“How on earth did you manage to build that?” I pointed out the window to the maze of generators and machinery at the center of the cavern and shook my head in disbelief.
“It wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. It turned out to be an engineering nightmare. We were able to hire a Swiss engineering firm to design and construct the entire system.
“Everything and everyone needed to build this facility were brought in by the heavy-lift air service. When they finally finished, we gave them a 10% bonus to forget we ever existed. Lucky for us their banking secrecy laws encourages financially induced amnesia,” Lisa laughed.
“This facility,” Lisa tapped her finger on the conference table, “Doubles as the control center for our geothermal generating capacity and also serves as a security command center in the event of an intrusion. We’ve wired every conceivable approach to our valley for sight and sound. We have acoustic sensor arrays and remote video cameras to alert us in the event of any intrusion.”
Floor to ceiling maps of the valley and surrounding area covered one wall of the center, and banks of radio equipment filled another wall. I hadn’t seen anything like it since I completed my tour of Vietnam. I had worked in the Out-Country Air Operations command center at MACV back in the day as we tried in vain to interdict the flow of enemy supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail.
The Air Force dropped tens of thousands of seismic and acoustic sensor arrays along the length and breadth of the trail system. The enemy couldn’t fart without us knowing about it. It didn’t do much good. Charlie had more farts in his belly than we had aircraft and bombs. Still, we had wired the trail like a pinball machine and played it every day.
“Our sensors are solar powered and have a 99% uptime. We picked you up on our surveillance system when you were still ten miles out yesterday. Our security teams didn’t go on high alert since we expected your arrival. On ready-alert maybe, but they weren’t deployed to prevent your entry into the valley,” Lisa said, as she pointed out the grease paint marking which indicated our route of travel.
“How often have you had a problem with intruders?” I asked.
“We’ve only had two incidents since we opened the cabin. The first was a troop of lost boy scouts. We intercepted them and redirected them back to civilization. The second time was when two escaped convicts wandered into our valley,” Lisa said.
“How did that turn out?” I asked.
“Not so well for the convicts. They stumbled upon three of our sister’s skinny-dipping in the river and decided to have some fun. They almost beat one girl to death and tried to rape the other,” Lisa said, as her eyes narrowed and her expression became a look of hardened fury.
“The third woman was able to get away and radio security. We got there before they could do much more harm than they had already done,” she said.
I remembered the hullabaloo over the escape of two men from the federal prison facility in Englewood. It eventually died down. No one ever found the escapees, and folks assumed that they had made their way to Mexico.
“What happened to the men?” I asked.
“I executed them and left their bodies for the animals. No trace of them remains,” she said without elaboration. I noticed her hands were shaking as she was talking.
The phrase uttered by Robot B9 from the TV series “Lost in Space” rang like an alarm bell in my brain. ‘Danger Will Robinson, Danger!’ I had an increasingly uneasy feeling. Lisa was a first class security freak, and she was telling me way too much and sharing too much information. If I couldn’t earn her trust, there was no way she would ever allow me to leave this place alive. In her mind, millions of dollars and fifteen years of labor depended upon Liberty Mountain staying off the grid and a secret from the outside world.
She was a competent and capable commander, and the security of her family of sisters was clearly her number one priority. My mission was to figure out a way to become a fully-vetted member of the colony and to earn Lisa’s complete acceptance.
Shit! She just confessed to murdering two men in cold blood. I tried to hide my involuntary shiver. I pulled out my pack of smokes out of my shirt pocket, offered a cigarette to Lisa, and took one for myself.
I felt a surge of sympathy as she smoked in silence. It wasn’t for the dead rapists that I grieved, but for Lisa. Necessity forced her to take two lives to protect the community, and she would carry the memory to the grave. I realized with a shudder that she wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet into me if she thought it necessary to protect the colony. Having a cup of coffee with someone who one day could be your executioner was weird. Weirder still was the fact that I liked and respected her. Memo to self: Don’t piss Lisa off.
“This is one of the secrets of Liberty Mountain. We decided to expand the network of tunnels leftover from the days when this site was a hard rock gold mine after we started to revamp the old cabin. Imagine our surprise when we busted through into this cavern. It’s a geothermal treasure. It took us almost five years to engineer and design this system. Construction was a three-year process which cost us almost $5 million to complete,” Lisa explained.
I looked around in amazement as Lisa spoke and tried to imagine what kind of mind had dreamed all this up. I had the dizzy feeling I had woken up in the middle of someone else’s science fiction novel.
Darlene had told me that Lisa had been a college professor back in the day and she was reverting to form. Her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm as she warmed to her subject.
“We’ve pretty much run the generators nonstop for the last ten years. We keep one generator active and the other in reserve. Every few months we switch them out to perform routine maintenance.
While she talked, Lisa moved from one window to the next as she pointed out the different aspects of the underground complex. Her enthusiasm was catching.
“We produce far more electricity than we need. The excess capacity doesn’t go to waste because we use it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. We use the hydrogen to power fuel cells and as stored potential energy. We’ve gut enough surplus hydrogen we could go into the Zeplin business,” Lisa said with a chuckle.
“Our location is so remote that it’s impractical to import gasoline. That’s why we’ve converted all our vehicles to run on hydrogen. The cabin is steam heated. We keep the fireplaces going for their psychological benefits rather than for heating value. Our relationship with fire is both a primal and tribal thing. There’s something about fire and an open hearth that makes a house a home,” Lisa said, as she tapped the ash off her cigarette into an empty water glass which doubled as an ashtray.
“Let’s take a walk. I’ve got a few things to show you guys,” Lisa motioned for us to follow her as she exited the control room.
I couldn’t help smiling. Lisa was beginning to sound like one of those infomercials on late night television. Just as she gilds the lily with more features than you could possibly imagine, she opens the next chapter with the words, “Wait! There’s more…” or in this case, ‘I’ve got a few things to show you.”
We followed the trail down to a winding passageway leading to another cavern deep under the mountain. After several hundred feet, the corridor emptied into an illuminated grotto. The air in the open space was thick with humidity and the rich scent of growing things. Before us was an expansive underground hydroponic garden, it was roughly the size of a football field.
The garden’s computerized hydroponic system automatically operated with a minimum of human intervention. Row upon row of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, and other vegetables thrived under a full spectrum array of an artificial lighting system. There was a patch reserved for Cannabis production. Forty or fifty dark green marijuana plants added a pungent fragrance to the air.
“Our Colony is nearly 100% self-sufficient in the production of food. We hunt deer and elk and take one or two a week. We also have a herd of 35 or 40 free-range cattle and two-dozen swine, to say nothing of our flocks of free-range chickens. The only foods that we still import are wheat for flour, coffee, and sugar.
We could grow winter wheat in the valley, but the fields would stand out like a neon sign on satellite imagery. Speaking of food, it’s time for lunch,” Lisa said.
The Colony leader led us to an elevator shaft dug out of one side of the hydroponics room instead of following the route we had taken to the cavern. We emerged in the grand kitchen of the main cabin a few minutes later.
Several sisters, a few dressed in aprons and nothing else, were busy fixing the Colony’s midday meal. Lunch consisted of the remainder of last night’s venison stew, freshly baked bread, and a garden salad. The food looked and smelled as delicious as the naked backsides of the kitchen crew.
I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I took a bite of the warm bread. The next ten minutes passed without conversation as we consumed lunch in blissful silence. I tried to process what I had seen on Lisa’s tour of the Colony. What she and her family of sisters had constructed defied description, and was Goddamned close to defying imagination. I wouldn’t have believed such a thing was possible if I wasn’t a witness.
“How did you find this place, and how did this community come to be?” I asked Lisa as I spread a pat of freshly churned butter on a new slice of warm bread.
“My father and I found this place by accident about thirty-five years ago. We were hunting on horseback and came up over a ridge, and we saw this spectacular valley below. The cabin was in ruins, but it was still beautiful. My dad knew these mountains like the back of his hand, but he had no idea this place existed until the day we stumbled on it,” Lisa’s eyes were closed as she shared her memories.
Several of the sisters took seats near us and listened intently to the conversation while the Colony leader told the story of the valley’s discovery.
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