They clustered before the exit. The door to the facility was heavy, round-edged, and airtight, and operated by a wheel; it was like a submarine’s hatch. Ahmed began to break its seals.

They were all shitting themselves, Snowy realized, even if none of them wanted to show it to the rest.

“So what do you think we’ll find?” whispered Sidewise. “Russians? Chinese? Bomb craters, two-headed kids? Everybody wearing monkey masks, like Planet of the Apes?”

“Fuck off, Side, you twat.”

With an uncompromising motion Ahmed turned the wheel. The last seal broke with a crack. The door swung back.

Green light flooded in.

Cryobiology was actually a venerable industry.

The key to its utility was that far below the freezing point of water, molecules slowed the frenetic pace that permitted chemical reactions to proceed. So red blood cells could be stored for a decade or more. You could freeze, thaw, and reuse corneas, organ tissue, neural tissue. You could even freeze embryos. The cold was as much an enemy as an ally, of course; expanding crystals of ice had an unpleasant habit of destroying cell walls. So the medicos infused tissues with cryoprotective agents like glycerol and dimethyl sulfoxide.

Still, freezing and reviving a complex mature organism — such as a hundred kilograms of blasphemous Royal Navy pilot — presented more of a challenge. In Snowy’s body there were many different types of cells, each requiring a different freeze-thaw profile. In the end, a little subtle genetic engineering had done the trick. Snowy’s cells had been given the ability to manufacture natural antifreeze — in fact, glycoproteins, a trick borrowed from some species of polar fish — and the freezing was regulated at the level of the cells themselves.

Obviously it had worked. Snowy had come out of the process alive and functioning. After half an hour he barely felt a thing.

Of course he had been intended to come out fighting.

Officially this unit was under the command of UNPROFOR, the UN Protection Force. But everybody knew that was only a cover. The strategy had become known as sowing dragon’s teeth. As the intensity of global conflict had rapidly increased, post-Rabaul, new forms of deterrence had been devised. The idea was that it would be futile for any power to attempt an invasion if it knew that the ground was salted with groups of highly trained military personnel, fresh and fully equipped, ready to resume the battle. From these scattered teeth the dragon would regrow. That was the theory.

There were drawbacks, of course. The cold sleep process itself brought a risk of injury or fatality (but low, not 75 percent). And you never knew where you would be stationed; the freezing had been done at huge central depots, the subjects transported and deposited, all unconscious, at selected sites around the country, even abroad. But Snowy had known that his unit of Navy flyers would be kept together, which was more than reassuring.

And there were worse assignments. The tour of duty was limited to two years. For sure it was safer than being posted on a carrier to one of the world’s oceanic hellholes, the Adriatic or the Baltic or the South China Sea. In all, it was odd but it was just another posting.

Snowy had been happy to go along with it, even though it meant being locked away from his wife. He had expected to come out of the hole healthy and happy, a lot richer with the back pay he hadn’t been able to spend. Or, failing that, the grimmer possibility would be that he would have to come out fighting. But that was what he was trained for. Even then, he had expected to emerge into the middle of an ongoing high-tech war, to find a chain of command, everything basically functioning, to find something to fly. That was why they had salted away pilots in the first place. He hadn’t expected that they would be cracking the door cut off from any chain of command, completely ignorant of conditions outside — ignorant even of where he was. But that was what he faced.

Snowy took the lead. He stepped through the hatch.

Beyond the hatch, a stairwell was cut into concrete. The well led up to a rectangle of bright green light: leaves, traces of blue-white sky beyond. A forest?

The stairwell’s concrete, where it was exposed, was stained brown where metal fittings had rusted away. And when Snowy put his weight too close to the edge of a step, the concrete just crumbled. The stairs themselves were barely visible under a tangle of moss, leaves, debris of all kinds. Snowy wasted a little energy trying to clear this stuff off, but found that much of it was actually growing here, out of a layer of mulch over the concrete.

Ignoring the mess, he stepped up and just pushed his way out of the well.

At last he found himself standing on leaf-covered ground. He was panting hard. Evidently the cold sleep had taken more out of him than he had expected. The others followed him, one by one, brushing dead leaves and moss and mulch off their clothes.

The forest was built of tall trees, with low branches, heavy, spreading leaves. Oak, perhaps. Wind rustled, bringing warm air to Snowy’s face. It felt like late spring or early summer. The air smelled fresh, of nothing but forest, green and mulchy.

The Pit was set in the ground, half-concealed by a great concrete lid. But the lid was tilted askew and cracked, and plants were growing out of its surface.

Ahmed had a small black backpack. This contained a clockwork radio transceiver — which, like the pistols, had been stored in oil. Now he turned this on, wound it up, extended its aerial and began to walk around the little clearing.

Both Moon and Bonner looked very young and scared, lost in the green shade.

Sidewise stood by Snowy. Moodily he kicked the concrete carapace. “It’s amazing the power supply kept going as long as it did.”

Snowy said, “It’s like we just clambered out of Chernobyl.”

“I don’t think Chernobyl is a problem anymore.”

“What?”

“Snow, just how long do you think we’ve been stuck down that hole?”

Snowy braced himself. “More than fifty years?”

Sidewise grunted. “Look around you, pal. Those trees are oak. And look at this.” He led Snowy to a fallen tree. The trunk had snapped off maybe a meter above the ground. Much of the fallen trunk was coated with greenery, and fat, platelike fungi adhered to the upright stub of trunk, like disks stuck into the wood. “Snow,” said Sidewise, “you are surrounded by a mature forest. These are old trees. This one got so old it died without being felled. Come on, Snow. You remember those eco classes in training. What happens if you let a forest clearing recover?”

The grasses and herbs would be first to colonize the empty space. Within a year or so there would be Scots pine seedlings, birches, other deciduous trees sprouting from seeds left in the ground, or from stumps. Once there was some protection from the frost, Norway spruce and chestnut might take hold. Then, as conditions changed, different species would compete for light and space. After maybe fifty years, as the recovering forest darkened, the grasses on the floor would make way for shade-tolerant vegetation like bilberry and mosses. And after that, the oaks would return.

Snowy hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to this kind of stuff, at school, during his training, or later. Eco was always too depressing, nothing but lists of dead creatures. But — how long?

Sidewise poked at the grounded trunk. “Look at these bryophytes — the mosses and liverworts — and the lichens, fungi, insects burrowing away. You know, in our day a sight like this dead trunk was as rare as a wolf.”

“In our day?”

Ahmed had given up his stroll around the clearing. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a peep on any frequency. Not even GPS.”