The digital countdown above the cellar bulkhead read: 23:59:14 EST.
Forty-six seconds remaining until midnight.
Admiral David Mercer looked at Captain Garrett Stone and me:
“The deadline closes in forty-six seconds, Chancellor Mercer,” Uncle David said softly:
“Let us go secure the bedrock.”
23:59:30 EST.
Beneath the brick pumphouse of Slip Ten, accessible through a concealed, circular hydraulic titanium airlock located eighty feet beneath the foundation, lay the master western surface intake of Conduit Ten: Valve Station Ten // Calumet River Command Aperture.
The chamber was circular, forty feet in diameter, constructed of pre-Cambrian crystalline schist blocks reinforced with hand-poured naval titanium plating. It smelled of ozone, eighty-year-old cedar preservation oil, and the dry, pure chill of an un-violated mountain redoubt.
Down the center of the chamber, illuminated by the continuous amber glow of independent tritium emergency lamps, sat forty-eight massive titanium transit cylinders bolted to the bedrock.
Inside each cylinder, sealed in pressurized nitrogen, rested the mechanical, analog brass code-drums and mechanical target-release ciphers for the nuclear deterrent of the United States.
