to the bottom, rolled it back up, and said, “Thirty-five feet.” Fisher gave her a nod. They set up a secure line, and one by one descended down to the bottom of the shaft courtesy of a Swiss seat rappelling harness that Gillespie had tied off for them. She was first to descend, and Hansen pulled up the rear.
Gillespie’s LED flashlight revealed a roughly triangular room, about ten feet wide, with ceilings angling up and more vent grating overhead and in the middle of the floor. Warm air blew past them and rushed up through the shaft, and from somewhere above, Hansen detected the faint hum of machinery. Fisher moved ahead to a door, eased it open, vanished a moment, then returned with the news: He’d checked a circuit panel and some lights were on somewhere. They were in a utility room, and judging from the size of the panel the place was damned big.
Fisher also said a service tag on the panel read “March 1962.”
Valentina guessed they were in a Cold War bunker or some kind of test facility.
“Either or both,” Fisher said. He suggested they pair up and do a little recon. Hansen would branch off with Gillespie, while Valentina and Noboru would serve as a second team.
That left Fisher alone, and Hansen voiced his concern.
Fisher grinned. “I’ll get by.”
Hansen was almost embarrassed by the question. He’d grown so used to working with his teammates that it suddenly seemed unnatural for a Splinter Cell to be working alone. With a curt nod, Hansen turned back and headed off with Gillespie.
40
Once Hansen and Gillespie left the utility room, they came into a wide corridor with a low ceiling barely seven feet high. The floor was painted with faded red, yellow, and green lines that fanned out away from them, not unlike the lines Hansen had seen on some hospital floors. Three-letter Cyrillic acronyms were stenciled onto each line. They donned their night-vision goggles and took Fisher’s order to head down the corridor to the left. Noboru and Valentina fell in behind.
They moved quickly down the hall, keeping tight to the wall, rifles at the ready, until Hansen spotted something and called for Fisher to come to their position.
They were staring at a map of the complex, protected by a sheet of dust-covered Plexiglas. Cobwebs extended up from the sign and rose to the ceiling. Hansen wiped a gloved hand across the glass. The complex was shaped like a cloverleaf with four concentric circles at its center. A label read RAMPS TO LEVELS 2, 3, 4. Each leaf was marked as a zone, and each zone was divided into four areas interconnected by more corridors.
“Medical, electronics, weapons, ballistics,” said Gillespie, reading the labels for each zone. “It’s a test facility.” She hoisted her brows at Valentina, who’d made that guess earlier on. Valentina nodded curtly.
“I assume ballistics means missiles and rockets,” Gillespie added.
Fisher nodded, and Hansen glanced over at Noboru, who said, “This place is massive. Take a look at the scale.”
Hansen watched as Fisher used his thumb and finger to check the map’s gradated line, then measure the complex from one end to the other. “Twelve hundred meters.”
With his jaw falling open, Hansen said, “That can’t be. That makes it a square mile.”
Valentina shook her head. “Four levels.
Fisher squinted hard at the map, deep in thought. “Ballistics and electronics. If you were experimenting, you’d want access to water for cooling and fire suppression.”
Hansen agreed.
“We’ll clear it as it’s laid out, by zone and level, starting here and moving down.”
He assigned Hansen to the medical zone, Valentina to electronics, Gillespie to weapons, and Noboru to ballistics.
“I’ll loiter at the ramp area and play free safety. Questions?”
They were good to go and started off, but not before discovering a freestanding elevator shaft that Hansen thought might lead up to the “meteorological” hut they’d found in the meadow. Fisher took up a position beside the ramp railing while everyone else split up.
Hansen picked his way down to the medical zone, the corridor festooned by overhead piping that dripped here and there. He ventured about two hundred yards farther and came to a pair of doors marked with a laboratory number. He tried the handle: open.
Tightening his grip on his rifle, Hansen eased the door open, braced himself, and slipped inside, sweeping the rifle over what was, in fact, another, shorter corridor with doors on both sides. Hansen poked his head inside the first open door and saw a laboratory with workbenches, sink area, rolling stools, and complicated networks of Pyrex tubing, test tubes, and beakers. He shoved up his goggles and flicked on his small LED flashlight. Gray metal shelving lined the walls. On the shelves were large glass jars filled with a yellow liquid. Hansen drew closer, wiped the dust from one of the jars, and something inside it shifted and pressed against the glass.
Hansen blinked hard. Cursed.
Was that a tiny human head? A nose? He gasped and backed away from the jar. “Sam, meet me in medical zone one,” he called over the headset.
Within a minute, Fisher arrived and they moved on into a hospital ward where the long rows of beds were equipped with shackles. They moved on to the next two areas, encountering more laboratories and hospital wings.
“There were a dozen or so gulags within a hundred miles of here,” Fisher said. “There’d always been rumors of prisoners disappearing and either never coming back or coming back… different.”
Hansen swore under his breath.
Fisher called for a status report, and the others checked in. They regrouped at the main ramp, where Gillespie said she had found an indoor target range. Valentina said she’d found a test area full of antique electronics, even some stuff equipped with old vacuum tubes. Noboru just shook his head: drafting tables and workbenches. No high-tech arsenal.
They started down the wide ramp toward level 2.
No more than a minute later, Fisher signaled a halt, advanced, leaned over the railing, then returned and filled them in.
“Two guards stationed at the entrance to the ramp below. They’ve got AKs. No night vision that I could see.”
So they had two guys down on level 3, and Hansen told the others that where there were two, there were no doubt more. Fisher agreed. They opted to check level 2 before contending with those guys below.
Noboru had been charged with clearing the ballistics area of level 2. The test facility was already sending chills up and down his spine. It seemed that back during the Cold War the Russians knew no bounds when it came to discovery and experimentation. He was almost afraid of what they’d find next.
And, in fact, what he found next left him standing there like a proverbial deer in the headlights.
Slowly he slid up his goggles, flipped on his flashlight, and gazed up into the massive, man-made cavern that had been carved into the rock and earth. The place was at least two football fields across and lined with engine-test scaffolding that looked like something from Cape Canaveral. Four massive steel bays still held rocket motors, their colossal nozzles sitting before giant, concrete, sewerlike pipes whose innards were blackened. The pipes were no doubt some kind of exhaust system to flush the motor fumes and gases out of the test zone.
Noboru doused his light, refit his goggles, then charged down the row of scaffolding to make a perimeter search. He reached the zone between the second and third nozzles, rushed past a wall lost in deep shadow, then did a double take. He froze, looked back, and started toward the wall, which in silhouette seemed to be part of a pyramid. He passed several thick posts that had partially blocked his view, and then he saw it.
Valentina slowly opened the first locker and found nothing but coveralls and a moth-eaten parka. She didn’t
