Don Pendleton: Tower of Terror

Lyons and Blancanales ran to the elevator.

Tearing away the first loop of nylon cord holding the auditorium doors closed, Green shouted to the hysterical employees inside.

"Back off! Just a second! I can't untie the ropes with you pushing."

"Cut them! Please, get us out of here!"

"I don't have a knife. I can't go looking — just a second!"

He glanced around the corridor. He saw the stacked boxes, a few discarded lengths of nylon rope, a woman's shoe, a black nylon bag. But no knives, no bottles to break, nothing. He started over to the dead terrorist lying near the elevator doors.

Green stopped. For the first time in the sixty seconds since he'd killed Fernando, he stood still. He read the wording on the crates stacked against the elevator column.

"United States Army" had been marked over with stenciled letters. He didn't immediately recognize the stenciled letters. The lettering and words were Vietnamese!

On the end of one crate, he saw the letter and number: C-4.

A twisted plastic rope ran from the boxes. Green was standing on the rope. He looked down at his feet, then to the rope behind him. It extended from the U.S. Army packing crates to the discarded nylon bag. The bag had been thrown into the corner near the auditorium doors.

A strip of tape secured the bag's strap to the wall. Green saw a gossamer strand of monofilament stretched from the bag, across the auditorium's double doors, to the other side of the doors. A second strip of tape, only an inch long, secured the mono-filament to the wall.

Green's heart stopped. He stood on a line of detonation cord. He recognized it from Vietnam. The det-cord ran from the stacked crates to the nylon bag. A line of monofilament stretched across the doors from the bag.

The panicked people in the auditorium threw their weight against the doors, pulling the nylon cord taut. The doors opened half an inch, fell closed again. Once more, the people threw their bodies against the doors.

One of the door handles broke. The door opened a half inch. Green saw the opening doors press against the monofilament.

His body moved so slowly. His brain screamed words, but his throat and tongue and lips didn't have the time to form the sounds. He threw himself at the doors, fell. He hit the doors with his back, pushed against the weight of the people hitting the doors.

He tried to scream the words again. This time he succeeded in mouthing the sounds.

"There's a bomb on the door!"

But they hit the doors again and again. Suddenly, two of the officers in black commando suits appeared, ran to him. The blond man threw himself against the doors.

Green and the officer stood side by side, pushing back the doors. The other officer — the bullnecked Latin man with gray in his black hair — traced the line of monofilament, peeling the tape off the far wall, letting the line go slack.

The officer went to the center of the corridor and whipped a knife from his boot to cut the det-cord. He threw the ends of the det-cord apart. Then he went to the black nylon bag, and very, very carefully cut the det-cord where it emerged from the bag.

The doors burst open and a wide-eyed mob of people poured into the corridor, some of them continuing to run in all directions as if from a fire.

"There's another bomb in there!" yelled a middle-aged woman. "Up in the projection room."

The blond officer disappeared into the cavern of the now-empty auditorium, as his partner attempted to control the disorder of the escapees with instructions for their calm descent to the ground floor.

Within a minute, he returned with the bomb. As he came by the alarmed Charlie Green, he said, "It's a fake. Just a transistor radio."

"Oh, man, what a relief," gasped Charlie.

"Mr. Green, you deserve a medal," said Carl Lyons.

Green laughed. "I already have medals. All I want to do is find a missing employee and then go home. I really wish I hadn't come to work today."

"We're glad you did," shouted Blancanales above the babble of the three dozen overjoyed people milling about him. "It's good to have the assistance of a concerned citizen."

Blancanales disentangled himself from the men and women lining themselves up to go downstairs.

"Now we must rescue Gadgets from that mess on the roof," he suggested to Lyons, who was inspecting the crates of C-4, "and let the three of us get the hell out of here. The cops can clean up the garage — it'll take them a week at least."

Mr. Green had disappeared in search of Sandy Robinson, and a pall of silence descended on the floor.

"You have never spoken truer words," murmured Lyons. "This building stinks. Let's get out of here."