But the girl was outside the front door, running, running for the stables and the thicket which concealed the entry to the passageway leading to the chamber where Mark Slate was held a prisoner.
Bosustow found the place immediately; he led her unerringly down a maze of tunnels and corridors in the rock, stumbling over stones, sliding on the damp patches, lurching against projections in the wan light of a torch whose battery was almost spent. But fourteen more minutes had passed before they stood before the oak door leading to the chamber, for it must have been all of half a mile in a straight line from Wright's house to the main mast of the secret station.
Sobbing for breath, April stood outside the door and stared at the thread of light outlining it. At least Mark wasn't in the dark, she thought.
"Mark," she croaked. "Mark? it's April — are you all right?"
"April! Don't for God's sake come in! Don't touch the door." The voice was tight with anxiety, the voice of a man dragged back from a journey from which there was no return.
"All right, Mark..."
"No, you don't understand. There's some kind of infernal machine wired to the door; it'll go up the moment you
"I know, Mark. I know, Listen, we've got to get you out... Tell me: can you see the door on your side?"
"Very nicely, thank you."
"How is the booby trap fixed? Is it a wire attached to the handle? Could we maybe saw through a different part of the door without tripping it? Is it a circuit that gets broken? Is it a contact? Can you see if —"
"It's none of those," Slate's voice cut across her, stronger now. "There's a trembler coil. The slightest move would You don't have to open the door. If you leaned hard on it, or rattled the handle…"
"What's in the chamber, Mark?"
"Me."
"Mark, this isn't the time... What else?"
"A great number of sticks of dynamite, a quantity of nitro glycerine in drums, a huge Victorian hour glass connected to an electrical complex that looks like the inside of a computer, a bulb hanging on its flex, and that's all!"
"There's no other entrance, no other door?" Her voice was taut with despair.
"You want jam on it, don't you, lovey?" Mark Slate said.
"How's the air in there, Mr. Slate?" Ernie Bosustow asked suddenly.
"Hallo! That sounds like our lighthouseman… Nice and fresh, thank you, if that helps... Oh. I see what you mean... Yes. There is a grating. Rather an old one set in distinctly ropey-looking cement, high up in the wall. You don't think...?" The voice was suddenly tinged with a trace of hope.
"We haven't time to think. We must go," Ernie yelled. "See you."
"I don't want to be a bore," the imprisoned man called, and there was a break in his voice, "but... the sand is pretty low. How much time is there left?"
The girl looked at her watch and caught her breath. "Eleven minutes."
"Eleven minutes. Oh... well, the best of Cornish luck to you."
But the man and the girl were already pelting down the tunnel, to leave the prisoner alone with his solitude and his despair.
"What is it?" April hissed when they were out of earshot. "How...?"
"Old air shaft I suddenly remembered," Ernie panted as he ran. "The smugglers had to put it in... otherwise things went bad... kept their food and provisions there."
"But, Ernie..." The girl dragged him to a halt. "If we have to go all the way back, and then return on the surface to find your shaft in the dark — we'll never make it. You know it took us fourteen minutes just to get here."
He was already running again. "'Course not... There's a way out just round the corner here... if I remember rightly..."
There were eight and a quarter minutes left when they burst out of a clump of bushes and felt the cool night wind on their cheeks. Stars pricked the sky overhead, but the moon had disappeared behind a bank of cloud to the west. Immediately above them, red Lamps glared fiercely two hundred feet from the ground. Farther down the slope of the moor, lighted windows marked the site of a clump of low buildings.
"Good heavens!" April breathed. "This is the main mast. Do the military people know there's a warren of passages with an exit inside their closely-guarded perimeter?"
"Reckon not," the boy chuckled. "But I guess that's how our friend reached a lot of his secrets. How much time now?"
"Seven and a half," she reminded him urgently.
"Should be in the middle of that patch of furze over there no, not this one: the one just beyond that boulder!
"Watch out!... Ah! Ernie was right!... Here we are, my beauty..."
He was holding aside a branch of gorse and staring with evident delight at what April at first thought was a large rabbit hole.
"There?" she asked incredulously. "Down there?"
He nodded. "Slants down at an angle of forty-five degrees. If we go feet first, and the grating's as insecure as I remember, I may be able to push it out into the room with my heels and then we can drop through. You'm best take off that sheep skin: the shaft's only eighteen inches square...
There were six minutes left before the hourglass was exhausted and Wright's contraption blew them all sky high when April lowered herself into the burrow after the boy and began wriggling downwards on her back. Of all the under ground journeys she had undergone that night, the twenty-odd feet of the slanting airshaft was immeasurably the worst. For the first few feet, dust, wet earth, pebbles and nameless things that moved were all about her face, threatening to suffocate her. After that, the conduit was carved in the solid rock and she was aware of nothing but coldness, damp, hardness, and the remorseless pressure of thousand of tons of earth, the thickness between her and the man-made steel structure which might at any minute, with her and the earth and the man bound in the cell somewhere below them, go howling skywards in a million fragments. At any minute? In four and a quarter minutes, to be precise.
The passage became so narrow that she could no longer raise her hands from her sides; they were pinioned as effectively as if she had been in a straightjacket. The darkness was total and absolute, the air stuffing, in the two inches of black space between her nose and the wet rock. And she couldn't take a deep breath because the rock pressed too closely upon her ribs for her to inflate her lungs. She couldn't move back upwards because she had no purchase; all she could do was to inch down into the after the scrabbling noises and gasping breaths that were Ernie.
Four minutes.
Suppose they got stuck? Suppose the shaft had become choked? She dared not speak to him: breath was too precious. But suppose — she put the thought from her. And then, lying on her back in this sightless and speechless black burrow, her feet struck something hard. She could go no farther. Her heels had come up against Ernie's shoulders. He was stuck.
The shaft was wide enough now for her to raise one hand up across her chest. Scraping the knuckles on the rook, she peered at the luminous dial of her wristwatch.
Three and a quarter minutes.
She bit back a sob of despair. What had happened? Why didn't he move? And then he did... There was a great bursting, clanging, ringing noise... and a rush of air and a flooding of light and the feel of his shoulders against her soles had gone. And then she was falling.