And he had no explanation for that at all.
“NERVE GAS,” Mildred said, pointing to a metal canister held in the frozen grip of the ice. “I recognize the toxin classifications.”
Ryan took a closer look at the metal canister. It was pressure sealed, like a lot of other storage containers they had found in other redoubts, and marked with a skull and crossbones. “Somebody set it off inside and chilled everybody here?”
Mildred shook her head. “I don’t think so. Look at the tear in the side of that canister. See how jagged it is? Leads me to think it was hit from something outside the canister, but maybe still inside the redoubt. Could have been sabotage.”
“Sabotage?” Dean echoed.
“Boobied it from the inside,” Ryan explained. “By somebody who was acting like he was one of them.”
“Or she,” Mildred said. “Don’t forget which is the deadlier of the sexes.”
Ryan knew she was only halfway joking. “These were Americans by the looks of their uniforms. Mebbe the Russians brought them down.”
“That would be my guess,” Mildred agreed. “With this much ice around, we’ve got to be somewhere up north. Mebbe even as far as Russia. If we are, that was a long jump.”
Ryan nodded. And it would be an even longer walk back to familiar territory if they couldn’t get the mat-trans unit operational again.
Farther on, they found the room where the bomb had to have gone off.
Ryan stood on the lip of the room, gazing down into what appeared to be a research lab of some kind. A lot of comps, frozen over now, sat against the wall along a ring that encircled the hub of the large room. Mechanical claws hung from the ceiling, black power cords as thick as pythons leading down from them.
He made his way gingerly to the edge of the railing and peered down. The light fixtures below weren’t operational at all. All he saw was a thick pool of frozen water, interrupted occasionally by bulky equipment that thrust up from the level surface.
“How far down, Jak?” Ryan asked.
“Fifteen feet, mebbe twenty. Light not good. Hard judge distance.”
“Yeah.”
“You can figure there’s probably thirty feet of ice before you reach the concrete bottom of that room,” Mildred said. “This must be where they were storing the nerve gas.”
Ryan silently agreed. His eye scoured the walls, seeing signs where explosions had ripped into the metal. Huge gouges lay under the sheets of ice, disfigured by the depth.
“I get bad feelings about this place,” Krysty said in a soft voice. “A lot of people died right here.”
“Took a lot of water to fill this room, Dad,” Dean said. “Kind of curious about where it came from.”
“Me, too,” Ryan said, but he felt a gnawing certainty that he knew where it had come from. He’d had to knock ice from the handkerchief around his lower face three times since they had begun to walk. Every time he had tasted the ice through the material, and every time it had carried with it the distinct taste of salt.
Salt water could only mean a sea or an ocean. But there were a lot of those in the world. It also meant that wherever they were, it was cold by a damn sight because salt water took longer and colder to freeze than fresh water.
Another rumble shook the ground. Metal creaked this time, and huge sheets of ice ripped free of the walls in the room. Some areas had already been bared by the earlier quakes, but not all of them had torn free.
A sheet almost twice the size of a man crashed onto the railing in front of Ryan. The impact reduced it to fist-sized pieces that pelted them with bruising force and smashed into the walls around them.
Then the quake finished with a final spasmodic quiver that sent ice chunks skittering across the frozen surface.
“Getting worse,” Jak commented as they pushed themselves up.
“Didn’t feel any worse than the last one,” Ryan said. He held a finger to the side of his nose, stemming blood flow where ice had hit him.