Undersea Prison (34 page)

Stratton chose not to question the remark and walked over to dozens of large steel gas bottles stacked in frames along a wall. They were an argon-oxygen mix, all connected together through an array of high-pressure pipes.

‘OCR emergency gas,’ Hamlin said. ‘It ain’t essential, though. Just a back-up.’

Stratton reckoned that two men could barely lift one of the bottles, never mind carry it very far. He had no specific interest in them and was simply filing away anything that might be of value.

‘Shall we get on with it, then?’ Hamlin asked, standing behind him.

Stratton had not heard him draw close. He looked around at the man and saw that he was wearing a strange smirk.

‘The door,’ Hamlin said. ‘Let’s test your theory.’

‘You mean open it?’

‘Sure. What else?’

‘It’s not something you can test and put away for another day. They’ll know in OCR as soon as it opens. We’ll only get one hit.’

‘Time’s running out for the both of us, especially for you,’ Hamlin said. ‘Gann ain’t the patient type. He’s gonna make his move soon.’

Hamlin was attempting to manipulate him by playing up the Gann threat. But the older man did not know how right he was. Gann was coming after him because he was the only witness to the ferry sabotage. This was no longer just a mission to get the tablet from Durrani. It had also become largely about Stratton’s survival.

He suddenly felt overwhelmed, his confidence about completing the mission in tatters.There was no way out for him, either. Even giving himself up and telling the truth about why he was in Styx was not going to save him. It would only make matters worse since his credibility as a witness would be too high. Stratton had bounced into the operation, all cocky and confident, not only about getting hold of the tablet but also making an historic escape.What an arrogant prick he was, he thought.

Stratton could feel his temples tighten as he realised the true level of his desperation. He was well and truly screwed. And now Hamlin wanted to open the door. But into what? Stratton had no idea where to go or what to do.Was everything down to waiting in ambush in some dark corner in the hope that Gann would amble past so that he could jump him? That was the best Stratton could come up with. It was pathetic. He felt like an amateur.

He looked at Hamlin who now represented the last vestige of hope he had to cling on to. His survival depended now on the plans of an old lunatic. Things could not get any worse. ‘Where’re you going if we get through that door?’

‘Let me explain somethin’ to you. I’ve spent two years, ever since the first day I walked into this joint, figuring out how to get out of here. One thing I hadn’t been able to figure were the doors and you walked into my life with the answer.That’s providence and I’m grabbing it with both hands. But I don’t owe you anything.’

‘Nothing for showing you how to open the door?’

‘You need that as much as I do. Maybe more. At least I have time on my hands. Yours is running out.’

‘You don’t even know it’ll work.’

‘It’ll work. You gave me the missing piece of the puzzle.’

‘Why can’t you take me with you to the ferry? That’s the only way out.’

‘Why don’t you just concentrate on your own problems? ’

‘Getting out that door doesn’t get me to Gann.’

‘Oh, I dunno. A resourceful guy might stack things in his favour.’

‘You’re full of shit, Hamlin. You’re just a crazy old man. I don’t see why I should help you if you can’t help me.’

Hamlin started to grin widely, displaying his stained and cracked teeth. ‘Maybe I can.’

‘I’m beginning to think you’re just an old windbag.’

Hamlin was still smiling. ‘I don’t know why I like you, ferryman. But I do . . . I know this place better’n anyone, even the people who built it, because I know the changes that were made when the corporation moved in. The original experiment needed independence from a surface barge. A life-support system floating on the surface defeated the whole idea. Failure in that department was probably why it got cancelled. The current surface barge was put in for the prison. They depend on it. It’s the key to helping the both of us. We need confusion. The barge provides air, water, power. We screw the barge up and we got ourselves a pretty neat diversion, just like a military operation.’

‘How can you do that from down here?’

Hamlin gave him a knowing smile once again. ‘This room houses all the distribution conduits for the prison since it was intended to be the main life-support factory. When they brought the barge in it made sense to utilise the distribution system that was already in place. That’s what I figured, at least. So I searched around. I discovered I was wrong to a certain extent. They rebuilt the water- and air-distribution system, added water pumps to level three, shut down the sterilisers and desalinators, reduced the workload for the air scrubbers. But what they did end up utilising was some eighty per cent of the power-distribution conduits.’

Hamlin walked over to a metal staircase and climbed to the top. ‘Come take a look,’ he said.

Stratton followed.

Hamlin led him along a gantry, around a corner, behind the line of scrubbers to an ordinary door. He reached for a small rock in the stone wall, removed it, put his hand inside the hole and withdrew a key. ‘One of the service engineers always used to leave the key in the door while he was working in here. I made a mould out of putty, took the key out of the lock one day and made an impression. Took me a while to make a copy of the key,’ he said as he put the key into the lock.‘It ain’t a perfect copy,’ he said, concentrating while manipulating it, massaging it back and forth. The key finally raised the tumblers and turned. ‘But it works in the end,’ he said as he opened the door.

Inside were several large dust-covered electrical cabinets. ‘These are just two of the transformers. But they’re an important pair - if you wanna screw up the others, that is.’

Hamlin opened the cupboards and Stratton looked at the complex array of high-powered cables, switches and junctions. ‘How do you know what feeds what?’ he asked.

Hamlin was still wearing that know-it-all grin. He reached behind one of the cabinets and retrieved a long tube of paper, placed it on a table and unrolled it. It was an electrical blueprint, a complex diagram that was practically meaningless to Stratton. ‘I took this off one of the engineers about a year ago. I know every damn circuit on here.’

‘You can control the prison’s circuitry from here?’

‘No. Can’t do that. But I can sure as hell screw it up. I can trip circuit-breakers all over that damned barge. The barge isn’t manned twenty-four seven. Even if there was an engineer on board it’d take him a while to figure it out.And no engineer would reconnect a circuit before they knew why it broke in the first place.’

‘You can cut the power to the prison?’

‘Some of it.’

‘But there’s an auxiliary power system.’

‘Sure. But it only runs essentials. In this place that’s mostly life support. Security always comes second to safety. I’d say you’d have as much as eight hours before the system was back on line.That long enough for you?’

‘Internal doors?’

‘Level access will become emergency access, not security. They’ll all go green.’

‘The ferry dock?’

‘Uh-uh. External access is safety so they’ll stay secure. I don’t know about cell doors and internal security such as that one,’ Hamlin said, indicating the door to the scrubber room. ‘That’s why we have to open it manually before we blow the fuses, otherwise we’d have no power to do it after. You see what I’m tellin’ you?’

Stratton did. His mind raced at the possibilities. He could get back up to the other levels. But he still wouldn’t be able to get to Durrani unless he knew precisely where the Afghan was. His only chance was to get to Gann first. If he could then he might be able to resume his original plan, having neutralised the main threat to his life. It looked like that plan still amounted to nothing more than lying in wait. But if the entire facility was in turmoil there was a good chance Gann would turn up and an equally good chance Stratton could find a dark, unobserved place from which to jump out at him. The overall plan was sketchy at best but it opened up possibilities. Suddenly he reckoned that once he was through the door he didn’t need Hamlin after all. That was a relief in itself. ‘OK,’ he said.

‘You go right. I turn left,’ Hamlin said, wanting assurance.

Stratton could not imagine why Hamlin would want to head deeper into the complex. Left was essentially down. As far as he could remember there was nothing in that direction but the mine and some more caverns. ‘You go where you want. I’m heading up.’

‘Good.’ Hamlin grinned. ‘To make the most of it we should open the door at the same time the circuit-breakers snap. That way, when the alarm triggers in OCR they’ll think it’s part of the electrical fault.They’ll have too much else to worry about than a door opening down at this level anyway.’

Stratton began to prepare himself mentally for the push. Like a runner approaching the starting line, he was thinking ahead to the first curve in the track. Charging up the corridor would be no different from crashing into a house and not knowing where the enemy was.

‘Let’s do it,’ Hamlin said as he left the room and headed along the gantry and down the steps. ‘A drill saw and something to isolate the sensor,’ he called out as he hurried down the steps.

 

Doctor Mani stood over Durrani who was lying on the operating table in a near-unconscious state. As usual, the medic was not expecting to find much in the way of outward signs of injury after an over-zealous pressure interrogation but he did a cursory check as always. Durrani moaned as Mani pushed open his eyelids to inspect his pupils with a light, looking for any sign of brain damage.

The door opened and Gann walked in. ‘How is he?’ he asked, towering over Mani.

‘They might’ve gone too far with this one. How many times have I warned those idiots?’ Mani said, pulling open Durrani’s shirt. He plugged the two earpieces of his stethoscope into his ears and moved the other end from one place to another around the Afghan’s chest while listening to the man’s erratic breathing. ‘God knows how many of his bronchial sacs are ruptured.’ Mani felt along the sides of Durrani’s ribcage. ‘I think he’s dislocated several ribs.’

‘Is he gonna live?’ Gann asked, not particularly interested from any humane point of view. He collected knowledge of the human body’s endurance to violence like a stunt-car racer took an interest in car wrecks.

‘He’ll live. Question is how comfortably. Unless he’s suffered brain damage in which case it won’t matter, I suppose.’

‘I heard the tech say they took him equal to almost halfway to the surface. His lungs must’ve been tryin’ to push outta his backside.’ Gann grinned at his description.

‘Charming,’ Mani said dryly as he wheeled a scanner over to the table and positioned it above Durrani’s throat. ‘Would you move aside, please?’ he said to Gann who was blocking the doctor’s view of a monitor on a nearby counter.

Gann obliged just enough, craning to look down at Durrani. ‘He’s gotta bit of red froth comin’ out the side of his mouth.’

‘Thank you. Now, please, give me room.’ Mani slowly moved the scanner down Durrani’s torso, his eyes glued to the monitor that showed the Afghan’s chest cavity in a variety of colours indicating bone, air spaces, flesh and fluids. ‘This man cannot go back into that chamber - ever. He won’t survive another massive decompression.’

‘They’ve got other methods,’ Gann said matter-of-factly.

Mani glanced sideways at Gann who was now concentrating on the monitor. He had known the man since arriving at the prison a year and a half ago to relieve the original doctor and had never ceased to be amazed at the depths of human depravity Gann was capable of reaching. Mani had never come across such an animal before. He more or less understood the need for such types in a high-security guard system of this nature and accepted it was a small community and that contact was unavoidable. But he wished he did not have to communicate face to face with him and his kind quite so much as he did. Preferably he wouldn’t have had anything at all to do with them. What irritated Mani most was how Gann treated him as some kind of colleague or, worse, accomplice. Mani accepted that he was a part of the Styx corruption but he never saw himself as anywhere near Gann’s sordid level.

‘You can speak their language, can’t you?’ Gann asked.

‘A little. I’m not fluent.’

‘When he comes around I want you to ask him some questions.’

‘Fine. Come back next week sometime.’

Gann looked at the side of Mani’s head as he suppressed an urge to punch it. He regarded the doctor as a subordinate and was not used to being talked to by him in that way. He wondered if it was perhaps time to remind the man of his position in the prison hierarchy. ‘I wanna know what Charon was doing with him in the galley,’ he said.

Mani sensed the irritation in Gann’s voice and realised his last comment had not gone down very well. ‘Sure. I’ll ask him . . . Anything else?’

Gann sensed the new patronising tone. ‘Maybe I’ll just wait until he comes around.’

Mani was always careful not to upset Gann, having experienced his venom on his first day on the job. Styx’s original doctor had also been an Asian - a coincidence, although that fellow was a Sikh. He had arrived wearing his turban, which did not go down very well among the guards, particularly with Gann. It was too similar to the traditional black headdress of the Taliban and as far as Gann was concerned the doctor had to be more or less the same as them. Mani never met the man and did not know how he had come to be employed as the prison doctor but when he’d refused to remove his turban he’d had to go.

When Gann found out that Mani was Hindu he confronted him right away, telling him he didn’t trust anyone who was religious, especially on this job, and a religious Asian was off the chart. Gann didn’t think there was any difference between Hinduism and Islam and therefore Mani was considered to be doubly untrustworthy. It took a long and patient conversation to persuade Gann that Hinduism was not a religion but a way of life, a philosophy. It was far older than Christianity, which in turn was hundreds of years older than Islam. Mani did not worship a god or single out any prophet and he had no set rituals or performances - like praying on a mat, for instance.