“Mebbe,” Jak said. “But was.” He pointed at the floor.
Fractures ran through the inches-thick accumulation beneath their feet. Ryan guessed that a few had been there from earlier, but in no way were they as bad as what he was looking at now. “Let’s get a move on,” he growled, “before this whole fire-blasted place comes tumbling down around our ears.”
“THE EXPLOSION MUST have taken place around the time of the nukecaust,” Mildred commented. She ran her hands through the pockets of the dead man they found in the corridor. More of the ice lining the floor had buckled, making footing even more treacherous. “Got paperwork here with a January 18, 2001, date on it.”
“What paperwork?” Ryan asked. He moved forward, squinting in the dim light to look at the paper she offered. She gave him three sheets, all covered with feminine handwriting.
“Personal letter,” Mildred said, shivering from the cold. She ran her hands along her arms, her gaze still captured by the young corpse on the ground before them.
The man looked to be in his early twenties. His hair was crew-cut blond, and his staring, dead eyes were hazel. A dimple centered in his chin gave him a look of arrogance, but the ice pieces clinging to his frozen flesh stripped him of that full effect. Sergeant chevrons marked his short-sleeved shirt. Some decay had set in before the freezing temperatures, and the ice had preserved what was left of his corpse. His body showed a watermark where blood had settled into his exposed limbs and the back of his neck.
The letter was just that, a message from home, written by a young wife who hoped to see her husband in two weeks for the first time in nearly eight months. Sections of the letter were covered over by black marker. From reading the text, Ryan knew the references had to do with where the young soldier had been stationed.
“Evidently this place stored a lot of war chems, lover,” Krysty said. They had turned up more of the canisters. Some of them, however, hadn’t been broken open. Ryan had given the order to stay away from them. If any nerve gas got released, the breeze blowing by them would have blown the gas cloud farther down the tunnel, killing them, as well as the others.
Mildred nodded. “Somebody in here was set up to take out this site. Maybe with all the tracking communications gear we’ve seen, it was part of the SDI.”
“SDI?” Jak repeated.
“Strategic Defense Initiative,” Ryan supplied. “Supposed to give the United States a chance to save the world in case the nukes were launched.”
“Didn’t work,” Jak said.
“No.” Ryan folded the letter and left it back with the dead man. He liked to read journals when he found them, and manuals, just to get an idea of what life had to have been like during the time before skydark. This was personal, and it belonged with the man. If there had been information in it, he would have kept it.
“Hot pipe!” Dean called up ahead. “I see light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Ease up,” Ryan called, moving forward across the slick ground. “Don’t roam too far ahead.” He followed the rising grade of the tunnel, his vision blocked ahead by the tunnel bending back down to level off again.
Dean stood at the top of the incline, his Browning in his fist and gray wisps of his breath dancing around his head.
Ryan went up the incline gingerly. The cracked ice made it easier going than the smooth ice would have been, but if the wrong piece was stepped on, a man would go back down the incline in a hurry. He noticed the sound when he was near the top, recognizing it at once as the crash and boom of surf.
The breeze thickened with the salt scent, and it became even colder. The wet handkerchief stuck to flesh where it touched Ryan’s lips. His eye opened wide as he took in the scene, seeing but not believing.
The access tunnel leading to the redoubt had been sheared off. Not by an explosion, Ryan saw, but by a twisting elemental force. The tunnel now opened up on a peak of dirty white ice, pointing like an open throat toward the abominable orange and purple of the nuke-dust-filled sky.