Lanyon pulled Maitland away, pointed to one of the beds. “Help me dismantle it! Maybe we can use the crossbars as jimmies.”
Quickly they pulled the mattress off the bed, ripped out the trestle and unlocked the two supporting bars, the heavy bolts ripping at their fingers. Freeing the angle irons, they forced the sharp ends into the narrow aperture between the door and the concrete wall, slowly levered the top half of the steel plate out of its louvers. As soon as it had sprung back a few inches, Lanyon reached up, seized the lip, and pulled it downward to provide a narrow, footdeep opening.
Outside, in the corridor, only the red storm light was showing. As Lanyon began to scramble through the opening the light in their room went out, plunging them into a thin red gloom, the diffused rays from the bulb glimmering in the dark surface of the water.
It reached to Lanyon’s knees in the corridor, pouring in a strong torrent down the stairway. Lanyon steadied himself, then helped Patricia Olsen through after him, followed by Waring and Maitland. As they left the room the water had reached the level of the beds, and two of the mattresses were sailing slowly around.
Quickly they waded down the corridor to the stairway, Lanyon leading. Water cascaded around their waists, and as they reached the first turning Maitland, who was last in line, looked back to see the surface only two feet from the ceiling.
Reaching the next level, they paused in a recess between two corridors at right angles to each other. The influx of water was coursing down the right-hand section, pouring out through the shattered doorways of a series of high store chambers.
Lanyon pointed to their left, where half a dozen guards were piling sandbags across the corridor preparatory to sealing it with a heavy bulkhead.
“Hold on!” he shouted at them. “Don’t close up yet!”
He started to run toward them, but the guards ignored him. As Lanyon reached the bulkhead they slammed in the crossbars, leaving the American pounding helplessly on the massive gray plates.
Maitland straddled the sandbags, filled with a quick-setting cement which was already locking the breastwork to the floor and walls as the water swilled against it down the corridor. He held Lanyon’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s make for the surface. No point in being trapped down here with these rats. There must have been a major cave-in somewhere. Once we get above it we’ll be safe.”
Pulling themselves up the stairway, they made their way past the next two levels. Gradually the flow of water pouring past them diminished, and by the time they reached the top of the shaft it had stopped altogether. At each of the four levels the retreating occupants of the bunker system had sealed bulkheads across the corridors, blocking off the central redoubt on the left from the stairway and the flooded store chambers on its right.
Waring and Patricia Olsen sat down against the wall opposite the stairway, trying to squeeze the water out of their clothes, but Lanyon shouted at them: “Come on, we can’t stay here! If another of these walls goes the whole place will flood out. Our only chance is to get through into Hardoon’s pyramid.”
One by one they entered the communicating tunnel, now in total darkness, guiding themselves along the walls. These were tilting, as if the tunnel were being twisted longitudinally. Water accumulated along the left-hand side, more than three inches deep. Tremendous faults had opened in the surrounding gravel bed, as the underground spring carried away enormous quantities of earth, leaving the massive bunkers suspended without support.
They reached the far end of the tunnel, made their way up a short stairway to the elevator shaft serving Hardoon’s suite.
Lanyon turned to Waring. “Bill, you stay down here with Pat, while Maitland and I see if we can reach Hardoon.”
He pulled back the cage of the elevator, made room inside for Maitland. He wiped his face with his sleeve, spitting out an oily phlegm that choked his sinuses, then pressed the tab marked ‘Roof.’
Halfway up to the top the elevator suddenly swung back, lodged momentarily in its housings, banging against the rear wall of the shaft.
Lanyon stabbed the roof button again. “Dammit, felt as if the whole place was moving,” he commented to Maitland.
“Impossible,” Maitland said. “A five-hundred-mile-an-hour gale would never shift this weight of concrete. Must have been some air driving up the shaft.”
The elevator creaked upward and finally stopped. Maitland pulled back the grille, found that the upper doors were open. They stepped out into the deserted hallway, where a light still shone over the reception desk in the corner.
As they neared the doors of Hardoon’s office they heard the sound of the wind battering against the panels, and for a moment Maitland wondered whether the observation window in Hardoon’s suite had been breached. Then he realized that the wooden doors in front of them would have been ripped off their hinges in a fraction of a second.
Lanyon nodded to him and they plunged through.
Inside the room the noise of the wind roared insanely in their ears, louder than they had ever heard it. Unbroken and apparently at the heart of the maelstrom itself, it reverberated off the walls and ceiling like the wave front of some gigantic explosion. The force of the blast stunned the two men, and they stood uncertainly on the threshold, peering around for its source.
The room was in darkness, the sole illumination streaming in from the observation window. Standing in front of it, his face only a foot from the glass, was Hardoon, the flickering field of light playing across his granitic features like the flames of some cosmic hell. So completely involved was he with the wind that Maitland hesitated before stepping forward, as much held back by the intangible power of Hardoon’s presence as by the sounds of the hurricane battering at the window.
Suddenly a second taller figure detached itself quickly from the darkness behind Hardoon, bent across the desk and pressed a button on the control panel.
Immediately the sounds dimmed and fell away, and the ceiling lights came on overhead. Hardoon looked over his shoulder in surprise. He pulled himself out of his reverie, and gestured impatiently at Kroll, who was covering Maitland and Lanyon with his ·45.
Maitland called out: “Hardoon! Listen, for God’s sake! The bunkers are flooding, the foundations are caving in!”
Hardoon stared at him sightlessly, apparently unaware of Maitland’s identity. His eyes focussed uncertainly on the wall behind Maitland’s head. Then he motioned again to Kroll with a snap of his fingers and turned back to the window.
“Hardoon!” Maitland shouted. He and Lanyon began to move forward, but Kroll leaped quickly around the desk, the large automatic holding them off.
“Turn around, both of you!” he snapped, pushing Maitland back with a heavy fist. They sidestepped out into the hall, and Kroll closed the doors behind him. Flicking the barrel of the gun, he steered them into the elevator, then stood two yards away from them, left hand on the control switch, ready to close the doors, his right leveling the gun, first at Lanyon and then at Maitland.
“Kroll!” Maitland shouted. “The shelters are collapsing! Four hundred men are trapped in there. You’ve got to get them across here.”
Kroll nodded coldly, his mouth tight, his eyes like black chisels under the visor of his helmet. He raised the barrel at Maitland’s head, his jaw muscles tensing, bunching the skin into hard knots.
As his finger squeezed the trigger, Maitland dropped quickly to his knees, trying to avoid the bullet. He looked up, saw Kroll grunt and train the gun on him again. Lanyon had backed up against the side of the car, stabbed frantically at the control buttons.
Waiting for the bullet to crash into his skull, Maitland lowered his head.
Suddenly, without warning, the floor tipped sharply, knocking him against the side of the elevator. As he straightened himself he heard the roar out, felt the bullet slam past his head into the leather padding, ripping a three-inch slash across it. Flung off his feet, Kroll lost his balance and tripped across the small table by the reception desk.
&nbs
p; As he picked himself up, swearing in a low snarl, Maitland dived forward at the automatic held loosely in his hand. Above their heads the lights swung eerily, and the floor remained tilted at a slight angle.
“Lanyon!” Maitland shouted. “Get his gun!”
Behind him, Lanyon dived out of the elevator and hurled himself onto Kroll.
As they staggered across the sloping floor, Lanyon slammed a heavy punch into Kroll’s neck, pounding the big man with the full force of his weight. Kroll rolled with the blow, holding off Maitland with his left arm, trying to free the automatic Maitland had seized with both hands.
For a moment they struggled tensely. Butting with his head, Kroll drove the heavy helmet up into Maitland’s face. Maitland gasped for breath and sat down on the floor, grabbing Kroll’s jacket with one hand and pulling the big man on top of him. Kroll pulled himself up onto his knees, sitting astride Maitland, and knocked Maitland’s hands away with a heavy left swing. As he rammed his forefinger into the trigger guard and leveled the automatic at Maitland’s chest, Lanyon picked a massive glass ashtray off the reception desk beside them and brought the edge down across the narrow strip of exposed neck below Kroll’s helmet.
The big man began to slump and Lanyon reached down and turned him by the shoulder and then slashed him again across the face with the ashtray, knocking his head backward onto the top of the desk, his face like an inflamed skull’s.
“You’ve got him,” Maitland gasped. He stood up and staggered back against the wall and Kroll sank loosely onto his knees and then collapsed across the floor, blood running from a deep wound behind his ear onto the carpet. Maitland picked up the automatic, held the butt in both hands. “God, that was close!”
Lanyon tried to find his balance on the angling floor. “What the hell’s happening here? The whole pyramid seems to be tipping over!”
The down light flashed in the indicator panel over the elevator.
“Waring!” Lanyon said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“Wait a minute,” Maitland told him. Gripping the automatic carefully, he ran up the incline toward Hardoon’s office.
The room was in darkness, the only light coming from the observation window. Books had spilled from the high shelves and lay across the floor, chairs and tables had careened over to the far wall. Hardoon had been thrown heavily off balance, was pushing himself back to the window along the edge of the desk.
Maitland had started to move toward him when the floor tilted again, dropping an inch below his feet like a jerking elevator. He stumbled, saw Hardoon pitch sideways across the desk. Books cascaded from the shelves like toppling dominoes. Hardoon regained his footing, seized the window ledge with both hands and pulled himself back.
Maitland crossed to the desk, stepped around it and touched Hardoon on the shoulder. The millionaire looked back at him blindly, the flickering light outside illuminating his storm-riven features.
“Hardoon!” Maitland shouted. “Get away from here!”
Hardoon shook him off, turned to the window. For a few seconds Maitland stared out at the scene below. The storm wind swept by at colossal speed, the dark clouds now and then breaking to reveal the dim outlines of the fortified shelters. The two long buttress walls had disappeared. In their place an enormous ravine, at least 100 feet deep, had opened in the ground, and a swift torrent of water emerged from the mouth of a huge rift and ran straight below the left-hand corner of the pyramid, carrying with it an everincreasing load of debris swept from the exposed sides. On the extreme left, protruding out through the wall of the ravine, Maitland could see the sharp rectangular outlines of part of the main bunker system, the communications tunnel straddling the ravine like a bridge. Once fifty feet below ground, it was now completely exposed for almost a third of its length. Behind it were the square ledges and walls of other portions of the bunker, their unsupported weight wrenching huge cracks in their surface.
The floor tilted again, throwing the two men against each other. Maitland steadied himself, helped Hardoon back onto his feet. The older man clung forward at the window, holding it desperately.
“Hardoon!” Maitland shouted again. “The entire pyramid is toppling! For God’s sake get out while you can! Look down there and see for yourself, the foundations are being carried away.”
Hardoon ignored him. Eyes glazed, he stared obsessively into the night, watching the whirlwind of black air.
Maitland hesitated, then left him. As he crossed the room the floor sank abruptly and one of the bookshelves fell forward and crashed down across a chair. Maitland ducked past it, pausing at the door to look back for the last time at Hardoon. By now the angle of the floor was almost ten degrees, and the millionaire was staring upward into the sky like some Wagnerian super-hero in a besieged Valhalla.
“Maitland!” Lanyon shouted urgently. He was standing by the elevator shaft, gesturing. On the floor beside him Kroll stirred slowly, drawing his long legs together.
Maitland stepped quickly into the lift. “We’ll leave him here,” he said to Lanyon. “Perhaps he can save Hardoon.” He stabbed the ground button, and the elevator slipped and then sank slowly down the shaft.
Waring and Patricia Olsen were crouching by the tunnel entrance as they stepped out, glancing up anxiously at the tilting ceiling.
“There’s every chance that the whole pyramid will keel over,” Maitland said. “Our best hope is to get back into the bunkers. Once the channel forces its way past the pyramid the shelters should drain again. Already they’re well above the floor of the ravine.”
As they stepped back into the tunnel the pyramid jerked heavily, throwing them against the wall. Deep fissures had appeared in the cement. They ran along it, Maitland and Lanyon helping Patricia Olsen. Halfway down the tunnel they felt a second tremendous wrench that threw them onto their knees. Looking back, they saw a short section of the corridor buckle, its walls twisted like cardboard. At the same time, once again they heard the sound of the wind hammering past.
They reached the doorway at the far end. Inside, as Maitland had anticipated, the corridors had drained but the bulkheads were still sealed behind the breastwork.
As he looked back for the last time down the tunnel, Maitland saw the section 20 yards away abruptly rise up into the air like the limb of a drawbridge. For a moment there was a cascade of masonry and ruptured steelwork, and then the entire tunnel fell back to reveal a blinding sweep of daylight. Sucked out of the still intact section of tunnel attached to the bunker, air swept past Maitland under pressure, and he was dragged forward a dozen feet before he held himself against a step in one of the walls.
Through the open aperture he looked out into the huge ravine below, like the hundred-yard-wide trench working of a six-lane underpass. Dust and exploding gravel obscured its sides, bursting through the narrowing venturi, but he could see the great bulk of the pyramid towering overhead. The ravine led directly below it, but at least two-thirds of its base still rested on solid earth, the overhanging portion revealing the L-piece of the communicating tunnel jutting below. The pyramid had tilted by a full ten degrees, snapping the tunnel in half like a straw.
Peering up, Maitland tried to identify the observation window in the apex, but it was hidden behind the dark clouds of detonating grit.
“Maitland!” he heard someone shout behind him, but he felt unable to tear his eyes from the spectacle before him. Like some enormous wounded mastodon, the pyramid reared up into the storm wind, the precarious shelf of ground on which it rested being cut away yard by yard as Maitland watched. The ravine deepened as the channel grew wider, now that the obstruction of the bunker system had been passed. For a few seconds the pyramid poised precariously, tipping slowly, apparently held by the adhesive forces of the ground below the small portion of its base still fastened to the supporting shelf.
Then, with a sudden final lurch, it toppled over the edge, and in a blinding explosion of dust and flying rock it fell sideways into the ravine. For a few moments
its massive bulk rose over the clouds of debris, its apex pointed obliquely downward, resting on its lef thand face. Then the wind began to cover it, burying it completely beneath vast drifts of dust.
Stunned, Maitland gazed out at the scene of this cataclysmic convulsion. At his shoulder he found Lanyon, his arm around Patricia Olsen, with Waring behind them. Together they stared down into the ravine, watching the dust clouds pour past at incredible speed. Then numbly the little group withdrew along the short stump of tunnel and made its way into the corridor.
Waring and Patricia Olsen sat down on the top step of the stairway. Lanyon leaned against the wall, while Maitland squatted on the floor.
“I guess you’ve got your story, all right, Pat,” Lanyon said to the girl.
She nodded, pulling the hood of her jacket closer around her cold face. “Yes, and maybe I can even believe it now. Just about the end to everything.”
“What do we do now, Commander?” Waring asked. “We’re not really much better off, are we? It’s only a matter of hours before this place starts breaking up like a derelict wreck.”
Lanyon pulled himself together. On either side heavy bulkheads sealed the two corridors branching off from the stairway, huge cement-filled sandbags blocking their approach. He and Maitland examined the cracks appearing in the ceiling. Forced by their own weight, no longer supported by the surrounding earth, the bunkers were breaking apart. As Waring had said, soon the staircase and the segments of corridor would detach themselves and fall onto the floor of the ravine 60 feet below.
“I’ll try the stairway,” Lanyon told the others. “There’s a chance we may be safer down below.”
Stepping past Pat Olsen, he began to make his way around, peering through the thin light. He had almost completed one circle when his foot plunged through the surface of a pool of water. Reaching down with his hands, he found that the stairwell was full. The three levels below had been completely flooded.
He rejoined the others. They had moved into the left-hand corridor, were pressed against the collapsing breastwork of sandbags. Maitland gestured Lanyon over quickly. Looking up, he saw that one of the cracks across the roof of the stairway was now two feet wide, a deep fissure in the thick concrete now widened perceptibly, moving in rigid jerks as the reinforcing bars snapped one by one like the teeth of a giant zip.