Page 47 of Nikolai
It was a portal.Or hatch.Or something.
It was huge, round, with that steering wheel-like thing in the center.Like submarines had at the hatches.Made of steel.Completely impenetrable, except that the earthquake had cracked the casing around the big wheel and cracked the circumference.
Nick had suddenly become quiet.Parker looked at him curiously.His face had hardened.Was he seeing something she wasn’t?
He pulled at the portal, and it yawned open easily, coming away from one of the two hinges.Nick stepped through and she followed, warily.
At first, Parker had trouble recognizing what she was seeing.Cases, boxes, canisters.It was some kind of deposit?A huge kind of warehouse, so large the end was lost in darkness.
Then she went deeper into the rows and saw that some of the wooden cases were open, and she gasped when she looked inside.
It was a huge weapons cache.Row after row of wooden cases, as far as the eye could see.Many of the cases had been shaken open and she saw rifles spilling out, hundreds and hundreds of them, in pristine condition.Handguns, what looked like thousands upon thousands of them.What must have been rockets, with weird shapes, all aligned along the walls on brackets, many having fallen to the ground.Suitcases with strange electrical gear, not sleek and streamlined, but looking like they came from a movie from the fifties.
Nick was checking the rifles, the suitcases, the guns.
Parker walked around, understanding little of what she saw until she stopped, in horror.
Eight large…things in stainless steel cases.Four long tubes with a rounded top.Four round metal balls.And next to them, three black curved blades painted against a bright yellow backdrop.The universal sign for…
Parker’s hand shot to the mouth.She turned to Nick, horrified.
“Oh my God!Is that—is that…” She pointed with a shaking hand.
“Nuclear weapons,” Nick answered grimly.“Yes.”
ChapterNine
Nick knew what this was.Bad news.The worst.
Parker knew, too, only her mind rejected it.“Nick?”she whispered, face ashen.“What is this?”
She ran her hand along a tube ending in a bulbous nose cone.
“My guess?It’s an arms cache created under Operation Gladio.Do you know what that was?”
“I know what a gladio was.It was the service sword of Roman legionnaires.Short, a stabbing weapon.”
“Yeah.The program took its name from the Roman weapon.Operation Gladio was a concerted effort made by NATO and the Italian government to establish arms caches and communications networks in the fifties and early sixties.There was a general feeling that Russia was planning an invasion and was hell bent on conquering Italy, which at the time had the largest Communist party in the West.The idea being that if the Soviets invaded, the resistance could begin right away thanks to these hidden arms caches.But as time went on, apparently some of the locations were lost.But they included more or less everything a resistance would need in terms of arms, explosives, including grenades and mortars, communications equipment, first aid equipment.Including that nuclear warhead you are caressing, called a Davy Crockett.”
Parker snatched her hand away from the weapon as if it had turned boiling hot.
She looked around and lowered her voice.“How many nuclear weapons are there?”
Nick had already counted them.“Eight.Four Davy Crocketts and four man portable ones.Those round things over there.”
She followed his finger, frowning.They actually didn’t look like much, just big round balls of metal.A strong man could, in theory, carry them.Nick certainly could.An atom bomb that a person could carry.
Parker turned around, arms out.“There seems to be enough weaponry and equipment here to start a small war.”
Nick nodded.“That’s the general idea.The resistance in World War II was still on everyone’s mind, and everyone agreed the war would have been won sooner if the resistance had been better armed.So, they decided to arm a possible resistance in advance.”
“Were the Soviets really planning on invading Europe?”
“Nobody’s clear on that, but there was definitely a faction in the Soviet military arguing to pour tanks through the Fulda Gap, move down through Germany, over the Alps, and take over Italy.And everyone wanted to be ready if they did.”
Parker looked around and he could see that she was starting to appreciate the difficulties, though this wasn’t her world.
“What do we do?”she asked quietly.
