I opened the lid of the box—another replica of those outside our own underground facilities—and punched in the same code as before: twenty-nine numbers and four letters. One by one, the massive protective doors opened.
I made a quick tactical calculation. Tried to evaluate alternatives in a situation where most of the variables could not be quantified. I had to work with “the unknown”, as Edelweiss had taught us.
A tunnel remained to be explored, one which could lead us further. But for now the code had worked. Had let me into the fallout shelter: as good a signal as any. On the other hand, the idea of shutting myself up in here, inside a minuscule dug-out deep down inside the bed-rock, was not easy to accept.
In the end, the thought of threats from outside—from the rest of the Team, from the President’s own men, or even from the people who had once built this enormous system—decided things for me. With difficulty I first dragged the Nurse and then the packs in through the tunnel. When I had pulled shut the last of the security doors, a normal gas-lock door with a pressure seal, I tried again to enter the code on the control panel just to the right, inside the entrance. The five diodes spun around for an eternity before stopping on “ERROR”. However much I tried pressing the buttons, tearing at the handle of the security door, heaving and yelling.
That was when, for the first time, I vomited, into a drain on the floor. In part because of the extreme violence, using the Nurse as weapon; after all my years of service, nausea often washed over me at times like these. In part from physical exhaustion, from the exertion of fleeing with such a heavy load for such a long time. But also because of the predicament I found myself in: locked behind monstrously thick doors in this tiny fallout shelter.
I had been all alone above ground. Now I found myself alone again, except for the unconscious Nurse—but this time precisely 253.3 feet down in the bed-rock.
1.06
So I just sat there and waited for Alpha, hoping against hope that this place was where we were to meet, at the exact depth given in the encrypted message. I had no choice but to believe.
After a while I took a notebook from my pack and started to scribble, to sketch out my story for you to read in posterity, the chronicle which you now have in your hands, which you must have stumbled on or managed to track down. My account of how it started, and perhaps how it ended.
When it was past 18.00, and I had managed to get some way into my record, the Nurse was still lying there, more or less unconscious. I tried to coax some water into her—at the same time I myself drank as much as I dared, without having the slightest idea how long we would be stuck down here, and ate the first of the crunch crackers from my pack. Most of the water I tried to feed the Nurse ran off her closed lips. When I tried with care to prize open her mouth, to get at least something down her throat, she had a violent coughing fit, although she remained unconscious. Maybe I would have to open the Nurse’s own medical pack and put a drip in her, although I was not sure it was worth the trouble.
Everything felt shut off, as if already part of history. The briefcase stood next to me, never more than two feet away, but now seemed more than anything like a dead weight. All this advanced technology had lost its meaning in this long-abandoned shelter, where it would be impossible to have it connect.
Nevertheless I decided to give it a try. Seen from the outside, the briefcase was not much to look at. The shell was made from tough aluminum encased in black leather and its spacious interior was surprising. But it was human nature to draw comparisons between things, to use metaphors whenever possible. So the briefcase was to this day still known as the nuclear football, even though the war plan codenamed “Dropkick”, from which the nickname came, had been scrapped decades earlier.
The first step, just to be able to open the briefcase, had its own ritual. Not only the correct biometric information, but the correct way of handling the thing. You were supposed to apply simultaneous pressure, firm but light, with eight fingers plus a thumb to the invisible points on the front of the briefcase, splay your hands as unnaturally as a concert pianist. The classic combination lock was a dummy. Designed to tempt unauthorized persons to put their fingers in the wrong place, which would send the briefcase into lockdown mode at once. In other words: impossible to open even for me. After each time we practiced dealing with enemy attempts to take the briefcase, it always reset itself with different codes and pressure points.
There must after all have been some sort of network in the fallout shelter, something which allowed the briefcase to connect with the database—because the briefcase now opened with its usual soft whining sound.
With reverence I stared into the briefcase, for the first time since my escape from the Team. The world’s most important object: torn from its habitual surroundings.
Everything was in its place despite my heavy fall down into the chamber. The four analog documents in their cut-to-measure foam-rubber compartments. Sacred, surrounded by myth, but hopelessly dated even decades ago. The book with the wax-cloth cover containing the out-of-date operational options for use in case of extreme crisis, thumbed by ten Presidents before the current one. The plastic-covered folder with the typewritten list of underground bases to which our Commander-in-chief could be taken when the alert level was at RED or LILAC. The faded note of information from 1965 describing the structure of the nuclear weapons system. The plastic counter with the secret codes the President was to use when he identified himself to Centcom—“the biscuit”.
The thinking was that they would only be used if he lost the chip with the codes which he was meant to always carry on his person. But since every one of our heads of state had managed to mislay that object on some occasion, even as one sock always vanishes in the washing machine, we had had to keep “the biscuit” until the present day.
According to our current war plan, this digital technology side-by-side with fading paper and a plastic counter would make the briefcase even harder for an enemy to understand, if seized.
Much of the hidden lower level of the briefcase consisted of the matte-black metal keyboard. Not even that was particularly noteworthy: a classic standard model conforming to M.I.L-S.T.D.-810 G tests including Explosive Atmosphere, Pyroshock and Freezing Rain.
What distinguished the keyboard was its inside, its functionality and capacity. Everything it was able to control.
To get at the keyboard, I folded up the hooks in each of the four corners of the foam-rubber layer and with care lifted it and our analog information out. You could not see anything underneath, just a leather covering, as if the briefcase ended there.
And few parts of our body are as hard for us to control as our little fingers—which was why it was only thanks to them that I managed the next step. It had taken years to control them in the same way as index fingers, to make that evolutionary leap. It needed months of effort to work up my strength there, in an exercise as demeaning as it was refined; Edelweiss called it “The Waltz of the Little Fingers”.
So I now pressed eleven three-digit sequences, using both little fingers at the same time with measured movements on the nodes on what appeared to be the bottom of the briefcase. The protective panel slid to the sides and revealed the keyboard. Once I had keyed in the rest of the initial codes, the metal screen on the inside of the lid also slid to the right, with a vivid red circle appearing on the screen. I looked straight into it. The iris recognition system was the last step in the security procedures: they had become more elaborate with time, as the briefcase became a kind of autonomous command module.