He swung his head through the doorway, shouted out:
“Attention there! Commander Lanyon to come aboard!”
Lanyon put a hand out and squeezed the man’s shoulder gratefully, then stepped through onto the narrow pier.
Deep water boiled and swirled into the sub-pen through the open gates, surging down to the far wall 200 yards away.
Riding high on it, deckwork trim, periscopes aligned, was the Terrapin!
♦
Paul Matheson waited while Lanyon toweled himself down after the shower and climbed into a clean uniform.
“We’re all set to move off, Steve. We’ve had a last check around the base; there’s no one here.”
Lanyon nodded. “Fine, Paul. By the way, how’s the girl who came aboard with me?”
“Miss Olsen? She’s O.K., a little shocked but she’ll come to. Looks as if you had quite a job getting back here. She’s sharing a cabin with the three WAC nurses. Tight squeeze. We’ve got about sixty extra passengers.”
“Sorry to bring another, Paul. Still, she can have Van Damm’s vacancy. If it’s any consolation, she’s with NBC; she’s probably taking all this down in cinemascope. Remember, it’s not enough to make history—you’ve got to arrange for someone to record it for you.”
Lanyon buttoned his shirt up, glancing at the movement signal from Tunis lying on the table.
“Portsmouth, England, eh? Do you think they’ve got any more corpses for us to collect?”
Matheson shook his head. “No, I gather they’re top air force and embassy VIP’s. May even be the ambassador and his family. Where we’ll put them I don’t know.”
He laughed easily, and Lanyon noticed that Matheson seemed to have filled out considerably over the past few days. There was an air of authority and confidence about him that suggested he had been through his own private ordeal.
Lanyon fingered the movement order. “Paul, this came through three days ago. Strictly speaking, you should have got under way immediately.”
Matheson shrugged. “Well, I couldn’t leave the skipper behind, could I, Steve?” He hesitated. “As a matter of fact, two more orders came through when we didn’t clear back, followed up by a couple of troubleshooters from the Provost Marshal’s unit here. Slight problem there. They could see we were all ready to blow, so I had to, er, use a little bit of old–fashioned persuasion.”
He grinned at Lanyon, and tapped the butt of the ·45 stuck in his belt.
Lanyon nodded. “I wondered what that was for. Thought perhaps you were trying to impress the WAC’s. Pretty good, Paul. Well, let’s go topside and get this rig under way.”
They climbed up into the conning tower, crouched down under the awning stretched across to keep out the spray thrown up off the sides of the pen. At the far end Lanyon could see heavy seas smashing against the open doors, hear the deafening unrelenting roar of the wind screaming past like a dozen express trains.
The entire pen was shifting sideways under the impact of the seas breaking across it, and large cracks split the roof and walls. The Terrapin was moored well back in the pen, double lines of truck tires lashed to her hull to protect her from the pier.
The last lines were cast off, and they began to edge ahead under the big diesels, churning a boiling wake of foam and black water behind the twin screws.
They swung out into the center of the pen, 50 yards from the entrance, bows breaking out of the water as swells rode in from the sea, lifting the sub almost to the roof.
Lanyon was checking the forward elevator trim when Matheson suddenly punched him on the shoulder. He looked up quickly as the helmsman shouted and pointed forward to the entrance.
A huge section of the roof, the full width of the pen and 40 feet across, was tipping slowly downward crushing the two steel gates like chicken wire. Through the wide crack mountainous seas burst like floodwater through a collapsing dam, splashing across the bows of the Terrapin.
“Full astern! Full astern!” Lanyon roared into the mouth tube, hanging onto the edge of the well as the diesels reversed and wrenched the sub back into its wake. They moved 50 yards, and then Lanyon held the Terrapin and watched as the collapsing roof section anchored itself in the jaws of the entrance, hanging vertically from the reinforcing roof girders, wedged firmly by the driving seas.
Matheson pounded on the edge of the well, frustration and anger overriding his hysteria. “We’re trapped, Steve, for God’s sake! We’ll never move it!”
Lanyon ignored him, picked up the mouth tube. “Starboard torpedo station! Alert! Charge N°2 tube with main HE heads.”
Waiting for the ready signal, he turned to Matheson. “We’ll blast our way out, Paul. That roof section is at least fifteen feet thick, must weigh about five hundred tons. It’s our only chance.”
At the ready signal he backed the Terrapin astern right up against the rear wall, so that 150 yards of clear water separated them from the entrance. Then, lining the bows carefully on target, he rapped into the tube, “Compressors sealed. Discharge vent open.” He paused as the bows swerved slightly, then realigned on the target. “Fire!”
The torpedo burst from its vent in a rush of bubbles, burrowed rapidly through the water three feet below the surface, moving like an enormous shark. Lanyon watched it until it was 20 yards from the blocked entrance, then crouched down, shouting to the others.
They hit the floor, and he seized the mouth tube and yelled, “Full ahead! Full ahead!”
As the screws thrashed and bit in, kicking the Terrapin forward, the torpedo exploded against its target. There was a vivid white flash that filled the pen, followed by a colossal eruption of exploding concrete and water which burst out of its mouth like a cork from a champagne bottle. Simultaneously a 15-foot-high wave swept down the length of the pen, a massive breaker that carried with it a foaming jetsam of concrete and metal. Full ahead, the Terrapin was moving at 15 knots as they met halfway down the pen. It slowed briefly under the impact of the wave, its conning tower glancing off the walls and carrying away a section of the pier. Then it surged forward again, heading smoothly through the gaping mouth of the entrance into the harbor. For a moment its bow rose up steeply under the writhing swells, then sank cleanly into the deep basin, its tower and stern quickly vanishing in a roar of escaping air.
♦
At last the pyramid was complete.
Sliding painfully down its smooth slopes, the few remaining workers dismantled the battered forms, letting their equipment lie where it fell at the foot of the pyramid. One by one, peering up briefly at the gray apex shining above them into the black reeling air, they made their way over to a single trap door sunk into a shaft between the two ramparts. Quickly they disappeared from view, until only a single figure remained, in the shadow of the buckling windshields. For a moment he stood in the shower of dust carried over the shields a hundred feet above, his body swaying in the air exploding around him. Then he too turned and stepped through the trap door, sealing it behind him.
The wind mounted. Raging into the shields, it tore at the plates, snapping the hawsers one by one, cracking the concrete pylons at their bases, driving through the great rents.
Suddenly the pressure became too great. With a gargantuan paroxysm the shattered screen exploded and the splitting plates careened away into the air, bouncing off the sides of the pyramid, dragging with them the frayed remnants of the tangled hawsers, the roots of the pylons and buttresses. No longer protected, the lines of vehicles parked in the lee of the screens dragged and crashed into each other, and finally broke loose, rolling end over end across the lower slopes of the pyramid, rapidly picking up speed, and then spinning away into the darkness with the flying sky.
Now only the pyramid remained.
SIX
Death in a Bunker
Pausing in the doorway to allow the shower of plaster falling from the ceiling to spend itself, Marshall stepped through into the Intelligence Unit. A skeleton staff of three—Andrew Symington, a corporal and o
ne of the navy typists—sat in the dim light of the emergency bunker, surrounded by the jumble of teletypes, radio consoles and TV screens. The scene reminded Marshall of the last hours in Hitler’s führerbunker. Discarded bulletins and typed memos lay around everywhere, a clutter of unwashed teacups stood on the lid of a forgotten suitcase, cigarette ash spilled across the desks.
Above the chatter of the teletypes and the muted cross-talk of the R⁄T he could hear the sounds of the wind echoing through the ventilator shaft that reached up to the Mall 60 feet above. Almost everyone had gone now. The last War Office and COE personnel had left in their Centurions early that morning for the peripheral command posts. Admiralty Arch had collapsed half an hour later, pulling down with it the complex of offices that had housed COE for the previous three weeks. Intelligence was by now a luxury that would soon be dispensed with.
The wind had reached 250mph and the organized resistance left was more interested in securing the minimal survival necessities—food, warmth and 50 feet of concrete overhead—than in finding out what the rest of the world was doing, knowing full well that everywhere people were doing exactly the same thing. Civilization was hiding. The earth itself was being stripped to its seams, almost literally—six feet of topsoil were now traveling through the air.
He sat down on the desk behind Symington, patted the plump bald man on his shoulder, then waved at the other two. The girl wore headphones over her straggling hair, and was too harassed answering the calls coming in endlessly from mobile cars and units trapped in basements and deep shelters to have had any time to look after her appearance, attractive as she had once been (Marshall had deliberately kept her on at COE as a morale booster) but when she saw him she ran a hand over her hair and gave him a brave smile.
“How’s it going, Andrew?”
Symington sat back, massaged his eyes for a moment before replying. He looked exhausted and ashen faced, but managed a thin smile.
“Well, chief, I guess we can start getting ready to surrender. Looks to me as if the war’s over.”
Marshall laughed. “I was just thinking the place feels as if the Russians are two hundred yards away. How are the PM and the Chief of Staff?”
“They reached Leytonheath a couple of hours ago. The mine at Sutton Coldfield had been flooded by underground springs—water must have driven through a fault leading in from the North Sea—so they’ve been forced to dig into the shelters at the airfield. They’re OK there for three weeks, but after that there’ll have to be a general election.”
A wry smile crossed Marshall’s face. For a moment he looked reflectively at Symington, then said: “What’s the latest from the Met people? Any hope of a breakthrough on the weather front?”
Symington shrugged. “They went off the air about an hour ago. Pulled out to Duiwich. I don’t think they’ve known any more for the last week than you or I. Just about all they’ve done is lick their fingers and hold them over their heads. The latest wind speed is 255. That’s an increase of 4.7 over 11 A.M. yesterday.”
“An effective drop, though,” Marshall said hopefully.
“Yes, but it’s accounted for by the tremendous mass of soil particles being carried. The sky’s jet black now.”
“What about overseas?”
“Had a signal in from a USAF field in New Jersey. Apparently New York is a total write-off. Manhattan’s under hundred-foot waves, most of the big skyscrapers and office blocks are down. Empire State Building toppled like a falling chimney stack. Same story everywhere else. Casualty lists in the millions. Paris, Berlin, Rome—nothing but rubble, people hanging on in cellars.”
The bunker shuddered under the impact of a building falling above, like a depth charge shaking a submarine. The light bulbs danced on the ends of their flexes. Dust filtered down from the ceiling. Involuntarily Marshall’s eyes moved to the mouth of the ventilator shaft, his mind crossing the interval of compacted clay up to the garage in the basement above where the big supertractor waited to take him to safety.
The corporal by the TV screens spoke up. “When do we pack this lot in, sir?” he asked anxiously. “Seems to me we’re cutting it a bit fine.”
“Don’t worry,” Marshall told him. “We’ll get out safely enough. Let’s try to hang on here as long as we can. You three are just about the only intact intelligence outfit still operating in the whole of Europe.” There was a hint of pride in Marshall’s voice, the pride of a man who has created a perfect team and hates to see it disbanded even after it’s outlived its purpose. He gave them all a wide encouraging grin. “You never know, Crighton; you may be the first person to see the wind reach its peak and slack off.”
Symington shifted a stack of teletype memos, spread them out on his desk, anchoring them from the draught with a stack of pennies.
“This is the provincial set-up. Birmingham: an estimated 300,000 people are sheltering in the coal mines around the city. Ninety-nine per cent of the city is down. Tremendous fires from the refineries at West Bromwich swept across the ruins yesterday, finished off what little the wind had left. Estimated casualties: 200,000.”
“Sounds low,” Marshall commented dourly.
“Probably is. Homo sapiens is pretty tenacious, but if London is any guide most people went down into their basements with one packet of sandwiches and a thermos of cocoa.” He went on, “Manchester: heavy casualties were caused yesterday when the roof of London Road station caved in. For some reason the authorities have been concentrating people there, there were something like 20,000 packed between the platforms.”
Marshall nodded while Symington continued in a low steady voice. There seemed to be a depressing uniformity about the reports. When he had heard one he had heard them all. The same picture emerged; the entire population of one of the world’s most highly industrialized nations, equipped with an elaborate communications and transport system, huge stores of fuel and food, large armed services, yet caught completely unprepared by a comparatively slight increase in one of the oldest constants of its natural environment.
On the whole, people had shown less resourcefulness and flexibility, less foresight, than a wild bird or animal would. Their basic survival instincts had been so dulled, so overlaid by mechanisms designed to serve secondary appetites, that they were totally unable to protect themselves. As Symington had implied, they were the helpless victims of a deep-rooted optimism about their right to survival, their dominance of the natural order which would guarantee them against everything but their own folly, that they had made gross assumptions about their own superiority.
Now they were paying the price for this, in truth reaping the whirlwind!
He listened to Symington complete the picture.
“A few navy units are operating bases around the Portsmouth and Plymouth areas—the defenses and arsenals there are tunneled deep underground, but in general military control is breaking down. Rescue operations are virtually over. There are a few army patrols with the crowds in the London Underground system, but how long they can keep command is anybody’s guess.”
Marshall nodded. He moved across to the bank of TV receivers. There were six of them, relaying pictures transmitted from automatic cameras mounted in sealed concrete towers that Marshall had had built at points all over London. The sets were labeled: Camden Hill, Westminster, Hampstead, Mile End Road, Battersea, Waterloo. The pictures flickered and were lashed with interference patterns, but the scenes they revealed were plain enough. The right-hand screen, labeled Mile End Road, was blank, and the corporal was adjusting the controls in an effort to get a picture.
Marshall studied one of the other screens, then tapped Crighton on the shoulder.
“I shouldn’t bother.” He indicated the Hampstead screen, pointed through the blur of dust swept off the shattered rooftops. The camera was traversing automatically from left to right in three-second sweeps; as it neared its leftward stop Marshall put his finger on the screen, pointing to a stub of gray concrete sticking up above the desolation several mi
les away on the horizon. As the duststorm cleared for a moment, revealing the rectangular outlines of the Mile End tower, they could see that a pile of debris lay across its waist, the remains of a ten-story building that had been carried bodily across the ground. The tower was still standing, but the camera turret, 50 feet above ground, had been snapped off.
Marshall switched off the set, then sat down in front of the screen covering the Westminster area. Its transmitting tower was mounted on a traffic island at the bottom of Whitehall only a few hundred yards from where they were sitting. It had been fitted with a 180° traverse, and was pointing up Whitehall toward Trafalgar Square. The road had disappeared below enormous mounds of rubble driven across the pavement from the shells of the ministries on the eastern side. The War Office and Ministry of Agriculture were down. Beyond them, the spires of Whitehall Court had vanished; only spurs of masonry were sticking up against the backdrop of the blackened sky.
The camera swung, following the battered remains of a doubledecker bus rolling across the rubble. Tossed over the ruins of the Foreign Office and Downing Street, it bounced off the remains of the Home Office portico and then was carried away across St. James’s Park. Along the horizon were the low ragged outlines of the National Gallery and the clubs down Pall Mall, with here and there the gaunt rectangular outline of a hotel or office block.
Marshall watched the last moments of the Piccadilly Hotel. The intervening area, Haymarket and the south side of the Circus, was down, and the hotel was standing out alone above the tempest. The colonnade between the wings was still intact, but just as the camera moved across it two of the columns buckled and crashed back into the face of the hotel, driving tremendous rents through the wall. Instantly, before the camera had time to move away, the entire front of the hotel collapsed in an explosion of dust and masonry. One of the wings tipped over and then crashed to the ground, carrying with it the remains of a small office block that had sheltered behind it. The other wing rode high above the chaos like the bows of a greater liner breasting a vast sea, and then slipped and cascaded to the ground in a soundless avalanche.