'How much did they get through?'
'Way more than we can guess. The air force in Europe was hundreds of thousands strong back then. And demand was pretty strong, too. It was a tough gig. I'm sure I would have snorted my body weight before my first tour was half done.'
'And this much was left over?'
'This could have been a month's supply. Suddenly not needed any more. Shutting down production was pretty haphazard at the end.'
'Why is it here?'
'Couldn't just junk it. Couldn't sell it. Certainly couldn't burn it. The whole of Europe would have gotten high as kites off the smoke.'
They went quiet. Just stared.
Then Holland said, 'Let's find the rest.'
The rest was shared between the next two tunnels to the left. The same hundred-foot shelves, the same meticulous stacks of packets, the same dull flashlight reflections off the yellowed glassine. A full fifteen thousand bricks in the second tunnel, another full fifteen thousand in the third.
Holland dropped to his knees. Clenched his fists. Smiled wide.
'Close to ninety thousand pounds, all told,' he said. 'The damn DEA will have to listen to us now. This has got to be the biggest drug bust in history. And we did it. Little old us. The Bolton PD, in South Dakota. We're going to be famous. We're going to be legends. No more poor relations. The damn prison staff can kiss my ass.'
'Congratulations,' Reacher said.
'Thank you.'
'But it's not all good. Plato found it a year before you did.'
'How?'
'Rumour and logic, I guess. He knew it had been used in the war, and he knew there was likely to be surplus stock somewhere, so he tracked it down. He's probably got guys in the air force. That's probably why we found the cargo manifest. It was on top of a pile somewhere, because someone else had been looking for it already.'
Peterson said, 'I can't believe the bikers left it all sitting here. The temptation to take some with them must have been huge.'
Reacher said, 'I get the impression that if Plato tells you to leave something, you leave it.' He shuffled a little further into the tunnel, picturing a long line of sweating men fifty years ago passing the two-pound packets hand to hand to hand and then stacking them neatly like craftsmen. Probably the shortest guys had been detailed for the work. He didn't know what the air force's height requirement had been fifty years earlier. But probably some of the guys had been standing straight, and some of them hadn't. They had probably roped the packs down the ventilation tubes in kitbags. Five or ten at a time, maybe more. Trestles and pulleys on the surface. Some kind of an improvised system. Too laborious to carry them all down the stairs one by one. Probably the bikers had brought them back up the same way. The fact that the ventilation pipes were unfinished and open at both ends must have been too obvious to ignore.
He shuffled a little further in and made another discovery.
There was a lateral link feeding sideways off the main tunnel. Like part of a circle's circumference butting up against its radius. He squeezed down it and came out in the next tunnel along. He shuffled deeper in and found two more lateral links, one to the left, one to the right. The whole place was a warren. A maze. There was a total of eight spokes, and three separate incomplete rings. Each ring had its own curved shelf. Lots more linear feet for sleeping children. Lots of corners. Some turned only left, some turned only right. There were no four-way junctions. Everything was a T, upright at the far end of the spokes, rotated randomly left or right at the other turns. A bizarre layout. The plan view on the blueprint must have looked like a Celtic brooch. Maybe there had been more construction compromises than just the ceiling height. Possibly the whole thing was supposed to be like an odd truncated underground version of the Pentagon itself, but rounded off, not angular, and with some of the links between rings and spokes not made.
The wedges of solid rock separating the spokes and the rings had been hollowed out in ten separate places. Bathrooms, maybe, never installed, or kitchens, never installed, or storerooms for subsistence rations, never supplied. Everything was faced with smooth crisp concrete. It was dry and dusty. The air smelled old. The whole place was absolutely silent.
Peterson called, 'Take a look at this.'
Reacher couldn't locate his voice. It came through all the tunnels at once, from everywhere, humming and singing and fluttering and riding the walls.
Reacher called, 'Where are you?'
Peterson said, 'Here.'
Which didn't help. Reacher threaded his way back to the main circular hall and asked again. Peterson was in the next tunnel along. Reacher scooted over and joined him there. Peterson was looking at a fuel tank. It was a big ugly thing that had been welded together out of curved sections of steel small enough to have been dropped down the ventilation shafts. It was sitting on a shelf. It was maybe forty feet long. It was big enough to hold maybe five thousand gallons. It was sweating slightly and it smelled of kerosene. Not original to the place. The welds were crude. Technically unacceptable. Air force mechanics would have done better work.
Peterson stooped forward and rapped it with his knuckles. The sound came back dull and liquid. Reacher thought back to the fuel truck that had nearly creamed him in the snow at the bottom of the old county two-lane.
'Great,' he said. 'We're two hundred feet underground with five thousand gallons of jet fuel in a home-made tank.'
'Why jet fuel? It smells like kerosene.'
'Jet fuel is kerosene, basically. So it's one or the other. And there's way more here than they need for the heaters in the huts. And they just got it. After they already knew they were leaving. And after ploughing the runway. So a plane is coming in. Probably soon. It's going to refuel. Holland needs to tell the DEA about that. They're going to need to be fast.'
'It won't come in the dark. There are no runway lights.'
'Even so. Time is tight. How far away is the nearest DEA field office?'
Peterson didn't answer. Instead he asked, 'How did they fill a tank all the way down here?'
'They backed the fuel truck to the door and dropped the hose down the air shaft.'
'That would need a long hose.'
'They have long hoses for houses with big yards.'
Then Holland called out, 'Guys, take a look at this.'
His voice reached them with a strange hissing echo, all around the circular room, like a whispering gallery. He was in a tunnel directly opposite. Reacher scooted and Peterson stooped and scuffled and they made their way over to him. He was playing his flashlight beam close and then far, all the way down the hundred-foot length and back again.
It was like something out of a fairy tale.
Like Aladdin's cave.
Chapter Thirty-Four
HOLLAND'S FLASHLIGHT BEAM THREW BACK BRIGHT REFLECTIONS off gold, off silver, off platinum. It set up glitter and refraction and sparkle off brilliant diamonds and deep green emeralds and rich red rubies and bright blue sapphires. It showed old muted colours, landscapes, portraits, oils on canvas, yellow gilt frames. There were chains and lockets and pins and necklaces and bracelets and rings. They were coiled and piled and tangled and tossed all the way along the shelf. Yellow gold, rose gold, white gold. Old things. New things. A hundred linear feet of loot. Paintings, jewellery, candlesticks, silver trays, watches. Small gold clocks, tiny suede bags with drawstrings, a cut-glass bowl entirely filled with wedding bands.
'Unredeemed pledges,' Peterson said. 'In transit, from Plato's pawn shops.'
'Barter,' Reacher said. 'For his dope.'
'Maybe both,' Holland said. 'Maybe both things are the same in the end.'
They all shuffled down the tunnel. They were unable to resist.
The shelf was a hundred feet long and maybe thirty-two inches wide. More than two hundred and fifty square feet of real estate. The size of a decent room. There was no space on it large enough to put a hand. It was more or less completely covered. Some of the jewellery was exquisite. Some of the paintings were fine. All of the items were sad. The fruits of desperation. The flotsam and jetsam of ruined lives. Hard times, addiction, burglary, loss. Under the triple flashlight beams the whole array flashed and danced and glittered and looked simultaneously fabulous and awful. Someone's dreams, someone else's nightmares, all secret and buried two hundred feet down.