With his jaw falling open, Hansen said, “That can’t be. That makes it a square mile.”
Valentina shook her head. “Four levels. Four square miles.”
Fisher squinted hard at the map, deep in thought. “Ballistics and electronics. If you were experimenting, you’d want access to water for cooling and fire suppression.”
Hansen agreed.
“We’ll clear it as it’s laid out, by zone and level, starting here and moving down.”
He assigned Hansen to the medical zone, Valentina to electronics, Gillespie to weapons, and Noboru to ballistics.
“I’ll loiter at the ramp area and play free safety. Questions?”
They were good to go and started off, but not before discovering a freestanding elevator shaft that Hansen thought might lead up to the “meteorological” hut they’d found in the meadow. Fisher took up a position beside the ramp railing while everyone else split up.
Hansen picked his way down to the medical zone, the corridor festooned by overhead piping that dripped here and there. He ventured about two hundred yards farther and came to a pair of doors marked with a laboratory number. He tried the handle: open.
Tightening his grip on his rifle, Hansen eased the door open, braced himself, and slipped inside, sweeping the rifle over what was, in fact, another, shorter corridor with doors on both sides. Hansen poked his head inside the first open door and saw a laboratory with workbenches, sink area, rolling stools, and complicated networks of Pyrex tubing, test tubes, and beakers. He shoved up his goggles and flicked on his small LED flashlight. Gray metal shelving lined the walls. On the shelves were large glass jars filled with a yellow liquid. Hansen drew closer, wiped the dust from one of the jars, and something inside it shifted and pressed against the glass.
Hansen blinked hard. Cursed.
Was that a tiny human head? A nose? He gasped and backed away from the jar. “Sam, meet me in medical zone one,” he called over the headset.
Within a minute, Fisher arrived and they moved on into a hospital ward where the long rows of beds were equipped with shackles. They moved on to the next two areas, encountering more laboratories and hospital wings.
“There were a dozen or so gulags within a hundred miles of here,” Fisher said. “There’d always been rumors of prisoners disappearing and either never coming back or coming back… different.”
Hansen swore under his breath.
Fisher called for a status report, and the others checked in. They regrouped at the main ramp, where Gillespie said she had found an indoor target range. Valentina said she’d found a test area full of antique electronics, even some stuff equipped with old vacuum tubes. Noboru just shook his head: drafting tables and workbenches. No high-tech arsenal.
They started down the wide ramp toward level 2.
No more than a minute later, Fisher signaled a halt, advanced, leaned over the railing, then returned and filled them in.
“Two guards stationed at the entrance to the ramp below. They’ve got AKs. No night vision that I could see.”
So they had two guys down on level 3, and Hansen told the others that where there were two, there were no doubt more. Fisher agreed. They opted to check level 2 before contending with those guys below.
Noboru had been charged with clearing the ballistics area of level 2. The test facility was already sending chills up and down his spine. It seemed that back during the Cold War the Russians knew no bounds when it came to discovery and experimentation. He was almost afraid of what they’d find next.
And, in fact, what he found next left him standing there like a proverbial deer in the headlights.
Slowly he slid up his goggles, flipped on his flashlight, and gazed up into the massive, man-made cavern that had been carved into the rock and earth. The place was at least two football fields across and lined with engine-test scaffolding that looked like something from Cape Canaveral. Four massive steel bays still held rocket motors, their colossal nozzles sitting before giant, concrete, sewerlike pipes whose innards were blackened. The pipes were no doubt some kind of exhaust system to flush the motor fumes and gases out of the test zone.
Noboru doused his light, refit his goggles, then charged down the row of scaffolding to make a perimeter search. He reached the zone between the second and third nozzles, rushed past a wall lost in deep shadow, then did a double take. He froze, looked back, and started toward the wall, which in silhouette seemed to be part of a pyramid. He passed several thick posts that had partially blocked his view, and then he saw it.
Valentina slowly opened the first locker and found nothing but coveralls and a moth-eaten parka. She didn’t bother opening any of the others. The entire locker area appeared as though it hadn’t been touched for years.
She came back out into the corridor, and for a moment, she thought she saw someone at the far end of the hall. She dropped to her knees, and did, in fact, see a shadow shift slightly to the right.
But then it was gone. She blinked. Had she really seen it?
A call came in from Fisher. He wanted everyone down in ballistics.
Hansen gasped at the twenty-eight Anvil cases ranging from the size of small footlockers to that of bedroom furniture. They looked exactly like the case he’d seen back in Korfovka and were secured by the same type of padlock they’d found on the hut above.
Gillespie remarked that this couldn’t be the entire arsenal. Fisher estimated it to be about a third, so the rest was elsewhere inside the facility or, perhaps, not in Russia at all. Valentina was concerned about Fisher’s Ajax nanobots being able to get inside the cases to tag the weapons. He assured her that they needed a gap that was only a fraction of a hair’s width and was certain they’d penetrate.
Fisher ordered them back, then drew one of Noboru’s modified paintball guns and fired at the ceiling. The dart bounced off the rock, hit one of the Anvil cases, then rolled to a stop.
Hansen wanted to say, “That’s it?” but just stood there, watching. He expected something far more dramatic.
Noboru had already initiated an uplink to the bots and glanced up at Fisher. “Nothing yet.”
“What if there’s no power for them to gravitate to?” asked Hansen.
Fisher explained that just about every weapon or system on the inventory list was equipped with some form of EPROM, or erasable programmable read-only memory, a low-power battery for housekeeping functions like date, time, and user settings. If the item didn’t have an EPROM, then it wasn’t one of the higher-end items and losing it was no disaster.
Within five minutes, Noboru was reading multiple pings from inside the cases. He grinned. “I’d say our first live-fire exercise is a success.”
Before they left the area, in search of more of the arsenal, Gillespie pointed out a section of extra venting between the blast funnels and the wall. To Hansen, the gap at his feet resembled a bottomless pit, and his light faded before it could pick out any floor below. The vent probably extended all the way down to level 4.
Valentina took no pleasure in killing the guard, and she sensed that Noboru felt the same. She did, however, take great pleasure in working with Nathan, and she knew once the mission was over she would succumb to her feelings and ask to see him again… on a personal level.
She thought about this, even as she held her blade in a reverse grip and approached the guard.
Her hand rose to the man’s mouth at exactly the same time Noboru’s did for his guard.
Holding her breath, she drove her blade down into the guard’s neck to make a perfect kill shot to the spinal cord. The slash to the throat or knife thrust to the heart that instantly kills someone is the stuff of Hollywood inaccuracy. Most knife fighters would tell you, if you don’t get a kill shot to the spinal cord, your victim is going to stay alive for a while, and things will get very, very sloppy. Slashing the jugular was one of the last things you wanted to do. Sever that spinal cord and he’s dead, Jim. Instantly dead.