Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

“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. “Struggling 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.