Athabasca

by Alistair MacLean

  “Markers—there.” Carmody pointed as a small stumpy, black-and-white post went past, with the number 323 stencilled on it in bold figures. “We’re on Highway Three. In a minute we’ll turn onto Highway Nine.”

  Altogether they drove for nearly ten minutes before lights showed up out of the darkness ahead. Dermott was amazed once again at the sheer size of the site: by then they were four or five miles from the administration buildings.

  The lights grew to a blaze of several windows, and they pulled up outside a single long hut. As they went through the door the heat hit them like a hammer as did a smell of disinfectant. Dermott at once began to wrestle his way out of his outdoor clothes: he felt he would stifle if he kept them on for one more second.

  They found Corinne propped up on a pile of pillows, looking pale but (to Dermott’s eye) very sweet in a pair of pea-green pyjamas. Contrary to Carmody’s predictions, she was wide awake. She’d been asleep, she said, and had woken up thinking it was already morning.

  “What time is it, anyway?” she asked.

  “Four o’clock, near enough,” Dermott answered. “How d’you feel?”

  “Fantastic. Not even a bruise, as far as I can tell.”

  “That’s wonderful. But my, were you lucky!” Dermott began asking routine questions, to which he didn’t really want the answers. He wished to hell Carmody would go away someplace and leave him alone with the girl. What he would say to her if that happened, he didn’t quite know: all the same it was what he wanted.

  “You’ve given us a real good lead, you know,” he said enthusiastically. “Can’t say just what it was, but it may be the breakthrough we needed. Mr Brady’s delighted…”

  His voice tailed off as a heavy rumble suddenly shook the building. “Jesus!” he looked up sharply. “What was that?”

  Carmody was gone already, out of the room and down the short passage. Dermott caught up with him at the outside door.

  “Helicopter!” Carmody snapped. “Made a low pass right over the building. There he is, burning now.” Way out in the blackness a red and a green light converged and then separated again as the aircraft swung round. As the two men stood watching a pair of car headlamps snapped on from a point about a hundred yards in front of them. The vehicle moved forward, turned and stopped, with its headlights steady on a patch of snow.

  “It’s a marker!” Carmody cried. “He’s gonna land. Quick, get the girl out of here. They must have come for her.”

  “How in hell do they know she’s here?” said Dermott.

  “Don’t worry about that. Let’s get her away.” Moving like a sprinter, Carmody slipped back into the building, bundled Corinne up in a cocoon of blankets and carried her out to the Jeep, where he dumped her in the back seat. Dermott lumbered behind him, envying his speed, and hauled himself into the front.

  Without putting on any lights Carmody started the engine and moved off into the inky night, heading out into the open behind the parked marker-vehicle. A couple of hundred yards beyond it he swung round and faced in the same direction as the lights, so that he and Dermott could watch what happened through the windshield.

  They sat there with the heater going full blast.

  “Warm enough?” asked Carmody over his shoulder.

  “Plenty, thanks.” Corinne sounded as though she was enjoying herself. “I’ve got enough blankets to keep an elephant warm.”

  Dermott wondered uneasily whether that was any sort of a joke at his expense, but his speculation was cut short by the arrival of the helicopter. Suddenly it was there, large and grey-white, riding down on a storm of snow into the headlight pool. The rotor flashed brilliantly in the silvery beams, and the snow flew outwards from the downdraught.

  “That’s the one!” said Carmody in a voice charged with excitement. “The getaway chopper. Description tallies perfectly with Johnson’s: grey-white, no markings, small fins by the tail. That’s our baby. Damn!”

  As soon as the machine had landed, the car’s headlights cut. The watchers sat blinded by the sudden darkness. They saw a flashlight bobbing about in the blackness, but nothing else.

  “Boy, will they be mad when they find you’ve gone!” Carmody said happily.

  “D’you think they’re still in it?” Corinne asked. “The others, I mean?”

  “Could be—easily. Depends where the chopper’s been these past few hours. Must have been waiting on the ground someplace.”

  “Come on!” snapped Dermott. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait a minute,” Carmody said easily. “I wanna see what they do. Any moment now they’ll be at the building. There—I can see them now.”

  Two figures moved swiftly past the lighted windows. More light showed as the door opened and shut.

  “Can’t we ram the helicopter or something?” Corinne suggested. “Stop it taking off?”

  “Too big,” said Carmody immediately. “You notice the legs and skis?” Higher than our roof. All we’d do would be to damage the landing gear, which wouldn’t stop them getting off. Besides, if I know them, there’s a couple of guys with guns guarding the thing, at least. Hey—what was that?”

  “What?” Dermott looked at him.

  “I heard something. Machinery. Sure I did.” Carmody looked out past Dermott into the darkness. “Open your window a minute.”

  Dermott obeyed, and instantly the noise was far louder: a huge squealing and clanking, as of some giant engine.

  “Jesus Christ!” Carmody shouted. “The dragline. It’s right here beside us.”

  Dermott opened his door and got out. His eyes, accustomed to the dark, could just make out the gigantic outline towering above them. Suddenly the noise seemed terrific. “Good God!” Dermott yelled into the wind. “It’s alive. It’s moving!”

  Instinctively he began to run towards the machine, or rather, round it, for already he was alongside. Beside him he could hear the whine of electric motors, the squeal of metal and the crunch of frosted dirt as the mighty shoe ground forward. The coldness of the wind seared his lungs and made his eyes stream briefly before they froze. In spite of the discomfort, he felt fired by excitement and by rage, for here was a final and outrageous act of sabotage taking place right on top of him. In a flash of intuition he saw what they intended: to drive the monster machine over the edge of the pit which it had been excavating.

  The facts and figures that had been flung at him came crowding into his head. Six and a half thousand tons. It could move at some 250 yards an hour. The pit was 150 feet deep. Although he was no engineer, he knew instinctively that if the monster went over the edge, it would never come out again.

  He came round the front of it and got another shock. The edge of the pit, showing as a limitless black hole, was less than thirty yards away. Perhaps only twenty-five. That meant he had a tenth of an hour—six minutes—to get the damn thing stopped. He looked up desperately. The boom disappeared into the night, like an Eiffel Tower tilted over. Somehow he had to get into the cab and throw the right switches.

  He ran back right under the thing, between the shoes. Somewhere there must be a ladder. At last he found it. But as he looked up towards the cab, far above him, he saw someone moving there in a faint glow of light. He hesitated, one foot on the steel ladder, wishing he had a gun and wondering whether he should go back for Carmody. That was the last thought that entered his head for a couple of minutes, for the blow caught him squarely on the back of the neck, and brilliant points of light seemed to shoot outwards through his head as he slumped to the ground.

  He came round shaking from the cold and stuck in an awkward position. His hands were jammed, somehow—jammed behind him. He needed to straighten his arms and get them back into action. He strained to sort himself out and realised with a shock that his wrists were manacled together, and manacled to something.

  He gave a grunt and heaved, whereupon a man spoke out of the dark behind him.

  “Ah, Mr Dermott,” said a voice he half-recognised but could not place. “Str
uggling will not help. You are anchored to a steel ring let into concrete. The ring is directly in the path of Dragline One, which, as you can see and hear, is now only a few feet from you. The controls have been preset and locked in position so that the middle of the right shoe will pass over you. Goodbye, Mr Dermott. You have less than two minutes to live.”

  Fear cleared Dermott’s head. “Bastards!” he cried. ‘“Sadistic bastards! Come back!” But even as he shouted, he knew it was useless. In the whistle of the wind and the monstrous grinding of the dragline, his voice was nothing and carried nowhere. He twisted round and discovered that he was tethered almost on the lip of the pit: the edge of the black abyss was no more than a yard away. In the opposite direction, the front of the dragline’s shoe had ground remorselessly to within fifteen feet of him. The front of it was coming on like a tank. Above him, the steel tracery of the boom seemed to fill the sky with an angry black pattern.

  Dermott stopped shouting and began to fight the manacles. At least there was some movement: he could feel that a length of chain had been passed through the shackle on the ground. He jerked it furiously back and forth in the faint hope that the chain would break, but all he achieved was to chafe his wrists viciously and expose them to the cold. He could feel the icy steel biting into his bare skin. Frostbite, he thought dully. But what did frostbite matter if he was going to be crushed like a beetle?

  “Carmody!” he yelled desperately. “Help!” Where the hell had Carmody gone? Why didn’t he come looking?

  Dermott fought the chain again and flopped flat, gasping. The shoe was only twelve feet off, scrunching on inch by inch. The whine of the electric motors seemed to fill the night, as if hell had claimed him.

  He threw his body feverishly to left and right, experimenting to see if he could get clear of the shoe’s line of advance. Nothing he tried was the slightest good: the shoe was ten feet wide, and he was tethered right in the middle of its track. The monster had been set marching with hideous precision.

  He lay still again, panting, beaten. Suddenly images began flashing through his mind, conjured up uninvoked by the extremity of his desperation. Once again he witnessed the final terrifying seconds of the car-crash that had killed his wife, the time when an explosion had blown him clean off a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, into the shark-infested sea…

  All at once he became aware of a light flashing over him. Then someone was crouching, pulling at his arms. Then he heard a high, feminine cry.

  “Corinne!”

  “My God!” she cried. “What’s happened? Oh, Jesus!” She leapt to her feet and began to run. “Wait!” she screamed ovej her shoulder.

  Dermott saw her fall, get up again, and go like a greyhound, round the corner of the shoe, the flashlight swinging wildly in the blackness. He shouted something after her, but she was gone. Wait, she’d said. Wait! What a hell of a thing to say! How could he wait? The shoe was scarcely ten feet from him: one minute, give or take a few seconds.

  He found his eyes were full of tears, though whether they were of fear or relief or gratitude or what, he couldn’t tell. He was crying like a baby.

  Seconds were passing. He began to count. He got to ten and couldn’t go on. He had been overtaken by a horrific vision of the exact physical process of destruction that was about to annihilate him. He would feed his feet and legs to the monster first. Or could he? Could he listen and watch while his ankles, shins and knees were crunched and flattened on the tundra? No—he would have to get the end over quickly and give it his head. But what would that be like, for God’s sake? To hear his skull crack and feel that unthinkable weight! Impossible! Never!

  He roared again: “CARMODY!” As if by a miracle, his shout was answered. Headlights came boring up out of the night and swept across him as the vehicle turned. Dermott stared incredulously as the lights came on at speed, heading right for him and the front of the shoe. At the last moment the vehicle slowed, but not enough to stop. The driver deliberately slid it into the front of the shoe, using it as a last-ditch barrier to stop the monster’s progress. There was a sharp crash and the tinkle of falling glass. Then the door of the Jeep opened and Corinne leapt out.

  There was so little space left that Dermott had all but been run over. The Jeep’s left-hand wheels were almost on him. The next thing he saw was the tyres being forced bodily sideways towards him by the irresistible pressure of the dragline’s advance.

  Corinne had the tail-gate of the Jeep open. She dragged out a steel box—the emergency equipment—and dumped it behind Dermott with a crash.

  “Keep still!” she shouted above the noise. “No—come back a bit. There. Keep there! I’ve got the bolt shears.”

  Dermott leant backwards in the attitude she ordered, speechless with tension. He saw the wheels of the Jeep come sideways at him again. The back wheel was touching his feet already. The Jeep was being pushed like a toy. At that rate it was going to do more harm than good: it was merely acting as an extension of the shoe, and would crush him before the dragline itself reached him.

  He felt Corinne struggling behind him. Suddenly she gave a desperate cry. “Oh my God! I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough.”

  Dermott’s voice returned. “What’s happening?” he shouted.

  “The cutters!” she sobbed. “The bolt shears are biting into the chain, but I can’t get enough pressure on them. It’s too bloody hard!”

  “Put one end on the ground,” he ordered calmly. “One handle on the ground. Then get your weight on the other.”

  He felt her try, but she slipped and went down with a crash. “Try again!” he yelled.

  By then the noise of the dragline was overwhelming: its roaring and grinding filled the night. But suddenly a new sound: a sharp crack told him that the great steel treads of the shoe had hooked into some part of the Jeep’s bodywork. Instead of being pushed back, the vehicle had been gripped and held down. Dermott stared incredulously as the Cherokee began collapsing like an eggshell. The remaining headlight was snuffed out. Cracking, snapping noises accompanied the collapse of the hood and front wheels.

  Behind him Corinne gave a despairing scream. “I just can’t do it. I’ve got half-way through, but that’s all.”

  “Look for a hacksaw!” Dermott shouted. “In the emergency pack.”

  “Got one!” She began working again frantically.

  For Dermott time seemed to have stopped. He saw that the Cherokee’s engine block had at last offered the dragline a spot of serious resistance: only a spot, it was true, but a definite token. Ponderous as a dinosaur, the machine lifted one foot slowly into the air as it ground the little human vehicle beneath its steel sole. As if in a trance, Dermott saw the windshield shatter, the front of the roof crumple down, the passenger compartment flatten. Right in front of him a back wheel snapped off and was squashed flat onto the ground. If his arms had been free, he could have reached out and touched the front of the shoe—it was that close.

  But his arms were not free.

  “I can’t!” Corinne screamed in desperation.

  Dermott’s head cleared, and he shouted: “Is there an axe?”

  “A what?”

  “An axe.”

  “Yes—here.”

  “Smash the chain with that. Aim for the link you’ve been working on.”

  “I might hit you.”

  “To hell with that. Belt it.”

  He felt the thump as she let drive. The chain snatched sharply at his wrists and nearly jerked his arms from their sockets. Suddenly he smelt the stink of gasoline: the tank had been crushed.

  Clank! She brought the axe down, then again. When Dermott twisted to see how she was doing, the clawing thread of the shoe scraped down past his shoulder. The thing was touching him. He shrank away from the monstrous beast, and brought out his last, terrible idea.

  “Chop my hands off!” he ordered, quite calmly.

  “I can’t!”

  “Go on. It’s them or me.”

  “NO!” She gave a
piercing shriek and swung the axe down with every ounce of her behind it. Next second she was on her knees sobbing: “Oh my God, it’s gone! It’s gone!”

  Dermott fought his instinct to leap up. He held himself down as she struggled with the severed link. The tread was bumping and bruising him now. In a few moments it would hook him under, as it had the car.

  “For Christ’s sake!” he shouted. “Hurry!”

  Miraculously, his hands came free. He got his arms back to their normal position and twisted sideways. “Look out for the pit!” he yelled. He himself was on the very lip. Hardly had he rolled clear of the dragline when there was a huge whumph and a roar of dark-red flame shot sideways at ground level. A chance spark had ignited the car’s gasoline. By a fluke he had rolled into the wind, so that the fiery blast went the other way and left him unscathed. Corinne was there behind him, also intact.

  The blaze made no difference to the monster’s advance. The flames roared for a few seconds, then went out, and the dragline continued without faltering towards the brink.

  Dermott felt weak with reaction—but not as weak as the girl. One moment she was standing behind him; the next, as Dermott struggled to find the words to express his gratitude to her, she had collapsed in a heap on the ground. He picked her up as tenderly as he knew how, laid her gingerly over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and began carrying her towards the still-lighted windows of the isolation quarters. His eyes seemed to have gone blurred with the strain. Or was it just ice? He scrubbed them with his free hand and saw better. Out in the patch of white light ahead of him, the helicopter was preparing to take off, lights flashing, rotor spinning. Even as he watched, it lifted off and slanted away into the sky.

  At once the car whose lights had provided the marker moved off and accelerated. Once again, Dermott realised, the villains had melted into the night. He knew he ought to feel disappointed: as it was, he could concentrate on nothing except getting back into the warmth of the hut and lying down.

  He was very close to the building, going slow, when he saw someone pass across the lighted windows in front of him. Fear seized him. Maybe it was one of them. Was he going to be shot after making such an effort? Before he had time to put down his burden or alter course, a flashlight came on, searched briefly and found his face.