A Deep Thing

by A. K. Smith

  Her secrets were about to overflow and explode, she needed to release the pressure. Dr. A brought her back to the present.

  In a quiet corner in the back of a Westminster café, she told him about the briefcase. He never took his eyes off hers as she described the video, the pictures, the blueprint, the longitudes and latitudes, and the neurosurgeon’s card. She told him everything except for the “Lambie” code word in the video, and the existence of the old map. She understood why she didn’t share the Lambie secret, but why she held back the existence of the old map puzzled her.

  Dr. Andrew Lunardini was the perfect listener.

  Chapter 35

  Kendall’s life resembled a movie. The genre of the film unclear. Possibly a thriller, an action-adventure flick, or yet another sad story of a lost woman trusting a husband who hides a deep secret, only to discover he is not the man she thought he was. How did she get here?

  The tightness in her chest relaxed, the pressure less constrictive since sharing the secret of the briefcase with Andrew. He insisted she call him by his first name now that he was retired.

  Head bent forward, eyes rapidly skimming over each document, Andrew was engrossed. He sucked in the contents of the briefcase, scribbling notes, searching the internet, comparing photos, completely entranced.

  He handed the neurosurgeon’s business card to Kendall without even looking up from his computer. “Call this Dr. Trailov first thing Monday morning at Johns Hopkins. Find out if he knew Tim.” He was nonchalant. “It might just be a card or it could be a lead.”

  She thought Andrew was younger than his years, but this Andrew was full of adrenaline like a teenage boy on his last day of school before summer vacation. The look of an anthropologist who discovers a bone, digging faster, anxious to see what lies beneath.

  He was alive again.

  ****

  Kendall swallowed and took a deep breath.

  “Go ahead, use it, it’s a master.”

  It turned out, Andrew’s conference room key was a master to the entire building. The lock turned and the basement door opened.

  It was seven a.m. Sunday morning. Andrew’s grin was contagious. “It’s possible the map in Tim’s briefcase is an underground tunnel system, accessed right here, in the basement of Lewis Hall of Science.” A flushed appearance colored his face. “I’ve always heard rumors of a bomb shelter underneath Western Maryland College, some type of tunnel system which led to a secret bunker hidden somewhere deep in the Catoctin National Forest.”

  Andrew whispered. “It was 1962 and I had just arrived at the college. The hush-hush was Western Maryland had a secret place to hide Congress.” His salt-and-pepper hair framed his handsome face, his hazel eyes shining with excitement. “Oh, there were specifics, it supposedly contained decontamination chambers, a communication area, a clinic, a full-blown cafeteria, and dormitories designed to accommodate at least a thousand people.”

  She followed him down the stairs to the basement of the building, when a memory came back to her. “I remember, an incident with one of the fraternities. The Bachelors, the oldest secret society on campus. One of their pledges talked about being locked in a tunnel. He wanted to confide in us about a hazing prank, but he was scared to death to talk. We tried to investigate it, but he denied everything and said he made the whole thing up. When asked about the tunnel, he was adamant there was no tunnel.”

  She recalled telling Tim about the oddness of it, and how fast the kid changed his story. Tim chalked it up to a fraternity prank, adding the pledge was probably blindfolded and made to believe he was in a tunnel.

  Kendall’s mind was buzzing. “So what is Tim’s connection to this place, do you think he was part of a military division that secured it?”

  Andrew turned, his head cocked to one side. “Perhaps, not a bad theory, maybe that’s why all the secrecy, but it doesn’t explain all the other coordinates and locations. Something has been bugging me about those pictures with the presidents. I know this sounds impossible, but the man in the pictures—he looks like the same man.”

  She stopped. The pictures spanned too many years. “Impossible, he would have been over 150 years old in the recent picture with Obama, and he can’t be a day over fifty. It has to be members of the same family, members that look alike…grandfather, father, and son.”

  The basement of Lewis Hall of Science was eerily quiet and empty. This was not unusual for a Sunday morning at a college, most of the students were sleeping. Andrew stopped in front of a door marked Boiler Room, with a Hazard sign on the wall. “See if the key opens this door.” He pointed. Kendall inserted the key and it opened. Inside a typical electrical room with two closets. Andrew went over to one and tried to open it. Locked. Kendall tried the key; this time the door did not open. Andrew motioned to the other closet. She easily opened this one; an unlocked storage closet.

  Andrew examined the room, checking out the walls and corners. He was certain the map pointed to this end of the building. He pulled a flashlight out of his backpack and investigated each corner, leveraging his body on the floorboards.

  Kendall attempted to open the locked door with a paper clip she pulled from her bag. “What else do you have in there?” he asked. “I didn’t know you had experience in breaking and entering.”

  She laughed. “No experience, unfortunately… thought it was worth a try. I have a paper clip and this key card.” She smiled. “Come on, don’t you know how to open it with a credit card like in the movies?” She handed Andrew the key card, and he grinned. His posture charged, his hazel eyes twinkled, peering above his round wire rimmed glasses. His shaggy salt-and-pepper hair reminded her of Harrison Ford. Well, we are on an Indiana Jones type of adventure.

  The enormity and complexity of what was actually happening in her life struck her for a moment like a screen door unexpectedly slamming. Indiana Jones, secret tunnels, really?

  She shook her head and chuckled. Andrew jiggled the key card wedged behind the lock. His clothing seemed out of place, almost like a costume.

  “What’s so funny, don’t I fit the profile of the cat burglar?”

  She pulled on her long ponytail twisting her hair. “First of all, no one uses the term cat burglar anymore and yes, you don’t fit the profile. This is crazy, right? I mean what are we looking for. I can’t believe all this is happening.”

  Andrew sat on the ground, his back against the door.

  Using both hands to get up from the floor with the key card in his hand, Kendall heard a click as Andrew’s hand passed over the bottom hinge of the door. “Did you hear that?” On his hands and knees, he ran the key card up and down the doorframe and they heard a click again. He tried the knob; it was still locked. He ran the key card over the door again and there it was—another click. He put his hand on the doorknob and opened it up.

  Old strong steel faced them, looking like the door of a bank vault. It appeared to be decades old. There was no combination lock, no lever, and no handle visible.

  Andrew ran the key card up and down all around the door, and again a loud click. The vault door popped its lock. They pushed against the heavy door and heard the loud creaking of hinges.

  They were both speechless, staring straight into the dark black nothing. He took his flashlight from his backpack and held it up close to his ear, creating a soft spotlight shining down a long dark corridor. It was a tunnel, definitely a tunnel, with wiring and piping running down one side, some type of lighting system overhead, and mechanical tracks etched into the ground.

  Without a word being uttered, Kendall followed him into the tunnel whispering, “What is this? A tunnel to a bunker?”

  He turned around, scooted past her, and unzipped his backpack.

  “I think we should follow it, Kendall. See where it leads, but I want to put something in the door. The last thing we need is to get locked in.”

  “Okay, let’s do it.” She gave a timid smile and took the flashlight he held out.

  They walked in sile
nce, Andrew’s flashlight leading the way.

  “What do you think the tracks are for?” Kendall stared at the metal tracks that ran the length of the tunnel. Andrew shone his light on the ceiling and sides of the tunnel. “My first instinct is it looks like an elevator shaft.” He pointed. “You can see the wires running the whole length of the tunnel on both sides but instead of the elevator going vertically up and down, it looks like it’s going horizontally through the tunnel.”

  Kendall looked around with her light. “You’re right! That’s what it looks like—a sideways elevator shaft.” He stopped walking. “What? What’s wrong?” she asked, whispering. He put his backpack on the ground, unzipped it and took out an electronic device. “I’m not sure if this GPS will work underground but if it does, we will at least have an idea of where we are headed. My guess is north.” According to Andrew, they had been traveling west-northwest for the last two hours. Kendall knew she could walk a fifteen-minute mile, so she calculated they walked about six or seven miles. Andrew kept a fast pace and made the time fly by with stories of bunkers and bomb shelters everyday Americans built in the 1950s. He was certain this was the infamous bunker he had heard whisperings and rumors about as an Associate Professor on campus in the 1960s. He studied the small GPS device in his hand.

  “Well, this is strange…” He slowed his pace. Turning around, he showed her the location on the GPS.

  “How can that be? It looks like the tunnel runs right through the cemetery.” The Nathaniel cemetery was about ten miles as the crow flies from Western Maryland College. Local families who worked in or grew up around the college were buried here. Tim’s coffin was buried there, just as she would be one day since she bought a plot at the time of Tim’s death for both of them.

  “How deep below the ground are we?” she asked. “Do you think we’re close to the surface?”

  “No. I think we’ve been going at a slant, a slight angle downward for the last two miles. I’m not sure how deep we are, but I am amazed my GPS works. There must be some kind of wiring for telecommunications down here.” He slowed his pace. “Look, over to the left, the tunnel splits.”

  Her head and her heart pounded. Tim, what were you involved in? Why would you have a key card that worked on this obviously decades-old underground system? Andrew turned left. “It’s a set of stairs, and if my GPS is correct, it’s going to come out right in the middle of the cemetery.”

  Unable to comprehend what was really going on, she forced herself to speak. “Do you think it comes out in a grave?”

  Andrew placed his hand on Kendall’s shoulder. “I don’t know, Kendall, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, why the cemetery? I’m going to mark this spot on my GPS, and we can go to the cemetery later and see where this exact spot is. But if you’re up for it, I would like to see where the rest of the tunnel goes.” He waited patiently, as though he were asking a simple question of whether or not she would like to stay a little bit longer at the coffee bar down the street. She admired him as a professor, a mentor, and a friend. She could do this, no, she needed to do this and he was willing to help her find the truth.

  “It’s not even lunchtime yet, and I brought snacks,” she said. “Let’s keep going.”

  ****

  Steel tracks, concrete tunnels, the same view for the last ten miles. Kendall sighed. “Are you hungry?” They stopped for a quick lunch break.

  Andrew, fascinated by the vents in the wall, was on his knees. “There has got to be some type of high tech system in this tunnel—ventilation, communication—I’m surprised there is no security camera.”

  “Well, if we are on video don’t you think someone would have stopped us? Maybe there’s no video because then there would be evidence this exists. I guess it depends on how classified this tunnel really is.” Unable to eat, she stuffed her lunch in her backpack. “Seriously, how could Tim be involved in this?”

  The Professor studied her without answering her question. “We still must be pretty far away from the actual bunker.”

  They had walked a long time. Kendall knew he was in good shape, he ran two marathons, twenty-six miles was nothing to him, but she also realized they had no idea of the length of the tunnel system.

  “If they took the time and effort to lay tracks for transporting people, whether it’s an elevator as I suspect or some type of monorail system…” He touched the tracks. “Yes, I’m really thinking some type of monorail, you know Walt Disney had a monorail system designed and built in the late 1950s, so that’s possible, he certainly had a secret connection to the government, actually even to Western Maryland College.”

  Kendall stared. “Walt Disney?”

  Andrew stopped and took a swig of water, angling the flashlight to illuminate the area they were standing in. “I think we should turn around. I’m marking this spot on my GPS. We could get in the car and check out the coordinates and find out where it is above ground. I know the stairs were in the cemetery, but at this spot I’m just not sure where we are; it looks like the middle of the woods.” Andrew paused. “I’m not sure what Tim was into, but I’m not giving up. Let’s try to figure this out.”

  Reluctantly she agreed, disappointed they had not found the answers she so desperately wanted.

  Chapter 36

  Staring out at the curvy, tree-lined road heading out to Cunningham Falls State Park, Kendall was thankful Andrew was with her. After leaving Lewis Hall, they decided to call it a day and regroup in the morning. But Andrew knocked on her door at five o’clock declaring he wouldn’t be able to sleep without driving out to the location of the GPS coordinates. He was certain the tunnel went underground by Cunningham Falls State Park. He figured it would be an easy hike and assured her they could be home before it turned dark.

  So here she was, the Professor beside her analyzing Google map on his phone, and Harvey in the back seat, eager to run in the woods.

  Cunningham Falls State Park adjoins Catoctin Mountain Park. Both green, forested areas with dark, rich brown soil, vines, tall trees and rocks. When she first moved to Maryland, she loved to hike in the park. It reminded her of the green and brown dark forests of Western Pennsylvania where she grew up with a passion for the outdoors.

  Her phone buzzed. Driving, she ignored it, she was an advocate of no texting or talking while driving. The sun lower in the sky, most hikers were gone or trekking back to their cars.

  “How much daylight do you think we have left?”

  Andrew looked down at his watch and answered matter-of-factly. “The sun sets at 8:05 today, so…we have a few hours left, and I brought flashlights.” He pulled them out as in show-and-tell. “But the park does close at dusk,” he said. “The only issue is, I don’t think there is a trail to where we need to go, so it may take us a little bit longer to follow the GPS.”

  ****

  They were making good time, averaging about a fifteen-minute mile. Her legs ached. The first four miles they followed a trail—but now definitely off trail—walking over boulders and through bushes following Andrew’s GPS.

  “It’s exactly what I thought.”

  “What is it?” Kendall asked.

  “See this road; it leads to the perimeter of Camp David. That’s where the tunnel goes into Camp David or it breaks off and goes to Site R.”

  “I never knew where Camp David was.”

  “Yes, it’s hidden here in the forest. It used to be a camp for government workers until President Roosevelt took it over and converted it to a Presidential Retreat and changed all the access. He originally named it Shangri-La after the magical place in Lost Horizon. Too bad Eisenhower changed it, naming it after his father and grandson, I liked Shangri- La better.”

  “How do you know it leads to Camp David?”

  “I’ll show you.” He walked out to the road turning in both directions. “There it is.” He pointed at a sign. She walked the rest of the way with Harvey to the large square sign. It read, No Trespassing, No Stopping, No Standing, No Parking, Violators Will
Be Punished by Law.

  “After this road, there is a larger area of dense woods and another road that is only opened seasonally if at all, and then more woods and then another road before the perimeter, which I am sure has cameras and security. I heard there is a line where armed guards pop out of the ground if it is crossed. I don’t really know. But seriously, we need to keep walking.”

  What would Tim have to do with Camp David? Just then a rabbit ran past, surprising Harvey. He yanked to run, pulled loose, and his collar came undone. The rabbit was fast but so was Harvey; he took off through the woods like lightning.

  They both started running. Harvey ran like a greyhound, gaining speed. Kendall screamed, “Harvey!” at the top of her lungs, but either he suddenly went deaf or he was too far away to hear her panicked cries. Soon they came to another paved road. “What is this,” Kendall asked, panic in her voice. “The perimeter fence? Is it electric? I don’t want him to get electrocuted!” She frantically called Harvey’s name.

  “I know there is a perimeter fence all the way around the property but I have no idea whether it is electric. I’m sure the rabbit will not run into the fence…” Andrew stopped running yelling Harvey’s name.

  Another country road appeared in the distance. They were definitely in the middle of nowhere and the sun was slowly going down behind the trees and the mountain. Was Camp David really this far out in the middle of rural America?

  Her heart pounded. In the distance, another road emerged with a green belt and a tall black fence with cameras and security equipment attached. Behind that fence was a large area of green, and a third fence off in the distance. A towering, sinister fence at least one hundred feet high. Her chest tightened, waiting for the armed security to spot them on the camera.