“Twelve-footers, ” I said wistfully as I opened the man-size entrance in
the forty-foot-high door. “Double overhead corduroy.”
“Churning out of a storm north of the Marques as Islands.”
“Something to live for, ” I said as I crossed the threshold into the
hangar.
“That’s why I mention it, bro. Boardhead motivation to get out of here
alive.” Even two flashlights could not illuminate this cavernous space
on the main floor of the hangar, but we could see the overhead tracks on
which a mobile crane long since dismantled and hauled away had traveled
from one end of the building to the other. The massiveness of the steel
supports under these rails indicated that the crane had lifted objects
of tremendous weight.
We stepped over inch-thick steel angle plates, still anchored to the oil
and chemical-stained concrete, upon which heavy machinery had once been
mounted. Deep and curiously shaped wells in the floor, which must have
housed hydraulic mechanisms, forced us to follow an indirect path to the
far end of the hangar.
Bobby cautiously checked out each hole as though he expected something
to be crouching in it, waiting to spring up and bite off our heads.
As our flashlight beams swept over the crane tracks and their supporting
structures, complex shadows and flares of light were flung off steel
rails and beams, thrown to the walls and to the high curved ceiling,
where they formed faint, constantly changing hieroglyphics that
flickered ahead of us but quickly vanished, unreadable, into the
darkness that crept at our heels.
“Sharky, ” Bobby said softly.
“Just wait.” Like him, I spoke only slightly above a whisper, not so
much for fear of being overheard as because this place has the same
subduing effect as do churches, hospitals, and funeral parlors.
“You been here alone? ”
“No. Always with Orson.”
“I’d expect him to have more sense.” I led him to an empty elevator
shaft and a wide set of stairs in the southwest corner of the hangar.
As in the warehouse where I’d encountered the ve ve rats and the thug
with the two-by-four, access to the floors below had surely been
concealed. The vast majority of the personnel who had worked in the
hangar good men and women who had served their country well and with
pride must have been oblivious of the infernal regions under their feet.
The false walls or the devices that had concealed entrance to the lower
floors had been stripped away during deconstruction. Although the
stairhead door was removed, a steel jamb was left untouched at the upper
landing.
Past the threshold, our flashlights revealed dead pill bugs on the
concrete steps, some crushed and some as whole and round as buckshot.
There were also the impressions of shoes and paws in the dust.
These overlaid tracks were both ascending and descending.
“Me and Orson, ” I said, identifying the prints. “From previous visits.”
“What’s below? ”
“Three subterranean levels, each bigger than the hangar itself.”
“Massive.”
“Mucho.”
“What did they do down there? ”
“Bad stuff.”
“Don’t get so technical on me.” The maze of corridors and rooms under
the hangar has been stripped to the bare concrete. Even the
air-filtration, plumbing, and electrical systems have been torn out,
every length of duct, every pipe, every wire and switch. Many structures
in Wyvern remain untouched by salvagers.
Usually, wherever salvage was pursued, the operation was conducted with
an eye for the most valuable items that could be removed with the least
effort. The hallways and rooms under this hangar, however, were scraped
out so thoroughly that you might suspect this was a crime scene from
which the guilty made a Herculean effort to eradicate every possible
clue.
As we descended the stairs side by side, a flat metallic echo of my
voice bounced immediately back to me at some points, while at other
places the walls absorbed my words as effectively as the acoustical
material that lines the broadcasting booth from which Sasha spins night
music at KBAY.
I said, “They scoured away virtually every trace of what they were doing
here every trace but one and I don’t think they were just concerned about
protecting national security. I think … it’s just a feeling, but