Chapter 2

Two days latter a much cleaner looking John posed for television camera’s as he received a check that was physically the size of the fish that got away. The check was only a token for the camera’s. He wasn’t about to really get the whole amount in one lump sum. If he had, the IRS would have gotten most of it anyway.

The bank had actually set him up with a very good tax attorney team. He had spent most that day with them and expected to spend several more.

The first action of the second bank manager was to phone the State lottery commission in question and let them know he had a prospective winner. He faxed a copy of the ticket to them for preliminary evaluation. Once the ticket was verified as probably legitimate, the bank had advanced him five thousand dollars in travelers checks and flash processed a gold credit card with a fifteen thousand dollar limit.

After locking up the ticket for the night in a safety deposit box, the bank manager had personally escorted him to the nicest hotel in town. A few of the cops rode along side, just in case ... two actually escorted him onto the plane (courtesy of the bank).

The bottom line worked out to a lump sum —after taxes— of $287,353.42, with a like amount to be paid each year, for basically the rest of his life.

The lawyers set up a trust account for his long lost child that suddenly “missed him dearly” and a $28,000 lump cash settlement for his ex-wife (who fired her lawyer because he had convinced her that John would “never amount to much” and that it wasn’t worth haggling over the dollar-a-year alimony that John was opposed to when they got divorced.)

Johns ex-wife was suddenly in love with him all over again. He told her and her fickle fledgling to fuck off, that he never wanted to see either of them again.

He bought the requisite sports car and new clothes.

At what had been his local watering hole he bought the house a round ... most all night long. Several of the women who wouldn’t have given him a second glance before, became seriously infatuated with him. He alternated nights at his old rental between the two cutest of them for about a week before they started hinting that he ought to move up in the world (and take them with him).

This reminded John of the missile silo. Two days later he was looking at it -without the gold diggers-. A week later it was his.

John was pretty well ready for a break from the world when he purchased the Silo.

From the time he entered the work force, he had quickly worked his way up through the ranks in the electronics world. Starting off repairing amplifiers and receivers. As a technician he worked his way up through various jobs until he topped out as a prototype technician in a microwave lab. He was hired contingent against a large government contract for a NATO base, which the company wasn’t granted. Fifteen minutes after this was known, he was on the street unemployed. There was no place else for him to go in his home town. Refusing to take a down in his career, and the emotional crisis of his divorce still fresh within him, he headed for the mythical Mecca of Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley; The land of the Pro’s. A magical feeling in the very air of the place, millionaires springing up like weeds around garage companies...

John spent months parked in his uncle’s driveway, sleeping in his old V.W. buss. Living off his last unemployment checks from his home state while he went from company to company leaving résumés.

Nobody wanted to hire him, as he had no local experience. Finally he accepted a position as an entry level technician in a calibration lab of a defense contractor, as his funds were virtually exhausted.

John had expected his climb in Silicon Valley to be a hard one. This was the land of the Pro’s. Much to his surprise and delight, his previous broad experience made him one of the best technicians in the valley.

Within six months he was promoted to Sr. Technician. Eighteen months later he was in an engineering aide slot. A year later he held the title of acting engineer. He wasn’t just good at his job, he was the best. As an engineer he quickly took on and acquired new talents that the then burgeoning Defense electronics industry was hungry for. Within half a decade, he was a full systems engineer specializing in automated instrumentation. His seemingly lofty title: Metrology Engineer. (Metrology being the science of measurement.) A shift to another growing company netted him the title of Sr. Metrologist.

Then in the late ‘80’s Détente arrived. Defense spending plummeted and the market was flooded with unemployed engineers. Non-degreed engineers were among the first to go. Especially if they took their positions seriously enough that they talked about recalling product because an out-of-tolerance was discovered in a company standard. John was a very ethical man. Which made him a natural target.

Starting his own, one man consulting firm, John subsisted on meager earnings from consulting contracts which were quickly diminishing. He skinned his nose real good pulling up from the resultant dive in his finances.

John finally had to give up his company and accept a position as a field sales engineer. Which barely paid him enough to survive, not in Silicon Valley, with its inflated real estate, but back in his home town. He spent almost eleven months of the year on the road. His vast experience in automated instrumentation making sale after sale possible. But he didn’t get the commissions. He designed the systems based upon the customers needs, then the real sales force would waltz in and present the companies with a completed solution to their needs. They got the commissions.

It wasn’t what you really were, but rather what you appeared to be that mattered the most. Despite twenty years of experience, John had no degree, so he couldn’t possibly be qualified for the positions he actually held. John’s dissolution with the world continued to grow. What he wanted most, was a comfortable hole to crawl into and pull the cover over it. The lottery provided him with the means to fulfill this wish. The silo was the perfect vehicle for his desire.

Working on it supplied him with the solitude he desired. He threw himself into the work for the sake of it, building his retreat from the world.

The firm John purchased the Silo from, had also been taken by the size of it. They had picked it up at auction for a mere $17,000. They had visions of building a retreat hotel in it, until the cost of conversion and the realization that few people wanted to “get away from it all” into a hole in the dessert sobered them to the fact that they were out $17,000.

One of the more sobering facts, was that the concrete used on the silo walls was among the hardest man made rock substance on earth. The cost of drilling the walls to hang umpteen floors was way out of their budget. They didn’t bother to mention this to John, but he noticed anyway before the deal was closed.

The $562,000 the owners were asking diminished fast. The land was in the middle of the desert, surrounded by BLM land. The only access was across 32 miles of bad dirt road. He made the purchase outright for $47,000 cash.

Three concrete cutting firms made estimates he quickly rejected. He purchased several diamond drill bits and the equipment to run them himself. Next he called around the country till he found the cheapest load of steel I -beams that he could find. More calls located a used winch motor used for Jig Pole radio tower installations.

The first project was mounting the winch motor to the concrete pad on the surface.

The Silo was one hundred seventy feet deep by forty-five feet in diameter. It was located roughly dead center of a fifty acre plot, which was fully enclosed with a razor wire topped fence with impressive looking signs about the use of deadly force on intruders. John left the signs up. The gate got a digital controlled garage door mechanism.

There was another shaft descending parallel to the Silo, but off to the side for the main elevator. This descended to the a group of rooms that were probably the launch facility. Between the elevator and silo, a set of cement stairs zigzagged downwards.

A small cement boxed stairway ran down from the surface to a heavy single door hatchway which opened into a large hallway staging area. This hallway led some thirty five feet away from the silo and then doubled back. to a smaller staging area. A communications room with a small bathroom, an environmental control room and an elevator shaft led off this area. Then a small hatchway led to a narrow hallway which circumnavigated the top of the silo. There was a main transformer room off the environmental control room. Here the three phase power lines terminated in a bank of three large transformers. These fed a series of main panels that fed out to sub panels throughout the silo. There was also a switch over panel to interface with a diesel standby generator.

John found maintenance stops on the main elevator which opened into small box rooms at half a dozen points on the way down. Each room had hatchways opening into inspection tunnels like the one on the top level and a small terminal and utility room which each contained a sub-main power panel. A large heavy, tapered hatch opened into the silo from each of these stops. From these one could access the four small service elevators which hugged the walls. Each little more than cages on a track. John fancied these up a bit to make them safer and more convenient. There were also hatchways at mid-points between the maintenance stops, accessible from the stairs.

The Silo came complete with an ISDN phone trunk line 132 pairs of high quality phone lines- and an underground power feed which was source metered, as it was the only customer on the line. He negotiated activation of power and a portion of the trunk line for phone service and Internet access. The power company was particularly thrilled as the line was just wasting away. A small satellite dish supplied him with entertainment when he got bored.

A standby diesel generator purchased from a used construction equipment firm rounded out his basic necessities.

One of the first problems John encountered, was that the original construction plans were “CLASSIFIED, SECRET, NOT AVAILABLE”. After repair and activation of the elevators John spent most of a whole month just surveying exactly what was, and wasn’t there.

The firm he had purchased from had done considerable damage to wiring and environmental equipment by ripping it out for salvage. He replaced what he needed to, to get power and heat into a small apartment which had probably been the launch control facility (based upon the amount of wiring and the size of the door.).

He bought every appliance known to man for his apartment in the meantime. His computer would have spun circles around many of the main frame models of just a generation earlier. He used it to design his hideaway and track the burn rate on his money. After a few months he realized the burn rate was way too fast. A final purchase of a Hot tub, washer, dryer, freezer, refrigerator and range finished up his major expenses for a while, with the exception of an old flatbed truck he had refurbished to safe running condition.