“I’m right with you,” she said in a clipped, nervy tone. “Let’s get moving!”
“I’ll just try the line. Wait there.” He moved away, groping along the walls towards the enclosed place where Sanderson had left them originally. It took him some time to find the telephone and when he got his hands on it he found it was a smashed wreck. He went back for Flame and told her this. He said, “We’ll go out now and chance if there’s anyone there. Hang on to me and don’t let go. Do exactly as I tell you all the way along.” He bent and pulled her upright and then turned away from her, still holding her hands behind his back. He pulled her arms around his waist and said, “There. Keep holding me like that till I tell you different. Ready?”
“Yes,” she said. Her grip was firm. They moved ahead. Soon the rubble was crunching beneath their feet and a little later Shaw said, “We’re coming up to roof level now. We’ll have to crawl soon.” When he felt the jagged rock against his head he said, “Right, this is it. Down on your stomach now. It’s going to be a long business, but we’re going to make it.” A moment later he said in a puzzled tone, “That’s odd.…”
“What is?”
“I can still see that patch of light… and I fancy it’s brighter. I assumed it was dusk, but it isn’t, it’s dawn! We’ve been here even longer than I thought, Flame.”
“They’ll see us,” she said tautly. “Even if we get through, they’ll pick us up.”
“We’ll worry about that once we’re the other side of the blockage. If I’m to stop the balloon going up, I have to reach civilization fast, so I won’t be aiming to stick around till dark — but anyway, I’ll reconnoitre when we get through. Before that, remember, we may have to deal with the man on telephone watch, though I have a feeling he’s hopped it.”
“And if he hasn’t?”
Shaw grinned into the darkness; it wasn’t a happy or friendly grin. He said, “We’ve just got to be a shade faster than him, that’s all!” He wasn’t as confident as he sounded; to some extent they would have the advantage of surprise, but unless the man had cloth ears he must surely hear their progress through the rubble when they neared the other end. You could hardly hope to emerge at the far end of a tunnel block as big as this one in total silence.
They went on, pulling their bodies over the rough, sharp jags of rock. Away ahead the view of the sky grew slowly, infinitesimally larger, the sky itself grew lighter. That sky looked glorious; from the little Shaw could see the weather seemed clear now — no rain in that sky, but some wind, and that wind was blowing in through the fissure entry, life-giving and very welcome except for the fine dust it blew into their faces. The gap through which they were crawling proved narrower than Shaw had hoped. Every now and again they were forced to stop while he scrabbled with bleeding fingers to clear away the piles of rubble. It was slow, laborious, exhausting — and all the while they were working against the clock. At any moment there could be more earth tremors, and then there might be a final fall from the roof, a fall that would bury them beyond all hope. As they wormed their way onward they were forced to take rests more and more often, lying face down and inert on the uneven surface, eyes and mouth, ears and nose filled with gritty dust, the sweat from their bodies mingling with the blood from lacerated skin to make the dust stick. The moment a little strength came back Shaw started on again, dragging himself through the narrow space, thrusting with his legs and with snake-like movements of his supple body. It was an agonizing process, physically and mentally — and it was taking longer than he had estimated.
It was during one of those rest periods, when they had lain still and silent for a while, that Shaw heard the faint, very distant sounds ahead. At first he believed this to be no more than tremor-loosened fragments falling at intervals from overhead. But he knew it wasn’t anything like that when the sounds came nearer and became more regular; and when he saw the hump, the outline of something moving very slowly forward against the oblong background of the dawn sky, he knew just what it was.
He turned his head and spoke very softly over his shoulder to Flame. He whispered, “Someone’s coming in. We stay right where we are and wait for him. I don’t think he’s heard anything… if he had, he’d just have waited in the clear, out of sight and with his gun lined up this way.”
“Why’s he coming in?” she asked in a panicky voice.
Shaw whispered back impatiently, “I don’t know — we’ll have to ask him — if he’s capable of talking when I’ve done with him!” A moment later a torch beam cut through the darkness, flickering on the roof some way short of their position, outlining the jagged pieces of rock that so nearly filled the way. Whispering to Flame to crawl backwards and move over to the left, Shaw also moved back until he was in the lee of a large chunk of rock and then he started carefully and quietly arranging some of the debris so that it concealed their bodies as far as possible from ahead. That done, and the still distant torch beam off again, he groped around until he found exactly what he wanted: a long-shaped jag of rock, pointed like a marline-spike, very sharp, very lethal.
With this poised ready, he lay dead still.
Chapter Nineteen
They practically stopped breathing as the moving enemy crunched his way nearer.
So far he had shown no signs of suspicion, was coming onward slowly but was taking no care to be quiet, no doubt assuming the two trapped persons to be dead — a reasonable enough assumption in the circumstances. The noise of his own journey would have stopped him hearing the sounds from inward earlier. Shaw could only guess at the reason for the man coming in like this; it was most probable he had been ordered by headquarters to reconnoitre if at all possible, so as to make quite certain Shaw and the girl were dead before he was withdrawn and the fissure abandoned for ever.
The man came closer; they could hear the heavy breathing and the muttering of a scared man who didn’t like his work, a man who knew that he too might at any moment be flattened by another fall. But he was obeying orders and no doubt he was more afraid of Tucker than of earthquakes. But this man wasn’t going to live to be troubled by Tucker any more, or earthquakes either.
He sounded within three feet now.
Shaw’s grip tightened on his jagged rock splinter and very slowly he moved his hand forward, making no sound. The darkness was as intense as ever and in any case the piled rubble was still shielding him. And then a moment later the torch came on again; the man’s eyes, visible now in the back-glow, widened with shock and seemed to focus on a point beyond Shaw — on the girl, who was evidently more exposed than was Shaw himself. There was a sharp breath and the torch beam moved directly on to Flame. Shaw heard her cry out, saw the man’s hand move back along his body as if reaching for a gun. In the split-second that followed, Shaw moved, and he moved very fast indeed. Thrusting out with his legs, powerfully, to give himself extra momentum, he sent his hand forward in a beautifully aimed jab. The sharp splinter of heavy rock went through the air like lightning, with all Shaw’s muscle-power behind it, and it took the man clean between the eyes and went in deep. The man died without a sound, died with his forehead split wide open and the top of his skull pierced through from below.
It took them a long while to clear the corpse-blocked tunnel. Shaw scrabbled at the debris by the side of the body, shovelling it back to Flame, who manhandled it away behind. After a while there was enough clearance to allow them to go on, and they crawled past the spot where the body lay, where blood drooled out over the rubble from the shattered head. Shaw reached out and took the torch from a death-grip and a Colt ·45 from a holster. Flame asked in a shaky voice, “What do we do when we get out of here?”