by Dan Latus
‘Sam here legally?’ George asked.
‘Not yet.’
‘You’d better see to that as well, son. You don’t want to risk losing her.’
John nodded. ‘I will, just as soon as this thing is over. It’s long overdue. We’ve been living in our own little bubble these past ten years, scared to move in case we might do something to burst it.’
‘You know what to do. I’m not gonna say another word.’
‘Thanks, George!’ John said, laughing.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The entrance to the main cave couldn’t have been a secret, even though it was shielded by a thin belt of woodland. If anything, it was like the entrance to a railway tunnel – very obvious. There was even a rough track winding its way up to it from the forestry road below. Its very ordinariness might have been some protection, John thought, as he and George made their way through the portals. There were many such caves in the area, some of them with much larger entrances than this one. They had seen a few.
They made their way some fifty yards into the cave, passing through a huge vault-like space before continuing along a narrower passage that was still wide and high enough to accommodate a big truck. There were no tracks on the cave floor, but that meant nothing after ten years of disuse. Even back then when the cave was being used, sweeping the floor upon exit would probably have been mandatory in a secret facility.
‘Reminds me of Serbia,’ George said conversationally. ‘This kind of country, you can conceal an entire army without any difficulty whatsoever.’
‘And the Serbs did,’ John pointed out.
‘That’s right. They did. The US Air Force couldn’t find ’em to bomb. Buildings all over the country were toppled and blown up, but we never laid a finger on any of their military capability. When it was all over, they came out of the caves and tunnels, with their tanks and armoured personnel carriers, laughing at us.’
‘Yeah. They didn’t have many communication towers left, though, did they?’
‘Not one,’ George said with apparent satisfaction.
‘Just a pity about the tanks, and things.’
‘Don’t try my patience any more, young feller,’ George growled.
They moved on and turned left, into a side passage that led after another hundred yards to a massive steel door. There was no obvious way of opening the door. It simply stood there, big and solid, a sheet of unadorned steel, nothing on it whatsoever.
John thumped the door with the heel of his hand. There was no vibration, no sound or echo, or any other indication that the door had registered their presence.
‘Impressive.’
He looked at George, who nodded and said quietly, ‘This is it. We got here. Now let’s see if we can get the sucker open.’
‘I can’t see us getting any reception in here, all this way underground.’
‘Maybe it doesn’t work like a normal cell phone?’ George suggested.
John shrugged. ‘We’ll soon find out.’
He punched the long list of digits Sam had given him into his phone. Then he checked to make sure he had got the list correct. Finally, he pressed “Send”.
Nothing happened.
For agonizing seconds, half a minute or so, nothing seemed to happen. Then they heard a series of clicks and a whirring sound from somewhere, and slowly the great steel sheet began to slide aside. It revealed a wall of blackness that the battery lamps they were carrying barely penetrated. As they stared into the void, strip lights began to flicker, one after another in two parallel lines. Within a few more moments the world beyond the door was brightly lit.
They both stared in silence, astonished, for a long moment. Then John said breathlessly, ‘Oh my god! Just look at it.’
George said nothing. He just stared.
It wasn’t an arms dump the like John had ever seen, or even imagined. There was a whole new world beyond the door, a city at least, a grid-iron city. Not a populated city, but still one with roads and lane markings. They could see an array of fork-lift trucks, scores of them, in a parking area close to the entrance, ready to start servicing long lines of storage racks stacked perhaps thirty feet high.
They both stood and stared, astounded and temporarily speechless. Somewhere a generator started up, ignited by invisible hands. The lights began to shine even more brightly.
Eventually, John shook his head and said, ‘Viktor Sirko’s private domesday enabler.’
‘Something like that,’ George agreed. ‘Come on! Let’s take a look around.’
John eyed the edge of the door, now recessed into the wall of the cave, and said uneasily, ‘If that thing closes with us inside, we’ll never get back out.’
‘It ain’t gonna do that, my friend.’ George chuckled. ‘What we’re looking at here is a marvel of American civil engineering, US Army engineering. Built to last, and without a malfunction option. This place will still be in perfect order when there’s no-one left alive on the planet.’
John snorted scornfully, but he suspected George might be right. Who else could have done all this? Who else but the US Army could have installed moving parts that were still working after more than ten years in hibernation, without the aid of an external power source? NASA? Maybe it was a practice for colonizing Mars.
‘What are we looking for specifically?’ John asked.
George shook his head. ‘We’ll know it when we see it, I guess. Whatever it is, it sure scared your wife.’
That was true, John thought. He had never known Sam so tight-lipped and worried.
She just wouldn’t talk about it. He had given up trying to get more out of her. It had to be something really nasty.
Swallowing their inhibitions, they moved forward together and entered Viktor Sirko’s lost world of defence equipment and assault weapons.
They walked together, side by side, up and down the aisles of what was an enormous military warehouse. The sheer scale of it reduced them to awed silence. They walked past rows of shelves containing small arms, heavy machine guns, field artillery, mortars, and crates of ammunition. Then there were battle tanks and armoured troop carriers, and jeeps and trucks. And mountains of miscellaneous equipment, and boots and clothing. Enough for at least an army. Nothing bore insignias but there might as well have been a white star on everything.
‘Enough to fit an army,’ John remarked, bewildered, as they walked back towards the entrance.
‘A helluva big army,’ George agreed. ‘Maybe more than one.’
‘Viktor might have owned or managed this dump, but I don’t believe he set it up. This place is way too big for his organization.’
George nodded. ‘You’re right.’
‘I wonder what he intended doing with all this stuff anyway.’
‘Who?’ George asked cynically. ‘Sirko, the Chief of the General Staff or the President of the United States of America?’
John shrugged. It was a fair question. And he had no idea. Couldn’t even begin to guess.
He came to a halt. ‘Mind if we split up for a few minutes, George? I want to check one or two things.’
‘You’re not thinking of offloading a couple of tanks, are you?’
John grinned. ‘I’ll see you back at the entrance in twenty minutes.’
So far as he could tell, the cave was a couple of hundred feet below ground. At first glance, that gave it cover against any sort of strike except a deep bunker-penetrating nuclear missile. It was a hell of a facility.
He made his way over to one of the walls and started to follow it, using his lamp to check the condition of the wall. It was mostly sound. There were places where the limestone had crumbled, but those places had been patched up with concrete.
The cave roof looked pretty sound, too. He couldn’t see any signs of imminent collapse anywhere. In fact, the cave looked clean and new. Judging by the markings left in the rock by machinery, it wasn’t wholly natural.
There might have been a small cave to begin with, but most of this place had been carved
out of the solid rock by engineers. He could see the patterns in the roof and walls, the squirls and whorls, made by the big drilling machine they had used. The mole would have bored its way in from the entrance cave, and now would be resting in perpetuity somewhere in the furthest reaches of the cave. Those things got built in situ, and never came out of the tunnels they dug.
It had been a big project, and somehow it had been undertaken in secrecy. How the hell had Viktor had managed to keep it so quiet?
He shook his head. He had no idea, and he’d seen enough for now. He made his way back to the entrance, where George was leaning against a wall, waiting patiently.
‘You done here?’
John nodded. ‘For now. Let’s close it up again. I’d like to take a quick look up on top. Then I suggest we go somewhere and discuss what we’ve seen.’
George nodded. ‘Suits me. Let’s get the hell out of here.’
Back outside, George left John to climb up the steep slope to the top of the cliff, while he ambled back to the Range Rover they had hired in Kiev.
‘Half an hour max,’ John said. ‘OK?’
‘Take your time. I can wait to hear what you’ve got in mind.’
John nodded. He did have something in mind, but everything depended on what he found topside.
He made his way up the snow-covered hillside, scrambling over rock outcrops and expanses of scree and gravel, threading his way through the thin coniferous woodland. It was cold, a few degrees below zero, but the temperature was welcome. Cold, clean, fresh air was something he had craved back there in the cave.
On top, under a thin snow cover, the surface was old, weathered limestone, with a sparse scatter of pine trees and dead grass on gravelly soil. As he moved around he found craters and holes aplenty. Typical karst landscape. Some of the holes were deep. He dropped pebbles into a few of the more promising of them, and counted the seconds until he heard the pebbles hit the bottom.
When he came away, he was well satisfied. What he had been thinking might well be possible. If they got to that point, he might be able to make a reality of Sam’s most fervent wish.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
‘Well,’ George said, ‘what did you get out of that?’
John shook his head ruefully. ‘What a place! Viktor certainly kept it well quiet. Sam, too.’
‘Don’t be too hard on her. She did what she thought was best. If she was the only living person who knew where it was, and nobody but you knew where she was …’
‘Yeah. I know. It should have been a secret forever. Except it doesn’t work like that, does it?’
‘Not very often, no. The truth will out, as they say.’
‘There was a lot of interesting stuff in there,’ John said, reflectively. ‘A lot of dangerous stuff, too.’
‘Yep. Toxic, poisonous, flammable, explosive – some of it real nasty – and plain ordinary bullets, bombs and missiles.’
John poured them both more coffee from a big flask. ‘Most of it with US Army markings,’ he said. ‘Do you know any of the codes they use, or will we have to open boxes and crates to find out what’s in them?’
‘Some. I recognized some of ’em.’ George gave a wry chuckle. ‘And I sure as hell know a main battle tank when I see one!’
‘You and me both,’ John said ruefully. ‘Jesus! They could fight a really big war with what’s in there.’
George nodded solemnly. ‘You figured out a way of closing it down yet, getting rid of it all?’
‘Possibly. Is that what you would like to happen?’
‘It is, considering what I saw in there. There was some very unpleasant stuff in that cave, stuff I wouldn’t want to see used on anyone.’
‘Chemicals?’
George nodded. ‘That’s right. I think that’s what Sam was worried about most. She knows more than she’s said. Probably too scared even to think about it, never mind describe it. Bullets and bombs just kill you, but some of that stuff will pass down through the generations, killing people who haven’t even been born yet. There’s a heap of chemical weapons stored in there, in amongst the guns and missiles, and the ammo.’
‘Anything you recognized from the codes?’
‘Yes, unfortunately. One thing’s for sure. The US Army sure didn’t store it all together like that. There’s no way trained logistics and ordnance people would do that.’
‘Probably Viktor’s people, then,’ John said thoughtfully. ‘That what you’re thinking?’
‘I am. For the US Army, supply depots are one thing, and ammunition dumps another. You don’t combine the two.
‘Dumps are extremely hazardous places that blow sky high sometimes for no good reason at all. They always have been. Even in the days of cannon and muskets the powder magazines were kept well away from everything else.
‘As for chemical weapons,’ George added heavily, ‘they don’t bear thinking about, even when they are isolated – especially the unitary weapons.’
‘They’re the ones that don’t need different chemicals mixing together?’
‘Darned right! They’re the ones ready to go, once you open the barrel. Part of the family known as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.’
‘I thought those things were banned.’
‘They are – all of ’em, not just the unitaries. The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 created a legally binding, world-wide ban on the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. Blah-blah-blah.
‘The trouble is that a lot of countries had big stockpiles, and it’s taking thirty years to get rid of them. That’s just the ones that are known about! The US’s stockpile will be gone by 2019, and Russia’s a year later, supposedly.’
‘But you don’t think so?’
‘Well … you saw what was in there, didn’t you, even if you didn’t recognize all of it?’
John nodded. ‘What did you see, George?’
The other man sighed and reached out his cup. ‘Any coffee left in that flask?’
‘Some,’ John said, shaking the flask and listening. He removed the stopper and poured him another half-cupful. ‘We should brew some more. So what did you see, George?’
‘I saw pallets of artillery shells. Some were labelled HN. That’s Nitrogen Mustard, a blister agent. I saw GB, Sarin. And GF, Cyclosarin. They’re both nerve agents. Then there were some pulmonary agents to destroy your lungs: CG, which is Phosphene, and CI, which is Chlorine. That enough for you?’
John grimaced. ‘More than enough.’
‘We have to get rid of it, kid.’
‘Because if we don’t…?’
‘Someone, somewhere, will use it eventually.’
John nodded. ‘Agreed. Can it be destroyed, though? Can we do it?’
‘Well, incineration is the usual method. The US has got rid of a lot that way, in depots from Alabama to Utah, and even on the Johnson Atoll in the Pacific.’
John thought about it a moment and then said, ‘That fits in nicely with what I was thinking of doing. One thing, though. What will your bosses in Washington say?’
George shrugged. ‘Not my bosses any more. Officially, I’m retired. I’m doing this job for an old friend – the guy that’s no longer with us. Jack Olsson. He would approve and cheer us on. I’m sure of that. The rest of ’em don’t count, so far as I’m concerned.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
They were quiet for a minute or two. Then John said, ‘Why do you suppose the US Army set that place up?’
‘Oh, they’ve got depots and ammunition dumps all over the world – anywhere where US interests might need protection, either now or in future.
‘The military will have set it up. Then, my guess is they paid Sirko a whole lot of money to look after it, on condition of strict secrecy. It’s a forward base. Probably they expected Ukraine to flare up before it actually did.’
‘There would need to have been government connivance for that to happen, surely?’
‘Oh, sure.
And at certain times, depending on who was currently the President, that would have been forthcoming readily enough. Yulia Tymoshenko would have been happy enough to see it done. Probably Yushchenko before her, too. They’d had enough of Russia.’
They brooded over that for a little while. Then George added, ‘Something else we need to consider, John.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Amongst all that stuff in there, some of it isn’t US ordnance.’
‘No? What else did you see?’
‘Some of them crates contain missiles made in Russia.’
‘Like the one that brought down the Malaysian plane the other year?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Oh, shit!’
‘Still, that’s not the truly bad stuff. The chemicals are the worst. Enough to poison a large part of Europe if they ever get used. And that’s just counting the codes I know.’
‘We really do have to get rid of it.’ John grimaced. ‘What the hell was Viktor doing, storing that stuff?’
‘Maybe it wasn’t his fault. He would have been just told to store what he was given. He wouldn’t even know what some of it was, let alone what it can do.’
John nodded. ‘You’re probably right. Viktor was no more familiar with ordnance codes than I am. I’m sure of that.’
‘But Jack Olsson was.’
‘What was his role?’
‘I don’t know if he had one, not for sure. But he was certainly some sort of channel between Sirko and Washington. He’ll have known something of what was going on here.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if part of his role was to keep a watch on this place, and make sure Sirko was looking after it properly, and nothing was being filched.’
‘I thought he was an arms salesman.’
‘Not as such, although that might have come into it.’ George shrugged. ‘But his job was to do whatever he was told to do. That was true for all of us, ultimately.’
‘So who would have been responsible for the depot – back in Washington, I mean? Somebody must have been.’
George shrugged. ‘My boss? The US Army? The cloud, maybe? I’m fucked if I know!’
‘And what were they thinking, I wonder. What was the point of it?’
‘Contingency planning, I expect. If the Russians had chemical weapons, which they certainly did, we’ll have wanted the Ukrainians to have them too – and we’ll have let the Russians know they did. That way, there would be less chance of them being used.’
