But there would be more to come.
A Boeing 737 airliner, white with the red stripe of the Janet fleet, was parked nearby, but Abbot took them to a smaller plane in the same livery, a Learjet 35A. Its twin engines were already idling. ‘Private jet,’ said Nina. ‘Nice to get the VIP treatment.’
‘Yeah, but if this goes pear-shaped,’ Eddie reminded her quietly, ‘our next flight’ll be with Con Air.’
The door was open; Abbot showed them inside. The plush six-seater cabin was empty, but Nina saw a co-pilot already in the cockpit. ‘If you’ll take your seats,’ said Abbot, closing the hatch, ‘we’ll get this show on the road.’ He joined the other man up front.
Eddie listened warily to the pilots and their radio communications, but heard nothing that suggested potential danger. He relaxed, slightly. The engine noise rose. ‘Okay, fasten your seatbelts,’ Abbot said over the intercom as the plane began to move. Nina nervously pulled her restraint tight, but Eddie left his belt loose – just in case he needed to make a move in a hurry.
The crew didn’t seem about to turn against them, however. Take-off was swift, the Learjet quickly ascending to ten thousand feet and heading north. A barren landscape of desert and mountains spread out below. ‘Hey,’ said Eddie after a while, indicating something through a window. ‘Guess what that is.’
Nina saw a stark, almost circular expanse of pale sand against the russet-browns of the surrounding terrain. A dry lake bed, she guessed; on its southern edge was what looked like an airfield, a long runway stretching all the way across the flat plain. ‘I don’t know. A military base?’
Eddie chuckled. ‘Yeah, you could say that. That’s Area 51!’
‘You’re kidding. What, the Area 51? Where they’re supposed to keep the aliens and flying saucers?’
‘That’s the one. I’d love to poke around there, just to see if any of the stories are true.’
‘You might get the chance,’ said Nina as the plane tipped into a descent. ‘You think that’s where we’re going?’
He pressed his cheek against the window for a better view ahead. ‘Don’t think so. Looks like we’re heading for the hills east of it.’ A frown. ‘Weird, I didn’t think there was anything out there.’
‘Oh, so you’re an expert on Area 51?’ Nina asked, teasing.
‘Had a bit of an interest back when The X Files and all that kind of stuff was big,’ he admitted. ‘Used to buy magazines called things like Alien Encounters. Hey, come on!’ he added, seeing her smirk. ‘Military secrets are a lot more boring in real life than on TV. It’s loads more fun to imagine you’re guarding a crashed UFO than a warehouse full of broken radio gear. And yes, I had to do that once. For a whole month.’
‘Poor baby. So what is down there?’
‘That’s the thing: nothing. That’s why they put Area 51 out here in the first place, ’cause it was fifty miles from anybody who might be watching.’
The plane slowed, engines easing back as it continued its descent. ‘Okay, folks,’ said Abbot over the intercom, ‘we’ll be landing at Silent Peak in five minutes. Put your seats and tray tables in the upright position, huh?’ He laughed a little at his aeronautical joke.
Nina wasn’t amused, though. The message had hammered home the reality of what they were about to do. ‘God, if something goes wrong while we’re out here . . .’
‘Bit late to start worrying now,’ said Eddie. ‘But we got this far okay. All we can do is keep pretending we know what we’re doing.’
‘Isn’t that what we always do?’
The Learjet kept slowing, dropping towards the rugged hills. Eddie looked for their destination. They were heading into a closed valley, a single large rocky peak beyond, but there was no sign of anywhere they might land . . .
He blinked as the truth suddenly sprang from the background like the hidden image in a stereographic puzzle. The valley floor had at first glance appeared desolate and empty – but as the plane drew closer the giveaway parallel lines of human activity were revealed. A runway ran along it, partly hidden beneath sand and dust. The concrete had apparently been made from that same surrounding sand, the colours matching almost perfectly.
Such camouflage wouldn’t conceal it from the infrared vision of satellites, though. That probably meant it had been built before they came into common use. Some kind of Cold War facility?
They would find out soon enough. The Lear adjusted its course for the final descent, lining up with the long runway. ‘This’ll be bumpy,’ Abbot announced, ‘so hold on tight.’
Nina’s nails were already digging into the leather of her armrests. ‘If I hold on any tighter, I’ll merge with the damn chair!’
The pilot had, if anything, underplayed the roughness of the touchdown, bumps and cracks in the dusty concrete making the jet judder like a bicycle riding over cobblestones. ‘Christ, I think I’ve lost a filling,’ Eddie said as the shaking eased to merely uncomfortable levels.
Nina took in the view outside. ‘Where are we going?’ she wondered aloud. There were no buildings along the runway, just the rising valley sides. ‘I don’t see anything here.’
‘Must be something,’ said Eddie. ‘If there isn’t, this is a really, really expensive version of the Mafia taking people out into the desert to kill them.’
‘Thanks, Eddie. You’re always so reassuring.’ But there were still no structures in sight . . .
The answer came as the Lear slowed to taxiing speed and made a turn, bringing the cliff at the end of the valley into view. Set into the rock at its bottom was a door.
A very large one.
It took Nina a moment to take in its sheer scale. An opening at least three hundred feet across and sixty feet high had been blasted out of the mountain. ‘Jesus,’ she gasped. ‘That’s a big-ass door.’
‘You should see their draught excluder,’ said Eddie, impressed.
The jet came to a stop. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Abbot, ‘welcome to Silent Peak.’
A military jeep took the couple from the stationary plane to the base’s entrance. The door itself didn’t open; rather, a part of it did, a smaller section hinging upwards like a cat flap to let the vehicle through. Even this opening was on a giant scale, easily large enough to have accommodated the Learjet. Worryingly, a sign beside the entrance warned of the sanctions that would be taken against unwanted visitors: Use Of Deadly Force Is Authorized.
But that concern quickly took second place to amazement. It was all Nina could do not to gawp at what lay behind the door. They had entered a vast underground hangar, at least seven storeys high and lit by rank upon rank of lights in the ceiling, made so small by height that they looked like perfectly aligned stars. Several C-130 Hercules transport aircraft were parked along one wall, almost lost in the cavernous space. ‘Wow. This is incredible!’
The jeep’s driver took them to a clutch of portable cabins opposite the line of aircraft. Men in the blue berets of the USAF Security Forces stood waiting for them. ‘Ay up, it’s the goon platoon,’ Eddie whispered to Nina.
‘Don’t talk unless you absolutely have to – and even then, don’t!’ she replied.
The jeep stopped, the military policemen surrounding it. Another man, a lanky officer in wire-rimmed glasses, stepped forward to greet the passengers. ‘Dr Wilde, welcome to Silent Peak Strategic Reserve,’ he said, holding out a hand to help Nina from the vehicle. ‘I’m the base CO, Colonel Kern – Martin Kern. It’s a great honour to have you here.’
‘Thank you, Colonel,’ Nina replied. Eddie climbed from the jeep beside her, remembering military protocol and saluting his superior officer. ‘This is my liaison from the Pentagon, Captain Tyler.’
‘Sir,’ said Eddie, making Nina cringe inwardly once more. Even that one short word sounded incriminatingly fake in his terrible accent.
But Kern was only concerned with his female guest. ‘Captain,’ he said with a noncommital salute of his own, before turning back to Nina. ‘I read about the role you played in s
aving President Cole’s life in India last year. That’s true heroism, if you don’t mind my saying. Something every American can be proud of.’
‘Ah, thank you.’ Nina’s awkwardness at the gushing praise was increased by the certainty that Kern would have a very different opinion of her if he knew the real reason for her visit. She changed the subject by presenting her pass. ‘Here’s my paperwork.’
‘This’ll just be a formality – I know who you are,’ said Kern with a smile. He briefly scanned the documents, then returned them before giving Eddie’s pass slightly longer scrutiny. ‘Okay, I imagine you’re keen to go down to the repository.’
‘Down?’ said Nina, surprised. She indicated the nearby cabins. ‘I thought those were . . .’
‘These? Oh, no, these are just the administration facilities. You don’t know about the base?’
‘No, everything was arranged at very short notice, and I didn’t think to ask. So, there’s even more of this place?’
Kern grinned. ‘Oh, there’s more! I’ll give you the tour personally. Log them in,’ he told one of the men nearby, before beckoning for Nina and Eddie to follow him. ‘Normally we’d take your phone and any other electronic devices, but you’ve got top clearance, so no need to worry.’ That raised a warning flag in Nina’s mind: why would Dalton have gone the extra mile for them? ‘This way, please. I think you’ll be impressed.’
He led them to a golf-cart-like yellow buggy nearby, the guards heading back to the cabins. Nina sat in the front passenger seat beside the officer, Eddie behind her. ‘So just how big is this place?’ she asked as Kern set the little electric vehicle in motion.
‘This level? One point two million square feet of floor space, more or less. And it’s not even the biggest. There are twelve levels in all.’
‘Fu— Gee, that’s a hell of a size,’ said Eddie – though it came out as ‘a hail arf a sars’.
Nina shot him a sharp look. ‘When was it built? For that matter, why was it built?’
‘They started construction in 1954,’ Kern told her. ‘It was designed as a way to ensure that the United States had a second-strike nuclear capability – no matter what the Soviets managed to achieve with a first strike against us, we’d have a backup bomber force able to be launched against them from a hidden base days or even weeks later. Problem was, by the time Silent Peak actually came online both sides had put ICBMs into service, making long-range nuclear bombers obsolete. So the base became a strategic reserve.’ He indicated the aircraft across the hangar. ‘Basically, it’s a storage facility.’
‘Lark the boneyaahds in Arizonah,’ said Eddie, referring to the huge desert ranges filled with mothballed planes.
‘Not quite – the vehicles there are just as likely to be scrapped or stripped for parts as returned to service. Everything stored here at Silent Peak can be made combat-ready within forty-eight hours, if needed. You’ll see our inventory on the way down.’
Nina looked ahead past lines of trucks and Humvees, but didn’t see anything that looked like a ramp or elevators, only a large black square on the hangar floor. ‘How do we get— Oh.’ Her eyes went wide as she realised what she was looking at.
The square wasn’t on the floor, but set into it, a separate entity. A gigantic elevator shaft.
‘Isn’t that something?’ said Kern, pride in his voice. ‘It’s two hundred and sixty feet on a side, and can bring a fully laden B-52 up from the lowest level in under five minutes. So I’m told, anyway. I’ve never seen it move anything that big myself – I only took command here last year.’
‘That’s . . . quite a thing, yes,’ Nina agreed. She wondered what future archaeologists, as far removed from the present as she was from the heyday of Atlantis, would make of Silent Peak. Would they have any comprehension of its original deadly purpose and the ideological conflict that spawned it?
She put such musings aside as Kern steered the buggy towards one corner of the open shaft. A metal cage marked a section roughly ten feet square. ‘Passenger elevator,’ the colonel explained as he pulled up alongside it. ‘There’s one at each corner of the shaft. It can be a bit unsettling, but it’s a lot easier than taking the emergency stairs. Okay, step aboard.’ The trio dismounted from the buggy, Kern opening a gate in the cage and walking through on to a platform with handrails round its edge. Once Nina and Eddie were on the platform, he closed the gate and went to a control panel. ‘The repository is on the lowest level.’
‘The depths of the earth,’ Nina remarked.
‘Yeah, you could say that. Some people say that if you listen hard enough, you can hear Satan himself at work underneath.’ Kern laughed briefly, then pushed a button. ‘Okay, here we go. Hold on.’
The platform dropped from the cage into a massive vertical shaft that fell away into oblivion. Nina instinctively recoiled from the edge, vertigo rising.
‘Don’t worry, Dr Wilde,’ said Kern. ‘It’s perfectly safe. Nobody’s fallen down it – at least, not on my watch!’
‘I think I’d still prefer more solid railings,’ she said. ‘Or, y’know, walls . . .’
The lift continued its journey. Great vertical tracks ran down the shaft’s sides; guides for the as yet unseen main elevator platform. At widely spaced intervals below were bands of light in the darkness marking the entrances to the base’s other levels. From the look of it, the repository could be almost half a mile underground. Even in the vastness of the shaft, the thought gave Nina a claustrophobic shudder.
The first level was approaching. ‘Take a look at that,’ said Kern, gesturing towards the hangar as it came into view.
It was full of aircraft. Bombers, the long, sinister charcoal-grey forms of a dozen, two dozen, more, B-52s packed into the space like lethal sardines. The eight engines of each plane were shrouded, the sleeping giants awaiting a new call to action.
‘That’s . . . that’s a lot of planes,’ Nina said. She hadn’t taken in the full meaning of the term ‘strategic reserve’ until now. Just because a weapon was old didn’t mean it was useless.
‘That’s only one level. We’ve got another three floors of Buffs—’
‘Buffs?’
‘Big Ugly Fat Fu— uh, Fellows,’ Eddie told her.
The colonel smiled. ‘Three more floors of them, plus we’ve got Eagles, Hornets, Warthogs . . .’
‘Sounds more like a zoo than a military facility,’ said Nina.
‘Ha! Yeah, I guess. And then we’ve got choppers, and a lot more general equipment – trucks, jeeps, bulldozers, that kind of thing. And more tanks than you can shake a stick at.’
‘My tax dollars at work.’ Even in 1950s money, the cost of excavating Silent Peak must have been as huge as the base itself.
They passed the hangar and continued down. The next level contained more B-52s, with Huey utility helicopters nestled in amongst the colossi; the hangar below was packed with fighter aircraft. Then more bombers, this time joined by a trio of coal-black SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. Never mind the base, Nina thought – the value of the mothballed hardware it contained was equally mind-blowing.
A sound reached them from below, the echoing rumble of an idling engine. Its source was revealed as they approached the eleventh level. The main elevator platform, an enormous metal expanse almost filling the width of the shaft, waited here; the hangar itself was filled with precisely lined rows of M60 tanks. One of the armoured vehicles was surrounded by portable lighting rigs, a pair of men working on its open engine compartment. Wide flexible hoses snaked across the floor, drawing its exhaust fumes into a large extractor vent. ‘Routine maintenance,’ Kern explained as they continued to descend, passing through the complex web of girders forming the platform’s supporting structure. ‘Like I said, everything here is kept ready for action. If we needed to, we could have a couple dozen of those babies rolling out of here by tonight.’
‘Let’s hope we never need to,’ said Nina. The elevator drew closer to its final destination. She moved back to the railing, eager
to see what the lowest level contained . . .
The sheer scale of what met her eyes was astounding. Despite the size of the rest of the base, it was in essence nothing more than a very large parking structure. The twelfth floor, however, was home to something vastly more complex.
The repository was a library – but beyond anything Nina had ever seen. The stacks were arranged in a grid, stretching away seemingly to infinity. And the shelf units were not built on a human scale; they were easily thirty feet high.
It quickly became clear that the whole place was not intended to be directly accessed by humans at all. Between the stacks ran a network of tracks, along which ran towering robotic forklifts. She had seen similar devices before: Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems, designed to collect specific items from large archives and deliver them to a central point. But the system at Silent Peak was several orders of magnitude larger and more complicated than anything she had encountered in academia.
‘My God,’ she said, genuinely awed. ‘How big is this place? There must be miles of shelves!’
‘Something like three hundred miles, if they were all laid end to end,’ said Kern as the platform stopped. ‘But Dr Ogleby can give you the exact details. I just work here.’ He opened another gate so they could exit the elevator, then led them to one of several cabins nearby. It was marked with a sign: Reading Rooms 01–08. Kern entered, Eddie and Nina exchanging ‘what the hell have we got into?’ glances behind him. Another man in Security Forces uniform sat by the door, looking utterly bored. He stood and saluted them, then returned to his blank-eyed torpor. Kern called out, ‘Dr Ogleby! Are you here?’
A bald man popped up like a groundhog to peer at them over a cubicle wall. ‘Oh, it’s you, Kern,’ he said, annoyed at being disturbed. He padded out to meet the new arrivals. Unlike the other base personnel he was a civilian, wearing a threadbare suit and a garish yellow bow tie.
Kern started to make introductions. ‘This is Dr Nina Wilde from the International Heritage Agency, and Captain Tyler—’
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