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“Son of a bitch,” Jim murmured as he surveyed Booth’s lair. “I wonder how long he’s been hiding out down here.”

“Two, three years anyway,” Branner said. She walked over to one of the printers. “Check this out-doesn’t this look like an exam?”

Jim went over and examined the printout. “Sure does. Shit, he’s probably been tapping the whole Academy intranet down here. Listening to E-mails, copying admin traffic. Look at that headset-it’s tied to that PBX switchboard.”

“Where’s he getting power for these lights?”

As they looked around, they heard the whine of an inverter. They found a stack of car batteries hooked to the inverter, which was producing the AC power for the lights.

“Pretty slick,” Jim said. “Got his own power supply. This whole place looks like some mad scientist built it. Remember what that kid said about Booth-supernerd with a bad attitude?”

Branner nodded and ran her fingers through her wet hair.

“What pisses me off is that I never came over here,” Jim said. “Everybody agreed that this side of the tunnel complex wouldn’t be useful, because it went nowhere near Bancroft Hall. That damned door wasn’t even locked. Let’s look for the way out before any more of that tunnel caves in.”

There were the same two square holes in the back corners of the domed ceiling at the end of the room. Each one had a small pipe running up into the hole from about two inches above the floor. But this time, there was no ladder.

“Where are we, in relation to the buildings topside?” Branner asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The maps we had were wrong about the other side, and about the Fort Severn layout in general. I never came over on this side because I was looking for a way in and out of Bancroft. We could be anywhere under Lejeune Hall, or even the field house. Or maybe even into the city. Hell, I don’t know.”

They heard some more noises from the tunnel complex outside. Jim went over to the steel magazine door and pulled it shut. It seemed to him that the water was a little bit deeper. Probably leaking around doors, he thought. Then they heard a loud bang from in the right-hand tunnel. They looked at each other, not saying anything. Jim was about to go back to the door for the cross tunnel to see what had happened when they heard what sounded like a small giant banging on that door.

“Cross tunnel just flooded out,” he said. “Damned door didn’t hold.”

He opened the steel door enough to shine the flashlight outside. The hammering sound had subsided into a steady vibration, which was being transmitted by the aging masonry to every joint in the anteroom ceiling. The mist became a fog as more and more of the cement vibrated out of the cracks between the old bricks. He swung the door closed again and reset the latches. They didn’t have much time before the whole thing caved in. He looked up at the ceiling of the magazine itself, but the cement covering it was smooth. Even if the anteroom caved in, this would probably hold. He hoped. He looked over at Branner, who was staring fixedly at that door. The expression on her pale face revealed that she fully understood their situation. The vibrations outside got louder.

Jim pocketed the Maglite and began pulling one of the lab benches over toward the right-hand corner of the room, underneath the closest vent hole. The fluorescent lights flickered and then steadied. He shone the Maglite beam up into the hole. He couldn’t see anything at all, just blackness.

“Try the other one,” he said.

They shoved a second bench under the left-hand hole. This time, he could just make out something way up in the exhaust shaft. The fluorescents flickered again and the pressure in their ears mounted. Branner looked over at the steel doors as they shifted audibly on their tracks.

“The other one had a ladder. He doesn’t just drop into this room. But how the hell we’re going to get up there, I do not-”

There was a crashing roar from outside the steel doors and then a wicked thump as something big hit them from the other side. One of the fluorescents fell off the wall and crashed down onto a bench in a flare of chemical light as a hundred sprays of water began blowing through the cracks around the doors, low at first and then rising fast. As the water began to swirl around their legs, Jim leaped across the room to the low rack where the inverter was mounted above the batteries and got it turned off just as the first of the batteries sputtered beneath it. The lights went out immediately, but they were no longer standing in water with an AC generator going. He sloshed back to where Branner was trying to hold the lab table in position beneath the hole.

“We’ll try to hold our position here,” he shouted above the rush of water as it boiled through the cracks now, flooding the space at the rate of a foot a minute. “The water’ll lift us to the hole.”

Branner’s face was frozen in fear in the glow of the Maglite. “Then what?” she wailed.

“We pray,” he shouted back as the doors, which had been built to resist pressure from inside the magazine, let go with a groan of fracturing metal and the room flooded with dizzying speed. Holding on to the thin pipe at the side of the hole, they rose with the water until their heads were bobbing directly beneath the four-foot opening in the ceiling. Stuffing the Maglite into his trousers pocket, Jim grabbed Branner and turned her around so that he could hug her from behind. The water forced them into the hole, where the air pressure rose immediately as the pocket was compressed by the flood below. Jim felt his right ear and then his left pop painfully, and heard Branner yell in pain as her ears resisted the pressure change. But then they stopped rising as the water pressure and the pressure in their air pocket reached equilibrium. Jim fished out the flashlight and switched it on. The water boiled ominously around their legs as the magazine finally flooded completely. Small bits of debris from Booth’s lab surfaced around their faces. Jim shone the light straight up.

“Anything?” Branner gasped. Jim saw that her eyes were closed. She had said she didn’t like confined places; this must be sheer terror for her, he thought. To his vast relief, the light revealed the bottom rungs of a ten-foot-long ladder. It was not permanently mounted to the shaft wall, but appeared to be hanging from a hook up at the top of the shaft. There was a rope coiled around a pulley at the top of the ladder. Finding the ladder was the good news, he thought. The fact that the bottom rungs were fifteen feet or more above them was the not-so-good news.

“Ladder,” he said. “This is the way he got in here. Now we just have to get to it.”

Branner opened her eyes and looked up. The movement put their faces together. She looked at him and he grinned at her. “This has to be true love,” he said.

She tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite come off. “I’m right on the edge of screaming my head off until this all goes away,” she said, her voice cracking.

“Except that it won’t,” he reminded her, trying to keep it light. The Maglite was beginning to give out, so he switched it off. She immediately asked him to turn it back on, which he did.

“You have no idea how scared I am right now,” she said. “But I do know how to get to that ladder.”

“And the answer is?”

“Chimney climb,” she said. “Move to the side as much as you can, and I’ll use my legs and back to go up the wall.”

He’d seen the technique and understood. “Okay; if you start to fall, let me know, so I can get out of the way.”

She squeezed herself sideways across the square shaft and started the maneuver. “If I start to fall, you’ll know it, not that you’ll have anywhere to go.”

“Just a thought,” he mumbled. “We’ll both go down.”

“What’s this ‘we’ shit?” she said as she started up the wall, wedging her legs against the opposite wall as she slid her backside up the surface. She was already puffing in the hot, humid, compressed air.