Walker seized the torch and inspected it. “There’s enough battery left for another eight hours,” he claimed, after checking the charge. But no sooner had he finished his sentence than they were again plunged into darkness for good.
“Shit!” he exclaimed among the cries of the others.
In the pandemonium, Gail had a vivid recollection of her dream when she was kidnapped, of being helplessly stuck in the darkness. She felt a tingle down her spine, as if the lack of light had taken all warmth from the air.
After what seemed like an age, but what could in reality barely have been a few minutes, a thin blade of blinding white light appeared at the bottom of the wall. Within seconds the wall had disappeared into the ceiling, and they were shielding their eyes as they tried to see what had been revealed.
Gail, still on her knees where she’d been facing the Xynutian engravings, squinted into the light. At first all she could make out was a straight corridor, the light coming from strips along the ceiling and walls. As her eyes became more comfortable, the strips split up into single points, and she saw that the corridor was illuminated with thousands of small dots of very bright white light, like the solitary LED at the top of the stairs. They led down the corridor, deeper underground; to a dead end that she guessed must also be a door.
Walker recovered first, and strode into the corridor towards it. Ben hesitated, pistol in hand, on the threshold. Gail looked up at Patterson.
“Henry, this is all very familiar,” she said slowly, thinking of the astronauts trapped behind the door on Mars.
He nodded and started walking into the corridor. “It is, and I know what you’re thinking, but we don’t really have a choice: the air in here is turning stale and the flashlight has gone out.”
As he said it, she became all too aware of the acrid taste on her tongue from the low quality air they’d all been sharing. The hall they had entered was massive, but she knew that its oxygen content had been poor to start with.
“Feels fresher in here,” Walker said with an approving nod. “Just need to work out how this other door opens, but we’ve been doing well so far,” he joked.
Gail paused for a moment as she got to her feet. George was somewhere behind her, above her, and yet ahead and further down was the only possible route. The lack of torch and dwindling air supply made further exploration or even retreat impossible.
It was the only way forwards, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something very final about going down the corridor. Nonetheless, she accepted Ben’s outstretched hand and joined him and Patterson inside. She was barely a few steps down the corridor, moving towards Walker, when she thought to look back at Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
What she saw terrified her.
The white light from the corridor had picked out the polished stone of their eyes. But instead of reflecting in the black of obsidian and blue of Lapis Lazuli, Akhenaten and Nefertiti were fixing her with blood-red eyes. Their peaceful smiles took on a whole new sinister dimension, and as Gail stared incredulously at their evil gaze, the door that led back to the Hall, back to the Library and back to George, slid closed, leaving them trapped in the corridor.
Chapter 75
During the mid-1980s, more than seventy thousand nuclear weapons existed in stockpiles maintained by the Americans and Russians. It is often quoted that the yield of those nuclear weapons was sufficient to destroy the world several times over, but that is poor imagery to help describe how such a cataclysmic event would take place.
In reality, a mere fraction of those nuclear arsenals would ever be deployed. After the first few hundred ICBMs had landed on foreign soil, there would be precious few people left alive who could even launch the remainder, and even fewer of whom would want to.
In 1991, the Cold War ended; on both sides of the border, no one had ever truly wanted to use the weapons they had created. The understood devastation of nuclear holocaust, the indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent people and the no-win situation that would arise from its aftermath ultimately spelled the end of the stand-off between East and West.
Nonetheless, in the post-Cold War era nuclear disarmament was both slow and unenthusiastic. The Russians, reeling from their own economic implosion, were unable to maintain their existing weapons, let alone decommission them. For its part, the West was particularly loath to take a large proportion of its nuclear arsenal off hair-trigger alert. Despite numerous attempts to pass resolutions through the United Nations, the United States of America, France and the United Kingdom persistently voted against the action.
This meant that several decades after the end of the Cold War, the old West maintained an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons pointed at targets in the East that could effectively be launched in less than five minutes.
Then, on 28th July 2015, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced to the world that it had officially joined the elite club of nations in possession of nuclear weapons.
The announcement came not via the state media, nor from the network of foreign intelligence agents and informants who risked their lives on a daily basis to provide up-to-date reports on the country’s machinations, although the very existence of such networks did mean that few were surprised when the announcement finally came.
Instead, it came from the vaporisation of fifty square miles of desert and arid shrub-land in the South Khorasan region of the country, less than a hundred miles from Afghanistan. It was confirmed by satellite imagery, but such technology was not needed for the majority Kurdish population along the Afghan border, who saw the mushroom cloud hit the Earth’s stratosphere around about the same time the ground started to shake.
The show of strength caused international relations in the already volatile region to heat up considerably; particularly damaging was the face-off that ensued between Iran and its pro-West neighbours Pakistan and Afghanistan, with many skirmishes along Iran’s heavily fortified border causing tensions to rise dramatically within the UN.
India was critical of the militant stance taken by Pakistan in particular, and terrorist activity in the two countries increased. The governments blamed each other, but nonetheless decided to increase investment in their own already substantial nuclear deterrents.
While Pyongyang sent congratulations to Tehran, Moscow urged prudence on behalf of the world’s largest nuclear power. Israel was up in arms, stepping up air patrols and angering Iraq and Iran for infringing airspace with spy drones.
The announcement meant it was now theoretically possible, although practically less so, to travel by land from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal or even the East China Sea without once having to set foot in a country that did not possess or have access to nuclear weapons.
The United States of America quietly slowed down existing disarmament programs, continuing to decommission warheads and delivery systems (that would in any case have belonged in museums) while installing ever more effective systems to support the warheads that would remain active.
At the same time, the President issued a stark warning to Tehran: “Nuclear Proliferation will not be tolerated,” he said with his hands firmly rooted to the podium at a press conference. “In cooperation with our international partners, the United States of America will strive to uphold the values that saw the end of the Cold War; the end of the nuclear arms race.”
In Tehran, they could read between the lines: Welcome to the club.
In 2045, nuclear weapons were still a deterrent; one that earned the owner greater respect, and made it far less likely you would ever be attacked. Everyone understood the destructive power of the technology and where it could lead the world.