Some kind of instrument conduit, she assumed. She’d torn the bottom of it loose from its rusted bracket and was now attempting to break off a section by causing metal fatigue. It appeared to be working. Each arc was getting a little bigger. She was working by the light of her trusty ChemLight, which was plenty bright down here in the absolute darkness of the tunnels. She actually felt as if she knew her way around the siphon chamber now, and the cold, clammy air swirling around her bare legs felt almost normal. Better air than water, she realized.
The Sig was still hanging in her shoulder rig, and she giggled when she thought what she must look like, half-naked, with that big automatic under her arm. Despite its awkwardness, she was glad she still had it. Because if this worked, and if she got out of here, there was no telling what or who was up there in the ammunition plant complex.
She felt water around her ankles as the siphon chamber began to fill again, and she realized she did not have all night. She pushed harder on the pipe, putting her legs into it now, and felt it giving way somewhere up there in the darkness. Then suddenly, the weight of it was in her hands and she jumped back as she lost control of it. The pipe clattered to the floor of the chamber with a huge ringing noise of steel on concrete, barely missing her feet. She picked one end up and found she was able to move it. She put the end down and took a rough measurement. About twenty feet. Good. It had broken off about where she had intended it to. Now, she had to get it to the ladder, haul it up to the ledge, and then see if she could position it somehow on the ledge and shinny up the damn thing to the main tunnel. The trick was going to be locking the bottom end into something long enough for her to make the climb. She began dragging the pipe down the siphon chamber toward the ladder rungs.
Browne heard something. He opened his eyes, shocked to realize he’d been drifting off to sleep. What was that noise? He leaned forward and cupped his good ear, straining to hear it again. He swore silently to himself.
His hearing was fair, for his age, but it was still the product of too many years working in an industrial environment without hearing protection.
He looked at his watch; it was a little after 8:00 P.M. He was wasting time; he had to get going. He decided to wait another fifteen minutes, see if he heard the noise again, and, if not, go down to the main street and check out the plates. If nothing appeared to have happened, he would go to the power plant, start up the hydrogen generator, and get to work.
Kreiss got down off the roof as quietly as he could and began moving from building to building, staying in the deepest shadows and hugging the still-warm concrete sides of the structures. He stopped at each corner, listening carefully but hearing nothing but a slight breeze blowing down the empty street. When he was two buildings away from the power plant, he did hear something, a metallic scraping noise, like a pipe being dragged on concrete. He was about to go up on top of the nearest building to set up the cone, when he realized the noise was coming from the
street—no, from that big hole in the street. He stopped where he was, and he heard it again. Definitely coming from that big hole, where the steel plate appeared to be missing. The guy must have come in the front entrance after all and was now doing something down below the street.
Or had he fallen into his own trap?
Kreiss moved quickly to the edge of the hole. He listened. Definitely something going on, but at a distance—the sound was echoing up what had to be a tunnel, a really big tunnel, under the street. He pointed his finger light into the hole but could barely see the bottom. Something glinted back at him—glass? He heard another noise, coming up out of the tunnel from the direction of the power plant. His light illuminated the ladder rungs embedded into the concrete on one side. He decided to go down. He went over to the far edge of the hole, pointed the tiny light down, and saw where hinges had been ripped out of the concrete right above the ladder. He thought about that for a minute. A man walking out onto one of those big steel plates and falling through because the support was gone wouldn’t have ripped the hinges off. He moved quickly around the perimeter of the hole until he found what he was looking for: scrape marks on the down-street edge of the hole, and a tire scuff on the concrete behind the edge. A vehicle had fallen through, not a human. He pointed his tiny finger light down the hole again. So where was it?
He listened again, but there were no more sounds. He went back to the ladder and climbed over the edge and started down. A cool draft eased by his face as he went down, one rung at a time, with pauses to listen. When he finally reached bottom he stepped away from the ladder and crunched on what turned out to be auto glass, a whole carpet of it, covering two large fluid stains. The steel plate was lying upward from the point of impact. The next thing he noticed was the slope: The tunnel angled down toward the power plant at a surprisingly steep angle. He turned on his finger light and examined the floor. Heavy metal scrape marks went down the tunnel. He stood up. The tunnel was big, its floor perhaps twenty feet down from street level and a bit over fifteen feet square. It smelled of chemicals and stagnant water, and the stream of air coming up from the bottom was heavy with moisture.
Okay. A vehicle had crashed through the plate, hit bottom here, and then slid down the tunnel into—what? Another metallic clank, this one much clearer than when he had been up on the street. From way down there, in the darkness. He stepped away from all the broken glass as carefully as he could and started down the tunnel, using the finger
light in spot mode to sweep the tunnel floor directly in front of him. The farther he went, the steeper it seemed to get, until he had to walk alongside the tunnel wall with one hand on the sloping concrete sides to keep from sliding down out of control.
After going a couple of hundred feet, he thought he saw a faint green glow ahead. The smell of water was much stronger, and then he could hear falling water. He kept going, taking smaller steps now to maintain his balance. He must be near or even past that power plant building. The green glow was getting stronger, and then he realized he was listening to someone working, working hard, huffing and puffing a little, doing something with a metal object. Based on the shape of the glow, the tunnel he was in ended up fifty feet ahead, and whatever was going on was happening below the level of the tunnel. He decided to get down flat and crawl the rest of the way. As he got closer to the edge, he suddenly froze in place as a swaying snakelike object rose over the edge, backlit by the green glow from below. In silhouette, it looked like a large cobra.
Browne crept down the main street from the administration building, keeping to the sides of the buildings and walking as quietly as he could. He stopped frequently to listen for any more of the mysterious sounds, but there was only the normal nighttime silence. He’d probably imagined it.
When he got to the hole in the street where the plate had been, he shook his head. He broke out his flashlight and played it around the edges of the hole, saw the scrapes and scuffs on the concrete, and then pointed the light straight down into the Ditch. He saw the steel plate, which had been torn off its hinges. The carpet of smashed automobile glass gleamed back at him, and he saw the drag marks leading down toward the power plant.
He swore softly. They’d driven right into it. Right into it. He snapped the light off and sat back on his haunches. There was a ladder of steel rungs built into the concrete wall. Should he go down there? Confirm what had happened? What if they were still alive? He thought he heard distant noises from the tunnel, but then decided he was imagining things. He went to the up-slope side of the hole and shined the light as far down the tunnel as he could, but there was nothing visible. That cinched it: Their vehicle was probably down in the siphon chamber, so even if they’d survived the fall, they were gone. Really gone. Swallowed up by the endless caverns under the arsenal.