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defense projects from the fifties onward were temporarily reclassified Top Secret, DoD Channels Only, pending a "major administrative oversight."
    The Baker raid was yet another disaster only narrowly covered up, and in its way, even more perplexing than the other. The mysterious event which occurred just before the Mission's bunker imploded left seven Delta Force commandos with terminal cancer which ate them alive in less than a week. Their families were told they were killed in a helicopter crash during a joint maneuver with the SEALS in the desert. AD Wyler told Cundieffe that they were exposed to a highly toxic substance in the Mission bunker which caused their deaths. Cundieffe probed no further, but he knew in his bones that it was RADIANT, knew also that there were cover stories within cover stories. Though he worked in a different dimension of truth from the nation as a whole, he still knew nothing that he could prove, even to himself.
    No evidence of any value and no remains were successfully excavated from the bunker. None of the vaunted non-lethal weapons technology that Wyler had dangled before him as that first taste of secrets that led to the Mules. Attempts to dig it out only disclosed high explosives and barrels of toxic waste sealed up within the walls. The Navy gave up, and a National Security Directive was quickly and quietly drawn up placing the property under DoD ownership, and fencing it off for the next ten thousand years.
    Since the events at the Radiant Dawn hospice in the Owens Valley, there was no intelligence indicating that the Mission even continued to exist, let alone that they still posed a threat, but the Mules believed otherwise. The Mission was being hunted both in North and South America, but that search had only yielded more dead ends. The Mission chopper which dropped one soldier off at their Baker HQ was never seen again, and presumably went to ground in Mexico. The oblique slant to the many, many briefings Cundieffe had attended with Wyler in Washington, however, suggested that they were not so concerned with concluding the investigation into what had happened there, but with preventing a worse outbreak of violence in the future. Cundieffe was consulted often and in depth on his limited knowledge of the man they seemed to feel was the key to the Mission. That he had been framed by parties unknown carried little weight in their discussions.
    Since his capture, Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch had been held at a nameless stockade on the Avon Military Reservation in Florida, a highly classified prison for military criminals so heinous the outside world has never heard of its existence. The CIA's interrogation specialists had made a playground of Storch night and day for the last five months. So far Storch had given up nothing. Cundieffe could hardly blame him.
    Held in secret by the military, Storch had no rights, no legal advocate, no witnesses, no one who knew he was even alive. When he told what he knew about the Mission and Radiant Dawn, he had to know that he would be quietly executed. Despite the CIA's best efforts to make him look forward to this event, he had remained silent. Cundieffe had hoped to reach him with a different approach, but up until last week, those in power had only wanted him to feed facts to the torturers. Cundieffe had been able to research Storch in excruciating detail, and believed that while he probably knew very little about the Mission, he knew more than anyone else was willing to tell him about Radiant Dawn.
    Nonetheless, Cundieffe had been shocked two days ago when Wyler called him into his office and told him he was to see Storch the following morning.
    He had made his ethical misgivings known at the outset, even as he pressed for it. This was not how justice was carried out in the United States. This was not what the FBI and the Army were for. This kind of thing never happened in America.
    Wyler had turned and risen from his desk and gone to his window.