The twenty-two children sat frozen, their eyes darting from their teacher to the federal prosecutor standing over her desk.
Cooper leaned across the lectern, his flint-gray eyes boring directly into Ms.
Harrow’s soul:
“Eighty years ago, in nineteen-forty-four, Clara’s great-grandfather—**Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior**—was commissioned by the Department of the Navy under Title 50 War Powers to bore forty miles of subterranean pre-Cambrian crystalline schist beneath North America.”
“He built **Conduit Ten**.”
“The classified, electromagnetic-shielded, pressurized analog command artery running eighty feet beneath this continent, connecting the naval communications redoubts at Camp Pendleton and Great Lakes straight into the nuclear retaliatory 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 for our nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent.”
“No digital hack could touch them.”
“No foreign satellite could override them.”
