For God’s sake, let’s do it, he told himself. There’s no one else to do it, so let’s do it. Stop thinking about it and just stand up and do it.
He stood up. He walked out of his protected shadow and across the open dirt to the flatbed truck. He saw no one, heard no one cry out, heard no shooting.
There were no doors on the truck, and the bench seat was covered by a tattered rattan throw. A key ring dangled from the ignition.
Luther slid behind the wheel and somebody shouted.
He bent low, turning the key, and the engine coughed into life, very loud, so he couldn’t hear if the shout was repeated. He shifted into low, and drove abruptly up the access road.
The bulldozer loomed ahead. He jerked the truck to a stop without bothering to shut off the engine, jumped out onto the dirt, and the truck rolled slowly backward, down the slope. He ran up beside the bulldozer, climbed the tread, grabbed the vertical metal post holding up the canopy, and swung himself into the seat.
Something pinged off the muffler, that thick vertical black pipe in front of him, rising from the engine. They are shooting at me!
Where was the starter switch? Oh, God, that was the part he hadn’t thought out ahead of time.
It’s outside! It’s on the canopy support post I grabbed coming up!
He leaned down low to the right, feeling for the starter switch, hearing another ping somewhere, then being aware of shooting out in front of him, and thinking, don’t shoot at me, I’m on your side!
Starter switch. Yes; the big engine roared into life.
Blade control, which was the blade control? Here on the right. The instructions for everything in this cab were very clearly laid out, in Chinese.
The blade was down on the ground, almost touching the chain-link gate. Luther moved the blade control, and the blade tried to press lower, nearly lifting the bulldozer.
He moved it the other way, and the blade lifted, scraping the gate.
He would never figure out reverse. Could he just make it move forward? Transmission and engine-speed controls here on the left.
Yes! The machine strained forward, treads slipping on the loose dirt, the gate bending but not breaking.
More pings all around him. He had to get out of here. Hunkered low, feeling bullets punch into the seat behind him, he pushed the right-hand steering lever forward, the left-hand steering lever back. The bulldozer swiveled leftward, and as it did the blade yanked the right side of the gate out of its hinges, metal snapping and flying everywhere.
Reverse, reverse, right lever back, left lever forward, swivel the other way, feel a beebite on the left side of the head, just above the ear, no time to think about it.
Sprong! The gate gave way, and Luther brought both levers straight, and the bulldozer shot out onto the road, pushing the wrecked gate ahead of it. He was too excited and confused, and couldn’t figure out how to stop the thing until it ran into a police bus on the other side of the road.
Fortunately, the bus was empty.
12
The diver’s voice spoke from one of the walkie-talkies: “Job done. Coming back.”
“Yes,” Bennett said in response. He put that walkie-talkie down and grabbed the other one to say into it, “Jackie? Where are you?”
“Coming out,” Tian’s voice said. “We can only do ten in the elevator at a time.”
“There’s more shooting up here, Jackie,” Bennett said, and he knew his nervousness could be heard in his voice, and he envied the tough calm that Tian still showed.
“Hold them off,” Tian said, “we’re coming out as fast as we can. The diver isn’t back yet, either.”
“He’s on his way,” Bennett said, and the phone rang, which must be Curtis.
Yes. What was in Curtis’s voice was triumph: “We’ve done it, Colin!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you set the last timers?”
“Not yet, sir. Jackie’s crew and the diver are still coming out.”
“Well, set them, man. They still have thirty minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do it now, Colin.”
“Yes, sir, I will.”
“And, Colin?”
“Sir?”
“Leave the phone off the hook. I’ll be listening to what happens there, and you’ll be able to talk to me any time you have to.”
“Very good, sir.”
“And start those timers.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Jackie Tian rode the elevator from the level above the flooding up to the surface, traveling with the last of his work-crew, he found the rest of his men milling around inside the area swathed in the blue plastic tarps.
“Bulldozer’s gone,” one of them said.
Tian looked around an edge of plastic. He saw an armored personnel carrier, windshield shattered, slowly driving down the access road from the smashed-open gate. A couple of men sniped at the personnel carrier from behind parked trucks, but he could see it was all over.
“We go now,” he decided, and signaled to his men, and they trotted after him in a long line away from the battle, toward the passage to the alley leading to Partition Street.
“I have to leave here now, sir,” Bennett said into the phone, knowing how panicky he sounded but unable to stop it. “The police broke through, they’re coming this way.”
“Did you set the timers?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Leave the phone off the hook.”
“But I have to go now, sir, I—”
“Leave it off the hook!”
“Yes, sir,” Bennett said, and dropped the phone onto the desk. Standing, he ran around the desk, and pulled open the door, and blue-uniformed policemen swarmed in.
Sharom swam through the flooded tunnels, his headlamp showing the way. At the end, there was a ladder, and he climbed it to the level above the water. He pushed the button there to summon the elevator, and while waiting for it he changed out of his flippers and back into the rubber thongs.
Then the elevator came, and he rode upward, flippers under his left arm. When he got to the surface level and stopped, the elevator cage was surrounded by uniformed policemen, most of them pointing pistols or rifles at him. When he raised his arms, the flippers fell to the floor of the cage.
In six places in the flooded tunnels, carefully positioned by Colin Bennett following Richard Curtis’s precise instructions, tucked against side walls in the pitch blackness, were rectangular metal boxes, each about the size of a child’s coffin. The boxes had hinged tops and padlocks, and inside, in waterproof plastic bags, were the timers, the radio receivers, the detonators and the slim tubes of TNT.
Water had already seeped into the boxes, but that didn’t matter. The timers chittered quietly to themselves, unreeling the seconds. When they judged the instant was right, one after the other, they would detonate.
No one explosion would be very severe, but every one of them would agitate the water in these confined tunnels, every additional one increasing the agitation, until the sixth explosion would be like attaining free-fall. The energy would now renew itself, the water shoulder more space for itself, pressing outward, crumbling the concrete, eating the landfill, turning all the island below the clustered tall buildings into porridge.
Curtis sat at the table in the main cabin of Granjya, telephone to his ear, his eye on the radio and sonar that controlled the submarine. Granjya plowed steadily through the night, south and west, and the submarine obediently followed.
Through the phone, he could hear a confusion of people milling around in his office at the construction site. Voices spoke, too far away from the receiver for him to make out what they were saying, but from the sound of it he believed they’d captured Colin.