The Partridge Kite (32 page)

A simple rise and fall mercury barometer governed both dampers, and the movement of the column of mercury activated a set of electrical points which sent current to the motors that operated the outside louvres.

With his nails Tom scraped off a layer of the soft plastic from the top of the batteries, rolled it into a ball between his fingers and then pressed it flat into a disc an eighth of an inch thick.

Then he carefully prised open the contact breakers with his little finger and eased the disc between the points. The louvres, without electricity, would stay closed. All that would happen now was that the existing air in the room would be sucked out through the ceiling grids by the fan in the ducting system and pumped back into the room through the floor.

The sensor was a different problem. It contained six small barrel-shaped containers, four inches long, lying on their sides end-on to the room. The ends were covered in two- inch-diameter porous diaphragms.

‘Chemical reactors,’ Tom said, ‘full of crystals. Each one sensitive to a different gas.’

He leant away from them. ‘How the hell do we fiddle these?’ He looked down.

Sanderson replied, ‘I remember reading that it’s possible to neutralise crystals with alcohol.’

‘And where the hell do we get. . .!’ But Tom didn’t finish. Instead he pulled out of the pocket of the overalls his pewter hip flask and shook it triumphantly at Sanderson.

‘How’s that?’

Sanderson looked up at him. ‘We’ve really no choice,’ he said. ‘If those booster chargers are working you’ve got just over a minute before the alarm goes off. We’ve nothing to lose.’

Tom rolled up his handkerchief and laid it under the line of reactors. He drank a tot and carefully poured the rest over the linen. Almost immediately the diaphragms became moist as they absorbed the whisky vapour.

‘Pray, and cross your fingers,’ he said almost in a whisper. But Sanderson had already closed his eyes. Tom looked at his wristwatch. Ten seconds to spare before the batteries would go over their maximum charge capacity and give off the first telltale gases. He watched the sweep hand move round the dial to zero, then twenty seconds plus, then forty and still no alarm. At least, none they could hear.

‘Open your eyes, Sanderson,’ he said quietly. ‘Your prayers may have worked. Now we get away from here, as far away as we can manage. In about an hour, with any luck, this lot should take the roof off.’

He looked again at his watch. ‘I wouldn’t put money on it,’ he said, ‘but let’s say kickoff is at 3.30.’

They moved back into the maze, and already through the translucent plastic casings they could see the distilled water bubbling.

The rubber seals on the door pulled and snapped again and they were in the white-tiled corridor. Sanderson led the way into narrow passages, into hallways, past an armoury, a food store and a tool room, until they reached the south wing of the house, the one farthest from the batteries.

For the next sixty minutes they sat in silence, huddled in the dark wet stench of the pump room that took sewage from the house and pushed it on to the cesspit buried a hundred yards away.

The fifteen boosters were now sending four hundred volts across each of their batteries, eighty volts over their normal capacity. The lead plates began to buckle and the plastic casings to distort and then crack. At 212 degrees Fahrenheit the distilled water boiled and atomised the sulphuric acid into a spray so that the room began slowly to fill with a dull grey mist.

The process of electrolysis reached its final stage, breaking the water down to its constituent gases, hydrogen and oxygen. With the outside air-conditioning louvres closed and the reactor crystals neutralised, the two highly explosive gases began to fill the battery and regulator rooms.

The recirculating fan, operating off the return air damper, began to spread the gases through the air-conditioning system, up through the ceiling grids into ducts running only inches beneath the floors upstairs, across the corridor and back up through the grids in the floor again. The gases were now spread well beyond the battery room itself.

Almost exactly one hour after the booster charge switches had been turned on MAXIMUM, the fail-safe mechanism in the regulators sent out their alarm to the computers. They, in automatic response, accepted the alarm, enabling the regulators’ fail-safe to switch off the current from the generators.

Immediately the regulators’ fifteen master switches on the outside of the racks dropped down to the OFF position with a heavy clang, like the levers in a railway signal box. And as the electrical contacts were broken apart, sparks jumped in the regulator room and the hydrogen and oxygen ignited.

In a light moment the flash ran the entire length of the room through the air-conditioning ducts, and the gases exploded. The heavy batteries in that same instant became lethal missiles, sent whole or in fragments through the air by the force of the blast.

The floor above took full impact, and in the Board Room, immediately over the explosion’s centre, people, furniture and masonry were rammed through the ceiling above them and the ceiling above that until fragments of human bodies, wood and stone were carried out at full force through the slates of the roof.

The blast sideways took out the generators at the far end, and the kitchens, restrooms and refectory at the other. Catering staff and technicians pondering over their late lunch were burnt and ripped apart by the rush of scorching air and flying shrapnel.

The large underground diesel fuel storage tanks were peeled open like banana skins. The flames set the oil alight and that in turn was carried on by the blast, covering in burning oil anyone or anything in its way. Men and women ran about on fire, muted in pain and terror.

The explosion downwards through the floor of the battery room tore the computers apart along with the thirty operators who were programming the final hours of the countdown. The blast force was then deflected by the solid concrete basement floor and spread out, twisting the steel pillars that supported the basement floors. Ceilings collapsed and absurdly grotesque shapes of what looked like charcoal hung from beams in the ceiling, or were sprawled obscenely across door frames - people scorched to carbon by the rush of superheat.

Tom followed Sanderson through the chaos of the ground floor of the south wing, which was furthest from the explosion. He pushed past men fighting men, and women sitting in the debris sobbing quietly to themselves.

Tom could hear automatic fire in the rooms upstairs and return fire from the grounds outside. He heard voices shouting commands but no one seemed to respond. Secondary explosions shook the house again and splinters of glass, carried by the wind from the broken windows, pierced Tom’s face. He tried to pull them out and saw that Sanderson was already smeared in blood.

They ran out into the grounds and on to the tarmac driveway. Already it was dark and a blizzard cut into them more sharply than the glass splinters.

There was another burst of automatic fire, joined by more from the same direction, then return fire from behind them. Two, maybe three men on Tom’s right, they were only vague shadows in the red glow of the blaze, began running. There were muzzle flashes from the bushes ahead and they fell. Tom quickly grabbed a rifle as it clattered across the tarmac towards him.

‘They’re fighting for the tracked vehicles,’ Sanderson shouted. ‘There’s an underground garage on the other side of the drive - and they’re trying to get to the tractors and caterpillars.’

‘Is that our way out?’ Tom shouted back to him.

‘No! We’d never get near them and even if we did there’s too much snow out there for us to get very far, even on tracks.’

‘Well, start running, for Christ’s sake,’ Tom said. ‘Anywhere you like but let’s get away from here. Where’s the front gate?’

They ran from the house, dodging men and falling masonry.

The gate is on the left,’ Sanderson shouted, ‘but it’ll still be guarded. Best get round to the back and make for the fence and the forest.’

There was another explosion above them on the first or second floor. The blast of shrapnel cut off the top twenty feet of a cedar in front of them and it spun in the air like a top and crashed through the slate roof of the house.

On their right they heard the whine of a turbine and saw in a clearing of trees helicopter rotor blades beginning to turn.

Men around them heard and saw it too and began running towards it realising it was their only means of escape.

Within seconds the machine was covered in bodies, fighting and clawing their way on to it. Shaking with the weight, the helicopter lifted ten feet, dropped back to the ground and lifted again. As it rose slowly, still shaking violently, Tom could see in the light of the blaze men clinging to the skids underneath. As the pilot manoeuvred it up and out of the circle of trees, fifty feet up, bodies began falling from it, clawing at the air, bouncing from the branches of the firs and hitting the ground seconds later.

One man still standing on the left-hand skid was screaming as the pilot, a foot away from him on the inside of the Perspex cockpit, began deliberately to twist his machine this way and that, trying to shake him off. The screaming faded with the helicopter as it gained height and disappeared into the night.

The fire now enveloped the entire right wing of the house and explosions were still coming from the basement. Gusts of wind swept the falling snow into a vortex and pulled flames out of the house, sending them off in other directions until the whole building was engulfed in flames and smoke.

Tom and Sanderson were now thirty yards away but still the heat stung their faces.

‘McCullin,’ Sanderson shouted, ‘there’s the fence.’

There was another burst of automatic fire. It could have been in their direction but they ran on, not caring whether it was meant for them or not, until they touched the fence.

It was fifteen feet high, a four-inch wire mesh staked every ten yards. On the other side of it, twenty yards away and running parallel, was another. Two identical fences making a wide corridor in between.

‘Is it mined?’ Tom shouted to Sanderson.

‘I don’t know.’ He was holding on to the fence, gasping for breath after the seventy-yard run. Snow flecked his face and his spectacles. Spittle ran from the corners of his mouth and his long grey hair streamed in the wind.

‘Take a deep breath!’ Tom shouted above the noise to him, ‘and start climbing. Don’t touch the ground the other side until I’m there. Just hang on to the fence above the snow. Go!’

Sanderson went up and over and down the other side, clinging on to the wire as Tom had told him, just above the ground.

Tom began climbing. Then suddenly he stopped. He heard them coming from the right like baying wolves.

‘Come back!’ he screamed across to Sanderson. Tor Christ’s sake start climbing back up. This isn’t mined. It’s a dog alley. Climb, for God’s sake!’

But Sanderson hesitated. He hadn’t understood. Couldn’t properly make out Tom’s words in the noise of the wind. He just clung to the fence looking up at Tom on the other side, puzzled, hardly able to see now through his snow-covered spectacles.

Then he too heard them and understood. But he never saw them. As he began climbing the pack of Dobermans leapt at him, snarling, and the lead dog caught him by his right ankle. The weight was too much for Sanderson who just hung there on the wire, spreadeagled and suspended in terror.

The second dog dug into his right knee and the others followed, leaping on to the back of the pack leader to get closer and higher to the man.

Tom dropped to the ground and began firing single shots through the wire, aiming at individual dogs to avoid Sanderson. Sanderson made no sound, his face was pressed so hard into the mesh that his skin overlapped the mesh, his mouth wide open as the dogs tore flesh from him. But no sound came.

Then suddenly the hands let go and he fell backwards into the snow. The animals twisted themselves back on top and covered him completely. His struggling stopped and Tom swept the dogs with automatic fire until they too were all dead.

He looked about him but his shots had been heard by no one. He crouched down by the fence closing his eyes and turning his back on what was behind him in the dog alley.

Now his concern was to keep warm and to do that he had to find shelter, or keep close to the house. The glow of the fire would sooner or later be seen in Braemar and it couldn’t be long before rescue teams were on their way to find out what it was all about.

But to stay alive until they came meant staying warm; staying close to the house, close to the warmer air provided by the blaze.

Slowly, tree by tree, he made his way back, feeling the warmth creep back into him with every step closer. Although the back of the house this side was still intact, new explosions shook the walls. He could hear falling timber and masonry inside and the roar as a new blaze was encouraged to grow and explode by the wind.

Flames were pouring out of the windows and doors like white-hot molten lava. Section by section of the roof collapsed and sparks mushroomed into the air.

He couldn’t see anyone in the grounds about the house now but he could hear the sounds of engines, heavy engines, possibly tractors and bulldozers moving away into the forest. On his right he saw tiny dots of headlamps moving in the forest a mile or so away, and could hear just occasionally the scream of engines trying to barge their way through the weight of snow that had built up in front of them.

A little ahead of him, ten, maybe fifteen yards away, Tom saw a small outhouse far enough from the blaze to be safe from falling debris but near enough to be warm. He stepped out from the cover of the tree but then stopped. Across the back of the house he saw a man, walking slowly, uncertainly, stumbling. An old man. A large man.

His face was hidden in the hood of a heavy duffle coat and as Tom moved closer the man stopped and began coughing. A violent cough but still that same strange familiar sound.

With a roar the wall behind him collapsed and suddenly the man found he was standing in the middle of a horseshoe of flame.