Slowly and grimly all five nodded. There was a terrible silence in the elevator. Deep inside Vickers' soul, something was screaming that it wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. He knew the voice well. He had heard it before in several dozen firefights but he couldn't remember when he'd heard it so insistent. He trusted that, when the action started, it would be muffled by pumping adrenaline. The elevator stopped, the doors sighed open and the silence was swallowed by the echoing crash of marching feet. The huge freight elevators were coming down loaded with men and materiel withdrawing from the surface. Jeeps and armored cars were driven off the platforms and parked in rows on the other side of the giant manmade cavern. On previous visits, Vickers had wondered about the first level. It had seemed so vast and bare and empty. Now he realized that it was a parking lot for an army. Even Parkwood seemed stunned.
"I can hardly believe this."
In some ways it was like a withdrawal. They were unmistakably in retreat but hardly defeated. This was no shattered army. It was clean and neat and orderly; it had fought no battle but the air of depression was unmistakable. Lines of gray-uniformed troops and blue-and-brown-uniformed workers waited patiently for internal transport to take them further into the bowels of the bunker. The fear was so intense that Vickers could almost taste it but the discipline was holding. Every few yards an armed soldier watched the slow processions that snaked from the elevators, looking for any kind of irregularity that might spark a panic. The five spread out, doing their best to look as though they were reinforcing the uniformed guards but secretly feeling a little redundant. Then, over on Vickers' right, a man started screaming. At first it was completely wordless but gradually it formed into words.
"No! No! No! No! I don't want to! I don't want to!"
Vickers knew exactly what he meant. A couple of soldiers moved toward him. Abruptly, the man stopped shouting and bolted. He was running directly toward Debbie. She didn't hesitate. Her shotgun roared. The man spun and sprawled in a bloody splatter. All over the area, guns were up. Would the single moment of hysteria trigger a stampede? Three soldiers ran up and threw a tarpaulan over the body. The lines started to move again. Moments later, the speakers came on. The voice was carefully measured as if its owner was only just managing to maintain his control.
"For the last five minutes, communications have been lost with the entire continent of Europe. Satellite reports are still coming in but observers in the air report huge fountains of smoke and dust erupting not only from Germany but from France, Italy, Spain and the British Isles. Early estimates place the number of nuclear explosions somewhere in the region of two dozen."
Vickers found himself illogically wondering if it had been day or night over there. The lines of uniformed men and women kept on moving. It was as if everyone was in a trance. Fenton walked to where Vickers was standing.
"You think they'll seal the bunker now?"
Vickers blinked. Maybe he was the one in the trance.
"Say what?"
"You think they'll seal the bunker now?"
Vickers shook his head. "No, they'll wait a while yet. They'll get in as many bigwigs as possible. The Pope and the rest."
"And we'll wait too."
"That's always the way of it."
They waited for two hours and then for two hours more. The public address bulletins came fewer and further between. As a substitute someone began to pipe in music to the first level. Mainly it was more of the doom and gloom electronics that they'd been treated to on level four but at one point someone had slipped in Gene Kelly's "Singing in the Rain." It was yanked, however, after the first couple of verses and, for a full five minutes, sinister silence prevailed before the mood electronics returned. The flow of people and equipment coming down from the surface gradually diminished. In the fifth hour it came down to little more than a trickle. NCOs and officers started pulling out the uniformed guards but nobody made any attempt to relieve the security group. Also, nobody had bothered to send the clean-up crew for the man whom Debbie had shot. With nothing to do, the five gathered in a small, complaining group. Even in the face of global twilight it was still possible to complain. The body simply remained where it had fallen, covered by its makeshift shroud. By the end of the sixth hour, they were the only people left, apart from a couple of maintenance crews working on the parked vehicles.
"You think that we've been forgotten?"
An air of desolation was creeping across the hollow, echoing area. An elevator platform came to rest with a giant's cough. Its only passenger was a soldier in a jeep. Eggy beckoned and yelled at her.
"Hey you!"
The soldier spun the wheel and drove over to where they were standing.
"You want something?"
"What's going on on the surface?"
The woman pushed back her helmet and shrugged.
"Pretty much of nothing. There's only a skeleton missile crew out there. Everybody else is inside."
"And there's nothing happening? No explosions, no mushroom clouds or nothing?"
The soldier shook her head.
"Sun's going down peaceful as you like."
"You wouldn't see anything, Eggy. Not unless they'd nuked Las Vegas."
The soldier leaned on her steering wheel.
"You really think that this is it?"
The five all looked at her as though the question wasn't worth answering. She nodded, pulled down her helmet, put the jeep into gear and gunned it away to where the other vehicles were parked.
The music faded. The group looked at each other, the silent question "What now?" After a pause of some thirty seconds the speakers came to life again.
"A number of reports are coming in of further Soviet missle launches. The Trans-America space station has observed over eighty rockets lifting from sights to the south of the Zhigansk on the Arctic Circle in the Yakut region of Siberia. These firings are located too far to the east to be targeted on the European conflict. They can logically only be multi-warhead ICBMs targeted on North America."
"Jesus Christ."
Instinctively the group moved close together. The vehicle maintenance crews had stopped work. They were walking away from their vehicles out into the open, staring up at the speakers in the roof. There was a brief burst of music and then a new voice came on.
"This is Anthony Lloyd-Ransom and I'm talking to you directly because I see no way to minimize what I have to say. Unless we have been misinformed to a point that would scarcely seem possible, the world is advancing into global thermo-nuclear war and there is no way out. If we do not receive confirmation of some attempt at a cease-fire or strategic pullback in the next few minutes, I shall seal the bunker. I know it seems scarcely possible to believe but we now have to face the strong possibility that the future of mankind may, at any moment, be placed in our hands. If this is the case we are about to receive a truly awesome responsibility. We have to rise and accept it. I am well aware that it's impossible to divorce ourselves from the situation on the surface. I know that you are all afraid that, as I speak, we may be losing friends and loved ones, that cities we know and love are being consumed by firestorms."
Vickers sneezed. "I think there's tranquilizers being pumped into the air conditioning."
"Shut up, Vickers, don't you have no respect?"
Lloyd-Ransom's voice boomed on.
"The administration of this bunker expects, hard as it may be, that you set these considerations aside and rise to the monumental task thaf now confronts us. The thing that I ask will certainly tax us to the limits of our humanity. We are entering a valley of shadow the enormity of which no one has ever experienced. Our sole responsibility is to survive. The means to that survival will be our discipline and our sense of duty. The task will be long and arduous but I am confident that every one of you will find inside him or herself the strength to fight the sense of despair that will undoubtedly come upon us. We are going into a dark and terrible night and I pray that both God and our own strength will go with us."