"I hope she has good news," Martin Cannell said. "I'm getting tired of waiting around."
"Shut up, all of you!" Amanda barked when the others crowded around her like eager children. "We've got new orders."
"What are they?" one woman named Marsha asked warily.
"We're going to steal what's left of the nuclear warhead we wrecked," Amanda said sternly.
There was a long moment of breathless silence in the farmhouse.
"Isn't that kinda... risky, Amanda?" Ethel asked.
"It's got to be done. And we've got to move fast. The Air Force could move the warhead to another location at any time. I want half of you to come with me, and the other half will stay here until I call. Volunteers step forward!"
There was another uncomfortable silence.
"I said, volunteers step forward, damn it!"
But no one stepped forward.
"All right, what's wrong?" Amanda demanded of the fidgeting group.
"Ummm. Some of us feel bad about the people who got killed last time," Ethel Sump said slowly.
Amanda frowned. "I feel bad, too."
"Yeah, but you did some of the killing yourself," someone muttered. "And you got one of us by accident."
"That's right," Ethel said. "And you shot that nice officer. He didn't do anything. And he was handsome, too."
"I had no choice, you know. Our glorious work must go on. Or have you all forgotten what this is all about? We're trying to save the world from itself. If a few people have to die, that's a small price to pay to keep all the military idiots from blowing the whole freaking world up."
The others looked at one another sheepishly. No one looked directly at their blonde leader.
"Now I need six people," Amanda said, placing a hand on the automatic clipped to her Sam Browne belt.
"Okay, I'll go," Ethel said. "But no more killing."
"Me, too."
"Count me in."
"Good," Amanda said, relieved that a full-scale mutiny had been avoided and she wouldn't have to shoot anyone as an example. Shooting people didn't seem to solve problems as much as she expected it would. Sometimes it even made things worse.
Giving that realization more thought, she ordered the group to load weapons and equipment into the FOES van.
* * *
Thad Screiber had chased Unidentified Flying Objects across 47 of the 50 states in his time and had never experienced a close encounter of any kind. Yet he had grossed $25,000 last year alone.
Thad was a writer, and a specialist in UFOs. He had never seen one, didn't care to ever see one, and if the truth were ever to be known, he did not even believe in them. But he made his living interviewing people who said they saw flying saucers, so he took the subject seriously when he was in the field.
The field this time was Oklahoma, where a flurry of wire service copy about motorists sighting strange objects in the sky brought him running. But in two days he had not been able to locate any one of these people. That was bad. Without interviews, he couldn't write articles for any of the various magazines that published his work under his various pen names. It didn't matter who he interviewed, so long as that person could be quoted as having seen something. Thad Screiber was not paid to judge the reliability of those he interviewed.
Instead, frustrated, he drove his Firebird along the highways south of Oklahoma City. He had just decided to return home when he pulled into a roadside gas station.
"Ten bucks, regular," Thad instructed the attendant, and turned on his pocket tape recorder just in case. "Lot of people claiming to see some strange sights around this area, I hear," Thad remarked casually.
"Could be," the attendant said absently, running the hose to the car. "But I ain't one of 'em."
"No? To hear some people tell it, the air is thick with flying saucers here."
"Well, about the only funny thing I've seen lately was one of those jazzed-up vans come barreling down the road not twenty minutes back. Come to think of it, it had flyin' saucers and such stuff painted on the sides."
"That so?" asked Thad, who decided that "Mystery Van Linked to Oklahoma UFO Sightings" might make an article. "Could you describe it?"
"Well... it was brown, had one of them bubble tops, lots of doodads and the like. Goin' pretty darn fast, too."
"That's interesting," Thad said as he tendered a $10 bill. "What's your name?"
"Bill."
"Okay, Bill. Thanks a lot."
Thad drove off, dictating into the recorder: "While no one knows the true motives of the mystery van, a gas company official who fearfully declined to give his full name, described the vehicle as brown and covered with cryptic designs. More importantly, his description mysteriously lacked any references to wheels or the driver of this 'van,' which he claimed, in awestruck tones, was traveling unusually fast. Was this phantom really an earthly van, or could it have been a drone scouting craft disguised to resemble..."
A roadblock interrupted his narrative. Thad had only to see the sawhorses and military vehicles and uniforms down the road before he hung a U-turn and went back the way he came. A detour brought him west of the roadblock, where trees were thick.
Something tall and metallic glittered beyond those trees and, his curiosity aroused, Thad pulled over, dug out his high-powered binoculars, and clambered to the roof of his car.
What he saw through those binoculars made him forget about Unidentified Flying Objects.
Thad Screiber saw the sun reflecting off a giant crane, which held up what was left of a Titan II missile, while a team of men attempted to maneuver the burnt weapon into one end of a giant canister. The canister was part of an eight-wheeled truck, and Thad recognized it as the kind of truck they used to ferry rockets to launching pads for NASA. Except that this missile was being secretly handled in an Oklahoma wheat field and was shattered beyond repair. Whatever had happened here, Thad knew, the world should know about.
?Chapter Eleven
"It's awful big," Martin Cannell said for the seventh or eighth time.
"It's bigger than big," Ethel Sump breathed. "It's humongous!"
"Shut up, both of you! I'm thinking."
"Well, I hope you can think of a way to steal that missile without anyone being killed," Martin said ruefully. "Especially us. The tires on that missile-carrying thing are about as big as our whole van, Amanda."
For hours, they had watched the missile-loading operation from a safe distance. They had known something was happening at the SAC base when they were turned away from a military roadblock, so they turned back, stashed the van in a clump of foliage, and infiltrated the cordoned-off area on foot. It had not been difficult because the government had simply blocked all approach routes to the base to discourage traffic. They hadn't expected foot traffic in such a sparsely populated area.
Amanda had felt good about that, but now she was nervous, contemplating the task of commandeering something the size of a missile-carrier. But now, with the missile loaded and the carrier getting ready to trundle its cargo onto the highway, she was at a total loss for an idea that might work. The truck's diesel engine sounded like faraway thunder.