Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

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.

“Good God! Dermott!”

“Carmody! Where in hell have you been?”

“Trying to ditch the chopper. What about you?”

“Had a…had a bit of bother.” Suddenly Dermott found he could hardly talk. He was about to break down. “Take her, will you?” he croaked. “I’ve had it.”

With an exclamation Carmody relieved him of his inert burden. “Quick,” said the policeman. “Inside.”

They laid Corinne on one bed and Dermott collapsed on to another with the manacles still dangling from his wrists. “Ring Shore!” he gasped. “Tell him for Christ’s sake to switch off the power to Dragline One. Tell him and Brady to get up here like they never drove before.”

They had turned on the floodlamps to illuminate the 150-foot depths of the pit below. They had also hammered in spikes ten yards back from the lip, and to these they had attached ropes so that the vertiginously-inclined or the less-than-sure-footed could cling to them as they peered over the edge.

Dragline One had ended up on its nose, tilted backwards towards the near-vertical face at an angle of thirty degrees. The massive casing appeared undamaged, as did the triangular arm over which the control cables passed. Even the boom, its enormous length stretched out horizontally across the uneven valley floor, seemed undamaged, at least from above.

Brady had prudently wrapped his belaying rope three times round his mighty girth. “Surprisingly little damage,” he said. “Or so it looks. I suppose some of the electric motors were wrenched free from their beds.”

“That’ll be the least of our troubles.” Jay Shore looked stricken, ashen-faced in the floodlights. The sight of the crippled monster had far more effect on him than on any of the others. “It’s getting the damn thing out of there.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to get a replacement?” asked Brady.

“Jesus! Do you know what a replacement would cost at today’s prices? Forty million dollars. Probably more. And you don’t order one up, just like that. If we could have one on our doorstep tomorrow, I’m sure Sanmobil would order it. But it can’t be done that way. You can’t transport a thing that size overland. Electric motors apart, the whole caboodle comes crated in tens of thousands of pieces, and it takes a team of skilled engineers months to assemble it.”

“Cranes?” Brady suggested. He seemed fascinated by the sheer size of the problem. Or he was trying to be diverted, trying not to think of his missing wife and daughter.

Shore made a dismissive gesture with his gloved hands. “The biggest cranes in the world – a whole battery of them – couldn’t lift the dragline an inch off the floor. We’ll either have to dismantle it piece by piece and raise the bits up here for reassembly, or build a road from down there back up to the surface level and have it towed up on bogies – or, perhaps, under its own steam. The road would have to be a very gentle gradient, which would mean a length of over a mile, heavily metalled on massive foundations. Whatever we do, it’ll cost millions.” He swore at some considerable length. “And all this in just seven minutes’ work!”

“Why in hell couldn’t you stop it, when we phoned you?” asked Carmody.

“The bastards knew what they were doing,” said Shore savagely. “They’d gone into the generator room, thrown the breaker that fed power to Dragline One, locked the door from the outside, left the key in the lock and smashed it so thoroughly that it’ll need an oxy-acetylene torch to open it again. We just couldn’t get in to shut down the power.”

“They sure knew how to cause the maximum damage and disruption with the minimum of effort,” said Brady. “I suggest, Mr Shore, there’s no point in our remaining here a moment longer: all you’re doing is twisting the knife deeper into your wound. Let’s all get back inside and ask George what happened.”

“O.K. Let’s go.” Shore, who had supervised the construction of the dragline, working along with the contractors, Bucyrus-Erie, seemed strangely reluctant to leave the fallen giant. It was as if he were abandoning an old friend. Brady could appreciate how he felt. But he could also appreciate how he felt himself: he had become acutely conscious of the cold.

Shore took one last look at the dragline and turned back towards the heated haven of the minibus. “O.K.,” he repeated automatically. “Let’s go hear Dermott’s story.”

They drove the short distance back to the isolation block, where they found Dermott lying on a bed, already being questioned by Willoughby. Corinne was sitting on a chair in the corner of the small room, looking in better shape than the man she’d rescued

“How is he?” Brady whispered to the nurse out in the corridor.

“His wrists look pretty bad: they got chewed up by the manacles, and frost-bitten as well. They’re going to be real painful for the next few days. They’ll mend, though.”

“What about his general condition – exposure?”

“What are you talking about? He’s got the constitution of an ox.”

By the time Brady, Mackenzie and Carmody had filed into the room, the place was crammed full. Brady seemed much moved by the sight of his senior operative brought low, with hands and forearms heavily bandaged.

“Well, George,” he began, clearing his throat heavily. “I am informed that you plan to survive.”

“Sure do.” Dermott grinned up at them. “But boy – I wouldn’t want to go through that again.”

“I got the story,” Willoughby cut in, brisk and businesslike. He gave a quick précis of what had happened, including the arrival and departure of the helicopter. “I’m sorry to say it, Mr Shore, but it seems the plant is riddled with corruption. Number one, somebody sabotaged the generator room, so that you couldn’t turn the power off. Number two, somebody else set the controls of the dragline to take it over the edge. Number three, somebody else hit Dermott and manacled him to the steel ring. Number four, somebody else again informed the kidnappers that the girl had survived her fall out of the helicopter and was back in the isolation unit. That makes quite a lot of villains for one plant.”

“Too right, it does,” Shore said bitterly. “You don’t think the chopper came back to do the dragline job – that somebody on board got out and set the controls?”

“Impossible. The dragline was moving before the chopper landed. Isn’t that right, Mr Dermott?”

“Right. At least – no – not quite. But we saw men from the chopper go straight to the building here – and then we heard the dragline moving, right near us. The guys from the helicopter didn’t have time to reach the dragline and set up the controls.”

“What I’d like to know is whether your family, Mr Brady, were still on board the helicopter,” Willoughby said.

“Yes, they were.” Carmody startled them all with his sudden pronouncement. “And Mr Reynolds. He was with them.”

“How d’you know?” Jim Brady asked. Dermott sat up abruptly.

“I saw them. That’s what I was doing all the time you were involved with the dragline. I made a wide circle on foot and approached the helicopter from the back. There was a man armed with a machine pistol guarding the ladder, but I climbed up onto the skid-struts from the opposite side and got a look in through the cabin windows. They were all there – Mrs Brady, Stella, Mr Reynolds.”