Harold Vance’s booming bluster died in his throat with a wet, spastic gurgle:
*gasp.*
His eyes went wide, bloodshot, fixed upon the four silver stars gleaming on David’s collar. His gold pen slipped from his fingers, tumbling into the crushed marigolds at his feet:
*tink.*
“Ad… Admiral Mercer…?” Harold stammered, his face draining of every drop of color until he looked like an un-painted funeral bust:
“Why… why is the Chief of Naval Operations standing on my neighbor’s back porch over a property line dispute?!”
“Because this is not a property line dispute, Harold,” Admiral David Mercer answered.
His voice was sixty decibels of mountain quarry explosive, reverberating through the suburban cul-de-sac like naval artillery:
“And you are not standing on a residential subdivision.”
CHAPTER 3: THE SECRET BENEATH THE MARIGOLDS
Admiral Mercer walked down the porch steps.
His hand-welted naval leather bridge boots made a clean, concussive *tack… tack… tack* against the brick walkway.
He stopped at the edge of the crushed flower bed, right where Bradley’s Ducati tire had excavated an eight-inch furrow through the loam:
“Eighty years ago, in nineteen-forty-four,” Admiral Mercer spoke, every syllable dropping like an eighty-pound iron anvil into thirty fathoms of dark water:
“Our father—**Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior**—was commissioned by the Department of the Navy and the United States Army Corps of Engineers to bore forty miles of subterranean pre-Cambrian crystalline schist through the Cape Fear River basin.”
Harold backed up two paces, his heels catching the edge of his torn Cadillac bumper.
“He built **Conduit Ten**,” David continued:
“An underground, electromagnetic-shielded, pressurized hydraulic pneumatic command-and-retaliatory artery running eighty feet beneath the foundations of this neighborhood, connecting the naval communications redoubts at Norfolk straight into the nuclear crypts beneath the Supreme Court of the United States.”
“Inside that conduit were placed forty-eight titanium transit cylinders containing the physical, analog mechanical targeting release matrices and cryptographic launch ciphers for our nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent.”
David pointed his hand straight down at the ruined marigolds:
“My sister Eleanor’s flower bed was not a decorative garden, Harold.”
“It was the primary overland surface access point for **Valve Station Ten**.”
“The emergency hydraulic ventilation manifold and analog cryptographic staging terminal for the entire southeastern defense sector.”
“Under the original nineteen-forty-four charter, Arthur Mercer Senior disguised the access shaft beneath four feet of topsoil and planted red and yellow perennials to mark the subterranean perimeter of the titanium blast hatch.”
