The Absolution (26 page)

ONCE AGAIN HOLLY
drove south. Usually this was a journey that lifted her spirits, the flat plains of the Po giving way to the soaring mountains beyond Bologna, tiny fortified towns clinging to their sheer sides for protection. But today she barely noticed them.

She was thinking about her mother's words.
Autodin and OL9, and something called the tropo that was always breaking down . . .
They'd stirred up half-forgotten memories: conversations between her father and his friends that had been less guarded than usual because only the kids were around.

When she reached Camp Darby, tucked away in the sleepy pine woods that stretched between Pisa and the sea, she showed her CAC card at the gate. “Know where you're going, ma'am?” the soldier on duty asked politely.

“Recycling centre. Straight down towards the beach, then left past the missile silos. That right?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, saluting.

The recycling centre was a vast hangar set amongst the pine woods. Half a dozen trucks were lined up neatly outside, each one at a precise forty-five-degree angle to the building.

“Whadda you want?” a voice shouted suspiciously. She turned to see a grizzled, limping figure stumping stiffly towards her, his paunch straining at the buttons of his uniform.
Staff Sergeant Kassapian might be only a year or so off retirement, but he ran the recycling facility with old-school rigour. “Ma'am,” he added as an afterthought.

“Staff? It's me. Holly Boland.”

“Well, so it is.” He gave her a stare which might have contained the faintest ghost of a smile. “Now, whadda you want?”

“Pick your brains, Staff.”

He grunted. “If I had any of those, would I still be here?”

“We're talking about some stuff that happened back in the day. I don't think there's anyone else from my dad's time left to ask.”

“No, there ain't,” he agreed. He gestured at the thirty-foot-high mounds of paper scattered across the inside of the hangar. “You're not going to sneak any of these papers out, are you? 'Cos I got into trouble last time you did that.”

“What I'm looking for won't be in here,” she assured him. “The thing is, I don't know where it would be. I'm looking for some records, tapes maybe, that my dad put in a safe place.”

He thought for a moment. But she got the feeling he wasn't so much racking his brains as debating whether or not to tell her something. Then he shook his head. “Nothing comes to mind.”

She said curiously, “What did my father do here at Darby, exactly? I know he ran a unit that was something to with Autodin. That was a codeword, presumably. But what exactly
was
Autodin?”

He snorted. “Kids today. Think you know everything when you don't know anything. Autodin wasn't a codeword, it was the Automatic Digital Network. The secure comms system for the whole US military. Back when we didn't have email, and a computer was the size of a truck, that's how we got information around.”

“How did it work?”

He shrugged. “Microwaves, I was told. Not the kind inside your oven, the kind that bounce round the sky. You wanted to send a secure cable, you took it to the hut and an operator typed it into the computer for you. No satellites or internet then. Everything went through the tropo.”

“What was the tropo? Part of the same system, presumably?”

He nodded. “The troposcatter was the transmitter, the bit that linked everything together. The tropo at Darby was the forwarding hub for the whole of Italy.”

“So my father would have had access to all the cables that were sent to and from Washington? Even cables from other bases?”

“They'd have passed through Darby, sure,” he said cautiously. “But I'm not saying he'd have looked at them. Why would he? Most of that stuff was classified.”

She recalled her mother's words.
Going through the tapes, was how he put it.
“And the CIA? Would they have used the same network?”

“Sure. Only one Autodin. And it was maintained by the military.”

“So that was why my father was involved in Gladio,” she said thoughtfully. “He'd have overseen their training in operational communications.” Her father had held a unique position, she realised: right in the centre of the US's global web of clandestine communications. A man like that, if he started digging, would have no shortage of material to dig through. “What happened to the Autodin system? Is it still in use?”

Kassapian shook his head. “It was decommissioned in 2000. Most folks were amazed it had lasted that long. But
that old kit was built tough. They used it mostly as a backup by then, but eventually it wasn't worth anyone's while keeping on the maintenance crew.”

“So the equipment's gone too?”

Again he hesitated. “Pretty much. There's a few bits and pieces in one of the storage hangars.”

“Could I take a look?”

He scratched his head. “Don't see why not. I'll take you there.”

She'd have walked, but he climbed into the driving seat of a meticulously clean army jeep.

“This area's ordnance storage, mostly,” he said as he drove, indicating the long, low buildings that stretched away as far as the eye could see, half-hidden amongst the woods. “ICBMs and chilled munitions. There's eight thousand tonnes of HE in our fridge just now.” He chuckled at her reaction. “You get used to it. Anything happens here, they reckon it'll make a bigger bang than Hiroshima. But it won't. We got procedures coming out of our ears.”

“How many are there?” she asked, twisting to look.

“Hangars? One hundred and twenty-four. Remember the Gulf War? Every missile and bullet came from one of these. Plus trucks, rations, construction materials, tents . . . The mission challenge here is to be able to send a brigade of five thousand men anywhere in the world within forty-eight hours, with everything they need to fight a war. Right down to clean underwear. Here we are.” He'd pulled up next to a hangar. Leaving the engine running, he got out and slid the doors open just wide enough to admit the jeep.

Inside, a concrete floor sloped downwards. On either side were lines of cargo containers, some covered in canvas drapes. Kassapian paused to turn on some lights – parallel rows of
industrial downlighters that walked into the darkness as they flickered into life, like beacons down a runway. Getting back in the jeep, he drove them towards the rear of the building.

They stopped next to a low island of metal cabinets, each the height of a man. It was only when she looked more carefully that she saw they were bits of ancient computer equipment. All had been crudely ripped from wherever they'd been installed and were now trailing bare wires. Some of the cabinets were buckled and damaged. Yet somehow they triggered a memory, a flashback of some long-ago visit to her father's workplace.

She blinked, and the memory was gone.

“This isn't it,” she said, frustrated. “Whatever my father found, he'd have put it somewhere safer than this. Isn't there anywhere else?”

Kassapian said nothing, chewing his lip. She recalled how he'd hesitated earlier. “There
is
somewhere, isn't there? Somewhere secure, that my father had access to.”

“Well, there's the old C3,” he admitted. “We weren't meant to talk about it, back then. But I guess there's no harm now.”

“C3? A Command, Control, Communications centre?”

Kassapian's squat face almost cracked a smile. “So you haven't forgotten everything your dad told you.”

“Not everything. But where is it? Not round here, surely?” During the Cold War, C3s were situated in bombproof bunkers, far underground.

He shook his head. “Not here, no. Sea's too close, and in any case they wanted it a long way from the ordnance.”

He drove her out of the camp and north along the coast road. It was crowded with Italian holidaymakers eating ice creams and carrying bottles of water. It was strange to think of these
bikini-wearing tourists casually strolling only a mile or so from eight thousand tonnes of high explosive.

“I remember my dad taking me to a radio station round here,” she shouted over the noise of the wind as they joined the motorway. “Just a couple of huts, and these big signal dishes. He said it was where Marconi sent the first radio transmissions.”

Kassapian nodded. “Coltano. That was where the main troposcatter dishes were. It's all falling down now.”

After twenty minutes he took the exit to Pietrasanta. Almost immediately, they started winding up into the mountains. A truck thundered past in the opposite direction, its trailer piled high with white stone. “Marble,” Kassapian said, pulling over to give it room. “Good stuff, apparently. This is where Michelangelo came when he wanted something special.”

Eventually they turned onto an unmarked track that led straight towards the sheer face of the mountain. Clearly, this had once been a quarry. Only a military guard tower, discreetly set back from the road, gave any clue to its more recent purpose.

“I don't know why they mothballed this place, instead of decommissioning it like they did Sorrate and West Star,” he commented. “Someone comes out every few months, makes sure the badgers haven't got in. But it's pretty low-maintenance. The stone keeps the humidity down. Maybe that's why they didn't close this one. Or maybe they just forgot about it.”

In front of them was a hangar similar to the ones at Camp Darby, built against the mountain. When Kassapian produced a key and slid the door back on its runners, however, it became clear that the hangar was there purely to conceal the bunker's real entrance, a round disc of blastproof iron the height of a truck.

Even though the door was counterweighted, it took all their combined strength to pull it open. “We'll take the vehicle,” he said when they'd done it. “Takes a while to get anywhere otherwise.”

He got back in the jeep and waited for her to join him. For a moment, though, she stood there, peering uncertainly into the tunnel's dark mouth.

“What's up?”

I'm terrified
, she wanted to say.
I can't do it
. She realised she was shaking. It had been in an underground facility, entered through a door much like this one, that a man had stripped her naked and tortured her, physically, mentally and sexually.

Kassapian grunted. “You're a US Army officer, aren't you, Boland? 'Cos you've sure as hell got the pips on your shoulder. Nothing to be scared of down there but a few spiders.” He hauled himself out and went to a fusebox. “Maybe this'll help.” Lights flickered on ahead.

“Sorry, Staff. I was just taking a moment.” She climbed back into the jeep.

The further they drove into the mountain, the more frequent the lights became. Every few hundred yards they passed through another set of blast doors. It was very cold.

“It was all self-sufficient, of course,” Kassapian said. “Got its own hydroelectric plant, sewers, the works. And there's half a mile of rock above us now. Russians could nuke Camp Darby to kingdom come, this place would still be functioning.” He nodded towards a side tunnel marked “Roosevelt Drive” in peeling stencil. “Sleeping quarters are down there. Moleholes, they called them. Two hundred bunks for six hundred men.”

“What about families? Was there any room for them?”

He shook his head. “No room for anyone who wasn't essential.”

She thought about her father. Could he have done it, if he'd been ordered to come here at a time of nuclear crisis? Could he have said goodbye to his wife and children – to
her
– with deliberate casualness, so as not to let them know anything was wrong, and then retired behind these blastproof doors to wait until the deadly radiation storms had killed every living thing above?

She supposed he could. An order was an order. And what would have been the alternative? To die with one's family instead of fighting the enemy would have been the greatest dereliction of all.

Kassapian pulled up and switched off the engine. “We'll walk from here.”

They went through a smaller blast door, past an alcove marked “DECONTAMINATION/SHOWERS”. Open-fronted metal cases held racks of radiation suits and masks. The ceiling now was only a little higher than a submarine's. She felt claustrophobia clutch at her, panic fluttering in her bowels.

It's just psychological. Like he said, you're a US Army officer. Deal with it.

More peeling stencils on the walls. “MESS” on one side, “LATRINES” on the other. To her surprise, there was even a tiny two-seat barbershop, the electric trimmers still dangling neatly from a metal arm. Even during a nuclear conflict, it seemed, the US military hadn't been about to tolerate long hair.

“In here,” Kassapian said, opening a door marked “COMMAND”. Inside, a viewing gallery overlooked a triple-height room, the far wall of which was dominated by a huge map of the world. Major cities were marked, as were US
bases. Facing it were four long desks, each designed to seat a dozen men. By each place was a heavy Bakelite phone. Some of the desks had what looked like radar screens and ancient computer monitors built into them. Even the chairs were somehow redolent of her childhood: solid and wide-armed, they spoke of the physical presence of big, burly warriors.

“The Autodin op sat down there. But the equipment's right in here. This is where your dad would have been.”

Kassapian opened another door and flicked on the light. The room was perhaps twenty feet by thirty, crammed with the same kind of computer equipment she'd seen in the storage hangar. But where that had been trailing wires, disassembled and neglected, this had been left neat and tidy and ready for battle. She half-expected Kassapian to press another switch and for all the relays and tape decks and cathode-ray screens to flicker silently into life, filling the room with the quiet, purposeful chatter of combat.