Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (42 page)

Simon heard the rumble of the truck and the hiss of its air brakes before he glanced in the rearview and saw May’s Espace come round the bend ahead of the convoy.

‘Showtime,’ he said to Taylor, who hit the accelerator and led the procession into the entrance tunnel.

Simon lifted the two SPAS‐
12 shotguns from the seat behind and slotted gas pellets into each one’s grenade launcher.

‘Steady hands, Freddie,’ Taylor said. ‘Remember the Twilight Queen,’ the cheeky bastard referring to their first abortive approach to the Black Sea cruise liner. This had ended in four of them having to dive off their speedboat after Simon accidentally launched a CS gas canister from his weapon when they hit an unexpectedly large wave. Fortunately, the wind was blowing away from their target and they were able to reboard unseen and resume attack a few minutes later.

‘You worry about the driving and don’t fly over any speedbumps like you flew over that fucking wave.’

‘Roger.’

Simon glanced in the wing mirror. The truck was in the tunnel at their backs, behind the vans and one of the speedboat‐
towing Mondeos. May and his Espace would be bringing up the rear, after locking the main gate behind them. The shield door would remain open for now, at least until the morning shift came on at eight.

He ordered Taylor to stop about ten yards before ‘the crossroads’, as the staff referred to it, where the entrance tunnel intersected a second cutting, accessing the tailrace on one side. On the other, there was an offshoot ramp leading to an observation deck above the central cavern, which was where they took the tourists to get a medium‐
distance look at the machine hall. The entrance tunnel was wide enough for two lanes of traffic, which allowed the truck to pass them and pull in ahead, its rear level with the intersection.

All engines were cut and no words were spoken as the team assembled at the rear of the lorry. The sound of the generators covered any noise they were likely to make, but by this stage nobody needed to be told what to do. They formed into coordinated groups, checked their weapons and pulled on their filter masks.

Simon checked his watch. The new shift would be in the control room for Changeover Report, which in theory was supposed to be a detailed breakdown of current operational status, but in practice meant a cup of brew and a blether about who was going to win the football tomorrow. In Simon’s experience, terrorists were about the only people in this world who turned up for their job and just got stuck in, rather than scratch their arses and read the paper for half an hour before thinking about doing a hand’s turn.

He and Taylor led the incursion squad into the central cavern at a soft‐
footed jog, leaving Cook, Deacon, Steve Jones and May (when he caught up) to unload the truck. They split into three groups at the machine hall’s main floor level. Simon led Matlock and Lydon up the near stairs, while Taylor, Headon and Strummer strode quickly and quietly beneath the control room’s observation window to the flight at the end. Simon and Mick Jones headed below to the turbine’s lower access levels, in case somebody was down there getting an early start and fancied trying to be Bruce Willis.

Simon led his team silently along the upper corridor, almost reaching the control room door by the time Taylor and his men came into view from the other end. Once in place, he and Taylor readied their weapons, while Strummer gripped the doorhandle and the rest took position either side.

Upon confirmatory nods from both Simon and Taylor, Strummer counted down from three by holding up fingers. On Go, he pulled the door open long enough for them to each pump two gas pellets into the room, then slammed it closed again, the three of them bunching up against it as the inevitable desperate ramming began.

If anybody in there kept his head, he might grab the phone and dial for help instead of joining the mêlée battering at the door, but by the time the switchboard had answered and asked which service he required, he’d be as unconscious as his colleagues.

They waited until the thumping ceased – a matter of seconds – then opened the door. Simon stepped over the tangle of bodies while the others began removing them, two to a man, taking them to the storage chamber, where they’d be bound and gagged with heavy‐
duty tape then locked behind a reinforced steel door. Matlock had asked why they had to use a non‐
lethal gas instead of just getting it over with, but that was why he was unlikely ever to enjoy inner‐
circle status. No matter how well you’ve planned something like this, it never hurts to have some leverage in case of emergencies – especially when you’ve just cooped yourself up inside a giant hole in the ground.

The phone had indeed been removed from its receiver, and was dangling from the desk. Simon put it to his ear.

‘… repeat, which service do you require, sir?’ asked an impatient female voice. ‘Another toddler playing with the phone, I’ll bet,’ she said more quietly, to whoever was sitting next to her at the switchboard. Simon lifted the filter mask from his mouth. He could smell the gas immediately, but it was dissipating rapidly since the door had been opened.

‘Hello? Sorry about that. It’s Dubh Ardrain control room, yeah. Somebody jumped the gun a wee bit, thought we had a fire. No, it’s nothing. Sorry to trouble you. Okay, cheery‐
bye.’

Simon disconnected the call by putting his hand down on the cradle, looking at the receiver to take note of the number printed on it in punch‐
tape. He took out his radio and relayed it to May. Radios would be fine for use around the main cavern, but those working topside would have five hundred metres of rock between them and their comrades, and the only means of communication would be to call the control room directly on their mobiles.

He walked to the semi‐
circular windowed buttress and looked out upon this gigantic facility over which he now had complete control. Six huge cylinders protruded robustly from the floor of the machine hall, yellow‐
walled, three metres tall, but they were merely the tips of icebergs. Out of sight beneath, the turbines plunged a further seventeen metres, accessed by four lower levels. Above them, the cavern ceiling arced to a height of twenty metres, flanked by gantries and traversed if necessary by a mobile platform suspended across the centre. A giant lighting rig illuminated the place, itself clinging to the overhead rock with dozens of stubby limbs.

At the mouth of the entrance tunnel, he could see May and Cook rolling the first of the drills towards the nearest aqueduct’s maintenance access door. One of three, the aqueduct ran from the turbines through five hundred metres of Ben Larig to the vast reservoir on top of the mountain. The reservoir was once merely a corrie loch, pooled at the bottom of a natural basin amid the expansive promontory that was Dubh Ardrain; the water another remnant of the glacier that had carved a trench through the mountain range, leaving the snaking scar that was Loch Fada and Glen Crom below. Further tunnels and aqueducts had been dug into the stone shoulders of the mesa, diverting the surrounding streams to flood the basin and expand its capacity to almost fifty square kilometres. And holding the billions of gallons in place up there was a concrete gravity buttress dam, four hundred metres long and fifty metres high.

Dubh Ardrain was a reversible pumped‐
storage system, allowing it to use its own stored power to pump water back up from Loch Fada into the reservoir at times of low demand. However, being constructed during the Cold War, an aspect of its intended purpose was to continue generating power in the event of a nuclear attack; hence the disproportionately enormous reservoir, allowing for sustained continuous generation without the need to reverse the flow. The threat of atomic annihilation had lifted since then, but the prudent practice had remained of maintaining capacity topside, especially during the comparatively drier summer months.

All six turbines were currently channelling the day’s usage back up the mountain, but their capacity would shortly be reduced by one third, when Simon powered down Aqueduct Three. Inside each tunnel was a mobile maintenance and inspection platform, which they would be using to transport equipment to the surface, and these tended to work more efficiently when there wasn’t several thousand gallons of water flowing rapidly around them. For emergencies, there was also a stairway cut into the aqueduct floor on one side, but that wasn’t quite so handy when you were lugging several hundredweight of drills and generators around with you.

Deacon and Steve Jones emerged with the second drill as May and Cook headed back to fetch the generator. It had seemed almost insultingly ironic that they needed to bring their own electricity supply to a place like this, but the inconsiderate bastards who’d built it had inconveniently neglected to put an easily accessible power outlet at the head of the dam.

Headon and Mick Jones returned to cart away the last of the unconscious hostages, Taylor stepping aside in the doorway to let them through.

‘That’s eight,’ he said. ‘Everybody accounted for. No strays.’

‘Good. I’m going to power down Aqueduct Three now.’

‘Is there a signal or something for when it’s clear? I don’t remember you saying.’

‘Yeah. The door unlocks and you can open the fucking thing. Clear enough?’

‘Crystal.’

Taylor exited, no doubt muttering insults under his breath. Simon turned to the control console and deactivated pumps five and six. They would need a few minutes to fully shut down, then it would take another five for the aqueduct to drain. He returned to the window and looked down again, listening for the lowering note as the turbines gradually slowed to a halt, smiling with a private satisfaction. He had been here in another lifetime, just another glaikit Geography student on a field trip, and had marvelled at it like he was standing on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Now he was in the captain’s swivel chair.

He watched May and Cook wheel the generator out of sight, heading for the vacuum‐
sealed door leading into the freshly drained aqueduct. Deacon and Steve Jones stood behind them with the first of the drills, waiting for the platform to be sent back down. Strummer and Matlock would go up with the second, followed later by Lydon and Simonon with the explosives and detonators.

Simon took some time to savour the moment.

Burns was wrong. The plans that ‘gang agley’ were not the best laid: that was why they ganged agley, for fuck’s sake. This, however, this work in progress, this plan in action, was why the Black Spirit was the most wanted man in international terrorism: whether they wanted his abilities or his head on a stick, they all knew he was the best in the business. The only thing better laid than his plans would be whichever young mademoiselle was lucky enough to catch his eye in Monte Carlo less than twenty‐
four hours from now.

The control room phone rang, shaking him from his reverie: May on the surface, checking in.

‘Control,’ Simon said, picking it up.

‘It’s May,’ confirmed the voice. ‘We’ve got a problem.’

‘What?’

‘The generator’s fucked. Worse than that: it’s been sabotaged. Drill parts jammed inside, cables cut … It’s a mess.’

‘Sabo …’ Simon’s mind started racing, but the time for speculation was not now. There was only one pertinent question to be asked. ‘Is it fixable?’

‘It’ll take time. And parts, too.’

‘Well, where are we going to find spare electrical parts in a power station? Bring it back down. We’ll get Deacon on to it.’

‘Roger.’

‘No, Deacon. Taylor knows fuck‐
all about—’

‘I meant Roger as in acknowledged.’

‘Just get down here.’

‘Roger.’

Simon slammed down the phone, the possibilities piling up in his head despite his attempts to stay focused. May was his first suspect, the bastard having been as jumpy as an arachnophobe in a room full of tarantulas since the farmhouse. Being the one to ‘discover’ the damage was a classic double‐
bluff, and he had broken the golden rule by sniffing around Simon’s personal information, so had he jumped the dyke? Was the bastard wired? Were there a hundred troops topside waiting to huckle the lot of them? Or did he still think Simon was planning to kill him and had therefore thrown a spanner in the works so he could use the resulting confusion to cover his exit?

That said, it somewhat minimised the impact for the damage to be revealed at the earliest juncture, when there was still plenty of time to repair it; plus, if May was planning to get off his mark, topside wasn’t the smartest place to make his getaway. Even if he had a motorbike secretly stashed at the reservoir, he’d have to travel three miles down the winding mountainside track to reach the main road, where the bridge west was out and the only open route would take him back past the power plant. On the other hand again, it was a good few hundred yards to the main gate from the machine hall, and if they were standing around waiting for him to descend on the automated platform, that would give him a few minutes’ start.

Simon ran from the control room, hurrying down the stairs then making the rest of the journey to Aqueduct Three at a brisk walk, not wanting to appear panicked.

‘Something up, boss?’ asked Deacon as Simon brushed past him and through the vacuum door. He heard the sound of the pulley as soon as he entered, and looked up along the insulated lighting panels to where he could see only the underside of the descending platform.

Simon reached for his radio. ‘May, this is Mercury, come in.’

He could hear the hiss of his own transmission echo in the tunnel above, just audible over the steady hum of the pulley, rendering May’s response redundant.

‘Receiving. What is it?’

‘Forget it. Mercury out.’

Simon exited the aqueduct and went to the nearest drill, whipping off the blanket that was covering it. There was no visible damage, but if they had a saboteur in their midst, it was improbable he’d have stopped at the generator.

‘I want these checked out before you take them anywhere,’ he told Deacon. ‘Somebody’s been messing with the generator. May’s on his way back down with it.’

‘Messing with it? Deliberately?’