Temple of the Gods (31 page)

‘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—’

‘Yes, I know, I know,’ said Ogleby dismissively. ‘I read the email.’ Beady eyes scrutinised Nina. ‘Waste of time and money your coming here in person. The material you want may be Eyes Only, but we could still have couriered it to you in New York.’

‘Really? We were told we could only view it here,’ said Nina, concealing her sudden nervousness. Dalton had been very specific that they would have to travel to Silent Peak to see the file.

‘Not for something of that classification. You were obviously misinformed.’ He turned his grouchy gaze to Kern. ‘Something else I can help you with, Colonel?’

Kern was evidently well used to Ogleby’s attitude. ‘Apparently not. Well, Dr Wilde, Captain, when you’re finished here I’ll arrange for someone to bring you back to the surface.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nina. Kern exited, leaving her and Eddie alone with the sour-faced librarian. ‘So, Dr Ogleby, this is a remarkable archive you have here.’

He didn’t even respond well to a compliment. ‘It would be if they gave me the staff and money to run it properly. Right, let’s see your papers, then.’

The pair produced their documents. Ogleby read them, then went to a computer to double-check their details. ‘No need for you to come here at all,’ he muttered as he pecked at the keyboard with one finger, logging the new arrivals into the system.

‘I’m curious about that myself,’ said Nina. ‘I mean, what we’re here to see is of historical importance, but it’s hardly a national security matter. Why keep it so highly classified?’

‘It’s not the material itself, it’s where it came from,’ Ogleby replied, still tapping away at the computer. ‘In this case, the Nazis.’

‘Nazis?’ said Eddie, in his surprise using his normal accent before hurriedly correcting himself. ‘Uh, I mean, Nat-zees.’

Fortunately, Ogleby didn’t pick up on it. ‘It was part of a scientific archive seized by US forces at the end of the war, some of which had been stolen from Greece during the German occupation there. A lot of the other material concerned what you might call “ethically questionable” Nazi experiments –’ he gave them a decidedly ghoulish smile – ‘so the whole collection was classified, including the material you want to see.’

‘Why?’ Nina asked. ‘It couldn’t possibly be connected to anything the Nazis did.’

‘It was connected just by association,’ said Ogleby in a patronising tone. ‘The Nazis were very good at filing. You release one file, people want to know where the others are, and what’s in them. It’s simpler just to classify everything so only people with a need to know can see it. That way, we still have the information without bleeding hearts bleating about our benefiting from “immoral knowledge”. There’s no such thing.’ He finished typing. ‘We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but at least we can stop people from whining that someone removed the cork.’

Nina agreed with him in principle that knowledge itself could not be immoral – as far as she was concerned, the cliché that ‘there are some things man was not meant to know’ was an anti-intellectual crock – but that hadn’t stopped her from quickly developing a dislike for the librarian. ‘Well, we’re in the need-to-know club now, so if we could see it?’ she said spikily.

Ogleby’s nod was distinctly disapproving, but he signalled impatiently towards one of the cubicles. ‘Go on, in there. You can get a good view of the system at work.’

As well as a well-lit reading desk, the cubicle contained something that reminded Nina of a smaller-scale version of an airport’s baggage carousel. A large flap set into the cabin’s outer wall opened on to a set of steel rollers that would channel anything coming down it into a flat collection area; another set of rollers at the opposite end led back through a second flap. A window looked out into the hangar and its miles of shelves. ‘Your material is on its way,’ said Ogleby. ‘The shuttle should be here in a minute.’

Eddie and Nina moved closer to the window. The tracks criss-crossed the vast space between the stacks, points at alternate intersections allowing the shuttles to follow the most efficient course through the grid. As they watched, one of the towering machines trundled past, carrying a large container resembling a bank’s safety deposit box. Sparks crackled from its dodgem-like overhead power grid. It clattered through a set of points and turned down an aisle, disappearing from view. Other shuttles were at work further away.

‘The place looks busy,’ said Nina.

‘It always is,’ Ogleby replied. ‘We send out at least three hundred retrieval requests per day – and new material arrives all the time, of course. The Pentagon, CIA, NSA, even the White House – everybody has files down here. And we keep track of every single one.’ Pride briefly overcame grumpiness. ‘Nothing’s ever been leaked or stolen from Silent Peak. Not so much as a Post-it.’ His abrasive attitude returned. ‘How long will you need?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said with a shrug.

The gesture irritated their host even more. ‘Well, this isn’t a social club, so don’t waste time chatting about it. As soon as you’ve got what you need, put everything back in the box and push it down the belt, then you can leave. In the meantime, I have work to do, so if you need anything, ask the zombie over there.’ He cast a disdainful look towards the mind-numbed man by the entrance, then stalked out of the cubicle.

‘Thank fuck he’s gone,’ said Eddie.

‘I know. What a jerk!’

‘No, I meant I can finally talk again.’

‘With you, silence is golden,’ Nina told him. ‘Especially with that god-awful accent you were using. Seriously, what the hell was it? You’re
married
to an American – how can you not know what we sound like?’

‘Oh, I know what you sound like. Sort of shrill, and annoying – ay up.’ Their discussion was interrupted as another shuttle stopped outside the window. A hydraulic whine as it raised its cargo to the drop-off point, then the flap opened with a bang and a metal container skittered down the rollers to stop in the collection area before them.

Nina examined the delivery. It was somewhat larger than a standard box file, a barcode laser-etched on the brushed steel. Beneath it was a large label bearing an identification number, along with the cryptic line ‘SCI(G3)/NOFORN’. The more readily understandable ‘Eyes Only’ was printed beneath it in red. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked, tapping the jumble of letters.

‘NOFORN means “no foreign nationals”,’ said Eddie. ‘I’d better look away, then. Don’t want to break any rules.’

‘I think we’re past the stage of worrying about that,’ Nina said with a half-hearted smile.

‘Just a bit. And SCI stands for Sensitive Compartmentalised Information. Super-Top Secret, basically. The G3 part’s probably some particular need-to-know clearance. Which Dalton arranged for you, so you’d better start using it. The quicker we’re out of here, the better.’

She took the box to the reading desk. ‘Yeah. I didn’t like what Ogleby said, that we could have had this brought to the IHA. You think Dalton’s trying to set us up to be caught red-handed?’

‘I’m surprised we haven’t been arrested already, to be honest. Or shot.’

‘There’s a pleasant thought.’ Nina sat and opened the box, Eddie leaning over her shoulder to see what was inside.

It didn’t contain a great deal: a manila folder with thirty or so typewritten pages within, and a large padded envelope housing a flat and heavy object. She flicked through the folder first. The opening pages were a summary of where and when US forces had acquired the material from the Nazi archive at the end of the Second World War, and the bureaucratic decision-making process that had kept it hidden to this day. Following them were translations – from German to English, of the Nazis’ own records, and then from ancient Greek to English . . . of the material itself.

Nina put them aside and picked up the envelope. Inside was another folder, but this was metal bound in thick black leather, not a simple card sleeve. A brass zipper ran around three sides. She carefully unfastened it and opened the cover.