There was a roar and Stormalong took up slack on the defense cable. He was using his plane"s bullhorns. "Ready to rip!" he yelled. "Tell me when everyone is clear!"
The big marine attack plane was hanging in the air at the dam end. Grapnels had the cable and it was loose from the junction box. Men were scrambling away there.
Jonnie yelled to the men on the port-a-packs. "Stand clear!"
Unwilling to leave their drills, they nevertheless shut them off and went slipping and sliding away from the cliff edge.
Jonnie checked it. They were in the clear all along what must be the cable path. "Let her rip!" he yelled into his mine radio.
In the plane, Stormalong poured it on. The cable, like a gigantic snake, jerking and resisting, began to come out of the ground. It was stalling the plane. Stormalong began to dance the huge ship up and down, yanking at the cable. Foot by foot and yard by yard it worked free of the ground. The plane rose higher and higher, working along the cliff edge.
He had almost half of it out of the ground!
There was a ripping pop. The cable parted!
Stormalong"s ship catapulted toward the sky, trailing two hundred yards of cable.
He checked the rise. That Stormalong could fly. He took the broken piece up the lake and laid it on the sh.o.r.e. He triggered his quick release and dropped it.
Stormalong came back overhead. Someone in the plane was lowering the grapnels. "Hook me up!" yelled Stormalong through the bullhorn above.
Men went slithering down to the cliff edge. They caught the grapnel and got it securely fastened to the torn cable end.
It could be patched. But all this was taking time and the drill crews weren"t drilling.
They got it fastened again and once more Stormalong was pulling the remaining length from the bed in which it had rested for centuries.
He got it free of the blast area and dropped it.
The men raced back to their drills.
"We"re all finished here!" came Chief Chong-won"s voice on the mine radio.
"Excellent," said Jonnie. "Now clear every man out of there and tell me when they"re gone, including you!"
He could see them streaming out of the powerhouse and up the far roadway, tiny figures in blue work clothes. At last they were safely away from the dam. "All clear, Lord Jonnie," said Chief Chong-won.
It wouldn"t stop the drilling. Jonnie signaled Dwight. Dwight gave the crew at the wreck their orders. "Fire in the hole!" yelled Dwight. Jonnie could see them setting fuses. Then they slipped and slithered and plowed through the ooze to their flying platform and boarded it. They had to bodily haul the last one onto it by his collar and fly off with his legs still dangling. The platform went over to a safe area and landed. Jonnie watched the wreck area.
Blowie! Blowie! The sharp cracks of blast cord exploding.
A long line of mud catapulted into the sky. Smoke and spattering goo obscured the wreck for a moment.
A shock wave made the ground tremble. A small roll of water ran down the lake. Twenty-four seconds after the blast the sound of it reached them like a hard buffet with a big hand.
The smoke was clearing away up there. The enormous wreck had not moved but a channel had been cut through the upper and lower crater edges. A trickle of water started through the farther one. Just a trickle?
Jonnie held his breath, eyeing it with a scope, afraid that in their shortness of time they would have to shoot again. "Come on! Come on!" he was saying. "More, more!" He knew water was very erosive and tended to chew and widen its own way. "Come on!"
The farther side was at least two feet higher than the lake at the dam. It should have more push than that!
Right then some object in the way of the flow was worked out by the water. It was a big blast gun. It twisted in the swirl and then at last went tumbling away.
The water burst through the far crater wall. It swirled and surged in the crater, a boiling, frothing churn of discolored mud. Water thrust the upper channel wider. More water burst through.
Now it was working at the nearest ditch the blast cord had dug. It gnawed at obstruction and debris. And then it started through!
A third surge in the upper crater. Pieces were tearing loose. There was a roaring torrent there now. The bowl was filling; it was emptying into the lower lake.
They had gotten the river running again. Jonnie told Dwight to give them a very well done. The drills were raving and smoking. Jonnie looked at his watch. They only had about twenty minutes left. Where had the time gone? "How many drill sections have you gotten into those holes?" asked Jonnie to Thor.
"Five. That"s seventy-five feet."
"It will have to be enough. Get those drills out of there. Stormalong!" he barked into his radio. "Start pulling these crews and equipment out of here!"
He could see Chief Chong-won, a speck way over on the far side. He spoke into his mine radio. "Chief, you are going to see one awful flash over here in a few minutes. Wait to make sure the whole dam doesn"t go out, and the instant it"s safe, send a picked crew in there to open two generator ports and get the power back on to the cone cable and paG.o.da area only. Got it?"
"Yes, Lord Jonnie."
"And be sure to be under cover for this blast," added Jonnie.
They had the port-a-packs out and were clattering them in plane holds.
"Dwight!" said Jonnie. "Take those three drums of liquid explosive and pour them in those holes and then set the empty drums on top of them. Fast!"
Dwight pointed with his good arm and got men running. They began to pour a big drum of explosive into each hole. The holes were still so hot, the explosive was almost boiling. It was hard to get it to flow down against the trapped air. The air came bubbling and steaming back up.
Jonnie raced along, stringing blast cord. He put a big loop of it around each place where they would set a drum. The drums would be like bombs with the explosive vapor still in them. "Fuses!" yelled Dwight.
"We"ve got no time," shouted Jonnie. "I"m going to set this off with a plane"s guns!"
"What?" gawked Thor.
They had the barrels empty and were putting them in place in the circle of blast cord at each hole. A shot into any one drum would set off the lot.
"Leave me that plane!" Jonnie pointed at a single battle plane they"d brought. "Get the rest of them out of here with all men right now!"
Stormalong started to protest and then started hurrying men into the remaining ships. As their equipment went slamming into the planes, Stormalong yelled over to Jonnie, "Shoot it from way up! This thing is going to skyrocket!"
Jonnie was looking at his watch. They only had nine minutes left.
The planes were taking off, Dwight was being dragged into the last one. Jonnie looked at this setup. All okay.
He rushed to the battle plane and got ready to start it.
There was n.o.body left in the area.
He took off. He jumped the ship to about two thousand feet. The dam still looked big.
The planes were landing in sandbag abutments on the other side. Stormalong had really gotten across and slammed them down in an awful hurry.
Chief Chong-won and his men were under cover.
"Fire in the hole!" said Jonnie on his mine radio.
He flipped the guns to "Flame," "Narrow," and "Maximum." He checked his security belt.
Now for some nice gunnery. At this moment it all looked pretty peaceful down there. The blackened wreck was spilling flotsam as water went through its broken girders. The river was flowing right up to the dam lake.
But the increased water was spilling under the dam below the lake and it would be tearing that hole wider and wider.
Jonnie closed all windows with a flick of switches, made sure doors were all secure. Should he back up to three thousand? No. This was the best range. A battle plane could take a lot. But he had never heard of anybody setting off a hundred fifty gallons of liquid explosive before. Plus a thousand feet of number five blast cord.
He put his sights carefully on the center barrel. He pushed the gun trip.
There was a flash across the whole sky before him. A curtain of green fire three thousand feet high.
Crash!
The recoil hit him and the plane went spinning skyward like a thrown toy.
The yank of the security belt was like a blow. It knocked the wind out of him.
Three seconds later he found he was upside-down. He punched the console. The plane"s balance motors caught up and righted it. He was flying backward.
The whine of engines fought against the wrong direction.
The plane steadied. Somebody would have to replace the windscreen. It had a diagonal crack in it.
And then he saw the cliff. The smoke had cleared. And the whole cliff front was sliding down toward the lake in slow, slow motion.
Half a million cubic yards of rock, moving down.
A lot of it was apparently still in one piece. But that was an illusion. It was a clean slice of cliff, knifed off neatly. But inside it the rock was cracked and shattered and just before it hit the water it lost shape and tumbled in fragments. It had looked at first like it hadn"t left the bank. But there had been distance. Some of it struck nearly at the center of the lake.
He watched the dam. Would it, too, crumble in slow motion and this whole lake go roaring down the gorge? He had set it up so the shock wave would go into the air, not down and through the ground. It had gone into the air, all right; witness what happened to his plane.
The first wave hit the dam and a splatter of water soared a hundred feet above the dam top. Had he lost too much water there? No, that was just spray.
Was the dam holding?
He could not tell whether the underwater currents were carrying the rock into the low hole. He darted the plane sideways. Water was still roaring out under the dam. He watched.
Was it his imagination that it was lessening?
His attention was yanked off it by blue figures racing down to the powerhouse. They certainly had not waited!
He looked at his watch. He only had two minutes to get this plane out of the air.
With a pound on the console keys Jonnie lanced the plane down to an empty abutment. He killed its motor. He had to make sure it was off- his ears were ringing.
Thirty-three seconds left to go. That was cutting it close!
He went through the underground pa.s.sage into the cone. He looked at the paG.o.da. Not even a tile had moved in that blast.
Angus was at the console. The small gray man at the computer. Angus waved and shouted, "Power"s on! We"re firing!"
Chapter 4.
Somebody else had been busy in the last two hours. A different music was playing. It was very n.o.ble and dignified. It sounded vaguely familiar to Jonnie and then he remembered that a cadet had found a pile of what he called "records," big things: if you ran a rose thorn held in a paper box around an endless circular groove and put your ear close, it sounded like twenty or thirty instruments playing; the ancient label on the record, mostly faded out, said the name of the piece was "The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. Lohengrin." This music was much like that but deeper, fuller, quite impressive! Jonnie suspected the small gray man had had a hand in that. Something from his ship? Music for the delegates to arrive by, of course.
And something else that must be from the small gray man"s ship: there was a screen, meshed so you could see through it, all around the firing platform, and Dr. Allen was finishing putting it up. "Disease control," he said cryptically as Jonnie pa.s.sed by.
Sweaty Chinese engineers crawled out of a duct hole with cheery faces. They had air circulating in and out now. The smoke had already cleared away. A good thing, thought Jonnie. A lot of different atmospheres would momentarily be whiffing across the platform at the instant of coincidence of s.p.a.ces and during recoil especially.
And the mobs of Chinese refugees from the village had changed, too. They may have lost their village but they had saved their possessions and these had been scattered about. Now the untidy bundles had vanished. Children and dogs were quiet down in the rifle pits and parents and others that had no immediate duties were standing about. They had on what must be their best clothes.
An honor guard came out of a bunker and finished neatening themselves up with a tug here and a buckle there. Six of them, different nationalities; all in their best uniforms. No weapons but the shafts of pennons. An aged Chinese gentleman- no, a Buddhist communicator dressed to look like a Chinese, wearing a silk robe with designs on it and a small cap- was taking position at the head of the honor guard. Of course, somebody who spoke Psychlo to greet the arrivals, yet who looked like a dignitary.
It would be three or four minutes until the first one appeared and Jonnie walked toward the ops room. He didn"t get in. The boy, Quong, sprinted out, going somewhere fast, and Sir Robert popped out of the door and called after him, "And tell Stormalong to bring that other recognition book too!" The boy hardly checked his pace, nodding in full run.
Beyond Sir Robert the ops room was boiling with sound and movement as people worked.
Jonnie opened his mouth to ask how it was going. But Sir Robert answered before he could speak. Sir Robert shook his head bleakly. "They"re using a new kind of bomb. The guns sometimes don"t explode it. And the idiots are burning deserted cities! Our drones are still running. Why would they want to burn an empty place that used to be called "San Francisco?" The last drone shot we had of it, there were just two bears walking down the street. We"re dealing wi" daft imbeciles!"
Jonnie made to go in past him and Sir Robert shook his head again. "You can"t do anything more than we"re doing. Have you thought what we"re going to tell these emissaries?
"No idea," said Jonnie. "Shouldn"t we get Clanchief Fearghus down here?"
"Naw, naw," said Sir Robert. "No e"en a wee chonce! Edinburgh is gang up in flames!"
Jonnie felt a contraction of his heart. "Any news of Chrissie?"
"They"d a" be doon in the shelters.
Dunneldeen is giving them a" the air cover he can."
Stormalong raced in with the book.
Sir Robert took a look at Jonnie. "Go get yersel" cleaned up. And think of something to tell these arrivals!" He shooed Jonnie off toward his room and vanished into ops. He closed the door behind him so the frantic sounds wouldn"t come into the platform area.