The pause was longer this time. The guys were obviously having more problems. Then came a thump, and some strangled curses. At last the scraping noise began again, and I stood clear in anticipation.
Suddenly a loud, sharp crack ripped down the shaft. A patter of particles landed by my feet, as if there'd been rapid movement above. Jesus, I thought. Somebody's fired a shot.
I stood frozen. All movement in the shaft had ceased. Some bastard's stumbled on them, I thought. They've dropped him.
But they can't close the cover with the pulley ropes in the way.
Why the hell don't they get on and lower away? Maybe there are more guys in the yard.
In the silence of the tunnel I could hear my heart beating. Not a sound came from above. Irrationally, I felt that if I moved or spoke I might precipitate disaster. All I could do was keep still.
For many long seconds I waited motionless in the dark. My heartbeat seemed to grow louder and louder. Then at last I heard more noises above. They sounded different from the earlier scrapings, but at least something was happening. More bumps and thuds. I shone my torch quickly up the shaft and saw that the whole of its section was filled by the third and last net. Yet, in spite of the noises, the thing wasn't moving. Had it jammed?
I tried my radio and got no response. My instinct was to yell up the shaft and find out what in hell was going on. But I realised that they couldn't shout back for fear of being heard, so I steeled myself to wait.
In the end movement resumed and the big case came on down, Toad and Pay close behind it.
"What the flick were you doing?"
"Didn't you hear that?" Pay asked.
"I sure did. Did somebody fire a shot?"
"No, no. That was the main beam in the stable going."
"Jesus!"
"Yeah. The whole roof dropped several inches. Shit rained down all round. We thought the place was falling in on us.
"Nobody else heard it?"
"Don't think so."
"What did you do?"
"Found an old timber lying at the back and managed to get it under as a prop so the beam couldn't drop any lower. Then we carried on.
We'd lost quite a bit of time already, so we made haste to catch up.
First we had the laborious task of getting the cases out of the nets, loading them into the rubber bags, then bundling them into the nets again.
Experiments with nets full of sandbags, filled to the equivalent weight, had shown us that the best way of shifting our loads in the confined space of the tunnel would be by fitting slings of wide webbing to the nets, fore and aft, and advancing as a pair in line-ahead, one leaning forward and the other back, to levitate the burden between us. It wasn't easy or comfortable because the laden net tended to crash into the heels of the person leading and drag the back marker off his feet but it was better than hauling a huge weight along the floor.
It was obvious that three journeys would be needed, so we set out on the first with me leading, Pavarotti behind, Apple's section one between us, and Toad carrying his own bergen full of tricks. My plan was that, once we reached the site, we'd leave him there with the first half of the device so that he could start preparing it while we went back for the second.
All went well until we were on the downward slope, leading to the river. Then, as the beam of light from my head-torch danced around in front of me, I sensed that something had changed.
"Stopping," I said.
I slackened off my end of the net and stood still.
"The water," said Pay.
"It's gone."
"Exactly. I'm sure my marker was just here somewhere. Look there it is." I pointed to the horizontal scratch-mark on the wall.
"Some bastard's been in here draining it," said Pay incredulously.
"Can't have been."
"Where's it gone, then?"
"You tell me."
In fact only some of the water had gone. A lot remained. Soon after we'd moved forward again we saw its surface lying still and black ahead of us. As we advanced to the edge of it I realised that even at its deepest point it no longer reached the roof: there was a gap of about a foot under the arched yellow bricks, and I could see right through to the other side.
"Well, damn!" Pavarotti sounded very Welsh in his indignation.
"The tide's gone out."
"Tide be buggered!" I snapped.
"We're a thousand bloody miles from the sea."
"Only joking. We don't need our masks now, that's for sure. Hardly need the suits, even. We can walk straight through with our heads above water."
"All the better," I told him.
"But… hey, what's this?"
On the right-hand wall ahead of us, just above the water line, the top of an arched recess was showing clearly the opening to a side-tunnel. It was bricked in, but some of the cement had washed out and I could see water welling in and out through the gaps.
"That's where it's gone," I said.
"Or where it came in from. Part of the system."
"So what?"
"So nothing. We carry on.
And through the flood we went, moving slowly to create as little disturbance as possible. Once in the water the steel case, with air trapped round it inside the rubber bag, was almost floating, and towed along easily.
Very soon we were out of the water and at the site itself. We laid the case down a few feet short of the end of the tunnel, to make sure no debris fell on it when we started digging.
"There you are," I told Toad.
"It's going in that recess. And there's the shaft for the SCR. You get cracking, and we'll be back."
One of Toad's unnerving features was his silence, the fact that he spoke so little. You felt that his brain was turning over smoothly like a well-oiled mechanism, but you hadn't a clue what he was thinking. Now, as we left him, he stood there dry washing his hands without a word.
"I wouldn't mind sealing the bugger down here," I said as we started out with our second load.
"That'd stop him annoying me.
By the time we returned, Toad had the lid off the case, and for the first time we got a glimpse of its contents: a terrifying maze of bright blue and white wires snaking round compartments of different shapes. He was wearing latex gloves and a pair of headphones, listening carefully as he touched a probe on one point after another. He had small socket spanners, Allen keys and battery-driven screwdrivers laid out on a mat beside him, occasionally picking one up to tighten or loosen a connection.
But as soon as we delivered the SCR, he turned his attention to that, because he was anxious to have it up and working first.
Rather him than me, I thought as Pavarotti and I peeled off our dry-suits and got stuck into the digging. Secretly, though, I felt a bit like a navvy labouring in the presence of a technician who understood things that would always be beyond me.
We were already sweating when we started to dig, and soon we were positively pouring. The ground was neither clay nor rock but something in between a hard, shaly, grey-brown compound that sometimes broke away in lumps and sometimes split up into flakes with sharp edges. To save batteries we worked with minimum light, using only one torch at a time, whacking our short-handled picks into the face, levering out whatever the blades had got hold of, and shovelling loose spoil away with our hands. From past experience I already knew that Pay stank like a badger when he got hot Pavagrotti, he was sometimes called — and now, at close quarters and in the confines of the tunnel, he was overpowering. But I realised I was smelling probably as bad to him, and said nothing.
Toad, as always, worked in silence, but after twenty minutes or so he stood up and said, "This one's ready."
Out of its cover, the SCR reminded me of the head of a robot, with twin aluminium antennae, linked by a cross bar near the base and rigged on the top like a pair of miniature rugby goal posts. I knew that Toad wanted it installed as high up the ventilation shaft as we could get it, and we'd worked out a means of fixing it in position. From behind our block at Balashika we'd scavenged three pieces of angle-iron and had cut them into twenty-four-inch lengths so that they'd jam across the shaft at an angle beneath it, and lock in position when its weight came down on them.