Chapter 17

The Object of Plausible Denial—OPD—lay under a rock.

It had fallen out of the sky when it shouldn’t have and hadn’t exploded when it should have. It bounced and skidded across the desert floor for 87.62 yards before becoming wedged under the big rock. The skid marks were erased by a brisk wind before they could be sighted from the air by the U.S. Air Force search planes. The Air Force devoted almost ten thousand man-hours to the search effort, but the device was never found.

There were two schools of thought on how to handle the loss of a device that dangerous.

One group wanted to warn the population, offer a reward for finding the device and create enhanced public safety through a high degree of awareness. The safety-first group was actually just one engineer with a defense contractor from Dallas, and before long he was persuaded to move to Iowa. He spent the remainder of his engineering career designing coin-operated laundry appliances—sophisticated laundry appliances, with lots of elaborate features.

The second group decided not to tell the public, not even tell that peanut fanner who was technically commander in chief at that time. Yeah, right, like that idiot peacenik could be expected to make a rational decision about a lost bomb. The best thing was to simply categorize the lost device as an OPD.

The device, once designated top secret, was now designated an Object of Plausible Denial, which meant its existence, was creatively erased in all Air Force paperwork. The engineers and officers who had sweated, and labored to create the device purged it from their memories. If you asked them what they were doing during that eighteen-month phase of their careers, they would tell you it had something to do with developing advanced, ultrastrong bungee cords for high-speed ground-to-air pickups. But the cords snapped a lot so the project was shelved.

Without evidence, it was easy to convince others and themselves that the device had never existed.

There was one man who was given the burden and responsibility of retaining the facts of the lost device, just in case this information would ever again be needed. Which it never would. Just a formality, really. The man was chosen for his security level and his youthfulness. He memorized all the data on the device, so when the data was destroyed the young officer was the only remaining source of data on the device. This was how the military did things. It was OPD SOP.

Decades later, the young officer was a retired old officer and even he had forgotten about the device. He had also forgotten about his wife, his dog and his ranch house in Houston—everything except the inside of the He’s Not Here Tavern.

Amazingly enough, the forgotten OPD was found again. It took minutes for Jack Fast’s airship, mounted with its stolen, top secret ordnance detector, to zero in on the OPD, where it had lain undiscovered under a rock since 1978.

This particular ordnance detector, ironically, had been stolen from the U.S. Department of Defense just a few months before and had just been reclassified as an OPD.

“Morons,” Jack Fast thought as he watched his laptop display. He had no idea what the thing under the rock was, but he knew he wanted it. He deployed the pincers, lowering the high-tensile cable until it grasped the one small corner of a bent tail fin that protruded from under the rock. The pincer closed with magnetic force that had the proton-driven generator turbines humming constantly. The airship ascended and the OPD emerged from its shelter for the first time in decades.

Minutes later, the airship deposited the device gently on a flat, empty patch of desert a hundred yards from the drill, then it rose again and began looking for more OPDs.

Jack wondered how many lost objects the military had lying around out there. Lots? He hoped there were lots.

Pretty soon, he knew the answer.

There were lots.