“It’ll do,” I said. “It won’t have to last me a great deal longer. I’m sorry, Marie. I’m sorry.”
I closed the door behind me. The guard took me straight to the hangar and luck was with me and LeClerc, for I did not meet him on the way. Hewell was waiting for me, with Hargreaves and Williams, both with their notebooks at the ready. I got onto the lift without being told, the other two followed and we started work.
First I opened the junction box on the inside of the outer casing and adjusted the timing devices on the rotary clock, then, checking that the hand-operated switch on the destruct box was locked at ‘Safe’, I took a quick look at the second break in the suicide circuit, the solenoid switch directly above the timing device. The solenoid, normally activated when its enveloping coil was energised, was held back by a fairly stout spring which required, as a quick tug informed me, about a pound and a half of pressure to close. I left the box open, the lid hanging downwards and secured by a couple of butterfly nuts, then again turned my attention to the destruct box: when pretending to check the action of the switch I did the same as I had done on the first Shrike, forced a small piece of wire between switch and cover. Then I called down to Hewell.
“Have you the key for the destruct box? Switch stuck.”
I needn’t have bothered with the wire. He said: “Yeah, I have it. Boss said we might expect trouble with this one too. Here, catch.”
I opened the cover, unscrewed the switch, pretended to adjust it, replaced it and screwed home the rocker arm. But before I’d replaced it I’d turned it through 180°, so that the brass lugs were in a reversed position. The switch was so small, my hands so completely covered it that neither Hargreaves nor Williams saw what I was doing: nor had they any reason, to expect anything amiss, this was exactly, they thought, the same as they had seen me doing on the destruct box in the other rocket. I replaced the cover, shoved the lever to the safe position: and now the destruct box was armed and it only awaited the closing of the solenoid switch to complete the suicide circuit. Normally, the switch would be closed by radio signal, by pressing the EGADS button in the launch console. But it could also be done by hand …
I said to Hewell: “Right, here’s the key.”
“Not quite so fast,” he growled. He signalled for the lift to be brought down for him, rode up to the open door and took the key from me. Then he tried the destruct box switch, checked that it was impossible to move it more than half-way towards ‘Armed’, let it spring back to the ‘Safe’ position, nodded, pocketed the key and said: “How much longer?”
“Couple of minutes. Final clock settings and buttoning up.”
The lift whined downwards again, Hewell stepped off, and on the way up I murmured to Hargreaves and Williams: “Stop writing, both of you.” The hum of the electric motor covered my words and it wasn’t any trick to speak without moving my lips, the left hand side of my mouth was now so puffed and swollen that movement was almost impossible anyway.
I leaned inside the door, the cord I’d torn from the blind concealed in my hand. To fasten one end of the cord to the solenoid should have taken maybe ten seconds but my hand was shaking so badly, my vision and coordination so poor that it took me almost two minutes. Then I straightened and started to close the door with my left hand while the cord ran out through the fingers of my right. When only a four-inch crack remained between the door and the outer casing of the rocket, I peered inside-the watching Hewell must have had the impression that I had one hand on either side of the door handle, trying to ease its stiffness. It took only three seconds for my right hand to drop a round turn and two half hitches round the inner handle, men the door was shut, the key turned and the job finished.
The first man to open that door more than four inches, with a pressure of more than a pound and a half, would trigger off the suicide charge and blow the rocket to pieces. If the solid fuel went up in sympathetic detonation, as Dr. Fairfield had suspected it would, he would also blow himself to pieces and everything within half a mile. In either case I hoped the man who would open it would be LeClerc himself.
The lift sank down and I climbed wearily to the ground. Through the open doors of the hangar I could see the scientists and some of the sailors sitting and lying about the shore, an armed guard walking up and down about fifty yards from them.
“Giving the condemned boys their last few hours of sunshine, eh?” I asked Hewell.
“Yeah. Everything buttoned up?”
“All fixed.” I nodded towards the group. “Mind if I join them? I could do with some fresh air and sunshine myself.”
“You wouldn’t be thinking of starting something?”
“What the hell could I start?” I demanded wearily. “Do I look fit to start anything?”
“It’s God’s truth you don’t,” he admitted. “You can go. You two”-this to Hargreaves and Williams-“the boss wants to compare your notes.”
I made my way down to the shore. Some of the Chinese were man-handling the metal casing for the rocket on to a couple of bogies, with about a dozen sailors helping them under gun-point. Reck was just tying up at the end of the pier, his schooner looked even more filthy than I remembered it. On the sands, Captain Griffiths was sitting some little way apart from the others. I lay on the sand not six feet away from him, face down on the sand, my head pillowed on my right forearm. I felt awful.
Griffiths was the first to speak. “Well, Bentall, I suppose you’ve just wired up the other rocket for them?” He wouldn’t win many friends talking to people in that tone of voice.
“Yes, Captain Griffiths, I’ve wired it up. I’ve booby-trapped it so that the first man to open the door of the Black Shrike will blow the rocket out of existence. That’s why I did so good a job on the other rocket, this is now the only one left. They were also going to shoot you and every other sailor on the base through the back of the head and torture Miss Hopeman. I was too late to stop them from getting at Miss Hopeman.”
There was a long pause, I wondered if he had managed to understand my slurred speech, then he said quietly: “I’m so damnably sorry, my boy. I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Put a couple of your men on watch,” I said. “Tell them to warn us if LeClerc or Hewell or any of the guards approach. Then you just sit there, staring out at sea. Speak to me as little as possible. No one will see me speaking in this position.”
Five minutes later I’d finished telling Griffiths exactly what LeClerc had told me he planned to do after they had the Black Shrike in production. When I was finished he was quiet for almost a minute.
“Well?” I asked.
“Fantastic,” he murmured. “It’s utterly unbelievable!”
“Isn’t it? It’s fantastic. But is it feasible, Captain Griffiths?”
“It’s feasible,” he said heavily. “Dear God, it’s feasible.”
“That’s what I thought. So you think booby-trapping this rocket-well, it’s justifiable, you think?”
“How do you mean, Bentall?”
“When they get the Black Shrike to wherever it’s going,” I said, still talking into the sand, “they’re not going to take it out to any remote launching field. They’re going to take it to some factory, almost certainly in some heavily populated industrial area, to strip it down for examination. If this solid fuel goes up with the T.N.T. I don’t like to think how many hundreds of people, mainly innocent people, will be killed.”
“I don’t like to think how many millions would be killed in a nuclear war,” Griffiths said quietly. “The question of justification doesn’t enter into it. The only question is-will the batteries powering the suicide circuit last?”
“Nickel cadmium nife cells. They’re good for six months, maybe even a year. Look, Captain Griffiths, I’m not just telling you all this just to put you in the picture or to hear myself talking. It hurts me even to open my mouth. I’m telling you because I want you to tell it all to Captain Fleck. He should be coming ashore any minute now.”
“Captain Fleck! That damned renegade?”
“Keep your voice down, for heaven’s sake. Tell me, Captain, do you know what’s going to happen to you and me and all your men when our friend LeClerc departs.”