slab on the rails in the roof so as to complete the final seal from the upper air, and in doing that they couldn’t possibly miss him.
Once again he shone his torch through his fingers. Up on top of the pile of containers, where the natural irregularities of the roof made close stowage impossible, he found after a time a gap that might be big enough to take him until those men and the woman had gone on back to the workings. Switching off the torch and putting it in his pocket, he reached upward, heaved his body on to the pile, steadied a loose container which seemed on the point of dropping, and then lay there dead still under the lee of the roof. Again there was absolute quiet and stillness, broken only by the thumping of his own heart. The wait on top of the pile seemed endless, but at last he heard the men and the woman coming back, the light on its lead swinging in front of them, and soon they had stopped below the shaft. Looking down and keeping dead still, Shaw watched as the workman went to the electric motor and switched it on. The woman was standing by the officer, her naked breasts rising and falling as she struggled for breath in the filthy air, sweat showing damply on her thighs and stomach. There was a high whine as the big concrete slab — which Shaw now noticed was also backed with a layer of lead — began to slide across the opening on its greased rails, inch by inch. There was a lot of load on that motor. The officer, a good-looking, well-built man in his early thirties, was showing signs of impatience and after a moment he snapped, “Is it running at full speed?”
“Yes, Comrade Major.”
A sigh whistled through the major’s teeth and he looked down at the woman. Meeting his eyes, her lips parted and the tip of her tongue protruded momentarily; then she looked away — scared, perhaps, at having let the officer see her thoughts. But he grinned back at her, and then said something, which Shaw couldn’t catch, to the motorman. Then he reached out a hand to the woman, placing it on her breasts and letting it slide down her body. Her hips moved a little and Shaw heard the hard breathing of the major, and then together they turned away and went along the gangway below Shaw, towards the distant working-lights. As they passed along he heard a low gurgle of laughter. Then they were gone into the darkness, silhouetted against the distant glow, leaving the light on its wandering lead with the motor-man.
The shaft was very nearly sealed now.
The man at the controls was watching closely and Shaw could hear stertorous breathing. All the man’s attention was on that sliding concrete slab when Shaw, slowly, carefully, silently, brought up the Webley and aimed. The Russian had reached forward and had just cut the motor when Shaw squeezed the trigger of the silenced gun. The man spun round, his head messily shattered, and dropped without a sound. The soft plop of the silencer echoed eerily in the tunnel, but it was the kind of noise that would be lost in the working racket ahead and Shaw wasn’t worried about that. He scrambled down from his perch, picked up the wandering lead and pushed the bulb behind the stack of containers so that it gave only a dim glow into the gangway, then he dragged the body close up to the containers and started pulling down some of the pile and re-stowing it so the body was covered against any casual glance if anyone should chance to walk back up this way again.
After that he took off his own clothing except for his trousers and stuffed the garments away out of sight on the top of the stowage. He fixed his holster so that it swung uncomfortably but securely between his legs and then he picked up the light and moved out into the gangway, going forward now quickly and without hesitation, just one of the civilian labour force.
Soon he emerged into the full light of the next section along, where the tunnel widened out considerably.
There must have been six or seven hundred men and women working here, working as a huge human chain and manhandling the metal containers into place, continuing that great stack right along from floor to roof. Lifting and straining, singing snatches of songs from time to time. Never letting up — working away like horses. Shaw was close to the third air-shaft here; this one, which was still open, seemed to be drawing air downward, for, though foul enough, the atmosphere was a little fresher. No-one looked twice at Shaw as he made his way along, assuming, probably, that he had been detailed for some job or other away from the gangs.
He slid past the greasy naked bodies until farther along he heard a shout; “You there!”
He half turned and a big, hairy-bodied N.C.O. carrying a sub-machine-gun grabbed him by the arm and swung him round close to a thin-lipped, sadistic face. “Where d’you think you’re off to, comrade?”
“Get on with it — no excuses! If this job isn’t finished by the day after tomorrow, we shall all be in the Siberian labour camps. You know that as well as I do. And however much you grumble, all of you, about the heat… you’ll not find the cold of the Siberian plains to your liking!”
Shaw was pushed violently backwards and almost fell. He staggered into one of the women, felt the contact of naked flesh, heard her laughter and a coarse joke. Holding on to his temper he joined in with a team of men and women stowing the pile near where he was standing. He worked for perhaps half an hour and then a siren sounded out loudly and the N.C.O. roared at them to pack up.
They stopped work thankfully, all along the tunnel, but there wasn’t much chatter; many of the workers were too tired, too spent, even to talk. This was evidently the end of the shift — they wouldn’t be able to keep going for long at a stretch down here anyway. Shaw simply followed the motions of the others and made for a kind of assembly square a little way along where a mass of clothing was hung on hooks or piled on the floor. The men went to one side, the women to the other, and they seemed to be grabbing the first articles of clothing that they came to, clothing that was all much of a pattern: rough trousers like enough to his own and short pyjama-like coats of heavy material, and coarse shirts. It was like a prison rig. Shaw grabbed with the others, taking one of the shirts and a coat but retaining his own trousers; each man, as he got dressed, went ahead, marshalled by the N.C.O.’s, towards a turnstile gate where the tunnel narrowed again. As each man came up to the turnstile he was checked on an automatic counter and handed two salt tablets and a mouthful of water from a metal jug. Once through the number-check, the workers piled into a line of small, open trucks drawn up on one lane of a double-track miniature railway running into the brilliantly lit distance. As soon as everyone was in, Shaw among them, there was a jolt and the little train started up. It ran on the flat for some way and then started up an incline. Farther along they passed another line of trucks coming up from the other direction — the relief shift reporting. Then they came below the fourth and last of the air-shafts, the one that rose above the sea. This one, like the third, was still unsealed.
Farther on the tunnel, its walls, roof, and floor lead-covered for some twelve feet back from the entrance, opened out into a large round compartment; that compartment must have been a couple of hundred feet in diameter and it was regular, with none of the natural characteristics of the tunnel proper. This, Shaw realized, must be the actual base of the tower itself. There were many doors leading off to stores, workshops and the like; looking back at the entrance to the tunnel Shaw’s attention was caught by a vast lead-and-concrete door to one side of it, a door that was ready for sliding across on huge greased rails like outsize girders. Shaw had never seen anything to equal it for size; that door must have been all of twenty feet thick and, once run across, would be driven back into the lead-covered entrance of the tunnel until it slotted neatly to form a complete seal, blocking the tunnel off like a well-driven cork. Down into the main compartment which he was in, a series of twelve big open-platform lifts descended in groups of three, all of them ready now to take the workmen up, presumably to the top of the tower for the run along the pier to the camp on shore. These lifts were quickly filled as the crowd surged forward, twenty at a time riding on each.