Dawson drank some more, spluttered, but less than before, and put his glass down. “I guess that’s about all.”
“And more than enough,” said Brady with unaccustomed warmth. “A splendid job, son.” He looked around the assembled group, then asked sharply, “Where’s George?”
Until then no one had noticed that Dermott was missing. Then Mackenzie said, “He slipped out with Carmody some time back. You want me to go find him?”
“Leave him be,” said Brady loftily. “I have little doubt our faithful bloodhound is pursuing some spoor of his own.”
In fact the bloodhound was pursuing a fancy, not a line. He had taken Carmody aside and whispered in his ear that he urgently wanted to question the girl, Corinne. Where was she?
“In the isolation ward, like I said,” Carmody replied. “But I doubt you’ll find it on your own. It’s way out by itself, near Dragline One. Want me to come with you?”
“Sure. That’d be real kind.” Dermott swallowed his disappointment. He wanted to go alone. The instincts at work inside him made him feel uncomfortable. Nothing like this had happened to him in years. But he had better be realistic and accept the offer of guidance.
By then the wind had increased, as it often did late in the night, and was whistling across the flat, open site with a deadly chill. The noise made it almost impossible to talk in the open — not that anyone in his senses would remain in the open for more than the minimum time.
Carmody had been reunited with his damaged Cherokee. Shouting an excuse into the wind, he got in first at the passenger door and slid across behind the wheel. Dermott heaved his massive frame in close behind him and slammed the door.
Carmody drove steadily across an apparently unmarked plain. The film of drifting snow had obscured the road, and the flat ground all looked the same.
“How the hell do you know which way to go?” Dermott asked.
“Markers — there.” Carmody pointed as a small stumpy, black-and-white post went past, with the number 323 stencilled on it in bold figures. “We’re on Highway Three. In a minute we’ll turn onto Highway Nine.”
Altogether they drove for nearly ten minutes before lights showed up out of the darkness ahead. Dermott was amazed once again at the sheer size of the site: by then they were four or five miles from the administration buildings.
The lights grew to a blaze of several windows, and they pulled up outside a single long hut. As they went through the door the heat hit them like a hammer, as did a smell of disinfectant. Dermott at once began to wrestle his way out of his outdoor clothes. He felt he would stifle if he kept them on for one more second.
They found Corinne propped up on a pile of pillows, looking white but (to Dermott’s eye) very sweet in a pair of pea-green pyjamas. Contrary to Carmody’s predictions, she was wide awake. She’d been asleep, she said, and had woken up thinking it was already morning.
“What time is it, anyway?” she asked.
“Four o’clock, near enough,” Dermott answered. “How d’you feel?”
“Fantastic. Not even a bruise, as far as I can tell.”
“That’s wonderful. But my, were you lucky!” Dermott began asking routine questions, to which he didn’t really want the answers. He wished to hell Carmody would go away someplace and leave him alone with the girl. What he would say to her if that happened, he didn’t quite know. All the same it was what he wanted.
“You’ve given us a real good lead, you know,” he said enthusiastically. “Can’t say just what it was, but it may be the breakthrough we need. Mr. Brady’s delighted…”
His voice tailed off as a heavy rumble suddenly shook the building. “Jesus!” He looked up sharply. “What was that?”
Carmody was gone already, out of the room and down the short passage. Dermott caught up with him at the outside door.
“Helicopter!” Carmody snapped. “Made a low pass right over the building. There he is, burning now.” Way out in the blackness a red and a green light converged and then separated again as the aircraft swung around. As the two men stood watching, a pair of car headlamps snapped on from a point about a hundred yards in front of them. The vehicle moved forward, turned and stopped, with its headlights steady on a patch of snow.
“It’s a marker!” Carmody cried. “He’s gonna land. Quick, get the girl out of here. They must have come for her.”
“How in hell do they know she’s here?” said Dermott.
“Don’t worry about that. Let’s get her away.” Moving like a sprinter, Carmody slipped back into the building, bundled Corinne up in a cocoon of blankets and carried her out to the Jeep, where he dumped her in the back seat. Dermott lumbered behind him, envying his speed, and hauled himself into the front.
Without putting on any lights Carmody started the engine and moved off into the inky night, heading out into the open behind the parked marker vehicle. A couple of hundred yards beyond it he swung around and faced in the same direction as the lights, so that he and Dermott could watch what happened through the windshield.
They sat there with the heater going full blast.
“Warm enough?” asked Carmody over his shoulder.
“Plenty, thanks.” Corinne sounded as though she was enjoying herself. “I’ve got enough blankets to keep an elephant warm.”
Dermott wondered uneasily whether that was any sort of a joke at his expense, but his speculation was cut short by the arrival of the helicopter. Suddenly it was there, large and gray-white, riding down on a storm of snow into the headlight pool. The rotor flashed brilliantly in the silvery beams, and the snow flew outward from the downdraft.
“That’s the one!” said Carmody in a voice charged with excitement. “The getaway chopper. Description tallies perfectly with Johnson’s: gray-white, no markings, small fins by the tail. That’s our baby. Damn!”
As soon as the machine had landed, the car’s headlights cut. The watchers sat blinded by the sudden darkness. They saw a flashlight bobbing about in the blackness, but nothing else.
“Boy, will they be mad when they find you’ve gone!” Carmody said happily.
“D’you think they’re still in it?” Corinne asked. “The others, I mean?” .
“Could be — easily. Depends where the chopper’s been these past few hours. Must have been waiting on the ground someplace.”
“Come on!” snapped Dermott. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait a minute,” Carmody said easily. “I wanna see what they do. Any moment now they’ll be at the building. There — I can see them now.”
Two figures moved swiftly past the lighted windows. More light showed as the door opened and shut.”
“Can’t we ram the helicopter or something?” Corinne suggested. “Stop it taking off?”
“Too big,” said Carmody immediately. “You notice the legs and skis? Higher than our roof. All we’d do would be to damage the landing gear, which wouldn’t stop them getting off. Besides, if I know them, there’s a couple of guys with guns guarding the thing, at least. Hey — what was that?”
“What?” Dermott looked at him.
“I heard something. Machinery. Sure I did.” Carmody looked out past Dermott into the darkness. “Open your window a minute.”
Dermott obeyed, and instantly the noise was far louder: a huge squealing and clanking, as of some giant engine.
“Jesus Christ!” Carmody shouted. “The dragline. It’s right here beside us.”
Dermott opened his door and got out. His eyes, accustomed to the dark, could just make out the gigantic outline towering above them. Suddenly the noise seemed terrific. “Good God!” Dermott yelled into the wind. “It’s alive. It’s moving!”
Instinctively he began to run toward the machine, or rather, around it, for already he was alongside. Beside him he could hear the whine of electric motors, the squeal of metal and the crunch of frosted dirt as the mighty shoe ground forward. The coldness of the wind seared his lungs and made his eyes stream briefly before they froze. In spite of the discomfort, he felt fired by excitement and by rage, for here was a final and outrageous act of sabotage taking place right on top of him. In a flash of intuition he saw what they intended: to drive the monster machine over the edge of the pit which it had been excavating.
The facts and figures that had been flung at him came crowding into his head. Six and a half thousand tons. It could move at some 250 yards an hour. The pit was 150 feet deep. Although he was no engineer, he knew instinctively that if the monster went over the edge, it would never come out again.
He came around the front of it and got another shock. The edge of the pit, showing as a limitless black hole, was less than thirty yards away. Perhaps only twenty-five. That meant he had a tenth of an hour — six minutes — to get the damn thing stopped. He looked up desperately. The boom disappeared into the night, like an Eiffel Tower tilted over. Somehow he had to get into, the cab and throw the right switches.