stairs. Okay, step aboard.” The trio dismounted from the buggy, Kern opening a gate in the cage and walking through onto a platform with handrails around 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 elevator 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 looks 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 toward the hangar as it came into view.
It was full of aircraft. Bombers, the long, sinister charcoal-gray 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 among 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 armored 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