The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“Under the circumstances, Mr. Lammelle, answering whatever questions you have for me seems to be the obvious best option of those pointed out to me by our mutual friend Svetlana.”

“Can you make it to the elevator?” Lammelle asked, pointing to it.

Sirinov nodded.

“Do you want to go with them, Colonel?” Castillo asked Sweaty.

“Of course,” she said.

“Stick with them, Lester,” Castillo ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

There came the sound of a diesel engine starting, and a moment later Uncle Remus drove the forklift down the ramp.

“With your permission, Colonel?” Master Sergeant Dennis said, and when Castillo nodded, walked up the ramp into the Tu-934A.

[FOUR]

With great skill—and very carefully—Uncle Remus lowered one of the blue beer barrels onto a layer of insulated blankets in the bottom of a pit dug in the floor of the cave.

When Master Sergeant Dennis unfastened the web straps around the barrel and gave Uncle Remus the “up” signal, Uncle Remus raised the arms of the forklift, and then backed away from the pit.

Then he stood up and took a bow.

“What would we do without you?” Castillo asked.

“I shudder at the thought,” Uncle Remus said, and then turned to Master Sergeant Dennis. “What do you want me to do, Sergeant? Get another barrel, or help you load the helium on top of this one?”

Dennis thought it over before replying.

“It would be better if we got all the barrels in the ground first,” he said. “And then put the helium packages, the bags, on top. If one of the bags got ripped, and the helium contacted the arms of the forklift, they would shatter. Helium makes a witch’s teat look like the sun.”

“You got it, Sarge,” Uncle Remus said, and steered the forklift back to the ramp of the Tu-934A.

[FIVE]

“What we did in the lab, Colonel,” Master Sergeant Dennis explained in the dining room of the house, after taking a swallow from a bottle of Dos Equis beer, “that killed that shit, was to expose it to the helium—at minus two-seventy Celsius for fifteen minutes.”

“And that killed it?” Castillo asked.

“Dead as a fucking doornail, Colonel,” Dennis confirmed, then drained his bottle. “Do you suppose I could have another one of these?”

“Give the nice man another beer, Uncle Remus,” Castillo ordered.

“And then we let it thaw,” Dennis went on. “It took eight hours and twelve minutes at seventy degrees Fahrenheit.”

“And it was then really dead?” Castillo said.

“Dead fucking dead,” Dennis confirmed. “But what we don’t know, Colonel, is how cold the helium we used just now was. It was way the fuck down there, but it may not have been all the way down to minus two-seventy Celsius. So what Colonel Hamilton told me to do was give it a thirty-minute bath. We did that. And more. The helium is still on the barrels.”

“Makes sense. What are you going to do about thawing it?”

“We also don’t know about the thawing. If we took the helium off now, it’s seventy-four Fahrenheit in the cave—probably seventy-six or -seven by now—so it would thaw faster. But it might not be all the way dead, if you take my meaning, when it’s thawed faster.”

Castillo had a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“So, then what do we do?”