Spiral (41 page)

Parry whistled. “High-stakes stuff,” he said. As Parry leaned on a neighboring desk and began to tug his beard in thought, Will noticed that everyone’s eyes were on him. Stephanie even had her mouth open and was shaping words as if she was willing him to decide that the scheme was feasible.

Parry was shaking his head when he eventually spoke again. “I see what you’re saying, but the volume of explosive material in the arsenal will be a limiting factor. And even if we plowed ahead with every last stick, if the plan fails, all the remaining oxygen in the Complex will have been used up. We’d have brought forward the last curtain call.” With a sniff, he crossed his arms. “Besides that, what’s left of the Complex might just come crashing down on our heads.”

“Er . . . Commander,” Sergeant Finch began. “Aren’t you forgetting someth —”

“No, Finch, I’m not!” Parry snapped savagely at him.

Drake was looking from his father to Sergeant Finch and then back again as he tried to work out what their exchange had been all about. “If there’s something you two aren’t telling us, I think we have a right to know.”

Parry was on his feet in an instant. “No,” he barked. “There are some things that
nobody
has a right to know. And Finch here has spoken out of turn, when he doesn’t know the whole story.”

Mrs. Burrows’s voice was quiet and controlled as she joined the conversation. “Parry, we’re the only people in the world who are aware that the Phase might still be under way. And we’re the only ones who can do anything to stop it. So what can be so important that you’re prepared to let us all die in this place?”

Parry was looking at the ground and tensing a leg as if he was racked with indecision. He suddenly raised his head to his son. “Are you certain that we’ve got a chance with this cockamamie idea of yours? Are you absolutely certain?”

“Within the tolerances of the drawings we’ve seen, and on the assumption that more erosion has taken place . . . yes,” Drake replied. “The only real negative is that we could do with two or three times the amount of explosive to punch through the reinforced Complex wall
and
the mountainside.”

“You boys do like to use brute force, don’t you?” Parry said, then thought for a moment. “OK, you’d all better follow me,” he decided, giving Sergeant Finch a nod.

As Parry directed, they collected sledgehammers, coal chisels, and mallets on the way. The elevators were out of action, so the Colonel carried Sergeant Finch on his back, while Drake and Sweeney hauled his mobility scooter down the stairs.

Once they were all on Level 6, Parry led them past the water tanks and to the arsenal at the very end of the floor. He strode through one of the aisles between the racking shelves until he reached a large metal cabinet against the wall.

“Several of you get to work and move any explosives and incendiaries within a twenty-foot radius of here. Last thing we want is to ignite anything with a stray spark,” Parry said with a wave of his hand at the shelves. Then he supervised his son and Sweeney as they slid the metal cabinet out of the way. The wall behind appeared to be no different from anywhere else, but Parry took up a coal chisel and mallet and began to tap away at it.

It quickly became apparent that it wasn’t just a solid slab of reinforced concrete. He’d located an area at the bottom of the wall that gave off a different sound when he chipped at it. And he was working his way vertically up the wall when he stopped to address Will. “You’re good at this sort of stuff, laddie. Help yourself to some tools and find the other side of the doorway,” he said, pointing four feet or so along the base of the wall.

Will found that there was a wooden batten buried just below the surface of the concrete, and it didn’t take much effort to uncover it. As the two of them continued to work, a rectangle the size of a pair of double doors gradually revealed itself. Once they were finished, they both stood back.

“Open Sesame,” Parry said. “That’s our way in.”

Having checked that the surrounding shelves were clear, Parry turned to everyone. “Now we break down the concrete in the doorway.”

“What’s in there?” Drake said. “An explosives cache?”

Ignoring the question, Parry swung a sledgehammer at a bottom corner of the rectangle.

Sergeant Finch wasn’t so reticent. “Yes, the secondary store is ’idden there,” he said. “A top secret store.”

“And the rest,” Parry muttered under his breath as he kept swinging. Both Sweeney and the Colonel joined in. The concrete was gradually yielding, but not as quickly as Will had thought it would.

“Can I have a go?” someone asked, striding into the arsenal.

“Chester!” Will burst out, a big smile on his face. Elliott was following several paces behind, her expression one of concern.

“About time I did something,” Chester said as the Colonel passed his sledgehammer over and the boy set to work.

Sweeney was the first to break through, and stopped to take a look.

“No, carry on,” Parry said. “Better that we clear it completely.”

Some twenty minutes later the Colonel was attacking the last piece of concrete at the top of the opening. After it crashed to the floor, Parry used his flashlight to show the way. They all filed in behind him.

“There’s more than enough here for what we need,” Drake said, taking in the sheer number of wooden crates as Parry flicked his flashlight beam over them. “But this is nothing fancy — just your plain vanilla postwar explosive stock. So what was with all that melodrama earlier?”

“The best way to hide something is to hide it in something already hidden,” Parry announced as he spun around to face everybody. “You cannot under any circumstances breathe a word of what you are about to learn — not to anybody.” He drew himself up to his full height. “I am now going to ask you each to give your consent that, under the Defense of the Realm Act 1973, as revised 1975 and 1976, that you irrevocably and unreservedly yield to the powers contained within the act.” Parry then spoke their names in turn.

“Drake?”

“Whatever all that means, yes,” Drake said.

“Finch?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Colonel Bismarck — you are hereby granted full British nationality. I need your answer.”

“Can Parry do that?” Will whispered to Chester as the Colonel indicated that he agreed.

“And, likewise, Eddie the Styx, you are hereby granted full citizenship of this country. Do you agree?”

“Yes, sir,” Eddie replied.

“Mrs. Burrows?”

“Yes, Parry,” she said gently. “Why ever not?”

“Elliott — sorry, I forgot that you also need to be granted British nationality. Answer me, please.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Sweeney?”

“Yes, boss.”

Parry then addressed Will and Chester, who confirmed their agreement.

“Stephanie?” Parry said.

“Like, yes,” she replied.

“Right,” Parry said. “You should be aware that if any one of you leaks information regarding this matter, under the Defense of the Realm Act, you will be liable to summary automatic execution without trial or any form of legal recourse whatsoever.”

“Execution?” Mrs. Burrows said.

“I’d have full authorization to kill you,” Parry answered matter-of-factly. And from the tone of his voice, everyone knew he meant it. “After the nuclear disarmament treaty of 1972, it was resolved by a secret subcommittee within the Ministry of Defense that we were leaving ourselves at a howling dis-advantage. So . . .”

Parry directed his flashlight beam into the corner of the room.

There were ten metal containers there, shining dully.

“Huh?” Stephanie said, wholly unimpressed after all the buildup.

“We stuck a few TNDs away in here,” Parry said, “for a rainy day.”

“TNDs?” Will asked.

“Thermonuclear devices,” Parry explained.

“Nukes . . . he’s talking about nukes!” Drake said, staring at the containers. “And he’s got to be bloody joking!”

Parry and Sergeant Finch, armed with his ever-present clipboard, went around both the arsenal and the secondary cache, marking chalk crosses on the crates that contained the most potent explosives. Bit by bit, these were then loaded onto a trolley, which was pushed to the stairwell. Will and Chester took over from there, finding they had the unenviable task of lugging each crate up the eight flights of stairs to Level 2, where another trolley was waiting for them.

It was hard work: The wooden crates were heavy, and the boys were suffering from the lack of air. As they labored up the stairs with the umpteenth crate between them, Chester seemed to be oblivious to the rope handles cutting into his hands. They finally cleared the stairs with their crate and placed it carefully on the trolley with all the others.

Leaning against the wall and breathing heavily, Will caught his friend’s eye. Chester gave him a broad grin as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

“You OK?” Will asked him.

“Just pleased to be doing something,” Chester replied. Regardless of the way he seemed to be coping, Will was concerned about him, but there wasn’t much he could do right now.

Chester mopped his brow. “Where’s Drake got to? I say we take this load to him ourselves.”

“Sure,” Will agreed.

With Will pulling and Chester pushing, they wheeled the heavily laden trolley down the corridor. One of the wheels had begun to squeal plaintively. “Reminds me of when we were emptying the wheelbarrow on Highfield Common,” Chester remarked.

As they came to the end of the corridor, they steered the trolley through a doorway and into the utility room Drake had identified. He’d said it was their best bet to punch a way through the mountainside.

The room was already piled high with crates, and Drake was in the process of embedding pencil-sized detonators into each one, which were connected by a skein of cables.

“Cool,” Drake said, glancing at the trolley. “I’ll unload it myself if you want to get on.”

“How many more do you need?” Chester asked, looking at the stacks of crates beside Drake.

“Enough to fill this room, then the one next to it,” Drake answered. “I reckon that’s another twenty or so trips with the trolley.”

“Twenty!” Chester exclaimed, laughing in an exaggerated way. “Cool — we’ll keep ’em coming,” he added as he left the room. They could still hear his laughter as he passed down the corridor, slapping the wall and saying “More, more, more!”

“He’s not himself,” Drake pronounced in a low voice, frowning.

“Are any of us?” Will shot back.

“Well, keep a close eye on him, won’t you, Will?” Drake said.

It took the best part of a day to prepare the two rooms. Finally, Drake walked the distance up the stairs and into the Hub, a drum rotating in his hands as he played out a cable behind him.

Parry had been concerned that even if the explosion blew a way through, it might also bring down the ceiling of Level 2 in the process, sealing their way out and negating the whole exercise. There was no way of closing the blast doors to the level, but at Parry’s direction, everyone piled sandbags around the two rooms in a bid to contain some of the inward force of the blast. Parry still wasn’t satisfied that they were doing all they could on this front, so he oversaw the construction of another sandbag barrier halfway down the corridor.

The time had come. Everyone was waiting outside the small canteen off the Hub, where Chester had first noticed his mother behaving strangely. Drake and Eddie had picked it because they believed it would be a good place for them all to shelter from the blast.

“All systems go,” Parry said, and everyone trooped into the canteen, and the door was shut behind them. They watched as Drake untwisted the two glinting copper wires at the end of the cable, then connected them to the terminals on a detonator.

No one spoke. As Mrs. Burrows stroked Colly, there was a chorus of anxious meows from the row of wicker baskets along the top of the work surface. Stephanie and Elliott had had a devil of a job rounding up Sergeant Finch’s cats from their various hiding places in the Complex, but it was the least they could do for the old man.

Drake had told everyone to stow their Bergens in one corner, so they had their kits close by them. And in addition to the many fire extinguishers they’d brought into the room, Parry had ensured that there was enough food and water to last them a few days.