"Wag it, anyway," Rick suggested.
Steve put a hand to his forehead. "Gags like that at this time of day cause shooting pains. Please be attentive, and not waggish."
"Ouch!" Scotty exclaimed.
Steve sat down again. "After you were safely on your way I changed to dark clothes, smeared a little black goo on my face, and took off for Calvert's Favor. I drove to within a half mile and parked the car in the woods, then hiked. The first thing I came to was a chain-link fence. It took some time to see if it was wired for an alarm—and it was. So I had to find a tree with a limb that overhung the fence. I'd taken the precaution of carrying a rope. I found the tree, fixed the rope to an overhanging limb, and down I went."
"We could have postponed recovering the payload and helped you," Scotty said reproachfully.
"Sure you could. But I'm used to operating alone, and I was interested in what you might find in the cove. Anyway, I approached from behind the barn and had to take cover when two men went by. They had rifles. They headed down the peninsula toward the cove. I scouted around, but no other guards were in sight, so I started with the barn."
Steve paused. "That is quite a barn. No hay, no oats, no horses. But it has the loveliest dish antenna in it you've ever seen."
"A microwave dish?" Rick gasped.
"Exactly. It's mounted on a truck, and I suspect the electronic gear is inside. I couldn't get a good look. There are also little cubicles inside the barn, probably horse stalls, and I could hear a man snoring in one of them. There wasn't much light, and I couldn't use my little flashlight beam too freely, but I did get a look at several gas bottles racked along one wall. They were big ones, of the kind used for commercial gases like propane or oxygen."
"Or hydrogen?" Scotty asked quickly.