Vaughn put the rifle down as he spotted a door on the side of the unit facing to the west. None of the other units had had such a door. He went to it and tried the handle. It was locked.
Tai came up. "What do you think?" she asked, nodding toward the door.
"We haven't found them yet," Vaughn said. He grabbed one of the.45 pistols and loaded it. Then he went to the door and fired three rounds through the lock, startling the others.
"Damn, what's wrong with you?" Logan demanded.
Vaughn ignored them as he shoved the door open. He shined his flashlight through, revealing a large ice chamber, about one hundred feet wide by two hundred long. He immediately saw six crates, four of them very large, two of them somewhat smaller. Stenciled on the outside were the words: MACHINED GOODS. Beyond those six crates were numerous smaller crates, stacked on top of each other, filling the entire space.
Pure bullshit, Vaughn thought as he walked up to one of the large crates. He turned and grabbed a bayonet off one of the shelves. He pulled the blade free and went up to the nearest large crate, placed the point under it and, putting his body weight on it, levered up. With a loud screech the top moved a half an inch.
"What did you find?" Logan asked as he and Tai came in and watched.
"I don't know," Vaughn grunted as he pushed again. He slid the blade around and carefully applied pressure every foot or so. Slowly the top lifted. Vaughn put his fingers under the lid and pulled up. The top popped off, and he pushed it to the side. A large, gray, cylindrical object, rounded at one end and with fins at the other, was inside, resting on a wood cradle.
"They put a fucking bomb in here?" Logan exclaimed.
Vaughn bent over to examine it with a growing feeling of coldness in his stomach. Lansale's papers had indicated this would be what they found, but he hadn't truly believed it. A serial number was stamped on a small metal plate, halfway down the casing. Vaughn read the ID and then slowly straightened.
"It's an MK-17 thermonuclear weapon," he said. He pointed with the bayonet at the other three large cases. "Four altogether."
"Fuck," Logan said.
"What's in the smaller two cases marked 'Heavy Equipment'?" Tai asked. "And the rest?"
"Probably not party supplies," Vaughn said as he went over to one. He pried it open. Another, smaller, bomb. He checked the serial number. "Each nuclear weapon has a special serial number-this one also has the proper designator for a nuclear weapon. If I remember rightly, this looks like an MK/B 61, which is a pretty standard nuclear payload for planes back in the fifties." He looked back at Logan in the dim light cast by their flashlights. "You may know something about nuclear reactors, but I know about nuclear weapons, and that's a goddamn nuclear weapon."
"How do you know so much about nuclear weapons?" Logan asked as he came over and looked into the crate.
Vaughn pointed his flashlight at the bomb. "I was on a nuke team for a little while when I first arrived in the 10th Special Forces Group. A nuke team had the mission to emplace a tactical ADM-that's atomic demolitions munitions. We were supposed to infiltrate behind enemy lines, put the bomb in the right spot, arm it and then get the hell out before it blew."
"What about the rest of the crates?" Tai asked.
Vaughn walked to the stacks of crates past the bombs. There were at least a thousand of these of varying sizes and shapes. He opened one and saw three paintings, carefully wrapped inside. He glanced at Tai. "The Golden Lily. Or at least part of it."
Logan whistled as he broke open a small crate and pulled out a bar of gold. "There must be millions of dollars worth of stuff here."
"Yo!" Burke called out. He was farther in the cavern and pointing at a stack of crates. They had swastikas stenciled on the sides. "How the hell did these get here?"
"Who knows?" Vaughn said as he pried open the top to one. He froze when he saw what was inside.
"What the hell is that?"
Vaughn carefully pulled out one of the gray metal canisters. "Sarin nerve agent. The Nazis developed it during the war." He looked around. There were at least twenty similar crates. "God knows what other deadly stuff is in here, mixed with the treasure." He put the canister back in the crate.
"There's enough WMD stuff in here-" Tai began, then shook her head. "This is a cluster-fuck. Why would someone put all this here? And how did it get here? I think MacIntosh would have said something to us if he'd seen any of this coming in."
"These two newer nukes had to be put in here in the sixties or seventies," Vaughn said. "Lansale must have kept moving stuff down here over the years."
"But why?" Tai asked.
"Got me," Vaughn responded.
Logan seemed mesmerized by the cold gray steel of the nuclear weapon. "You said you knew quite a bit about nuclear weapons. Can that thing be detonated?"
Vaughn closed his eyes briefly, trying to remember. "There are a lot of safeties on a nuclear weapon. We used to have to pass a test every three months that required us to flawlessly complete forty-three separate steps to emplace and arm our nuke.
"On your standard nuclear weapon you've got an enable plug, ready/safe switch, separation timer, pulse thermal batteries, pulse battery actuator, time delay switch, and a whole bunch of other things that all have to be done correctly. Despite all that, though, if someone knows what they're doing, and they have enough time to tinker with it, I have no doubt that they could initiate it, except for one thing. You can't even begin without-" He stopped and blinked.
"What one thing?" Tai asked, finally looking up from the bomb.
Vaughn turned and headed out of the unit.
"Where are you going?" Logan yelled. When he didn't answer, they followed.
Vaughn made his way directly to the mess hall. Brothers looked up as he stormed in and grabbed the blue binder off the counter. He thumbed through, turning to the index. He had started reading it from the beginning when he'd found it earlier and only gotten halfway through. Now he ran his finger down the index as the others crowded around. It stopped at a section labeled: EMERGENCY PROCEDURES.
Vaughn rapidly flipped through until he found the section. There was a page that referred them to the operating manual for the reactor in the power room if there were any problems with it. The second page talked about getting the tractors out of the east ice storage room using the ramps. The third page was a handwritten note. Vaughn recognized the handwriting from the note that had been taped to the outside of the binder:
THE PALS AND ARMING INSTRUCTIONS ARE IN THE SAFE.
LANSALE.
Vaughn closed his eyes. "Oh fuck!"
"What does that mean?" Tai asked as she looked over his shoulder.
Vaughn opened his eyes and looked at her. "Let's go out in the hallway." He led Tai and Logan out, taking the binder with him. "As I was telling you-if someone knows what they're doing, they can get by all the safeties on those bombs but one. The first and most critical safety is the permissive access link, or PAL. That's the code that allows you to even begin to arm the bomb. The code and bomb are never kept together, for security reasons. The MK/B has a multiple code six-digit, coded switch with limited try followed by lockout. That means you get two shots at the right codes, and if you get it wrong both times, you don't get a third shot-the bomb shuts down."
Vaughn stabbed his finger down at the paper. "Except it appears that the PALs for those two newer bombs are here in the base." He turned back to the index and scanned. "Here." He turned to the correct page, where a diagram of a unit was displayed. "The safe with the PAL codes and arming instructions is located in Unit A2."
CHAPTER 10
Antarctica
"Latest weather from McMurdo calls for at least another twenty-four to forty-eight hours of this storm," Brothers informed the group gathered around the mess table. "I took a look outside about ten minutes ago and couldn't see more than five feet from the door. The wind is howling out there."