Chapter 3

The shrieks of the scattering crowd of blast-hole watchers faded into the air. And whatever commotion followed, I was too far away to hear and too full of adrenaline to care. The numb silence of the Northern Cape enveloped me in my silver suit. The desert is a quiet place under normal circumstances, but when every plant and scurrying lizard has been incinerated and then covered over with a metre of rubble and ash, it becomes not just silent, but dead. The prints of a jackal, or the pin-prick spoor of a beetle, though noiseless, are signs of life lived in the desert. But there were no signs here. Only the grey ash that had mixed with the sand. Life and sound long exterminated.

And then, like a second gunshot shattering the quiet, I heard a deafening click. My Geiger counter. I pulled the device off my belt and held it up to my visor. The numbers didn’t make sense, but I knew what clicks meant from watching TV and playing computer games. I took another step closer to the pit and it clicked again. Then again. By the time I had reached the edge of the hole, it was clicking in time with my heartbeat. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Before I stepped over the lip and descended into the blast crater, I turned back to see the festive campground I’d come from. From this distance, the tents took on their original charm, and I wished for a second that I could be back there, instead of clambering down a rocky slope into the epicentre of a three-day-old site of a nuclear explosion – with no qualification for being here besides a journalism degree and a quick Google search.

From far off, the depth of the pit could only be imagined. I for one had pictured something like a moon crater, a slight slope down to a level floor. But this was more like an antlion sandpit trap on a massive scale, an almost perfect inverted cone of sand and rubble. The sand in places had clumped together, halfway to becoming glass in the heat of the blast. Signs of a launch pad or a science lab were gone now. Not even a shard of metal, however twisted or melted, lay in the sand. Nonetheless I descended the slope, while my Geiger counter hummed with almost continuous clicks.

The sun baked my radiation suit, and while it had worked to keep me cool on my trek across to the pit, it had since collected enough heat from my body to create an oven. I could feel sweat collecting in my boots until it was as though I was sloshing around in a portable puddle. My head was aching with dehydration. With every breath my visor misted over – which made navigating the incline very difficult. I was dreading the prospect of climbing back up to the rim.

I was halfway down the slope, clambering on all fours, when my footing gave way and my leg broke through the slightly clumpy surface into a sub-subterranean chamber. I pulled my leg out and inspected the suit for cuts, immediately petrified that the radiation was now leaking onto my skin. It looked fine, scuffed but not torn. Then I turned my attention to the hole. Without a torch, I held the Geiger counter, with its pale green screen, into the hole and peered in. I couldn’t see much at all, so I began pulling the sand and rocks away from the opening. The hole dropped down a couple of metres and then seemed to run underground – like a tunnel.

This discovery was the sort of thing I should’ve reported directly to the people in charge, but though I may not be the world’s best journalist, I’m a better journalist than that. Second on the scene is as good as last on the scene. First on the scene is King of the Scene. I lowered myself into the hole until I felt a firm footing. Once inside, the glow of the Geiger counter was sufficient to navigate by, and I could see the floor of the tunnel covered in recently molten metal, solidified now in tumorous lumps. It was evidence of a base of some sort. I followed the tunnel, leaving behind the beam of sunlight that shone through the hole I’d dropped through, like a beacon for my safe return to the surface. As I walked, the tunnel gradually took on its former shape, where the heat of the blast had not penetrated. The walls were just solid plates of steel and the low ceiling was dotted with caged fluorescent tubes. It was sparse.

This tunnel seemed to be an afterthought, just thrown together – riveted with simple aluminium rivets, the kind anyone can buy at a hardware store. After minutes of walking, the Geiger counter began to slow, and once I’d turned a bend in the tunnel it clicked only a couple more times before it was quiet. I had no idea how long the Geiger counter’s battery would last, and no idea how far the tunnel went. Having come this far on my own was perhaps foolish, but to go further into the darkness with only the backlight of an LCD screen to guide me would be real stupidity.

I was about to listen to my better judgement, give up and turn back, when I noticed a smear on the wall. I stepped up to it and put my nose right up against it, the Geiger counter alongside my face. It was blood. It had dried and turned brown, but it was certainly blood. I followed the tunnel further, inspecting the walls. Another smear, this time with three finger marks through it. Then another – a full handprint of blood. I held my hand up to judge its size. Bigger and wider than my hand by quite some way.

And that’s when, just a couple of metres ahead of me, I saw the crumpled, bloody heap of a man lying on the tunnel floor in nothing more than his underpants.

“You got a smoke?” he wheezed.