61 Hours

he resumed. Holland and Peterson followed him all the way, bent over, crouching, waddling, always in his view. He could hear knee joints popping and cracking. Ligaments, and fluid. Holland’s, he guessed. Peterson was younger and in better shape.
    He made it to the doorway and swivelled around and shone his flashlight down the length of the corridor. It was a tunnel maybe a hundred feet long, perfectly horizontal, like a coal seam. It was five feet six inches high, and about the same in width. The left hand half was an unobstructed hundred-foot walkway. The right hand half was built up into a long low continuous concrete shelf, a hundred feet long, about two feet off the floor. A sleeping shelf, he guessed. He imagined bedrolls laid head to toe all along its length, maybe twenty of them. Twenty sleeping children. Five feet each.
    But the place had never been used. There were no bedrolls. No sleeping children. What was on the shelf instead was the war surplus flown back fifty years earlier from the old U.S. bomber bases in Europe. Aircrew requirements. Hundreds and hundreds of bricks of white powder, wrapped smooth and tight in yellowing glassine, each packet printed with the crown device, the headband, the three points, the three balls representing jewels. A registered trademark, presumably, for a now defunct but once entirely legitimate and government-contracted outfit called Crown Laboratories, whoever and wherever they had been.
    Peterson said, ‘I don’t believe it.’
    The packs looked to be stacked ten high and ten deep in groups of a hundred and there were maybe a hundred and fifty groups along the whole length of the shelf. A total of fifteen thousand, minus those already removed. The stack was a little depleted at the near end. It looked like a brick wall in the process of patient demolition.
    Holland asked, ‘Is this forty tons?’
    ‘No,’ Reacher said. ‘Not even close. This is only about a third of it. There should be another two stacks just like this.’
    ‘How many packs in forty tons?’ Peterson asked.
    ‘Nearly forty-five thousand.’
    ‘That’s insane. That’s forty-five billion in street value.’
    ‘Your granddaddy’s tax dollars at work.’
    ‘What was it for?’
    ‘World War Two aircrew,’ Reacher said. ‘Bombers, mostly. None of us have any idea what that war was like for them. Towards the end they were flying twelve-hour trips, sometimes more, Berlin and back, deep into Germany, day after day after day. Every trip they were doing stuff that had never been done before, in terms of precision and endurance. And they were in mortal danger, every single minute. Every second. Casualties were terrible. They would have been permanently terrified and demoralized, except they were always too exhausted to think. Pep pills were the only way to keep them in the air.’
    ‘These aren’t pills.’
    ‘Delivery method was up to the medical officers. Some made it up into pills, some preferred drinking it dissolved in water, some recommended inhaling it, some liked suppositories. Probably some prescribed all four ways at once.’
    ‘I had no idea.’
    ‘It was general issue, like boots or ammunition. Like food.’
    ‘Can’t have been good for them.’
    ‘Some of the planes had little wires soldered near the end of the throttle travel. The last quarter inch. War boost, it was called. If you needed it, you hauled the throttle back and busted the wire and got maximum power. It strained the engine, whichwasn’t good, but it saved your life, which was good. Same exact principle with the dope.’
    ‘How much did they get through?’
    ‘Way more than we can guess. The air force in Europe was hundreds of thousands strong back then. And demand was pretty strong, too. It was a tough gig. I’m sure I would have snorted my body weight before my first tour was half done.’
    ‘And this much was left over?’
    ‘This could have been a month’s supply. Suddenly not needed any more. Shutting down production was pretty haphazard at the end.’
    ‘Why is it here?’
    ‘Couldn’t just junk it. Couldn’t sell it. Certainly couldn’t burn it. The whole of Europe would have gotten high as kites off the smoke.’
    They went quiet. Just stared.
    Then Holland said, ‘Let’s find the rest.’
    The rest was shared between the next two tunnels to the left. The same hundred-foot shelves, the same meticulous stacks of packets, the same dull flashlight reflections off the yellowed glassine. A full