He foreshortened the range of his binoculars and stared ahead at the shore beyond the barrier. After a while he saw three more objects in line with the tower, three round pillbox-like constructions, one in the sea and two on shore. They were similar to the one, well outside the military area, that he had noticed briefly that afternoon on the way back from Godov’s house. He frowned, rubbed a hand along his jaw. What could they be for? Possibly some sort of defensive position — and yet pill-box strategy was dead nowadays, dead and buried.
But those three inside the military area must serve some useful purpose, or they would have been dismantled long ago…
He lowered his glasses. He wasn’t doing any good here, and certainly he couldn’t pass that barrier. Somehow or other he had to get out to the tower itself, making his way by sea, and have a look around inside it. He laughed to himself, cynically, bitterly. Offhand he couldn’t possibly have thought up a more impossible task to set himself, but it would have to be done — unless, perhaps, he could get Major Igor Bronsky into a nice, quiet spot and threaten to blow his guts out if he didn’t tell him just what was going on? But then even Bronsky, assuming he could be believed under threat, might not know the whole story. If he wanted that, he would have to get himself a general. There was no time to mess about with the small fry now.
Frowning in black anxiety, he was about to get onto the bicycle again when he heard the racket, distantly, on the road behind him. He swung round in alarm, saw the lights turning shoreward off the main road from Moltsk… the distant headlamps of many big lorries swinging round across the barren, swampy land. Quickly he pushed the bicycle over the verge so that it was hidden by the mossy overhang of the raised metal road-surface and then he crouched down flat beside it. Soon after, the roar on the roadway increased as the heavy convoy approached up the rising ground. As they took a slight bend he saw them clearly: ten-ton lorries, one after the other, never-ending.
They were close on him now and he ducked right down. Dust swirled over him, stones and grit flew over his body, as wheel after wheel crunched by close to his head. Some of the lorries were crammed with troops, some with civilians, while others were full of wooden crates of varying sizes. The shouting sound of roaring song came down to him from the troop lorries, men bawling out the words of the Soviet’s national anthem at the top of their voices: Soyuz nerushimy respublik svobodnykh…
They sounded extremely het-up about something; there was some curious quality in their voices, some quality which England had very likely had in the days of the Crimea and the Boer War, which Germany had certainly had in 1939. It was a kind of baying hysteria, terrifying in its implications.
Shaw counted between thirty and forty vehicles and after they had all roared past beyond the barrier he allowed ten minutes in case there was another convoy behind; and when the night remained still he scrambled back onto the road. Beyond the wire the troops had spilled out of the lorries. Some were unloading the crates, others were getting aboard smaller trucks, light vehicles, which as they filled were heading up one by one under the control of a beachmaster for the roadway along the pier to the tower.
How could all this possibly be going on without the knowledge of the central Government in Moscow? Or didn’t even these troops know the full score, was there — there must be — some genuine but actually unwarlike purpose for which the tower was officially being used?
The nuclear-device storehouse?
Must be. Quite genuinely — and the extremists could in effect be making use of what was already there. Back in Vienna, Prakesh had said something along those lines, now he came to think of it. But how were they making use of it?
Getting onto the bicycle he pedalled back to the Moltsk road. When he reached the turning he stopped by the pillbox, shoved the bicycle onto the verge again and went across towards the stubby concrete structure gingerly, for the ground to the west of the main road was largely swamp. He was able to keep to a fairly firm track, however, and he reached the pill-box with no more mishap than muddied boots. It was a wide, squat affair, very thick, and was almost identical with the last-war British pattern except that its firing-slots (as he took them to be) were rather higher, just about on a level with the top of his head and below a kind of detached mushroom-top, also of concrete, held firmly in stanchion-like steel uprights. Nothing about it to attract attention or interest, except possibly as a war relic and not a very dramatic one at that.
But it was going to be worth a closer look.
Shaw heaved himself up, getting a grip on the edge of one of the slots and using his feet to give himself leverage on the rough concrete wall. His hand slid on thick grease as he grasped one of the stanchions. There was plenty of clearance between the top of the wall and the mushroom-roof, and, reaching out with his torch, he could estimate the great width of the wall itself. It must have been a good eight feet thick all round — and it was practically solid, with only a central hole of perhaps four feet across.
So — it was no ordinary pill-box after all!
Shaw pulled himself onto the top of the wall and, still using his torch, edged towards the hole. He found that it was more of a shaft than just a hole. Down the middle of it ran a thick metal rod which was fitted into the mushroom-top and was screw-threaded for something like two feet of its length. He squirmed farther forward and then gave a sudden exclamation as the beam of his torch, dipping into the shaft, showed up more of the construction. The centre of the pillbox, the tube or shaft, was lead-lined; and so was the base of the mushroom-top, as he saw when he looked up. And it seemed very much as though the screw rod could be used to wind down that top, which in effect must be a lid, a lead-lined lid to seal off a lead-lined tube.
Interesting…
He reached down with his torch, looking directly into the tube shown up by the beam of light. There was a stuffy smell, an indescribable smell of over-used, foetid air blowing past his head and ruffling his hair. The torch was a powerful one but its beam flickered away into nothingness, totally dark, blank space. That tube was deep all right, had been sunk right into the earth. Frowning in puzzlement Shaw went on peering down the beam. After a while he detected a very faint and distant whirring sound funnelling up to him eerily and he realized that somewhere down there in the bowels of the earth there was an electric fan blowing air up the shaft… an extractor, expelling foul air from somewhere below.
So that was it!
This was an air-shaft, part of a breathing system.
What was it all for?
This was the fourth in the chain of pill-boxes leading shoreward. It could be assumed that they were all like this one. It seemed likely that there was a tunnel, then, leading inland, and he was now looking down into it via that air-shaft. This, of course, could fit with the storehouse theory still; it would indeed be more likely that a tunnel rather than the tower itself was the store. The tower was just the entrance — but why build it out at sea? And why all these lead linings? And again — why, if the secret was coming out about a store, didn’t they also talk about the tunnel? There must be a reason for that somewhere. There was something here that was more sinister than just a store.