I hadn’t explained any of this to Martin. Sometimes a deviation from set plans is required in an emergency, and if a participant recognizes the deviation but not the emergency, nervousness results. Despite Keith Martin’s reputation for cool-headedness in tight situations, I hadn’t seen enough of it demonstrated to trust him completely. Which is why I insisted that I be in charge. Martin didn’t like a subordinate role; it was against his nature. But he had the sense to agree.
The task of moving all of our equipment down the long shaft and depositing it on top of the center elevator cab was a lot more work than just getting it on the roof. Martin served as chief loadbearer again. I followed him down the narrow steel ladder after giving Willow some final instructions and then replacing the removed inspection panel back above my head. Standing on the ladder, I fastened it from below with a single metal screw.
We were sealed inside the elevator shaft now until the job was done. Or until something went wrong.
Martin stared at me expectantly when we were standing together on the top of the elevator that operated adjacent to the back wall of the vault. “What happens now?” he wanted to know. His voice echoed hollowly in the shaft.
“We go to work,” I informed him.
Elevators always have an emergency door in their roofs. I raised the door, wriggled through the opening, and dropped down inside. Using the penlight again, I found the car’s control panel and turned on the overhead light. Martin handed our two equipment bags down to me then dropped himself by my side. “Shall I close the door in the top of the elevator?” he asked in a half-whisper.
“No,” I replied in a normal tone. “We’ll need the ventilation.” Martin was going to stand a lot more noise before he heard less.
I unloaded our canvas sacks and spread their contents in a semicircle on the floor of the cab. I picked up a magnetized screwdriver and removed the screws from one of the three-by-seven-foot metal panels making up the back of the car. I lifted it out of the way, thereby exposing the reinforced concrete wall of the vault just a foot away. It was a thick wall, also serving as a part of the building foundation.
Next I cut the heads from the screws I’d taken from the panel and glued them back in place on the face of the panel with quick-drying epoxy cement. Martin watched me with a puzzled look.
I reached up and removed the light bulb in the roof of the car. Martin held my penlight so I could see what I was doing while I installed a two-socket fixture. I returned the bulb to one socket and placed a female plug in the other. Now that I had both light and a power source, I plugged in the masonry drill and attacked the wall of the vault.
The concrete was fourteen inches thick, but the drill chewed through it like a run in a cheap pair of pantyhose. I soon had the walk honeycombed with holes. Martin watched intently. “It can’t be this easy,” he observed.
“It’s not,” I told him. “There’s quarter-inch steel plate behind that concrete.”
From the floor of the cab I picked up three lengths of steel pipe which I screwed together to make a handle. To this I attached a solid, fourteen pound weight to complete the fabrication of a heavy striking implement. I handed the sledge to Martin. “Go ahead,” I invited him. “Bust up that concrete.”
“What about the noise?”
“The drilling I did wasn’t heard, except maybe by Willow. No one is going to hear the thud of that hammer unless they have an ear pressed against the building. And then they couldn’t easily locate where the noise was coming from. Have at it.”
Martin did, with long-armed swings of the sledge that soon had the air laden with a powdery dust. Even before I removed the panel, there was a one-foot space between the vault wall and the back of the elevator cab. Most of the concrete chunks and chips from Martin’s pounding fell into this gap and ended up at the bottom of the shaft, some four feet beneath the floor of the elevator.
Martin worked so rapidly and to such good effect that he soon exposed the latticework of reinforcing rods, which was all that separated us from the steel vault liner. I stopped him while I disconnected the masonry drill we wouldn’t need again. Next I used the whiskbroom to clean up the mess we’d made in the cab.
Anything too large to be brushed away we kicked over the edge into the bottom of the shaft. We also removed the clinging dust on our clothing, paying special attention to the welts of our shoes. When we finished, the floor of the elevator cab was cleaner than when we had entered.
I picked up the miniature acetylene outfit. It was according to my specifications, both light and compact. The hose was cut down to only five feet, the acetylene carried in a small propane tank, and the oxygen contained in a single skin-diving tank. The outfit was just big enough to do the required job with very little margin for error.
I donned a knitted ski mask and dark-lensed goggles. The torch I lighted had a hot, violet flame that took only seconds to turn the reinforcing rods to water. When I heated them up and then increased the oxygen, the metal grew red, then yellow, then ruptured, and ran before the invisible jet of oxygen.
The barrier of rods separating us from the vault liner soon was just short lengths of scrap metal at the bottom of the elevator shaft. I inspected the final obstruction, the steel liner. From outside it looked like any other piece of sheet plate, but from the blueprints I knew there was no way of cutting through it without triggering an alarm.
“When I burn this and climb inside there,” I told Martin, “clean up everything in the cab again after you pass the bagged equipment inside to me. The cab has to look as though it hasn’t been used for anything. Get set to go. When we move now, we move fast.”
Martin got the equipment to one side of the removed cab panel. I relit the torch, took a deep breath, and sliced through the steel vault liner plate in one long cut, following the edges of the sledged-away concrete.
When the outline was completed, I kicked hard at the center portion of the vault liner. The torched section fell inside the vault with a loud noise. “Quick now!” I called to Martin. Bells were ringing all over the city. I didn’t know how many minutes we had before security forces, police and truckloads of combat troops would be surrounding and crawling all over the building.
Martin had the whiskbroom going again feverishly while I sprayed with a can of air freshener. I closed the emergency exit in the cab’s roof and kept using the aerosol bomb before dropping the can into the pit and jumping through the hole we’d made into the vault’s interior. The aerosol spray would remove the last traces of torch heat and cement dust from the elevator.
Martin threw the equipment bags and their contents in to me over the hot edge of the gaping hole in the vault liner. When I had everything, he scrambled down into the vault. I sent him back to turn off the switch controlling the cab’s roof light, then guided him back with the thin beam of the penlight.
Martin held the light for me while I reached back and fitted the previously unscrewed back panel from the cab into place again, working from inside the vault and outside the elevator. I fastened the panel into place firmly using a dozen powerful alnico magnets. From inside the cab there was nothing to show the panel had ever been removed, since I’d glued the cut-off screw heads back in place, and the panel was almost as securely attached from the heat by the magnets as it would have been by the original screws.
“Now what?” Martin asked tensely, looking at the big hole we’d made. We could hear the sound of running feet outside the vault door. I could picture some guard, perplexed at the sudden explosion of alarm sounds, checking to make sure it was unopened. And relieved to find the status quo.