If Buckley could prove his value, the occupiers might bring him into their inner circle. He knew they’d never trust him, but maybe he could pick up some cross talk or hints about their plans. Then he’d need to figure out a way to get a message to the Sheriff, Daisy, or Bunker. Assuming any of them were still alive.
Part of him hoped his friends had decided to head away from Clearwater. Somewhere safe and not within the reach of the Russians. However, his gut knew better. Those three would never abandon the town. Or their friends. Even Bunker—the man he knew the least about.
Zhukov stopped his pacing and returned to the desk. He sat down in the swivel chair and spoke to the observer at length. The observer nodded mostly, but he did get in a few words before he turned and headed for the office door. A few seconds later, the man was gone from sight, the sound of his boots making quick work of the hallway outside.
The General brought his focus to Valentina. She stepped forward, her posture snapping to attention. Zhukov relayed his orders; her eyes locked and focused.
When the General finished speaking, he waved a quick hand at her before turning his attention to the paperwork on the desk. The man’s eyes never came Buckley’s way, almost as if Buckley wasn’t standing in the room.
Valentina spoke to the guard, again in Russian, then turned her stunning face to Buckley, pausing before she spoke. “The guard will escort you out of the building.”
The guard latched onto Buckley’s arm.
Buckley tried to pull away, but couldn’t. “So that’s it? We’re done here?”
She gave him a single head nod. “The General is a busy man. You are dismissed.”
The guard spun Buckley around and hauled him toward the office door.
Buckley glanced back at Valentina, hoping to glean some information from her before he left his former office.
Valentina’s beauty was on full display, filling the room with splendor, but that’s where the information ended. Her eyes were devoid of emotion, not giving up a single detail or any impression he could use.
He should have expected as much. These Russians were cold, calculating, and well-trained.
The guard brought him through the door and into the all-white hallway he knew all too well. He’d traveled this same corridor a thousand times before, only this trip was different. He’d just failed biblically. Sure, he’d taken this walk after a failure many times, but never after a fiasco that might affect the lives of everyone in town—and a few who weren’t.
He thought he’d kept his cool and played the situation correctly. The Russians’ failure was a clear opportunity to work himself inside, but apparently his tactics were wrong. He must have missed something. A hint. A phrase. A look. Otherwise, the guard wouldn’t be pulling him along like a prisoner heading for the gallows.
Just then, Bill King appeared at the far end of the corridor. A guard was escorting him as well, but they were heading the opposite way.
The facts lined up in an instant. General Zhukov must have summoned the Silver King Mine owner to his office. A man who would do anything to save his own ass. Or the ass of someone he cared about. Like his son Jeffrey.
A twinge hit Buckley’s chest after he realized what he’d missed. The Russians didn’t need to rely on him after all. There was another person in town with the stature, the brains, and the balls to work out a deal, and probably sell out everyone else in the process.
The adrenaline soared in Buckley’s veins, giving him the strength to pull free from the guard. He flew at King and pushed the slender blond man against the wall with the force of a linebacker taking down a quarterback.
King’s back smacked into the wall with a thud.
Buckley’s chest was pumping with fire when he looked up and let the words fly from his lips. “Don’t you dare, Bill!”
King grunted, then brought his hands up in an attempt to free himself from Buckley’s grip, but his effort failed.
Buckley felt a strength he’d never felt before, wanting to pull back a fist and land a punch in the center of this man’s face. He wasn’t sure where this anger was coming from, but it was long overdue. “You can’t do this, Bill! Those are our friends out there! People you’ve known a long time!”
“Yeah, and one of them is my son.”
The guards pulled them apart, tossing Buckley to the floor in a heap. His shoulder slammed into the base of the wall, sending a sting of pain into his body.
King adjusted his shirt collar, while shooting a look of superiority down at Buckley. The man turned and continued his trek to the General’s office with determination in his step.
Valentina was in the hallway, just outside the office door. She must have seen everything, yet her face looked numb. Almost like she’d expected the altercation to happen.
CHAPTER 12
Bunker waited for Sheriff Apollo to pull open the wire mesh door of the metal fencing that surrounded the chicken coop in Tuttle’s back yard. Once the hole was large enough, Bunker slipped inside the structure Tuttle had built as a Faraday cage.
Daisy was right behind him, the two of them heading for the secondary door that led to the actual chicken coop.
The birds went wild as two sets of legs invaded their space, clucking and running in random directions. Bunker couldn’t believe the raw pandemonium, wings flapping and feathers flying.
“Can you imagine doing this every day?” he asked after his mind flashed a scene of old man Tuttle hobbling his weary bones through the two sets of doors.
Chickens are a high maintenance food source that require regular attention. Building a secondary cage around the coop made little sense, not when you must feed, water, and fetch eggs daily. That’s what a normal person would think. Of course, not everyone in Clearwater saw Tuttle as normal. He was anything but.
However, the farther Bunker dug into Tuttle’s life, the more he believed Tuttle wasn’t simply a crazy old man like everyone thought. A mad genius might be a better term, even if Tuttle had a tendency to go overboard.
The working theory was that Tuttle had built this wire structure to appear crazy, when in reality he was hiding something. Something important enough to bury under a mound of chicken shit. On face value, the idea seemed absurd, but after Jeffrey showed up with rust on his hands, they decided to investigate.
Bunker figured Apollo was thankful for his wide hips and extra girth, relegating him to doorman duty since he’d never fit. Yet, given the look on Apollo’s face, Bunker was sure the Sheriff wished his nose wasn’t downwind. The stench of feces was strong, permeating the yard.
Daisy tapped Bunker on the arm and pointed to the left. “Jeffrey said it was over there, near the watering station.”
When a rooster came at Bunker with its beak in attack mode, he swatted at it with a backhand. The bird dodged the swipe, but didn’t back down. It came at him repeatedly, each time landing a blow near the bandage wrapped around Bunker’s forearm. “Damn, El Chappo is pissed.”
Apollo laughed.
“Maybe I can herd him into a corner. Hang on,” Daisy said, moving her feet quickly with hands outstretched. The bird changed direction and ran the other way.
“See if you can keep him there,” Bunker said, sending his hand into the straw. He fished in the sticky mess until he found a ring of metal, then reported, “Got it!”
A second later Bunker had the door open, its hinges complaining in a squeal of metal on metal. The straw and other clutter clung to its surface, no doubt held in place by the abundance of excrement.
Even if the man in black hadn’t gunned down Tuttle, Bunker didn’t think the chicken coop would’ve been kept any cleaner. There had to be a month’s worth of crap on the floor, literally. Given the mess inside the home, Tuttle obviously didn’t prioritize neatness. It was going to take a firehose and a scrub brush to clean off his shoes.
“What’s down there?” Apollo asked.
“Not sure. Can’t see the bottom. The hatch is angled.”
Daisy joined Bunker
, her eyes focused on the opening below with her hands on her hips. “Huh, not what I expected. I figured there’d be a regular ladder like what we found with the weapons cache. Not those metal rungs.”
“It reminds me of a submarine hatch I once climbed into, though this one doesn’t smell like the ocean.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I’m guessing there weren’t too many chickens onboard a sub.”
He smiled, feeling the need for a little humor. “Well, not the kind that still have their heads.”
“Do you think he stocked this one with guns and ammo, too?”
“Probably. You never want to keep them all in one place.” Bunker bent down and knocked on one of the all-white walls. A deep-toned hollow sound answered back, his knuckle test vibrating across the steel. “Just what I thought.”
Daisy knelt down and ran her fingers across the metal. “Nice powder coat.”
He nodded. “Some serious cash went into this.”
“Prefabricated?”
“That would be my guess. Rust-proof and air-tight.”
“What else do you think is down there?”
“Only one way to find out,” he said, holding out his hand. “Ladies first.”
She shook her head. “Not today, Bunker. Age before beauty.”
“Well then, I guess we have more chickens running around here than I thought.”
She smacked his arm with a light swat. “Hey watch it, buddy. El Chappo’s not the only one who bites.”
Bunker couldn’t hold back a grin. “Promises. Promises.”
Daisy didn’t answer.
Bunker let go of his smile, then turned his attention to the trap door when something new caught his eye—something he hadn’t noticed before—a steel plate underneath, glued to the boards instead of screwed.
He wasn’t sure why Tuttle decided to give the illusion the door was made of wood, but he was happy to see a trio of hydraulic-assisted hinges connecting the thick plate to the walls. Otherwise, the door would have been much harder to open and more dangerous when someone climbed down—like him.
“Watch the door for me,” he told Daisy, swinging around to put a foot on the top rung of the down ladder.
She held the door as he descended using the thirty all-white metal rungs, each welded to the walls and spaced about a foot apart.
If he had to guess, he’d estimate the walls to be running at a thirty-degree angle. The design made the climb safer but seemed to be a waste of engineering. A vertical shaft would have been much more efficient and easier to build, especially for something buried thirty feet deep.
The instant his foot landed at the bottom, a series of lights snapped on behind him. He found himself standing on a wood plank in an eight-foot tall tunnel made of corrugated steel. It looked like a giant culvert—the kind of pipe you’d find buried under a roadway to carry runoff water from one side to the other.
He was at the far end of the tunnel, where a bright yellow sign had been hung on the wall next to the ladder. It was about a foot wide and had a set of black, upside-down triangles and the words FALLOUT SHELTER stenciled on it.
A hand-carved wooden plague hung to the right of the warning sticker. It said MUD ROOM.
Directly behind him was a single showerhead hanging from the ceiling. It was centered over a drain in the floor. The words “Decontamination Station” flashed in his mind.
To the right was a stainless steel, thirty-gallon garbage can with a lid on it, plus a whiskbroom and dust pan. Beyond the dust pan was a two-foot piece of plywood with a dense patch of nails sticking up in the center, their tips covered in dried clumps of mud.
“Wait, that can’t be right,” he muttered. There was no mud above the hatch—only chicken crap, so mud couldn’t have been on the nails. That meant it was dried shit, scraped off by Tuttle after running his shoes over the sharp points.
Bunker took advantage of the bed of nails to rid his shoes of a sticky layer of feces, then washed them off with a blast of water from the showerhead. He used the broom and dustpan to quickly sweep up the mess he’d made, then walked across the wooden plank posing as a floor. His destination—the other end of the tunnel.
The corrugated steel corridor came to a stop at a two-way junction. His choices were to turn left or right, then take another corridor like the one he was in.
The two connecting tunnels had overhead lights, each appearing to be about twenty yards in length. He figured they took another sharp turn at the far end, but he couldn’t see it from his position.
Bunker returned to the down ladder and craned his neck up. “You gotta get down here and see this.”
Daisy climbed down in seconds, her face smothered with anticipation when she arrived. “What is this place?”
“Some kind of underground bunker. I’m not sure if Tuttle built this himself or not, but it looks to be huge.”
She held out a hand. “Lead the way.”
He pointed to the nails and then the showerhead. “You might want to clean off your shoes first. Close quarters and all.”
Daisy did as he suggested before they ambled to the two-way junction, with Bunker leading the charge. He went left and walked to the far end of the connecting tunnel, where it took a ninety-degree turn to the right as expected.
When Bunker found the end of the next tunnel, he came upon a closed door. But not just any door. This was a sealed hatch, much like what you’d find between compartments on a nuclear submarine.
He grabbed the handle in the middle and spun it until the door released. He pushed it open and went inside, stepping over the lower edge of the bulkhead.
The next section wasn’t round like the tunnels. It was rectangular and spacious, with heavy beams supporting the steel walls and ceiling in two-foot increments—no doubt engineered to support the weight of the dirt outside.
“Holy crap!” Daisy said after she stepped through the hatch and found her way next to Bunker.
“That’s an understatement,” Bunker said, taking in the scene before him. The walls and ceiling might have given off an ugly industrial look, but the rest of the space was better appointed and modern. Well, Frank Tuttle’s version of modern.
Plush, tan-colored carpet covered the floor from wall to wall. In the middle of the room were a pair of leather couches and a love seat. Three La-Z-Boy chairs completed the seating area, along with two floor lamps and a central coffee table, complete with a glass top. The eight-foot-long dining table in the far corner was a nice touch. So was its overhead chandelier and stable of high-back chairs. A stereo system and flat panel TV hugged the wall in front of the couch, providing a prime viewing angle.
There was even a fancy, curved bar in the corner. The mirrored wall behind it held a shelf full of booze. Bunker counted at least twenty bottles, mostly whiskey based on their familiar labels.
Rows of glasses hung upside down from a wooden rack, directly above a handful of knickknacks sitting on the bar’s surface. One of them was a miniature statue of a fat man wearing a white apron. Below the figurine was a placard that said, “Frank’s Bar and Grill.”
“Now this is what I call a man cave,” Bunker said, his tone energized. “Cave being the operative word.”
The black and white artwork on the walls failed to match the expensive carpet and modern furnishings. They were military photographs from the 1940s, if Bunker had to guess, each protected in a simple wooden frame.
The action scenes were all different but portrayed the same theme—a beach landing, with troops and equipment storming the sand.
The massive room reminded Bunker of Senator Gray’s game room in Laguna Beach, California. He’d only been to the career politician’s house on Rivera Drive once with his boss, Connor Watts, but it was a memorable visit. If Bunker remembered correctly, the Senator purchased the mansion for sixty million and wasn’t shy about sharing that fact with just about everyone he met.
Bunker spent most of that night standing watch outside of the home, while Watts and Gray drank copious a
mounts of alcohol and smoked Cuban cigars in celebration of their newfound alliance. When the two-man party was over, Bunker hauled his boss back to their clubhouse to sleep off a wicked hangover.
Tuttle’s country version of the Senator’s room was almost as nice, if Bunker chose to ignore the bland steel construction. Oh, and the black and white artwork. Senator Gray preferred Picassos.
Bunker and Daisy continued forward, passing the seating area before opening the hatch on the opposing wall. They went through another tunnel that took them to the sleeping quarters.
This section was round and made of corrugated steel like the connecting tunnels, only triple the diameter. Its layout was much more efficient than the living room, with three sets of bunk beds lining the walls on both sides.
Daisy hesitated for a second, pointing at each bunk bed in rapid succession. “This sleeps, what? Eighteen?”
“Tuttle must have been expecting company.”
She fiddled with the mattress on the upper bunk closest to her. “The kids are gonna love this.”
Just past the third set of beds was a shower, tub, and dual toilets. None of them had privacy walls or curtains.
Bunker pointed at the first toilet. “Yeah, but I’m not so sure about this. I don’t know about you, but certain things need to be done in private.”
“I won’t argue with you there.”
The next compartment was the kitchen. It wasn’t nearly as spacious as the main room, but featured top-of-the-line Viking appliances and a matching full-sized, built-in double-door fridge—all of them Cobalt Blue.
“I don’t know who designed this place,” Daisy said, “but I would’ve added in more counter space and storage. Feeding eighteen people won’t be easy.”
Bunker pointed at the intersecting point of two of the floorboards. “Looks like storage is underneath.”
Daisy bent down and put the tip of her finger inside a plastic recess taking the place of one of the corners. She pried the floorboard up, revealing a two-foot-wide storage space underneath.
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