by Mattias Berg
My watch showed 06.03. Eight minutes since the alarm sounded at the hotel, my escape seeming both lightning quick and endlessly drawn out. It should take at least two minutes before they managed to make their way through the remains of the gate, which would probably be obstructed by rockfall from the explosion, and to get down the two escalators. Then it would be about fifteen seconds before they had us within range of their guns—and a few moments more for them to assess the situation. To weigh the alternatives.
I began to run my fingers around the base of the statue of the God of War, methodically searching. The decrypted message to the cell phone at the playground had read “around mars”. At first it had meant nothing to me—until I studied the photographs from the underground platforms. Then my eye lit upon the statue. The God of War, Mars.
Liquid was slowly seeping out along a vaulted niche behind the statue, like a tiny artificial waterfall. Close up like this, one could even see the thin yellow runnels in a narrow gap between the rock wall and the floor. Maybe it was part of the statue’s design, maybe not. Just to the left of the statue there was something on the ground that could have been taken for the cover of a well, about three feet in diameter, and it too went in under the base of the statue. So there must be something under it.
Only when I could feel the small control box on the back of the God of War, did I glance at the watch: already 06.05. The pursuers must now be on the lower of the escalators, on the way down to the cabinet of horrors.
It was not easy to key in the twenty-nine numbers and four letters from that position, lying half-curled around the statue. Even to be able to fit one’s arm between its base and the uneven rock wall by the platform was hard, not least to move one’s fingers nimbly enough to press the correct buttons in the right order. But on the other hand: it was not meant to be easy.
When I had managed to register the same sequence as at the copper gate, the cover of the well shifted reluctantly. It was weightier than I had thought, reinforced with lead or steel. The mechanism juddered and rattled. Soon a small staircase could be seen, swinging down to the right, in under the statue itself, into the darkness.
I drew the Nurse close to me and thought that I could see her mouth move a little through the grimace on her face, but I could not hear anything against the piercing noise of the alarm. I lifted off my combat pack and took out the rescue harness—and after wrestling for a few seconds with the semi-lifeless form, I managed to secure the Nurse to me with her face buried in my chest. During the struggle she seemed to come to life a little and began to wave her arms weakly. When she realized that I was going to carry her off, maybe even deeper underground, her helpless flailing increased.
Out of the corner of my eyes I thought I could see our pursuers some tens of feet away, one or more of them with drawn weapons. But it could just as well have been the magnified silhouettes of my own movements in the light of my lamp: an illusion playing against the rock wall.
The cover of the well started to close. Time seemed to be up. I put my foot in the gap and hoped for the best—and after an eternity the cover did after all stop, half-shut. Despite the Nurse being harnessed to me, the briefcase and my full combat pack, I was able to push my way through the opening and start down the spiral staircase, with the cover of the well closing above us.
Then we plunged headlong. Deep down into the bed-rock.
1.05
We managed a more or less controlled landing. I landed first on my back, then the Nurse, harnessed to me, her face on my chest. We had trained jumps and landings so many times, for so many years, with every sort of complication, finally from considerable heights both with and without parachute. Learned to roll on pretty much every kind of material. The ground down here felt as even as in the tunnel system we had fled through, maybe here too it had been covered with spray cement. If we had fallen on untreated, sharp points of the bed-rock instead, we would have been much worse off.
Everywhere was pitch-dark with an ominous quiet. I checked my watch: 08.11, still September 5, 2013. The impact must have knocked me unconscious for a time. Then I switched the watch into altimeter mode. Negative 252 feet, almost to the measure that Alpha’s encrypted messages had indicated.
I tossed my beret out into the darkness and carefully drew my hand over my shaved head. I expected blood and splinters, maybe even brain tissue—but it stayed dry. I felt raw and bruised, but not cut. My left hand locked onto the briefcase. I traced the lamp with the fingers of my free hand. The glass was intact, despite everything. I tried pressing the on/off button—and my immediate surroundings were bathed in light again. The impact of the fall had switched it off.
I let the beam illuminate first the briefcase, which remained intact, undamaged, then the Nurse, and I examined her head to toe as I had been trained. No external signs of damage, apart from the bloody mess on her head. Her pulse was low but stable. As I leaned over, I could feel a weak, warm flow of air coming from her mouth and nose.
Then I looked up and let the glow from the lamp play over the area around me, trying to orientate myself, understand what had happened. We were in the middle of an enormous chamber detonated out of the bed-rock, perhaps some sort of rest area for the users of the tunnel system. The rough ceiling must have been at least sixty-five feet above me, and the metal spiral staircase stopped about fifteen feet up. In the light of my lamp I could now see the rusty ladder we should have taken to lower ourselves the rest of the way—if I had not assumed that the staircase continued all the way down.
My whole body gave a sudden shudder. During my research I had read that the tunnels at Kungsträdgården Tunnelbana station were home to the dwarf spider, Lessertia dentichelis, whose habitat was otherwise in mines and deep caves. It had appeared as an uninvited guest at the inauguration of the northern entrance of the station in the late ’70s. Now one of its kind was crawling over my left hand, over the security strap of the briefcase. I closed my eyes. Looked away. Breathed deeply. Although I had a horror of spiders, this one was tiny, not much larger than a tick.
I shook myself until I could no longer feel it and resumed my search along the walls. Somewhere there had to be a concealed lighting system, something that would also give me an idea of what awaited us further inside. I could not believe that a tunnel network as advanced as this would have been built without one.
As if working inside a diver’s bell, I moved my head to examine section after section of wall, without seeing any sign of wiring or lamps. Not even when I got to my feet—my battered body swaying, my black, tactical combat uniform ripped—for a closer study of the rock walls, could I see anything which stood out from their natural contours.
In each of the lower corners of the vast rock chamber there were cavities, small caves which were even darker. I shone my lamp into them, one after the other. But the light reached only a few short feet before the darkness took over.
So, for the moment I left the unconscious Nurse and the two packs behind, to make a closer inspection of the tunnels and try to gain some sense of where they might lead. The first one was so narrow that right from the opening I had to crawl. And then it just got narrower. Everything vanished into darkness behind me, since my body soon blocked the beam from my forehead lamp. The briefcase remained in my left hand, my drawn weapon in my right hand, while I wriggled forward on my elbows.
Soon both of my shoulders scraped against the tunnel walls, even though I was moving pretty much in a straight line. Just a few feet into the tunnel I could no longer turn around—the only way to get out would be to crawl backward, scrabbling like some sort of crustacean. Without warning my left elbow hung free and I lost my grip on the briefcase as it fell. The security strap alone stopped it from plummeting into the void. When I looked down to shine the light into the darkness, I could see no bottom.
Reversing out took more than twice as long as it had done to crawl in. The next tunnel too, working clockwise around the chamber, turned out to be the same sort of dead end. After perhaps si
xty feet into an increasingly narrow passage, my lamp revealed an even darker oblivion. A different sort of structure than the level spray cement on the floor of the tunnel system suggested that this too would drop down into the underworld. With effort, I once again backed out. The palms of my hands became boiling hot in the attempt and blood appeared in the cracks of my knuckles. I was drenched in sweat, even though my watch showed that the temperature down here was only a few degrees above freezing.
The whole tunnel system seemed like a labyrinth of dead ends and hidden chutes. These were not natural geological hollows: the same people who had constructed the passages had also built in an intricate web to block anyone who did not know the correct route through them.
But two openings remained. Just as I had lain on my belly, my legs stretched behind me to start making my way in again, this time into the third tunnel, I felt something cold and smooth against the front of my right thigh. I crawled back out with caution and angled my light down.
At first I saw nothing—except that it was not blood, as I had at first thought and feared. Then I spotted the line, flush with the surface of the spray cement. A straight line of extinguished light diodes ran along the floor and disappeared into the tunnel. I ran my fingers over the glass I had felt through a tear in my combat pants.
Once again I lay prone and followed the line with my fingers. After just a few feet the diodes swung off in a semi-circle, around yet another abyss, before the tunnel continued on. I could not help nodding to myself in satisfaction. I had never before seen the problem of underground lighting solved in this way, high-tech and yet so old-fashioned at the same time.
I’d had no idea who or what I would find inside the tunnel, but certainly not this.
When I had wormed my way some hundred feet into the cavity, and carefully made my way around the abyss, the first bright red door appeared like a mirage in the gleam from my headlamp. Unlike the other cavities, this one gradually broadened out until I could stand up by the time I reached the control box, perfectly concealed inside one of the folds of the rock wall.
I opened the lid of the box—another replica of those outside our own underground facilities—and punched in the same code as before: twenty-nine numbers and four letters. One by one, the massive protective doors opened.
I made a quick tactical calculation. Tried to evaluate alternatives in a situation where most of the variables could not be quantified. I had to work with “the unknown”, as Edelweiss had taught us.
A tunnel remained to be explored, one which could lead us further. But for now the code had worked. Had let me into the fallout shelter: as good a signal as any. On the other hand, the idea of shutting myself up in here, inside a minuscule dug-out deep down inside the bed-rock, was not easy to accept.
In the end, the thought of threats from outside—from the rest of the Team, from the President’s own men, or even from the people who had once built this enormous system—decided things for me. With difficulty I first dragged the Nurse and then the packs in through the tunnel. When I had pulled shut the last of the security doors, a normal gas-lock door with a pressure seal, I tried again to enter the code on the control panel just to the right, inside the entrance. The five diodes spun around for an eternity before stopping on “ERROR”. However much I tried pressing the buttons, tearing at the handle of the security door, heaving and yelling.
That was when, for the first time, I vomited, into a drain on the floor. In part because of the extreme violence, using the Nurse as weapon; after all my years of service, nausea often washed over me at times like these. In part from physical exhaustion, from the exertion of fleeing with such a heavy load for such a long time. But also because of the predicament I found myself in: locked behind monstrously thick doors in this tiny fallout shelter.
I had been all alone above ground. Now I found myself alone again, except for the unconscious Nurse—but this time precisely 253.3 feet down in the bed-rock.
1.06
So I just sat there and waited for Alpha, hoping against hope that this place was where we were to meet, at the exact depth given in the encrypted message. I had no choice but to believe.
After a while I took a notebook from my pack and started to scribble, to sketch out my story for you to read in posterity, the chronicle which you now have in your hands, which you must have stumbled on or managed to track down. My account of how it started, and perhaps how it ended.
When it was past 18.00, and I had managed to get some way into my record, the Nurse was still lying there, more or less unconscious. I tried to coax some water into her—at the same time I myself drank as much as I dared, without having the slightest idea how long we would be stuck down here, and ate the first of the crunch crackers from my pack. Most of the water I tried to feed the Nurse ran off her closed lips. When I tried with care to prize open her mouth, to get at least something down her throat, she had a violent coughing fit, although she remained unconscious. Maybe I would have to open the Nurse’s own medical pack and put a drip in her, although I was not sure it was worth the trouble.
Everything felt shut off, as if already part of history. The briefcase stood next to me, never more than two feet away, but now seemed more than anything like a dead weight. All this advanced technology had lost its meaning in this long-abandoned shelter, where it would be impossible to have it connect.
Nevertheless I decided to give it a try. Seen from the outside, the briefcase was not much to look at. The shell was made from tough aluminum encased in black leather and its spacious interior was surprising. But it was human nature to draw comparisons between things, to use metaphors whenever possible. So the briefcase was to this day still known as the nuclear football, even though the war plan codenamed “Dropkick”, from which the nickname came, had been scrapped decades earlier.
The first step, just to be able to open the briefcase, had its own ritual. Not only the correct biometric information, but the correct way of handling the thing. You were supposed to apply simultaneous pressure, firm but light, with eight fingers plus a thumb to the invisible points on the front of the briefcase, splay your hands as unnaturally as a concert pianist. The classic combination lock was a dummy. Designed to tempt unauthorized persons to put their fingers in the wrong place, which would send the briefcase into lockdown mode at once. In other words: impossible to open even for me. After each time we practiced dealing with enemy attempts to take the briefcase, it always reset itself with different codes and pressure points.
There must after all have been some sort of network in the fallout shelter, something which allowed the briefcase to connect with the database—because the briefcase now opened with its usual soft whining sound.
With reverence I stared into the briefcase, for the first time since my escape from the Team. The world’s most important object: torn from its habitual surroundings.
Everything was in its place despite my heavy fall down into the chamber. The four analog documents in their cut-to-measure foam-rubber compartments. Sacred, surrounded by myth, but hopelessly dated even decades ago. The book with the wax-cloth cover containing the out-of-date operational options for use in case of extreme crisis, thumbed by ten Presidents before the current one. The plastic-covered folder with the typewritten list of underground bases to which our Commander-in-chief could be taken when the alert level was at RED or LILAC. The faded note of information from 1965 describing the structure of the nuclear weapons system. The plastic counter with the secret codes the President was to use when he identified himself to Centcom—“the biscuit”.
The thinking was that they would only be used if he lost the chip with the codes which he was meant to always carry on his person. But since every one of our heads of state had managed to mislay that object on some occasion, even as one sock always vanishes in the washing machine, we had had to keep “the biscuit” until the present day.
According to our current war plan, this digital technology side-by-side with fading paper and a plastic counter w
ould make the briefcase even harder for an enemy to understand, if seized.
Much of the hidden lower level of the briefcase consisted of the matte-black metal keyboard. Not even that was particularly noteworthy: a classic standard model conforming to M.I.L-S.T.D.-810 G tests including Explosive Atmosphere, Pyroshock and Freezing Rain.
What distinguished the keyboard was its inside, its functionality and capacity. Everything it was able to control.
To get at the keyboard, I folded up the hooks in each of the four corners of the foam-rubber layer and with care lifted it and our analog information out. You could not see anything underneath, just a leather covering, as if the briefcase ended there.
And few parts of our body are as hard for us to control as our little fingers—which was why it was only thanks to them that I managed the next step. It had taken years to control them in the same way as index fingers, to make that evolutionary leap. It needed months of effort to work up my strength there, in an exercise as demeaning as it was refined; Edelweiss called it “The Waltz of the Little Fingers”.
So I now pressed eleven three-digit sequences, using both little fingers at the same time with measured movements on the nodes on what appeared to be the bottom of the briefcase. The protective panel slid to the sides and revealed the keyboard. Once I had keyed in the rest of the initial codes, the metal screen on the inside of the lid also slid to the right, with a vivid red circle appearing on the screen. I looked straight into it. The iris recognition system was the last step in the security procedures: they had become more elaborate with time, as the briefcase became a kind of autonomous command module.
When the text “READY FOR COMMAND” appeared on the screen, I went no further with the ritual. Instead, I began closing the briefcase down again, each step in reverse, so that it would not go into lockdown.
All the functions were in order, it seemed. But without Alpha, whoever or whatever it was that controlled the whole chain, I would not be able to get further. So I stayed there and waited, in what was both shelter and prison, locked in behind ten-inch-thick ramparts of welded sheet metal.