Chapter 9

We returned to our room after breakfast to find a note from Sheila pinned to our door. She was reminding us to join her on the front deck for an introductory tour of the colony and the surrounding area. The instructions also suggested that we dress for the weather.

Our walk-in closets looked like walk-in dumpsters. Everything we had brought with us in the Rav4 had been piled in the storage spaces like an unorganized jigsaw puzzle. I busied myself picking out an appropriate wardrobe for our tour.

I selected my favorite Indiana Jones style hat; a dark-brown, fur-felt fedora which had cost a small fortune. I bought it online a few years ago in the mistaken belief it made me look like Harrison Ford. Fedoras are some of the most practical headgear known to man. The wide brim keeps the sun out of your eyes and sheds rainwater like a mini-umbrella.

I customized the hat with the addition of an eagle’s feather I had acquired at a yard sale. It counted as contraband since I didn’t belong to a federally recognized tribe. Non-native people are prohibited by law from possessing eagle plumage and could be fined as much as a hundred thousand dollars and sent to prison for up to a year.

Deciding to take the risk for the sake of fashion, I stuck the feather into the hatband, which was adorned with a small enamel replica of the red-yellow-green Vietnam service ribbon that I had earned when I finished my tour in Vietnam. Considering the remote location of our mountain hideaway, it was unlikely we would run into any federal feather police. I preened in front of the full-length mirror, wearing nothing except for my hat, a beaded necklace with the same ribbon colors, and a smile.

The handmade necklace was a work of art created by Paul Lavoie, a fellow Vietnam Veteran who’d succumbed to the effects of Agent Orange. I never met the man, but after he died, his sister gave me the necklace under the conditions that I wear it in his memory and never take it off. I honor the man and his legacy by mentioning his name and story whenever someone asks me about the necklace.

“You’re so vain that you probably think this song is about you...” Darlene sang in a perfect imitation of Carly Simon as she gave me a warm hug. “Wow, the cowboy hat makes you look sexy.”

“It’s not a cowboy hat, it’s a fedora,” I replied with a grin.

“Well, it’s a very sexy fedora,” Darlene whispered into my ear as she pressed her nude body against my backside.

Her hands reached around me and began to fondle my semi-flaccid equipment. The incredibly sensual feeling of her slender fingers delicately caressing the length of my shaft almost drove me out of my mind.

“I’m horny. Want to fool around?” Darlene asked.

“We’re meeting Sheila in ten minutes; we don’t have the time,” I answered.

“Ten minutes? Isn’t that nine more than you usually last?” Darlene teased.

I turned to face Darlene, dropped to my knees, and was eye level with her sex. I positioned both legs in a wide stance and glanced at my wristwatch. Using my fingers, I gently opened the cleft of the mons pubis to reveal a pink clitoral hood. Beads of lubricant and a reddish glow around her vagina testified to Darlene’s advanced state of arousal. She let out a little gasp and shifted her feet to maintain balance when I ran my tongue over the hood’s length and licked the swollen clitoris beneath it.

I blew a cooling stream of air on the clit before placing my mouth over her genitals and exhaled a hot breath. The contrasting sensations were like fire and ice. I followed each sequence by giving the little man in the boat a rough tongue bath.

Darlene’s legs began to quiver and tremble. She grabbed the back of my head to help steady herself and to maintain balance and pressed my face into her sex. Lick, blow, and suck, I increased the pace of my stimulation and was rewarded by a series of pants and grunts as Darlene’s level of arousal increased. I slid my finger into my lover’s vagina and stroked the rough G-spot with enthusiasm to speed her ascent as she climbed the mountain.

“Oh my God, I’m cumming,” she cried, as waves of contractions squeezed around my finger.

She suddenly lost all control and my mouth filled with liquid as she squirted and urinated. She pushed my face away with her hands. I loved the sight of her contractions as Darlene’s clit pulsed in climax and streams of liquid trickled down the inside of her legs.

I looked at my watch again and announced, “One minute, thirty seconds. I think that we have a new land speed record. Now we’ve got to hustle if we’re going to be on time.”

Darlene stood naked before me and tilted her head. With a woe-is-me face, she asked, “What about my afterglow?”

“Take it with you,” I said, patting her bare behind.

Sheila was waiting for us with a warm smile when we arrived on the cabin’s front deck more or less on time. I returned her smile as handed her a pack of hand-rolled cigarettes and a red Bic lighter. The shadows still held a hint of last night’s frost despite clear blue skies and bright sunshine.

“Follow me,” Sheila said as we set out on our tour of the Colony.

Our first stop was a utility building built into the base of the mountain with only the outer garage doors visible.

“This structure is designed to minimize the colony’s visual footprint. We don’t want to draw undue attention to our presence because of Google Earth and the plethora of available satellite imagery. Our continued survival is dependent upon us keeping low visibility, and we do our best to be invisible to the outside world,” Sheila said, as she opened a set of outer doors to reveal a long dark tunnel blasted into the mountain’s bedrock.

When Sheila entered the darkened corridor, motion sensors activated banks of overhead LED lighting which in turn illuminated the passageway for as far as the eye could see.

“Holy crap! You guys build this?” My words echoed off the walls.

The tunnel was a twenty-by-twenty-foot wide box ramping downward into the mountain’s interior. The rough-hewn rock walls glistened with seepage and condensation. Drainage ditches lining each side of the corridor’s crushed gravel roadway carried the excess water into the depths.

“The Liberty Mountain Mine was one of the several thousand hard-rock gold mines dotting the Rocky Mountains back in the 1860s. The claim, like many, never much amounted to anything. It went bust after three years. We took the existing mining shafts and adapted them to accommodate our vehicle fleet,” Sheila explained.

The temperature gradually rose as we descended. About five minutes later we found ourselves in a large cavern containing a full-service automotive center, complete with a dozen vehicles of various descriptions. I spotted several snowmobiles, Jeep Cherokees, trucks of various makes and years, and ATVs, along with a few front-end loaders and small Bobcats. I saw our Toyota Rav4 parked off to one side.

“Several sisters are excellent mechanics and skilled operators. They do a fantastic job keeping our fleet up and running,” Sheila said as she led us to a tunnel at the back of the cavern.

We followed the lighted passageway for a few thousand feet into another expansive cavern so large that the roof and far walls were lost in darkness. The hot and humid air in the grotto hummed with energy; the distinct whine of three-megawatt steam-driven turbines filled the chamber with the low rumbling hum of power.

I was slack-jawed in disbelief. It looked like a scene out of the science fiction movie Journey to the Center of the Earth. Piping and heavy machinery at the middle of the cave surrounded a huge complex of hot springs and heated pools of water on three sides. A single story control center occupied space on the side of the pond nearest to where we stood.

Looked like waterfalls frozen in time, Flowstone oozed down the walls of the cavern behind us. Stalactites reached down from the darkened ceiling, and thousands of stalagmites grew from the floor, some as massive as trees. We followed a well-worn path through the stone forest while batteries of strategically placed LED streetlights bathed the area around the lagoon in a glow of whitish-blue illumination. I noticed that motion detectors kicked the lights nearest us into high power when we came into the range of a lamp; it was like walking beneath a searchlight’s moving beam.

“Let’s stop by and say hello to the technicians on duty. We’ll have a cup of coffee and some conversation. I’ll tell you more about this amazing place.” Sheila pointed to a two-story building about the size of a raised ranch and motioned for us to follow her. She climbed the exterior stairway and entered the building without knocking.

“Surprise!”

“No way, Sister. We’ve been watching you three on camera for the last twenty minutes,” said a thirty-something brunette as she gave Sheila a warm hug.

The slender technician was dressed in a loose-fitting one-piece coverall. The zipper of the hunter green outfit was pulled down to her navel, and it was clear at a glance that she wore nothing under her outer garments. I recognized the woman as one of the sisters from last night’s meeting.

Thanks to air-conditioning, the interior of the control center was ten or fifteen degrees cooler than the cavern’s tropical humidity. Wraparound observation windows provided three hundred and sixty-degree field-of-view.

A control panel filled with switches and dials below the window monitored the performance of the turbines and generators. Several large screens displayed different views of the underground labyrinth of caverns and passageways. Images of various views of the area around within the cabin dominated one bank of displays. Big Sister was watching. Security cameras doth make saints of us all.

Sheila said a quick hello to the two women on duty before leading us to a large conference table on the Center’s first floor. Three K-cups worth of hot steaming coffee awaited our pleasure.

“What is this place?” I took a sip of coffee.

“It’s incredible, whatever it is. Never seen anything like it. 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 as I shook my head in disbelief.

“It wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. More like an engineering nightmare. We hired a Swiss engineering firm to design and construct the entire system. Everything and everyone needed to build this facility were brought in by their heavy-lift air service. When they finally finished, we gave them a ten percent bonus to forget we ever existed. Lucky for us, their banking secrecy laws encourage financially induced amnesia,” Sheila laughed.

“This facility,” Sheila 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. We tried in vain to interdict the flow of enemy supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The Seventh 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 smelling it. It didn’t do much good. Charlie had more gas in his gut than we had aircraft and bombs. Still, we wired the trail like a pinball machine and played it every day.

“Our sensors are solar powered and have a ninety-nine percent uptime. Yesterday, we picked you up on surveillance when you were still ten miles out. Our response teams didn’t go on high alert since we expected your arrival. On ready-alert maybe, but they didn’t deploy to prevent your entry into the valley,” Sheila said, as she pointed out the greasepaint 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,” Sheila said.