“All out,” he said, and they piled out into the filthy weather. Sanderson slapped the guns dangling down his thighs from the Wild West gunbelt thick with cartridges. “Okay, Lee, bring the box.”
Lee delved into the front of the truck. While he was doing this his companion brought out some bundles of narrow steel tubing from beneath the seats in the back, together with a field telephone and a roll of electric cable. When Lee was ready the quick-firing automatics of the Negro guards nudged Shaw and Flame on behind Sanderson, who climbed towards the rock face with long, loping, easy strides, his tight-trousered buttocks looking like some grotesque, self-mobile apple. Shaw couldn’t make out yet what was to happen but he wasn’t left in the air much longer. Sanderson, reaching a thin, dark fissure in the hillside, stopped and beckoned to Lee. “This is it,” he said. “Set your gear up and have the fuses ready to light soon as we get back. Get moving,” he snapped at the two prisoners. “Move on into the fissure there… and keep moving!”
Shaw set his teeth and moved, half dragging Flame along with him on the rope. Once into the fissure the going was rough and difficult — and the rope didn’t help at all; they literally stumbled along, with loose grit and stones and jagged chunks of rock sliding about under their feet. Immediately behind them were the Negro guards, urging them on with their gun-barrels. The rope led back between the guards to Sanderson, who was bringing up the rear and shining a powerful torch ahead to light the way. The beam played on slimy rock, granite-hard, threaded in parts with metallic streaks of ore. This place, however, hadn’t the look of a mine. The passage was too obviously unused, too virgin. It was more like a natural pot-hole. Soon the lack of headroom was such that they had to bend nearly double to move at all. Meanwhile Shaw had no intention of turning and making a stand before the automatic weapons that would rip both him and Flame into little pieces before they could achieve anything more positive than a formal protest. While they lived there was hope of a sort… he whispered to Flame as they stumbled on into the close, dust-laden atmosphere, doing what he could to keep her going. He feared the results if she should lose control now, and he knew she wasn’t far off breaking point. It was a miracle she’d kept going so long.
After a while the torch showed a tunnel leading off to the left and Sanderson said, “If I was you, I wouldn’t go along there. It ends up over the big drop — that’s to say, just around twelve feet below the doors of the vehicle trap back at H.Q. You reach the end, and one more step sends you over into a thousand feet of nothing.” As he finished speaking the rock fissure took a downward slant, soon becoming so steep that Shaw found himself practically sliding down on his back. He was sweating hard and so was Flame. Loose rock flew ahead, dislodged by their movement, and the rope tautened as Sanderson, cursing, held back, digging his heels in to prevent himself falling. But shortly after that the passage ended. The torch-beam showed that the terminal point was a small, enclosed space, almost circular, with a diameter of scarcely four feet.
Sanderson said, “Okay, this is the end of the line. Here you stay and say your prayers… not that it’ll do you any good now. Only one thing can save you and that’s to talk.” He paused. “Well? You have anything you want to say before we leave you?”
“Not a thing.”
“Bud, think of the girl.”
“I am — among other considerations. If I talked, she’d still die and you know it, whatever you like to tell her now.”
“It’s your decision.” Sanderson hitched his thumbs into his belt above the twin revolvers. “Your decision to stay… and, bud, I sure hope the girl’ll keep that in mind after we’re gone!” He snapped an order at the guards and one of them came forward with his gun levelled and his gaze on Shaw’s eyes. He flipped the rope loose, jerking it away over their heads. Then, still watchful, he stepped back.
Sanderson said, “This is where we leave you in the dark. Lee, he’s been busy rolling in a fuse behind us and planting dynamite in the roof of the fissure. After we leave here, the fuse is lit. When the charges blow, they bring down the rock and block the fissure for around maybe thirty yards. That just about seals you in, I guess. So get used to your tomb.” He shone the torch around the tiny space. “Nice,” he said in a genial tone. “Not so big you can’t get to know each other better. If you get tired of it — just talk.”
“And how, precisely, do I do that?” Shaw asked sardonically.
“You’ll see.” After a few minutes a dragging sound, accompanied by footsteps, came nearer and Lee appeared with his sidekick, pulling a length of cable through a narrow steel tube made up in sections — the sections Shaw had seen in the back of the truck. In one hand Lee’s companion carried the field telephone, which now he connected to the cable and set on the ground by Shaw’s feet.
Sanderson said, “Okay, Lee.” The Negro and his assistant went back the way they had come. Sanderson turned to Shaw. He said, “That line runs right through where the charges are due to blow and the steel tubing is special stuff that’ll keep the line open through the fall of rock. That’s your link. At the other end we’ll leave a man keeping a listening watch. You decide to talk, you just pick up that phone and tell our man. He calls up H.Q. on his walkie-talkie. Within half an hour someone’ll be here to take down all you say along the wire. If what you say satisfies Tucker, we’ll have the fallen rock clear so quick you won’t know it was ever there. If it doesn’t satisfy him, you and the girl stay nice and neatly buried for all time. Right?”
“You’re a low-life bastard, Sanderson.”
Sanderson leered. “Maybe I am, in your book. But don’t take too long making up your mind. You’ll find there’s not all that much air down here after the charges blow. I’ve a feeling you’re going to be yelling for help inside a coupla hours at the most. Meanwhile, don’t try to follow us out. If you do that, you’ll be left to die slowly with bullets in painful places.”
After that Sanderson and the guards, streaming sweat in the close atmosphere, turned away and marched off, Sanderson still carrying the torch. After the scrape of boots had retreated a dozen yards there was pitch darkness, and a silence broken only by the fall of rock fragments dislodged by the men as they went back to the fresh air outside. There was already a stale, used-up feel about the air in the fissure; it was hot and thick and it stank.
Shaw reached out for Flame. He said, “I’m sorry, Flame dear. But even if I did talk, they still wouldn’t let us out.”
“Sure,” she said unsteadily. “That’s what we have to remember when things get bad.” He felt her arms go around him, searching for comfort.
He had no means of telling how long it was before the first of Lee’s charges blew; both their watches had been removed some while ago. But the explosion seemed to Shaw to come fairly quickly after the men’s departure. The charges went up with a fiendish roar in the enclosed space, though presumably they would in fact have been small ones. The hot air compressed back along the tunnel. Shaw felt tremendous pressure on his body, in his cracking ear-drums, as another and another charge went off, filling the air with a fine powdery dust that of itself seemed likely to choke the life from them. Coughing, spluttering, breathing with great difficulty already, they waited. Soon that part of their ordeal was over. But the air itself remained stifling, rank with the stench of the explosions. All the fresh air they would get now would be a minute trickle coming along the steel tube sections and any that might come in from the long tunnel leading to the pit below Tucker’s headquarters. Shaken and bruised, Shaw felt around for the field telephone, found it, fumbled for the handpiece. He operated it and a few seconds later a thin, distant voice, the voice of a Negro, answered. “Yeah? You goin’ to talk, bud?”