Shaw was driven to the airport and from there he flew to a prearranged appointment with the Commanding General of the U.S. Fifth Army in Chicago. There he spent some time in conference with a group of army engineers and personnel specialized in rock climbing. Then, after dark on that last night before the President was due to speak to America and the world — and possibly thereby still to touch off catastrophe — Shaw and a selection of specialist volunteers went aboard a helicopter and headed south and west into Kansas state.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The weather conditions were against Shaw that night; the sky, it seemed, was disinclined for peace. There was a moon and plenty of good, sharp delineation. Very nice for picking up the landmarks — otherwise, as Shaw remarked to the pilot, bloody.
“How far off’d you reckon we are now?” he asked.
The pilot checked his instruments. “Around fifty miles, maybe a shade more. Once we pick up the road out of Kansas City, I’ll leave it to you to navigate, Commander.”
Shaw nodded. “Right.”
The pilot went on, “I’ll close a little more yet, then I’ll drop right down. From the map, the lie of the high ground around where you want is such that we won’t be seen coming in at low altitude… not from the hill where you say this hide-out is.” The American’s lean face was puckered with concentration as the dim light from the instrument panel showed the hard outline. No one spoke much from then on. They sat and waited in the darkened cabin; they were showing no lights anywhere except for the instrument panel. Like some great dark bat they swooped over the American interior, coming around their target area in a wide arc to take them beyond and to the eastward, into a position for an approach run from the south, well away from the mountain that covered Tucker’s headquarters. As they neared the vicinity of Kansas City the pilot identified the highway where Shaw had picked up his lift; Shaw told him to follow this highway. Farther on, getting his bearings from the map, Shaw said, “Not far to go. Keep to the south of the highway, Lieutenant. I’ll tell you when I want to cross to the north.”
“Okay.” The thin line of highway, white beneath the moon, ribboned away into desolate country. A little later the pilot took the machine right down until they seemed to be skimming the earth’s surface, lifting now and again as they came to higher ground or trees. Shaw, watching closely the run of the hills and checking every three or four seconds on the map, began to pick up the landmarks; soon he had identified the hill range he had crossed after climbing out of the crevasse-like rift so short a time before. He said, “Swing her north of the road here, Lieutenant, and take her across that range. If I’m right, there should be a sizeable forest area the other side.”
The pilot acknowledged, swung the machine off northwards, and climbed to clear the hills.
The forest was dead where it should have been, so was the great rift that Shaw had climbed out of. “Couldn’t have been more spot-on, Commander,” the pilot remarked, giving Shaw a sideways glance. “Navigation okay!”
Shaw grinned. “It hasn’t got all that rusty,” he agreed. “You can put us down anywhere you like, this side of the forest area. We’re far enough off not to be heard, and they certainly won’t have seen us.”
Within a minute they were down. For a full quarter-hour they sat as still as statues, with a side hatch open, just listening. There were no sounds except for the occasional cry of a night bird, and the shriek of some small animals in the dark trees ahead.
Shaw looked round at his party of specialists. “Right,” he said crisply. “All out, and follow me. It’s a long walk, but we have time in hand.”
He jumped out.
Three men with knives strapped to their thighs came out behind him, three more still aboard started manhandling some boxes and half a dozen sub-machine-guns down to the others, then jumped down themselves. Seconds later, as the helicopter, with a final wave from the pilot, took off for base, Shaw and his volunteers started in single file for the trees and the hills beyond, heading for the fissure where the earth tremors had originated.
They came carefully round the side, the side away from Tucker’s headquarters. Shaw went ahead, sliding along, as he had before, on his stomach. He hadn’t any real doubts that the entry would be left unguarded, for there was — so far as Tucker could possibly know — nothing whatever to guard against in the fissure; but he was taking no chances. The place, however, was as wide open as he had expected and there was no life around. Shaw crawled into the entry, then called to the six men. Once they were inside he said, “Lights, please.” An enlisted man opened up one of the boxes and brought out a powerful lamp on a lead attached to a battery in the box itself. Shaw took the lamp and shone it ahead. The place seemed to be just as he and Flame had left it a couple of days earlier. He said, “Right ahead there you’ll see the tunnel Tucker’s boys blocked. We have to get right the way along there, past the blocked section, and then we hit the tunnel that leads to the pit under Tucker’s entry passage.” He added, “Remember, when we reach the end of that tunnel… watch your step!”
After that he went right ahead and led the way to the rubble-blocked section of the fissure and began climbing until the lack of headroom forced him down as before to a wormlike, slithering advance. Behind him, the enlisted men did the same. It was a curious feeling, to be going back up that narrow, flesh-tearing way. Lumbered with the boxes and the guns, it took them a long while to do it, though this time they had the assistance of the lamp. The dead man Shaw had left behind was still wedged in the rubble. At last they reached the end and turned off along the easier tunnel leading to the deep pit. Here the going was fast until, more than an hour later, the lamp showed the wall of blackness beyond, the lip of the thousand-foot drop.
Shaw let out a long breath of relief; all along, he had feared that he might find the last lot of tremors which had opened up the rift in the valley would also have caused a shift of earth somewhere in the fissure or the tunnel and that he would find his way blocked. He said briskly, “Climbers, please!”
Four men came forward; their leader, a sergeant named Adler, a man with enormously powerful arms and shoulders, took the lamp from Shaw. He approached the edge with it. Standing nonchalantly on the brink, Adler shone the beam down into the blackness. It struck fire off polished rock sides but if it failed miserably to find bottom.
“Deep right enough,” Adler said laconically, and shone the light upwards at the roof. This time the beam picked out the bottom of the vehicle trap, showed it up brightly and in detail. Two vast wooden doors, with a quarter-inch gap in the centre filled with grit and small chips of rocks, and below each a heavy steel bar set in brackets driven deep into the rock at either end. Adler studied it a while and then said, “I reckon the way it works, when some bright boy up top jabs a button those brackets just move away outwards and release the support bars. See — they’re kind of hinged… all ready to slip away, I guess. The bars are only held by a quarter-inch of their length, that’s all. When they slip, the whole lot drops through.”
Shaw nodded. “Could be. And when they want to replace the doors after someone’s gone for the long drop, I suppose they could do it from up top easily enough, taking one side at a time and shipping new bars into the brackets. The doors’ll probably have double hinges, so they can lift them right up, slip the bars in place, then lower the doors down on to them again.” Themselves, they had to rely on Tucker having a back-door bolt-hole, or maybe the engineers of the party could build a makeshift bridge. Shaw looked around. “Now — can we climb through from here after we blow the trap? Having seen it, what’s your opinion on that?”