The jar up my arm could have been a glance off the UZI's breech, or the bone armour of his rib-cage.
I fell on him, enveloped him — a crude parody of a rugby smother-tackle. My knife hand skewered him. If he screamed or uttered any sound, I did not hear it. We cannoned off a partition wall, pitched into the main sickbay, carrying the curtain with us.
I had a momentary sight of the UZI being snatched up by another hand — Tideman's. The guard and I lay face-to-face, I on top. I was grateful for my visor. The man's mouth was contorted. Tell-tale pink sprayed from it. blurring the Perspex. He gave a final convulsion and was still.
It was Kay with shaking hands who freed my cap. Tideman knelt a pace away with the automatic's barrel trained on the guard's head. There was no need. He was dead. 'Quick!' I rapped out. 'The bridge — both of you!'
There was no direct access to the bridge from the sickbay. The wheel-house, radio office, chartroom and pilot office were all situated on the floor above us. The route from sick-bay to bridge was along a corridor running athwartships, flanked by officers' cabins. At the far end was the captain's suite. There were twin upward companion-ways, one to port, the other to starboard. These ladders debouched from our level into a central well immediately abaft the wheel-house itself. This well was bisected by № 2 mast, which I now intended to climb via the servicing door which Kay and I had used during our first ascent. The whole of this well area could be isolated in an emergency by means of watertight bulkheads. In short, the central well was the junction of all routes to the bridge. Tideman and Kay started to the sick-bay door.
'John!' I said. 'In ten minutes — no sooner, no later — you will blow the mast charges. Is that understood?' 'Aye,' replied Tideman. 'Whatever.' 'Good luck!' The two sprinted off.
I ballooned along the corridor in their wake. I felt like a grotesque carnival figure. That is where the resemblance to fun ended. The knife was bloodied to the hilt.
I lost Tideman and Kay at the first ladder to the mastwell. I negotiated it with the nimbleness of a baby elephant.
I found myself in the well itself. The mast towered in front of me like a burnished lift-shaft. The access door was shut. It had a type of fancy quick-release press-catch. My banana fingers fluffed it. I shifted hands with the dagger, tried again. I felt it yield, open. Sound poured down from the floor above — a burst of automatic fire. Then — shorter, staccato. The mast was relaying the sound of the bridge action. One — two — single shots.
The UZI seemed to appear from the direction of the captain's suite before the man. A seeking black muzzle, the unmistakable heavy finning, a hand on the trigger, Grohman!
Why didn't he blast me? I shall never know. He could not have missed, at less than four metres. I think it must have been the sight of the ludicrous apparition which froze his finger. Or perhaps it was the sight of that bloody dagger,
In that moment of arrested time I realized that Kay had failed in her part. She had not reached the hydraulics console in time to throw the vital bulkheads switch which would have caged Grohman and the other Group Condors. Those last isolated rat-tat-tats from above could have been her epitaph.
My savage despair at the attack's misfire gave me the courage to stand there facing my killer for a split-second long enough to ensure that he would come up the mast after me.
I slammed the door shut. A siren-like whoop reverberated everywhere. Emergency alarm! Kay had managed the bulkhead switch! But it was too late. Grohman had escaped the trap.
I fumbled with the lock of the mast door. Against it from outside came a savage battering. It wasn't done by hand. It was a magazine full of 9 mm shells.
The emergency siren told me that my part of the plan was still on. I had to get aloft — climb with feet like snow-shoes, a suit the size of a hangover, and mittened hands 1 could scarcely feel through! The visor and cap I left loose against the nape of my neck. It would only take a second to zip them into place when the mast blasted off.
I couldn't climb with my weapon hand encumbered. So I put the dagger between my teeth and hefted my leg on to the first rung.
The confined space rang with two or three concussions. Grohman was trying to shoot open the lock, carefully aiming individual shots.
I levered myself up the ladder. The going was tougher than I had expected. Until I managed the rhythm of lifting the feet and understanding their non-feel against the rungs, I was certain Grohman would pick me off before I reached the level of the lower mainyard. All he would have to do, once he had blasted open the door, was to fire straight upwards. I presented the perfect target against groups of lights fitted for servicing purposes at the juncture of each yard with the mast. The first group was at the lower mainyard. I had to reach them before Grohman broke in the door. I fought my way up. "There was another rattle of shots from below. Heavy slugs began to tear through the door and were banging about at the foot of the ladder. Grohman wasn't inside yet.
The group of four naked electric bulbs was close. I threw myself up at them. One foot slipped, and I hung on by my right hand.
The mast door crashed open. I glanced down. Grohman brought the UZI to his shoulder. I was clambering directly above him, like a bird waiting to be picked off a branch.
It is difficult to fire straight overhead. My position allowed him no angle, however slight. He would either have to lean completely backwards or lie on his back to aim.
In that brief interval while he gathered his aim, I made the remaining rungs to the lights.
I swiped madly with my heavy paw. There was a crash of breaking glass, a blinding flash of short-circuiting electrics. Then everything went dark. A general fail-safe switch tripped out the rest of the overhead lights inside the mast. I hurled myself up — fumbling, slipping, panting.
There was an ear-ripping jangle of sound. The blackness below was polka-dotted with red malice. The interior of the mast seemed full of ricocheting bullets.
Grohman was firing wild. He was hoping that the lethal spray would somehow find its target but the shots were all landing below me. He wasn't getting his angle of fire. The shattering sound cut off. I guessed the magazine was empty after that prolonged burst. To change it would give me a few precious moments. Up! Up!
Jetwind's yards were spaced at five equal intervals of ten and a half metres up the mast. The mast itself towered fifty-three metres above the deck. I had now covered the first ten and a half metres. The mast was divided into three sections; the lower mast, the top-mast, and the top-gallant. It was this latter which contained the ring charges at its juncture with the topmast thirty-four and a half metres above deck. The interior profile of the mast was elliptical and diminished progressively the higher one went.
At the point where each of the six yard-arms joined the mast there was a servicing compartment. Apart from a maze of pipes and valves, the main feature of these compartments was a pair of massive vertical rollers, each ten and a half metres in length, on which the sails were rolled in along tracks like a giant roller blind.
The bottom compartment, whose lights I had just smashed, was the largest. It measured about two and three-quarter metres long and was about half that broad. A steel cat-walk extending from the main ladder enabled technicians to stand and work.
I hesitated for a moment on this cat-walk. Its open grille provided no protection against a volley from underneath. There was a metallic clinking from below. What was Grohman up to? He hadn't fired off the UZI's full forty rounds. There was another snap and clink, then — unmistakable — the clack of a magazine being rammed home.
I knew enough about the UZI to realize that the big forty-rounder was too heavy to climb with. He had substituted for it a smaller twenty-five rounder. That still didn't account for all the delay. Another series of clicks reached me. He was probably unhitching the skeleton butt, converting the weapon into a compact, manoeuvrable automatic pistol. He was taking his time — he was very sure of me, pinned without hope of escape inside an ever-narrowing field of fire.