Reacher pressed the see-through plastic against the faded old laminate behind it, and he scratched at it with the tip of the key. The key snagged and jumped and made pulls and blisters. The blisters went thin and puffy and the second go-round with the key started a hole in one of them. Reacher got the tip of the key in the hole and sawed away at it, cutting where he could, stretching and tearing where he couldn't. When the slit reached three inches long he put the key back in his pocket and hooked his fingers in the slit, palms out, and forced his hands apart.
The plastic was tough. Some kind of heavy grade. Not like the tissue-thin stuff he had seen painters use as drop cloths. More like shrink wrap. He had seen people struggling with it. Supermarkets should sell switchblades, right next to the salami. He got the slit about twelve inches long and the tension went out of it. He had to start a new cut with the key. He learned from that experience. He changed his technique, to a rhythmic cut-yank-cut-yank sequence, with the key in his mouth between cuts. Eventually he got it done, more or less all the way from top to bottom, very stretched and ragged, but big enough to force himself through.
He put his arm through the hole and turned the heavy steel handle and pushed the door with his fingertips. Nothing but darkness beyond. And cold air. And a silent acoustic suggestive of vast space and hard walls.
He turned sideways and forced himself through the slit in the plastic, leading with the Glock, then his right foot, then his right shoulder, ducking his head, pulling his left arm and his left foot after him. He used touch and feel, tracing the shape of the cast frame around the door, closing the door behind him, searching for a light switch. He knew there would be one. Those old-time architects with their drafting tables and their sharpened pencils would have been plenty thorough. The electrical plans would have been a whole separate sheaf of blueprints.
He found an electric conduit on the wall. Steel pipe, thickly painted, cold to the touch, covered in dust. He traced it back to a square metal box, maybe four inches by four, with a dimple on its front face, and a cold brass toggle in the dimple.
He turned the lights on.
SEVENTY-THREE
THE THIRD CHAMBER was not subdivided. It was in its original state. It was a tunnel, roughly semicircular in section, forty feet wide, maybe four hundred feet long, just over head high at the side walls, perhaps thirty feet tall at the peak of the vaulted ceiling. It was formed from concrete, poured and cast like the outside, with wood grain showing here and there, with stepped curves, with thin ragged ribs and seams where the formwork had leaked. It was unpainted, but no longer raw. It was mellow and faded and dusty, after many patient decades. It had a blank wall at the far end, and it had blastproof doors at the near end, with a mechanism exactly like the one Reacher had used in the centre chamber.
It was not empty.
All along the centre of the space was a nose-to-tail line of enormous flatbed semi trailers. No tractor units. Just the trailers, one after the other, like a traffic jam on the highway. Each trailer was close to fifty feet long and twelve feet wide. There were eight of them. Each of them had four load-bearing axles at the rear, and two huge cantilevered arms at the front, first rearing up at a steep angle, and then reaching forward at a shallower angle, ready to latch into the tractor unit, like gigantic insect antennas.
They were all painted the colour of sand. Desert camouflage base coat. Reacher knew exactly what they were. They were components from the army's HET system. Heavy Equipment Transporter. This particular type of trailer was called the M747. Its matching tractor unit was called the M746. Both had been built by the Oshkosh Corporation in Wisconsin. Both had been taken out of front-line service after the Gulf War in 1991. Neither had proved sufficiently durable. Their task had been to haul Abrams battle tanks around. Battle tanks were built for tank battles, not for driving from A to B on public roads. Roads got ruined, tracks wore out, between-maintenance hours were wasted unproductively. Hence tank transporters. But Abrams tanks weighed more than sixty tons, and wear and tear on the HETs was prodigious. Back to the drawing board. The old-generation hardware was relegated to lighter duties.
But in this case, not much lighter.
Each of the eight trailers was loaded with a nose-to-tail pair of flasks or vats or containers. For some kind of liquid, clearly. But really big. Tens of thousands of gallons. Each unit was the size of four Volkswagens stacked two on two, like bricks. The size of a small room. They were made of steel, rolled and folded and hydroformed, and welded, like squat fat bottles, with a protective frame all around, the function of the bottle and the function of the frame so well integrated it was hard to see where one finished and the other began. Overall they were like rounded-off cubes, about twelve feet long, by twelve feet wide, by twelve feet high, reinforced in places for strength and durability. The steel looked thick and solid. Maybe it was backed with an extra mineral layer. An innovation.
But not a recent invention. Because nothing in the chamber was recent. There was a thick layer of dust over everything. Over the massive containers, over the flatbed trailers, over the concrete floor. Grey, and spectral, and undisturbed. Under the trailers most of the tyres looked soft. Some of them were flat completely. There were cobwebs. The scene was archaeological. Like breaking through into a pharaoh's tomb. The first to lay eyes on it for five thousand years.
Or twenty years, maybe. The physical evidence was there. The age of the equipment. The dust. The perished rubber. The still air. The chill. It was perfectly possible to believe those trailers had been backed in two decades ago, and detached from their tractor units, never to move again, and then walled off, and left behind, and forgotten.
Eight trailers. Sixteen containers. Sixty-four Volkswagens. The steel was painted bright yellow, now faded a little by dust and time. On the side of each one, at a modest size, no bigger than a basketball, was stencilled a design first sketched in 1946, by a bunch of smart guys at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. Smart guys with time on their hands, designing a symbol, coming up with what they thought was stuff coming out of an atom. Most people thought it was three fat propeller blades, black on yellow.
Nuclear waste.
SEVENTY-FOUR
REACHER KILLED THE lights and squeezed back through the slit in the plastic. He crossed the empty room and stepped out to the corridor. And saw three people. All men. They were walking away from him, talking as they went, piles of three-ring binders in their arms. Shirtsleeves. Dark pants. Unarmed. None of them was McQueen.
Reacher let them go. The cost outweighed the gain. Too noisy, for no real reason. They opened a blue-spot door on the left, way far up the corridor. Clearly heading sideways into the first chamber. Four spots down, one room over, one room back. Or whatever. Like map coordinates. Not unlike getting around the Pentagon.
They had come out of a room ahead and on the left of where Reacher was standing. Its door was open, and it hadn't been before. Reacher took a breath and counted to three and walked the thirty feet. The room was an office, maybe twenty feet by seventeen, with one concrete wall and three plywood walls. All four walls were full of shelves. The floor was full of desks. Both desks and shelves were full of paper. Loose, in stacks, clipped together, in rubber bands, in binders. The paper was full of numbers. Six, seven, and eight figure numbers, of no great interest or appeal, just raw material to be added and subtracted and multiplied. Which they had been. Most of the papers were like ledger pages.
No computers.
All paper.