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Flipping another set of switches, Kurt activated a sonar syste kicked the san to sink, spooling out a cable behind it and bouncing mid-frequency sound waves off the bottom of the lake A pattern soon appeared on the display screen

As Kurt e of the pit, the bottom dropped away sharply The pit was a ated V, with a wide, flat bottom

“Six-forty and dropping,” he said to hie “Let’s see how deep you are”

The top of the riinal bottom, but the water level was at least a hundred feet below the riun to fill in the pit He noticed a leveling at eight hundred and fifty It was hard to fatho on a lake so deep that a World War Two submarine would be crushed if it went more than halfway down, but there he was

At roughly the center of the lake, the sonar picked up a do like a sleek water tower, rising above the cornfields of the Midwest, bulbous at the top, with a group of pipes descending froht bunch As far as Kurt could tell, they went right down into the center of the lake bed

He wondered what he was looking at What was its purpose?

Bradshaw had used the teres of a nuclear warhead of soe, one didn’t need to build a giant toith a sixty-foot dome on top to unleash atomic fury

The doet ca, artistic lines of the dome It lookedcontainers stacked on top of one another Fro It appeared to be anchored to the steeper wall of the lake and connected to the doantries and thick cables An inter it to the wall

The roof of this structure sat near a depth of two hundred and fifty feet, the bottom checked in below three hundred and twenty The dome loomed above it and off to one side

Kurt was grudgingly i a structure like this at a depth of three hundred feet was quite a task to begin with To do it in a toxic lake, in secret… He was ly impressed

He took his hand off the throttle, and the a coasted to a halt near the center of the lake Kurt got out of his seat and climbed onto the flatbed behind him

He was directly over the et down there

Joe spent a fewto patch his of the first-aid kit Despite the effort, Bradshaw looked bad, ghostly pale, with skin that was cool to the touch He needed real attention and he needed it soon

Joe left Bradshaw and began to rurabbed a handheld radio and turned it on The LED, which should have lit up nice and green, remained dark Joe fiddled with the poitch a few ti: no squelch, no static The battery was dead

Looking for a charger, Joe noticed that the keys were still in the SUV’s ignition He also noticed that both doors were open and yet the do any kind of annoying ping