from view on all sides. If I was going to hide anything, this would sure as hell be the place to do it."
As if in response, light flared briefly from within the matrix of rock faces, the loud, unnatural hum that accompanied it nearly deafening.
"Stay here," Bolan ordered, "and be ready to take off."
"Not this time, partner." Julie opened her door and climbed out. "I didn't come all the way out to this godforsaken wilderness to sit in the car. I waited for you in Florida, and it nearly drove me crazy. Whatever we do now, we do together."
He tightened his lips. "I can't stop you."
"Damn right you can't," she replied, and started to walk toward the place where Tater had disappeared.
"Easy," Bolan said as they reached the boulders. "We'll take this real careful, a step at a time."
They came around the stand of boulders and saw a wide open space between two of the majestic rock formations that were scattered so thickly here.
"It looks like an entrance," Julie said softly.
"A hidden valley," Bolan replied. "Incredible."
They walked through the opening, sheer rock faces towering all around them, dwarfing them to insignificance. Within the rock walls were more rocks, the valley itself still hidden.
"Look," Julie said, pointing to the left, and Bolan turned to see a mobile home nestled between several large, round boulders fifty yards distant. The flatbed was parked in a clearing nearby. "Let's check it out."
They moved quickly and quietly, staying on the fringes beneath overhanging rock faces until they had come around the front of the large trailer. A light was on, and through the closed window they could hear strange moaning sounds punctuated by the same cackling laughter they'd heard at the Zanzi-bar.
The trailer was up on blocks, putting Julie and the warrior well below the window. Bolan turned to the rocks around the trailer. "Let's climb up and get a look."
They crept away from the window, moving quietly up the rock face opposite until they could see in. When they did, Bolan had to put his hand over Julie's mouth to keep her from laughing.
The mobile home was furnished elegantly, and kept up as if it had a live-in maid. Tater sat stark naked — except for his hat — on a black leather couch, a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He was watching a big-screen TV with a VCR hooked up to it. On the screen, a blond woman with huge breasts was having sex with a short man wearing nothing but his socks. Every time the people on the screen groaned, Tater threw back his head and laughed loudly.
"Some people have all the fun," she whispered to Bolan when he took his hand from her mouth.
They climbed back
down the rocks, traveling the way they had come until they found another passage through the boulders, which seemed to have been strewn around by some careless hand. They walked along the path, then through a narrow channel between two of the sandstone monoliths to find themselves at the edge of a large valley, completely surrounded by rock.
"Mack, this is weird," Julie said, as they picked their way slowly into the valley.
"And it gets weirder, too." He pointed to a spot on the ground no more than five feet before them.
It was a perfectly round indentation in the ground with a twenty-foot circumference. The indentation was one foot deep, its walls perfectly smooth and hard. The inside of the place was charred black.
Bolan walked into the circle, bending to touch the ground, and came up with a handful of something. "It's like powdered glass," he observed, letting it slip through his fingers.
"What the hell's going on here?" she asked.
"Something someone wants to keep secret," he returned, turning in a circle.
"Here's another one," Julie said, running several feet farther on. "It's... smoking!"
He hurried to join her. Another circle, exactly like the first one — except with a deeper indentation — was wisping gray smoke from within. "I've never seen anything like this," he said.
"There's another one!" Julie exclaimed, pointing farther on, "and another...and look!"
She had turned and was facing the way they had come. Bolan turned with her, amazed to see a great number of similar circles cut right into the rock face of the surrounding cliffs. The holes seemed to be deep.
They had been working their way up a gentle slope, the remainder of the valley hidden beyond its crest. Julie ran toward the summit, wanting to see more, while Bolan puzzled over the holes in the ground and rock.
She hailed him from the summit. "Mack! You've got…"
A loud siren pierced the night, and all at once, floodlights were coming on, bathing the rocks and valley floor in harsh light. Julie had set off some sort of alarm.
"Mack!" she screamed, terrified as powerful floodlights bore down on them from all directions.
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