“Clara Whitaker’s maiden name is not Clara Miller, Judge Hanley,” Colonel Carter revealed, every syllable falling like an eighty-ton iron depth-charge into fifty fathoms of dark water:
“Her name is **Clara Eleanor Bennett**.”
“She is the sole surviving lineal granddaughter of **Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Bennett**.”
“The man who surveyed forty miles of subterranean bedrock beneath the City of Omaha in nineteen-forty-four.”
“**Conduit Nine**.”
Carter pointed his gold pen at the vellum deed:
“Conduit Nine is not an auxiliary municipal drainage culvert, Your Honor.”
“It is an eighty-mile, electromagnetic-shielded, pressurized hydraulic pneumatic command artery running seventy feet through the limestone bedrock directly from the command redoubts at Offutt Air Force Base straight into the subterranean missile silos of the Strategic Air Command.”
“Inside that artery are sealed forty-eight titanium transit cylinders containing the physical, analog mechanical targeting release matrices and cryptographic launch ciphers for our nation’s Minuteman Three nuclear deterrent.”
