by Kit Pedler
‘For God’s sake come on,’ said Holden impatiently. The station master turned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Harry’s lot are in there.’ He gestured towards the inferno.
‘We can’t do anything now,’ said Holden impatiently. ‘Come on!’ The station master still hesitated. ‘There’s another way up,’ he said.
‘Where?’ said Holden, ‘Under the escalator,’ said the station master.
‘No good,’ said Holden. ‘The steps are made of wood, it’ll be like a furnace.’
He held out his arm and steadied the station master as he climbed stiffly down from the coach.
‘It’s our only chance. The next station’s way up the track.’
He turned to the station master: ‘How far, Bill?’
‘Quite a stretch,’ said the station master. ‘About half a mile.’
A hot blast of air blew back through the door as Holden shut it. The others were now standing uneasily in the tunnel waiting for Holden to lead them. ‘The next train,’ said Slayter anxiously, ‘isn’t it liable to …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.
‘There won’t be any next train, the current’s off,’ said Holden shortly. ‘OK,’ said Slayter, ‘but this is a downhill gradient. What if this train takes off after us?’
‘The brakes’ll hold,’ said Holden. ‘We’re quite safe.’
They started back along the track. The formerly cool air was rapidly warming up as it flowed past them. Behind them, the crackling and roaring of the fire echoed in the tunnel. The front coach was now flaring up and throwing sparks and long flames out towards them along the tunnel outlining their shadows on the dark ribs. They stumbled along and turned the corner into the junction where they had been examining the damaged wires. The girl, Wendy, and the station master were both badly out of breath. They paused.
Holden looked around. ‘Wait here for a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and check.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Slayter. Holden shook his head. ‘Please wait here,’ he said, and set off along the tunnel taking the main line. The others sat on a pile of dusty timber and waited. They were out of sight of the fire now but they could still hear it. The air inside the tunnel was now hot and the station master’s breathing was getting increasingly laboured. He began to cough.
The big man now turned to the others: ‘My name’s Purvis,’ he said. ‘I suppose you don’t know what the hell this is all about?’
There was something about him, an air of petulant arrogance, that reacted unfavourably upon the others. Slayter shrugged his shoulders. ‘You know as much about it as I do.’ He turned round and took the flashlight from the station master who was now leaning back, visibly ill.
‘Here,’ said Slayter to Gerrard. ‘You’d better take a look at him.’ Gerrard went over to the station master who was starting to droop away from the wall. He was breathing heavily, his face scarlet, gasping for breath. His eyes half closed. Gerrard loosened his tie and bent his head to his chest. Slayter turned to follow Holden.
‘Hey,’ said Purvis, ‘don’t take that.’ He pointed at the flashlight. ‘It’s the only one we’ve got.’
Slayter looked down at the flashlight for a moment, then shugged his shoulders, ‘I suppose you’re right.’ He handed the torch over, turned and began groping his way along the tunnel following Holden.
Eight
The area around King’s Cross mainline railway station is one of the most complex transport communication junctions in the world.
On the surface, there is a vast, intersecting road complex fed with never ending streams of traffic. Groaning lorries turn up the York Way towards the Great North Road, dense masses of cars and vans pour eastward along the Euston Road towards the City and at the centre there is an almost incomprehensible mixing of traffic streams. Altogether, six major road systems meet next to the mainline railway station and are further confused by traffic entering the second mainline railway station immediately to the west: St Pancras.
During the day and far into the night, the noise, vibration and polluting stench of exhausts never ceases. Pedestrians, unwise enough to be involved in the clattering racket, flinch permanently away from the thrusting leviathans and, as quickly as possible, dive down into the disinfectant air of the underground or up onto the hissing throbbing platforms of the main railway stations. It is their only escape from an area which has long since become intolerable for any real man-machine coexistence.
Underneath the crowded pavements and juddering roadways there is yet another complex of tunnels, walkways, escalators and tracks; the King’s Cross underground station.
Those who travel in its brightly lit web of tunnels almost never imagine that they are moving along an interwoven arterial system of tubes: water and gas mains and great vaulted sewers. As they walk, with their senses cut off to avoid having to relate to the intolerable density of humanity around them, they never pause seriously to think either of the thudding traffic overhead or of the complicated mass of conduits and pipes coiling through the ground around them.
It is quite enough to have to face emergent feelings of claustrophobia without having to imagine the pressures above and below the serried lines of humanity flowing, like corpuscles in a vein, towards their destination.
In the whole of a day, there are perhaps two hours when relative peace descends above and below ground. Between approximately 1.30 and 3.30 AM the surface traffic dwindles and the wet, empty streets glisten blackly in the harsh light of the overhead sodium lamps.
Down in the tunnels, a small army of cleaners, fluffing gangs and maintenance engineers move methodically through the stark, echoing system, sweeping the gleaming rails free of oily dust and inspecting the mass of communication and power lines strapped to the spare ribs of the black walls.
Although travellers on the surface and in the tunnels never see each other directly, there are several places where only thirty inches of earth lie between them. A thin membrane of soil preventing a totally unimaginable admixture.
Altogether, there are five main levels of railway tracks at King’s Cross. First of all, there are the surface lines of British Railways, then just under the already overcrowded surface, the Metropolitan Inner Circle line. Then the newly built Victoria line squeezed in under the Inner Circle, followed by the tunnels of the Piccadilly line and finally, deepest of all, the Northern line tube.
Each has its own particular method of construction. The Metropolitan line for example is brick lined and has no invert or tunnel material under its tracks.
The Victoria line, on the other hand, is bolted together from spun concrete segments, and thrusts its way in between the Metropolitan and Piccadilly and in some places, during its construction, the unsupported tracks of the ancient Metropolitan had to be specially supported on steel plates and giant hydraulic rams to prevent collapse.
Before London became totally covered by its brick and concrete crust of ugliness, several small rivers used to flow freely down from the northern hills of the town towards the Thames. But as man, the ceaseless builder, spread his artifacts out over the ground, the course of the river was altered, constricted and finally forced underground into a closed twelve-foot pipe.
One of these was the Fleet. Originally a river open to the sky, it is now an enclosed storm relief sewer running close by one of the King’s Cross underground ticket halls.
Also enmeshed within the intersecting tunnels are a parallel pair of large water mains, two-foot wide gas mains and yet another by-pass sewer originally constructed in 1842.
The successful operation of a modern city is now a knife-edge balance between separate and overloaded systems which just continue to function provided that there are no unwanted inter-reactions between them.
An inter-reaction can sometimes start from an apparently trivial event.
Just such a small event was reaching its conclusion in the Northbound Samson line tunnel leading out of King’s Cross towards Hornsey and Islington.
It had in fact started
some weeks previously, when a minute trickle of water had seeped unnoticed through a faulty seal between segments of a small communications conduit in the Samson line. Ordinarily, this would have constituted no danger at all. But in this particular instance, the water had leaked from the nearby Fleet storm relief sewer.
Again, this might have soaked away without consequence had it not been for the fact that the sewage water contained two unique ingredients and there were plastic coverings over the cables attached to the wall of the tunnel. Also by a malign chance, the cables were covered by an outer sheath of plastic, but many of the individual wires so enclosed were insulated by synthetic rubber.
Over the following weeks, the outer plastic covering slowly began to soften and decay, to drip away in foul smelling strips of wet glutinous residue. Since the inner wires were lined by rubber and not affected by the dissolution of the plastic, power and communication systems were almost unaffected and there were no indications of the developing presence in nearby signal systems and control centres.
The reaction process spread along the conduit in almost total silence except for a very slight hissing noise due to the development and bursting of bubbles on the surface of the dripping plastic. As the bubbles formed and broke, the tunnel began to fill with a gas. Some of the gas was diluted and sucked away by the ventilation system, but some remained in pockets trapped in track laybys and in between staves of the roof structure.
Finally the component parts of the King’s Cross disaster were assembled and related in their proper order.
On the surface, hurrying crowds of homebound office workers gathered their coats around their faces to keep out the freezing December fog. The tube entrances, like the open mouths of giant primeval animals, were swallowing up the huddled mass of people. They poured down steps and escalators into the brightly lit warmth. In the road, the traffic slowed almost to walking pace by the acrid fog, fumed and roared impatiently as it waited for the imperious directions of a policeman in a bright fluorescent orange over-jacket.
Down in the gas-filled Samson line tunnel, two copper cables finally lay bare. One was above the other on the wall of the tunnel and slowly sagged towards its fellow. The upper carried 170 volts of electricity and the lower was at earth potential. They touched. There was a small spark and power abruptly drained away.
In the Coburg Street control room, a duty engineer raised puzzled eyebrows at an unfamiliar light signal in front of him. In the tunnel came the first explosion as the trapped gas ignited.
It occurred in the space between two northbound trains and so was confined to the cylindrical space of air between them.
A racing wall of flame slammed into the rear of the train ahead and shattered the window of the driver’s cab in the train behind.
As the force of the explosion reached its maximum, the bolted concrete segments of the tunnel split, carrying with them the mass of steel plates and concrete which held the overhead Metropolitan line tunnel from collapse. One of the two twenty-four inch gas mains embedded in the concrete of the roof support sheared open, releasing a flood of town gas into the shattered tunnel and as it rumbled its deadly contents into the confined space between the two trains, small fires were already burning in the cables on the distorted walls of the tunnel. Finally, the mixture of tunnel air and town gas reached its optimum concentration and exploded.
With a roar heard for miles around, the Samson line tunnel blasted upwards into the Metropolitan line and through the thirty-inch covering of soil into the roadway. Deep below at that moment Gerrard and the others were thrown to the floor of the tunnel.
Flames were now belching out of the crater carrying the fog upwards in arches of convection, the air filling with wood smoke and a sickening overlay of burning flesh.
On the pavements, the injured lay in huddled rows lit by the inferno pouring out of the road. Other shocked groups huddled together and watched silently, blindly trying to understand the impossible scene before them. Practically no one spoke.
Out of the yellow gloom, the piercing blue flashes of police cars and ambulances began to appear, sirens baying their ugly warning. Uniformed men jumped down out of vans and moved in quickly and purposefully, shepherding people away from the stricken area. Others carrying road block signs began to close off the area and firemen hastily donning aluminium suits moved towards the flames gouting from the crater.
Gerrard looked around at the others. Anne nodded at the station master: ‘How is he?’
‘He’ll probably be all right if we’re not down here too long,’ said Gerrard. ‘He’s got pulmonary oedema – left sided failure.’
‘That’s all we need,’ said Purvis, turning away. He looked along the tunnel. ‘How long are they going to take there?’ He looked back towards the station. Smoke was beginning to filter along the tunnel. ‘We’ll be suffocated if we stay here!’
‘Don’t know what’s happened yet,’ said Gerrard.
Purvis turned round irritably on him. ‘Damn it, man, we can’t leave this poor bastard here.’ Gerrard turned and looked at Hardy who, up till then, hadn’t spoken. He was thin, brown haired and rather bird-like. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘if you’ll both give me a hand.’
Purvis nodded abruptly. ‘This is Hardy, our company secretary.’ Again Gerrard felt the absurdity of introductions.
The smoke was curling round them and the station master was coughing violently and gasping for air as Gerrard pulled him to his feet. Hardy went round the other side and put his arm under his shoulder, but couldn’t lift the man’s almost dead weight.
‘Sorry, I can’t quite manage,’ he began. Purvis brusquely pushed him aside. ‘Let me!’ He took the station master’s arm and put it round his neck, held on to his hand and pulled him up.
Wendy was white faced and holding a handkerchief over her nose. Anne had tied her scarf over her mouth as they started off with Hardy taking the torch and leading the way.
They lurched along the tunnel in the smoke away from the junction. Anne followed behind Gerrard trying to steady up the station master.
‘Luke.’ She touched his arm.
‘What?’
‘That train, what happens if it does run away down the tunnel? Can we get out?’
Gerrard turned his head slightly. ‘I saw one or two connecting passageways between the tunnels, I think Holden called them bolt holes. We’ll have to get into one.’
‘Where in God’s name have those two got to?’ said Purvis. They had now walked some three hundred yards along the curving tunnel but there was still no sign of Slayter or Holden.
‘Can’t be far off the next station,’ said Gerrard.
Suddenly Hardy gave an exclamation and stopped, flashing his torch at something ahead.
In the dim light of the torch something was flopping along the rails towards them … something hardly human, on all fours. In the light of the torch, as he turned his face up, they recognized Slayter as he collapsed full length across the rail.
Gerrard and Purvis quickly lowered the station master against the wall of the tunnel and Gerrard scrambled forward to Hardy who was standing transfixed, staring into the pool of light from the torch. Gerrard snatched the torch and bent down.
Slayter looked dead. ‘Quick,’ he said, ‘got to get him breathing.’
He rolled Slayter awkwardly onto his back, felt quickly for his pulse and then started to push his hands up against the lower chest. Rhythmically he began to coax breath back into the unconscious man. After about half a minute he stopped and bent down listening against Slayter’s nose and mouth for the first sounds of spontaneous breathing. Again, he went to work and finally, after about four minutes Slayter’s chest gave a convulsive heave and then started back into the rhythm of normal breathing.
Gerrard sat back, breathing heavily – deeper than usual – he noticed almost subconsciously. Purvis was at his elbow proffering something. ‘Any use.’ Gerrard took it. It was a silver and leather pocket flask. He held it to Slayter’s mouth. For a mom
ent there was no response then finally he spluttered, choked, then opened his eyes. Then, as he tried to move, he winced in pain.
‘Can you talk?’ Gerrard cradled him into a sitting position. ‘What’s happened?’
Slayter looked wearily at him. ‘I don’t know. The track ahead, it’s blocked … partially.’
‘Where’s Holden?’ said Gerrard.
‘He tried to get through, collapsed – tried to get him out – couldn’t.’ Slayter’s eyes closed again and he leant back against the track breathing heavily.
‘I’ll go and take a look,’ said Gerrard.
‘Right, I’ll come with you.’ Purvis stood up and moved forward.
They turned and moved along the tunnel. Ahead of them there was a sharp, downward incline. Through the light of the torch they could see the curved, ribbed iron segments of the tunnel flung down across the track. The earth behind had collapsed inwards and the tunnel was blocked except for a narrow passageway between the curved pieces of iron. Water trickled out of the piled debris. The sight of the bare earth bulging in was unnerving.
‘God, how deep are we?’ exclaimed Purvis.
‘According to Holden, about sixty feet,’ said Gerrard. ‘There’s only one line above us and that’s the Metropolitan. The explosion must have been there somewhere.’
Both men were beginning to gasp for air, drawing their breath in long shuddering gulps.
Gerrard shone the torch into the narrow passage formed by the distorted tunnel segments. ‘He must be in here.’ Purvis took something out of his pocket.
In the beam of the torch, they could see a trousered leg protruding from the collapsed tunnel. Behind him he heard the scrape of a match.