Frank Schätzing - Limit

Where would she hide something like that? In the jungle of the greenhouses? In among the trout and the salmon?

In the ceiling?

She looked up at the Great Hall’s basalt dome. She felt a feverish desire to get out of there, to go with the guests. What they were doing here was crazy! The fact that Hanna had showed up in the control room didn’t remotely mean that the bomb had to be here in the underground. It could be anywhere in the whole vast complex.

She peered indecisively into the corridors.

What would make sense?

What did people do when nuclear attack threatened? They built bunkers, underground bases for protection. That was because an atom bomb exploding up on the surface would destroy everything for miles around, but there was some chance of survival if you were in a reinforced bunker. Did that mean that the underground would survive at Peary Base?

Hardly.

She looked at her watch. Twenty to five.

Think, Minnie! An atom bomb was an inferno, devouring everything in its path, but even a doomsday device could be deployed more or less optimally. Towns and cities were built on the surface, never mind all the tunnels, cellars and sewers below ground. If you wanted to destroy New York with an atom bomb, your best bet was to drop it from above, but life on the Moon demanded a mole’s-eye perspective once you’d lived there for a few months. If you wanted to destroy the base, really destroy it, it had to be done from inside. The bomb would have to tear apart the bowels of the plateau, and only then blaze up over the crater.

It had to be down in the catacombs. Between the aquaria, the greenhouses, the residential quarters and the laboratories.

She glanced across at the airlock.

Hmm. She didn’t need to search beyond the airlock. There was nothing there.

Wrong! That was where the unused part of the labyrinth began, and some of the passages led into the canyon.

How had Hanna even managed to get into the igloo? Through the surface-level airlocks? It was possible. But if he had, wouldn’t Wachowski have seen him on the screens? Well, maybe he had. Maybe Hanna had just strolled in, all above board and official, but if so, why hadn’t he gone from the ground floor to the control room on foot? It was only a couple of metres. Why had he taken the lift?

Because he had come from underground.

‘Nothing here,’ said a tense voice over her helmet link.

‘Here neither,’ Palmer answered.

And how had he got into the catacombs unnoticed?

She walked towards the airlock. Hardly anybody ever went into the caves beyond. From here, the labyrinth burrowed endlessly into the massif and the crater wall beyond. It would have taken a whole army of astronauts weeks or months to search the labyrinth’s full extent, but DeLucas knew that the only logical place to look for the bomb was nearby, somewhere central, below the habs, and that meant the Great Hall and its immediate surroundings.

She went into the airlock, put on her helmet and pushed the button that would pump the air out. When the airlock door on the further side opened, she switched on her helmet lamp and stepped out into the forgotten corridor beyond.

Almost immediately, she stumbled across Tommy Wachowski’s corpse.

‘Tommy,’ she gasped. ‘Oh my God!’

Her knees trembling, she squatted down and played the cone of light over the body. His limbs were twisted as he lay there, his face deformed.

‘Leland!’ she called out. ‘Leland, Tommy’s here, and—’

Then she realised that the interior radio network didn’t work this side of the bulkheads. She was in no man’s land, cut off from the world.

She felt sick.

Gasping, she fell to all fours. Cold sweat broke out all over her body. It was only by a mighty effort of will that she succeeded in not throwing up inside her helmet. She crawled away from the dead man on all fours like an animal, into the corridor, where she closed her eyes and quickly took in a few deep breaths. Once she dared open her eyes again, she saw a shadow in the light from her helmet. It was just a few paces away.

For a second, her heart skipped a beat.

Then she realised that there was nobody standing there, that this was just a narrow gap in the cave wall. She squinted, her eyes still watering from retching, then pulled herself together and stamped on her fear. She climbed to her feet like a puppet, walked across to the gap and looked inside. She saw that it was more like a crack than a corridor. Not very inviting. Nowhere you would choose to go of your own accord.

And that, she thought, is exactly why you’ll go in.

She drew in her shoulders and pushed her way in until the roof dipped sharply down and she had to crawl. Her breath caught and choked in her throat as the fear fought back. Then there wasn’t even room to crawl. She had to lie flat on her belly, feeling her heart hammering against the rock below her like a jackhammer. She considered turning back. This was going nowhere. Dead end. She would go one more metre. Gasping, she pushed herself on, following the scurrying disc of light, imagining what it would be like to be buried alive here, and then all of a sudden the passage opened wide and her fingers were scrabbling in a heap of rubble.

That was it. End of the line.

Or was it? She hesitated. The rubble looked odd. Not a natural pile. DeLucas stooped, and the light scurried over the stones and reflected off something buried in among them. She began to clear the rocks away with one hand, and then saw the surface of something bulky and metallic, smooth, machine-tooled, sleek.

It couldn’t be anything else but—

She shovelled the rubble aside madly, uncovering the thing. It was the size of a briefcase. She tugged it towards herself. There could be no doubt, now she saw the blinking display and the timecode running backwards from—

‘Oh no,’ she whispered.

So little time. So little time.

Frantic, clinging on to the bomb with both hands, she began to wriggle out. She had to get out of here, but the next moment her backpack was wedged against the low roof and she couldn’t move another inch. She was stuck fast.

Waves of panic came crashing together over her head.

‘You are crazy,’ said Shaw.

Her workspace was an identical copy of Norrington’s office, modest and functional, the only difference being a few hints that she had a life beyond the Big O. Photographs showed that Shaw had a husband and grown-up children, that little kids somewhere called her granny. Jericho thought of the exile of his own existence, and had a hard time imagining this flinty-featured security chief as someone with wants and needs, hormones, a woman who had whispered and moaned and cried out with pleasure, limbs entangled. Jennifer Shaw was in charge of the safety of the world’s largest technology corporation. He wondered what her pet name was. At home, within her own four walls, between the TV set and the dental floss, was she Bunnikins or Mummy Bear? He glanced outside quickly, but Norrington’s office was out of sight from here.

‘Doesn’t all that give you pause for thought?’ he asked.

‘What makes me pause is the thought that you’ve been abusing my trust,’ said Bunnikins, or Mother Bear, sternly.

‘No, you’re not looking at it right. We’re trying to stop someone from abusing your trust.’ He drew up a chair and sat down. ‘Jennifer, I know we’re on very thin ice here, but Norrington lied about his relationship to Vic Thorn. He obviously knew him better than he’s letting on. Why would he do that if he had nothing to hide? He may have had perfectly understandable reasons to take Hanna under his wing, but given all the resources he has at his disposal, how come he couldn’t identify an ex-CIA man? Before the moon trip! And once he noticed that we’d cracked his pass-codes, well – what would you have done, in his place?’