Die Abaddon-Mission (German Edition)

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Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. I thought this sort of thing only happened when pimply little adolescents played Dungeons and Dragons, but we actually do post watches and I really, really do see the necessity for them. I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night. Out there in the dark, something is screaming. Penned these notes while I was on watch.

Took my helmet off and put it down on a rock nearby so I could write by its light. Remember hearing from a friend who was in the army that a torch held in front of your body is the only point a sniper can see to shoot at in the dark. That may be why the police hold torches high up and reversed in the hand. We all woke up in the morning.

When we woke up, nesting birds were looking back at us on either side, perfectly dry, with puzzled expressions on their beaks. The canyon walls around it might conceivably hide it from view. In daylight - or what passes for daylight here, a sort of porridge-grey gloom which nevertheless seems brilliant after the oily blackness of last night - there is indeed a waterfall draining out of it, as well as into.

It plops rather than plunges over the edge, sending a brown torrent of water, not-quite-water, used nappies and tampons which, tut tut, should never be flushed and a whole raft of other unlikely flotsam down unthinkable distances into the depths.

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I walk up to the lake, and am impressed, though unamazed, at the extent to which it steams. Maybe that also masks it from overhead view. The sides of the lake are very slippery, and I can only marvel at the lucky escape we had last night in not ending up in it. Anyone falling in would certainly not come out again, I tell myself. And then, a peculiar thing happens.

I see a particularly big piece of garbage drop into the soup from above, an entire electric oven, a thing that would not normally float. It bobs, mostly, back up to the surface and drifts serenely back towards the shore, in bits. Then I notice the bubbles rising and popping in the centre of the lake, unleashing great choking sulphurous farty clouds when they burst and shower poo around themselves like some sort of purulent hand grenade. This is not a lake of water, but a lake of poo, and decomposition is taking place down there underneath the surface, and decomposition means heat.

The temperature down there in the centre might be that of bathwater, maybe even hotter. Perhaps the old bathhouse far above is not so weirdly situated. Maybe the bathhouse owners somehow managed to pump hot water up from here into its boilers. And sure enough, in one corner of the lake, I find a set of muck-encrusted pipes. Municipal sewage outflow, or private Victorian hot water inlet? No way to know. So whatever solid objects fall into the lake, the lake gives up. Good news for scavengers hunting the shore for useful discarded items.

The boy could have fallen down this far and survived. And been nudged gently ashore, even unconscious, by the current. The Escalator, though cut directly from the stone of the cliff, has steps of rock of a completely different colour. The path is also shored up with this material where it needs to be. Turned into a country park now. On top of the marks of a thousand chisels, there is something scratched into the stone in the Roman alphabet. I write down the lettering exactly. Quite an important man, a Centurion, I think.

We also, it has to be said, pass parts of the path which have been repaired with more modern materials - poured concrete, iron girders, metal brackets - although the Romans had concrete, they seldom put steel reinforcement in it. After all, it spans the Abyss from side to side. But its original night-black paintjob is still obstinately refusing to reflect light - presumably the original builders painted it that colour to blend it in with the black hole of the abyss beneath it, probably to fend off air attacks. At its centre, I can still see the attachment points for the cable windings.

Lord alone knows how they got it into place. It resembles a single span of the Forth Bridge, both in size and appearance. Every single one of the metal triangles that honeycomb its surface must be large enough for a man to fall through them. There are control cabins, inspection walkways, ladders, housings for giant motors. It must weigh as much as an ocean liner, contain enough steel to make a hundred Maus tanks. It must be capable of hauling a hundred tonnes or more.

Probably even used German scientists to build it. Not as difficult to build as an atom bomb or rocket, maybe, but hardly easy. And they just left it down here to rust. If Hitler and Goebbels and so on were crazy enough to think this was so all-fired important, why did they leave it for the Russians to find? There is indeed movement, down there in the thicket of metal triangles. But something was moving, and has now hastily withdrawn into the scaffolding, which means only one thing: I squint to follow his finger.

There is no ammunition left in the machine gun. But what was it doing down here in the first place? What can have been down here that required the use of armoured vehicles for protection? I sit down on a rock a long way away to get a stone out of my boot while Pete and Vern walk down to one of the concrete piers that support the gantry. I warn Vern and Pete that the hopheaded nutjobs, whoever they are, might have guns or knives or pit bull terriers and such. Pete nods, but states confidently that the accurate range of a pistol is only about forty or fifty yards.

He walks out onto the broad flat walkway where the crane joins the cliff. His boots crunch on the muck. The structure is deserted. At one end, a rusted iron manhole lies on the concrete like a bad penny. The hole it covers lies open, and the wind is making a noise on it like the blowing of a flute.

All three slugs hit him dead in the chest. He topples back, off the edge to which he was walking so close like a twat, and falls on the back of his head onto the rusted iron crap of the gantry. There is a sound like a heavyweight boxer punching a melon. Then he slides off the gantry and down, leaving a red trail like a slug, and is gone. Live human, dead human. Having looked for Vern in vain, the controlled substance user in the manhole turns around, preparing to do me too.

It hits so hard that I see blood. He should scream like a baby. Rock chips spray me from all sides as his near misses carve up the cliff. Vern, who had dropped down behind the concrete pier out of sight, suspended over the abyss by his fingertips, has squirmed back up over the edge and taken him from behind. I rush over suddenly to the manhole cover and kick it back over the hole, several times before it settles. Then I sit on it. Vern has no answer. He seems as stunned as I am. To cap it all, the Oracle Smoker - I presume he was an Oracle Smoker - meanly kept hold of the submachinegun when he fell over the cliff.

They are shooting at us with a pistol - about three or four people and one pistol, from much higher up the Abyss. Occasionally they miss the gantry structure altogether. That might be where they live. More ironmongery is flickering in the dim light. Bigger things than knives.

Axes, maybe, or shovels, or meat cleavers. This, I have to admit, is a good point. And only put your feet on the edges of the rungs. Within it are walkways running the length of the structure, platforms, engine mountings, a telephone handset bolted to a girder. What I can do, however, is smell them. The whole of the inside of the gantry stinks like an unwashed lavatory.

In fact, when I take my hand off the wet sticky rung of the ladder and smell it, I realize that it is an unwashed lavatory. My feet crunch on something as I step off the ladder. Vern switches on his head torch, shines it down. Glass glints back at us from the dark. Glass, and silver foil. Vern appears to be trying to get an international number on the bakelite telephone attached to one of the gantry supports. We move out of the gantry and into the concrete pier, where fingermarks are clearly visible by head-torch-light in the shitsmears on the wall.

Smears of shit, and of blood. The entire floor, it seems, is just one big potty to these people. Stepping through the room is like stepping through a faecal minefield. Up above us, up a length of ladder, is the manhole cover to the top, with a sturdy rusted iron bar in its inner surface. Right behind us is the steel door to the gantry, which looks thick enough to give gunfire a serious run for its money. Now no-one can open either. Whilst the dragon-chasing lotus-eaters outside learn this and start to hammer on the metal, we move on into the structure. We find us a dead Nazi.

Our dead Nazi is sitting in a little office inside the pier, where, from the position of his body, he appears to have blown the top of his own head off with a gun he is no longer holding possibly the one the hopheads are now using on us? It has too much bum juice smeared all over it to be properly legible. The symbol on it looks like a swastika drawn with two sets of lines, as if drawn by a bad kid writing with two pens in the same hand to get his lines done quicker.

It also means that he was a concentration camp attendant. There is not much meat on him by now; rats seem to have gnawed his clothes apart to get the meat off the skeleton. A gas mask lies on the floor next to him. Since he shot himself, the room also appears to have been vandalized by Soviets.

In the next chamber on is a dead Red Army soldier. On his desktop he even has a steam-powered Soviet computer of some antiquity, with a screen the size of a postage stamp. He, too, has been shot in the head. He has actually been shot through one eye of his gasmask, which he is still wearing. There is glass inside his skull. It rattles when I touch it. His gun is also missing. The gasmask he is wearing is also useless.

It seems to have been cut through at the front, where the rubber tube leaves the mask on its way to the filter cannister on his back. There is no sign of the knife that did this either. Stars, hammers and sickles are stamped on every page, using even more unnecessary red ink than my old maths teacher. Something only prison labour was fit to make. I rummage further through the drawers. Look like production figures too, for the manufacture of something they just call Omega-Stoff. Hey, we all have our dreams. Behind us, voices outside the fragile-seeming metal doors are, and I am not kidding, informing us that the weather will be fine tomorrow until lunchtime, when a light drizzle will blow in from the direction of the Pripyet Marshes.

It will, they say, be cold. We bar the next door on the inside. It disturbs me that, down here, someone felt the need to put a bar on it. The door is also huge, the size of a bank vault, inches thick. Beyond the Airtight Seal - which I assume is the door - the walls are still concrete, though we must be inside the cliff by now.

But the chamber beyond is huge. The air in here is like soup, full of airborne shit. I have to cough, but quietly, so hard that my brains nearly explode out of my ears. There are hoists for lifting heavy objects and lowering them onto the lines, bins for storing continuously consumed components, conveyor belts that span the length of the room.

They were building them all over Germany towards the end of the War, to protect against Allied bombing. Germany and other places too, like Czechoslovakia. But what were they making? The factory lines seem to have been making more than one thing, in fact - huge, fluted metal tubes big enough around for a tall midget to stand up inside them, flat-riveted metal sheets that look like they belong on aircraft, man-high things like drainpipes with crosshairs and triggers, and a number of things whose purpose is totally unmistakable.

The hulls of these things alone are the height of a man, and the turret above adds almost that again. The turret runs almost the entire length of the hull. Their tracks are thick as building bricks. Their guns - those that have guns - seem big enough to fire truck axles out of. Down here, entombed in concrete, they have become useless.

Otherwise a junkie would be firing one of them at us. And those aviation parts over there look like bits of a Bochem Natter. Cheap piloted rocket so dangerous they really should have gone the whole hog and just called it a kamikaze. Weapons they produced towards the end of the war, when they were beginning to realize they were beaten. The big tanks, too. There are also offices, canteens, storage bays, and what look like air conditioning facilities. Vern looks at them distrustfully. Give yourself lung cancer, breathing through them.

Despite this, I run my hand along the masks until I find one, at the very end of the bottom row, that I reckon might fit my face. The masks are helpfully sorted into sizes. They do not look quite like normal gas masks - the bit round the nose, and the filter cannister at the belt, both seem longer and more complicated.

Some of the SS troopers must have had small heads, no doubt to house those tiny Nazi minds they were out of. I hang my mask around my neck, and buckle the filter round my waist. Immediately, I feel safer. The Soviets, it seems, planted a skeleton staff down here literally in at least one case, haha. One of the canteens has a red border round it, and bunk beds at the far end. A Portakabin, which at a guess contained the office staff, sits next to the canteen.

As usual, there are no guns.

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But by far the most interesting thing we find is at the very end of the chamber, recessed into the wall and big enough to drive a tank into. We know this because someone already has done. It sways giddily under my weight, but not too much - after all, the pressure of my foot is not going to push a heavy tank sitting on a metal plate big enough to hold up a heavy tank very far. Far, far up above me, steel cables which must be strong enough to bind Satan himself sigh wistfully.

He looks up again. We find the bloody stairs, as I suspected, at the end of one of the ever-present red lines. How many weed-loaded junkheads can one clandestine underground facility support? They come down here to die.

Just at that moment, we hear the sound of our carefully constructed blockade breaking far behind us. I sweeten the deal. When the light dies, the dark is awful, all-enveloping. Much, much more than two or three. But in the dim light, I tell myself, we will be able to see them coming and slink about invisible in the dark. And when they come to the entrance to the machine hall, they move on into the room just like they were supposed to.

A man with a gun. The gun looks like a hunting rifle, a tiny little one, hardly designed to kill people. Instead, whatever intelligence they had prior to getting junked up is sharpened, bent solely to the purpose of getting hold of junk. Or, of course, of protecting what supply of junk they already possess. He hisses too loudly. He pricks up his ears. He takes a couple of steps further down the stairwell. Then someone falls over a big clangorous pile of something in the big room upstairs, and we scuttle down a few steps, maybe just a little too loudly, as our junkie stiffens and listens again on the stairwell before taking another two steps closer.

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Someone else makes a racket in the big room, and we edge down a little further. Again, our junkie hears us and edges lower. We are now coming close to the doorway on the next storey down. And through the doorway, we can see light. The door is another of the massive steel ones, designed to be airtight, hanging open on a set of hinges big enough to be bridge supports. It is actually swinging open in the breeze - there is a breeze - though it must weigh at least a tonne. To leave such a massive object free to travel is surely to invite disaster. But to the people who live down here, the only conceivable disaster is a failure to get their next hit of Smoke.

Having their arms, legs or head crunched off in a one-tonne door is, it seems, nothing by comparison. Beyond the door, as I said earlier, we can see firelight. It is surely beyond the end of foolhardy to light campfires underground. The chamber on this level, I notice as we creep lower, is just as large, just as chock full of widgetry.

But the widgetry is different, somehow. Line upon line of cylindrical metal tanks, each the length of a petrol tanker. Each one bolted to the floor. Each fed by a complex mystery of pipes and valves, snaking out along the floor, rising to form metal arbours over the walkways between the tanks. On the walkways, people are living.

Not clustered around the campfires, huddled close to the heat, but laid out as good as dead on the cold metal, staring raptly at nothing, at things no-one without a head full of Smoke can see. The fires, I realize with a cold shudder, are not to warm people, but to warm Smoke bottles. Makeshift wire tripods are propped up over the flames with an ingenuity born of complete and utter devotion to purpose. Bottles of every size, colour and configuration are arranged neatly round the floor, even the empty ones positioned with the same reverence as religious icons.

I shut my eyes, reopen them, and see the empty bottles still there, each one lovingly pre-wrapped in silver foil pressed around its outline like a tailormade dress around a bride. But I can tell these are full, because they are as black as asps and gleam like venom. There are so many full bottles that they stretch up the steps that lead up to our door out of the chamber. Some of them are close enough to touch. Between the empty bottles and the full on the floor downstairs, meanwhile, there is a tap, almost as if Oracle Smoke were a thing that came out of the walls like water or electricity.

And that tap is coming right out of the end of the nearest and biggest of the tanks. The tanks that have skulls and crossbones on them. The junkie at the top of the stairs has clumped down another couple of steps before we hear him coming. I swear I hear bones crack. Then Vern sweeps the kid sideways over the balustrade as if he were a doll which he virtually is; the Smoke has left him no musculature except what he needs to stand up straight and wander from bottle to bottle. The gun clatters to the floor on our side of the bars. Luckily, though its barrel is pointing straight at me as it clangs down on its butt on the steps, it does not go off.

The single shot it did fire, however, has been heard. In the firelit blackness below us, bodies that looked dead are stirring. On the stairs above us, feet are clanging downwards. Vern, meanwhile, has collapsed against the balustrade, leaking red stuff. Decidedly useless and immobile. I hear a knifeblade click out of a handle and lock.

They talk in shitty prophecies, remember.

He probably read it in a book. Now that really does put the frighteners on. Oblivious to all things but the need to protect their precious Smoke. And suddenly, I see our way out of this. Quickly, I reach forward and snatch up a bottle of the black junk. And when I look into it, into the glass, the smoke or dust or gas inside it really does seem to coil and roil like some sort of infernal eel.

Puffs of smoke that seem to go out of their way to seek out the bare flesh on my arms. I quickly develop second thoughts about having picked up the thing. They all, to a junkie, go silent. An indeterminate number of angels could be heard tapdancing on a dropping pinhead.

As I have said before, these are not stupid people. These are perfectly intelligent and rational people whose rationality has been entirely perverted to the aim of acquiring Oracle Smoke. The goons on the stairs are equally impressed with the gravity of the situation. They stand down, holding it transpires a motley collection of firearms ranging from fowling pieces that look like they were made for Czar Nicholas to full-on military hardware. We pass them on the stairs at kissing distance as I dangle the bottle over the bannisters. I have to support Vern with my other arm.

Half the artillery these people have looks set to blow up in the face of anyone fool enough to fire it. He probably has twice the number of red blood cells of any normal man. I look up and the number of flights above seems interminable.

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If I stay down here with him, I am going to die. Unless I stay down here with him, on the other hand, he is going to die. He turns back, and his face is spattered with some substance like black living mercury. As I watch, one of the droplets slithers uphill against gravity into his nostril. An almost living cloud of glass and gas and dust and droplets fills the air. A religious moan of lamentation comes from the crowd behind us.

The front rank of stoners drops to the steps, searching on hands and knees, trying to literally lick up the spilled junk. Nobody runs after me. But up above, far up above, beyond stairway after stairway after stairway, is a glint of daylight. I can force myself to push for it despite the fact that my lungs are searing and my leg muscles are tying themselves into crochet and my pulse is hammering like a steam locomotive in my brain. And it is daylight. Genuine live daylight, coming in through a grille in the concrete ceiling scarcely larger than a microchip.

Fading, bluing daylight creeping towards dusk, and distinguishable as such from any cheap fluorescent imitation. But as it is, caked in my own sweat at the top of the final staircase, up here in the twilight with real rain dripping through that tiny matrix of fading evening sky above me, and the smell of the outside air and freedom soft and cool on my face and certain death closing on me from below, I think this looks very much like the End Of The Line.

The top of the stairwell is blocked off. It obviously once opened into somewhere - there are doorways, many doorways, which someone has painstakingly bricked up. This is why there was no glass and shit on the upper storeys. No-one ever comes up here. When the Russians abandoned their underground venom-manufacture complex, they bricked it up and concreted it over, and probably ploughed the ground with salt for good measure.

I can hear the enemy gasping and wheezing as they lope up the stairs towards me, out of condition due to their Smoke habit. But however unfit they might be, they can and will cut me to pieces. Then I realize suddenly that the distance from me to the grille in the roof does not have to be ten feet. Not if I stand on the balustrade before I jump. The drawback to this is that both grille and balustrade are positioned above perhaps one hundred metres of vertical space.

Right in the middle of the stairwell, in the case of the grille. If I miss it, I fall; and if I fall, I die. But any danger of death is better than death as an absolute certainty. I hop up onto the rail and waddle out towards the grille like an overstuffed budgerigar. I sit there for a second or two, testing my weight distribution, plucking up courage. My hands hit the grille. My small and puny fingers pass through it and hold on; the bars are heavy enough to hold my weight.

But what do I do now? And the grille is an iron manhole cover set into concrete. And it opens, if it opens at all, upward. I can feel rain on my face now. After all, the difference between the two options is only measured in seconds right now. I jerk my entire body, punching it upwards against the grille. Beautifully, miraculously, the grille moves, lifting out of the concrete slightly. This time it comes out completely. I jerk again, and this time, twist as I do so. Nearly, but not quite. The grille drops back into its hole, back to where it started.

I hold on again for another couple of seconds, summoning up everything I have, and spasm upwards, and yell like a karateka. And the grille catches on the edge of the hole. And I see four thin slivers of daylight round its edges. I twist further, making the slivers bigger, big enough to writhe a finger through.

Then I cautiously unstick the fingers of one hand, and slap them onto the concrete up above. Steam hisses from drain covers all around me. Somewhere, I hear a toilet flushing. A building with flush toilets. Smoke houses, I imagine, do not usually have functioning flush toilets.

Smoke users are not the sort to go in for domestic plumbing. I can still hear them down below, issuing threats and dire predictions in the dark. But they cannot come up here. The drug has destroyed their bodies too efficiently. Ivan for it is he looks thoroughly ill at ease sitting in a huge floral print armchair with a cup of bone china tea on his lap and a slobbery labrador at his left elbow.

Ivan being treated with the utmost hospitality, but a sort of hospitality thoroughly un-Russian, making him look like a vodyanoi out of water. In his best dress uniform, with every silver button, star and eagle polished, Ivan is also heavily overdressed. But the safety of British citizens also has to be considered.

Ivan fidgets with his cap badge and replies that he cannot prove that a thing does not exist. Ivan shoots me a look of crocodilian coldness, then claims not to have understood my Russian. The floral curtains match the chintz on the armchairs. Despite this, everything manages in some bizarre impossible manner to clash with everything else. The flowers on the chintz curtains are red, green and orange. The wallpaper is blue and pink. The carpeting can only be described as Battenburg. Said counselling, however, seems to involve being flown back to England at government expense whenever he suggests it.

This would mean letting go of the sort of story any decent journalist needs to be prised away from with tyre levers and blowtorches. Normally anyone who, say, accidentally cuts off their own head in foreign parts can whistle for any government assistance whatsoever for the price of a sticking plaster, no matter how much invisible trauma they may have undergone.

No, Sir Reginald does not want me in his back parlour, so to speak, and for this reason I am determined to stay lodged in there like a bad piece of sweetcorn. Sir Reginald asks if it would be possible for an armed police detachment to be sent down into the caves or catacombs or whatever they might be to ensure no risk to human life remains. And whether it would be possible for this detachment to be accompanied by Embassy staff. Ivan clearly does not like this one little bit, and points out that all that is known so far of these so-called drug caverns is derived from the story of one excitable, possibly sex-maniac woman with an overactive imagination, who might in any case have inhaled drugs whilst on an illegal visit to the Abyss.

Ivan claims never to have heard of Oracle Smoke. He denies ever having discussed it with me. Then, still in his carpet slippers, he gets up out of his floral armchair, and walks over to a small window in one corner of the room. The window is covered by a curtain. Sir Reginald opens the curtain, then opens the window, then climbs out of the window and beckons for Ivan to do the same. Sir Reginald is standing in the centre of a light well sunk into the Consulate building. In the centre of that light well is a metal grating, and on top of that grating is what looks like the engine block of a Czaer Patiently, and with some difficulty, Sir Reginald shuffles the engine block aside into a corner.

Then, standing on the opposite side of the grating from Ivan, and looking him straight in the eye, he lifts the lid and flourishes a hallmarked silver teaspoon, which he must have palmed before he went out the window. Then, still looking Ivan dead in the eye, he drops the spoon carefully down into the dark, and theatrically cups his hand to his ear to listen for any impact. It might play havoc with the foundations. Keogh is well qualified to recognize it. We are fortunate he happened to be here.

And that you later developed them further to produce newer and still more exciting substances.

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