Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (54 page)

The force of the flow pushed him along the passage on his front until he came to a staircase, on to which he gratefully clambered, spitting what felt like a lungful of water as he did so. There was no time to reel, to feel dazed or even fear, and still less to weigh up his options in light of who might be lying in wait. The water was rising and so must he. Taking a deep breath, he got to his feet and began climbing the stairs, reaching another curving corridor at the top. He knew it wouldn’t help to look back, but felt he had to anyway. The water was coming up the stairs almost as fast as he had, and was only a few steps behind. Nonetheless, behind it was, and that was all that mattered. Or at least that was all that mattered until he turned back around and saw more water coming to meet him, this time pouring down the next flight of stairs.

‘Aw for fuck’s sake.’

Ray gripped the banister rails one by one as he made the next ascent, the rubber around his feet providing a welcome degree of purchase on this concrete waterfall. The sound of rushing and crashing got louder as he reached the top, where he found himself at one end of a balconied walkway, affording a view along one side of the whole flooded excavation. The water level was already higher than the balcony floor, flowing in ankle‐
deep under the bottom rung of the safety railings and pouring down inside the turbine housing to meet the stuff he’d been climbing to escape.

The next two turbines along were wrecked, their maintenance and access areas mangled and collapsed, and the force of the blast had impacted where he was standing too. Further along the corridor, the railings were buckled and the floor was tilted upwards almost the width of the passage where something had smashed into it from below, the peak of this tilt being the only part not submerged.

Ray waded his way carefully up to this point, which was where he was able to see that there was no corresponding downslope on the other side, because there was in fact no floor on the other side. The steel inside the concrete had been severed, and the remainder of the balcony floor was folded back against the next stairway, blocking the route up. Behind him, there was a bubbling sound as the water from below came up over the top of the staircase.

Is this it? he couldn’t help but ask himself. No sudden blast as he hurled charges from the dam, no bullet or knife, but drowning here unseen in the bowels of this man‐
made cave? He thought of Kate, that first night they made love.

Adam and the Ants. No bullet or knife. He thought of Martin, all the hopes he had, the songs he wanted to play him, the books he wanted him to read.

What would he be when he grew up?

Ray breathed in through his nose. All around him was the smell of wet stone: incongruously warm, inexplicably comforting.

‘Make it that there’s a river runnin’ through the caves, an’ we’re wadin’ through it until it gets too deep an’ then we have to duck under an’ haud oor breaths an’ swim through the dark an’ come up in a big pool except still in a cave, right?’

Ray looked over the mangled and now almost submerged balcony railings into the rising, foaming black pool, and knew that he still had a chance. He remembered the sunken city level in Duke Nukem, trying to ignore the fact that he’d snuffed it the first couple of times attempting to find his way out of the submerged skyscraper. It was only a matter of yards, and this was the one area in which Real Life(tm) gave better odds than FPS games; the latter only letting you hold your breath for about ten seconds before you started to drown.

Ray dived over the railings and began swimming around the turbine, striking out for the next platform along, which would have been sheltered from the blast. He knew the water would be above the level of the balcony by the time he got there, but was not tempted to wait for it to lift him all the way to the machine hall’s gantry. The only easier target than a player on a ladder was some lamer bobbing below you in a big open pool of water.

As he approached the turbine housing, he took a breath and dived under the surface. The lights had all shorted out below the waterline, but the giant rig on the cavern ceiling allowed him to make out where the balcony was. Once under, he propelled himself in a breaststroke, looking for light spilling down the next stairwell, above which the fluorescent strips should still be functioning. He swam in above the sunken railings and followed the corridor ceiling, a glow visible at the end.

His chest tightened as he rose up the staircase, a moment of despair setting in when he reached the top and found himself still submerged, but on this level there was a second flight zigzagged against the first. He turned around and kicked both feet off the wall for renewed momentum, already breathing out in a stream of bubbles before surfacing with a great gasp five steps below the dry corridor floor.

Simon stood in front of the closed‐
circuit monitor relaying the view from the security post at the main entrance. He’d been staring at it for a few minutes now, unable to take his eyes off the view, though it mocked him with its silent tranquillity. It showed the locked steel gates, the approach road and the landscaped flower beds, but what he saw was humiliation, failure and defeat. What it did not show was an engulfing torrent of water sweeping into Loch Fada, on its way to wipe out Cromlarig at the end of the glen. The dam was not breached, though every other fucking thing seemed to have been.

He thought of Shub and his drills, then looked to the Glock pistol in his hand.

No. Not until he’d got some payback, anyway.

Simon turned to the window and gazed into the machine hall, where water would soon fully swallow the crippled turbines, filling up the hollow mountain but unable to wash away his failure. He felt it ironic, nonetheless, to be surveying such enormous devastation and regarding it with anything less than pride. It was, it had to be acknowledged, one hell of a mess; the thought making him appreciate that though the water couldn’t wash away his mistakes, perhaps it could yet cover them up. Failure was a matter of degrees.

Terrorism, like politics, was about perception. The outside world didn’t have a clue what was intended to happen here. All they would know was what they would find: the mighty Dubh Ardrain power station destroyed, and thirty‐
odd staff drowned in the very waters they once harnessed. Mopoza could take the huff if he liked, and would probably withhold payment, but if he had any sense, he’d make out this had been the sum of the plan all along. It was still one hell of a strike against the General’s enemies, in the heartland of the man who had been in charge of the forces that overthrew him.

But jobbie‐
polishing aside, it was still merely a fraction of what it should have been. For that Simon wanted answers, and he wanted them written in blood. He picked up his radio.

‘Any of you fuckers still alive, report to the Control Room right away.’

He watched them from the window a few minutes later, a paltry rump making their disparate ways across the machine hall before grouping at the foot of the stairs: Jones, Lydon, Simonon and finally Strummer.

‘Is this it?’ he asked rhetorically, stepping out into the corridor as they approached.

‘Yeah,’ said Jones. ‘Deacon and Headon got it in the blast. I don’t know about May, though. I thought he was with you.’

‘He was,’ Simon said, holding open the Control Room door.

‘Where is he now?’

‘Right here.’

‘Oh fuck,’

The four of them gathered around May’s body as Simon closed the door.

‘What happened to him?’ Strummer asked.

‘What does it look like? I shot him.’

‘What for?’

‘He disappointed me.’

‘He disa … You fucking—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Simon commanded. ‘What you ought to know, Joe, is that Mr May was taking a very unhealthy interest in my personal background, and who’s to say he wasn’t taking a similar interest in all of yours?’

Strummer’s eyes narrowed. ‘I think he was just as interested as all of us in knowing who the fuck this Ash person is and how he got here.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ Simon agreed. ‘So I’d suggest we get hold of him, and then we can all get everything out in the open. The cop too. We need to find out how much the authorities know, and how the fuck they know it. I want them taken alive.’

‘This whole place is going to be underwater soon.’

‘So you’d better hurry up, then.’

‘Even if they’re alive, they could be anywhere.’

‘They could be anywhere, but it’s where they’ll be headed that matters. And these self‐
righteous goody‐
two‐
shoes fuckers are nothing if not predictably principled.’

Ray ran up the next staircase on the balls of his feet. The noise of the water was covering his sounds, but he knew it would cover everyone else’s too, so he ducked back against the wall when he got to the top. After this passageway, he would reach the final flight, which would take him to the machine hall, where death or glory awaited, depending on how the terrorists had fared in the blast. He unslung the speargun from around his shoulder and took it in both hands, then set off into the corridor at a sprint. He managed two paces before his feet were whipped from under him in a flash of black.

When he turned around on the floor, he was looking down the barrel of a pistol. Fortunately, it was Angelique’s finger on the trigger.

‘Thank Christ, you’re alive,’ she said, offering a hand to get him to his feet. They hugged each other and laughed with nervous relief.

‘So how we doin’?’ Ray asked.

‘Still intact.’

‘More than can be said for this place. What happened?’

Angelique looked a little embarrassed. ‘Oops. My bad, as the Yanks say. I threw a load of the explosives down the aqueduct. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Probably took out some of the bad guys, but …’ She shrugged, like she was talking about a supermarket car park prang.

‘No use cryin’ over spilt milk, eh?’

‘Well, it’s not all my fault. I’m not the one who sealed off the tailrace.’

‘Oh fuck,’ said Ray, remembering. It was designed to channel the outwash of all three aqueducts at once, so would have drained the place in no time if he hadn’t wheeled it shut. It still might, if they could open it.

‘There’s a manual over‐
ride in the Control Room,’ he said.

‘Okay, then that’s where I’m headed.’

‘What about the bad guys?’

‘They’re runnin’ away. I think it would be fair to say that they don’t like it up them.’

‘Don’t like a square go, mair like. Fuckin’ llamas.’ Angelique gave him a baffled look. ‘What the hell’s a llama, apart from a long‐
necked South American quadruped?’

‘Gamer slang. A lamer is somebody who’s just shite, but a llama is someone who, regardless of whether they’re lame or leet, will always be a wank.’

‘Sounds like our boys. They’re pullin’ out in the huff.’

‘How d’you know?’

Angelique held up her radio.

‘Mine’s at the bottom of a pipe,’ Ray said.

‘Yeah, sorry. You picked the wrong aqueduct – there were more charges still in place above the one you took.’

‘It was the express route down, at least.’

‘The bad guys didnae fancy your chances, anyway. They’ve written us off as dead and they’re sneakin’ out to lick their wounds.’

‘Magic. So we just tread water – literally – until they’re gone?’

‘Not quite.’

‘How did I know you were gaunny say that.’

‘There’s hostages being’ held in the storage chamber at the end of the cavern. One of the bad guys asked Darcourt if they should machine‐
gun them before they left. His exact answer was “save your bullets – they’ll all be drowned in about ten more minutes”.’

‘Fuck.’

‘The storage area’s down a ramp at the—’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Ray interrupted.

‘We can wait a few minutes, but if the coast isnae clear upstairs soon, we’ll have to take a chance. God knows how many of them are trapped down there.’

‘I’ll call it a bonus mission. Let’s do it.’

They set off at a jog before cautiously climbing the final flight, down which more water was inexplicably pouring.

‘How can …?’ Angelique asked.

‘Place is like a Terry Gilliam cartoon. Pipes, channels and tubes everywhere. And don’t complain to me, bombergirl.’

They emerged behind the exposed top section of the turbine, crouching together as they took a tentative look down the hall. There was further damage even at floor level, blast debris having smashed into the far end of the control building, beneath the Control Room’s external gantry. Loose and broken bricks lay on the floor, amid fragments of metal and concrete. Insulation panels had been blown off the wall, leaving heavy cables exposed against the brickwork where they ran from beneath the floor, all the way up the rockface to the lighting rig on the ceiling.

Around Ray and Angelique the water was ankle‐
deep, pouring over the edge into the excavation, where the level was rising to meet it, now only a few yards lower. To their right, they could see it flowing down the slope towards the storage chamber; to their left it was covering the cavern mouth and running downhill into the entrance tunnel, where crucially there were no longer any vehicles.

‘Okay,’ said Angelique. ‘This is it. You get them out of there. I’ll get the tailrace open.’

Simon heard the quiet footfalls in the corridor and held his breath. They sounded fast, nimble and light; he guessed female, the cop. He backed against the wall behind the open door and gripped the SPAS‐
12 with both hands, left on the barrel, right on the trigger.

The door moved a little as she came through it, upon which she was confronted by the sight of May’s body, Simon having moved him to the centre of the floor, face up, for this very purpose. The corpse took her immediate attention just long enough for him to step out from behind the door and say ‘Psst’.

He fired as she turned, aiming for her kevlar‐
protected chest, the point‐
blank blast throwing her backwards into the air and over the control console. Her handgun – another Glock, so in fact it was probably Taylor’s handgun – clattered against the window and thumped to the floor alongside her. Simon leapt across to kick the pistol further away, but she was in no state to even reach for it yet. Her eyes were closed as she winced and moaned, the spray of pellets embedded in the vest having no doubt broken a few ribs. Simon drove the butt of his rifle into her throat, causing her to grab her neck and roll over in reflex. He looked at her face, pretty beneath the pain. Must get her out of that wetsuit, he thought. It would be conducive to her interrogation, and after all he’d been through today, the least he deserved was a ride.