Abaddon - Chapter 9

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 21, 2010

I am now resident in the British Embassy. Sir Reginald has sent minions out to obtain my things and check me out of the Novotel. This means they probably found the Pauline Réage bondage novel hidden in the back of my suitcase, but they probably don’t read English in any case. Half of them might not even read the Roman alphabet - Na’s Russian population are as cosmopolitan as they are educated.

My room in the Embassy is obviously the emergency Tourist Who Cut Off His Head By Accident room. It seems not to have been redecorated since the 1930’s, and has a carpet which is worn right down to the matting next to the shaving mirror. Also, the bed has a protruding spring, sharp as a bacon slicer and just as pleasant to sit on.

Worst of all, it looks out on the light well at the bottom of which is the Nazi Abyss.

Luckily, the Czaer 2000 engine has been replaced over the grating with a larger 1 litre model. In fact, the grating itself looks newer, as if Sir Reg. has had a new cover put in. One which locks. But it’s still there. And there’s still that horrid giddy feeling that my bed, being close by the window which is close by the grating, is still sitting vertically above five hundred metres of twisty turny staircase lightly frosted with glass and blood and human excrement.

Five hundred metres. That means, potentially, another hundred storeys underneath the ones we know about, containing what? Ordnance factories full of weapons no Allied historian ever heard of, storage facilities full of enough Oracle Smoke to drown a city in, never mind poison it? Why did they need to dig down that deep? Surely that deep down, you’re not digging through rock, but magma.

The room has a TV, communist-era, which doubles as a heating radiator when it’s turned on. A polite note in English and Russian on the wall behind it enjoins guests not to put anything flammable, or indeed meltable, on top of it. The wallpaper is the colour of dirty marzipan. It was probably a recognizable shade of something once, but is now a uniform nicotine.

It is nine p.m. in Na. Seven p.m. in Britain. Right about now the sun is just setting over the Houses of Parliament. Here, it’s black as pitch and the night life is well underway. The sounds of drunks singing, gypsy violinists annoying diners, and police sirens blaring penetrate faintly through the night even to the bottom of my own little abyss in the light well. I stretch out on the bed and discover that it is slightly shorter than even I am tall. Maybe the couple of pouffes lurking underneath the bureau are supposed to be appended to the bed in some way to make it a more normal length. They have zip fasteners on their sides...

The police siren is blaring around, and around, and around, almost as if it’s circling the building. Maybe the coppers are chasing someone who has his steering lock stuck full on. Although deafening, it’s hypnotic. It could send a body to sleep -

I’m falling down a rabbit hole. There are bits of furniture, heroin syringes, tinkly broken glassware and an entire suit of cards flying with me. Some of the cards are animated, with tiny arms and legs and arms, yelling at me that this is all my fault, shaking their little pink fists.

Then I open my eyes with a start and see a Czaer 2000 engine block flying up past my window.

The building shudders. I must have been woken by a loud bang, but I can hardly remember it.

I sit up in bed and see the same Czaer 2000 lump flying downwards. I wait for a very, very long time. Then there is a second almighty bang, as of a Czaer 2000 engine lump hitting the bottom of a five hundred metre deep shaft at an appreciable portion of the speed of sound.

That will definitely not be good for the foundations.

I open the windowsash and lean out. The concrete bottom of the light well has disappeared. I am looking five hundred metres down a vertical shaft. Down in the dark, deep beneath, I can see tiny neon wasps of what might be tracer fire.

Three metres directly beneath me, on the other hand, gawping out of the back parlour window, I can see Sir Reginald’s bald head. He appears to be wearing purple floral pyjamas. He looks up, and sees me. He is furious.

“Little sod’s trying to sweep it all under the carpet before we get down there”, he says indignantly. He brings his right arm into view. He’s holding a pistol and slotting a magazine into the handle. Then he disappears.

What I think at this point is: I’m not missing this. Besides, Vern might still be down there.

I grab my notebook from under my pillow and struggle into my day clothes.

***

Sir Reginald is dressed to kill - or at least, has a gun. I know nothing about guns, but it is a big, nasty-looking gun that looks like it would make big nasty holes in people. The rest of his ensemble is less deadly - sturdy hiking boots, socks rolled over his corduroys, and the inevitable Barbour. Tom Keogh, meanwhile, seems to have produced an automatic weapon - a Kalashnikov, complete with folding stock and nightsight.

I ask if he smuggled the gun in in a diplomatic bag. He shakes his head and says, no, he just bought it off the black market once he got here, it’s easier and cheaper. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t seem to find the irony of the situation amusing.

We are in what I suppose Sir Reginald would refer to as the embassy’s Front Parlour. The police siren is still circling the building. It does not appear to be chasing anything. Possibly it was only there in the first place to distract us from a gunbattle happening five hundred yards beneath us. Sir Reg. is on the phone - his mobile phone, as our land line has predictably and inexplicably malfunctioned - to both his masters in the UK and Ivan’s masters in Vzeng Na by turns.

Tom Keogh also just happens to have an impressive collection of caving and mountaineering gear, which he’s laying out on the front parlour floor and securing to the wall next to the street - i.e., the wall in the house furthest from the Abyss - with an industrial bolt gun. He also has helmets, head torches, and climbing boots, but I have my own helmet, boots, etc. in any case. Right now he’s telling me there’s no way he can let me go down into the Little Abyss, as it seems to be a combat zone right now. I tell him he can either give me a harness and a descender, or I’ll try to swarm down the rope by hand. He looks at me critically for a very long time, then nods, shrugs, and chucks me a harness and descender.

I ask him what the plan is. He says it’s “to go down and assess the situation.” He lowers his voice and says Sir Reginald thinks he’s coming too. This, he says, is unlikely. Sir Reginald’s mission function, he says, is to stay on the other end of the phone up here and keep us alive by making sure whoever is remotely friendly down there doesn’t think we’re unfriendly and attempt to neutralize our threat. He explains that, by neutralize our threat, he means shoot us. I ask him what he thinks is going on down there. He says he thinks the local police have probably attempted to “pre-empt the situation. They were probably going to plug the shaft a hundred yards down with concrete and prevent further access”, he says. “Looks like the junkies are a little more resistant to non-military weapons than the police chief thinks.”

I think it sounds like rifle and submachinegun fire coming from the well, and tell him so. He agrees, with one addendum; he thinks it’s two sets of rifle and submachinegun fire. Right now, both the junkies and Ivan’s policemen have got out the heavy iron. “Very heavy iron”, he clarifies. “I think what blew the top off the stairwell was probably an RPG launcher. The bad guys used it, probably. Anyone using a weapon like that in a confined space has to be assisting their normal mental processes with chemistry.”

I ask him how it is that junkies can be using military weapons. He ignores me. Instead, he looks up and nods at four armed men who have just entered the room, also carrying Kalashnikovs, though ones not quite nice as his. Their suppliers don’t seem to have been able to run to folding stocks. They appear to be dressed for some sort of fetish party. Respirators are hanging from around their necks on straps, and they are wearing a great deal of black plastic.

“More friends from the International Atomic Energy Agency?” I ask. Tom Keogh doesn’t reply. Instead, he looks me up and down concernedly. “I’m afraid that no matter how much you stamp your tiny feet, we just don’t have an NBC suit in your size. Or indeed any spare NBC suits.”

“It’s all right. I have my own gasmask.” He stares at me oddly. “And mine”, I add, “is designed to stop Oracle Smoke, unlike yours.”

He absorbs this.

“Okay”, he says finally. “You can go first, then.”

In the event, he goes first, which is very nice of him.

I had thought we were going to abseil down like James Bond ninjas into the middle of a big scary explody firefight. Thankfully, Mr. Keogh doesn’t seem to be insane. He waits for a very, very long time indeed before thinking about dangling any part of himself down into the deep.

The first thing he and the others do, in fact, is remove the carpet from one of the upstairs rooms, and drape it over the entrance to the Abyss, closing off any holes with duct tape and rags, blanking out any light from above. “Be like running in banging a big gong yelling ‘DINNERTIME’ otherwise”, he observes.

Every few minutes afterwards, Mr. Keogh ropes himself up with a climbing helmet on and creeps and crawls all mousy-quiet up to the edge of the abyss and peers down carefully through night vision goggles into the dark.

A long, long time after all sound of gunfire has stopped way below us, he crawls back out from under the carpet and gives a thumbs-up to his team. He seems to think something over a minute, then turns to me and asks - in a whisper, as if he’s expecting someone to be listening - “Did you see any NBC suits down there?”

I shake my head.

“Thank Christ for that. Out of the fucking monkey suits, guys. We’ll only be needing the masks.”

There is a general chorus of relief.

“Keep those chemical sniffers turned on, though.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Stay very, very close to me. Hold on to my shoulder strap, put your hands and feet where I say, and don’t move if I don’t tell you to.”

“I’m not hanging on to you like some sort of blind woman.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to be doing. We don’t have any spare night vision goggles.”

***

Going down a rope you can’t see the end of, in the dark, five hundred metres above a very hard landing, in a confined space where people have been firing guns, is scarier than scary. I slow them down to an appalling extent. Tom Keogh has to keep reaching up and grabbing my ankle to get me to go down further. He has to have been hanging on one hand for most of the way down. And then, after we’ve abseiled down what seems like half the way to the Earth’s core and finally alighted on a merciful thin sliver of steel and concrete sturdy enough to stand on and I get to stand rigidly in the same position and ‘rest’ for a handful of seconds to get my breath back, they clip in another length of rope and start the same process all over again.

Whenever we find a place to stand, I freeze like a mannequin - that is to say, I freeze after the first time, when I assumed I was standing all safe and cosy on the stairwell that used to be down here, and Tom Keogh hissed at me Not To Move, You Stupid Bitch, and then unclipped his own night vision goggles and clipped them on to me for a moment. The world was green inside them, as if seen through the bottom of a beer bottle, squaddie vision. There is no staircase down here any longer. The force of the RPG explosion, and possibly also of Sir Reginald’s experiments with teaspoons, has torn the fragile structure clean out of the walls all around us, leaving only twisted stumps of steel and concrete joists, like blackened, rotten teeth. The metal of the staircase was probably rusted to hell anyway - the grenade only gave it that little extra push.

Keogh’s men are very, very quiet. They are not IAEA men, and they have done this sort of thing many, many times before. I, on the other hand, have done it a grand total of once, and cannot see the surface I am jumping down like a moonman, paying the rope through my descender as I do so. I feel like a traction engine acting as the pace car to a starting line of Ferraris. My descender feels cold in my fingers as I go down. As I stand cramped on the second ledge down next to Tom Keogh, I brush against his descender for a second, and it’s so hot I have to snatch my hand away.

We have to go through this whole ghastly process four times before we get to anything solid enough to risk standing on for more than a matter of seconds.

For the first time in a long time, I can see a dim, almost imperceptible light below, the right height and width to be a doorway. The light is yellow and low-powered, like the ambient glow from a torch not pointed in our direction.

I hear a few soft THUMPs in the dark, like a cat coughing furballs. I hear a soft shuffling, as of a lady in a long skirt flouncing down a hallway. The light in the doorway crazes as if the torch that casts it has been knocked off balance.

“It should be safe for us to go down now.” A hand feeds a rope into my descender.

“What about the Smokers? There might be Smokers.”

“There were seven.”

There were actually more than seven, it transpires; more cat-coughing from the dark, and a series of THUDs which I am sickeningly certain are bodies hitting the floor. Tom Keogh’s hand tugs at my ankle. Gingerly, I set off down the rope. Nobody shoots me as I descend. Eventually, I feel my feet touch terra firma. Concrete. Solid concrete.

I slump down against the wall, exhausted, relishing the chance to bend my legs.

“Hang on”, says Keogh from somewhere out in the dark. “This one isn’t a Smoker.”

“How do you know?” says another low voice.

“I’ll lay a bet Smokers don’t often wear police uniforms.”

“Shit.”

I’ve got a horrible, awful feeling about this.

“Does it smell like it’s gone for a shit in its pants?” I say.

There is a pause for sniffing, and then someone answers, “Er - yeah. Very much so, actually.”

“Then it’s a Smoker and a policeman. Probably inhaled Smoke fumes. Oracle Smoke addicts you that fast.”

“Jesus, so that’s why there were two sources of tracer fire”, says a disbelieving voice, and then: “GET THOSE BLOODY GASMASKS ON NOW.”

There is a sound of muffled fumbling and tugging, and not a little discreet swearing. The modest hubbub dies down slowly. There is the sound of someone shooting a Smoker somewhere out in the dark.

Then a shot rings out around all four walls of the chamber. I see it as well as hear it, careering around the room like a light sabre. A tracer round.

“WHO GOES THERE?” yells someone. Unfortunately, he yells it in Russian, so nobody can hear that he’s coherent.

“Kill him”, says Keogh, his voice hissing through his respirator.

“He’s not a Smoker”, I say. “Smokers don’t ask you Who Goes There, they tell you Elvis, Saddam Hussein and Lord God Almighty will be going there tomorrow.”

“You want me to kill him, Cap?” hisses a voice back.

I pounce victoriously. “Aha, so you’re a Captain, are you?”

“Nice one, Corporal. Can you see him?”

“Up the end, Cap, on his own. Sat behind a big pile of metal sheeting. Probably thinks he can’t be seen. He’s putting a gasmask back over his mouth.”

“Kill him”, says Keogh. “He may be friendly, but if he keeps firing the mob downstairs’ll know we’re coming.”

This is too much. I stand up.

“SIT DOWN!” rasps Keogh.

“МЙСТЕР ПОЛИЦЕЙСКИЙ!” I yell out. “WE’RE FRIENDLY! COME OUT AND PUT YOUR GUN DOWN!”

There is an ominous pause.

“He’s getting up, Cap”, comes Jimmy’s voice.

“Good”, says Keogh - and then: “Kill him.”

“For FUCK’S SAKE -“

A cat coughs twice in the dark.

“Sit DOWN.”

“I will NOT sit down. That encryption key I was talking about is also in the keeping of a friend of mine, and she will be emailing it to every single one of the papers who have the story if (a) I do not come back from this trip alive, or (b) you do not stop shooting our friends and allies. And I can see that laser dot you’ve just moved on to my chest, thank you so very much.”

Keogh absorbs this.

“All right”, he says. “We won’t shoot anyone else wearing a mask unless they shoot first. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

I still can’t see shit (though I can smell it right enough, all over every smearable surface). I find a torch on the floor and switch it on.

I am surrounded by bodies.

All of them have been shot. Some of them have also been finished off with a knife around the throat. I don’t recall having heard any ricochets.

“SWITCH that BLOODY TORCH off -“

“There was a torch on up here before. That means the ones downstairs will still be expecting a torch up here now.”

“Er...yes. Yes, good point.”

There appears to have been a firefight between policemen still wearing their anti-Smoke masks and policemen happily breathing Smoke. There is more glass glistering around the bodies here than I remember...

“They used Smoke bottles as bombs”, I say. “Lobbed them into the middle of Ivan’s police. A few of them were too daft to be wearing their masks, perhaps, or too slow to put them on in time. They turned on the others.”

I search the dead men’s faces with my torch. None of them is Ivan. But then again, I never expected them to be. Ivan would send someone else down here to do his dirty work.

Keogh’s team are working their way through the machinery chamber. There seems to be nobody else in here, or at least, nobody we can see.

“If they can use this stuff like a hand grenade”, says Keogh, who is poking through shards of bottle with his boot, “I’m surprised they don’t break out and use it to take over the town.”

“I don’t think you appreciate how difficult wasting Smoke in that way would be for them. I think it would have been like throwing your own children at the enemy. Take your foot out of that. You might touch your boot later.”

He’s incredulous. “It isn’t that poisonous, is it?”

The outer offices have been stormed through by Ivan’s men, but are empty - in the case of the filing cabinets, even more empty than before. All the files and papers have vanished, leaving only the bodies and the graffiti.

And then there’s only a manhole and a steel door between us and the outside world. One of Keogh’s men sticks his head up through the manhole and pronounces it safe up top. Cautiously, watching each other’s backs, they emerge and spread out.

“Seems OK.”

“All clean this way.”

But a third voice, sounding puzzled, says instead:

“Is this a Smoke bottle?”

“DON’T TOUCH IT”. I actually yell this. When I get myself back together, I go on to say: “And don’t go anywhere near it either.”

Then I move up to the manhole, stand directly underneath it, and yell:

“OKAY, GUSHIN. YOU CAN COME OUT NOW. UNLESS YOU HAVE A THING ABOUT WATCHING OTHER MEN.”

There is a long, long pause. Then there’s a distant answering yell, echoing round the Abyss:

“BUT THEY LOOK SO ADORABLE IN THEIR NBC GEAR.”

Luckily for Ivan’s health, this exchange is taking place in Russian. But Keogh, at least, seems to be understanding some of it.

I keep Ivan talking. “THAT NBC GEAR’S KEPT THEM ALL ALIVE SO FAR. THOSE SHITE SOVIET-ISSUE MASKS YOUR MEN ARE WEARING KILLED HALF OF THEM STONE DEAD. OR RATHER, FORCED YOU TO KILL HALF OF THEM STONE DEAD.”

"SADLY I AM FORCED TO ADMIT THIS. THEY WERE GOOD MEN, PENELOPE."

I poke my head up, cautiously, from the manhole, and take a look around. Nothing but stone, steel and concrete in all directions.

"WELL, NOW THEY'RE GOOD CORPSES. ARE YOU COMING OUT WHERE WE CAN SEE YOU OR NOT?"

In answer, a number of figures detach themselves from the rock walls uphill and downhill of us.

"Good work", says Keogh. "That won't be all of them, of course."

I hadn't even thought of that. But of course that would be how Ivan would think, and fight. Dirty. I climb out of the hole and squat on the concrete. A kaleidoscope of stars stares down a hundred-metre-deep rock tube at me.

One of the figures cups its hand to its mouth and yells downhill at us in Ivan's voice. "DON'T GO NEAR THE SMOKE BOTTLE."

"WHY NOT?" yells Keogh.

"IT'S GOT A SOVIET ARMY ANTIPERSONNEL MINE BURIED UNDERNEATH IT."

"I KNOW", I yell. "I KNEW IT HAD TO BE YOU, GUSHIN. SMOKERS DON'T USE A BOTTLE OF JUNK AS BAIT, NOR DO THEY LEAVE THEM LYING AROUND."

"AND NO REAL HUMAN WOULD GO ANYWHERE NEAR ONE. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE PROVED BRITISH PEOPLE ARE REAL HUMANS."

He comes down the slope towards us, holding an AKM as if he's used one all his life. He probably has. All this stuff about Daddy being the only ex-KGB man in the family was probably all lies. Ivan was probably the last beardless youth saluting the Soviets through the border crossing when they left for Moscow in '91.

"Ought to shoot him now", says Keogh, "if I didn't know he still had a few men up there in the rocks that I can't see, I would do." I’d applaud Keogh’s willingness to shoot Ivan if I didn’t know he’d been drawing a bead on me too just now.

The men that we can see number seven, but they're policemen - too young, too old, too fat, or too skinny to cause Mr. Keogh's men any trouble. Keogh's men look like they only recently evolved into men. They could probably deal with Ivan's tired old coppers without even needing to fire a shot, if they got close enough.

But those tired old coppers were also clever enough to set a trap that would have taken half of Keogh's men out if I hadn't warned them. I'm not so sure.

"I take it you were going to tell us about the mine", I say in Russian.

"Of course", says Ivan in English, grinning. "At first, we could not easily see who you were, you understand. You came down the stairwell underneath the Embassy, yes?"

I nod. Ivan calls his men around and gets to talking soldier and policeman stuff with Tom Keogh. Luckily neither speaks the other's language perfectly, so I catch all of the conversation as a lot of it needs to go through me. Ivan's men came down during daylight, secured the bridge - 'Мост' is the Russian word he uses for the German gantry crane, and this means bridge - and then moved on into the tank and rocket factory. All that went well, until they went down to the lower levels, "where", Ivan admits, "there appears to have unfortunately been a contamination of my personnel by some variety of toxin.”

Keogh interrupts at this point.

"So", he says, "she was telling the truth, then."

Ivan's face squirms into several expressions at once.

"It would seem so", he says. "I apologize", he says to me with the briefest of nods.

Keogh and Ivan agree to "have another stab" (Keogh's words) at the tanker chamber. I realize with sudden clarity that this is a jolly-hockey-sticks way of saying they are going to go downstairs and kill everybody. I should feel appalled at this, but I really can't work myself up to it.

They leave seven men - mostly Ivan's - on the Bridge upstairs, and send the others back into the factory chambers. I am told to stay put on the Bridge pier together with one of Keogh's troopers, and for once I don't feel like disobeying. If Vern's still alive down there, thin as a rake, eating nothing and scooping up piss from the deck whenever he needs to drink, I've no desire to watch one of Keogh's australopithecines disembowel him. The real Vern saved my life, and is as dead as he is dignified.

I'm actually really tired. I stretch out on the concrete and try to sleep, but it's too damn cold and wet. Down here, even in the big Abyss proper, there's always water dripping down onto your head from somewhere.

I resign myself to getting no sleep, and work on the very notes you are now reading for a while by the light of a card torch - a Christmas present, it fits into a wallet and provides enough light to ruin your eyes by. My australopithecine tells me it'll get seen by Oracle Smokers. I shrug and recommend that he shoot me. Luckily he doesn't.

After a while, I become aware that things are happening around me. The disposition of our troops on the Bridge pier is changing subtly. Two of them are still on guard uphill and down - the downhill road from the Bridge pier looks just as untechnological as its uphill counterpart, and winds around overhangs and spurs until it vanishes from sight in the blue dark far beneath. Two of them are making holes in the top of the pier with an Hilti gun, almost as if they intend to begin rappelling downwards. A fifth man, meanwhile, appears to have found a welding kit from somewhere, and is hard at work on the steel door at the head of the Bridge pier, fusing it strongly shut. A sixth man is cleaning a long hunting knife on the Bridge girders, dangling his feet over the drop. A seventh is communicating with somebody or other on a field radio. An eighth -

An eighth?

At that moment I suddenly also realize that the eight (or nine, or ten) or so troopers I can currently see are all Ivan's men. What has happened to Keogh's man?

The last time I saw him, he was sitting inside the Bridge girders, sheltering from the drizzle. Clouds had come over the sun, just before sunrise. The sky up above is still just a dim blue circle, but my dark-accustomed eyes are beginning to be able to take in my surroundings without torchlight.

I cross to the edge of the Bridge pier, trying not to appear too urgent. I look down. The body of Keogh's man is lying down there on top of the girders, a dark, sharp line ringing his throat from jawjoint to jawjoint. A dark liquid seems to have leaked out of him onto the iron.

I look up and see Ivan's man, still cleaning a dark liquid off his knife - with a handkerchief now, he's wiped off most of the thick stuff on the Bridge steel. He nods at me and smiles. He's wearing a hat, a peaked cap, the sort of big daft dinnerplate hat Eastern European military officers tend to favour. He's also now wearing Keogh's man's night vision goggles, and looks very much the gay fashion icon.

And then I remember I've seen hats like that before, not only during the day stalking around menacingly looking for opportunities to get bribed, not only during rush hour directing traffic, but also in a dark square in the wee small hours, on the heads of men dragging something screaming across the cobbles, towards a wall...

"You", I say - in English, forgetting myself. "It was you who threw that kid down the cliff." And I call him a rude name in Russian.

He shakes his head and tells me his anus is open only to outgoing traffic.

I suddenly realize what it is the two men with the bolt gun are fixing into the concrete over by the manhole cover. There are three of these things, and they are roughly oblong, mounted on four sturdy steel legs. From above, their shapes curve inwards like a canteen. On the inward-curving face is stencilled, in the Roman alphabet:

M18A1 CLAYMORE
FRONT TOWARD ENEMY

Why these guys are using American rather than Russian hardware, I have no idea - maybe American hardware actually works. I may be a mere sweet slip of a girl who seldom if ever reads Commando War Picture Library, but I've been an assistant understudy to a war correspondent, and I know what a Claymore mine is. It works in one direction only, against people rather than armoured targets, like a giant shotgun shell. And the faces of fall three of these Claymores are pointing inward, towards the pier - towards, in fact, the manhole cover, which now that the downstairs door is being welded shut is the only remaining exit from the Bridge.

I take a step down onto the Bridge girders, next to the knife cleaner. Next to the body of Keogh's man. After they've set the Claymores in place, they set about covering them with greatcoats and uniform tunics, disguising them from whoever might emerge from the manhole, and then retire a few steps back up and down the Devil's Escalator, trailing detonator wires behind them, before concealing themselves behind rock outcrops sturdy enough to take blast damage.

I walk backwards, gingerly, on the rusted surface. It feels as safe as a giant engineering project made of gingerbread. The knife-cleaning guy looks up at me, leers again, and runs the blade of his knife over his tongue, as if stropping it on a leather to sharpen it rather than cleaning it. His tongue begins to bleed, and must be bleeding heavily for me to see it in the dark. He grins at me round a mouthful of blood.

"Your repertoire is stale and unoriginal", I say. But I say it in English, as I don't want him to kill me just yet.

But he's in no hurry to kill me - after all, he knows I'm backing away towards a blank rock wall set into a solid concrete pier with no internal rooms or chambers, no doorways and no hidey holes.

He is so confident of his ability to deal with me, in fact, that he puts down his gun, very carefully, and draws his nice clean knife, seeming quite prepared to get it dirty all over again.

But I know a thing he does not know.

Keeping my eye on the nice gent with the knife, I move to the side of the Bridge, and begin working my way, as careful as if climbing through a house of cards, hand over hand over foot down the metal, being careful to keep at least seven points of contact between me and my climbing surface at all times. The man upstairs seems to find this hugely amusing, standing staring down at me with knife in hand, knowing I have to come up some time. All he has to do is wait. But he also knows that if he doesn't want to wait, he'll have to brachiate down all this rusted crapulence after me.

The metal is a nightmare to hold on to - huge chunks of it just come away in my hand, and I take to giving each rung a good tug and twist, hard enough to give me hepatitis, to take off the swarf before I put my weight on it. My hands are bleeding before long.

But I can see it now. The thing that he doesn't know is down here, though he must be blind if he can't see it, or at least infer its existence from what he can see from where he is. I reach a hand out to touch it, and am safe. Or at least safer.

I give it a tug. It holds. I ease my weight down onto it, very gradually. It continues to hold.

I work my way down it, into the dark. I have no idea where it leads to. All of a sudden, the man up top realizes what is happening, and panics. He begins yelling to his companions in Vaemna, then in Russian (presumably becoming aware that half of them can't understand him in Vaemna). He's telling them to shoot, shoot, shoot the British bitch. But they can't shoot me, because half of them have the body of the bridge between me and them, and the other half can't see me in any case. I can't see me, for Christ's sake. But I don't know how far down Sean's climbing rope will let me go before it peters out - just about to where Sean stopped climbing and started falling, I imagine. I will probably feel the end of the line before I see it, and if I'm hanging in space next to a sheer rock wall without any handholds, what then?

Shots begin raining down out of the dark - luckily, wildly inaccurate ones. I can see just how inaccurate because they're obliging enough to use tracer bullets. The worst that could happen seems to be that the sound of the shots might cause some sort of freak rockslide. The one man who can see where I am perfectly - i.e., who is wearing a pair of stolen night vision goggles - is standing on the other side of a thousand-tonne climbing frame, and therefore irrelevant.

After a little while, the rope bends over what must be an overhang, nearly trapping my fingers against the face. Only a little further down, I find a ledge beneath my feet. I’m safe. I realize I’ve just climbed a terrifying distance - gosh, maybe as much as twenty whole metres - down a sheer rock face without a safety harness. My granny would disapprove.

Shortly after this, they cut the rope and send it down after me. But I expected that, of course. What I didn’t expect is that they’d tie a filing cabinet to the upstairs end of it. I hear nuts and bolts ripping out of the cliff below me, and if I’d still had hold of the rope, I’d have gone down with them. I hear something big, heavy and metallic bouncing down interminable depths beneath. But I hear no enormous BOOM as it hits bottom. No matter how long I wait.

Maybe there’s a lake down there. Or some big pool of volcanic mud. Maybe the pit’s not bottomless after all. There has to be a rational explanation, right?

But down there on my own in the dark, I know that all of that is just wishful thinking, just as I was certain that the trees rattling around in the wind and the dark outside my parents’ house when I was a kid were a vampire’s long sharp fingernails tapping against my window.

It’s still blacker than Hell’s own coal-hole down here. But maybe once the sun rises a bit higher I’ll be able to see a way to climb down. Down because I’m hoping the Devil's Escalator might continue downhill from the Bridge – might, I try to convince myself, be only a ten-foot pitch away.

Or maybe I’m sitting on the only three- by two-foot ledge in an expanse of sheer cliff the height of Half Dome, Wyoming. But right now, nothing, not even the thought of falling forever, is going to stop the accumulated weight of late nights from hitting me like a sledgehammer in the back of the skull.

...And while my mind is still working through the late nights, I have a dream....

I dream I am a drowned woman, feet tangled in the anchor chain of some enormous filing cabinet-shaped ship that sank while I was trying to swim away from the wreck, and I have been pulled down into a dark crevice between continents, an Abyss, a subduction zone where one landmass is being sucked under, rocks and fossils and all, into the dark and the murk and the globigerina. And then, all of a sudden, something new enters my universe. Something brash and noisy. A bright bauble dangling on a length of silvery cable snaking down from far, far above. There are floats spaced out along this cable like parasites feeding on a larger life form, and the larger life form is a big steely ball with glowing glaring eyes brighter than the lures of deep-sea anglers, staring out white light into the dark, not the soft blue dusk of the Abyss that I'm used to.

And trapped inside the thing's glassy eyeballs is a man, another parasite, imprisoned in its pupils like one of the marine crustaceans that feed on a Greenland shark's corneas, peering out at the alien world around him. He doesn't see me, of course. How can he? I'm dead, after all. On the outside of his big glittery ball, some other man has painted a US flag and the words KOMATSU EUROPE.

Weird. My dreams are not normally this spaced out.

It's a bathysphere, of course, not any sort of sea creature. I know better than to be fooled so easily.

When the sun rises up so high it stabs down into the Abyss and allows folk down here to see, I nearly laugh myself off the ledge.

Climbing ropes are built to hold the weight of a falling person, after all; and the Nazi filing cabinet is still hanging on the end of Sean’s rope, held securely by a climbing anchor that is doing its job and then some. It’s no more than twenty feet below me. And underneath it is a man with a beard and a hard hat, looking up. He must be attached to the cliff by either glue or telekinesis, because he’s certainly standing on nothing.

He stares at the filing cabinet. Then he stares at me.

“I prefer you to your mate”, he says.

“Stop looking up her drawers”, I answer. “What’s the matter, you never seen a girl take her filing system climbing with her before?”

“I’m not even going to ask”, he says. He’s carrying on a conversation with me without apparent concern that he’s holding on to a sheer rock wall by his fingertips.

“You’ll be Sean, I take it.”

This fazes him even more than the filing cabinet. “You have the advantage over me.”

“You’re very famous in subterranean circles. My name’s Penny Simpson. I came down with Vern and Pete. Looking for you.”

He nods. “I saw bits of Pete over by the lich gate.”

“Lich gate.”

He nods. “That’s what I call it. Ain’t that what you call the gate to a cemetery?”

“I’m sorry. You said ‘lich gate’. And then you said ‘cemetery’.”

He’s up to the filing cabinet now – climbs like a gecko. Right now, he’s holding on to the abyssite with one hand whilst trying to undo the policemen’s knots with the other.

“Waste my bloody climbing rope”, I hear him mutter.

He looks up as the cabinet begins to shift in its bonds. “Vern?” he says.

I shake my head. “Dead. The Oracle Smokers got him.”

“The Oracle Smokers those really thin scratters with guns up by that big iron cantilever?” I nod. He nods back. “They took a pot shot at me.” He frowns. “I clipped a krab on to the girders up there, and I reckon I abseiled down faster than poor old Pete fell. I nearly had me a drysuit that wasn’t quite so dry in the arse region. Ah, there we go –“ He loosens the last knot, and, leaving the rope still in his hand, the cabinet lurches and plunges to its doom. I hear it progressing from rock to rock down the Abyss, on its way to the world’s core.

“I’m not sure I can get down from here”, I say.

He nods, detaching and re-attaching nuts from and to cracks on the face as he does so. “That’s a descender on your belt, innit? Clip it onto this.” He hands me the uphill end of the filing cabinet tether. “There’s a ledge you can play five-a-side football on only a couple of seconds’ drop down from here.”

“I’d prefer to abseil rather than drop if you don’t mind.”

“You’d only a break a few legs if you did drop. It’s a cissy distance.”

Then, having made sure of his aids, he disappears down the rock again with the downhill end of the rope – and I do mean disappears. There must be an overhang immediately below. What is most worrying is the fact that he hasn’t bothered to clip himself on to the rope.

“COME ON”, yells a voice I can’t see. “I’VE BELAYED THE ROPE TO SOMETHING FAR TOO HEAVY FOR ITS OWN GOOD.”

“WHICH IS?”

“ME.”

Like a skinny kid forced into a swimming pool on a cold day by a cruel scoutmistress, I lower myself from the ledge by inches, taking my weight on both hands; then I shift to one hand and try my weight on the first nut. It doesn’t budge. I put my weight on the rope and start to work my way downwards.

The ledge down below is huge by Abyss standards – it must be the size of a squash court. Its full extent is only dimly visible in the light coming down from above.

“You can switch on your head torch”, says Sean. “There’s no line of sight down here from the cantilever. The scrotes tried dropping rocks on me from time to time, but they just bounce off the overhang. The ledge’s just about protected from falling crap. See how the votive garbage only collects round the sides of it? I don’t ever sit in those bits.”

I switch on my head torch. It is true. This is probably the only reason why the ledge still exists – otherwise, chunks of Na garbage motoring down from above at man-killing speed would have chiselled it flush to the face centuries ago.

“Careful how you tread”, he says. “The floor’s almost all bat guano.”

There are little tiny button mushrooms everywhere. Even down here, where the sun never comes, there is life, though probably not life Beatrix Potter would care to illustrate wearing trousers and a waistcoat. There is also a buzz of insects, and heat like that of an oven. The smell is diabolical. The rock walls all around us resemble sea cliffs hung with mussels, and I only realize after a few seconds that they are actually crawling with bats.

“Don’t handle them”, says Sean, which he of course really needed to say, as otherwise I’d have been all over them. “Rabies.”

Despite Pete’s and Ivan’s earlier conversations on this subject, I hadn’t thought of rabies. Vampires, yes. Rabies, no.

But the most remarkable fact about the ledge is the ornamental wrought iron railing going all the way around it.

“They brought it down from somewhere else, of course”, says Sean. “These, though, they made with local materials.” He strides into the middle of what he’s talking about, and taps one with a thumb.

These are gravestones. Many gravestones, arranged in rows – rows of modern ones hung with iron crosses and Soviet army helmets, and rows of older ones, undecorated. Maybe they were decorated once. Maybe some grave robber stole what hung on them.

The older gravestones are stones, crudely hacked-up lumps of abyssite into which inscriptions have been scored in dog Latin. The Soviet stones, as befits a worker state, are pieces of construction iron that have been welded – curiously enough, welded into the shapes of crosses. Comrade Stalin would never have approved. Whatever Sean says, the Nazi stones, at least, look like they weren’t made here – they’re marble, nothing but the best for the Waffen SS. The First Reich came here, then the Third. The Second seems to have missed out.

“They can’t be buried very deep”, I say.

He shrugs. “Might be. Lot of bats have been shitting here for a lot of time. Not nice to know you’re buried in shit.”

I look down into the shit, and frown at what I see.

“Yeah”, says Sean. “Footprints.”

“They come down this far?”

“No. They don’t.” He nods his head torch at the end of the ledge furthest out in the Abyss. It illuminates something unpleasant.

Being very careful on the slick surface, I walk out amid the graves to the end of the yard. There, planted in the earth like a new crop, like a subterranean John Barleycorn, someone has left a man.

At least, I think it’s a man. Oracle Smokers are so thin it’s hard to tell the difference. His-or-her body is splayed out on two long shafts thrust into the dirt – shafts made out of smaller lengths of something roped together. At their upper ends, the shafts terminate in crude rusty iron spearpoints. At their bases, they are set into heavy square lumps of lead, presumably to balance the spears and make them fly better. The frame made by the two makeshift spears is flimsy and insubstantial, and someone’s had a very tough job driving in the nails to crucify him.

They didn’t just stop at crucifying him, though - someone also seems to have removed his arms and legs. Whether he died before or after crucifixion is unclear - he’s not so much been made into an amputee as a Boneless Man, his legs and arms filleted neatly of humerus, tibia, fibia, femur, radius and ulna. He’s been attached to the cross by pegs driven through the mummified flaps of skin and muscle that are all that remain of his extremities. His hands and forearms are wrapped sardonically round his neck like fox furs, in case he catches a chill.

But the spears holding him up there aren’t made of wood. I wonder what they are made of, thinking at first it must be carbon fibre or plastic. Then I mentally subtract forty or fifty years of immersion in an atmosphere of sewer urine, fungal spores, and bat guano, and finally I realize what I’m looking at. I realize now just why the man had to be de-boned like a chicken. He’s been crucified on a frame made from the long bones of his own arms and legs.

“Why’d’you reckon anyone would want to do that?” says Sean clinically.

“Wood is really scarce down here”, I shrug back. I notice that, as a final marvellous conceit, the man’s fingerbones have been used as the pegs that fix him to the cross. They’ve had to actually sew his flesh to the frame in places before hammering the nails in. The nails evidently wouldn’t take the weight.

“I know it’s weird to say this, but I think these are someone’s attempt to make a Roman legionnaire’s javelin out of bone.”

Nod. “I think so too. The lead weights.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. Why would Oracle Smokers want to do this to one of their own people?”

“You ain’t got the point. They didn’t. This wasn’t done by them.”

And then it does make sense. The Smokers stay in the manufacturing facility up above, even when attacked, when they could just as easily retreat to the lower levels. Why do they do this? Because there’s something down here that’s worse. There’s more than one lost tribe of humankind down here, and we’ve just crossed a line into someone else’s territory.

“The footprints”, I say. “None of them wear shoes.”

“Think you better count the toes on those footprints”, he says.

I count. I don’t believe. I recount, and get the same result.

“These little piggies”, he says, “are never going to go wee-wee-wee-wee all the way home.”

There are several different sets of prints, all of different sizes. Each one is deficient in the piggy department.

The gravestones are carefully tended. Each one has been painstakingly kept clean from the constant rain of guano. In front of each stone is a dull grey pile of pebbles, like a cairn. Each pebble looks polished, as if by a gemcutter. I don’t disturb the pebbles. Neither has Sean. I think we've both come to the independent conclusion that this would be a bad idea.

“Been waiting around for a couple of days,”, he says. “Imagined Pete and Vern might have showed up by now. Did wonder why. Now I know. Suspected it, obviously - someone took a shot at me, so I thought they might have got shot at too. I reckoned if I waited around down here for long enough, whoever it was who had the guns and the bad attitude would get bored and go home. Besides, it’s interesting down here.”

“What have you been living on?”

He jerks his head torch at a lightweight pack clipped to the rock above me. “I have an inexhaustible supply of Mars bars.”

“How many is inexhaustible?”

“At least three. I had one about a day ago by my watch.” He shows me his watch proudly. It’s luminous.

“It’s a genuine radium watch”, he says. “Little match girls used to get radiation sickness painting the figures onto these suckers. They used to lick their brushes to stiffen them and hey presto, oral cancer. That’s why I never, ever put the watch in my mouth.”

I try hard to change the subject. “What have you been waiting around down here for?”

He pokes a toe at the footprints. “Been waiting for them to turn up. Wanted to know what they looked like.”

“Well, pardon me for not sharing your enthusiasm.” I nod at the crucifix. “You want to spend Easter like that?”

He shakes his head. “I set all my ropes up so you need to climb up to get to them, so only I can use them. There’s a pathway people seem to use around this place, probably cut by the Romans. But it goes down in a spiral, and I can get from level to level of it faster than any enemy can chase me, up or down.”

“What if the enemy can climb as fast as you can?”

“Ain’t no cave man can climb faster than me.”

“Sean, these people, these things, live here. If they can’t climb, they die at an early age. And they’ve been dying at an early age for hundreds of years, maybe even thousands. I wouldn’t be surprised if they could run up walls like spiders by now.”

This does make him look up at the walls above his head a trifle nervously; but it doesn’t bother him overmuch. He frowns and claps me on the shoulder. “You ain’t seen the best yet. You’re in for a real treat.”

***

When he says there’s a path carved into the Abyss even this far down, his definition of the word ‘path’ leaves a lot to be desired. This isn’t the three-abreast thoroughfare cut, shored and blasted into the rock high up above. This is what the Romans’ engineering projects look like when the Germans don’t lovingly repair them.

Parts of the Roman road still survive – the occasional forlorn mason-cut step or archway, hanging in air, connecting with nothing. These islands of classical civilization are connected by paths worn deep into the rock by heaven knows how many years of feet (and Lord alone knows how many toes per foot), meandering up over great stone blocks and under overhangs, taking detours up and down twenty or thirty feet, necessitating climbs and scrambles that would stop anyone having undesensitized fear centres in their five-toed tracks. But of course, for me, by now, it’s a doddle. Somehow, I even seem to like it down here now, as if I’m becoming part of the environment. I feel almost like singing a happy Climbing Down Into Hell song.

And then we come upon Sean’s idea of the Best Thing. If anything, it proves that he doesn’t get out much.

It’s a pipe – an indisputably Twentieth-Century one, rooted in undeniable Twentieth-Century concrete. It's too rusty to be a Twenty-First Century pipe, but made of steel, and serviceable. It’s also, when I rap on its outside, full. And thrumming softly as something passes through it. Up or down, I’ve no idea, but I’d guess at up. People don’t normally pump stuff down into the ground...

“What’s in it, you think?” says Sean. “Geothermal energy? Oil? Natural gas?”

(...except in California, where I’ve heard they pump water into the ground sometimes to ease the stresses on the San Andreas fault. Or maybe, if someone had something really really bad that they’d created and had realized that they shouldn’t have, maybe they might sink a really long, deep pipe into some very hard old rock and try to squirt the stuff as far underground as they could get it...something like radioactive waste, maybe...or nerve gas...)

This is a very old pipe. As I turn my head and headtorch upwards, I can see an emergency valve some way up it. There are letters on the valve. Something-Or-Other-SGEFAHR. The ‘SGEFAHR means ‘Danger of Something-Or-Other’. I get the feeling the Something-Or-Other isn’t likely to be pleasant.

And the pipe is still in operation. A tribute to Nazi engineering.

Maybe, though, I think to myself, I got the direction of flow right the first time.

“There was once supposed to be another temple in Na”, I say, "which no archaeologist has ever found. An old Greek temple, or rather, a temple known to the Greeks, where priestesses – Oracles – were said to foretell the future. Do you know how ancient Greek oracles were supposed to work?”

He shakes his head torch. The beam dances about wildly.

“Well, the Oracle at Delphi, for one, is now thought to have worked like this. The temple’s sanctus sanctorum was constructed over some sort of volcanic vent which seeped poison gas – not nerve-gas poisonous, but enough to have an intoxicating effect on the brain. The priestesses, and for all I know the worshippers too, breathed in this gas, and it gave them visions of the future all right, all the way to showing them their own deaths in some cases, I shouldn’t wonder. Of course, all this is pure speculation, based on fanciful interpretation of ancient sources. But what if those sources were one hundred per cent accurate? And what if the Greek poison gas oracles we can’t find any reliable evidence for were just copies of one original?”

Sean frowns under his helmet. “But you said no-one ever found the temple.”

I nod. “And what if the reason why the archaeologists never found the temple is because they didn’t go deep enough? What if the temple is down here?”

“Gosh”, he says.

Then we hear three explosions loud enough to send rock splinters tumbling off the walls far above.

I look up. There is a cloud of smoke and dust billowing around what looks to me like the factory limb of the Bridge. It’s as clearly visible as things ever get down here, between me and the morning sun.

“Claymores”, I say.

“Pardon?” says Sean.

“Someone just died up there.”

“Good guys or bad guys?”

“Bit of both.”

I look at the pathway leading upwards. Well, parts of it lead upwards.

“Does this still go all the way to the Bridge?”

He shrugs. “Far as I know.”

“Then I’m going up it. You may want to stay down here forever, I don’t.”

He looks doubtful. “Have to turn off your torch. They’ll shoot at the light.”

“Well, it’s a choice between climbing up that in the dark – “ I wave a hand up at the Abyss wall – “or walking up this. And I know which one I’m doing. Until I get close to the Bridge, at least. Then maybe I can try climbing past it.” Though I know, of course, that I can’t. The walls are sheer, and Sean is right, I’ll have to do it in the dark, because Ivan will leave a man on guard, who will shoot me. If he sees me.

No, I’m hoping I can shame Sean into coming with me and leading the climb – but I don’t hold too much hope out for this, as by the look of his hairdo, he has very little shame.

He shakes his head. “You won’t have to walk up the path all the way to the Bridge. There’s another set of openings further down. Saw them about a day ago. It was all lit up, there were tracer bullets flying around up there like fireflies. Happened a few hours back too.”

“Why haven’t you tried to get out that way, then?”

He repeats himself, slowly. “There were tracer bullets flying around up there.”

“Will you come up that way with me if I threaten to ridicule your masculinity?”

He looks at his feet, illuminating them as he does so with his head torch, and makes noises of disgruntlement, but I know I have him trapped.

***

It takes some time to get up to the place where Sean says there are openings in the rock. Since the Bridge is vertically above us, the openings (if they’re actually there) do indeed look promisingly like the sub-basement levels of the Nazi factory complex.

And there are people here. Mostly dead people. In places, also, people who are mostly dead, who’d probably benefit from a coup de grace which neither I nor Sean are prepared to give them.

“National Autoroute Number One into Na”, whispers a voice from the dark mournfully, “will be blocked from 0800 hours onwards during the months of September and October due to essential road widening.”

“In the year 2087”, sighs another voice, “Nhamo Pongo will be the first Zimbabwean to set foot on Uranus.”

Occasionally, sniper fire – sometimes tracer, sometimes not – stabs down from the dark, but always a long, long way away from us. What the people upstairs think they’re shooting at, I have no idea. Maybe they’re just trying to chip the rocks into interesting shapes. Like a camera flash going off at random intervals in a darkened room, the gunfire gives a tantalizing outline of gigantic iron doors set in concrete, with rivets that look the size of beachballs. With Soviet armies rolling ever closer up at the mouth of the Abyss, fortified gateways should surely be expected at the upper end of the SS stronghold, not the lower. But these gates are clearly not designed to throw off attacks from above.

Despite this, however, someone has left them open. A last malicious act by the departing Russians, maybe.

The corpses on the ground are ninety per cent Oracle Smoker, looking not much deader than they did in life. However, one man, lying full length on the path, is one of Keogh’s. Based on the fact that he no longer has most of his face, he would seem to have been shot in the back of the head.

And close up ahead, I can hear movement (or it may be way, way ahead, or even right round the Abyss behind us. The rock walls bend sound like a whispering gallery). A series of scrapes and shuffles, and then a clearly identifiable KLIKKLIK.

“Someone moving”, says Sean, very softly. “Someone with a gun.”

“I think I know who that is”, I mutter.

This someone is moving around very noisily; he’s having great difficulty negotiating rocks and obstacles he can’t see, and he also hasn’t spent a week squatting down here in the dark living on Mars bars and magic mushrooms. Sean, on the other hand, has. By now, he can probably see things in the dark that other men can only dream of.

“There’s two of them”, he says. “One up high, big guy, uniform with lots of shiny buttons, on the rocks above the doors. Carrying some sort of AK. And one down below, pressed close in against the wall. Also carrying an AK, but one with a folding stock, and he’s wearing boots and a climbing harness. Both got gasmasks just like you. Neither of them actually wearing them, though.”

“Ivan and Keogh”, I say.

I explain, very quietly, that the municipal authorities of Na do not, for some reason, approve of foreigners exploring their big hole in the ground, quite possibly because it's full of homicidal addicts to a substance worse than PCP-cut heroin. And possibly because those same municipal authorities keep the civic peace by chucking in kids who misbehave. I explain that there might well be, as well as said homicidal opium fiends, armed and unfriendly policemen out there in the dark. I explain how the British Embassy has also expressed a purely scientific interest in the toxic substance emanating from the Abyss tunnels, and that they have sent a group of armed MoD monkeys to locate and bring back samples. I theorize that the MoD monkeys are now in battle with the Na police.

Sean absorbs this, then nods sagely.

"Figured it had to be summat like that."

“Are either of them wearing sort of big heavy goggles?”

“Nah.”

But I knew they had no night vision specs already. If they could see to shoot in the dark, Ivan would have given me fresh holes to bleed through by now, and Keogh would probably have shot Sean as a troublesome threat to his mission objectives.

“Can we get through the gateway without going past them?”

Sean shrugs nonchalantly. I take this as a yes.

“Let’s go.” They can kill each other to their heart’s content.

The gateway is littered with bodies. It is also very dark. As Keogh and Ivan have probably just come through here, though, I imagine (no, hope and pray) that there aren’t any Oracle Smokers left inside. There are footprints coming in and out aplenty, however, dotted across the spoor of a number of tracked vehicles that came this way a long time ago, leaving marks like big bold brushstrokes laid on by a lunatic in a work of art that is purposely meaningless.

About ten yards in, we turn on our hats, and I satisfy myself that what I’d thought I’d find is here.

Just as I thought.

A forest of gigantic pipes, disappearing into floor and ceiling like steel sequoias. Thrumming gently from some weird subterranean power source still operating after all these years. Pumping something upward from the depths, many storeys upward. At first, it all looks like a colonnaded hall from the depths of Tolkien’s Moria or Piranesi’s Carceri; the only source of light, apart from the pathetic candles of our headgear, are Smoker bonfires, some of them nothing but lit puddles of meths and petrol made up in water potholes, giving the pipes the appearance of classical columns, the rust of rock. The whole of Hell.

There’s no-one alive in here. No-one I can see. I pick up an Avtomat Kalashnikova off another of Keogh’s men I find in the hallway (shot, again, in the back). I pull off the dead man’s NBC mask and hand it to Sean. He shakes his head.

“You misunderstand me”, I say. “You wear it, or I shoot you. You don’t know this stuff like I do.”

He shrugs and puts it on, and I put mine on, and we walk into the place like deep sea divers, seeing the world through two tiny circles of glass. Through the circles, the world looks like an oil refinery piled on top of a chemical works. Half the machinery is clearly both disused and unusable. Despite the fact that the pumps seem to be operating, there is no power in the light fittings, as a moment’s flicking back and forth with a thumb reveals. Anything burnable has long since gone into one of the myriad bonfires dotted round the floor and stairwells. The walls are covered with thick streaks of black soot in which bizarre hieroglyphics announcing the end of the world in a variety of cruel and unusual ways abound. My nostrils tell me this is Smoker territory.

Part of the wall at the far end seems to have collapsed, and people are protruding from the rubble. I shine my head around, and there is molten aluminium smeared all over the pipework. This, I suspect, is the work of Sir Reginald’s Kzaer 2000. We must be at pit bottom here, after all, though I doubt it would be possible to reach the stairwell now. The entrance must be blocked by a thousand tonnes of garbage. My memory informs me that there’s still a lift shaft, though, even if there isn’t a stairwell any longer. And when we check it out, there are – joy of joys – climbing ropes already bolted to its walls. Keogh’s men must have come down this way. And nobody shoots at me even when I stick my illuminated head into the shaft.

“It’s safe”, I say.

“Huh”, disagrees Sean.

Without bothering with the rope, he locates a few slight indents in the wall with his fingertips, chins and chews himself free of his gasmask, and starts climbing.

“Hey! Your mask! Your BASTARD MASK!”

“OK SO FAR”, he yells happily, ignoring me.

“DON’T YELL”, I yell. But I already know Ivan’s policemen have welded the doors shut upstairs, and Keogh and Ivan seem to have gone down through the whole complex shooting everything that moves, so there really is unlikely to be anyone in here who can hear us. Isn’t there?

I take a last look back at the pump room. The firelight behind a hundred vertically rising pipes tigerstripes the wall with creeping shadows. I take hold of the rope, and go up it.

Sean is already a long way ahead, pronouncing each level safe with a cheery thumbs-up back to me as he goes. But only three levels after we start climbing, all I can make out above, instead of the blank black oblongs of lift entrances, is bare raw concrete stretching as far as Sean’s light will carry.

I should have expected this. For the Nazis to have completely honeycombed the rock with factory halls and pumping stations to a depth of over one hundred metres, the complex would have needed to have been as big as the Empire State. Ergo, most of it isn’t honeycombed. It’s solid rock. They only tunnelled out new levels where they needed them. The factory complex was built just deep enough to escape the blast from any Russian bomb (and maybe even the rather bigger bombs they must have suspected the Americans were developing), whilst still allowing supplies to move easily back and forth between it and the surface. The pumping station we’ve just left was built deep enough to keep the pipes sunk into the rock undamaged and properly maintained, and ensure a constant supply of whatever it is they were bringing up here from the dark.

“You’re going to get tired”, says Sean. “Must be ten storeys of sheer concrete up there at least. It’s roped and bolted, but there’s not much room to stop and rest as you’re going.”

I look up. “I can make it.”

He looks dubious. “If you fall –“

“It’ll be quick.”

***

My arms ache. My legs, which I’ve been working harder to take the pain from my arms, also ache. I have rope burn over every soft and tender surface on my body.

I switched my headtorch off half an hour ago. I’ve grown so used to the shape of the space I’m shinning my way up through that I can find my way by feel. Besides, my mystic third eye bobbing up and down in the dark made an ideal target for a sniper, and silly me, I haven’t yet been able to shake my paranoid fear that there might still be people who don’t like me left alive in the dark above.

At first I think I’ll be able to rest my legs by perching on the steel reinforcing bands that lap the shaft every ten yards or so. But I find out very quickly that I have to hold on to something to steady myself, and that something can’t be the climbing rope, which stretches and pulls out from the vertical, leaving me dangling in space, having to hold on even harder. The best I can manage to get a minute’s rest is to hook the insides of my wrists around the counterweight cables, which are nests of frayed wire and leave impressions of themselves in my flesh. It has to be the wrists I hold on with. I can’t risk injuring the insides of my palms. I wouldn’t be able to grip the rope and climb.

Sean helps as much as he can, of course – he says he’s already reached the next level up, which seems unimaginably distant, and keeps on disappearing into the darkness up above to check that everything’s still safe ahead. But he always comes back down, clambering down balance weights and cables, sometimes lending me an arm to steady myself.

It seems like we’ve been climbing for hours. I say so.

“About an hour” he agrees, sotto voce. “You’re just too slow.” He pats me on the head and disappears up the wall again. By this time, even he is having to take breaks. “Not too far now.” He first said not too far now a long, long time ago.

Then, suddenly, I hear him say disbelievingly:

“Shit. It really is not too far now.”

I can hardly believe the effrontery. “BASTARD! YOU NEVER DID GET TO THE TOP!”

“No, it really is not too far away now. I can actually see it.”

Bastard. Mind you, if he hadn’t been lying to me comprehensively since we started climbing, I wouldn’t have made it this far.

“How long have we really been climbing?”

“About three hours.”

Bastard.

And then, almost immediately (bastard!) he’s reached the top and installed himself there, and is crowing down to me.

“Not too far. You can do it easily. If you don’t fall or anything.”

But then I hear a discreet whispering from above Sean, and think twice about the wisdom of having yelled BASTARD at him at the top of my voice. It’s conversation I can hear rather than prognostication, so I’ve a fair idea who it is doing the whispering. After all, I’ve counted two of Keogh’s men dead on the ground, and seen another man wiping his knife clean of the blood of a third. And the claymore mine up above must have dealt with the fourth.

Then I hear a noise I can’t quite put my finger on. A noise like a violin being bowed by a madman on cattle tranquilizers, accompanied by tinny tinkles like the high strings on a piano snapping.

Sawing.

Someone’s sawing through the cable that holds the lift platform up above my head. The platform that’s big enough to lift a two hundred tonne tank. That already has a two hundred tonne tank on it.

“Penelope -!”

“I know.” I start hauling myself upward on muscles I thought I couldn’t force anything more out of, but which now seem oddly cooperative. Blisters sear my fingers, but it still seems I’m only inching up the rope. The rope is now jerking about like the alarm line that leads from a spider’s web to a spider. If this rope goes all the way up the shaft to the top, whoever’s doing the sawing will certainly know I’m here if they didn’t already, and redouble their efforts on the basis of that information.

So it doesn’t matter if I yell now. “HOW – MUCH – FURTHER – “

“Not - far -” The rope suddenly goes taut in my fists, and I’m climbing up it as it travels up the shaft of its own accord. It’s difficult to stay on it at first. It’s moving up in short, rapid jerks, as if being pulled first through one hand, then the other, of someone stronger than any man has a right to be. Up above I can only hear Sean gasping for breath, not shouting encouragement any longer. I can also hear the sound of something very, very large shifting in the shaft above, as a single silvery cable snaps and hurtles downwards frighteningly close to my left ear, whiplash-fast.

There is light way up there now. Someone has switched a torch on. The outline of the lift platform, an oblong of silvery luminescence the size of a postage stamp, is visible – and underneath it, my rope, feeding up over the lip of a black aperture in the shaft, over the boot of someone standing in that aperture. Someone who is heaving at the line like Saint Andrew bringing in his catch.

Only another few metres now –

Then the platform lurches and starts to move.

I suppose it’s too much to ask that the lift have some sort of functioning safety brake.

It drops down like a steel press, which I suppose is exactly what it is. I shut my eyes, and my neck nearly snaps with the acceleration as someone yanks me upwards and sideways with a last heroic effort, and I’m suddenly rolling on a glass-and-faeces-covered surface as the fastest tank in the world hurtles past me at a hundred miles an hour.

It is a good two or three seconds before I can remember to breathe again.

While I’m still trying out my first breath, I’m stopped in mid-gasp by a bolt of fire shooting up the elevator. The walls shake so hard that cracks shudder up them as if they were windscreen glass. A sheet of flame shoots across the roof, then vanishes as if it were a tablecloth whipped away by a magician, to be replaced by a puff of soot that rains down on us like wedding confetti.

Almost immediately, there’s a second, not quite so loud bang from the top of the elevator shaft. This is more alarming, as it isn’t expected. There is screaming, and a man plummets past the elevator entrance, trailing smoke.

“D’you think the tank had live ammunition in it?”

Sean looks at me patiently. “The tank weighed two hundred tons and was travelling at a couple of hundred miles an hour on top of a platform that weighed at least as much as it did. It didn’t need to have live ammunition in it.”

I roll over and stick my head incautiously into the lift shaft, looking upwards. “Why did the top of the shaft explode?”

Sean squints up the shaft after me. “When they were sawing the cables, they forgot that every elevator everywhere in the world has a set of balance weights attached. Big job like that’ll have more than one set of weights, I reckon. They probably sawed through most of the counterweight cables but overlooked one attached to something light and fluffy that only weighed ten tonnes or so. When the big weight goes down, the small weight attached to it goes up, at the same speed...”

“Ten tonnes, travelling as fast as a tank falling down a lift shaft. No wonder he screamed.”

“Yeah. Bound to have stung a bit.” He pulls himself to his feet. “Let’s have a look round. They might have Mars bars.”

“They built this place sixty years ago, and they were Nazis.”

He nods confidently. “Nazi mars bars. Made with dead Jews. Bite through the creamy Jewy caramel into thick thick chocolate.” He casts his head to right and left. “Looks like a ruddy school bursar’s office.”

It is an office all right, though a very old one. There is also living accommodation of a cramped sort at one end - people were expected to eat and sleep down here, as well as working. There are Olympia and Mercedes typewriters, Kaweco fountain pens, and bottles that once contained Pelican ink, and now only contain dry cakes of purple dust. Only a few bodies, most of them in Leibstandarte Dacia uniform, two of them without backs to their skulls, and teeth blacked with carbon on the insides. Suicide wounds, though someone has taken away the guns they used to do it. In a room which has three separate mortice locks on its door and contains seven telephones, we also discover things that look like a cross between big typewriters and GPO operators' switchboards.

“What are they?” says Sean.

“They're Enigma machines; a whole bank of them. I saw one at Bletchley Park once. I had a boyfriend who was a mathematician. I remember unwisely asking him to tell me how they worked in mathematical terms. A bloody Enigma switchboard.”

This was a communications centre. A secure communications centre. But why here, a hundred metres underground?

The telephone lines in this room have names, not numbers. One of them is labelled KIEL; there is also a ROM, a PRAG, a PARIS, a KIEV, and one - an especially impressive one the size of a church lectern, smothered in bakelite eagles and lightning bolts - is labelled BERLIN.

Despite the fact that this telephone room seems to be a secure area, one wall of it is glass. Very thick glass, with a manufacturer's hallmark on one corner. Possibly bulletproof. Beyond the glass is a small, cube-shaped room only just big enough to contain one metal chair with leather cuff restraints attached to its legs and arms. I half expect to see steel wok-like headgear suspended over the head of the seat with wires trailing from it, but this isn't an electric chair. The chair also has a large microphone sprouting from the floor in front of it. And behind the chair, also projecting from the floor, is a steel tube terminating in what looks like an oversized showerhead. It's not just the wall I'm looking through that's glass - all four sides of the cube are. One of the offices I'm looking into through those other glass sides is full of recording equipment - banks of ancient tape drives with spools the size of dinnerplates.

"The bastards. The sick bastards."

Sean raps on the glass. "Thick glass. Soundproof, probably. Looks like a radio broadcast booth. For sending messages out to the troops, probably."

"Soundproof I can understand." I draw a fingernail down the edge of the windowpane. "Airtight I can't. It's an execution chamber. They put people in there, and something came out of that big power shower over there. And I'm pretty sure I know what that something was."

He frowns and ransacks his imagination. "Cyanide?"

"No. Put yourself in the position of the Reich. They've been pushed back from Stalingrad. They know the Allies are crawling up Italy - their own propaganda posters say so." I point to one on the wall of the radio office, its colours as bright as the day they were printed in the total absence of UV underground. Though covered in mildew; the poster depicts a rather fetching Allied snail with British and American eyestalks oozing its way north from Naples. The poster says - in English, which I'm quite impressed by - IT'S A LONG WAY TO ROME. But the snail is moving, gaining ground if only ever so slowly, and the poster admits it. "They also know that their Japanese allies are losing the war in the Pacific, and that the Allies are preparing for the Second Front across the Channel. They are getting desperate. And if you were getting that desperate, wouldn't it be really valuable to you to know the date of, say, D-Day in advance?"

He still hasn't got it. He carries on staring blankly.

"Oracle Smoke causes the Smoker to babble predictions of the future", I say. "Whether they were accurate or not, no SS commander would have cared by that stage. The Germans were clutching at straws. Giant two hundred ton tanks that sank into whatever ground they drove over. Suicide rockets."

I stare into the cubicle. There are scratches all around the wrist cuffs on the chair, like the scratches found on the coffin lids of people buried alive. "They used prisoners, I imagine. Jews. Vaemna. Russian POW's. Or gypsies."

I turn round and see Sean has left the comms room and is pacing the length of the wall in the main office. When he reaches the end of it, he starts working his way left from room to room at a right angle to the main wall, shoving furniture aside as if searching for something.

"What are you looking for?"

"Windows", he says.

"We're underground", I say gently, suspecting he might be going cage happy. "There are no windows."

He raps on the plaster hard with his knuckles. "Thirty paces. This wall should back on to the Abyss."

"Maybe there aren't any windows. What use would windows be to us anyway?"

"You were on the face downhill from the gantry yesterday. You must've seen it."

"Seen what?"

"The Americans' crane. They've been dangling it down into the Abyss for two days now. Didn't go very far down, I thought. Maybe they're doing some sort of speed trial."

And I suddenly remember my dream of last night. The bathysphere stamped with the American flag. The man inside it, looking out in wonder at an underwater world. I kick myself.

"I did see it", I say. "But I thought I was asleep at the time."

Sean has discovered a toilet door. He has to kick it open and dislodge a bad-smelling Nazi occupant who's blown out his brains with his trousers down, but the all-important thing is that the toilet has a window. Or at least a fanlight, which Sean proceeds to smash into a window large enough to squirm through using a snapped-off table leg.

I notice that the corpse on the carpet is exceedingly well-dressed, sporting official SS underwear. Sean wriggles through the hole in the wall, and I'm now holding a conversation with his arse. It makes just about as much sense as his head.

"Anything out there?"

"Hmph", says Sean's arse expressively. "There's no crane capsule. But I think there's light up at the Abyss mouth, and from where the crane comes down too."

"And that means?"

"They're still up there. Your municipal authorities haven't shut them down."

That doesn't sound like Ivan, and I say so.

"Ivan's still downstairs playing Murder In The Dark with your Mr. Keogh. He's not himself right now. Besides", Sean adds, "the crane's on live TV. National Geographic. Worldwide coverage."

I begin to see Sean's plan. "They wouldn't dare shoot at the Americans' balls while those balls are dangling from a crane and sending back live footage."

He leans further into the Abyss. "Precisely." He's fumbling with the straps on his climbing helmet. "Help me get this bastard off."

"What for?"

He doesn't answer, but rips off the head torch and begins flicking it on and off slowly, pointing it up toward the Abyss mouth. Someone shoots at him. A rifle bullet ricochets off the rock a comfortable number of yards away. He carries on flashing the torch, but retreats back into the window, leaving only hand and torch outside in the dark.

Someone carries on shooting at him. After a while they get frustrated with the lack of progress from the single shots and switch to automatic fire. Flinty splinters occasionally bounce in through the window, but nothing nits Sean. After several minutes of pebble-dashing the cliff with wildly inaccurate fire, the sniper runs out either of ammunition or of motivation, and the gun falls silent. Sean carries on flashing, whilst making sure all his vital areas are still well inside the window.

"Get back over to the elevator", he says. "See if you can find any other ways up or down. If you can, see if you can find a way to block them. Now I'm doing this, I'm signalling our position to the bad guys as well as the good ones. And we'll need rope. Rope and something curvy and solid." He points back into the office, where there's a wooden hatstand. "That'll do."

I'm not really sure why he needs to hang his coat up at this juncture. But I show willing.

***

The stairwell is too full of mangled stairs at this depth for anyone to actually be able to climb up it. The grenade explosion in the upper storeys brought down what looks like a hundred or so flights of steel steps, and they all ended up down here. The way up is a mess of mangled iron and powdered plaster, with hardly a passage through big enough for a mouse, or at the very most a medium-sized badger. I am larger than a badger.

The elevator, meanwhile, has been swept weirdly clean of ropes, cables, balance weights, everything - it's now nothing more than a long concrete box leading upward. Nobody, I reckon, is coming at us up or down via either of those routes.

But there must, I reason, be a smaller elevator. Nobody is going to use a lift platform which might itself weigh a hundred tonnes to shift an office desk. And sure enough, I find a desk-sized elevator, tucked away behind a wooden door in the main office. I can lever open the safety doors inside with a paperknife, and there's a shaft beyond which I suspect to have a lift in it up above me somewhere - it must be up above me as, at the moment, I can only see counterweight cables. I ponder how to block it. I wonder whether to block it; I’m not entirely certain whether Sean’s cunning plan is going to work, principally because I don’t yet know what it is. And if the plan doesn’t work, we’re trapped on this storey.

Or rather, I am. Sean’s almost as happy climbing up a cliff face as he is walking along a floor.

As I’m leaning into the dark pondering my options, a voice calls out from below:

“Is that you, Penelope?”

I don’t see any point in lying, so I reply:

“Yup.”

“The others in your party are all dead. You may as well give up.”

“Hmm, give myself up and die, not give myself up and not die. You’ve a tenuous grasp of logic on you, Ivan.”

There is a pause. And then he says:

“If you give yourself up to me now, I can promise it’ll be quick. But I can’t answer for my men up higher if you try to climb up past them. Some of them are...unpleasant.”

I think about this a second, and follow it to its logical conclusion. “You’d really like me to drop you down a rope, wouldn’t you, Ivan.”

A much longer pause this time. “I can get up any time I like.”

“There’s a break in the Roman road between there and here, isn’t there? Sometime in the last two thousand years, there was a landslip or a rockfall and the road fell away from the cliff. Or is Tom Keogh still alive out there? Did you not manage to finish him off? Are you scared to go back out the gates?”

This time the pause is very, very long.

“I am going to kill you, Miss Simpson. I will take great pleasure in it.”

“Come up here and say that. How long have you people been hiding your guilty little secret? Two thousand years? Three thousand? Longer?”

“If it were your children who were affected by the Smoke, perhaps you would feel differently.”

“How did it start? Was it the bat people who got it first, in the time of the Greeks and Romans, and started affecting others?”

“The Abyss”, says Ivan, “was once a patch of water meadow in a field, a part of a Vaemna’s land he could not use. This is what our earliest stories tell us. That part of the field was low, and water would always collect there, yet it always seemed to drain away, even after the heaviest rain, and even while nearby rivers were still flooded. The Vaemna, wisely, left the meadow alone, and told his wife and family to do likewise. But then, one day, the earth shook, and the water level in that corner of the field rose. Black water was bubbling from the ground.

“The Vaemna told his wife and sons not to drink from it. But the next day, while he was out in the forest hunting with his sons, his wife, realizing it was further to a nearby spring than to the black water in the field, and having a good deal of washing to do, thought: “It’s only washing water. It will not matter.” And she brought in several buckets of the black water, which smoked foully, and set to washing her husband’s clothes in it.

“When the Vaemna and his sons came home from the hunt, they found nothing left of the woman but a washing bucket, and a trail of suds leading from their croft to the water’s edge, where her clothes and shoes were floating in the mire.

“The Vaemna put up a fence around the mire. A month passed, and then there was another night when the earth shook, and the fences collapsed inward into a great hole in the ground. The Vaemna, not to be outdone, built another fence. But the earth shook again, devouring the second fence, and by now the hole in the earth filled half the Vaemna’s homestead, and he could not see the bottom of it.

“The Vaemna, in desperation, sold his land for cattle and moved. The man who bought the land from him was a greedy Slav, and rubbed his hands in glee to think that he had made profit from a neighbour who’d had no other option but to sell. Several nights passed, and then the earth shook again. The new owner of the land stayed indoors all night, fearing to set foot outside his door, fearing that the monsters and devils Slavs believe in were fighting round his house.

“When he finally opened his door, he found out all the land around him had collapsed, and his hut was marooned on the pillar of rock where the Church of the Angel now stands. None of his fellow Slavs would help him to cross the Abyss to escape; they were afraid his bad fortune would transfer to them. He survived another year and a day, living off chunks of food thrown across the chasm by his neighbours. When he finally began to die, he began to babble predictions, yelling out how the world was going to end, sometimes in strange languages no-one in the area knew. Travellers who went near the place were often similarly affected, and many of the farmers living nearby talked of selling their own land and moving. But the chasm grew no larger, and somehow they could never work up the courage to leave the district. Even the original farmer, the man who sold his land for cattle, was later seen running, blind mad, towards the edge of the precipice, yelling prophecies as he hurled himself into the depths. He’d bought land seven days’ ride away from the Abyss, but still it drew him back.

“We Vaemna have been unable to move away since then. We are, as the Germans said, a weak, inferior race. We have stayed here, no matter how low our status, no matter how miniscule our gene pool becomes, like a child holding to its mother’s skirts. But we have been the same people for over two thousand years, and like the Israelites, we remember. We have a language and a spoken history stretching back since before the Romans. We remember when Celts were on our western border.

“The Abyss calls us. It draws in our children, our mothers, our fathers, and once it has one of our loved ones, our concept of civilization demands that we cannot leave them to die down in the dark alone. We keep them safe down in the tunnels, and we send them food - often we need to put food into their mouths, and massage their jaws and throats to make them chew and swallow. And we tolerate the monstrosities they perpetrate when they occasionally find their way back up into the world above. Do you know there is not one single heroin or cocaine addict in Na? The needle holds no fascination for us. We already live with it every day.”

“I’m still not going to lower you a rope, Ivan.”

“The Abyss has you too. You know it. Have you not noticed how you keep on returning to it, despite the fact that it has almost killed you several times? We prevent people from going down into it for a reason.”

“What about the Americans? You’re letting the Americans into it.”

“We made them satisfy us that their crane capsule was airtight. We cited firedamp to them, and volcanic gases. We did not want to be responsible for their deaths. Our civic leaders, and our real leaders, talked the matter over at great length. But we imagine the Smoke to be a toxin, and no matter how potent any toxin might be, surely it cannot penetrate an airtight vehicle. We may behave like creatures of the Dark Ages, but we do have twenty-first century educations. And we are as interested in the contents of the Pit as any man. Possibly more.”

“Your real leaders? Who might they be?”

“I”, says Ivan, not without a twinge of solemn pride, “am the one hundred and fifty-first priest of the Outer Temple. Priest, pontifex, magus, call it what you will. For fifteen hundred years, we walled the Abyss round and made money out of kings and emperors wanting glimpses of the future. Recently, we have been forced to curtail such activities due to a creeping Christian morality. But Russian mafiosi, businessmen and politicians alike still pay high prices on the sly to listen to the babblings of our tame maniacs.”

“The Outer Temple? Would that be the Greek, the Roman, or the Persian?”

“They are all the Outer Temple. The entire city is the Outer Temple.”

“So...that really means you run the city, doesn’t it.”

“Yes. It really means I run the city.”

“Can’t run a city from the bottom of a lift shaft, though.”

“That is why it is vitally important that I return to the surface with immediacy.”

“What’s the matter, Ivan? Worried you might start to breathe in some of the stuff yourself? I saw you earlier on in the lower levels. You weren’t wearing your gasmask.”

I pause a moment to think.

“Where’s the Inner Temple?”

He also pauses before answering.

“I think you know where the Inner Temple is.”

And it's just about then, when I'm about to learn the location of Ivan's inner sanctum, when someone stuffs a submachinegun into the lift shaft next to my ear and unloads it downward. Ricochets swarm back up the shaft at me like neon wasps, and I have to jerk back into the office to avoid getting new holes made in my skull to let the demons out. I have to jerk back Sean too, and his submachinegun, which is still going off as he falls backward. A line of bullets punctuates both the carpet and the ceiling. For several scary seconds, mobile lead is everywhere. Light fittings shatter.

Sean finally manages to release his trigger finger. He sits up on the carpet, looking hugely hurt.

"Whaddyou do that for?"

I look at him in disbelief.

"He was lining you up for a shot", he says. "Didn't you figure that out?"

"There's only him down there, Sean."

"He'll have a radio. Only has to walk outside and call up his friends upstairs. Then they ball up a block of Semtex round a climbing rope, stick a time fuse in it, and dangle it down the precise number of storeys their leader tells them." He scrawms up to the edge of the shaft and stares down into total blackness. Ivan has wisely turned off his torch. "We don't do any more talking", he announces. "Particularly talking with torches strapped to our heads", he adds darkly.

"As long as you don't do any more shooting at concrete ceilings at arm's length with a gun you can't aim properly."

He looks sheepish, and lays the gun down gingerly on a desktop, like a drunk putting down a beer glass very, very carefully for fear of spilling it.

"I came to tell you", he says. "They're flashing back."

***

It's still pitch black upstairs - it's five a.m. up there by my watch. But then again, I can't remember resetting my watch from Greenwich Mean to Eastern European Time. The watch is my only remaining link with the world on the surface, and even it isn't reliable. As far as everything down here is concerned, it might as well be 1945. As far as everyone down here is concerned, it might still be the Dark Ages.

...But it's true. Up there, close on half a mile above us, a bright white light is winking on and off. On-on-on...on...on...on...on-on-on...on-on-on....

"They obviously haven't much grasp of Morse Code", I say. "They're just flashing our own SOS back at us."

Sean looks on the bright side. "Maybe they're in trouble too."

I find a secluded office and scribble down more notes by torchlight in very tiny shorthand. There is plenty of paper available, though much of it has more swastikas, lightning flashes and helmeted tarts riding wingèd steeds than I'd ideally prefer.

Sean, meanwhile, continues leaning out of the window and flashing his implement. Occasionally someone takes a shot at him. Once, someone actually chucks down a hand grenade, though they don't seem too well up on working out distances and accelerations. I hear a big bang and a squillion little impacts pebbledashing the Abyss walls, then Sean asking if That's The Best They Can Do at the top of his voice, and going on to inquire if they Call Themselves Men. These people's willingness to chuck explosives down a pit they're sitting halfway up the sides of seems to know no bounds.

Eventually, Sean rushes in, smacking the walls around him to feel his way.

"THEY'RE COMING DOWN!" he yells. "GET READY!"

I've already seen the Americans' bathysphere, although the last time I saw it I was under the impression I was dreaming. It's still hard to believe it's not being lowered from the stern of some ship moored a thousand feet above us, and that I can't just push myself out of the window and swim to it.

Sean still has his own torch switched on, and is flashing it in a regular on-on-on...on...on...on pattern, trying to make final adjustments to his length of line and bit of hatstand as he does so. He's wound rope around the wood, making the whole thing stronger-looking, less brittle. It now resembles some obscure part of the rigging on an old sailing ship, but it's quite obvious what he intends to use it for. It's a grappling hook, with which he's going to try to lassoo the American crane capsule. He pays out a few metres of rope and tries to swing it, but there isn't room to swing the premature foetus of a kitten. It's looking like he'll have to simply chuck the hook and hope it hits home.

I really don't know how he's made himself so sure that the Americans are coming down to rescue us. All I can see are lights. Bright white lights, carbon arcs or halogens, not the nicotine yellow of some tired old tungsten filament. Something is bearing down on us from above, and it is lit up like an angel at the Annunciation. At least five or six dazzlingly bright beams, each one moving independently like the eyes of a chameleon, stab out into the dark in all directions. As the machine descends closer, I can see that each searchlight has its own individual TV camera, filming directly down its beam.

The bathysphere - I'll have to stop calling it that, we're not underwater - is big, the size of a camper van, connected to its main cable by a bizarre macramé of levers, stays and shock absorbers. One end of it is all window, two huge bug eyes goggling out into the gloom. Around the windows, a battery of television cameras and other, weirder devices assist the naked eye in figuring out what's down here, looking like barbels on a deep sea fish (we are not underwater). The sphere has skids so that it can be entered and exited via a single hatch on the port side, where there's a small railed platform dotted with what are almost certainly anchor points for attaching caving and climbing gear. A rack of pressurised cylinders is stored along its dorsal surface - oxygen, maybe? - and there are further tanks and pods and equipment cages ringing the sphere's upper surface.

But one thing is certain. It has a big Yankee flag sprayed down one side of it, underneath which someone has added CENTER OF THE EARTH OR BUST.

Besides being so big, the machine is also smaller than I'd like, as it is a very long way away. Sean is going to have his work cut out hurling his makeshift grappling hook that far.

Luckily, he doesn't have to. There is already a man standing on the platform by the capsule's hatch. He is manning something big, squat and powerful that looks remarkably like a cross between a demi-culverin and a whaling harpoon, the muzzle of which is swinging round to point directly at our makeshift window. He appears to be aiming his culverin-harpoon at us.

"Sean - he's going to -"

But Sean's already down under the level of the window as the gun booms and something flicks out between capsule and cliff like a striking snake, punching into the abyssite with a shock I can feel through the concrete I'm now pressed flat against.

"Christ", says Sean from his new position hunched up under the windowledge. "Big one, that."

"D'you think the city cops have got to the Americans?"

"Dunno. Maybe. Maybe they're just as interested in narcotics that foretell the future as the Nazis were."

I sit up next to him in the dark. "What do we do now?"

"Er. Did you block the other elevator?"

"Thankfully not. Even though someone told me to."

I hear a sound like a ruler twanging on a desktop - the sound of something being pulled taut. Then, I hear grunting, swearing and the unmistakable noise of karabiners being clipped onto lines and harnesses.

"They're tooling up to cross over to the window", I say.

"Time for a discouraging sweeping burst through the window", says Sean. "I had a gun." He goes to get it, crawling across the carpet.

"You can't shoot for toffee", I point out. "They probably can. And you'll be blinded by their lights. They won't. And they'll be using night vision goggles."

"AHOY THERE", calls a voice from outside. Light plays across the toilet door through the jagged hole of the window. "PERMISSION TO COME ABOARD?"

"It's a trick", I say.

"We're not at sea", agrees Sean. "Just trying to disorientate us."

"ANYONE IN THERE, FOLKS?" says the voice again. It doesn't sound like a voice trained for military command at West Point. It sounds more like a voice trained for geology at the University of Praig, Michigan.

And besides, I know the voice.

I sit up straight. Light shines in my face, blinding me.

Wilson the friendly American, wearing a caving suit made of enough aluminium insulation to equip a Gemini astronaut, is hanging around outside our window, hooked up to a line slung between the capsule and the cliff. His line is attached, at our end, to a rocket propelled grappling iron I can only assume he has just fired into the cliff from the capsule.

"Er - hello", I say. "We, er, thought you might be someone else."

"You were maybe waiting to be rescued by someone more classically handsome? I can always go, if you prefer."

"Ah, no, my mistake, we were expecting you, no-one else, definitely. Can we come aboard? Now would be good."

Sean, meanwhile, has already swarmed past both me and John onto the wire, and is halfway to the capsule already. Noticing the fact that he still has a submachinegun slung over his shoulder, Wilson leans over to me and says, sotto voce: "I'm the same. Every time I go underground, I always make sure I pack my dry suit, my head torch, a few Hershey bars, and adequate firepower."

"Did anyone, erm, shoot at you on the way down, while we're on the subject?"

He scratches his head. Well, actually..."No - though the Na branch of the Man's been trying to shut us down for close on two days now. Making all kinds of threats. Even sent out traffic cops to tell us the crane jib was illegally parked. You know there's been a rain of car parts in the cathedral district?"

I nod. "Czaer 2000, at a guess?"

He eyes me with deep suspicion. "You know your rains of car parts. Over the rope to the capsule, don't move around too sudden, she's only rated to carry two."

I make my way hand-over-hand down the line to the crane capsule. By now, climbing is almost as second nature to me as it is to Sean, though I'm holding on with a fireman's grip to ease my aching hands. In the sterile white light on the capsule platform, I can see my palms are leopard-spotted with blood blisters.

I suddenly realize I've just brachiated maybe a hundred feet out over a bottomless chasm without even thinking about being frightened.

What for want of a better word I call the capsule pilot, Craig, the unfriendly American, scowls at us in greeting. He's sitting at a control console, trying to appear busy, although how hard can it be to control a hunk of junk dangling on the end of a crane cable? He seems to be doing stuff with the capsule's various TV cameras, whose footage is displayed on a bank of VDUs above him.

"Another body", he says to Wilson, pointing at one of his screens.

I lean in close without being invited. "Yes, I think that one's name was Jim. Headshot from behind, by the look of it."

He looks up at me, mortified.

"I think we'd better be leaving now", I say. "Don't you?"

"Afraid we can't do that", says Wilson. "Got one more passenger to pick up." He moves across the capsule, very carefully, and points down into the dark. Way below, almost vertically beneath us, a single white light is blinking on-on-on...on...on...on....

“Uh”, I say, and then “Erm.”

“It would not be a good idea to pick that man up”, says Sean, with an uncharacteristic verbosity born of self-preservation. I nod my head in agreement.

“We picked you up”, says Wilson accusingly.

Yes, I want to say. But we’re nice.

But we’re already downward bound; Craig the Unpleasant American has operated the controls (which appear to consist of a switch marked DOWN in one direction and UP in the other). The light is coming closer.

“Is this thing bulletproof?” I ask Wilson.

“He hasn’t got a gun”, says Craig. He taps the image on one of his TV sets. And it’s Ivan. Standing without mask or officer’s hat, waving a flaming bundle of rags in the air for all he’s worth. The rags are wrapped round something long, white and knobbly that isn’t burning.

“He doesn’t have a gun right now”, I concede. “But he does seem to have a human thighbone.”

This fazes them, particularly as it’s plain to see, now that they’re looking for it, that it’s true.

“Plenty of bones lying around loose down there”, comments Sean.

"There's a shelf of rock just about underneath us", says Craig. "Might be able to manoeuvre over to it."

It transpires there's actually more than one control for the crane - there are also two big dials marked TRACK and ROTATE, which Craig is now juggling with. Nothing seems to be happening despite his juggling, but I remind myself that the motors that move the crane are way above us, on the end of close on a kilometre of cable.

Eventually, there is a gentle sensation of motion, as of a giant hand swinging us inexorably around in the direction of the cliff.

"PULL BACK! YOU'VE OVERCOOKED IT!" Craig pulls back. The cliff recedes, to be replaced by another cliff in the other window. Craig twiddles his dials frantically. The capsule begins to rock violently from side to side.

"H-have we h-hit something?"

Craig shakes his head. "I've screwed up and put an oscillation in the cable. Hang on." He flicks a switch marked DAMPER. The rocking subsides. He flicks the DAMPER off again. "Puts a counter-oscillation in to flatten the wave", he explains impenetrably.

I suddenly realize with horrible certainty that I am becoming seasick underground.

Ivan is now clearly visible underneath us, still waving his flaming bone, still sans gasmask. Wilson clips himself onto the cabin walls and eases himself out of the hatch. I notice that the National Geographic team have already broken their promise to the Na government to carry out all their exploration from inside an airtight capsule.

Ivan, however, doesn't look Smoked, despite having breathed the atmosphere down here. If anything, he looks cheerful, particularly when he catches sight of me. He's standing on another concrete ledge at the base of the massive doors that give entry to the Nazi citadel. As the capsule's front skids hit the concrete, he runs over to a pile of rags by the doors, extracts his officer's cap and AKM, and scurries back to our vehicle. He even winks at me as he clambers over the rail. I have to stop Sean from pulling the cocking lever back on the submachinegun he doesn't know how to use. A missed shot would almost certainly kill us all in here with all these oxygen cylinders, and Ivan's AKM is still slung safely over his shoulder.

"And when I think that I tried to stop your first test yesterday", he grins to Craig and Wilson. "I am grateful and sorry at the same time."

"Where's Tom Keogh?" I ask.

"I have not seen him for some time", he says - probably truthfully, as this encompasses Ivan having shot Keogh and dumped his body into the deep.

"I am looking forward to getting back behind my desk", says Ivan, with a meaningful stare at me.

And there's nothing I can do. I can't shoot him, unless I shoot both the Americans too, and dump their bodies; I'd be tried for murder. Ivan isn't going to shoot us with his gun on the way up out of the Abyss - why should he? As police chief he can have us shot any time he likes. He's only carrying that AKM to remind us of the fact that he doesn't need to use it. The irritating Cheshire Cat grin on his face says all of that. I haven't time to explain to Craig and Wilson exactly how many ways Ivan is a low-down cocksucking dog on our way up, because I'd need space to draw diagrams, and possibly also an overhead projector. And they wouldn't believe me anyway.

And the whole way up, the little rat is smiling at me in a way that damn near forces me to grab Sean's gun, shoot him and swing for it anyway.

"It was your clever idea of signalling SOS that gave me the idea, Penelope", he says. "I thought, if someone will come to pick up her, they will pick me up as well." And we're rising up fast now as the cable shortens and the winch has less weight to reel in, and daylight is greying the abyssite around us. After two days underground, the dimness is blinding.

"I don't suppose anyone would care to tell us what's been going on down below before we surface?" says Craig nonchalantly.

"I intend to make a full report as soon as I get back to my department", assures Ivan. "Until then, I must point out to you", he says to Sean, as proximity to the world above builds his confidence, "that carrying automatic weapons is illegal in Vzeng Na."

"That so", says Sean. And I'm still amazed he doesn't shoot him.

Instead, there is a sudden jolt, as of someone tripping the safety circuit in a lift between floors. I look down, and see Craig's hand on the UP/DOWN switch.

"Anyone shooting anyone is not going anywhere", says Craig prissily. " If a gun goes off in here it could snap a cable, break that airtight seal you're so fond of, Captain, or cause an explosion. You will please both hand over your weapons to my colleague." He taps a box bolted to the ceiling behind his head. "I may also remind you that you're both on live television."

"I will be only too glad to do so", says Ivan, theatrically handing his AKM to Wilson butt-first, after removing the magazine. Sourly, Sean also surrenders his SMG.

Craig flicks the UP/DOWN switch to UP again (and surely both Ivan and Sean knew they could have done that without his help?).

And then there's a sound so loud I think the cable must be breaking.

All around the top of the Abyss, the edge is lined with people, Vaemna and foreigners alike, pressed dangerously close to balcony rails, windows, the low wall round the Gzel Lziofang, and even, in places, the edge of the gulf itself. Cheering as if we were a Soviet army arriving in triumph in 1945, or a Soviet army leaving in disgrace in 1992.

The tourists, I reckon, are cheering because they've been told, and believe, that a bunch of stranded cavers have been rescued by the philanthropic Americans. Craig and Wilson are beaming like returning astronauts, evidently sure of the same thing. But I know why the Vaemna are cheering, and there are far more Vaemna in that crowd than there are foreigners. Every time Ivan shows his face at the windows, the crowd roars louder. Ivan wasn't getting delusional down in the tunnels. He is their High Priest, their hierarch, maybe even their pharaoh. And he has been cast down into the awful Pit, and has returned alive.

But surely he can’t have us shot here and now, in front of so many people.

And then I see the number of Na police uniforms clustered round the crane jib, and begin to doubt very much whether we’ll leave Victory Square alive.

The crane capsule swings round like a morningstar as the jib tracks left, returning us back over the Beglerbeg’s Wall out of harm’s way. Craig flicks the switch to DOWN and the crane begins to unwind that final ten feet down onto the cobbles, which we hit with an inevitable CLANG.

Wilson throws the capsule open. The crowds close in. The Polisic are plastered across the front of them, appearing to be holding them back, protecting us. But every single one of those officers is armed, some of them to levels that go far beyond crowd control.

Wilson steps down into the square, standing at the bottom of the ladder ready to help me down like a perfect gentleman. Making sure I’m the first down into the line of fire. For a moment, I wonder whether Wilson is actually in league with the Vaemna. Then Sean comes down the ladder, and then Ivan. As Ivan steps out of the capsule, the crowd shrieks fit to bust eardrums, and still Craig and Wilson have their fists in the air like champion boxers, thinking that all this is for them.

Ivan walks out into the middle of the crowd, and there are people in it holding out flowers and begging him in Russian to kiss their children, for Christ’s sake, and the line of policemen is having difficulty holding them back.

Then one of the policemen, in perhaps a slightly shabbier and more bloodstained uniform than the others, walks forward, raises his gun, and shoots Ivan in the head. The crowd noise drops like the tide before a tsunami, then flows back with a vengeance, this time in the form of women screaming. Men screaming.

The policeman stands there, watching Ivan crumple, and I notice his policeman’s uniform has a neat and perfectly circular little hole just over where his heart should be. The hole is blackened, as if by powder burns. Underneath the hole, however, I can see his nipple. I notice that the nails of the policeman’s hands are snapped to the quick, as if he’s just clawed his way out of an early grave.

“That”, says the policeman in Tom Keogh’s voice, “is for my men.”

He turns the pistol round towards his own head.

“This”, he says, “is for your men.”

And then he adds, with immense satisfaction:

“All your men.”

It is debatable whether or not he shoots himself before Ivan’s police cronies do. Certainly, he has more than one bullet in him before he hits the ground, his body moving this way and that, failing to fall in a neat and predictable manner as the slugs rip into it. One of the policemen near him also collapses, hit by poorly aimed fire. Everyone around Keogh and Ivan takes a cautious step backward, including me.

Then the police holster and shoulder their weapons, and run in towards Ivan as if sufficient speed and diligence will cure the hole in his head. They fall around him like beneficent vultures, protecting the corpse with their lives. I don’t know. Maybe it needs to be saved for burial in some weird Vaemna manner.

I lean over to Craig and whisper in his ear:

“Now would be a good time to leave for the nearest American embassy.”

He thinks about this for a microsecond, then nods; and we begin to edge our way out cautiously through the crowd.