Skyprobe (10 page)

After a couple of seconds Schuster, with his ground communication switched to transmit, quietly said, “Christ.” Down below at Kennedy Klaber heard that. Schuster put his hand back on the retro-rocket control, pressed off and on, off and on again. Nothing happened. He tried the alternative system . . . still no result. They were way beyond their position now. Schuster poured sweat into his helmet. His heart pumping rapidly, he fought down a feeling of incipient panic . . . mission control had been right after all, in fact had maybe not acted fast enough. There was decidedly something wrong somewhere. They weren’t going to make it. He said harshly, “Something’s gone crazy.”

Then experience and training took over. “Skyprobe calling control . . . am unable to fire the retro-rockets. Repeat, am unable to fire the retro-rockets ... on either system. I am negativing further attempts at splashdown on this orbit. Over.”

“Control to Skyprobe.” The voice was sharp with anxiety. “What is causing the trouble? Over.”

“Come up and tell me!” Schuster’s voice, too, was harsh and strained; his hands were shaking. “Could be it’s the metal stresses—couldn’t it? Whatever it is, there’s a fault We can’t ditch till I have located this. I’ll investigate while making another orbit.”

“You are okay to do this?”

“Sure. I find no other fault. Over and out.”

Behind Schuster, Danvers-Marshall straightened, switched off the metal cylinder and concealed it again in his gloved hand. He had a curious look in his eyes, a look of relief and hope and triumph. On the ground mission control went into immediate emergency routine and all over the world the telephone and cable and radio links got busy. Klaber himself called the Schuster and Morris homes.

Maybe, Shaw thought, he should do something, anything, before he became physically too weak to act at all.

He could have been in the shaft for almost any length of time. It could have been hours, it could equally well have been days for all he could tell. Swinging at the end of the rope in the pitch blackness, touching now one slimy, greasy wall and now another, knocking the crumbling brickwork, he was sick from the filthy smell in which he existed, tired and hungry and thirsty. His head ached and his eyes were stinging and his chest and armpits felt rubbed raw by the rope. Three times more the manhole cover had been opened up, three times he had answered that he wouldn’t talk. He was still playing for time because it was all he could do. Someone might get on the track of Katherine Danvers-Marshall. . . and the longer he could hang on, the greater the chances of her trail leading to this place.

But—chance was the right word! It was a hell of a long shot. . . .

And he wasn’t to be allowed it anyway. More hours, days or weeks passed and then he heard the cover above him coming off once again and he saw the bright light streaming down. Horn called, “You’re coming up.”

A moment later Shaw felt himself being pulled slowly up the shaft. It was a long haul and it took a long time before he was lifted right through into the cellar. He was lifted almost to the gallows-head, with his legs clear of the shaft. He was lifted into electric light and the dark behind the air grating told him it was night. He saw Beatty over by the steps with a gun in her hand. Horn gave a curious laugh and said, “You have to die, mac. This place is closing down, just in case of trouble. That being so, we’d rather make sure you’re really dead before we leave.”

Horn lifted his gun.

As he did so Shaw brought his legs up and lunged forward, swift as light.

His feet caught Horn a wicked, crunching blow in the under-side of the chin that shattered teeth and jaw and lifted the American backwards. Horn went over as if he’d been sandbagged—but from behind him Beatty opened up with the gun. Her aim wasn’t too bright; the lead sang over Shaw’s head but in doing so it sliced right through the rope holding him to the gallows. As the rope parted Shaw dropped, instinctively throwing his legs out sideways. He landed lightly, right astride the top of the shaft. Horn was still out cold on the floor. Beatty used her gun again but she was badly rattled, firing blinder than before. The bullets went wide. Shaw jumped away from the shaft towards where the coal was stored. He got his right foot behind a large lump and lifted it into the air, hard and fast and accurate. It got Beatty right on her gun arm and she dropped the gun, and before she could recover Shaw had thrown himself bodily at her and the two of them had crashed to the floor, Beatty underneath with the breath knocked clean out of her well-developed body and her head pouring blood at the back from where she had hit the stone.

Like Horn, she was out cold.

Shaw looked across at Horn. The man hadn’t moved a muscle and his head looked a trifle oddly set. Shaw began to think that kick in the jaw had broken his neck. Whether or not that was the case, Horn was undoubtedly immobile for quite a time to come. And Shaw knew the American had been carrying a knife. . . .

He got up from Beatty and ran across to where Horn was lying. Speed was everything now, but he had a necessarily long job ahead if he was to free his hands. Dropping down by Horn’s body—he could see now that the man had in fact broken his neck—Shaw pushed at the clothing with his feet, lifting the coat until he had contacted the knife in the trouser waistband. Slewing, he took the haft in his teeth and pulled it away from the corpse. Quickly he got to his feet and looked around for somewhere to fix the knife firmly enough for him to be able to saw the rope across its blade, and he found the place he wanted in one of the wooden uprights of the gallows, where a bullet from Beatty’s gun had slightly separated two continguous battens. With his teeth, painfully, Shaw slid the haft of the knife into the wood, then drove it home firmly with his foot, wedging it down on to a large nail. Losing no time he turned round, felt with his bound hands for the knife, and maneuvered the blade beneath the rope. He sawed away hard, helping to hold the knife in place with the tips of his fingers.

It took him only two minutes of painful effort and a good deal of blood and then he felt a strand of the rope give. He wrenched his wrists hard apart and the rope pulled away. He shrugged himself out of the loosened noose beneath his arms and then, breathing hard, he ran for Horn’s and Beatty’s guns, reloading the latter and taking some spare ammunition for both. He took a quick look at Beatty; she was pale and there was a lot of blood but she was breathing.

With a gun in each hand Shaw went fast up the cellar steps.

He paused at the door, listening out. There was no sound. Carefully he turned the handle and eased the door open, then stepped out into the passage, which was lit by a single electric bulb. Moving slowly on, he made his way quietly along the passage towards the room where he had breakfasted—how long ago? He still had some way to go when he heard footsteps. They were coming down the passage leading from the hall ahead. Between him and the hall, the passage took a right-angled corner. Shaw flattened against the wall and brought up both guns and he had hardly done this when Thixey and Moss and Kortweiler came round the corner, quietly but apparently without any suspicions at all—and then stopped dead.

Shaw fired point-blank with both guns.

The three men pressed back in a panic. Moss wasn’t quite quick enough to get clear and he died with a bullet in his chest, coughing up a good deal of lung before the end came. The other two vanished temporarily. Shaw moved along, carefully, not too fast, waiting for someone to show. The one that moved and showed was Thixey, behind a heavy Luger, but he hadn’t a chance to use it before Shaw’s bullet took him in the throat and he keeled over in a gush of blood. Kortweiler didn’t wait to carry on the battle. He turned and ran into the hall, dodging Shaw’s fire, and made for the front door. Here he turned and aimed his gun at Shaw, but Shaw got him with his next shot, through the chest like Moss.

Shaw lowered his guns.

It was a pity about Thixey, who could have been made to talk, but it couldn’t be helped now. At least the way out was clear—but first Shaw had to make a close check right through the house. Among other things he rather hoped to find Rencke, who had been totally absent throughout all the persuasion proceedings earlier; but in the event the check produced nothing whatever, except Beatty, who was still out cold. It was only too obvious that Beatty would never have been put in possession of any hard facts and Shaw was far from keen to have his getaway lumbered by an unconscious girl. . . the Special Branch could clean up this place and they could put Beatty into hospital, under a security guard if they felt she was worth it. . . .

Shaw used some of the rope from the gallows to tie Beatty up securely and then, once he was satisfied he had missed nothing, he left the house and headed through the night for Purfleet. He made the journey on foot. Somebody, probably Rencke who must have pushed off earlier, had already taken the car.

“Right,” Latymer said into the telephone. He’d been fast asleep but there had been no sleep in his voice or in his reactions when Shaw had come on the line from a police station. “Get round here at once. There have been other developments—I’ll tell you when you get here.” He reached out and adjusted the shade of the bedside lamp. “Meanwhile I’ll contact the Special Branch and have ’em take over the Purfleet set-up, and I’ll also have another call put out for Rencke—and I’ll see if I can get the Polish ship intercepted.” He rang off, lay back for a moment with his eyes closed, then got busy on the phone again. When some while later Shaw arrived he found Latymer wearing a blue silk dressing-gown and drinking old brandy out of a balloon glass that reminded him irresistibly of Beatty.

Latymer stared. “You look a little frayed, but I’m glad to see you’re in one piece,” he said. “I dare say you can do with a drink. Help yourself.”

“Thank you, sir.” Shaw went over to a tray and poured a stiff whisky.

Latymer said, “I take it you won’t have heard about the spacecraft.”

“What’s new?” Shaw turned, with his glass in his hand. “Washington ordered them to ditch . . . but the retro-rockets failed. Schuster and Morris spent the next two orbits checking right through and they found no fault whatever anywhere—and I gather it has no connection with the slight fuel cell trouble they ran into earlier. They tried to go into retro-sequence again on the third orbit after, and the same thing happened.”

Shaw whistled. “Anything else known, sir?”

“Nothing. Which is not to say you won’t be able to read all about it by tomorrow evening, or I should say this evening . . . in all the world’s known languages! This is going to be a Pressman’s dream of paradise, and there’s going to be any amount of speculation flying around.” He lit a cigarette.

Shaw asked, “What’s the official theory?”

“There’s not one,” Latymer said briefly. “NASA’s foxed.”

“H’mmm. . . Shaw took a pull at the whisky. He asked, “Anything yet from the Special Branch?”

“Give them time, for heaven’s sake.”

“I thought they might have something on Thixey.”

“They haven’t, but I rang a man I know. Thixey was supposed to be on extended leave and he had permission to go abroad. His chief believed him to be sunning himself in Greece. Currently there’s considerable panic in that quarter—”

“I’m not surprised!”

“—and investigations are already in hand.” Latymer jerked ash oil his cigarette. “Tell me,” he said, “ah you got from Thixey.”

Shaw said, “That won’t take long! I told you about Danvers-Marshall. As to the rest. . . Thixey told me ‘they’ could intercept Skyprobe just as soon as the capsule reenters the earth’s atmosphere. He said that with Danvers-Marshall’s help they could do this whenever and wherever NASA orders it to ditch. He sounded pretty confident. Now, to me, what he said sounds as if they mean to bring the capsule down themselves—in their own way and at some preselected spot which certainly won’t be the Caribbean. Unfortunately Thixey didn’t go into the details of how or where!”

Latymer took a long pull at his cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke. “As to
how
,” he said, “I would suggest a radio signal . . . some sort of interference with the controls.”

“I’ve been thinking along those lines but I doubt if it’s quite that, sir. Remember what I told you Thixey said about re-entry—if they were using a radio signal, they could go into action at any time, I imagine. Radio signals aren’t restricted to the earth’s atmosphere, after all.”

“True.” Latymer frowned. “Personally, I prefer to concentrate on
where
. If we can find their base, we’ve got ’em cold, and the
how
won’t matter. Now, if the deadline is the moment of re-entry, we have a little over five days in which to dig these people out, and—”

“Why only five, sir? Can’t the capsule stay in orbit till we’ve found them?”

Latymer said evenly, “No, it can’t. Skyprobe, so they tell me, has an endurance limit, a point in time when she must come down. Most unfortunately, that point will be reached only twenty-four hours after her properly scheduled splashdown time. Taking this extra time into account, it gives us just the five days. It’s because of limited fuel and oxygen capacity due to the tremendous load of specially built-in equipment Skyprobe is carrying, and to other technical factors. Before that final time limit runs out we have to find the interference base and inhibit it. That’s a tall order.” Latymer got to his feet and walked across the room towards a picture hanging above a Japanese cabinet. Sliding the picture aside he pressed a button behind it and along the opposite wall a section of panelling slid noiselessly aside and revealed a large world map, illuminated by concealed lighting. Latymer studied this map thoughtfully for some while, then swung round on Shaw. “Well?” he asked abruptly. “Any ideas?”

Shaw said, “Just a few. I was thinking about locations on the way in from Purfleet.” He hesitated. “My mind’s been running on the Pacific, and the North Pacific in particular.”

“H’m. Reasons?”

“From what Thixey said, it appears Russia is behind all this. It’s fairly obvious they won’t be behind it
openly
. Right, sir?”