“He charged on in, shoving me to one side so hard I was knocked against the wall. For a minute I was stunned, I couldn’t even stand up. He ripped the intercom off the bulkhead with his hands! His bare hands! I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. He tied my hands behind me and my ankles together with belts he’d taken from the two guards. He could have killed me easily enough, snapped my neck. Man, I still hurt where he grabbed me. But he left me alive, I’ll say that for him.
“I finally got loose and staggered out to the ward. All four guards were on the floor. Two are still alive but badly hurt. The intercoms were all wrecked. The door was locked, and the pistols and knives of the outside guards were gone. I’d still be there if I wasn’t so handy at picking locks and the lock wasn’t pickable. Then I ran to the nearest bulkhead phone …”
“How long ago was it that he broke loose?”
“Twenty-five minutes ago.”
“Twenty-five?”
She was dismayed. What had Thorn been doing in all that time?
“Take care of those men,” she said and switched him off.
“He must have had a transmitter hidden somehow, somewhere,” she said to Cyrano.
“But how do you know that?”
“I can’t be sure. What else would take so much of his time? Nikitin, take her down to ground level! As fast as possible!”
Katamura’s voice came over the intercom.
“Captain, the chopper’s gone.”
Cyrano swore in French.
Nikitin flipped on the general address and informed the crew that the ship would be going into dangerous maneuver. All personnel should make themselves secure.
“Forty-five degrees, Nikitin,” Jill said. “Full speed.”
The radar operator reported that the helicopter was on his scope. It was going south and downward at a maximum velocity at a forty-five degree angle to the horizontal.
By then, the deck of the control room was tilted downward. The others hastened to strap themselves into chairs bolted to the deck. Jill took a seat by Nikitin. She would like to have taken over the pilot’s chair, but even now protocol forbade that. However, it did not matter that she was not at the controls. The wild Russian would get the dirigible down as swiftly as she could. Her job would be to make sure that he did not overdo it.
“If Thorn has a transmitter,” Cyrano said, “he can use it now. We’ll never make it.”
Though he was pale and wide-eyed, he smiled at her.
Jill looked from Cyrano to the control panel indicators. The ship was parallel to the Valley, so there was no problem about clearing the mountain tops. The Valley looked narrow, but it was rapidly broadening. There were some lights down there, bonfires around which would be sentinels or late-night revellers. The rain clouds had dissipated swiftly, as they almost always did. The star-packed skies cast a pale light into the space between the two mountains. Was anybody down there looking up at them? If so, they must wonder what this huge object was and why it was coming down so swiftly.
Not that it was going fast enough to suit her.
Cyrano was right. If Thorn did intend to set off a bomb, he would be doing it now. Unless . . . unless he would be willing to wait until the ship had landed. After all, he had spared Graves, and he could have killed the other two guards.
Keeping an eye on the panel radar-scopes, she called the hangar bay.
Szentes answered.
“We were all in our quarters, “he said. “There’s no guard posted in the bay.”
“I know,” she said. “Just tell me … quickly .. . what happened?”
“Thorn stuck his head in the door. He pointed a pistol at us. Then he ripped off the intercom, and he told us that he was going to close the door. He said he had a bomb rigged to explode if the door was opened. Then he shut it. We didn’t know if we should believe him, but no one was willing to find out if he was lying or not. Then Officer Katamura opened the door. There wasn’t any bomb; Thorn had lied. I’m sorry, Captain.”