Soldier's Christmas (Wingmen Warriors 8)

Her sleep-husky tones tempted him to hold her, shake her, kiss her, insist they give things another chance. But did he really want to keep trying to repair their broken relationship?

Not if she wasn't willing to be straight up with him.

He'd had a bellyful of people holding back from him. Hell, it wasn't like his brain made him a mind reader. Yet even while he mainstreamed enough to fit in, people always kept up walls with him as if his intelligence allowed him an understanding of their inner secrets.

If he could do that, then he wouldn't have his crap dumped at the BOQ. "Go back to sleep. It'll be an ex hausting trek with the extra snowfall. You've got maybe four hours left before we start out." He raised his torch to illuminate her.

Big mistake.

She stood silhouetted by the halo of light, her hood flopped back to reveal blond hair, spiky, tousled, as if mussed from his hands during sex. Her unzipped parka flapped open to her sides, revealing soft curves encased in her flight suit.

Heat surged south with unerring navigation.

Hitching the torch ahead, he charged past toward the last corridor left unexplored. Four steps in, his instincts blared an undeniable warning. He eyed the irregular hacks in the cave walls, fresh indentions that had nothing to do with nature and everything to do with human intervention. The mine wasn't abandoned anymore.

White suits dangled from pegs in the wall beside a tarp-draped mound no bigger than the new dining room table he and Alicia had bought the day before their split.

"Josh? Is something wrong?" Alicia asked from a step behind him and, hell, but he hadn't even heard her approach this time.

"I'm just hoping I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing." And now he intended to keep Alicia plastered to his side until he knew for certain. "Stick close."

Illumination swelled in the small rock chamber as they walked deeper inside. He strode past the canvas-covered bulk to the white suit bags dangling like ghostly apparitions from a Dickens tale.

Holy crap.

Alicia's gasp behind him echoed his realization. "Protective clothing and breathing apparatus. God, Josh, these are better quality than the chemical gear we're issued and new. What the hell's going on here?"

He swept aside the tarp to reveal boxlike machinery with levered doors and gauges. And thanks to a stint at the nuclear-weapons officer course at Sandia Labs at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico, he knew exactly what he was seeing. None of it good.

"Apparently someone has set up a small-time mining operation here. This machine—" he gestured to the device on the left"—measures mass of the rock. The one on the right measures radioactivity. Combine those two machines and they perform radiometric sorting, which separates preferred uranium from rock and lesser uranium."

"Whoa. Uranium? Hold on. This mine's supposed to be shut down." She hooked her hands on her hips, spinning a slow circle. "Wouldn't someone have noticed all the activity from hacking out so much rock?"

"Usually with uranium to rock mass, you have to haul away a helluva lot of rock." He knelt on one knee in front of the black metal stretch of machinery, flicked a dial gauge. "Unless I miss my guess, they've struck a vein of pure uranite, probably a highly concentrated form. Uranite can be up to eighty-five percent concentrated, which makes small parcels. A mom and pop operation could pull this off without their activity being detected."

"And this uranite has been sitting in a training base backyard?"

"People see what they expect to see. Up to five seconds ago, I thought the only place to find this particular ore was in Blind River, Canada."

"I may not be a genius, but even I know Canada's mighty darn close to Alaska."

"They're probably taking out maybe a grocery-bag-size amount per day, then using a small plane or helicopter."

Alicia stared at the suits. "I'm guessing a helicopter since we didn't see tracks outside other than the rab bits'." She filled in the blanks as quickly as he thought them. "Helicopter blades would blow away footprints upon take off."

"Good guess." Damn, why couldn't they figure out marriage this easily? "Granted, it's raw uranium and has to be enriched. But it's enough uranium to build a bomb the size used in World War II."

"So with that grocery bag, either paper or plastic, we could be totally screwed."

He fingered the Geiger counter attached to one of the suits. "That's not even taking into account skipping the enrichment process and building a dirty bomb."

His skin tingled at just the thought of radium exposure even as the Geiger counter in his hand told him they'd been exposed to less than an X ray.

Alicia backed away from the suits. "Rose-Bud, as enlightening as this discussion is, I think it's time we took it outside."

Fair enough. Radiation may not be a major concern, but the people who inhabited those ghostly suits could do some serious real-life haunting.

Josh doused the torch, the flashlight more than adequate for hauling ass out. He clasped her hand and tugged her along behind him, grip tight. He wasn't risking losing her in the maze of tunnels. "We'll call from the radio once we're outside and can pick up a frequency. Hopefully the weather's cleared enough to send a chopper."