A Winter Grave

Chapter Twenty-Four

He seemed to be driving headlong into the gale. Hailstones flew out of the darkness like sparks, deflecting off the windscreen. The outside temperature displayed on the dash of Brannan’s SUV was minus two. He could barely see the road ahead of him, hail blowing around and drifting like snow on the recently cleared tarmac.

It took him longer than the ten to fifteen minutes predicted by Brannan. Several times he stopped to consult the map that lay open on the passenger seat, and to try to identify landmarks in his headlights. Finally he spotted the lay-by that Brannan had marked with a red cross on the map, and he pulled in off the road.

He sat for a while, steeling himself to face the storm outside, summoning his last reserves of energy, and felt the vehicle buffeted by the wind. The door was nearly whipped from his grasp as he opened it, and he had to battle hard against the wind to close it again.

He pulled up the hood of Brannan’s anorak, and slipped the elastic of his headlight around it. Now at least he could see where he was going, hail slicing through its beam almost horizontally as he clambered down off the road to stumble through trees and a tangle of dead ferns towards the loch somewhere unseen ahead.

He very nearly ran straight into the bunker as it loomed suddenly out of the dark — a concrete pillbox that stood almost three metres high, just beyond the line of the trees and within sight of the water. It was hard to imagine a more inhospitable time and place to meet anyone. He felt his way around the walls to the front side facing the loch. A heavy steel door stood partially open, and electric light angled out from behind it towards the shore.

Brodie ducked inside, grateful to be out of the wind and the stinging hail whipped in on its leading edge. A single round LED light set into the roof cast a harsh yellow glow around the concrete walls, and the closed doors of what looked like an elevator.

He recognised Jackson immediately from Brannan’s description. Tall, gangly, wiry ginger hair spraying out from beneath the hood of his parka. His face was the colour of ash, and nervous green eyes darted from Brodie, to the outside dark and then back again.

‘Jackson?’ Brodie asked unnecessarily.

The other man nodded. ‘I don’t want to be involved in this.’

Brodie said, ‘Mr Jackson, you’re involved whether you like it or not.’ He tipped his head towards the elevator doors. ‘Where does the lift go?’

‘More than half a kilometre down a lead-lined shaft to the deepest level of the storage tunnels below. It’s designed for escape rather than entry. Though those of us with security clearance have access badges on our key rings.’

‘You didn’t come up in it, then?’

‘Good God, no. It wouldn’t be safe down there.’

‘Why not?’

Jackson rubbed his face with spindly white fingers. ‘Look, I only ever spoke to Mr Younger on the basis of complete anonymity.’

‘He was a journalist, Mr Jackson; I’m not. And if you don’t want me to arrest you for his murder, I suggest you start talking. And fast.’

Indignation exploded from wet, purple lips. ‘I didn’t kill him! Why would I kill him? Jesus Christ, you can’t be serious.’

‘Then who did, and why?’

‘I’ve no idea who.’ He hesitated. ‘Someone who didn’t want him publishing his story.’

‘And what story would that be?’

Jackson shook his head in slow desperation. ‘I can’t.’

And he wasn’t prepared for the force with which Brodie banged him up against the wall. The policeman breathed in his face. ‘My pathologist was murdered yesterday. And someone tried to kill me today, Mr Jackson. If you don’t tell me what’s going on here...’ He didn’t need to frame the threat in words. Its implication was clear enough.

Jackson shook himself free of Brodie’s grasp. ‘Okay!’ He almost shouted. He straightened his parka and breathed deeply, trying to figure out where to begin. Finally he said, ‘Do you remember a story in the media about six months ago? It was on the radio and TV. An earthquake in the West Highlands.’

Brodie shrugged. ‘Vaguely.’ He thought about it. ‘But the only reason that would have made the news is because you hardly ever get earthquakes in Scotland. And, as I recall, this one wouldn’t even have made rings in a cup of tea. So no one made very much of it.’

‘No, they didn’t. But they should have.’

Brodie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was a shifting of the tectonic plates on either side of the Great Glen Rift. Not far north of where we are now.’

Brodie stuck out a lower lip. ‘Great Glen Rift? I’ve no idea what that is.’

‘It runs roughly in a line from Fort William to Inverness, Mr Brodie. Effectively along the length of the Caledonian Canal. If you look at Scotland from space, it appears divided along that line into two parts.’ He paused. ‘Well, actually, it is. Sort of. And six months ago, the plates on either side of that divide shifted sideways. It wasn’t a huge movement, and there wasn’t that much felt above ground. But...’ he shook his head in hopeless despair, ‘there were fractures in the bedrock on both sides. Deep down.’

An unthinkable realisation began to dawn on Brodie. He pointed towards the floor. ‘You mean down there?’

Jackson nodded. The ashen hue of his face was touched now by a green that almost matched his eyes. It spoke more than anything he could have put into words. He said, ‘You know how the waste from Ballachulish A is disposed of?’

‘Not in detail. Only that tunnels were excavated five, six, seven hundred metres down to store the stuff.’

Jackson screwed his eyes shut for a moment before opening them again to stare wildly at Brodie. ‘We borrowed the idea from the Fins. You drill half a mile down into the bedrock, and excavate tunnels that fan out into a network of galleries. Radioactive waste from the reactor is put into boron steel canisters, which are then enclosed within corrosion-resistant copper capsules. Individual holes are drilled in the galleries. The capsules are placed into the holes, and then backfilled with bentonite clay.’ He paused to draw breath. ‘A permanent solution. The stuff is entombed forever. No further human or mechanical intervention is required, because the waste is now one hundred per cent inaccessible.’

Brodie thought about it. ‘There must be a limit, though, to how much stuff you can put down there.’

‘Of course. But there’s enough capacity to store waste from the plant until 2120, when they’ll seal it permanently and Ballachulish A will be decommissioned.’

Brodie said, ‘And nobody foresaw the possibility of an earthquake?’

The shaking of Jackson’s head was laden with sadness. ‘That’s just it. They did. In the early stages, the Scottish Government commissioned a feasibility study into the whole waste-storage plan. The final study included a report which outlined the possibility of damage if there were any tectonic shifts in the Great Glen Rift. It did make it clear that such a thing was highly unlikely. The remotest of possibilities, Mr Brodie. I mean, almost certain never to happen. But, still, in the greater scheme of things, not impossible.’

‘And they ignored it?’

Jackson’s purple lips were tinged with white as he pressed them together in a grim line. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Well, what exactly?’

‘If you look at the records in the government archive, Mr Brodie, you’ll not find that report. It’s not there.’

Brodie let disbelief escape from his lips in a breath. ‘They buried it.’

‘An inconvenient truth. Any further investigation into the possibility of tectonic shifts, or the damage that might result, would have taken years. The whole Ballachulish A project would have been put on ice. Might never have happened.’

The silence that fell between them then was broken only by the sounds of the storm raging outside and the wind that whistled in the half-open door and blew about their legs. The enormity of what Jackson had just told Brodie was slowly sinking in. But the reactor operator wasn’t finished.

‘The energy minister responsible for driving the whole nuclear project through the parliament in Edinburgh in the thirties gambled everything on Ballachulish A. It was going to be Scotland’s energy future. And it was the rock upon which she built her whole career.’

Brodie looked at him. ‘She?’

‘The first minister. Sally Mack. Hoping now that the great Scottish voting public are going to re-elect her, forever grateful that power in Scotland doesn’t have to be rationed like it is in so many other parts of the world.’

Brodie said, ‘So she doesn’t want this coming out before the election. In, what...’ he checked the date on his watch, ‘less than a week from now.’

‘And with good reason. If it was revealed that she deliberately concealed a report warning of exactly what has happened, it would sink both her and her government.’

‘And what exactly has happened?’

Jackson’s breathing was shallow now as fear devoured oxygen and energy. ‘No one knows for sure, Mr Brodie.’ He steeled himself to say it. ‘But radiation is leaking from the tunnels. A lot of it.’ He raised his eyes towards the ceiling as if in silent prayer to make it all go away. Then refocused on Brodie. ‘We figure that a fracture in the bedrock somewhere down there has damaged some of the boron steel canisters.’

Brodie frowned. ‘Surely a radiation leak would trigger an alarm system of some kind?’

‘Oh, it has. There’s a team of experts here, combing the tunnels in radiation suits, trying to track down the source of it. A full investigation. But it’s all hush-hush. Kept under wraps for reasons of “national security”.’ The sarcasm with which he imbued the words national security was not lost on Brodie.

And Brodie said, ‘National security being another way of saying political convenience.’

Jackson sighed heavily. ‘I don’t want to get into the politics of it, Mr Brodie. But, well, call me a cynic. I figure that the whole fiasco will be cloaked in national security at least until after the election.’

Brodie said, ‘How bad is it down there?’

‘It’s bad. A large section of the tunnel network has been sealed off to try to contain it.’ He buried his face in his hands as if he could hide behind them. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, his voice muffled by them. And when he took them away again, Brodie saw tears in his green eyes. ‘It’s starting to leak out into the environment. This whole area shows readings way above safe levels.’

Brodie immediately thought of Addie and Cameron and felt sick. His investigation had turned into the worst kind of nightmare. Like a dream that haunts you during dark, troubled nights, then lingers long after the sun has risen. ‘How was Younger going to prove all this?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know how he managed it,’ Jackson said, ‘but he’d got hold of a copy of the disappeared report. Signed off by Mack herself. And he wanted to take readings. God help me, but he persuaded me to let him down into the tunnels. I told him radiation levels were probably fatal, but he was determined to go down anyway. He said he wouldn’t be exposed for long. He needed the proof.’

And suddenly it dawned on Brodie what Younger was doing on Binnein Mòr. He remembered the radiation sensor just a little further along the ridge from Addie’s weather station. Younger had wanted to take a reading from it. Crossing every ‘t’ of his story. And if he had been fatally exposed to high levels of radiation himself, that would explain why he didn’t want to waste half a day or more taking the long way up to the summit. Every minute counted.

‘His piece in the paper and on the internet, Mr Brodie, was going to blow this government clean out of the water.’

The words had barely left Jackson’s mouth when Brodie saw his head almost dissolve in an explosion of blood and bone and brain matter, throwing his body back against the far wall. The roar of gunfire in the confined space was enough to burst eardrums, and Brodie could hear only a loud, insistent ringing in his ears as he saw Jackson slide down the wall, leaving a bloody trail on the concrete. He turned as a shadow loomed in the doorway and caught only the briefest glimpse of a ski mask. Pain and light filled his head, then, consciousness sucked like matter into a black hole, and nothing remained but darkness.

The first thing he became aware of was a sensation of slowly sinking. Then came the return of pain filling his head, and when finally he opened his eyes, it was to be blinded by light. He could not immediately identify the source of the light. It seemed hidden by the square of ceiling above his head, and leaked out on all four sides. He was lying on a rubberised floor, half propped up against a stainless steel wall. He seemed surrounded, in fact, by reflective stainless steel. On the wall opposite, at roughly chest height, two illuminated buttons were mounted on a steel panel. The numeral ‘one’ above the numeral ‘zero’. A ring of green light surrounded the ‘zero’ button.

Through the cloud of confusion that accompanied the pain in his head, it very slowly dawned on him that he was in the escape elevator, descending into the storage tunnels from the pillbox where he had met with Jackson. The sinking sensation was the slow downward motion of the lift. And all he could hear above the ringing in his ears was Jackson’s voice saying I told him radiation levels were probably fatal.

Slowly, he got first to his knees, and then, with an effort, to his feet. He leaned a hand against one of the elevator walls to support himself. Lead-lined, Jackson had told him. The lift shaft was lead-lined. So for the moment he was protected from the radiation below. He staggered to the illuminated buttons on the far wall and jabbed his thumb at the ‘one’ button. The elevator continued on its slow but relentless descent. He jabbed it again, several times. Then, just for good measure, tried the ‘zero’ button. Neither had any effect. Panic started rising in his chest, and he pressed himself against the back wall, willing the elevator to stop. And still it persisted in its unrelenting downward passage. He closed his eyes. The doctor had given him six to nine months, which had seemed like nothing at all. And now they seemed like an eternity, and felt like life itself. Precious.

He could hear his own breathing in the confined space. Almost imagined he could hear the rapid beat of his heart, but really it was just the pulsing of it in his neck.

And when the lift came to a softly juddering halt, he held his breath, aware of the silence. It felt as though an eternity passed before a deep clunk preceded the opening of the doors.

He was not sure what he had expected. But death did not rush in to greet him. At least, not that he could see. Just warmth and light. Beyond the doors a cavernous cathedral rough-hewn out of the bedrock opened up before him, walls lined with pipes and trunking. It was well lit, bright lights reflecting off a polished concrete floor. The air was suffused with a soft electric hum, the source of which was not immediately apparent.

Brodie stood without moving for several minutes, imagining that his invisible enemy was killing him, even as he breathed it in, even as it was absorbed by his skin, and entered his body through every cut and graze. And yet he felt nothing. Smelled nothing but the acrid dust of drilled rock. And he wondered if the odd inflammation that Sita had found in Younger’s lungs, and the sloughing of mucus in his intestine, was the result of radiation sickness. The samples she took would have revealed the truth back in the lab, but he figured they were gone now, along with the pathologist herself.

An unexpected calm descended on him. He was going to die anyway. And maybe those precious months would only have been an endless cycle of chemo and radiotherapy. A living nightmare. Better, perhaps, to die sooner. But not before he got out of here to settle the score. To get his daughter and grandson as far away from this place as possible. To bring the people responsible to book. To drop them to their fucking knees.

He pushed away from the back wall of the elevator and stepped out into the vast arc of this underground cathedral.

The main entrance into it was closed off by a large black door, perhaps five metres square, delineated by red light strips that cast a faint pink glow around the whole cavernous space. Brodie’s footsteps echoed in the softly humming silence as he walked across the floor to examine it. There seemed no way of opening it from the inside, and he thought that the door itself was probably made of lead, immovable by anything other than some very heavy industrial mechanism. Huge tunnels fed away from the main space like spokes in a wheel and disappeared into darkness. A number of them were sealed. Rubber tyre tracks on the floor led off into others.

Brodie fumbled in his pocket for Younger’s Geiger counter. He found a switch on the side of it and turned it on. The grey screen flickered to life, and immediately the device began to issue a piercingly high rate of audible clicks that fired through him like the pellets of a shotgun. Brodie had no idea exactly what level of radiation was being registered, but he had sat through enough movies to know that this sound was not good. The reading on the screen meant little to him either, and he quickly turned it off. The relief from the crackling was instant. Better not to know, he thought, and pushed it back into his pocket.

He looked around now. There had to be another way out. These tunnels ran for kilometres underground. Surely there would be another escape elevator?

He crossed the hall and entered the nearest tunnel, reaching up to find that his headlight was still in place and still functioning. It pierced through the darkness that lay ahead. He saw lights running along the arc of the ceiling overhead, but had no idea how to turn them on. He set off, following the trunking that lined the wall to his right. Smaller tunnels fed away to his left at regular intervals. Again, some of them had been closed off. He passed a large electric trolley that appeared to have been abandoned and saw a red light somewhere up ahead. When he reached it, he realised that it was set high on the wall above another square door that, this time, stood open. Its delineating light strips were powered off.

Brodie stepped through it into a larger chamber, turning his head to direct light around its chiselled walls. It reflected back from a sign of red letters on a white background. EMERGENCY EXIT. And an arrow pointing off into darkness. He pressed ahead.

He had difficulty breathing now. The heat was suffocating, and he was perspiring down here when the world above was being plunged into an Arctic chill by an ice storm. It was very still in the tunnels. Almost peaceful. Why would he even want to escape back into the raging storm? He was so tired. All he wanted to do was sit down with his back to the wall and close his eyes. And maybe never wake up. And then he thought of Addie, and Cameron, and knew he had to keep going for them.

He walked on, past yet another sign, before the dark walls of a lead-lined shaft rose out of the floor to vanish into the roof space above. There was a single illuminated button set into the stainless steel to the right of the door, a ring of green light around it. His mouth was dry. He pressed it, and the door slid open, spilling bright yellow light into darkness.

He stepped into the light, and with a trembling finger pushed the ‘one’ button. If it did not respond, then these tunnels could well be his final resting place. His tomb. He might starve to death, or die from radiation poisoning before anyone found him.

To his relief, the door slid shut, and with the softest of judders, the elevator set off on its long, slow climb back to the surface.

The lift travelled at little more than walking pace, and took nearly ten minutes to reach the surface. Brodie stood leaning against the back wall with his eyes closed, trying not to think. After all, he wasn’t out yet. He found himself transported into what felt like an almost Zen state of mind. Nothing mattered. Nothing existed beyond this space. All anger and sadness, all emotion, left him. Like spirits escaping after death. Minutes might have been hours, days or years. Time was irrelevant.

Then the elevator came to a sudden halt and the doors slid open. The cold was invisible, like the radiation, and it rushed in as the contamination he imagined he had brought up with him escaped. He opened his eyes, and the anger returned. A burning, all-consuming fury. He stepped out into the ice-cold of a concrete pillbox and put his shoulder to the bar that released the catch on the door. Heavy as it was, the strength of the wind outside caught it and flung it open. Brodie staggered out in the chaos of the storm and was nearly blown from his feet. Hail had turned to snow. Big fat flakes of it that filled the air and stung his face.

He could just make out the trees beyond the pillbox fibrillating wildly as they yielded to the wind. Perhaps twenty metres off to his left, the ground sloped steeply away towards the turbulent waters of the loch. If he kept the loch to his left and followed the shoreline, he would surely get back to the place he had met Jackson. He ducked his head and leaned forward into the wind, to thrust against it, forcing his legs to carry him through the snow, back the way he had come down below.

It was ten or more minutes before the concrete of the first pillbox reflected back at him from his headlight. He pressed himself against the near wall of it, taking momentary refuge from the power of the wind, then swung around to pull at the steel door. It was firmly shut and wouldn’t budge. Whether or not Jackson, or what was left of him, was still in there was moot at this point. He was dead, and there was nothing Brodie could do to change that.

He wheeled away and staggered up through the trees, back towards the road, hoping against hope that Brannan’s SUV was still where he had left it. The glass of the passenger window caught and reflected the LED of his headlight as he scrambled up the embankment, and it was with huge relief that he felt his way around the vehicle, pulled the door open and almost collapsed into the driver’s seat. It took an enormous effort to close the door again as the wind tried to rip it from its hinges. And then he was locked away in a bubble of comparative silence. The storm still raged beyond the glass, but it was muted now as it vented its anger, rocking the SUV on its wheels and obliterating its windscreen with snow.

Brodie sat for several minutes, gasping, fighting for breath, and when finally he took control again of his lungs, he avoided the rear-view mirror. He had no desire to look death in the face. He slipped the vehicle into drive, set the wipers to fast, and as soon as he could see out, swung the wheel hard around to head back to the village.