He laughed easily, and Lanyon noticed that Matheson seemed to have filled out considerably over the past few days. There was an air of authority and confidence about him that suggested he had been through his own private ordeal.
Lanyon fingered the movement order. "Paul, this came through three days ago. Strictly speaking, you should have got under way immediately."
Matheson shrugged. "Well, I couldn't leave the skipper behind, could I, Steve?" He hesitated. "As a matter of fact, two more orders came through when we didn't clear back, followed up by a couple of troubleshooters from the Provost Marshal's unit here. Slight problem there. They could see we were all ready to blow, so I had to, er, use a little bit of old-fashioned persuasion."
He grinned at Lanyon, and tapped the butt of the.45 stuck in his belt.
Lanyon nodded. "I wondered what that was for. Thought perhaps you were trying to impress the WAC's. Pretty good, Paul. Well, let's go topside and get this rig under way."
They climbed up into the conning tower, crouched down under the awning stretched across to keep out the spray thrown up off the sides of the pen. At the far end Lanyon could see heavy seas smashing against the open doors, hear the deafening unrelenting roar of the wind screaming past like a dozen express trains.
The entire pen was shifting sideways under the impact of the seas breaking across it, and large cracks split the roof and walls. The _Terrapin_ was moored well back in the pen, double lines of truck tires lashed to her hull to protect her from the pier.
The last lines were cast off, and they began to edge ahead under the big diesels, churning a boiling wake of foam and black water behind the twin screws.
They swung out into the center of the pen, 50 yards from the entrance, bows breaking out of the water as swells rode in from the sea, lifting the sub almost to the roof.
Lanyon was checking the forward elevator trim when Matheson suddenly punched him on the shoulder. He looked up quickly as the helmsman shouted and pointed forward to the entrance.
A huge section of the roof, the full width of the pen and 40 feet across, was tipping slowly downward crushing the two steel gates like chicken wire. Through the wide crack mountainous seas burst like floodwater through a collapsing dam, splashing across the bows of the _Terrapin_.
"Full astern! Full astern!" Lanyon roared into the mouth tube, hanging onto the edge of the well as the diesels reversed and wrenched the sub back into its wake. They moved 50 yards, and then Lanyon held the _Terrapin_ and watched as the collapsing roof section anchored itself in the jaws of the entrance, hanging vertically from the reinforcing roof girders, wedged firmly by the driving seas.
Matheson pounded on the edge of the well, frustration and anger overriding his hysteria. "We're trapped, Steve, for God's sake! We'll never move it!"
Lanyon ignored him, picked up the mouth tube. "Starboard torpedo station! Alert! Charge No. 2 tube with main HE heads."
Waiting for the ready signal, he turned to Matheson. "We'll blast our way out, Paul. That roof section is at least fifteen feet thick, must weigh about five hundred tons. It's our only chance."
At the ready signal he backed the _Terrapin_ astern right up against the rear wall, so that 150 yards of clear water separated them from the entrance. Then, lining the bows carefully on target, he rapped into the tube, "Compressors sealed. Discharge vent open." He paused as the bows swerved slightly, then realigned on the target. "Fire!"
The torpedo burst from its vent in a rush of bubbles, burrowed rapidly through the water three feet below the surface, moving like an enormous shark. Lanyon watched it until it was 20 yards from the blocked entrance, then crouched down, shouting to the others.
They hit the floor, and he seized the mouth tube and yelled, "Full ahead! Full ahead!"
As the screws thrashed and bit in, kicking the _Terrapin_ forward, the torpedo exploded against its target. There was a vivid white flash that filled the pen, followed by a colossal eruption of exploding concrete and water which burst out of its mouth like a cork from a champagne bottle. Simultaneously a 15-foot-high wave swept down the length of the pen, a massive breaker that carried with it a foaming jetsam of concrete and metal. Full ahead, the _Terrapin_ was moving at 15 knots as they met halfway down the pen. It slowed briefly under the impact of the wave, its conning tower glancing off the walls and carrying away a section of the pier. Then it surged forward again, heading smoothly through the gaping mouth of the entrance into the harbor. For a moment its bow rose up steeply under the writhing swells, then sank cleanly into the deep basin, its tower and stern quickly vanishing in a roar of escaping air.
____________________
At last the pyramid was complete.
Sliding painfully down its smooth slopes, the few remaining workers dismantled the battered forms, letting their equipment lie where it fell at the foot of the pyramid. One by one, peering up briefly at the gray apex shining above them into the black reeling air, they made their way over to a single trap door sunk into a shaft between the two ramparts. Quickly they disappeared from view, until only a single figure remained, in the shadow of the buckling windshields. For a moment he stood in the shower of dust carried over the shields a hundred feet above, his body swaying in the air exploding around him. Then he too turned and stepped through the trap door, sealing it behind him.
The wind mounted. Raging into the shields, it tore at the plates, snapping the hawsers one by one, cracking the concrete pylons at their bases, driving through the great rents.
Suddenly the pressure became too great. With a gargantuan paroxysm the shattered screen exploded and the splitting plates careened away into the air, bouncing off the sides of the pyramid, dragging with them the frayed remnants of the tangled hawsers, the roots of the pylons and buttresses. No longer protected, the lines of vehicles parked in the lee of the screens dragged' and crashed into each other, and finally broke loose, rolling end over end across the lower slopes of the pyramid, rapidly picking up speed, and then spinning away into the darkness with the flying sky.
Now only the pyramid remained.
6 Death in a Bunker
Pausing in the doorway to allow the shower of plaster falling from the ceiling to spend itself, Marshall stepped through into the Intelligence Unit. A skeleton staff of three-Andrew Symington, a corporal and one of the navy typists-sat in the dim light of the emergency bunker, surrounded by the jumble of teletypes, radio consoles and TV screens. The scene reminded Marshall of the last hours in Hitler's fuhrerbunker. Discarded bulletins and typed memos lay around everywhere, a clutter of unwashed teacups stood on the lid of a forgotten suitcase, cigarette ash spilled across the desks.
Above the chatter of the teletypes and the muted cross-talk of the R/T he could hear the sounds of the wind echoing through the ventilator shaft that reached up to the Mall 6o feet above. Almost everyone had gone now. The last War Office and COE personnel had left in their Centurions early that morning for the peripheral command posts. Admiralty Arch had collapsed half an hour later, pulling down with it the complex of offices that had housed COE for the previous three weeks. Intelligence was by now a luxury that would soon be dispensed with.
The wind had reached 250 mph and the organized resistance left was more interested in securing the minimal survival necessities-food, warmth and 50 feet of concrete overhead-than in finding out what the rest of the world was doing, knowing full well that everywhere people were doing exactly the same thing. Civilization was hiding. The earth itself was being stripped to its seams, almost literally-six feet of topsoil were now traveling through the air.
He sat down on the desk behind Symington, patted the plump bald man on his shoulder, then waved at the other two. The girl wore headphones over her straggling hair, and was too harassed answering the calls coming in endlessly from mobile cars and units trapped in basements and deep shelters to have had any time to look after her appearance, attractive as she had once been (Marshall had deliberately kept her on at COE as a morale booster) but when she saw him she ran a hand over her hair and gave him a brave smile.