Out of the corner of my eyes I thought I could see our pursuers some tens of feet away, one or more of them with drawn weapons. But it could just as well have been the magnified silhouettes of my own movements in the light of my lamp: an illusion playing against the rock wall.
The cover of the well started to close. Time seemed to be up. I put my foot in the gap and hoped for the best—and after an eternity the cover did after all stop, half-shut. Despite the Nurse being harnessed to me, the briefcase and my full combat pack, I was able to push my way through the opening and start down the spiral staircase, with the cover of the well closing above us.
Then we plunged headlong. Deep down into the bed-rock.
1.05
We managed a more or less controlled landing. I landed first on my back, then the Nurse, harnessed to me, her face on my chest. We had trained jumps and landings so many times, for so many years, with every sort of complication, finally from considerable heights both with and without parachute. Learned to roll on pretty much every kind of material. The ground down here felt as even as in the tunnel system we had fled through, maybe here too it had been covered with spray cement. If we had fallen on untreated, sharp points of the bed-rock instead, we would have been much worse off.
Everywhere was pitch-dark with an ominous quiet. I checked my watch: 08.11, still September 5, 2013. The impact must have knocked me unconscious for a time. Then I switched the watch into altimeter mode. Negative 252 feet, almost to the measure that Alpha’s encrypted messages had indicated.
I tossed my beret out into the darkness and carefully drew my hand over my shaved head. I expected blood and splinters, maybe even brain tissue—but it stayed dry. I felt raw and bruised, but not cut. My left hand locked onto the briefcase. I traced the lamp with the fingers of my free hand. The glass was intact, despite everything. I tried pressing the on/off button—and my immediate surroundings were bathed in light again. The impact of the fall had switched it off.
I let the beam illuminate first the briefcase, which remained intact, undamaged, then the Nurse, and I examined her head to toe as I had been trained. No external signs of damage, apart from the bloody mess on her head. Her pulse was low but stable. As I leaned over, I could feel a weak, warm flow of air coming from her mouth and nose.
Then I looked up and let the glow from the lamp play over the area around me, trying to orientate myself, understand what had happened. We were in the middle of an enormous chamber detonated out of the bed-rock, perhaps some sort of rest area for the users of the tunnel system. The rough ceiling must have been at least sixty-five feet above me, and the metal spiral staircase stopped about fifteen feet up. In the light of my lamp I could now see the rusty ladder we should have taken to lower ourselves the rest of the way—if I had not assumed that the staircase continued all the way down.
My whole body gave a sudden shudder. During my research I had read that the tunnels at Kungsträdgården Tunnelbana station were home to the dwarf spider, Lessertia dentichelis, whose habitat was otherwise in mines and deep caves. It had appeared as an uninvited guest at the inauguration of the northern entrance of the station in the late ’70s. Now one of its kind was crawling over my left hand, over the security strap of the briefcase. I closed my eyes. Looked away. Breathed deeply. Although I had a horror of spiders, this one was tiny, not much larger than a tick.
I shook myself until I could no longer feel it and resumed my search along the walls. Somewhere there had to be a concealed lighting system, something that would also give me an idea of what awaited us further inside. I could not believe that a tunnel network as advanced as this would have been built without one.
As if working inside a diver’s bell, I moved my head to examine section after section of wall, without seeing any sign of wiring or lamps. Not even when I got to my feet—my battered body swaying, my black, tactical combat uniform ripped—for a closer study of the rock walls, could I see anything which stood out from their natural contours.
In each of the lower corners of the vast rock chamber there were cavities, small caves which were even darker. I shone my lamp into them, one after the other. But the light reached only a few short feet before the darkness took over.
So, for the moment I left the unconscious Nurse and the two packs behind, to make a closer inspection of the tunnels and try to gain some sense of where they might lead. The first one was so narrow that right from the opening I had to crawl. And then it just got narrower. Everything vanished into darkness behind me, since my body soon blocked the beam from my forehead lamp. The briefcase remained in my left hand, my drawn weapon in my right hand, while I wriggled forward on my elbows.
Soon both of my shoulders scraped against the tunnel walls, even though I was moving pretty much in a straight line. Just a few feet into the tunnel I could no longer turn around—the only way to get out would be to crawl backward, scrabbling like some sort of crustacean. Without warning my left elbow hung free and I lost my grip on the briefcase as it fell. The security strap alone stopped it from plummeting into the void. When I looked down to shine the light into the darkness, I could see no bottom.
Reversing out took more than twice as long as it had done to crawl in. The next tunnel too, working clockwise around the chamber, turned out to be the same sort of dead end. After perhaps sixty feet into an increasingly narrow passage, my lamp revealed an even darker oblivion. A different sort of structure than the level spray cement on the floor of the tunnel system suggested that this too would drop down into the underworld. With effort, I once again backed out. The palms of my hands became boiling hot in the attempt and blood appeared in the cracks of my knuckles. I was drenched in sweat, even though my watch showed that the temperature down here was only a few degrees above freezing.
The whole tunnel system seemed like a labyrinth of dead ends and hidden chutes. These were not natural geological hollows: the same people who had constructed the passages had also built in an intricate web to block anyone who did not know the correct route through them.
But two openings remained. Just as I had lain on my belly, my legs stretched behind me to start making my way in again, this time into the third tunnel, I felt something cold and smooth against the front of my right thigh. I crawled back out with caution and angled my light down.
At first I saw nothing—except that it was not blood, as I had at first thought and feared. Then I spotted the line, flush with the surface of the spray cement. A straight line of extinguished light diodes ran along the floor and disappeared into the tunnel. I ran my fingers over the glass I had felt through a tear in my combat pants.
Once again I lay prone and followed the line with my fingers. After just a few feet the diodes swung off in a semi-circle, around yet another abyss, before the tunnel continued on. I could not help nodding to myself in satisfaction. I had never before seen the problem of underground lighting solved in this way, high-tech and yet so old-fashioned at the same time.
I’d had no idea who or what I would find inside the tunnel, but certainly not this.
When I had wormed my way some hundred feet into the cavity, and carefully made my way around the abyss, the first bright red door appeared like a mirage in the gleam from my headlamp. Unlike the other cavities, this one gradually broadened out until I could stand up by the time I reached the control box, perfectly concealed inside one of the folds of the rock wall.