Recovery: V Plague Book 8

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Book: Recovery: V Plague Book 8 Read Free
Author: Dirk Patton
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discussion.
    “I’ll be
right behind you,” he said.  I nodded and gripped the roped tightly, scrambling
my way over the edge.
    “Watch
yourself,” I said.  “The rope’s going to be slick in this rain.”
    Going down
was easier than coming up had been the other night.  Bracing my feet against
the wall, I moved my hands down a knot at a time, walking down with my feet. 
It’s not hard.  The biggest thing to focus on is making sure you keep your
center of gravity above your feet.  If you don’t, well, you turn upside down,
lose your grip, fall on your ass and break half the bones in your body.
    Fortunately
I did it right and stepped onto the ground in a short amount of time. 
Immediately I turned, moving away from the rope and raising my rifle.  Scanning
my surroundings I didn’t see any movement, but kept watch as I heard the scrape
of the Colonel climbing over the edge and starting down.  Soon he was standing
next to me, rifle up and ready.
    I glanced at
him and hand signed the direction we were going.  He nodded and I stepped off. 
Crawford fell in five yards behind and was so quiet I had to glance over my
shoulder to make sure he was really there.  I guess I had expected less from a
Colonel who had spent most of his time behind a desk, even though I knew it
hadn’t always been that way for him.  He hadn’t earned that beret by being a
slacker desk jockey.
    It took us
five minutes to work our way out of the maintenance area at the bottom of the
wall and across a small, paved area to a massive solar array.  There were
hundreds, maybe thousands, of panels and each was six by twelve feet.  They
were mounted on iron brackets, held a few feet off the ground with enough space
between each for a man to walk through and perform whatever maintenance they
might require.  They also created a maze with enough space below the surface
for infected to be lying in wait, ready to drag me down to my death.  I stopped
a few yards from the edge of the first panel.
    Where to
start looking?  For that matter, what was I even looking for?  Standing there,
I took a moment to scan the area as I thought about what to do.  All was clear
and I checked on Crawford.  He was behind me, facing the opposite direction,
keeping an eye on our rear.
    OK, what did
I know about solar?  I knew the electricity generated by the panels was Direct
Current, or DC, and not compatible with the lights, motors and pumps in the
casino that ran on Alternating Current or AC.  That meant there had to be some
inverters somewhere that converted the power before it was supplied to the
building.  And since there had been power at night, there also had to be a bank
of batteries to store electricity generated during the day for use when the sun
was down.
    But where
the hell was all that equipment?  Copper wire is expensive, so I suspected that
it would be somewhere between the generating array and the destination for the
power, but after turning two complete circles I couldn’t spot anything.  Would
they have put it inside the casino?  Maybe the inverters, but I didn’t think
they’d put massive banks of batteries inside.  Too great a risk for explosion
and fire if something went wrong.  Even if the local building codes didn’t prohibit
it, I was pretty sure their insurance company would.
    With that in
mind, where the hell would the equipment be?  Raising my rifle again I scanned
the perimeter of the array, stopping when I saw a sprawling, squat building on
the far side of the sea of panels.  Focusing on it I realized why it hadn’t
caught my attention before.  It had a very low profile roofline and was well
screened from view by trees and shrubs. 
    I was fairly
confident this was what I was looking for when I noted the forest of vent pipes
sticking up from the roof.  Gasses from batteries can be extremely toxic, and
if allowed to build up can also be very combustible.  Proper venting solves
that problem, and this building was

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