by Steve Cole
‘Perhaps,’ James agreed. ‘I wonder where it stands now?’
The fob-watch said it was close to noon as they passed another huge pile of explosives, secured near another junction. As they crept past, James cupped a hand around the storm lamp, kept as close to the wall as possible. The concentrated power in the explosives would be colossal, and an explosion here could trigger the entire chain reaction.
He quickened his step until the mountain of crates was out of sight. Twinges of claustrophobia plucked at his resolve, and he took deep breaths. To be trapped in this underworld, with the city above in such danger . . . His father had died for the information he’d gathered. For James there could be no peace, no hope of rest, until he knew he’d done something to make a difference.
‘Wait a moment.’ James stopped abruptly. In the glow of the lamp, he could make out characters chiselled into the stone. ‘Junction two,’ he read. ‘And look, what is that?’
Anya peered at the stonework. ‘A three?’
‘Oh my God . . .’ James dropped to his knees and put down the lamp, scrabbling for the map on the chamois holster. ‘Anya, that has to be it! J6 isn’t a grid reference, or a Bible chapter – the “J” stands for junction, don’t you see? And the number is the number of the tunnels.’
Anya had got to her knees next to him. ‘You mean, 6 14–15 would be the sixth junction crossing tunnels number fourteen—’
‘And fifteen, yes.’ James nodded, his heart quickening. ‘So the detail of the map must show the precise point to bring down. And that blue wavy line above the tunnel—’
‘Is water.’ Anya gripped his arm. ‘When we lived here, Papa told me there are thirteen rivers and streams buried beneath London’s streets. Perhaps water runs at the weak point above that stretch of tunnel. An underwater stream?’
‘Or a tributary, or . . .’ James groaned. ‘Fleet! That wasn’t some early warning of Soviet submarines travelling north, your father meant the River Fleet. It still runs underground, marks the border of Westminster and the City.’ He paused. ‘Do you think it’s just coincidence, or can we blame your papa’s sense of humour for designing and numbering his weak point for a biblical reference?’
‘I am afraid we can.’ Anya half-smiled. ‘But, James, these tunnels are like a labyrinth. We are in the second junction of tunnel three – who knows how we get to fourteen or fifteen . . .’
James studied the map for any further clues, but there were none; it was really just a detail from some larger plan to be used as reference.
Anya stood up uncertainly and brushed bits from her trousers – a futile but endearing act given how filthy they were already – and they set off again, bearing left along the tunnel. The floor was submerged, and soon they were wading through water that was almost knee-deep, as quietly as possible.
Within minutes, James stopped at the sound of movement some way ahead of them.
Anya had heard it too. ‘Rats?’
‘Too big.’ James peered into the gloom ahead, lowered his voice. ‘Must be part of Elmhirst’s search party.’ Anya made to move away, but James stopped her. ‘How are they navigating these tunnels . . . how are they dividing the space up to search?’
Anya caught his gaze and understood. ‘They must have maps.’
‘And if we want one, we’ll have to help ourselves . . .’ James blew out the lamp. A brief whiff of kerosene filled the stale air – then there was nothing but the cold darkness and the endless drip and plop of water. ‘If we’re going to deal with this man we have to be quiet. We can’t risk anyone else hearing.’
He saw a torch beam play from the darkness, and he and Anya flattened themselves against the wall. The light was strong, and there was nowhere to hide from it.
‘Follow my lead,’ James whispered. He slipped down into the cold, disgusting stink of the water, lying on his back, grimacing as it sucked at his skin through his clothes. Anya did the same. The man with the torch came closer, sliding his feet through the silty water so as to make as little noise as possible. The torch beam swung over James’s chest and, with a gulp of air, he sank his face under the water, save for his nose and mouth. Silence thickened with the pressure in his head, and he felt the eddies in the water increase as the man approached. The torch beam must have revealed Anya, for he heard a voice shout out in Russian.
Hold still, Anya, James thought, bracing himself as the man splashed closer.
When he was alongside, James lifted himself on his elbows, raised his legs and thrust both feet into the man’s groin. With a strangled cry and a crash of water the man went down. Anya jumped up and flew forward with the Browning. The crack of stock against skull rang out over the wash and lap of the freezing water.
Shivering, James reached beneath the surface to retrieve the man’s stubby silver torch. He saw that their hunter, as big and black as the tunnel, had been knocked out cold. Anya was already tearing at the insides of his coat, trying to find—
‘A map!’ She held a folded piece of paper out to James, triumphant. ‘Now, we must go – this noise may bring others.’
James nodded, his heart thrumming with excitement – until it stopped still as a gunshot crashed out in the confined space. Mouldering brick exploded from the wall behind him.
‘It’s brought them, all right!’ James shouted. ‘Run!’
Another shot saw a pack of rats break cover from the slimy water. James and Anya turned and splashed away after them through the murk, the torchlight flaring over water and walls. They turned right along the junction and into the next tunnel. But the water here was up to James’s waist, deep enough to swim in – an underground tributary perhaps.
Anya shone the torch around desperately. ‘Which way now?’
James turned right and found the water became deeper still. ‘Swim for it?’
‘But if the map gets wet . . .’
‘I’ll take it; you use the torch.’ James grabbed the map from her and clamped it in his teeth. Then he launched himself into the water, propelled by his most powerful front crawl. The torch beam lanced through the pitch-darkness as Anya kept close behind. James angled his chin to the tunnel roof, trying to keep the map as dry as possible. Another gunshot boomed above their thrashing in the water.
James came up hard against something ahead, stood up anxiously and found that at this point, the water came up to his chest. Anya shone the torch over some timber shoring. To the left was a crude archway hollowed out of the rock, mostly blocked by building debris: rubble, steel mesh, the bent and severed blade of some sort of earthmoving equipment.
‘We’re trapped,’ James breathed. ‘We can’t climb over that.’
‘Maybe . . . we do not have to.’ Anya ducked beneath the stagnant water, exploring the submerged landscape. James frowned, and when she didn’t reappear called her name as loudly as he dared, wondering how long it would take for their pursuers to trap them here and—
A loud splashing on the other side of the barrier signalled that Anya had found a way through. ‘It is narrow,’ she hissed, ‘but you can swim through.’
James glimpsed torchlight playing on the walls. ‘Where does it say we are now?’
‘Junction six. Tunnel fourteen.’
‘Then – this is the place,’ James realized. ‘The start of the weak point in the network. Hold on, let me pass the map to you . . .’ He climbed awkwardly onto the rubble, found a gap large enough to push his hand through to her on the other side. Anya took the map. ‘Wait there,’ he said. ‘I’ll join you.’
Even as he spoke, wet splinters burst from the timber beside him as another gunshot reverberated around the tunnel. James ducked down beneath the stinking water without another thought, arms outstretched and feeling through the blackness for the same path through the debris that Anya had found. He pushed forward between two chunks of stone, but his build was bigger than Anya’s. His chest felt wedged, his back scraping against the stone.
James found that he was stuck fast between the abandoned conc
rete blocks.
Fighting to keep calm, he tried pushing against the stone to free himself. His movements grew wilder, more desperate. I have to get through here before I drown, he thought. Or before I’m shot. He almost opened his mouth to cry out as something took hold of his wrists and pulled.
From the reassuring squeeze of her fingers, James guessed it was Anya reaching through from the other side of the underwater obstacle, trying to pull him free. The blood began to roar in his temples. James felt like a cork in a bottle, a cork that didn’t want to give. Come on! he willed himself, fighting harder, pressure building behind his burning eyes. Now! It’s got to be now . . .
But the concrete did not give.
James heard another gunshot echo weirdly through the water. The blackness was absolute, the all-pervading cold had stripped all sensation from his skin. He stopped his struggles; the world felt suddenly peaceful, after taunting and hurting him for so long. A part of James wanted to give himself up to the peace and the dark, to drift to the bottom and know nothing more. But then he heard his mother’s scream, imagined his parents falling.
‘Snap out of it, James!’ his father would tell him.
Twisting as if jerking awake, a terrible tightness in his chest and behind his ears, James finally felt the concrete shift a fraction. With fresh hope and desperation, he kicked his legs as hard as he could and struggled and scraped his way through the narrow gap. Hands closed on his forearms; Please let them be Anya’s. He needed air, needed to surface—
Finally, retching and choking in the blackness, he broke from the water and recoiled from torchlight, bright in his face. Gulping at the stale air, he clung to Anya, shivering, wiping his eyes.
‘We’ve got to go,’ she said – as another bullet thumped into the concrete in the barrier behind them. Too exhausted to swim any more, James waded through the water, leaning against Anya for support. The tunnel led to another junction – numbered 16, he noted – and it sloped upwards so that the water level soon got lower. With this knowledge, James found the strength to quicken his step.
‘Why do you think that barrier was left there?’ asked Anya.
‘To keep people like us out,’ James panted. ‘The excavators must have known that this area is particularly vulnerable if a part of the Fleet is running just above.’
‘Causing a flood they do not want?’
‘And enough damage to stop the chain reaction,’ James agreed. ‘I wonder how much force would be needed to “bring it all down with one blow”?’
‘We need experts to tell us this,’ Anya declared.
‘And a way out to reach them.’
Once he and Anya had made it round the corner with no sign of further pursuit, they rested, shivering against a filthy wall. ‘The map got very wet,’ Anya apologized, smoothing it out against the wall. ‘Let us hope it shows us the fastest way to reach the Opera House. We have to raise the alarm before the King arrives.’
She trained the torchlight on the map. A black cross was marked in the centre of a radial grid of several tunnels, and a large square nearby was marked ROH.
‘There,’ Anya noted. ‘Things go our way, at last.’
James was too disquieted to feel much optimism. He and Anya began to calculate the quickest path through the maze of junctions and tunnels.
28
The Rise from the Underworld
THERE WAS NO note of scale on the map, but James and Anya’s ultimate destination proved to be barely a quarter of a mile away. The walls to the approach were smooth and polished, clearly carved out of the rock with precision and care.
To better channel the forces of the blast, James supposed.
The tunnel stretched downwards before opening out into an enormous, cavernous space, perhaps as large as the hall of an Underground station. James stopped dead at the sight of a colossal assortment of crates of prime Blade-Rise hexogen and boxes of TNT, double the size of the other stacks they’d seen. Like the others, it had been smothered in steel mesh, chained and netted together to prevent tampering – but from this one a wide trail of gunpowder stretched away along an adjoining passage.
‘The fuse,’ James breathed, ‘waiting to be lit.’ His skin prickled with fresh sweat. ‘X marks the spot. This has to be the trigger to it all.’ He tried to kick the black powder away, but it had been combined with a greasy glaze of some kind and plastered to the ground, making the fuse part of the rock they walked on. ‘It can’t be disarmed.’ He checked Karachan’s watch. ‘And look – it’s after two o’clock in the afternoon. The show will be starting in about five hours.’
‘We have time to reach the Opera House,’ Anya declared. ‘Show the police all this.’
‘Assuming they even start to believe us.’ Studying the damp map and the square marked ROH, James noted a small dotted path stretching away from it. ‘Come on; let’s get the lay of this land.’
Exhausted, but driven on by nervous energy, James led the way out, this time climbing up the sloping passage. He realized he was following the fuse from the RXD pile, for a good hundred yards. How long had it taken to burrow out this impossible space, and how many had died to make it a reality – while above, London danced on in ignorance?
But after tonight . . .
James hurried along, splashing through the puddles at the right-hand side of the passage, checking the map in Anya’s hands. The tunnel opened up into a smaller, roughly circular cavern perhaps thirty feet across. The weak torchlight was hardly enough to see by, but soon he spotted it – the door in the cavern wall, an oak panel barely wider than a man with a single brass keyhole below the handle.
‘The way into the Opera House,’ Anya said.
‘And the way out,’ James supposed. ‘That dotted line on the map . . .’ He crossed to a different door in the wall opposite; it too was locked. ‘This must lead somewhere so they can light the fuse and retreat.’
‘After the royal execution,’ Anya added.
Grimly, James rejoined her by the oak door. He pulled the ring of keys out of his pocket and tried each one in turn. Nothing . . . nothing . . . ‘Come on!’ He went on switching through the keys, hands slick with sweat. But it was no good.
‘All that we have done,’ Anya said bitterly, ‘and we are just as trapped as before.’
James felt for the Beretta in his pocket and pulled it out. It was wet through, but the barrel seemed all right; it ought to function. He raised the muzzle to the lock, and aimed carefully.
‘Get behind me,’ he told Anya, and fired.
The retort rolled like thunder, as if the ancient clay was groaning in pain. The lock jumped as the bullet hit, but stayed strong in its housing. James fired again, with the same result. The door stood fast.
‘Your gun is too small calibre,’ Anya said, producing the heavier Browning. She aimed and squeezed the trigger, but heard only the empty click.
‘Out of ammo,’ James breathed. ‘And out of luck.’
‘Wait . . .’ Anya took the ring of keys from him. ‘I wonder.’
‘What is it?’ James found himself jogging after her as she retraced their steps to the huge stockpile of explosives.
‘The steel nets are tethered to the chains with padlocks, all the way around!’ She was already sorting through the keys. ‘If one of these fits, perhaps we can start to dismantle this pile . . .’
The thought was hardly appealing, but James willed her to succeed as he watched her work, carefully and methodically trying each key in the lock, her tongue caught between her teeth as she concentrated. His guts turned with the tension, until finally, with a metallic click, one padlock popped open! Anya pulled away chains, and a section of the steel net loosened just enough for her to gain access to the pile. She looked up at James, eyes all but outshining the torch with pride.
He was about to congratulate her when he heard movement from further along the passage, and words in Russian.
Anya’s eyes widened. ‘They heard the gunshots.’
‘Quickly,’ J
ames hissed. ‘Get inside the mesh.’
Silently she turned and lifted the edge of the net she’d freed. James held it up for her while she climbed inside, then followed her into the shadowy edifice, squeezing into a space between two crates. They held silent and still, crushed together there as footsteps sounded in the cavern space outside; voices called out, echoes deadened by the strange acoustics.
James could feel Anya’s heart chiselling at her ribs. ‘What are they saying?’
Anya took a shaky breath. ‘One says the other only imagined gunfire,’ she whispered. ‘He thinks we drowned back at the barrier.’
A man came into sight, holding up a lamp in one hand and a semi-automatic pistol in the other: it was Demir, La Velada’s bodyguard. He spoke in deep, resonant Russian, and his bright torch beam struck the crates. To James, the light felt bright enough to ignite the explosives. He held his breath, waiting for Demir to circle past. His friend called across to him and a conversation ensued. When it ended, both men laughed.
‘He said: I tell you, they must be dead,’ Anya whispered once the light had faded, along with the footsteps. ‘The other said, If they are still wandering round here tonight, that will make certain. But he will check the doors to the Opera House and the . . . the Shukov to be sure.’
‘Shukov?’ James echoed, edging out from the hiding space after Anya. ‘What is that?’
‘It is strange to translate,’ she admitted. ‘The Shukov Tower is in Moscow – a radio mast. It is tall and powerful enough to broadcast across the nation . . .’
Even as she spoke, James could tell from her face that she knew what she was saying. ‘That’s the tower,’ he breathed, ‘and why we didn’t see designs for it. It’s not a proper building, it’s a transmitter tower, a metal framework.’
‘And that second door you found in the cavern leads there?’
‘It fits,’ James agreed. ‘The dotted line on the map: a swift, safe route to a big radio mast for “King” Mimic to broadcast propaganda to the entire nation once the Thames breaks its banks.’ He wondered exactly where above ground the transmitter tower was located; how far away it was from here. ‘Well, when they find the lock’s been tampered with they’ll know we’re not dead.’