Adler grinned, flexed his shoulder-muscles, and said, “That part of it’s okay. I’m still worried about the bang, that’s all.”
“So am I,” Shaw said grimly, “but we just have to accept that, as I’ve pointed out before — and then move like greased lightning afterwards. So long as you think we can make the climb, we’ll go right ahead.”
Adler flashed the lamp along the wall above his head again. “Dead easy,” he confirmed. “Nothing in that… for trained rock climbers. The four of us can nurse you and the engineer corpsmen along, Commander.” He brought the lamp back in and jerked a thumb at the engineers, who were looking somewhat sick about the long drop. “You two, get the boxes of charges strapped to your bodies. Pete,” he added, swinging round on one of the climbing party, “just bring out the spikes, will you.”
“Okay, Sergeant.” Pete dug around in another of the boxes. While he was doing this, Shaw had an idea. He took the light and shone it up once again at the trap-doors, examining them critically.
“Come and look, Sergeant,” he said. Adler joined him and looked upwards. “See those brackets — the ones holding the bars?”
“Yuh?”
“Couldn’t they be pushed aside and one of the bars let go — so the door just drops open without too much noise?”
Adler said thoughtfully, “I reckon maybe… yes. No reason why not, I guess. They’re hinged, after all, and they should be workable independently of the control circuit.” He looked at Shaw. “What you mean, Commander, is we climb up and hang on under the nearer door, and let the other one go?”
“Something like that. It’d save all the racket of the charges. After that we just haul ourselves across to the lip of the remaining door, which’ll be held firm — and up we go! Those bars are rough pieces of work — they’re a shade bent and in places they don’t fit all that closely to the trap. There’s room to get a hand round, and swing from there.”
Adler nodded. “I reckon that’s right,” he agreed. “So we won’t need the charges?”
“Not for this job, but I’ll want them carried through for use later.”
“Sure.” Adler turned away and gave the climbers a detailed briefing. The enlisted men went into action with all the speed and precision of real experts, men to whom no climb was too difficult. Adler himself led them, driving in his spikes with a hammer muffled with a heavy cloth, while Shaw held the light. Inside minutes Adler was wedged below the inner door and another man was going up. As this man reached him, the sergeant stretched out for the bar securing the nearer door, and, ape-like, swung himself away into space above their heads, reaching with his free hand for the bracket on the far end of the outer door. Holding this, he snapped an order to his companion who also got a grip on the inner bar, then swung out in the same way as the sergeant and held the second bracket. Adler looked down. “All ready?” he called to Shaw.
Shaw said, “Let her go.”
Adler nodded at the other man and counted, “One — two—three!” On three he and the enlisted man pushed the brackets outwards simultaneously and at once swung themselves clear. The bar fell free, straight as a plumb, and the door dropped on its hinges, banging against the rock face behind it. Stones, grit and other disguising debris showered down. Shaw held his breath as they waited. Minutes later, it seemed, there was a distant clang from far below as the steel bar hit the bottom.
The jarring of the door’s sudden crash opening could have aroused a sentry but there was no time to worry about that now; they had to get up into the tunnel fast. Shaw moved out over the drop, another man now holding the lamp, and, as Adler and the second climber swung themselves up on to the topside of the other half of the trap, he began the climb, keeping his eyes on his goal and trying not to think of that thousand-foot drop below. Reaching the last of the driven-in spikes, he stretched out for the remaining steel bar, got a grip, and swung his body outwards. As he swung under the lip of the door, he grabbed wildly with one hand at the wood, found his hold, and steadied. Then he heaved his body over the edge into the comparative safety of the entry tunnel, between the two bends. One by one the other men followed, Shaw and Adler reaching down to help them, burdened as they were with the heavy boxes and automatic weapons. And they had barely got their sub-machine-guns ready for action when they heard the footsteps crunching on loose grit, coming along the tunnel towards the inner bend leading from Tucker’s central square.
Shaw whispered urgently, “Back against the rock, all of you! Don’t shoot unless I say — they’ll just have come to find out what the noise was about, they won’t be suspecting anyone could actually have got in here. If we can knock ’em off without gunfire, we still have the element of surprise against the rest. If you need weapons — use your knives.”
Adler’s big hands clenched and unclenched.
Tense and silent as the beam of a torch started to flicker on the rock wall from beyond the bend, they waited.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The footsteps crunched nearer over the grit.
There were two men, Shaw thought. He waited just around the bend, with Adler immediately in rear of him. As the first man came round behind a torch, Shaw was on him, his hands sliding around the throat. The man fell with Shaw on top of him; with all his strength Shaw squeezed the throat and smashed the back of the head hard against the floor of the tunnel. When the body went limp he scrambled up and saw, in the light of the lamp that one of the enlisted men had switched on, that it was one of the Negro guards; then he saw the man Adler had attacked — Sanderson, that semi-maniac cowboy character, lying very still on the floor with his head at a curious angle. He looked dead and he was.
Adler said, “Reckon I broke his neck when I hit him, Commander.” Ruefully, he looked down at his large fists. “Don’t know my own strength sometimes.…”
“You needn’t worry about Sanderson,” Shaw said grimly. He hadn’t forgotten that stockwhip that had flayed Flame’s sun-tanned skin. “So far, so good! Leave these two here and keep behind me, all of you.”
Adler asked, “Where to now?”
“We go in the direction they came from,” Shaw answered. “Tucker himself is the objective now… and then we have to look for the girl!”
They went ahead, weapons ready, hands itchy on the triggers, moving quickly but silently round the bend and on towards the pool of light ahead, the square Shaw had likened to a parking lot the day he had first come here. They saw no-one; they were of course inside the sentries, inside the men manning the concealed gun-posts either side of the tunnel farther back. If no one else had heard that steel bar falling — and it was quite possible Sanderson and his companion had only been on a routine patrol anyway — they could have a clear run in. Nevertheless Shaw approached the inward end of the tunnel slowly and carefully, making as little sound as possible. Behind him, the sergeant and the five soldiers moved equally silently.
When they came right into the square the first thing they saw was the truck containing Tucker’s mobile transmitting outfit then a moment after that they saw a woman: Flame, white-faced, tear-stained, loosely chained with her face to the wall beyond the truck… Flame, looking round, staring as Shaw came in sight, staring as if she couldn’t believe it possible.
Shaw ran forward, his mouth hard.
She was crying and she couldn’t speak. Shaw noticed the heavy red weals across her body. He felt a cold rage towards Tucker, a cold and sheerly murderous rage. Flame, he fancied, was here as a kind of Aunt Sally, a White girl to be jeered at, derided — hit, perhaps, every time one of Tucker’s men went past, or wanted some sport, an ever-present reminder to the revolutionaries of what lay waiting for them when the coming war was won — a totem, a promise and a spur for the future.