‘No, everything was arranged at very short notice, and I didn’t think to ask. So, there’s even more of this place?’
Kern grinned. ‘Oh, there’s more! I’ll give you the tour personally. Log them in,’ he told one of the men nearby, before beckoning for Nina and Eddie to follow him. ‘Normally we’d take your phone and any other electronic devices, but you’ve got top clearance, so no need to worry.’ That raised a warning flag in Nina’s mind: why would Dalton have gone the extra mile for them? ‘This way, please. I think you’ll be impressed.’
He led them to a golf-cart-like yellow buggy nearby, the guards heading back to the cabins. Nina sat in the front passenger seat beside the officer, Eddie behind her. ‘So just how big is this place?’ she asked as Kern set the little electric vehicle in motion.
‘This level? One point two million square feet of floor space, more or less. And it’s not even the biggest. There are twelve levels in all.’
‘Fu— Gee, that’s a hell of a size,’ said Eddie — though it came out as ‘a hail arf a sars’.
Nina shot him a sharp look. ‘When was it built? For that matter,
‘They started construction in 1954,’ Kern told her. ‘It was designed as a way to ensure that the United States had a second-strike nuclear capability — no matter what the Soviets managed to achieve with a first strike against us, we’d have a backup bomber force able to be launched against them from a hidden base days or even weeks later. Problem was, by the time Silent Peak actually came online both sides had put ICBMs into service, making long-range nuclear bombers obsolete. So the base became a strategic reserve.’ He indicated the aircraft across the hangar. ‘Basically, it’s a storage facility.’
‘Lark the boneyaahds in Arizonah,’ said Eddie, referring to the huge desert ranges filled with mothballed planes.
‘Not quite — the vehicles there are just as likely to be scrapped or stripped for parts as returned to service. Everything stored here at Silent Peak can be made combat-ready within forty-eight hours, if needed. You’ll see our inventory on the way down.’
Nina looked ahead past lines of trucks and Humvees, but didn’t see anything that looked like a ramp or elevators, only a large black square on the hangar floor. ‘How do we get— Oh.’ Her eyes went wide as she realised what she was looking at.
The square wasn’t on the floor, but set into it, a separate entity. A gigantic elevator shaft.
‘Isn’t that something?’ said Kern, pride in his voice. ‘It’s two hundred and sixty feet on a side, and can bring a fully laden B-52 up from the lowest level in under five minutes. So I’m told, anyway. I’ve never seen it move anything that big myself — I only took command here last year.’
‘That’s… quite a thing, yes,’ Nina agreed. She wondered what future archaeologists, as far removed from the present as she was from the heyday of Atlantis, would make of Silent Peak. Would they have any comprehension of its original deadly purpose and the ideological conflict that spawned it?
She put such musings aside as Kern steered the buggy towards one corner of the open shaft. A metal cage marked a section roughly ten feet square. ‘Passenger elevator,’ the colonel explained as he pulled up alongside it. ‘There’s one at each corner of the shaft. It can be a bit unsettling, but it’s a lot easier than taking the emergency stairs. Okay, step aboard.’ The trio dismounted from the buggy, Kern opening a gate in the cage and walking through on to a platform with handrails round its edge. Once Nina and Eddie were on the platform, he closed the gate and went to a control panel. ‘The repository is on the lowest level.’
‘The depths of the earth,’ Nina remarked.
‘Yeah, you could say that. Some people say that if you listen hard enough, you can hear Satan himself at work underneath.’ Kern laughed briefly, then pushed a button. ‘Okay, here we go. Hold on.’
The platform dropped from the cage into a massive vertical shaft that fell away into oblivion. Nina instinctively recoiled from the edge, vertigo rising.
‘Don’t worry, Dr Wilde,’ said Kern. ‘It’s perfectly safe. Nobody’s fallen down it — at least, not on my watch!’
‘I think I’d still prefer more solid railings,’ she said. ‘Or, y’know, walls…’
The lift continued its journey. Great vertical tracks ran down the shaft’s sides; guides for the as yet unseen main elevator platform. At widely spaced intervals below were bands of light in the darkness marking the entrances to the base’s other levels. From the look of it, the repository could be almost half a mile underground. Even in the vastness of the shaft, the thought gave Nina a claustrophobic shudder.
The first level was approaching. ‘Take a look at that,’ said Kern, gesturing towards the hangar as it came into view.
It was full of aircraft. Bombers, the long, sinister charcoal-grey forms of a dozen, two dozen, more, B-52s packed into the space like lethal sardines. The eight engines of each plane were shrouded, the sleeping giants awaiting a new call to action.
‘That’s… that’s a lot of planes,’ Nina said. She hadn’t taken in the full meaning of the term ‘strategic reserve’ until now. Just because a weapon was old didn’t mean it was useless.
‘That’s only one level. We’ve got another three floors of Buffs—’
‘Buffs?’
‘Big Ugly Fat Fu— uh, Fellows,’ Eddie told her.
The colonel smiled. ‘Three more floors of them, plus we’ve got Eagles, Hornets, Warthogs…’
‘Sounds more like a zoo than a military facility,’ said Nina.
‘Ha! Yeah, I guess. And then we’ve got choppers, and a lot more general equipment — trucks, jeeps, bulldozers, that kind of thing. And more tanks than you can shake a stick at.’
‘My tax dollars at work.’ Even in 1950s money, the cost of excavating Silent Peak must have been as huge as the base itself.
They passed the hangar and continued down. The next level contained more B-52s, with Huey utility helicopters nestled in amongst the colossi; the hangar below was packed with fighter aircraft. Then more bombers, this time joined by a trio of coal-black SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. Never mind the base, Nina thought — the value of the mothballed hardware it contained was equally mind-blowing.
A sound reached them from below, the echoing rumble of an idling engine. Its source was revealed as they approached the eleventh level. The main elevator platform, an enormous metal expanse almost filling the width of the shaft, waited here; the hangar itself was filled with precisely lined rows of M60 tanks. One of the armoured vehicles was surrounded by portable lighting rigs, a pair of men working on its open engine compartment. Wide flexible hoses snaked across the floor, drawing its exhaust fumes into a large extractor vent. ‘Routine maintenance,’ Kern explained as they continued to descend, passing through the complex web of girders forming the platform’s supporting structure. ‘Like I said, everything here is kept ready for action. If we needed to, we could have a couple dozen of those babies rolling out of here by tonight.’
‘Let’s hope we never need to,’ said Nina. The elevator drew closer to its final destination. She moved back to the railing, eager to see what the lowest level contained…
The sheer scale of what met her eyes was astounding. Despite the size of the rest of the base, it was in essence nothing more than a very large parking structure. The twelfth floor, however, was home to something vastly more complex.
The repository was a library — but beyond anything Nina had ever seen. The stacks were arranged in a grid, stretching away seemingly to infinity. And the shelf units were not built on a human scale; they were easily thirty feet high.
It quickly became clear that the whole place was not intended to be directly accessed by humans at all. Between the stacks ran a network of tracks, along which ran towering robotic forklifts. She had seen similar devices before: Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems, designed to collect specific items from large archives and deliver them to a central point. But the system at Silent Peak was several orders of magnitude larger and more complicated than anything she had encountered in academia.
‘My God,’ she said, genuinely awed. ‘How big is this place? There must be miles of shelves!’
‘Something like three hundred miles, if they were all laid end to end,’ said Kern as the platform stopped. ‘But Dr Ogleby can give you the exact details. I just work here.’ He opened another gate so they could exit the elevator, then led them to one of several cabins nearby. It was marked with a sign:
