The pressure caused the air to swirl in eddies like fog, and was almost as concealing. The temperature was high — always high, coming close to a hundred and forty degrees. An hour under such conditions was enough for the toughest of men.
But Ed Kirby was immune to the discomfort. He was willing to go through with anything in order to reach his goal — the destruction of the racketeer murder-ring.
Only vaguely was he conscious of the ghostly figure of fellow-workers, the hiss of air, the clank of hammers, and the sharp crackling of acetylene flames biting into hard steel.
His hour shift was nearly up. Then five hours of rest. During that five hours he must move and act swiftly. He must keep on playing the part until he found out more about the murdering. He believed he had evidence enough. But he wanted to obtain more. He knew that by tomorrow he would be in a position to get it if...
His mind suddenly went slack. He was conscious of something that didn’t seem quite right. He snapped off the flame of his torch and turned around slowly. The sand hogs had quit their work. Every man present in the underground chamber had the same thought in his mind as had Kirby: “What had happened to the air pressure?”
For several strained moments there was a silence of dull uncertainty as minds groped with the impending tragedy. Ed Kirby broke it. His body splashed through the hot water on the floor bottom as he raced towards the field telephone hanging to the caisson wall. He rattled the receiver hook impatiently. No answer. The line was dead.
A shift superintendent appeared out of nowhere. “Pressure’s going down fast,” he stated, calmly. “What’s the matter with the phone?”
“Dead,” said Kirby.
Men came crowding over to where Kirby and the superintendent stood. Anxiety and fear were revealed in their mud-streaked faces at something they did not yet want to believe. One of them rushed over to what looked like a long, metal chimney stretching up to the sky. This was the man-lock used for entering and leaving the pressure chamber.
Kirby heard him scramble up the metal rungs and hammer on the closed door at the bottom of the compression lock above his head and shoulders.
“Water’s coming up!” choked a second voice. “It’s gurgling past the cracks in the planks. Some of them are beginning to bend inward already.”
Kirby and the superintendent stumbled forward. The water was indeed rising. With air cut off from its source above, and becoming steadily weaker in the working chamber beneath the caisson, the enormous pressure from the river was beginning to get in its deadly work. And there was nothing they could do. These men were trapped.
Kirby’s lips curled. He could hear the braced timbers cracking and groaning from the strain. How long could they stand it? Nothing but thick concrete or steel could hold back the mighty pressure of the river bearing down on the puny planks. They’d snap like matches.
Mud-covered sand hogs floundered through the water towards the safety of the chimney leading to the man-lock above. But this would be a hopeless place once the river started to pour in. Higher and higher lifted the water, driving human beings towards the false security of the chimney.
Air was whistling through the planks. Sand was already beginning to blow through. Once the first plank gave way the whole structure would collapse into an avalanche — a flood. Kirby kept away from the milling bodies.
He wasn’t afraid of death. Too many times had he faced it, felt its fetid breath, and stood in its awful shadow. But to die without being able to fight against it was like tasting the bitter gall of failure. He clenched his hands. Water was surging around his hips, his chest, his neck — then the silence of the death tomb was abruptly shattered by the hiss of air as it poured into the working chamber of the caisson. The flood was momentarily checked.
There was a quivering tenseness about Ed Kirby’s lips, and dark shadows in his eyes when he emerged from the decompression lock on the street level. Stevens was waiting for him. “You all right?” he asked, huskily.
Ed nodded. “Tell me. How’d it happen?”
“Morengo. I was watching him, but I didn’t get on to what he was up to. I don’t know much about tunnel workings. He went into that little place over there,” indicating a housing built around the air compressors. “The engines were making so much noise I couldn’t hear a thing. But I saw him come out soon afterwards, look around to see if anyone was watching him, then hurry out through the gate to the street. I watched him disappear, then decided to investigate.
“I found the mechanic in charge of the compressors lying on the floor. He had been struck on the head with a pipe wrench. I poured a bucket of water over his face and he roused up long enough to tell me what to do. I opened the air valves leading to the caisson like he told me to, but I couldn’t do anything about the smashed telephone. Then I called in one of the superintendents.”
Ed Kirby lit a cigarette. The smoke cleared his head and made him feel better. One thing was certain, Morengo had attempted to kill him at the sacrifice of many other human beings by cutting off the air pressure in the working chamber of the caisson. Clearly, Morengo must have been forced to do this by someone else — the Big Guy — Fleming.
Something had gone wrong. Somewhere along the line Kirby knew that he had made an error. Where? Had Weatherby been captured? Had the deformed murder chieftain outguessed and outthought him from the very beginning? Ed Kirby would have given a lot to have known the answers to these troubled questions. He turned to the young agent beside him.
“Stevens,” he said. “If you hadn’t turned on those valves when you did I’d have been a bloated corpse by now.” He sighed. “Well, Morengo’s got a good start on us. And my guess is that he’ll be at that address Grant phones in to the chief. And that’s the hot spot we’re going to visit — before dawn!”
Stevens felt for the gun beneath his armpit. “You want me to phone headquarters for additional men?”
“I don’t know,” mused Kirby, thoughtfully, “how dose we are to the showdown with this murder-ring. Weatherby might be in a jam. I won’t know for sure until I phone the chief to find out if he’s made a report. Then there’s Grant to keep in mind. I think I’ll figure our move after I’ve talked with the chief. That’s the best way.”
Fleming’s black, malignant eyes glared at the hard faces of the three gunmen in front of his desk. “What am I going to do?” he flung at them. “What do you suppose? I’m going to sit tight. Nothing’s going to happen. This punk in the back room is out. We can play safe by planting a bullet through his head.”
He pounded the desk with the palms of his hands. “The early morning papers will be out soon — extras. We’ll know for certain then about both Rawlings and Kirby.” He centered his gaze on Morengo. “Dip, are you sure you fixed Kirby for keeps?”
Morengo’s smile was sickly. “Kirby and everybody else that was in the chamber beneath the caisson.”
“Do you see?” explained Fleming, turning to the other men. “Kirby was alone in this — Kirby or Grant, whoever he is. With him wiped out, we’ve got nothing to worry about. Take a drink and forget about it.”
A buzzer beneath his desk caused him to inhale sharply. He waited a few seconds before taking down the receiver of a special telephone whose wires led to a spot close to the elevator in the hall below. His face went green as he listened. Beads of sweat popped out on his hairless head. His voice, when he spoke into the mouthpiece, rasped like a dull file on steel.
“Bring him up, Leon,” he said, thinly, “and keep him covered.” He slammed the receiver to the hook and glared once more at the ring of taut faces in front of his own. “The dead comes to life,” he told these faces. “Kirby, alive and well, is on the way up.”