He blinked as the last drop of energy left his torch and it went completely dead. It was going to be very inconvenient if he had to carry out the rest of his task in complete darkness.
Stratton grabbed a couple of packs of sandwiches and two bottles of water from a shelf and walked over to the counter of the 24-hour BP garage on the A11 ten miles from the Mildenhall turn off. He paid the cashier, took his receipt and headed outside.
He walked to the car parked alone across from the pumps and looked inside, expecting to see Gabriel still sprawled across the back seat asleep but he was sitting up and pressing his skull with his hands as if in great pain.
Stratton opened the rear door. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
Gabriel didn’t move as if he had not heard him. Stratton touched his shoulder and Gabriel lowered his hands and looked into his eyes, his own darkly drawn and filled with dread.
‘What is it?’ Stratton asked.
Gabriel shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in frustration. ‘I don’t know . . . I can feel him. He’s filled with excitement but at the same time there is guilt, but he’s suppressing it . . . He has no doubts about what he wants to do. He’s committed . . . I’m beginning to wonder if he’s insane.’
‘Do you know where he is?’ Stratton asked getting down to basic tangibles.
‘In a dark place. Cramped. Surrounded by things, objects. I can’t make them all out. I saw beds, boxes, containers . . . There was some writing. Quick, give me a pen and paper.’
Stratton took a pen and notepad from his pocket and handed it to him.
Gabriel placed the tip of the pen on the page and then went still and closed his eyes. Stratton wondered if Gabriel was summoning up the image from memory or actually remote viewing it.
Gabriel started to scribble, eyes closed, and after drawing what looked like several squiggly lines he stopped and opened his eyes to see what he had done. Stratton leaned in to look. There were half a dozen separate markings but he could not tell if they were drawings or foreign letters. They looked Greek, or Russian perhaps.
‘Is this happening now?’ Stratton asked.
‘It’s now,’ Gabriel said.
‘Is this at the air base or the forest?’
‘How can I know that?’ Gabriel snapped. ‘I told you it’s in a small room . . . or perhaps it wasn’t a room,’ he said tiredly as he dropped his head into his hands again.
Stratton was beginning to see why this was such a low percentage success-rate intelligence-gathering programme. He wondered how many visions Gabriel had had that were never proven. It seemed too easy to say something was happening and expect to be taken seriously. The phrase ‘con man’ came to mind. Perhaps these characters had sucked everyone in. The CIA said the skill was real, put millions into it and, since they were committed, who could doubt them. It might be feasible and viewers might actually exist in the world, but who could tell if this guy was a fraud? Maybe the tanker was just a coincidence?
Stratton checked his watch. He decided that since they were here he would humour Gabriel a while longer before heading back to London.
‘The ceiling was low and arched,’ Gabriel then said.‘It was made of metal, steel, not brick or concrete. Like a submarine.’
Stratton gazed at the petrol station which was now empty. ‘Now we’re in a submarine,’ he mumbled to himself. He wondered if he could lure him into a pub for last orders. A drink might help make this easier to deal with.
‘What do you want to do?’ Stratton asked.
‘I want to find him, of course. That’s why we’re here.’
Stratton rubbed his face as if to push away the tiredness he was suddenly feeling, then closed Gabriel’s door, opened the driver’s door, climbed in and started the engine. He drove out of the garage and on to the highway, passing a sign to Thetford Forest.
Zhilev searched in the blackness under one of the bunk beds, his hands becoming his eyes as he felt around for what he knew had to be somewhere in the room. If it took him all night and the next day, searching every inch of the steel tube, he would find it. Zhilev was a patient man but his growing frustration was being fuelled by his own feeling of incompetence. The issue of the failed torch would never leave him, not for as long as he had a memory. As he cursed himself out loud, his hand brushed against what felt like a cable hanging below the mattress.
He pulled it through his fingers until it divided into two thinner cables and then he found the ends, both of which had crocodile clips attached. He followed the cable back in the opposite direction to where it disappeared inside what felt like a junction box. This was what he was looking for. Taking hold of the crocodile clips he stretched under the bed, fanning out his arm in search of the power source that had to be within the length of the cable, and hit a solid, heavy box. He felt the top and what seemed to be battery terminals, attached the crocodile clips to the nodules, and light from several bulbs in the ceiling and on the walls instantly glowed, illuminating the chamber.
Zhilev crawled out from under the bed, covered in dust, and as he stood he had to hold his head for a moment and support it as his neck began aching fiercely. He massaged the vertebrae, bringing his head back and then dropping it forward down on to his chest hoping for the click that usually brought some relief, but it did not come this time. He moaned loudly as he forced his head down, increasing the pain, and then it suddenly cracked. He released it slowly, enjoying the comparative relief, dropped his shoulders and exhaled to relax, then took a look around at the long, narrow, sombre, metal chamber. In shape and size it was similiar to the inside of a road-haulage fuel tanker. It was just high enough for Zhilev to stand up in although he had to lean forward to prevent his head scraping on the ceiling. The memories came flooding back and the cache grew more familiar to him by the second.
A military communication system sat on its own metal shelf welded to the wall beside the bunk bed. Zhilev turned the radio on and as soon as a series of LED lights glowed, he turned it off.
The length of one side of the cylinder was crammed tightly with shelving packed with durable moulded, black plastic boxes of various shapes and sizes. Two pairs of bunk beds took up most of the other side with a narrow walkway separating them from the shelves. At one end of the bunks was a toilet with no privacy panel or curtain, and a sump in the ground beneath it large enough to take care of four men’s evacuations. Beside the toilet was the ladder welded to the wall directly below the entrance hatch. At the other end of the cylinder, beyond the beds, was a small table with an electric kettle on it as well as neatly stacked plates, mugs and cutlery. Beneath the table were several oxygen bottles. Everything was covered in a thin film of white dust which came from the air-scrubbers, a carbon-dioxide-absorbent powder which increased the life of the air inside the chamber in case it was unsafe to open the hatch for a long period. Like the submarines of old, if the percentage of oxygen dropped below a partial pressure of point two bars absolute, which affected most people’s brains, causing an initial drunken-like state before unconsciousness, the oxygen bottles could be activated and a trickle flow of the live-saving gas would maintain the correct percentage.