The Wind From Nowhere

3 Vortex over London

Deborah Mason took the bundle of teletype dispatches off Andrew Symington's desk, glanced quickly through them and asked, "Any hopeful news?"

Symington shook his head slowly. Behind him the banks of teletypes-labeled Ankara, Bangkok, Copenhagen and so on through the alphabet-chattered away, churning out endless tapes. They almost filled the small newsroom, cramming the desks of the threeman staff over into a corner.

"Still looks bad, Deborah. Up to 175 now and shows no signs of breaking." He scrutinized her carefully, noting the lines of tension that webbed the corners of her eyes, gave her smooth, intelligent face a look of precocious maturity, although she was only twenty-five. Unlike most of the girls working at Central Operations Executive, she still kept herself trim and well-groomed. He reflected that the ascendancy of woman in the twentieth century made the possibility of an abrupt end to civilization seem infinitely remote; it was difficult to visualize a sleek young executive like Deborah Mason taking her place in the doomed lifeboats. She was much more the sort of girl who heard the faint SOS signals and organized the rescue operation.

Which, of course, was exactly what she was doing at Central Operations Executive. With the slight difference that this time the whole world was in the last lifeboat. But with people like Deborah and Simon Marshall, the COE intelligence chief, working the pumps, there was a good chance of success.

The unit, directly responsible to the Prime Minister, had been formed only two weeks previously. Staffed largely by War Office personnel, with a few communications specialists such as Symington recruited from the Air Ministry and industry, its job was to act as an intelligence section handling and sorting all incoming information, and also to serve as the executive agency of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Home Office. Its headquarters were situated in the old Admiralty buildings in Whitehall, a rambling network of stately boardrooms and tiny offices in the underground bunkers deep below Horseguards Parade. Here Symington spent most of the day and night, only getting back to his wife-who was expecting her baby within a fortnight at the outside-usually after she was asleep. Along with the wives and families of the other COE personnel, she was housed in the Park Lane Hotel, which had been taken over by the government. Symington saw her daily, and as one of the few employees not resident at the Admiralty he was able to verify personally the reports he spent all day preparing.

TOKYO: 174 mph. 99% of the city down. Explosive fires from

Mitsubashi steelworks spreading over western suburbs.

Casualties estimated at 15,000. Food and water adequate for

three days. Government action confined to police patrols.

ROME: 176 mph. Municipal and office buildings still intact,

but Vatican roofless, dome of St. Peter's destroyed.

Casualties: 2,000. Suburbs largely derelict. Refugees from

rural areas flooding into city, catacombs requisitioned

by government for relief and dormitories.

NEW YORK: 175 mph. All skyscrapers in Manhattan windowless and

abandoned. TV aerial and tower of Empire State Building down.

Statue of Liberty minus head and torch. Torrential seas

breaking inshore as far as Central Park. City at standstill.

Casualties: 500.

VENICE: 176 mph. City abandoned. Casualties: 2,000. Heavy seas

have demolished Grand Canal palazzos. St. Mark's Square

under water, campanile down. All inhabitants on mainland.

ARCHANGEL: 68 mph. No casualties. Intact. Airfield and

harbor closed.

CAPE TOWN: 74 mph. 4 casualties. Intact.

SINGAPORE: 178 mph. City abandoned. Government control

nonexistent. Casualties: 25,000.

Simon Marshall read carefully through the reports, chewed his lip for a moment and then gave them to Deborah to file.

"Not so good, but not so bad either. Tokyo and Singapore, of course, are gone, but one can't expect those cardboard jungles to stand up to winds above hurricane force. Pity about Venice."

A large powerful man of fifty, with a tough handsome face, strong arms and shoulders, Marshall filled the big office, sitting massively at his desk like an intelligent bear. He had built up COE in little more than two weeks, hiring and firing the necessary personnel single-handed, organizing a world-wide coverage of reporters, seizing the services of top meteorological, communications and electronics experts. COE now was one of the Western Hemisphere 's key nerve centers, keeping the Combined Chiefs of Staffs and the government as well informed as they could be.

"Get home all right last night?" he asked Deborah.

"Yes, thanks." She glanced at her wrist watch. It was 10:57, three minutes before Marshall was to give his daily report to the Combined Chiefs, but he had already mastered the entire intelligence picture, was completely relaxed.

As the minute hand of the clock moved on to 10:59, Marshall stood up and left his desk. The meeting took place in the cabinet room at the end of the corridor. As Deborah picked up Marshall 's briefcase, he took it from her with a smile, his hand pressing over hers as he held the handle. The other hand touched her waist, pushed her gently toward the door.

"Time for our tête a tête," he said. "Let's see if we can give them something today to keep them happy."

The other members of the COE cabinet were taking their seats as they entered. There were five members, who reported to the Prime Minister through Sir Charles Gort, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. A trim neat figure in pin-striped trousers and dark jacket, he was a professional civil servant, quiet but firmly spoken, never appearing to volunteer an opinion of his own but adept at reconciling contrary viewpoints.

He waited for the others to settle down, and then turned to Dr. Lovatt Dickinson, Director of the Meteorological Office, a sandyhaired Scot in a brown tweed suit, who sat on his left.

"Doctor, perhaps you'd be good enough to let us have the latest news on the weather front."

Dickinson sat forward, reading from a pad of blue Meteorological Office tabular memos.

"Well, Sir Charles, I can't say that I've anything very hopeful to report. The wind speed is now 175 miles per hour, an increase of 4.89 miles per hour over the speed recorded at 10 A.M. yesterday, maintaining the average daily increase of five miles per hour that we've seen over the last three weeks. The humidity shows a slight increase, to be accounted for by the passage of these enormous air volumes over the disturbed ocean surfaces. We've done our best to make high-altitude observations, but you'll appreciate that launching a balloon in this wind, let alone keeping track of it, is well nigh impossible. However, the weather ship _Northern Survey_ off the coast of Greenland, where the wind speed is down to a mere 85 mph, has reported data indicating, as one would expect, that the velocity of the global air stream declines with decreasing density, and that at 45,000 feet the air speed is approximately 45 mph at the equator and 30 mph over this latitude."

Dickinson momentarily lost his sequence, and while he shuffled the memos Gort cut in smoothly.

"Thank you, Doctor. But boiling it all down, what prospects are there of the wind system's actually subsiding?"

Dickinson shook his head dourly. "I'd like to be optimistic, Sir Charles, but I've every suspicion that it's got some way to go yet before it spends itself. We're witnessing a meteorological phenomenon of unprecedented magnitude, a global cyclone accelerating at a uniform rate, exhibiting all the signs distinguishing highly stable aerodynamic systems. The wind mass now has tremendous momentum, and the inertial forces alone will prevent a sudden abatement.

"Theoretically there are no reasons why it should not continue to revolve at high speeds indefinitely, and become the prevailing planetary system similar to the revolving clouds of gas that produce the rings of Saturn. To date the weather systems on this planet have always been dictated by the oceanic drifts, but it's obvious now that far stronger influences are at work. Exactly what, any of you are free to speculate.

"Recently our monitors have detected unusually high levels of cosmic radiation. All electromagnetic wave forms have mass-perhaps a vast tangential stream of cosmic radiation exploded from the sun during the solar eclipse a month ago, struck the earth on one exposed hemisphere, and its gravitational drag might have set in motion the huge cyclone revolving round the earth's axis at this moment.

Dickinson looked around the table and smiled somberly. "Or again, maybe it's the deliberate act of an outraged Providence, determined to sweep man and his pestilence from the surface of this once green earth. Who can say?"

Gort pursed his lips, eying Dickinson with dry amusement. "Well, let's sincerely hope not, Doctor. We simply haven't got a big enough budget for that sort of emergency. Summing up, then, it looks as if we were optimistic a week ago when we assumed, quite naturally, that the wind would exhaust itself once it reached hurricane force. We can expect it to continue, if not indefinitely, at least for a considerable period, perhaps another month. Could we now have a report of the present position as assessed by the intelligence section?"

Marshall sat forward, the eyes of the other men at the table turning toward him.

"Recapping for a moment, Sir Charles, it's exactly eight days since London first began to experience winds of over 120 miles an hour, greater than any previously recorded, and certainly well beyond anything the architects of this city designed for. Bearing that in mind, I'm sure you'll be proud to hear that our great capital city is holding together with remarkable tenacity." Marshall glanced around the table, letting the impact of this homily sink in, then continued in a slightly more factual tone:

"Taking London first, although almost all activity in the commercial and industrial sense has ceased for the time being, the majority of people are getting by without too much difficulty. Most of them have managed to board up their houses, secure their roofs, and lay in adequate stocks of food and water. Casualties have been low-2,000-and many of these were elderly people who were probably frightened to death, quite literally, rather than injured by falling masonry."

Marshall glanced through his notes. "Abroad, in Europe and North America, the picture is pretty much the same. They've all battened down the hatches and are ready to ride out the storm. Scandinavia and northern Russia, of course, are outside the main wind belt and life seems to be going on much as usual. They're equipped for hurricane-force winds as a matter of course." Marshall smiled his big craggy smile. "I think we can probably stand another 20 or 30 mph without any real damage."

Major-General Harris, a small man in a spic-and-span uniform, nodded briskly.

"Good to hear you say that, Marshall. Morale isn't as high as it could be. Too much negative talk around."

Vice-Admiral Saunders, sitting next to him, nodded agreement.

"I hope your information is right, though, Marshall. One of the Americans told me this morning that Venice was a complete writeoff."

"Exaggeration," Marshall said easily. "My latest report a few minutes ago was that there had been heavy flooding, but no serious damage."

The admiral nodded, glad to be reassured. Marshall continued with his survey. Deborah sat just behind him, listening to the steady confident tone. With the exception of Gort, who remained neutral, the three other members of the committee were inclined to be pessimistic and depressed, expecting the worst and misinterpreting the news to serve their unconscious acceptance of disaster. General Harris and Vice-Admiral Saunders were typical of the sort of serviceman in the saddle at the beginning of a war. They had the Dunkirk mentality, had already been defeated and were getting ready to make a triumph out of it, counting up the endless casualty lists, the catalogues of disaster and destruction, as if these were a measure of their courage and competence.

Marshall, Deborah realized, was the necessary counterforce on the team. Although he might be overoptimistic, this was deliberate, the sort of Churchillian policy that would keep people head-up into the wind, doing everything to defend themselves, rather than running helplessly before it. She listened half consciously to Mar shall, feeling his confidence surge through her.

On the way back to Marshall 's office after the meeting closed, they met Symington, carrying a teletype memo in his hand.

"Bad news, I'm afraid, sir. The old Russell Square Hotel collapsed suddenly about half an hour ago. Some of the piles drove straight through the sub-soil into the Piccadilly Line platforms directly below. First estimates are that about two hundred were killed in the Russell basement and about twice that number again in the station."

Marshall took the tape and stared at it blindly for several moments, bunching his fist and drumming it against his forehead.

"Deborah, get this out to all casualty units straight away! About four hundred were down in the station, you say, Andrew? For God's sake, what were they doing there? Don't tell me they were waiting for a train."

Symington gestured with one hand. "I suppose they were sheltering there, the way they did in World War II."

In a burst of exasperation, Marshall shouted: "But that's just what we don't want them to do! They should have been above ground, strengthening their own homes, not just abandoning them and cowering away like a lot of sheep."

Symington smiled wanly. "Properties in the Bloomsbury and Russell Square area are pretty decrepit. High Victorian terraced houses ready for demolition. People there live in single rooms-"

"I don't care where they live!" Marshall cut in. "There are eight million people in this city and they've got to stand up and face this wind together. Once they start thinking of themselves and a warm hole to hide in the whole damn place will blow away."

He swung through into his office. "Call transport," he snapped at Deborah. "Tell them to get a car ready. We'll go out and have a look at this ourselves."

He pulled a heavy trench coat off the door, climbed into it while Deborah hurried over to the phone. As he strode off down the corridor she followed, slipping into her own coat.

The operations deck was on the second floor of the Admiralty building, a honeycomb of small partitioned offices off the narrow high-ceilinged corridors. They passed the overseas news section, made their way through into a wide office which was the UK news reception unit. There were a dozen teletypes taping down an endless stream of information from the major provincial capitals, TV screens flickering with pictures broadcast from mobile transmitter Units all over London, and a trio of operators in direct touch with the Met. Office.

"What are the latest casualties at Russell Square?" Marshall asked a young lieutenant sitting at a desk in front of a TV set, watching the screen as he talked rapidly into a boom mike jutting from his shoulder.

"Heavy, I'm afraid, sir. At least four hundred dead. The station access platforms are in pitch darkness, and they're waiting for the RASC unit at Liverpool Street Station to move their generator down."

The screen was blurred and indistinct, but Marshall could make out the stabbing beams of searchlights playing over the ragged silhouette of the collapsed hotel. Its ten stories had concertinaed to the equivalent of three; many of the windows and balconies were apparently intact, but closer inspection revealed that the floors were separated by an interval of only three or four feet instead of the usual 12.

Marshall took Deborah's arm and led her out of the room into the corridor. They walked down the stairs to the ground floor. The building was equipped with its own generator but its power was inadequate to move the heavy elevator.

All the windows they passed were securely boarded. Outside, ten-foot-thick walls of sandbags had been stacked up to the roof, roped into an impenetrable wall. As they neared the ground floor, however, Deborah felt the building shudder slightly as a massive draught of air struck it, stirring the foundations in their clay beds. The movement stabbed at her heart, and she stopped for a moment and leaned against Marshall. He put an arm around her shoulders, smiled reassuringly.

"All right, Deborah?" His hand cupped the round swell of her shoulder through the jacket.

"Just about. I'm afraid it startled me."

They moved down the steps, Marshall slowing his pace for her. The tremor continued as the building settled itself into new foundations.

"Something big must have come down," Marshall said. "Probably the Palace, or No. 10 Downing Street." He gave a light laugh.

At the bottom of the steps there was a revolving door; heavy rubber flaps making the seal airtight. Inside the building the air was filtered, the suites of offices and the operations deck contained in a warm, noiseless world. Beyond the revolving doors, however, in the corridors leading to the transport bay and the service units, the air seeped in through the casing of sandbags, driven by the tremendous pressure of the wind outside, and through the glass panels of the revolving doors they could see the floor, thick with dust and grime, chilled by sudden gusts of air bursting through pressure points.

Marshall put up his collar, led them briskly down the corridor to an orderly room by the rear exit, where he collected their driver. Five or six exhausted men in dirty khaki uniforms sat around a table drinking tea. Their faces looked pinched and sallow. For three weeks now no one had seen the sun; the dust clouds dimmed the streets, turned noon into a winter evening.

Marshall 's driver, a small wiry corporal called Musgrave, unlocked a narrow panel door in the steel blast-proof bulkhead at the end of the corridor. Deborah and Marshall followed him into a lowceilinged garage where three armored cars were parked. They were M53-pattern Bethlehems, square ten-ton vehicles with canted armored sides designed originally to deflect high-velocity shells and now ideal shielding for surface units moving about in the wind. Their 85 mm. guns had been removed, and in place of the original mounting six-inch-thick perspex window pieces had been fastened.

After helping Deborah into the truck, Marshall followed, swinging himself up in two easy powerful movements. Musgrave tested the hatch, then climbed into the driver's seat beside the engine and pulled the hatch over himself.

He drove the car forward across the garage floor, and edged it up onto the wide steel plate of a hydraulically operated elevator shaft. Remote controlled from the car's radio, the elevator rose slowly into the air on its single pylon, carrying the car upward into a narrow well in the roof of the garage. As it neared the top the roof retracted sideways, and the Bethlehem emerged into the rear courtyard, between Admiralty House and the Foreign Office Annex.

Inside the cabin, Marshall sat on the edge of the padded metal seat, craning forward into the circular window. Deborah crouched behind him, switching on the radio channel to the Operations Room.

They made their way into Trafalgar Square, turned up the west side toward the National Gallery. It was one o'clock but the air was dark and gray, the sky overcast. Only the continuously flickering tracerlike striations across the air gave any indication of the air stream's enormous speed. They reached Canada House and the Cunard building on the west side of the square, and the walls of sandbags and the exposed cornices above flickered with the violent impact of the dust clouds.

Nelson's Column was down. Two weeks earlier, when the wind had reached 95 mph, a crack which had passed unnoticed for 75 years suddenly revealed itself a third of the way up the shaft. The next day the upper section had toppled, the shattered cylindrical segments still lying where they had fallen among the four bronze lions.

The square was deserted. Along the north side a tunnel of sandbags ran from the Haymarket and turned up into Charing Cross Road. Only military personnel and police used these covered runways; everyone else was indoors, refusing to venture out until the wind abated. The new office blocks along the Strand and the clubs along Pall Mall were heavily sandbagged and looked as if they had been abandoned by their occupants to sustain alone the terrors of some apocalyptic air raid. Most of the smaller office buildings had been left unprotected, however, and their windows had been stripped away, their floors and ceilings gutted.

As they turned into Charing Cross Road Marshall noted that the Garrick Theatre had collapsed. The unsupported auditorium walls had caved in completely, and the arcs of the dress and upper circles now looked down onto a windswept pile of rubble. The lines of seats were being stripped away like dominoes. Marshall watched them explode off their moorings and cannonade out into the street, as if jerked away on the end of enormous hawsers, disintegrating as they flew.

As they moved up Shaftesbury Avenue toward Holborn, Marshall waved Deborah forward and she joined him and rested her elbows on the traverse. In the dim light of the cabin she could see the strong edge of Marshall 's jaw and forehead illuminated in profile. For some reason he was undeterred by the immense force of the wind.

He put his hand over hers. "Frightened, Deborah?"

She moved her fingers, held his hand tightly. "I'm not just frightened, Simon. Staring out here-it's like looking onto a city of hell. Everything's so totally uncertain, and I'm sure this isn't the end."

Searchlights played across Kingsway as they crossed the road, shone into the observation window and momentarily dazzled them. The Bethlehem halted at the intersection while Musgrave spoke to the command post dug into the mouth of Holborn Underground Station. Ahead, along Southampton Row, was a group of vehicles-three Centurion tanks, each pulling a steel trailer.

Musgrave joined them, and together the column moved slowly up toward Russell Square. More vehicles were drawn up by the collapsed hotel, others were moving about in the square, their tracks flattening the tattered remains of the few bushes and shreds of wire fencing that still protruded from the beaten ground. Two Bethlehems with RN insignia were up on the edge of the pavement in front of the hotel, playing their searchlights onto the jumble of telescoped floors.

They moved around the block to the windward side. Here a line of Centurion tanks was drawn up, sandbags piled between them, steel hoods mounted on their track guards locked end to end to form a windshield, giving the rescue squads digging their way into the basement sufficient protection to move around. Their success was hard to assess, but Marshall realized that few survivors could be expected. The heavy rescue rigs-all originally designed and built for World War III and now pulled out of their mothballs- needed more freedom of movement. There were huge draglines, mounted on tracks as high as a man, fitted with hinged booms that could reach between two telescoped floors. One of them was feeling its way tentatively below the buckled lintels of the second floor like a giant hand reaching into a deep pocket, but the wind sent it slamming from side to side, and the crew in their armored cab found it impossible to control.

Musgrave drove the Bethlehem up onto the opposite pavement, and they edged past the line of vehicles to where a massive tractor, almost as big as a house, 60-foot-long steel booms jutting up from its front like the twin jibs of a sailing ship, was edging a circular steel escape shaft into position. The shaft pivoted between the booms. The lower end drove through a narrow window below the edge of the pavement, then powerful hydraulic rams extended it downward into the matrix of the ruin. Inside the shaft, rescue teams equipped with steel props would spread out across the basement, crawling along the foot-high space that was probably all that was left of the floor.

Next to it were two more tracked vehicles, fitted with conveyor belts that carried an endless stream of rubble away from the ruin and dumped them onto the roadway behind. Some of the fragments of masonry were six feet long-massive blocks of fractured concrete that weighed half a ton.

"If there's anyone alive in there they'll find them," Marshall said to Deborah. Just then the Bethlehem slid into reverse and backed suddenly, throwing them against the traverse. Marshall swore, holding his left elbow, the arm paralyzed for a moment. Deborah had struck her forehead against the steel rim. She pushed herself away and Marshall was about to go to her aid when he heard Musgrave jabber excitedly over the intercom.

"Look out, sir! The conveyor's going over!"

Marshall leaped to the window. The wind had caught one of the two conveyors, swung the 30-foot-high escalator around like a balsawood dummy. The huge vehicle swiveled helplessly. Its tracks tautened as the twin diesels pulled, and the driver backed the whole unit away from the ruin, trying to regain its balance. Moving in a sharp arc, it backed straight toward the opposite pavement, where the Bethlehem had stalled with its rear wheels jammed against the steps of one of the houses.

Before they collided the conveyor driver saw the Bethlehem in his rear mirror and retroversed the tracks, the great steel cleats stabbing through the surface of the roadway, locking in a sudden spasm. Immediately the 20 grab buckets swung back and inverted, tipping their contents into the roadway below.

A fragment of masonry 15 feet long, a virtually intact section of balcony, fell straight onto the hood of the Bethlehem. The car slammed down onto its front axle, rear wheels bouncing off the pavement. Arms shielding his head, Marshall was hurled around the cabin. Deborah knocked off her feet. When the car finally steadied he bent down over Deborah and helped her off the floor onto the seat.

The front suspension of the Bethlehem had collapsed and the floor tilted downward. Marshall leaned over, peered through the window, and saw the long slab of concrete which straddled the hood, its lower edge penetrating the driver's hatchway.

"Musgrave!" Marshall bellowed into the intercom. "Musgrave! Are you all right, man?"

He dropped the mike, bent down under the traverse and wrenched back the radio set, hammering on the hinged panel that sealed off the cabin from the driver's compartment. Musgrave bad locked it from his side. Marshall tore at the edges of the panel, managed to pull the one-eighth inch plate back off its louvers. Through the crack he could see the hunched form of the driver. He bad slipped off his seat, was stuffed head down into the narrow interval below the driving columns.

Marshall pulled himself to his feet, climbed up onto the edge of the traverse and unlocked the hatch bars. Deborah jumped up and tried to hold him back, but he shouldered her off and punched the hatch sections up into the air. Air whirled into the cabin, gusts of stinging dust carried down from the ruined hotel. Hesitating for a moment, Marshall heaved himself up into the air, head and trunk out of the hatch.

Immediately the wind caught him and jackknifed him over the edge of the turret. For a few seconds he hung there, pinned by the wind stream, then pulled himself downward and spilled onto the ground, driven back against the underside of the chassis. The wind drove under his coat, splitting it down his back and then stripping the two sections off his arms like a piece of rotten cotton ripped in two. He watched them blow away, then dragged himself along the side of the car, hand over hand, by the camouBage-netting hasps riveted along the bottom of the chassis.

A continuous shower of stones drove over him, slashing red welts across his hands and neck. The tall houses facing the hotel deflected the wind slightly and he managed to reach the hood of the Bethlehem. Anchoring himself between the tire and hood, he stretched out painfully to the concrete beam, bunching every muscle as he strained against its massive weight. Through the swirling half light the huge rescue vehicles loomed over the hotel like arinored mastodons feeding on an enormous corpse.

He pressed against the beam, hopelessly trying to lift it, his eyes blacking out momentarily, then slumped down against the tire just as two Centurions approached the Bethlehem, their steel shutters extended. They swung around the car, locked shields and drove in together, immediately lifting the wind stream off Marshall. A third tractor, an armored bulldozer, backed up to the Bethlehem and swung its ram over the cabin and down onto the hood. Expertly retroversing his tracks, the driver flipped the concrete beam off the Bethlehem, then drove off.

Marshall tried to climb up onto the hood, but his leg and back muscles were useless. Two men in vinyl uniforms leaped down from the Centurions. One swarmed up onto the car, opened the driver's hatch and slid inside. The other took Marshall by the arm, helped him up onto the turret and into the cabin.

While Marshall sat back limply against the radio, the man ran expert fingers over him, wiping the welts across his face with an antiseptic sponge he pulled from his first-aid kit. Finally he propped Marshall 's swollen hands on his knees and turned to Deborah, who knelt beside Marshall, trying to clean his face with her handkerchief.

"Relax, he's in one piece." He pointed to the radio. "Get me channel four, will you? We'll give you a tow back. One of the front tires is flat."

While Deborah fumbled at the console he looked down at Marshall, lolling against the cabin wall, his great head like a weathered rock, shoulders flexing as he gasped for air. A network of fine blue veins webbed his cheeks and forehead, giving the powerful lines of his face a steelly sheen.

Deborah selected the channel, passed the mike across.

"Maitland here. Marshall is O.K. I'll ride back with him just in case he tries to climb out again. How's the driver? Sorry about him… Can you get him out? All right, then, seal him in and they can cut him loose later."

Maitland reached up and secured the hatch, then sat back against the traverse and pulled off his helmet and goggles. Marshall leaned forward weakly, elbows on his knees, feeling the swollen veins across his face.

"Air bruises," Maitland told him. "Minute haemorrhages. They'll be all over your back and chest. Take a few days to clear."

He smiled at them as Deborah crouched down beside Marshall, putting her arm around his shoulders, and smoothed his hair back with her small hands.

They reached Marshall 's house in Park Lane in half an hour, towed by one of the Centurions. High steel gates let them into a small covered courtyard where two of Marshall 's guards disconnected the tank and then rolled the Bethlehem down a long ramp into the basement. Maitland helped Marshall out of the turret. The big man had begun to recover. He limped slowly across the concrete floor, the sole of one of his shoes flapping, holding the remnants of his suit around him, his hand taking Deborah's arm.

As they waited for the elevator he turned to Maitland, gave him a craggy smile.

"Thanks, Doctor. It was stupid of me, but the poor devil was dying only a couple of feet away, and I couldn't do a damn thing to help him."

One of the guards opened the doors and they stepped through and were carried up to Marshall 's suite on the first floor. All the windows had been bricked in. From the street Marshall's house appeared to be imitation Georgian, slender lintels over high narrow windows, but the façade was skin deep, slung on a heavy steel superstructure that carried the wind easily. The air in the suite was quiet and filtered, hanging motionlessly over the purple carpeting- one of the few private oases that still existed in London.

They entered Marshall 's drawing room, a two-level room with a circular black glass staircase. Below, an open log fire burned in a massive fireplace, throwing a soft flickering glow onto the semicircular couch in front of it, reflecting off the black tiles and the lines of silver trophies in their cases against the wall. The room was expensively and carefully furnished, with a strong masculine taste. There were abstract statuettes; heavy sporting rifles clipped to the walls, their black barrels glinting; a small winged bull rearing from a dark corner, its hooded eyes blind and menacing. Altogether the effect was powerful, a perfect image of Marshall 's own personality, intense and somehow disturbing.

Marshall slumped down onto the sofa, leaving the lights off. Deborah watched him for a moment, then slipped out of her coat and went over to the cocktail cabinet. She poured whiskey into a glass, then splashed in soda and brought the drink over to Marshall, sitting down on the sofa next to him.

He took it from her, then reached out and put his hand on her thigh. Tucking her legs under her, she moved close to him and began to stroke his cheek and forehead with her fingertips, feeling the fine tracery of contused veins.

"I'm sorry about Musgrave," she said. Marshall 's hand rested in her lap, warm and strong. She took the glass from him and sipped at it, feeling the hot fiery liquid burn down her throat, brilliant and stimulating.

"Poor devil," Marshall commented. "Those Bethlehems are useless; the armor is too thin to hold a falling building." To himself he added: "Hardoon will want something tougher."

"Who?" Deborah asked. She had come across the name somewhere else before. "Who's Hardoon?"

Marshall waved airily. "Just one of the people I'm dealing with." He took his eyes off the fire and looked up at Deborah. Her face was only a few inches from his own, her eyes wide and steady, an expectant smile on her full lips.

"You were saying something about the Bethlehems," she said quietly, massaging his cheeks with the knuckle of her forefinger.

Marshall smiled admiringly. Cool passionate lover, he thought. I must try to remember to take you with me.

"Yes, we need something heavier. The wind's going to blow a lot harder."

As he spoke Deborah moved her face against his, then brushed her lips softly across his forehead, murmuring to herself.

Reflectively, Marshall finished his drink, then put it down and took her in both arms.

Maitland watched as the acetylene torch cut neatly through the steel buttress over the driving cabin. The whole section slipped slightly, and he helped the two mechanics raise it over the hood and put it down on the floor of the garage. Musgrave's body was still lying bunched up below the dashboard. He leaned over the wheel and felt for the pulse, then signaled the other two to lift it out.

They carried the driver over to a bench, stretched him out. A guard came out of the radio-control booth and walked over to Maitland. He was a tough, hard-faced man of indeterminate background, wearing the same black uniform as all Marshall 's personnel. Maitland wondered how large his private army was. The three members he had seen were obviously recruited independently; there were no service or rank tags on their shoulders and they treated the Bethlehem and himself as intruders.

"There's a big navy crawler on its way down from Hampstead," the guard told Maitland curtly. "They'll tow you back to the Green Park base."

Maitland nodded. He felt suddenly tired and looked around for somewhere to sit. The one bench was occupied by Musgrave's body, so he squatted down on the floor against a ventilator shaft, listening to the wind drumming in the street outside. Now and then the blades of the fan stopped and reversed as a pressure pulse drove down the shaft, then picked up and sped on again.

Apart from the Bethlehem there was only one other vehicle in the basement, a long double-tracked armored trailer being loaded by two guards from a freight lift. They brought up an endless succession of wooden crates, some loaded into the lift so rapidly that their lids were still waiting to be nailed down.

Out of curiosity, Maitland wandered over to the carrier when the guards had gone down in the lift. He assumed the crates would be full of expensive furniture and tableware, and looked under one of the loose lids.

Packed into the crates were six 3 1/2" trench mortars, their wide green barrels thick with protective grease.

The mortars were War Department issues, but there was no clearance seal on the sides of the crate listing their destination and authority. Turning the lid over, Maitland saw that it had been stamped in black dye: "Breathing apparatus. Hardoon Tower."

Most of the other cases were sealed, stamped variously with markings that identified them as oxyacetylene cylinders, trenching equipment, flares and pit props. Another open case, marked "Denims. Hardoon Tower." contained a neatly stowed collection of the black uniforms he had seen Marshall 's men wearing. Hardoon Tower, Maitland pondered. He repeated the name to himself, trying to identify it, then remembered a newspaper profile he had read years earlier about the eccentric multimillionaire who owned vast construction interests and had built an elaborate underground bunker city on his estate near London at the height of the cold war.

"O.K., Doctor?"

He swung round to see the big tough-faced guard who had arranged his transport step slowly across the floor, arms swinging loosely at his sides. Whether he was armed was hard to tell, but his battledress jacket could have hidden a weapon.

Maitland tapped the case full of trench mortars. "Just looking at this-breathing apparatus. Unusual design."

The guard scowled. "That's a useful piece of equipment, Doctor. Very versatile. Let's go, then." As Maitland walked back across the basement the guard pivoted on one heel and followed close to his shoulder.

"What's Marshall trying to do?" Maitland asked amiably. "Start a war?"

The guard watched Maitland thoughtfully. "Don't know what we might start. But let's not get too worried about it, Doctor. Sit down over there and take your pulse or something."

They wrapped Musgrave in a polythene shroud and lowered him into the turret of the Bethlehem. Maitland climbed in and wedged the body below the traverse, belting it down with the seat straps.

When he tried to get out he found that someone was sitting on the hatch, his feet obscuring the plexiglass window. For a moment he wondered whether to force it, then decided to take the hint. A few minutes later the navy crawler arrived and backed down the ramp. He felt it hook up to the Bethlehem, then move forward up into the street.

Powerful gusts of wind drove at the car, kicking it around. He gripped the traverse, swaying from side to side as the cabin plunged and bucked.

All around him, in the streets outside, he could hear the sounds of falling masonry.