"I want to find Merlin as much as any of you," he said. "More. Merlin was the only thing I was trained for. We'll look there first."
Somebody asked where, approximately, this underground Force Command headquarters was.
"Why, it's in the Badlands, over between the Blaubergs and the east coast."
"Great Ghu! We'll need an army to go in there!" Tom Brangwyn said. "That's where all these outlaws have been coming from, Blackie Perales and all."
"Then we'll get an army together," Klem Zareff said happily. "Might make a little of that reward money that's been offered."
"We'll need more than that. Well need excavation equipment, and labor. Lots of labor," Conn said. "It's a couple of hundred feet below the surface; from the plans, I'd say they just dug a big pit, built the headquarters in it, and filled it in. There are two entrances, a vertical shaft and a horizontal tunnel."
"When they pulled out, they probably filled the shaft and vitrified the rock at the outer ends," his father added. "That was what they did at Tenth Army."
Another idea hit him. "Mr. Mayor, do you think you could set up some kind of a public-works program here in Litchfield? We can't start this till after the wine-pressing's over, and we'll need a lot of labor, as I pointed out. Now, it's important that we keep all our projects a secret until we can get our claims filed. If we start this municipal fix-up-and-clean-up program, we can give work to a lot of these drifters who haven't been able to get jobs on the plantations, get them organized into gangs, and keep them together till we're ready for the Force Command job."
Lorenzo Menardes supported the idea. "And while they were boondoggling around in Litchfield, we could pick out the best workers, get rid of the incompetents, and train a few supervisors. That's going to be one of our worst headaches; getting capable supervisors."
"You telling me?" Rodney Maxwell asked. "That was what I was wondering about: where we'd get gang-bosses. And another thing; this municipal housecleaning would mask our real preparations."