They circled the building at a distance and approached the back fence where they found no great effort had been made to secure it; any security measures had obviously been saved for the prison unit itself. The hospital was just a crumbling shell around it.
‘Piece of cake,’ muttered one of the soldiers as he checked the wire for electrification and found none. He snipped through old wire to give them entrance to the grounds.
They made their way through knee high weeds to the rear elevation of the building where the moon allowed them to examine the wall.
‘Spoilt for choice,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Pick a drainpipe... any drainpipe.’
He was detailed by Andy to climb a pipe that ran in close proximity to a first-floor window with an almost horizontal section leading off under it. It would provide something to stand on. He had a coil of rope over his head and shoulder.
‘Got the tape and diamond?’ Andy asked.
‘Affirmative.’
Steven watched as the man tried to open the window and failed. It wasn’t unexpected, the old, rotten sash and case windows were probably never going to open again. The soldier moved on to scoring the lower pane with a diamond point cutter. He marked out a square, tracing the edge of the frame and then attached strong, sticky tape at strategic points before elbowing the glass smartly until it gave way and parted company with the frame. The soldier loosened the tape carefully from the frame and fed the pane slowly inside the window opening to lower and prop it up against the inside wall before climbing in himself and finding a secure anchor for the rope. A minute or so later he lowered the other end to start pulling up the equipment bags. They were followed by the men themselves. All seven of them were standing inside on the first floor of the hospital building inside eleven minutes. None of the soldiers showed any signs of exertion, Steven felt as if his arms had become six feet long.
They were in a large, narrow room with a row of sinks against the wall they just climbed. The horizontal section of the pipe they’d used to stand on was the waste pipe from the sinks leading to the down pipe. ‘Looks like a laundry,’ Andy suggested.
‘It was probably the sluice room,’ said Steven, ‘waste from the ward would be washed away here. I think we’ll find there’s an open ward out here...’ He made his way over to the door and the others followed.
‘It’s a bloody ballroom,’ said one of the soldiers as moonlight lit up a long open ward where rows of beds on either side would once have stood in days gone by. It was empty.
‘Right,’ said Andy. ‘We should be heading over this way. We need to find the ward on the other side of the building.’
They exited the ward into a short corridor running at right angles to it and shared between the ward they’d just left and the one next to it, the one that they found faced the front of the building.
‘Yo!’ said Andy.
‘And it stretches right up to the east wall,’ said Steven. He pointed to the third window along on the far wall. ‘That’s what we’re looking for.’
Steven approached the window, turned his back and measured out seventeen walking paces. He traced a circle in the air with his finger as he turned around in a full revolution. ‘I think the office is down there,’ he said, pointing at the floor.
One of the soldiers got to work with a small-bore drill, constantly sensing the resistance of the floor until he felt it lessen. He stopped before the drill bit had gone right through the ceiling below and withdrew it to be replaced by what looked to Steven to be a rod with a needle point on the end. The soldier pushed the needle through the remaining plug in the drill hole and then withdrew it to look down through shielded eyes. ‘No light on,’ he said. Steven understood that the soldier hadn’t wanted a small plug to fall from the ceiling into an occupied room. He watched as the drill was allowed to finish its job. A flexible cable camera was inserted in its place.
‘Desk... couple of chairs... books... picture on the wall, boats.’
‘That’s it,’ said Steven. ‘Can you point to where the desk is?’
The soldier indicated and Steven chose an area where he thought it would be clear to drop down.
‘Couldn’t we drop down on to the desk without using ropes?’ Andy asked.
Steven said not. ‘The ceiling’s too high. Even hanging at full stretch, we’d still have a six foot drop on to the surface of the desk.’
‘Broken leg territory,’ said Andy. He set about looking for a rope anchor while two of the others set about cutting a circular hole in the floor. Steven expected noise but, whatever they were using, it made very little and even less when it came to cutting an opening in the ceiling below. ‘Bit of a tight squeeze,’ said one. They had to make the opening between joists.
‘This is where we find out who ate all the pies,’ said Andy who had come up with an old iron bed frame they could press into use as an anchor.
All seven made it down safely although Steven felt his rib cage had been pushed through his spine He resisted a strong desire to hug himself.
There were no windows in the office so shielded torches could be used to search for useful information. This was made more difficult however, by the room having been searched already and its contents scattered everywhere.
‘Christ!’ exclaimed one of the men. He said it in such a way that everyone spun round sensing something approaching panic. ‘There’s a bloke in the corner,’ said the soldier.
Torches lit up the figure of a man sitting propped up in the far corner. He was dead and his ears and nose were missing.
‘It’s Groves,’ said Steven. ‘I recognise the suit...’
The search continued in silence, but all were considering what they were up against, Steven more than most.
‘How about that?’ said Andy, pointing at the wall to the right of the door.
Steven looked at a card with seven four number sequences printed on it. ‘One for each day of the week,’ he said.
‘We can get in the easy way,’ said Andy to sighs of relief all round.
‘Maybe,’ Steven cautioned, ‘we don’t know what day of the week the inmates took over the asylum.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘They might not have bothered changing the entry code after that and we don’t know what day of the week they stopped doing it,’ said Steven. ‘We might punch in the wrong code. We’ll probably get away with one wrong entry, but two or more and we’ll probably trigger an automatic lock-down with alarms going off.’
‘Right, we give it two tries but won’t risk a third,’ said Andy. ‘We’ll blow the door and follow up with stun grenades. Are there any coded doors inside the unit?’
‘There are, but somehow I don’t think they’ll be operational. If you’d been locked up for years I think an open-door policy might be very popular.’
‘Good point. Beats me why they haven’t all hit the road anyway.’
‘The two guys in charge are clever,’ said Steven. ‘If they let the others scatter to the four winds without a plan, they’ll be picked up within a few days and the cat would be out of the bag about Moorlock. As it is, they have what they believe is a safe and secure hideout for the time being where they can plan their next move.’
‘Only... they’re wrong,’ said Andy. ‘Time, guys.’
The soldiers picked up their weapons and readied themselves without comment. The man Andy had detailed to carry out a quick reconnoitre — specifically to see if anyone was in the gatehouse — stood ready by the door. Torches were extinguished, Andy opened it a fraction and listened before nodding and letting him out. He was back within four minutes. ‘Empty, boss.’
Andy nodded to the two men detailed to investigate the opening of the front entrance and they slipped out. After a few more moments he turned to Steven and the four remaining soldiers. ‘Show time.’