She started out again, weaving between trees and crawling under bushes as she made her way methodically to the summit. Hopefully, this one wouldn’t blow up like the last.

When the terrain started to level out, she dropped to her stomach and slid across the dead leaves and sticks, scanning for surveillance equipment and booby traps. Not that she really had any idea what to look for. Based on the latest from Fred Klein, goddamn space-based lasers and genetically modified, glow-in-the-dark rottweilers weren’t out of the question.

Randi slowed further, slithering through the tall grass until the slope turned downward. It took a few moments to mat down a hole sufficient to see though, but when she did, she was pleased to learn that her map-and-compass skills hadn’t entirely disappeared in the GPS era. Below, at a distance of about a mile, was exactly what she’d come to see.

It looked pretty much like the pictures she’d found on the Internet. The entrance was a natural cavern about twenty yards high and a bit less in width. According to the publicly available plans, it descended into the mountain for nearly two-thirds of a mile before dead-ending into a set of blast doors. Beyond those doors, the cavern was human made, leading into the main nuclear waste storage area.

There was one access road, paved to allow heavy trucks to travel along it safely. The entrance was ringed with a not particularly formidable-looking chain-link fence, creating a courtyard large enough for a semi to be unloaded in. Steel tracks were visible going into the cave entrance, but none of the transportation carts that traveled along them were in evidence. She guessed that they were stored just inside to keep them out of the weather. Other than that, there was nothing but a tiny guardhouse with a single guard.

Randi let out a long breath and retrieved her binoculars, studying the area in more detail. Even magnified, there wasn’t much to see. Or, more precisely, she was seeing exactly what someone would expect at this type of installation. Either Takahashi was as clever as he was given credit for or this really was nothing more than a radioactive trash heap.

Randi focused her lenses on the guard and felt a glimmer of hope for the first time in days. He looked too hard to be of the hourly variety. She waited for him to exit the guardhouse and watched as he walked the fence line, peering into trees that had been cut back about seventy-five yards. No gut hanging over his pants. No wheezing or waddling. He moved with graceful efficiency and was carrying a Belgian assault rifle. Not a particularly common weapon and one that she herself had taken a liking to a few years back.