He leaned into the vertical shaft and slowly dropped down headfirst, extending the dummy compressor beyond his head as Stacy took up the strain on one line. There was plenty of room here, but when he came to the elbow into the horizontal duct, he had to contort his body like a snake and squeeze through. He entered on his back in order to bend his body around the narrow curve. And then he was in.
“Okay, Stacy, pull away,” he spoke into his wrist radio.
“How’s the fit?”
“Let’s just say I can hardly breathe.”
She pulled on a pair of gloves and began to heave on one of the nylon ropes that wound around the pulley on the hedgehog and attached to Weatherhill’s harness, pulling him through the narrow confines of the ventilation duct.
He could do little to help her, except exhale when he felt her tug on the rope. He began to sweat inside the nylon suit. There was no air-conditioning running through the ventilator, and the outside atmosphere that wafted down from the opening on the hotel roof was hot and stifling.
Stacy wasn’t enjoying mild temperatures either. The steam pipes that ran through the utility room kept the heat and humidity close to that of a steam bath.
“I can see the hedgehog and ventilator screen,” he reported after eight minutes.
Another five meters and he was there. The blueprints had not shown any TV cameras in the vault, but he peered into the darkened interior for signs of them. He also removed a small sensor from a sleeve pocket and checked for laser or heat-seeking scanners. His inspection thankfully came up dry.
He smiled to himself. The elaborate defense and alarm measures were all on the outside of the vault, a flaw that was common in many security systems.
He twisted off the screws, tied a small string to the screen and lowered it to the floor quietly. He slipped the lever that released the hedgehog anchor prongs and lowered it into the vault along with the bogus compressor. Then he slowly descended headfirst until he finally rolled onto the concrete floor.
“I’m inside,” he told Stacy.
“I read you.”
He shined the light around the vault. The bomb cars seemed doubly menacing, sitting ominously in musty blackness and surrounded by thick concrete walls. The awesome destruction in such a cloistered area was difficult to imagine.
Weatherhill came to his feet and detached his harness. He moved around the nearest bomb car and laid out a small packet of tools that had been tied around one leg and spread it on one fender. The replica compressor he set on the floor. Then without bothering to glance inside the car, he reached in and pulled the hood lever.
He stared at the actual bomb unit for a moment, sizing it up. It was designed to explode from a coded radio signal. That much he knew. Activating the detonation mechanism by a sudden movement was doubtful. Suma’s nuclear scientists would have built a bomb that could absorb the shock from an automobile driven at high speeds over rough roads. But he wasn’t about to take chances, especially since the cause behind the blast on the Divine Starwas still unknown.
Weatherhill brushed all dire thoughts from his mind and set to work removing the pressure hoses from the compressor. As he’d discovered earlier, the electrical leads to the evaporator coils that acted as an antenna were quite elementary. The electronics were exactly as he would have designed them himself. He delicately spliced off the leads and reconnected them to the fake compressor without breaking their circuits. He could now take his time to remove the bolts on the compressor’s mounting brackets.
“Bomb safely out of the car,” he reported. “Will now make the switch.”
Six more minutes and the fake compressor was in place and connected.
“Coming out.”
“Standing by to retrieve you,” Stacy answered.
Weatherhill stepped back to the ventilator opening and snapped on his harness. Suddenly he noticed something he’d missed in the darkness of the vault.
Something was sitting in the front seat of the car.
He flashed the light around the vault. He could now see that all four cars had some sort of mechanism seated behind the steering wheels. The vault was cool, but Weatherhill felt as if he was in a sweat-box. He was soaked inside the nylon suit. Still holding the flashlight in one hand, he wiped his face with a sleeve and crouched until his head was even with the window frame on the driver’s side of the car.
It would be ridiculous to call the thing behind the wheel a mechanical man. It was stretching things to even consider it a robot, but that’s what it was. The head was some sort of computerized visual system perched on a metal spine with a box full of electronics for a chest. Clawlike steel hands with three fingers gripped the steering wheel. The arms and legs were articulated at the proper joints like a human’s, but any remote resemblance stopped there.
Weatherhill took several minutes and studied the robot driver, fixing the design in his memory.
“Please report,” Stacy ordered, becoming anxious at his late return.
“I found something interesting,” he replied. “A new accessory.”
“You better get a move on.”
He was happy to leave. The robots that sat in dark silence waiting for a command to drive the car to their preprogrammed targets began to look to him like skeletons. He clipped the ropes to his harness and lay on the cold floor, raising his feet above his head, up the wall, back to the wall.
“Pull away.”
Stacy braced a leg against a pipe and began tugging on the rope that circled the pulley on the hedgehog. On the other end, Weatherhill’s feet reached the ventilator and he went in as he’d come out, on his back, except this time he was holding the compressor containing a nuclear bomb in outstretched hands beyond his head.
As soon as he was completely in the shaft he spoke over his headset. “Okay, stop while I replace the hedgehog and ventilator screen. Won’t do to leave a clue to our visit.”
Hand over hand, working around the bomb compressor, he raised the hedgehog and sprung its rods against the ventilator walls. Then he pulled the screen up by the string and quickly screwed it back in place. Now he allowed himself to relax and go limp. He could only lie there and be dragged up the shaft, leaving all physical effort to Stacy, staring at the bomb and wondering about his life expectancy.
“I can see your feet,” Stacy said at last. Her arm muscles were losing all feeling, and her heart was pounding from the exertion.
As he came out of the narrow horizontal shaft, he helped her as much as he could, pushing out and up. There was room now to pass the bomb over his shoulder to where she could reach down and pull it safely into the utility room. As soon as she wrapped a soft cloth around the cylinder and laid it in the tote bag, she finished hauling Weatherhill through the opening in the ventilator shaft.
He quickly released the nylon lines and shrugged out of his harness as Stacy actuated a second trigger releasing the jamming prongs on the hedgehog. Then she reeled it up through the shaft, curled the nylon lines around it, and set it in a tote bag. Next, while Weatherhill changed back into his tennis sweater and shorts, she used duct tape to reseal the panel over the forced opening.
“No interruptions?” Weatherhill asked her.
She shook her head. “A few persons walked by after parking their cars, but the hotel employees stayed clear.” She paused and pointed at the tote bag containing the compressor. “Almost impossible to believe we have a nuclear bomb in there.”
He nodded. “One with enough power to vaporize the entire hotel.”
“Any problems?” Stacy asked.
“None, but I did find that our friend Suma has come up with a new twist,” he said, stuffing his suit and harness in a bag. “The cars have robotic drivers. They don’t require humans to drive the bombs to their detonation points.”