Broken antennas—what used to be radar, I supposed—stood in the corners of the triangle. An assortment of smaller manhole covers and what looked like fuel or water tanks were spread in a circle around the missile bay itself. The tanks were filled with dirt and weeds that had blown in since the missile was taken away.

I watched a snake glide past. Were the fields of Kansas home to poisonous snakes? Maybe this was the kind we were supposed to love because they ate rodents, but my toes curled and tingled inside my running shoes. The snake slid onto the oblong lid to some part of the complex, where two other snakes were already resting—perhaps the cover was made of a material that amplified the sun’s weak late-autumn heat.

I tried singing, to boost my spirits, but the wind swallowed my voice. It ripped through my windbreaker and the thin Hippo shirt underneath. I jogged around the perimeter, trying to warm up, snapping pictures of the different empty tanks, of the snakes, of the loading bay. I didn’t see any place that looked as though Doris and her team had been digging here.

On the far side of the enclosure I found what looked like a ranch house, wooden, with a concrete step up to the door. The windows had been painted black. At first I thought meth makers had taken over the place, but then I saw a small plaque next to the door: when the kanwaka silo was active, this was the launch control support building, where crew members off duty could sleep. windows were painted black so the owl shift could sleep during the day.

The door had a new padlock, I noticed, a sophisticated one. Maybe meth makers really had moved in. In which case the SUV that had chased Sonia and Doris’s team across the fields belonged to a drug enterprise with major resources. Good people to stay away from. I sniffed the air and thought I picked up a tangy chemical smell, but not the sulfurous stench that comes with a big drug operation.

Before leaving the enclosure, I went to look at the high doors to the loading bay. Drops of oil on the tarmac showed that a truck or car had parked here fairly recently, but the doors themselves didn’t look as though they’d been opened in some time. They were too heavy to manage without special winches, and I didn’t see any shiny places in the hinges or massive handles that would show that someone had been operating them recently.

No one had gone in through that door for some time. So someone was parking here, using this out-of-the-way spot for . . . what? The only thing I could think of continued to be drugs.