Max was not more than thirty yards from me now. I glanced quickly up towards where the men were standing in a close-packed huddle. They were scared and uncertain. Once Max reached me I knew I’d never get them moving in time. It was Max or them — one man or nearly a hundred. ‘Max!’ I screamed. ‘Stay where you are!’ And then, as he came on, I raised the weapon slowly, took careful aim at his right leg above the knee and fired.
The report was a thin, sharp sound in the rock-strewn valley. Max’s mouth opened, a surprised look on his face. He took two stumbling steps and then pitched forward on to his face and lay there, writhing in pain.
‘You swine! You’ll pay for this.’
I swung round to find Trevedian coming at me. I raised the gun. ‘Get back,’ I said. And then as he stopped I knew I had the situation under control for the moment. ‘Now get out of here, all of you,’ I ordered. ‘Any man who’s still around in one minute from now will get shot. And for God’s sake see you find high ground. Now, get moving.’ To start them I sent a bullet whistling over their heads. They turned then and made for the timber, bunched close together like a herd of stampeding cattle. Only Trevedian and the man who was with him stood their ground. ‘Get your brother out of here to safety,’ I ordered him.
He didn’t move. He was staring at me, his eyes wide and unblinking. ‘You must be crazy,’ he murmured.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ I snapped. ‘Come on. Get your brother out of here.’
‘That dam was all right. Government engineers inspected it at every stage. We had engineers in to inspect it before we started the work of completing it.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it.’ He turned to the man beside him. ‘We’ll see if we can get them on the hoist phone. If not I’m going up there. Will you run the engine for me?’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. ‘Every moment you delay-’
‘Oh, go to hell,’ he shouted. ‘Come on, George.’ They started at a run for the cable terminal. For a second I considered firing, trying to stop them. But my fractional hesitation had put them out of effective range. Anyway, what the hell. Maybe he’d make it, and if he didn’t…
I turned away and went over to where Max lay with his body doubled up over a big splinter of rock. His face was bloodless and he was unconscious. His right leg was twisted under him and blood was seeping on to the stones, a crimson splash in the sunlight. I got hold of him by the arms and began to drag him over the rocks. He was incredibly heavy. Each time I paused I called towards the line of trees, hoping one of the men would have the guts to come back and help me. But the timber seemed silent and empty. If anyone heard me, he didn’t come down to help. In shooting Max I had finally convinced them of the urgency of the danger, just as I had convinced Trevedian himself.
Foot by foot I dragged Max’s body along the stone-packed road, up the hill to the timber. Every few yards I had to pause. I heard the diesel start up and saw the cage move out of its staging. Trevedian still working on the cradle, tapping home the pins that locked the driving cable to it.
I suppose I was about halfway to the timber when I paused and glanced up once again at the cleft between the two peaks that towered high above us. The cage was halfway up the face of the fault, a small box swaying gently on the spider’s silk of the cable. And then my eyes lifted to the pylon at the top and suddenly all my body froze. A solid wave of water and rock burst from the lip of the cliff. The pylon vanished, smothered and swept away by it. And as the water spouted outwards over the cliff edge a distant rumbling reached my ears. It went on and on, sifting down from above, echoing from slope to slope from the face of the cliff. I remember seeing the cage sway violently and watching the brown flood fall with slow deliberation down the fault, frothing and spouting great gouts of white as it thundered against ledges and outcrops, smashing away great sections of the rock face with its force, flinging them outwards and down. And I stood there, rigid, unable to move, fascinated and appalled by the spectacle.
A shattering roar filled the whole valley as that monstrous fall of rock and water hit the base of the fault and came thundering on in a mighty, surging wall down the slide. I saw the pylon at the top of the slide smashed to rubble and I remember how the cable suddenly broke and the cage began to swing slowly in towards the cliff. And then I was suddenly running, climbing desperately towards the timber. I heard the angry thunder of those pent-up waters crash down the valley behind me and then the swirling fringe of it reached out to me, sent a line of trees crashing as though cut by a great scythe, caught at my legs and buried me in a frothing flood of water.
I struck out madly, reaching up towards the surface, gasping for breath. Then I was flung against something and all the breath was knocked out of my body. Pain ran like a knife up my right leg. Something swirled against me and I clutched at it, felt the soft texture of clothing and hung on. Then the water sank, my feet touched ground and as pain shot through me again, almost blacking me out, the branch of a tree curled over me and I clutched at it, holding on with the grip of desperate fear.
I must have passed out, for when I next remember anything I was lying on the sodden earth, still clutching the branch with my right hand, my left hand twined in Max’s jacket. He was lying face down beside me, his left ear almost torn off by a jagged cut that had opened to show the white of his jaw bone. And just beyond Max, only a few yards below us, a colossal flood of brown water went ripping and roaring down Thunder Creek. The valley was a cataract a thousand yards across and the face of the slide was a monstrous series of falls and rapids. And in the centre of this violent rush of water great rocks were on the move, grinding slowly down through a welter of foam. And on the fringes the scene was one of mad devastation, timber and earth and brush swept clean down to the bare rock by the first rush of the waters. I stared at it all through a blur of pain, saw the peaks of Solomon’s Judgment and the lake spilling through the cleft, felt the sun blazing down on me and passed out again.
I think it was pain that brought me round. I heard a voice say, ‘It’s his leg all right.’ The words were remote and faintly unreal. I opened my eyes to see two faces bending over me. And then they began to move me and I was screaming as the pain ran up my right side, splintering like sparks of electricity in my brain. For hours it seemed I alternated between periods of blessed unconsciousness and periods of searing pain. I remember the noise and jolting of a truck, the sound of voices, the feel of a spoon against my teeth and the smell of brandy. I think I must have asked at some time about Max. At any rate, I knew somehow that he was alive. And then there were starched uniforms and the smell of ether and the jab of a needle.
I woke at last to full consciousness in a little room where the blinds were drawn against the sunlight. There was a movement beside me and a hand closed over mine. I turned then and saw Jean bending over me. Her face was pale and drawn, but her eyes smiled at me. ‘Better?’
I nodded, trying to accustom myself to the surroundings, to her presence. It was so quiet after the roar of the waters. I tried to move my body, but I seemed weighed down. My right leg was wooden and solid, my chest stiff and painful. It hurt to breathe and I had to force myself to speak. ‘I’m in hospital, aren’t I?’ I asked her.
She nodded. ‘Don’t talk. And don’t worry. You’re all right. You’ve broken a leg, a collar bone and three ribs. The doctor says you’ll be fine in a week or two.’
‘And Max?’
‘Fractured skull and left arm’s broken. But he’ll be all right. There’s a bullet wound in his leg, but it’s not serious.’. Her hand reached out, touched my forehead and then her fingers were sliding through my hair in a caress. ‘Don’t worry, darling. Everything’s going to be all right.’