Chapter 84 Chapter Eighty-Four

Puller drove to Cole's house.He is waiting.A call came two hours later, and another came in after that, and that was what Puller was waiting for.If the military is determined to do something, it will advance it at an astonishing speed, especially when the Minister of Defense personally supervises the formation. Cole sat in the living room staring anxiously at what Puller was doing across the way. Puller answered the phone. The caller was a retired colonel in his late nineties named David Lelymore of Sarasota County, Florida.Puller had his greatest and last hope in him, for the man was an engineer who had served as a military representative overseeing product manufacturing at Drake's secretive facility in the 1960s.According to the Department of Defense, he is, in fact, the only living person of those who worked at Drake.

Lyrimore's voice was a little weak, but steady and composed.At the beginning of the call, Puller found that the other party was very conscious.Puller hopes the man's memory is also unimpaired.He needs to grasp every possible acquisition, even the smallest situation. "It seems that as long as a person wears a uniform, he will never be able to enjoy retirement in full freedom," said Lelymore. "It seems so." "Perhaps you have something to do with God of War Puller?" "He's my dad." "It's a pity I never had the opportunity to serve under him, yet the Army and the country are proud to have him, Investigator Puller."

"Thank you, I'll pass on your message to him." "A two-star major general called me. I've been out of uniform for almost thirty years, and I'm still horrified to get a call from him. He told me to tell you everything. He didn't say why. " "It's complicated. But we really need your help." "Drake? What do you want to know about it?" "Anything you can tell me will be valuable to us." "It's an old scar, boy, at least as far as I can remember." "Can you tell me why?" Puller looked up at Cole.Cole was staring at him so nervously that Pooler worried that she might suddenly have a stroke.He turned on the phone speaker and placed it on the table between the two of them.

Lyrimore's voice echoed in Cole's living room. “I was sent to Drake because the government built a state-of-the-art facility there under the nuclear weapons development program. I had a degree in nuclear engineering and I served at Los Alamos Laboratories, where I was involved in Some work on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. Later in the 1960s, our technology has far surpassed the stage where the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945, but there are still many things we don’t understand about thermonuclear weapons. In Hiroshima The atomic bomb dropped was a gun-type detonation method, which seems to be at the level of a kindergarten today. According to our calculations, the maximum explosive equivalent of an atomic bomb is 700,000 tons of TNT. One of the bomb tsar's hydrogen bombs had a yield of 50 million kilotons, the largest in history. With something like that, you could wipe a country off the map in one fell swoop."

Pooler saw Cole slumped back in his chair, raising a hand to his chest. "I've seen a secret document that said Drake's facility was used to make some of the bomb's components. There might be a certain amount of radioactivity left in there, but that's about it," Puller said. "That's not true. But I'm not at all surprised that the official documents say that. The military doesn't want to let outsiders know what's going on, and they had more leeway at that time to make things up." "So you were building a nuclear-fueled warhead," Pooler said. "Is it implosion?"

"Are you a nuclear major?" "No. But I have a friend who learned that." “We worked with a defense contractor at Drake. The name of that company doesn’t make sense anymore. It was bought by other companies and sold off multiple times.” Puller could feel Lyrimore's mind drifting with memory, but he didn't have more time to listen to that. "You said it was an old scar. Why?" "We went into that area, built that monster, and never told anyone what it was. We brought in all the people we needed from outside and asked them not to deal with the locals as much as possible. When they went to that small town for business , we sent people to watch them. That’s how it was done in those days, people were suspicious, like suffering from paranoia.”

"I don't think it's changed much now," Puller commented. "Is that the only reason it makes you feel uncomfortable like a scar?" "Not only that, but the way we ended up making me uncomfortable." "You mean to leave a building with a concrete dome? A meter-thick wall?" "What nonsense are you talking about?" "You don't know?" "I don't know. All the facilities there should be dismantled and transported away, not a single molecule can be left behind. This must be done, which is determined by their nature."

"They're still in place, at least that's how I see them. Inside a thick concrete dome cover. I don't know how much floor space it takes, but it's a pretty big place." "I really don't understand what they think!" "How come you don't know about this?" Puller asked. "I worked there in stages. Then I moved to a pilot plant in the South. I was a military supervisor, yes, but a lot of things were done by private contractors, and we The generals of China always give the green light to their demands." "Well, apparently they didn't want to dismantle and transport the facility, but cemented it. Why would they do that?"

Lilymore said nothing. "Mr. Lyrimore?" "I'm listening." "I would like you to tell me what happened." "Investigator Puller, I've been out of the Army for a long time, and I was surprised to get a call from them today. I'm on a pretty decent retirement package, and I want to spend my remaining years in the sun here. I don't want to lose it all." "You have nothing to lose. But many Americans will lose their lives if you don't help me." When Lyrimore spoke again, his tone became firm. "Maybe start by talking about why we're closing that place. That's what I meant when I said I didn't like the way it ended."

"How do you say that?" "We failed." "How did it fail? Is there something wrong with the separation of enriched uranium by gaseous diffusion?" "What we're doing is not refining nuclear fuel by gaseous diffusion." "I think that's what we've been talking about, like they did at Paducah." "Have you ever been to that factory in Paducah, boy?" "No." "It's huge. The gas diffusion plant needs to take advantage of the different speeds of different molecules in thermal motion to separate uranium-235. It can't be small. Paducah's plant area is much larger than Drake's."

Puller looked at Cole with puzzled eyes. "So what are you guys doing at Drake?" "test." "What experiment." "Going to test a super nuclear fuel to put in our nuclear warheads. Our aim is to destroy the Soviet Union in one fell swoop, before they destroy us."