Happily a cable car was strung up the slope to the west of the dam. They got in a car and rose swiftly, getting an excellent view of the concrete incurve of the dam. Ear-poppingly tall. Hard to imagine someone saying Let’s put a dam here, let’s fill the air of this deep narrow valley with a concrete wall a thousand feet high.
At the upper station of the cable car they got out and walked through a long tunnel, a tunnel with open gallery sections on its left side that gave views down onto the reservoir behind the dam. Water the color of radiator antifreeze.
Then they were out of the tunnel and in a high shallow valley, headed west. Another narrow glacial valley, with a trail that ran up its floor next to a chuckling brook. Mary tromped up this trail wearily. It was a lot easier than hiking in crampons and snow boots, she had to admit, but she was out of gas. Knackered. It was a little embarrassing that her guards didn’t even seem to register it as effortful. Fucking Swiss and their fucking mountains. She had been outskied by three-year-olds who weren’t even using ski poles, zipping by her not even seeing her; why should she be surprised now, they were like the ibexes up here. Home ground. Rocky dusty trail. Green grassy slopes bordering the creekbed, rocky walls above the grass, high on the left, low on the right. Up and up, and up again. Grinding. She felt weak in her bones.
Then she noticed that the creek to her right was a dark brown color. Its clear water riffled quickly over a reddish-brown streambed. She looked closer; the creek was floored almost entirely by rusty nails. Nails, bolts, washers, nuts, L joints, other bits of small metal hardware, all of it a dark rich rusty brown, carpeting the creek bottom in a dense tangle, like mussels or sea urchins. It was like a vision in a dream, surreal such that she could scarce believe her eyes. She actually wondered if in her exhaustion she was seeing things.
What the hell’s that? she asked her minders, pointing.
They shrugged.
From the old days, Priska said.
What old days?
You will see.
Then they topped a rise and found themselves in a round high basin, a mountain wall to their left, green alp to their right. Grass covered the floor of the basin, along with rocks of all size, from small to house-sized, the big ones like dolmens in Ireland— and then she saw that some of these really were buildings, blank-walled cubes of concrete, doorless and featureless.
Then, as she looked around again, Mary saw that the cliff that walled off the basin to the south had inlaid into it three massive concrete doors, giant ovals perhaps fifteen or twenty meters high, and almost as wide. Like the blockhouses on the basin floor, these walls in the cliff were as blank as concrete could be.
What is this? Mary asked.
Military, Sibilla told her curtly.
Air force, Priska added, gesturing at the giant doors in the cliff as if that explained what she meant.
Civilians not actually allowed in this basin, they told her. No one comes here.
But we did? Mary said.
And then a small concrete door under the giant ones, so small Mary had not noticed it, opened from the inside. Her minders led her up and into it.
She followed them right into the mountain. One of the Swiss air force’s secret bases, she gathered; Priska had gone uncharacteristically silent. Mary had heard rumors about these places, everyone had. A rocket-launched jet facility, remnant of the Cold War, designed to repel Soviet invasion. If the Soviet tanks had rolled, these big doors in the mountainside would have opened and Swiss jets would have shot out like bolts from Wilhelm Tell’s crossbow. Swiss defense craziness: it wouldn’t be the first time.
And in fact the jets were still there, racked on their launch slides. Little things like cruise missiles with stubby wings and bubble cockpits. Obviously outdated and old-fashioned, like weapons from the set of a James Bond movie. New cruise missiles made these things look like rowboats in a marina. Like shillelaghs in a museum.
It was a newer kind of warfare, she thought wearily, that had gotten her invited into this hidden fortress. They weren’t just protecting her now, she guessed, nor her ministry; it was Switzerland itself under attack. This she gathered from the people there to greet her. The assault on the ministry had been part of a larger attack, one of them confirmed to her. Viruses had sabotaged not just the ministry’s computers but other UN agencies based in Switzerland, and more importantly, their banks. So it was an emergency; they were on a war footing now, but for this new kind of war, invisible and online for the most part, but also including the possibility of drones, and of fast targeted missiles.
So now defending her ministry was part of defending Switzerland. And as this museum fortress served to show, the Swiss were very intent to defend themselves. Small country in a big world, as was explained to her by a Swiss military man as he escorted her along a big tunnel to a conference room deeper inside the mountain. Unusual things became necessary. He introduced himself; turned out he was the country’s defense minister.
She sat down at a long table, suppressing a groan of relief, and was joined by a circle of officials. Such a relief to sit down, her legs were throbbing. She glanced around the room; it was broad and low-ceilinged, its long back wall made of the green-black gneiss of the mountain itself, cut and polished like an immense facet of semi-precious stone. Overhead a ceiling that seemed to be white ceramic glowed everywhere with a powerful diffuse luminosity.
Mary felt her face burning, knew by that feeling that she was sunburnt and trail-dusted. Wiped out: Alpenverbraucht, Priska had called it. Alp-wasted. She
