He stayed where he had fallen, reaching for his gun and then keeping dead still and quiet. There were distant noises of men at work along the tunnel — and he’d been right, it was a tunnel — where he could see a faint glow of light; but in his sector there was absolute stillness. He listened for five minutes, ears attuned to catch any near-by sound and react instantly. Then he reached into his pocket for his torch and, shielding the end with his hand so that it gave only a dim red glow, he shone it around. Faintly he could see sheer rock, jagged rock, all round him — above, below, and on both sides. Moving his fingers to let through more light, he directed the beam upward, saw how uneven the clearance was. In parts the roof was barely visible, in other parts there was little more than three to four feet between roof and floor, and the lateral measurements also seemed to vary quite considerably. In the roof near the air-shaft he saw a heavy block of concrete mounted on rails which ran across the opening — possibly another sealing device — and on the ground was an electric motor, presumably for moving that heavy slab.
Somehow the whole aspect of the place gave Shaw the impression of being natural rather than man-made, neither blasted nor excavated but formed, perhaps, by some freak internal movement of the earth’s crust, maybe millions of years back in pre-history. He flashed the torch along the tunnel away from where the sounds of men working were coming. Nothing there, just blankness and the heat — enervating, frightening heat. He sweltered. He judged the temperature to be in the region of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, possibly more, and that must mean that he was a devil of a long way down into the earth. He got up and walked along the tunnel for a little way, sweat pouring off him at every step. The place seemed to go on and on into the blank emptiness and after fifty yards or so he turned back, faint now with the loss of body-moisture. He wondered how the men kept at work down here; his clothing felt just as though he’d had a steaming hot bath in it.
He struggled on back and went beyond the air-shaft, making in the opposite direction now, cautiously and slowly, towards the human sounds and the faint light in the distance.
Just beyond the air-shaft the tunnel seemed to narrow again and take a very slight left turn, and beyond this the gangway was down to no more than two or three feet. And in a moment, as his shaded torch swung round, he saw why. The whole place, higher here, was stacked from top to bottom with row upon row of shining metal objects, cone-shaped, sinister.
Shaw examined them.
He had never seen anything like them, couldn’t identify them. They bore no markings whatsoever. Going on, he found that this stack continued, tightly stowed, into the far distances of the tunnel… there must be hundreds of thousands of them if the stowage continued right the way along to the sea-tower at the end; these must be what those lorries had brought. As he went along slowly, he found that the canisters varied in size and shape. Some were cone-shaped as he had already seen, some were oblong, others square; there were some enormous finned objects which looked more like conventional guided missiles and must have needed mechanical handling to get them in place. Whatever else this place might be in addition, it was most certainly a store all right. That part of it was perfectly genuine, and all this stuff would be quite safe down here so far under the earth, safe against any imaginable attack. It was so damned logical, he thought… and it was logical, too, to keep the place as secret as possible.
Getting nearer now to the work going on ahead, he removed his heavy boots and slung them around his neck, put on the rubbersoled shoes from under his windcheater, and then went on again in dead silence towards the pool of bright light. The tunnel stretched away ahead, endlessly. Thinking back to the surface he estimated that it must be a good five miles all the way to the tower itself… five miles of those weird contraptions. What in God’s name could they be? Were they some diabolic new weapon, could the tower in fact be some brand-new missile-launching platform, would it perhaps spray these containers out over Europe, in close but spreading formation on the principle of a sporting gun, or the old “Hedgehog” anti-submarine weapon that had been used by the Allied navies back in World War II?
On the other side of the coin, of course, it could simply be the site for some big new underground test explosions, with no immediately hostile intent whatever.
Had Rudintsev imagined things, had rumour bred rumour and the wild stories mounted until this place had become a mystery and, as such, a potential threat in the mind only? No… too many sane people had sensed something in the air. Godov wouldn’t be misled by baseless rumour, for one, and then there were all the outward and visible signs of a coup d’état in progress. If this tunnel was innocent that needn’t necessarily be connected, of course, but…
Again no. There had been too many pointers. There was a threat all right, and this had to be the hub of it.
Shaw walked on slowly, his gun in his hand. Soon he could see men working, most of them stark naked, some with trousers only, in that narrow gangway, could hear orders being shouted in hectoring voices. There were women too, working alongside the men, their naked bodies glistening in the light. It was a quite fantastic scene of slave labour. Only the whips were missing. Shaw sensed a feverishness in the air, as though the men were working desperately against time, stacking more and more of those shining metal cases, sweat running off their naked bodies so that they gave the effect of working in a glass fishbowl. Some way ahead, Shaw fancied, the big stack came to an end — so perhaps they had only quite recently started stowing these things and were now working round the clock to get the job finished.
Suddenly some of the lights went out ahead and one more whole section was in darkness. Beyond that, far beyond now, the work was as intense as ever. Shaw pushed on quietly, not hurrying. It seemed as though, when each section was filled, the lights went out and the workers moved on. After a time Shaw came to the second of the air-shafts, the first of those inside the military area, and this too had its fan switched
off and all was silent as the grave, silent and hot, stifling. No doubt this shaft was screwed down as well, lead-sealed from the fresh air above…
Shaw’s thoughts were nipped off then. He had seen the light moving towards him.
Sixteen
He was only just in time.
Someone was coming back along that tunnel with a light on a wandering lead. Shaw looked round quickly for somewhere to hide; there wasn’t anywhere. Doing the only thing he could he dodged back beneath the air-shaft and crouched down in the lee of the stacked canisters where the stowage had been discontinued to leave the space below the shaft free of encumbrances.
Still as death, he waited.
Two men and a woman came past, naked like so many of the others and following their leader, who wore the peaked cap of a Red Army officer. Without looking into the recess the officer said in Russian, “We will close the western shaft first, then come back to this one.”
“Yes, Comrade Major.”
They went straight on and in the back-glow from the electric bulb Shaw’s eyes followed the woman who was in the rear of the line, saw her swelling, pointed breasts, her long flanks ridged with muscle and the perspiration glistening on a bottom as small as a boy’s. Hard work in this filthy atmosphere would keep anyone slim enough… as the procession went past Shaw caught the acrid tang of body-sweat, sharp yet heavy on the air. They passed on into the darkness, back along the tunnel where he had been himself earlier. Again there was silence; Shaw wondered what his next move should be. If he went on, he would be caught in a sandwich between the working mob ahead and those three when they came back. Yet he couldn’t stay here, obviously. “Closing the shaft” no doubt meant swinging across that heavy concrete