Strangers

well. However, at any hour of the day, a few workers and a guard were usually on duty on the third and lowest floor. When Leland stepped out of the elevator, into the central cavern off which other chambers opened - an arrangement much like that on the second floor - he was pleased to see the basement was deserted tonight. General Alvarado had obeyed Leland's orders and had sent all of his people to their quarters.
        Alvarado probably thought that, by cooperating, he could convince Leland that he and all his people were unquestionably human. But Leland was not naive enough to be taken in by such a ruse. His own parents had been capable of behaving like normal human beings, too - oh, yes, smiles and plenty of sweet-talk, oaths of love and affection - and just when you started to think they actually cared about you and wanted the best for you, they'd suddenly reveal ' themselves for what they really were. They would get out the leather strap or the Ping-Pong paddle in which the old man had drilled holes, and the beatings would be administered in the name of God. Leland Falkirk couldn't be easily deceived by a masquerade of humanity, for at an early age he had learned to look for - in fact, to expect - an inhuman presence below the skin of normality.
        Crossing the main cavern to the massive steel blast door that sealed off the munitions room, Leland looked nervously left and right and up into the darkness between the lights. One of his punishments, as a child, had been long imprisonments in a windowless coal cellar.
        Leland pressed his left hand to the glass panel beside the door, which rolled open. Banks of lights flickered on automatically down the length of a room piled twenty feet high with anchored crates and drums and racks that contained live ammunition, mortar shells, grenades, mines, and other instruments of destruction.
        At the end of the long chamber was a twenty-foot-square vault that also required a palm ID to be opened. The weapons within were of such deadly magnitude that only eight people out of the hundreds in Thunder Hill were authorized to enter, and no one of them alone could open the vault. The system required three of the eight to apply their palms to the glass panel, one after another, within one minute, before access would be granted. But this also was overseen by VIGILANT, and the computer's new program, designed by Leland, made him the sole keeper of the Depository's tactical nuclear arsenal. He put his palm to the cool glass, and fifteen seconds later the many-layered, steel MacGruder vault door swung slowly open with a hum of electric motors.
        To the right of the vault door, twenty backpack nukes hung on wall pegs, missing only their primary detonators and their binary packages of explosive material. The detonators were stored in drawers along the back wall. To the left of the door, in lead-lined cabinets, the binary packages lay waiting for Armageddon.
        DERO training included familiarization with a variety of nuclear devices that terrorists might conceivably plant in American cities, so Leland knew how to assemble, arm, and disarm The Bomb in virtually all of its design permutations. He got the components from the cabinets, took two backpack-bomb frames down from the wall pegs, and put together both weapons in only eight minutes, glancing nervously at the door as he worked. He breathed easier only when he had set the timers on both detonators for fifteen minutes and had started the clocks.
        He slung his submachine gun over his shoulder, slipped each arm into the straps of a backpack nuke. Each device weighed sixty-nine pounds. He heaved both off the floor and lurched out of the vault, bent like a hunchback and grunting under that apocalyptic weight.
        Another man might have had to stop two or three times during the journey back through the immense munitions room. Any other man might have been forced to pause, put the bombs down, catch his breath, and stretch his muscles before going on. But not Leland Falkirk. That dead weight wrenched his back and pulled at his shoulders and made his arms ache, but he grew happier as the pain intensified.
        In the main cavern into which the elevators opened, he put one of the backpack nukes on the center of the floor. He looked around at the solid rock walls and up at the granite ceiling with a feeling of satisfaction. If there were any faults at all in the rock strata - and surely there