“Of course,” Hargreaves muttered. “Of course. Time is on our side.”
He sat down on an empty ammunition box and stared down silently at the floor. He seemed to have lost all inclination to talk. I didn’t much feel like talking myself.
A key turned in the door and LeClerc and Hewell came in. LeClerc said: “Feeling better?”
“What do you want?”
“Just wondering whether you might have changed your mind about your alleged ignorance on the subject of solid fuel.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course not. Hewell?” The giant came forward and laid a squat leather-covered box on the floor-a tape recorder. “Perhaps you would care to hear the playback of a recent recording we made?”
I rose slowly to my feet and stared down at Hargreaves. His gaze was still fixed on the floor.
“Thank you, Hargreaves,” I said. “Thank you very much indeed.”
“I had to do it,” he said dully. “LeClerc said he would shoot my wife through the back of the head.”
“I’m sorry.” I touched him on the shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault. What now, LeClerc?”
“It’s time you saw the Black Shrikes.” He stood to one side to let me pass.
* * *
The doors of the hangar were wide open, the lights burning high up near the roof. The rails ran all the way to the back of the hangar.
They were there, all right, the Black Shrikes, stubby pencil-shaped cylinders with highly-polished steel sides and water-cooled porcelain noses above great scalloped air-scoops, the height of a two-storey house and perhaps four feet in diameter. They rested on flat eight-wheeled steel bogies, and on either side of each rocket was a gantry crane, almost as high as the rocket itself, each crane mounted on a four-wheeled bogie: from the top and bottom of the gantries protruding clamps reached out to hold the rockets firmly in position. Both rockets and all four gantries were resting on the same set of rails.
LeClerc wasted no time, no words. He led me straight to the nearest rocket and mounted an open-sided lift fitted to the inner side of the nearest gantry. Hewell jabbed me painfully in the spine with his gun: I got the idea and climbed up beside LeClerc. Hewell stayed where he was. LeClerc pressed a button, an electric motor whined and the lift slid easily upward for about five feet. LeClerc took a key from his pocket, slid it into a tiny hole in the side of the rocket, pulled out a flush-fitting handle and swung out a seven-foot high door in the casing of the Black Shrike: the door had been so meticulously machined, so beautifully fitted, that I hadn’t even noticed its existence.
‘Take a good look,” LeClerc said. “That’s all you’re here for-to take a good look.”
I took a good look. The outer hardened steel casing of the rocket was just that and no more-an outer case. Inside was another casing and the gap between the two was at least five inches.
Directly opposite me, welded on to the inner casing, were two flat steel boxes, about six niches apart and each six inches square. The one to the left, green-painted, bore the legend ‘Propellant’ and below that the words ‘On-Off: the one to the right was a bright pillar-box red in colour, with the words ‘Safe’ and ‘Armed’ stencilled in white on the left and right side of the box respectively. On both boxes, just below the top, was a knob-handled switch.
From the foot of both boxes issued flexible armoured cables, with plastic sheathing below the armour-a measure almost certainly designed to protect the underlying electric cables from the tremendous heat which would be generated in flight. The cable to the left, coming from the box marked ‘Propellant,’ was almost an inch and a half in diameter: the other was half an inch in diameter. The former ran down the inner casing and, about three feet away from the box, split into seven separate cables, each one covered in the same plastic and armour: the latter crossed the gap to the outer casing and disappeared upwards out of sight.
There were two other cables. One, a small half-inch cable, joined the two boxes: the second, two inches in diameter, bridged the gap between the ‘Propellant’ box and a third box, larger than either of the other two, which was fitted to the inside of the outer wall. This third box had a hinged door facing me, secured by a couple of butterfly nuts: no other electric cables led either to or from it
And that was all that was to be seen. I saw it all in ten seconds. LeClerc looked at me and said: “Got it?” I nodded and said nothing.
“The photographic memory,” he murmured cryptically. He closed the door, locked it, pressed the lift button and we hummed upwards again for about six feet. Once more the routine with the key, the opening of a door-much smaller this time, barely two feet in height, the invitation to inspect.
This time there was even less to see. A circular gap in the inner casing, a view beyond the gap of what appeared to be fifteen or twenty round pipes narrowing towards their tips and, in the centre of those pipes, the top of some cylindrical object, about six inches in diameter, which vanished down among the tubes. In the centre of the top of this cylinder was a small hole, less than half an inch across. Attached to the outer casing was an armoured cable of the same dimensions as the one which had issued from the box marked ‘Safe’ and ‘Armed’, and it seemed a pretty fair guess that it was the same cable. The end of this cable, which was tipped with a solid copper plug, bent right over and hung slackly downwards in the gap between the outer and inner casings. It seemed logical to suppose that this copper plug was intended to fit into the hole in the central cylinder but here, it would seem, logic would have been in error: the hole in the cylinder was at least four times the size of the narrow copper plug.
LeClerc closed the door, pressed the button, and the lift dropped down to the foot of the gantry. Another door, another key and this time a view of the very base of the rocket, a foot below where the last of the pipes in the inner casing ended. There was no impression of a confusion of pipes here as there had been at the top: everything was mathematically neat and completely’ symmetrical, nineteen cylinders all of which seemed to be sealed with a heavy plastic compound, each cylinder about seven inches in diameter, eighteen of them arranged in two concentric circles about an inner core. The cylinders, which completely filled the inner casing, were not entirely smoothsided: at various distances above their lower ends they were smoothly indented in their sides, and those indentations, it was no trick at all to guess, were for the purpose of introducing the leads which hung in an untidy bunch between the two casings. I counted the leads, nineteen in all, breaking out from the seven armoured cables leading from the ‘Propellant’ box above: a pair of leads from each of three cables, three leads from each of the other three cables and four leads from the remaining cable.
“You have it all, Bentall?” LeClerc asked.
“I have it all,” I nodded. It seemed simple enough.
“Good.” He closed the door, led the way towards the hangar entrance. “Now to have a look at Fairfield’s notebooks, codes and references. At least we were able to save those.”
I raised an eyebrow-it was one of the few muscular exercises I could perform without causing myself pain.
“There were some things you couldn’t save?”
“The complete set of blue-prints for the rocket. I must confess we did not think that the British would have had the intelligence to take such precautions. They were in the lower half of a sealed metal box-a standard war-tune device, much faster and more foolproof than burning-the top half of which was a glass tank of concentrated hydrochloric with a metal plunger. The plunger was depressed, the glass broken and the acid released before we realised what was happening.”
I remembered the captain’s bleeding and battered face.
“Good old Captain Griffiths. So now you’re completely dependent on having a working model of the rocket, eh?”
“That’s so.” If LeClerc was worried, he didn’t show it. “Don’t forget we still have the scientists.”
He led me to a hut just beyond the armoury, a hut rather primitively fitted out as an office, with filing cabinets, a typewriter and a plain wooden desk. LeClerc opened the cabinet, pulled out the top drawer and dumped a pile of papers on the table.
“I understand that those are Fairfield’s papers, all of them. I’ll come back in an hour.”