Special Deliverance

by Special Deliverance (retail) (epub)

  The sort of delay this carefully timed scheme of entry could not survive. Sweat bathing his skin under the layers of heavy clothes. Fingers sticky inside the glove; he’d torn his wrist on the wire. He twisted the tool the wrong way; and it turned. Lock had not been locked, for Christ’s sake… Unlocking it again, he pushed down on the metal handle, ice-cold even through a glove; the door stuck at first, metal-bound from the frost, gave way inward when he put his weight on it. Several seconds had been lost and Hosegood was already right up behind him. Cloudsley had to double himself up to duck in, shoulder-first with the little door half open, Hosegood following and kicking the door shut against the flood of yellowish light, staying there while Cloudsley moved on into the hangar’s depths with the thin beam of a flashlight probing. Outside, Tony Beale dropped flat, face down, head and shoulders in the hole he’d been scraping for the second pack. A little west of due south and about ninety feet away the sentry had appeared from behind the hangar’s southwest corner, pacing westward, approaching that corner light. He’d pass out of sight again before he reached it, line of sight interrupted then by the diesel-tank on its breezeblock supports. Beale counted the sentry’s paces, seeing them in his mind’s eye and counting four — five — six… before he raised his head.

  Gone. He’d be halfway up the western end of the compound before he was in sight again. Then he’d be just about literally within spitting distance. Meanwhile — digging, finishing this job. Gloved hands were more effective than the entrenching tool, which was awkward to use when you were lying full length. One pack was already buried, close to the concreted base of one of the pillars. Couple more inches of excavation and he’d have the other one in. Soaking wet from sweat; and with an eye on the section of fence where the sentry would reappear. It happened also to be the point where they’d come over. He couldn’t see any signs of entry, any pieces of ripped cloth on the barbs, for instance. He reached for the second pack, to pull it into the hole, having good reason to want it in and covered before the Argie showed up and he’d have to pause again.

  He’d got it in. Using both hands, then, to scoop dirt in around it. Burying the digging tool as well.

  The sentry sloped into view. Round-shouldered, slouching, rifle slung. Green fatigues under an overcoat, field-boots, kepi-shaped cap; after one glimpse Beale was face-down again, flat on the shadowed ground, part of that shadow and as motionless as the ground itself. Counting the man’s paces again, knowing it would need six to take him to the corner and that the shed would then be between them.

  Five. Six…

  And OK. One last arm-scrape of loose soil before he gathered himself to run like a big dog, fingers touching the ground, to the corner of the hangar. Not the front where the door was; there wouldn’t have been time to reach it — might not have been time — and get inside and the door shut before the sentry’s line of sight to it was clear from beyond the other side of the generator shed. One chance sight of movement — if he’d happened to glance this way and you’d taken a chance on it — would have been enough to blow the whole operation, costing three lives here and God knew how many more at sea. The sort of chance you therefore did not take, for want of a little extra care… Beale was at the corner of the hangar, flat on his stomach at the foot of its end wall, on the west side of the corner, absolutely still again half a second before the sentry reappeared, taking his measured treads eastward along the front of the compound. A dozen or fifteen of those treads would put him out of sight behind the guardhouse; you didn’t have to count or guess at it, you could watch him all the way, eyes over one forearm like a crocodile’s just out of water, watching the distance shorten between him and that last stretch of cover. He wouldn’t be behind it for long, and when he got to his position at the gates he’d turn for a routine glance inside, a look at the tall sliding doors. You’d have ten or at the most twelve seconds to be inside by then, to have vanished.

  Starting now.

  Doubled, and running. Noise didn’t matter, thanks to the generator’s. As he got to the little door it opened as if by electronic eye, actually by courtesy of Marine Geoff Hosegood, who pushed it shut again as Beale fell in. Cloudsley told him matter-of-factly, ‘We’ve struck lucky, Tony. OK out there?’

  ‘No problems.’

  Except for the sweat that had become a coating of ice on his skin inside the padding of heavy clothes. He saw that Cloudsley had a silvery-blue AM39 in front of him on a wheeled trolley; there was another six feet away, also on wheels. Both of those were in position to be hauled out through the big doors at a moment’s notice, whenever the boys in blue came for them… Pencil-thin torch-beam swinging away and the big, silent-moving figure of Harry Cloudsley prowling deeper into the icy, echoey cavern, tin walls and domed roof strutted with angle-iron, new-looking concrete floor, the generator’s roar reverberating through it like a booming inside a drum… ‘See here, Tony?’ Six more missiles, but those were in racks. You could bet the pair on trolleys would be the first to be deployed, should therefore be the first for treatment. Cloudsley, having shown Beale the extent of the work ahead of them, wasn’t wasting time on any more detailed viewing of the interior; his torch-beam had travelled across a work-bench with tools in racks and some bins, other odds and ends, but he’d turned back now and was bending over the number one pack, pulling out the stuff he was going to need. Beale joined him, lifted out the batteries, putting them to the side and clipping a pair of leads to the terminals of one of them. Cloudsley muttering as he worked, ‘Jackpot. Worth the effort, after all.’ Beale wasn’t aware that anyone had doubted it would be; except for the gamble of whether or not they’d be here in time. Hosegood had come from the door to position himself in front of the first patient’s gleaming snout, his hands flat on the smooth curve of its homing head, keeping out of the way for the moment but ready to help shift it when Cloudsley gave the word. It had to be right-way-up to start with, anyway, and when you turned it you’d do it from the tail. Cloudsley had set a torch down with its light shining away from the hangar’s front wall. It wasn’t going to be any problem, moving these things around, because this airborne version of the Exocet was the smallest of the family — fifteen feet long, with a wingspan of three feet. Cloudsley stooping over its middle section to push a multi-pin plug into a socket from which he’d unscrewed the cover: the socket was actually on top of the dividing space between the cruise motor and the booster motor, and when the missile was loaded in an Etendard’s rack ready for launching this socket would take the plug from the firing-control in the aircraft, wrenching away when the launch was triggered. In the present set-up, however, it led to a black box which the boffins had referred to rather unscientifically as a ‘liner-upper’, and which was already connected to a battery. Cloudsley said, ‘Switch on,’ and put his ear to the missile’s body like a doctor who’s left his stethoscope at home; he heard a humming noise in short, pulsing jerks, the whole thing lasting about three seconds and then clicking off. So it did work; and that was all there was to that part of it. He pulled out the plug and refitted the screw cover, doing this while Hosegood and Beale, together now at the tail-end, lifted that end shoulder-high so that the wings were clear of the trolley, then turned the missile around to a belly-up position and eased its end down again. Cloudsley had now fitted one of the short steel bits into the drill, but he put it down on the concrete now and with one of the little Space-Age torches between his teeth crouched over the patient to measure — using a strip of metallic tape graduated in millimetres — an exact distance behind the lower wing, for his first incision. He scratched a cross there, over the guts of the booster motor compartment. It happened to be the largest compartment in the missile — unlike the ship-launched MM38s and MM40s or the submarine-launched SM39s, in which the cruise motor took up more space — and it was also, the experts had decided, the only place where this kind of rough-and-ready surgery could effectively be performed. You had the homing head — radar — up front, with the computer and radio-altimeter behind
it and the vertical and directional gyroscopes crowded in there too, but none of this ultra-sensitive stuff, which might have been the easiest to screw up, could have been got at (with such limited expertise, time and facilities) without the interference being obvious at a glance. And next to that nose compartment came the warhead — which nobody had even considered messing with — then cruise motor, and booster motor…

  ‘Here we go.’

  Proof of the pudding. Culmination of a lot of hard work and arm-chancing. Which might — if you weren’t lucky now — finish in one super-colossal bang. Explosion of the booster motor detonating the warhead, of course. Cloudsley had looked round for some wood to touch before he started, but there wasn’t any.

  The drill had its own built-in light, a tiny spotlight shining straight down the bit. It came on as soon as he pressed the trigger and the silent-running power tool began to eat, very finely and gradually indeed, into the missile’s outer casing. This was as much as it would penetrate in this stage of the thrilling, the plain steel bit being of a length that would only reach into the paper-thin air gap between outer casing and motor casing. This was so you couldn’t foul-up right at the beginning by breaking through so fast that the hot drill-tip would ignite interior gases. If you did this, you could be certain of an explosion, so they’d made sure it would be impossible to achieve. To continue into the next stage, the puncturing of the booster casing which was what would cause the missile to malfunction, you had to change to the other type of bit, longer and diamond-tipped and thus less heat-prone, and then still take it — as they’d said in Bristol — very, very carefully. Because the steel behind the diamond point wouldn’t be exactly cool by the time it got in there: you’d be aiming to have the diamond through but only just through.

  Hosegood had gone back to the door to keep an eye on movements outside. Beale was connecting the liner-upper rig to the missile on the other trolley, getting that one ready so that when Cloudsley was ready to move over he could do so without pause. He was bent awkwardly over the job, his height a disadvantage now; eyes slitted, peering myopically at the disc of silver brilliance around the spinning needle, his big hands holding the drill firmly enough to ensure it didn’t slip or slant off-course but applying hardly any pressure. They’d said in Bristol, ‘The weight of the drill’s about enough on its own, all you need do really is guide it.’ But when you knew you were working against time it took a lot of self-control not to try to hurry it along.

  Hosegood joined Beale at the second missile’s tail. They lifted it at that end and then turned it, twisting it round by using the tail-fins for leverage, then letting it down on its back.

  Beale fetched the measure from Cloudsley’s pocket and marked the drilling spot. Cloudsley hadn’t noticed his pocket was being picked; he was concentrating hard on the physical job and also coping with mental arithmetic while the drill bit finely into the bright circle that was mesmeric to the point of being dangerous. You had to keep watching it, but he’d found it was important to blink, shift your point of focus from one side of the drill to the other — to counter the threat of an hypnotic trance. Mental figure-work served a similar purpose, initially: first stage drilling 60 minutes, cooling period 30, second stage 45, total 135 – 2 hours 15 minutes… But you wouldn’t waste the half-hour cooling time: it was the casing that had to cool, not the drill; the drill would have a new bit in it for each stage, each hole. During the cooling period you’d be working on another missile, making that first hole then returning to number one for the second stage. And so on. End result, allowing some time for changing over and for switching bits, ought to be two missiles doctored in about 240 minutes, four hours. So you might get four of the eight patients fixed up tonight; two nights’ work to complete the whole job. Which would be a lot better than he’d dared hope.

  The circle of light rose from the blueish steel: incandescent and expanding, growing towards him, a vortex of brilliance, blinding… just as it was about to burst in his face the drill seemed to shriek a warning, a whine that set his teeth on edge; but he’d been practically over the edge, took some moments to react while the drill still screamed. Jerking awake, pulling back — a moment ago he’d been swaying forward… Tony Beale had a hand on his arm, having grabbed him to pull him back; the whining shriek had come from the nozzle of the drill hard up against the missile — because the bit had gone in as far as it could reach, its tip spinning in the air gap between inner and outer casings. Cloudsley said evenly as he withdrew the bit from the hole, ‘Lucky it was a short one. Might’ve busted right through.’

  Beale said, ‘Let’s have a go, Harry. You take a breather.’

  ‘Why not.’ Handing him the drill. ‘The light gets to be hypnotic.’

  ‘Yeah,’ fitting a new bit and tightening the grip on it: ‘But I slept today.’

  After this the three of them took it in thirty minute shifts. Hosegood completed the first incision in the second missile, then Cloudsley and Beale shared the second stage on number one. Hosegood took over again. Cloudsley had a tube of dental filling material which had been adulterated with colouring matter to match the missiles’ bluey–silver surface shine; he pressed a small pellet of it into the drilled hole before they turned that first patient the right way up again. The plug was practically invisible, and it would blow out when the booster fired.

  Outside, sentries relieved each other, paced around the wire every fifteen minutes. Generator rumbling on, hour after hour. Within a couple of hundred yards up to about a hundred Argies — base staff, aircrew and off-duty guards – dreaming the night away. Among them — maybe — Roberto MacEwan…

  It had taken nearer five hours than four, when the second missile was finished. Hard to know where the extra time had gone. In change-overs, replacing drilling bits and shifting from one patient to another, and maybe in some excessive caution in the handling of the drill. But by that time, with the pair on trolleys doctored and guaranteed to malfunction, another two had been prepared for surgery.

  ‘Right. Two more…’

  Another five hours — or a little less… Beale nodded; Hosegood tightened the drill’s snout: ‘Start this bugger, shall I?’

  Taking it for granted they’d get the four done. For one thing, it would be unproductive to stop at three, because of the thirty-minute cooling period which could be spent working on the other missile of each pair. For another, although they’d got off to a good start, progress since then had been disappointing. You had to allow for hold-ups, get the best mileage you could out of each hour on the job. Because — third and most basic reason — the Argies might be about to start deploying these missiles. It was sheer luck they hadn’t already.

  Cloudsley murmured, ‘Imagine us sitting up there, having come all this way, watching ’em ship the bloody things out!’

  ‘Sooner not.’ Hosegood’s pupils burned like a cat’s, reflecting that spot of light with the bit spinning in its centre so fast you could detect no movement, only see the slow build-up of steel dust around it, fine as pepper. He repeated, to himself, ‘Sooner not…’

  When it was finished they were bug-eyed, grey. The other two, Cloudsley noticed, looked as if they’d been crying. He was checking that everything looked exactly as it had when they’d got in here, and Hosegood was stowing the two nearly-spent batteries and the other gear in the pack. The batteries had performed as predicted by Aerospace technicians, each having powered the vasectomies on two missiles. If the same results were obtained tomorrow night — tonight — there’d be two batteries unused, and they’d be left buried. They were of Italian manufacture. Six had been brought along in order to allow for finding a dozen missiles here, the most one could have catered for or expected the Argies to have scrounged.