The defense cable also ran along those cliffs. He did not dare sacrifice that too.
Angus's voice on the mine radio. “First stage of firing is complete. Ready to
shut down!”
“Shut down!” said Jonnie into his mine radio. “Powerhouse! Take the power off! Stormalong! Fly them!”
The sizzle of the armor cable vanished. There was a patter of burst shell fragments, dead birds, and leaves and they dropped to the ground, no longer held there by the ionization armor.
The planes took off with a blasting roar.
Jonnie had spotted an unused flying platform and he stepped aboard and hit the console. He went streaking out over the dam and lake, heading for the tops of the far cliffs.
Dwight was there. Jonnie eyed the texture of the rock in the cliffs. He estimated the rush and flow of water which must be occurring at this side bottom of the lake. His task was to dump enough rock off these cliffs into the lake and get it carried into that break to plug it. A tricky calculation.
Three holes. He needed to drill three holes, each about a hundred feet deep and each at an exact angle. These would be at the points where the cliff must be sheered off.
He pointed, racing along back of the cliff edge. One, two, three. About two hundred yards uplake from the dam. Down at an angle of about fifteen degrees from the vertical.
Men got the port-a-pack drills in operation. They were usually used to deep-core a vein. But they could drill a fast hole. Fast enough? He only had two hours.
The cable! This section lay closer to the lake than they were drilling. He mustn't sacrifice it. If left where it was it would get severed by any blast and slide into the lake.
"Stormalong!" yelled Jonnie. The pilot had just climbed out of a mine passenger plane. “What's the biggest motor we've got here now?”
Stormalong looked at the planes. They had brought over four. One was a marine attack plane. Stormalong pointed at it.
“Get some technicians down to this end of the dam. There's a cable junction box there according to this old defense map. Get them to unhook it. And then you put a heavy line on that end and fly this whole section of it out of the ground and dump it up there.”
This was right where Stormalong lived. What a crazy idea! To take the unfastened cable end and secure it to a plane and fly the plane southwest up the lake and tear the cable out! He needed no further instructions. He knew the weight of a tenth of a mile of cable might well crash the plane. He'd put a quick release trip on it. He sent technicians racing to disconnect the dam end of it.
Jonnie looked at the drills. There were armored bits and they could stand an awful lot of heat. But they were smoking. How fast could they drill? He looked at his watch and saw how many sections they were down already. This was going to be close!
Up the lake, five miles away, the old mine hand that Dwight had sent and two assistants were sliding and slithering around in the silt beside the battleship wreck. They were sinking almost to their hips. The flying platform they had taken had to be reflown by its operator every few minutes to prevent it from simply sinking out of sight in the ooze.
What a gigantic wreck! No wonder they couldn't put those down in atmosphere. They must assemble them on that moon, Asart, above Tolnep. Probably they flew the pieces up there section by section. Only intricate calculations of planetary gravity and gravitic force flows would let those things fly at all.
He wondered for a sad moment whether Glencannon's body was in there somewhere. But even a Mark 32 couldn't stand up to that internal blast. That ship was really a graveyard. There must be charred chunks of fifteen hundred Tolneps in that twisted, blackened wreck. How long was it? Two thousand feet? Three thousand? Hard to tell from here, so much was buried. But it was sure making a great dam. One would have thought it would have buried itself deeper. Then he saw what really was the case. It had made a sort of crater and it was the crater edge that was restraining the water.
He took a small scope from his pocket to see exactly what the men were doing. Yes, they were doubling up blast cord over the far crater edge and then another one of them was doing the same thing on the near crater edge. They needed no advice.
The drills were screaming through the rock, steam shooting up from their overheated water-coolant jets.
Twenty men were rigging a line from the lake water to a mine pump. They were getting more cooling water.
Ow, the silt! It was hard to walk without sliding and nearly all the crews by now were caked with mud.
He looked at his watch. It would be very touch and go. To drill a hundred feet of hole in three hours would be a bit of a feat; they had to do it in about one and a half! They were really leaning on those drills. Four men on each were adding their weight to the handles.
He hoped that flashing signal on the small gray man's ship would hold good. They had skeletonized their defense force to handle this dam and they were wide open to attack with no cable armor.
His mine radio came alive. It was the party at the wreck calling Dwight.
They were ready to fire. Dwight looked over to Jonnie.
With his scope, Jonnie tried to see the generator intake ports in the dam. Were they closed? Muddy, muddy water. He couldn't see from here. He called the Chinese engineers inside the dam. Chief Chong-won was in there.
“It needs five minutes to close the last port,” the chief's voice came back.
“They've got the excess spillway ports closed. I am sorry, Lord Jonnie. I don't think these levers and wheels have been moved for years.”
“Make it a thousand,” said Jonnie. “How many men have you got in there?”
"Seventy-two," said the chief.
Good lord, he had half his force inside that dam.
“You're doing great. Finish it up and then get everyone out of there. That dam could go, the whole thing, with these blasts.”
“We'll hurry,” said the chief.
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 shore. 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.