"You wouldn"t see anything," he said.
"You wouldn"t feel anything. You"d be obliterated, just like that." He snapped his fingers and suddenly, as if he"d conjured up a genie, we became aware of a noise.
"What the.. . ?" Pay was crouching beside me on our ramp of spoil. He raised a hand.
"Listen!"
At first we could feel it rather than hear it: a deep vibration more than a sound, a shudder so low that it seemed to come through our boots. But in seconds it built into an audible flutter, then into a rumble, then into a roar which filled the tunnel and made it shake. The water behind us had long since settled back into stillness after our pa.s.sage through it. Now I saw a ripple on the black surface, and I was convinced that the roof was about to cave in.
I looked round at the concrete blocks behind us. We were trapped between the wall and the water in a section of tunnel about fifteen yards long.
The pulsating roar built up still louder until it seemed to come from right over our heads. Particles of brick dust started to fall from the roof. I looked up at the brickwork right above us, fearful that I"d see water break through the joins, expecting to be swamped any minute. I made a grab for my mask and breathing kit.
Into the din Pay yelled, "f.u.c.king Metro!"
"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks!" I shouted.
"No Metro line anywhere near. I checked it on the street plan."
"Gotta be a boat, then."
"A boat?"
"On the river."
"Some boat."
We were bellowing at the tops of our voices. Toad stood there looking vacant, but I think he was just as scared as we were. Then I realised that the racket was diminishing, and I felt sure Pay was right: a boat had gone up or down the river, close over our heads.
After that scare, it took Toad only a few more minutes to complete his preparations.
"OK," he announced, "we"re ready to go.
Anywhere else, the idea of taking orders from Toad would have made me see red, but here we were entirely in his hands and it didn"t bug me at all to follow his instructions. With him directing and helping, we raised the base section of Apple the heavier of the two and eased it sideways on to the rough shelf we"d created. That was relatively simple. The harder part was to lift the top section, turn it over in mid-air, then manoeuvre it into position above its mate without letting the two touch or knock together until they were perfectly aligned. The second part weighed just on 150lbs, and even for two fit guys, holding that amount out at arm"s length was no picnic.
Toad had had the simple but brilliant notion of bringing three slender spars of wood, an inch thick, to act as temporary buffers, and he laid these across the top of the base unit so that we could lower the top on to them without letting it touch the metal beneath until we were ready. Then, while Pavarotti and I held up one end of the top component, he withdrew the bars one at a time and we lowered away the last inch. As we stood back, he quickly went to work inserting six stainless-steel bolts one at each corner, one half-way up each long side and carefully screwed them down with a ratchet-handled socket spanner.
Then he plugged one of the two black co-ax cables into the lower half of the package and locked it in position, using an Allen key to turn the sunken nut.
As he took hold of the second wire, I said, "Listen, Toad. Are you quite certain this f.u.c.king thing isn"t going to go?"
"Don"t worry," he replied, not even looking up.
"My instinct for self-preservation"s as good as yours.
In went the end of the wire. Again he tightened a nut down.
"OK to cover up?" I asked.
"Hold on. I need to check."
Once more he put on his headphones, lifted a small flap at the bottom corner of the device and plugged in the lead from a control box slung across his stomach. For a minute or two Pay and I waited, running with sweat, itching with the grit that had worked its way down the necks of our shirts. My anxiety about possible premature detonation wouldn"t die down. I could only hope to h.e.l.l Toad knew what he was doing. Glancing sideways at Pavarotti, I could see him thinking the same.
At last that sly, secret smile stole back on to Toad"s face.
"What"s happening?"
"I can hear it."
"What?"
"It"s talking to us."
"What is, for f.u.c.k"s sake?"
"The satellite."
"Jesus! What"s it saying?"
"I don"t know. I just recognise the signal they gave me.
Listen."
He pulled off the headphones and handed them to me. All I got was a distant chirruping and beeping that rose and fell.
"How far up is the satellite?"
"Twenty-two thousand five hundred miles."
I handed the set back and said, "OK to cover up, then?"
Toad nodded and began to pack up his tools.
I"d decided in advance that we weren"t going to ponce about mortaring over cracks in the brickwork. The chances of somebody else reaching the site were remote and anyway, new mortar wouldn"t pa.s.s a close inspection. Now that Apple was live, I wanted to get the h.e.l.l out of the tunnel as soon as possible.
So we simply covered the casing with a loose mound of bricks and spoil, as though the heap had fallen from the roof, and pushed some lumps into the conduit that we"d cut for the connection, to hold the cables in the duct. Then we collected up our kit and prepared to withdraw.
"Toad," I said, "what happens if the water level comes right up and the thing gets flooded?"
"It shouldn"t make any difference. Now the units are sealed together they"re waterproof There"d be problems if the level got as high as the SCR, but I don"t reckon that"s possible."
There was one last precaution I"d decided was worthwhile.
Back at the edge of the water, we used one of the empty rubber bags as a water carrier, filled it, and dragged it to the base of the blocking wall. There we tipped the lot out at once, retreating backwards before a little tide that pursued us down the tunnel.
By doing that four times, we washed away every sign of disturbance and left the silt on the floor in a smooth, unbroken carpet.
Then we waded away through the flood.
We were back under the shaft by 0020. We"d missed the midnight rendezvous, but in only ten minutes Rick was due to make his next inspection. Our last batteries were all but spent.
As we waited in pitch blackness, my mind wouldn"t leave the twinned cases, buried under the mound across the river. I thought of the device as a time-bomb, ticking away towards detonation. I knew that wasn"t how it worked, but the idea wouldn"t fade. How could we be sure that some idiot in the Pentagon wouldn"t set it off by mistake? We had only Toad"s word to give us hope that accidents were impossible.
We waited, sweat congealing, grit itching inside our shirts. I found myself thinking of the occasion, years before, when we"d buried an old aunt in the churchyard of my village, in the north of England, how the clods of earth had rained down on her coffin as the grave-diggers started to fill the hole above her.
There was something uncomfortably similar about the way we"d heaped the spoil back on top of Apple"s black and green casing.
On the dot of 0030 we heard a creak of hinges above us, and a beam of light flickered down the shaft.
"Anyone for the up?" Rick called softly.
"Three," I told him.
"Can"t wait to get out. Everything OK on top?"
"Fine."
"Let"s have a rope for the berg ens then the ladder."
So we came back to ground level. The moment we were clear of the shaft and the cover was closed, Rick slipped the original padlocks into place and scattered hay over the top.
"Where"s our transport?" I whispered.
"Dumio exactly. Somewhere close. We"ve been talking to them. Give "em a call."
I switched on my radio and said, "Green One to Black, do you read me?
Over."
"Black," came Whinger"s voice immediately.
"Standing by for pick-up.
"Roger," I went.
"We"ll come out two and two, as planned. First pair one minute from now. Second thirty seconds later."
By then all the nuns or whoever they were seemed to have gone to bed.
Only a single light was burning at the back of the inner yard; everything else was dark. All the same, we stuck to our plan of coming out in separate pairs.
"Away you go," I said, and Rick and Toad vanished towards the gate. I counted thirty, then set off with Pavarotti.
Through the gate we turned right and started walking along the pavement. The asphalt gleamed wet after recent rain, and across the river the Kremlin buildings were still floodlit. There was n.o.body walking on the embankment. The first pair had disappeared picked up already.
About a hundred yards ahead of us I saw some object lying half on the pavement, half in the road. As we approached, I saw it was a man, or maybe a body, legs out in the carriage way head in the gutter. From the horrible angle of his feet I could tell that his legs had been run over, maybe several times. One hand was clutching the neck and shattered remains of a bottle, and round it a dark puddle had spread, more like blood than vodka.
"The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d"s snuffed it," said Pavarotti as we pa.s.sed. But no: at that moment the figure let out a gurgling groan and shifted slightly. On any other night, anywhere else in the world, I"d have pulled him to safety on the pavement. But here, so close to the scene of our infiltration, I didn"t want to know.
The contrast between the splendid buildings opposite and the sordid brutality of life in the gutter said everything about the way in which seventy-five years of Communism had brought a vast country to its knees.
We walked on. A second later we heard an engine and saw lights coming up behind us. I tightened my right hand on the b.u.t.t of my Sig, just in case; but then the lights flicked up and down in recognition. Whinger called, "I have you visual," the vehicle slowed, and a second later we were safe on board his Volga.
"Good on yer, Whinge," I said as we pulled away.
"No problems?"
"The whole place is lifting with drunks but apart from them, nothing.
How about you?"
"We managed it, just about. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d"s in place. Toad said he could hear the satellite talking to it, so we presume it"s all set up. But I tell you even if it isn"t, I"m not going back down that f.u.c.king tunnel in a million years."
"You couldn"t smell any worse if you did," Whinger observed.
"Thanks. And by the way what made that fearsome racket?"
"When?"
"About an hour ago. It sounded as though an aircraft carrier went up the never.
"Oh, that. It was just a barge with a load of sand on board."
"Christ it scared the s.h.i.t out of us. We thought the tunnel was coming in.
"Oh, well." Whinger sounded unimpressed.
"It didn"t. So that"s it for tonight, is it? One down and one to go.
ELEVEN.
In the morning we felt, and looked, pretty shattered.
"When our students noticed some pale faces and started asking questions, we pretended we"d once again been on the p.i.s.s. In fact we were rapidly gaining a reputation quite unjustified as leading p.i.s.s artists and we claimed to have been so smashed that we couldn"t remember the names of any of the bars we"d allegedly visited.
In fact we"d got back to barracks by 1:30 a.m., and I"d sent Hereford a coded message through the patrol radio to report the insertion of Apple.
Late as it was, the lads were far too hyped up by the success of the operation to feel sleepy. As we had sat round the kitchen table with a brew, Pavarotti had croaked, "What the f.u.c.k have we done?" perhaps partly in amazement because we"d managed it, partly in alarm at the possible consequences.
"That"s put the frighteners on the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, anyway."
"Not yet it hasn"t," I"d corrected.
"It may do at some time in the future, but they don"t know about it yet."