The Wind From Nowhere

4 The Corridors of Pain

Three times, on the way hack to the Green Park depot, the car left the roadway. Caught by tremendous crosswinds that swung it about behind the Centurion like a hapless tail, the Bethlehem plunged across the pavement, almost tipping over onto its side.

The streets were full of rubble and pieces of masonry, fragments of ornamented cornices from the older buildings, the remains of roof timbers strewn across the pavement, everywhere a heavy autumnlike fall of gray tiles.

They reached the depot at Green Park which housed Combined Rescue Operations, and entered the long tunnel of concrete sandbags that led them into the covered transport pool. A dozen other vehicles, Centurions and Bethlehems with a couple of huge M5 Titan personnel carriers, were unloading and refueling. Three of them had RN insignia; the navy, to whom Maitland was attached, shared the depot, but all the personnel in the pool wore the same drab uniforms. They looked tired and dispirited, and Maitland found himself sharing their despair. As he climbed out of the Bethlehem he leaned for a few minutes against the car, trying to free himself of the muscle and mind numbing weariness from the buffeting he had received all day.

He de-briefed himself quickly, then made his way toward the officers' quarters where he shared a small cubicle with a navy surgeon called Avery. Eager for a full role in the emergency, particularly with the RAF playing no part, the navy had put together a scratch operations unit. With Andrew Symington's help, Maifland had been assimilated with a minimum of formality. He had stayed with Andrew and his wife for a week, uselessly waiting for the wind to subside, and had been glad to be given a chance to do something positive.

Maitland closed the door and sat down wearily on his bed, grunting to Avery, who was stretched out full length, his black wind suit Unzipped.

"Hello, Donald. What's it like outside?"

Maitland shrugged. "A slight east wind blowing up." He took a cigarette from the silver case Avery passed to him. "I've been over at the Russell most of today. Not too pleasant. Looks like a foretaste of things to come. I hope everybody knows what they're doing."

Avery grunted. "Of course they don't. Reminds me of Mark Twain's crack about the weather-everyone talks about it, but no one does anything." He rolled over and switched on the portable radio standing on the floor below his bed. A fuzzy crackle sounded out eventually, almost drowned in the noise of people continually tramping up and down the corridor.

Maitland lay back, listening to phrases from the news bulletins. The BBC was still transmitting on the Home Service, half-hourly news summaries interspersed with light music and an apparently endless stream of War Office orders and recommendations. So far the government appeared to be tacitly assuming that the wind would soon spend itself and that most people possessed sufficient food and water to survive unaided in their own homes. The majority of the troops were engaged in laying communications tunnels, repairing electricity lines and reinforcing their own installations.

Avery switched the set off and sat up on one elbow for a moment, staring pensively at his wrist watch.

"What's the latest?" Maitland asked.

Avery smiled somberly. " London Bridge is falling down," he said quietly. "Wind speed's up to 180. Listening between the lines, it sounds as if things are getting pretty bad. Colossal flooding along the south coast-most of Brighton sounds as if its been washed away. General chaos building up everywhere. What I want to know is, when are they going to start doing something?"

"What can they do?"

Avery gestured impatiently. "For God's sake, you know what I mean, Donald. They're going about this whole thing the wrong way, just telling people to stay indoors and hide under the staircase. What do they think this is-a zeppelin raid? They're going to have the most fantastic casualties soon. Let alone a couple of typhoid and cholera epidemics."

Maitland nodded. He agreed with Avery but felt too tired to offer any comment.

There was a familiar tattoo on the door, and Andrew Symington put his head in. He was off duty at eight, and came over in the communications tunnel across St. James's Park to take his meals in the civilian mess at the depot before going over to the Park Lane Hotel. His wife's baby had still not arrived, at least a fortnight overdue. Dora was unconsciously holding the child to herself.

"We were just cursing these damn silly bulletins you people are putting out," Avery said. "Are you trying to convince yourselves it's a calm summer's day?"

"What's the real news, Andrew?" Maitland pressed. "I got in half an hour ago and it sounded as if the Russell wasn't the only place coming down."

"It isn't," Symington told him. His face looked drawn and tired. He lit a cigarette, inhaled quickly. "Everything I've heard indicates that we can expect the wind strength to go on increasing for several days more at least. Apparently localized areas of turbulence have to appear first, while the over-all wind strength continues to increase, and they've shown no signs of doing so. Whatever happens, it's bound to go up another fifty at least."

Avery whistled. "Over 230! God Almighty." He tapped the wooden wall partition which was springing backward and forward as air pressed its way past. "Do you think this place will stand it?"

"This building probably will, even if it loses the roof, but already most of the domestic houses in the British Isles are starting to come down. Roofs are flying off, walls caving in-not all that many modern houses are fitted with basements. People are running out of food, trying to leave their homes to reach the aid stations. They're being sucked out of their doorways before they know what's hit them, carried half a mile within ten seconds." Symington paused. "We aren't getting much news in now from the States and western Europe, but you can imagine what the Far East looks like. Governmental control no longer exists. Most of the radio stations are just putting out weak local identification signals."

For half an hour they talked, then Symington left them and Maitland slipped off to sleep, still wearing his wind suit. He was vaguely aware of Avery's getting up to go out on duty, then sank into a heavy restless sleep.

Six hours later, as they listened to their briefing in one of the lecture rooms at the far end of the depot, the sounds of collapsing masonry thudded dimly in the distance. The walls shifted uneasily, as if one end of the depot were seized in the mandibles of some enormous insect. An outside wall carrying the stairway up to the roof at the windward end of the barracks had collapsed, dropping the stairway like a pile of plates. Luckily the internal walls that divided the stairway from the remainder of the barracks held long enough for them to extricate themselves and most of their luggage, but five minutes after they retreated to the adjacent building the barracks toppled in a whirling cloud of dust and exploding brickwork.

The captain up on the dais raised his voice above the approaching rumble. "I'll keep this short so we can get out before the place comes down on our necks. Wind speed's up to 180, and frankly the overall situation is grim. The big job now is to move as many people as we can to underground shelters, and we're pulling out of central London and setting up ten major command posts around the outer circular road. Ours is the U.S. Air Force base at Brandon Hall, near Kingston. The deep bunkers there should give us enough room to get a sick bay with about three hundred beds going. There'll be a navy transport and rescue unit, and they'll try to move people into all the deep shelters-railway tunnels, factory basements and so on-in the immediate area. It's going to be pretty difficult. Some big new transports coming in from Woolwich are supposed to stand up to five-hundred-mile-an-hour gales, but even so we'll only be able to move a small proportion of the people we find, and we'll have to pick those who have food with them. Our own supplies are only good for about three weeks."

He paused and looked down at the rows of somber faces. "I hate to say it, but it looks as if casualties are going to be as high as fifty per cent."

Maitland repeated the figure to himself, trying to digest it. Impossible, he thought. Twenty-five million people? Surely they would cling to life somewhere, at the bottom of deep ditches, chewing old leaves and grass roots. He listened vaguely as the briefing continued, wondering if these preparations would soon prove as inadequate as the first had been.

They shuffled out and took their places in one of the queues winding down the corridors to the transport pool, listening to the mounting rumble from the streets outside. Gusts of filthy air drove through, and the floorboards below Maitland's feet were thick with dirt. The entire topsoil of the globe was being systematically loosened and windborne. The sky was black with dust.

From the talk near him he filled in his impressions of the crisis. The government, centered in the War Office, were dug into their Whitehall bunkers, communicating by radio with the ring of command stations around London and with similar posts in the provinces. An estimated 1,000,000 men-the three armed services, national guard, civil defense and police-were directly controlled by the government and a good proportion of these were involved in organizing and preparing deep shelters wherever they existed. Only a small fraction, perhaps 200,000, were actually employed in rescue work.

Maitland speculated shrewdly that preparations were now in band for a final retreat of the COE inner core-government and service chiefs, with a few people such as Marshall -to some secret bastion where survival could be assured for a good deal longer. He had tried to report his discovery at Marshall 's Park Lane house, but the senior officers at the depot were too busy to listen to him, and anyway had no authority outside the unit. Besides, Hardoon, with his army of construction workers and fleets of equipment, might well be working for the government.

When he finally slung his suitcase up into one of the half-tracked personnel carriers and climbed in after it, there were only a dozen men left in the depot.

The troop carrier was shunted up against one of the Centurions, the two jibs locked together. Both vehicles were loaded with concrete slabs three feet long and 18 inches thick, canted to exaggerate the original slope of the armor plate and provide the minimum wind resistance.

Maitland settled himself among the kitbags and suitcases and peered out through the narrow glass window, an inch-high slit just behind his head. Only two others were with him; an RAF flight sergeant and a young signals corporal.

After a long wait the engines roared out and they edged forward up the exit ramp. As they neared the end of the ramp the horizontal door was retracted and the 180 mph airstream moving across the flat parade ground lifted the carrier out like an enormous hand, slewing it around under a hail of fist-sized stones. The driver gunned the engine and pulled them back on course, and with the Centurion pulling ahead they moved toward the gateway and then through into Green Park. Maitland looked out at the darkened slopes. Stumps of trees stuck up through the turfless soil, littered with stones, gravel and miscellaneous debris that piled up against the embankment walls like refuse in an abandoned municipal dump.

They stopped just past Hyde Park Corner in the entrance to Knightsbridge. Maitland pressed his face to the window slit, looked out at the dim outlines of the office blocks and apartment buildings in the darkness. All of them were shaking perceptibly, heavy tremors jolting the roadway under the carrier. The roofs had been stripped away and Maitland could see the sky through the open top-floor windows. Many of the upper floors had fallen in. All the small shops and boutiques had been completely gutted, their plate glass smashed, interiors cleaned out to the last hatpin and hair curler.

Swinging to the right of the roadway, on the way dislodging the shell of a Jaguar that had trapped itself in a shopfront and now skittered off ahead of them, they avoided the debris piled across their path and pressed on toward the Brompton Road. As they passed Lowndes Square Maitland craned to look up at his apartment house, counting the floors to his own apartment. The building was still intact, but all its lights were out. As they moved on he wondered what had happened to Susan.

Harrod's department store lay in ruins, brownstone facing tiles lying thickly across the roadway, the wind picking like a thousand vultures at the tangle of girders and masonry, detaching fragments of furniture and tattered drapery and carrying them away in its fleeting clasp.

Shaking his head ruefully, Maitland left the window and searched for his cigarettes. He was taking out the pack when the half-track braked sharply. For a moment it hesitated and then began to tip backward and rolled slowly down a shallow incline that had opened in the roadway under the rear section of the vehicle.

Above the din of the wind Maitland could hear the driver shouting into his radio. He felt the Centurion throw its engine into a lower gear, trying to pull them out of the subsidence. The weight of the carrier had apparently caved in a shallow sewer traversing the road. Tilting at a ten-degree angle, the carrier's tracks raced and skated. Gradually it slid helplessly down the incline, pulling the Centurion after it. Finally it rooted itself immovably. The driver raced his engine, flogging the gears like a maniac, while the Centurion jerked and thrust helplessly. Then both engines stopped, and for a few minutes the drivers bellowed into their microphones.

Through the window Maitland could see the sides of a six-footdeep ditch. Behind was the ragged edge of the asphalt roadway, ahead the massive outline of the tank, its rear track wheels still on the road.

The driver opened his communicating door and came swarming aft, furious with what had happened, waving his arms and shouting: "Off, off, off! Don't sit here like a lot of helpless sheep."

The flight sergeant bridled, wondering whether to pull his rank on the corporal, then thought better of it.

"What do we do now, mate?" he asked.

The driver kicked the suitcases out of the way, shouted scornfully, "Walk, what else? I'm bloody well not going to carry you back!"

He unlocked the rear doors, pushed them open. The Centurion switched on its rear lights, flooding the interior of the carrier. To the left on the pavement above, Maitland could see the gray humped back of a pedestrian tunnel. Part of it had collapsed into the ditch, affording a convenient access point. The driver pointed to it.

"Take that back to Knightsbridge Underground," he barked at them. "Follow the Piccadilly Line to Hammersmith and you'll be picked up there. Got it?"

Maitland hesitated, then began to crawl along the bottom of the ditch toward the aperture in the tunnel. The wind drove overhead like an express train, sucking at the low-pressure space in the road, and he clung to the damp soil like a limpet. Reaching the tunnel, he pulled himself in, then helped the others who came after him.

When they were all inside they saw the Centurion roar into life and move sharply away from the ditch, its lights flashing, then swing round and drive off down the street.

The tunnel had originally been six feet high, but the wind pres… sure and the successive shells of reinforcing materials added during the past week had lowered the ceiling to little more than five feet off the ground. Here and there, at 50-yard intervals, a storm lantern cast a fitful glow over the dripping bags.

Crouching down, they moved forward, Maitland in the lead. it was only half a mile back to Knightsbridge, and luckily the tunnel was unbreached at any other point. A few people lay about in makeshift sleeping bags by the storm lights-claustrophobes, Maitland assumed, who were more terrified of their basements and the Underground than of the wind, and who preferred the surface tunnels with their long corridors and spaced lights. Tripping over abandoned clothing and cooking utensils, they reached the station in five minutes. The entranceway had been heavily fortified with reinforced concrete by the army. Two armed policemen in black wind suits checked their passes, then directed them to the signals unit set up in the ticket booth.

After the deserted, darkened streets, the station was a blaze of lights, packed with thousands of people huddled about on the upper level with their bundles of luggage, walling off crude cubicles with blankets and raincoats, cooking over primus stoves, queuing endlessly at the latrines. Sleeping figures and parcels of luggage crowded the floor. They picked their way over the outstretched limbs, trying not to disturb the fretfully sleeping children and older people, till they located the two signalers operating the radio transmitter.

After five minutes they contacted the Hammersmith control point and confirmed the driver's arrangement that a carrier from Brandon Hall would pick them up in a couple of hours' time.

People were sitting all the way down the stationary escalators, huddled against each other's knees, blankets wrapped around them, plastic bags at their feet containing gnawed loaves of bread, a few meagre cans and battered thermoses. Stepping past them, Maitland's group made their way down to the lower platforms, where some semblance of order had been enforced. Women and children had been allocated the westbound platform, while the men and service units occupied the eastbound. Wooden partitions had been erected and police patrolled the exits and entrances.

They were steered onto the platform, jumped down between the rails and began to walk along to the next station, South Kensington. Electric bulbs strung along the tunnel shone down onto the track. On the platform above them a throng of soldiers and other men lay in their sleeping packs, most of them asleep, a few watching impassively, their eyes dull.

They had nearly reached the end of the platform when someone ahead sat up and waved to Maitland. He turned around, recognized the hall porter from the apartment block.

"Dr. Maitland! Spare a minute, will you, Doctor?"

He was sitting back against a large expensive suitcase to which Maitland guessed he had helped himself in one of the deserted apartments.

"Doctor, I wanted to tell you. Mrs. Maitland's still up there."

Maitland stiffened. "What? Are you sure?" When the porter nodded, he clenched his fists involuntarily. He had overestimated Susan's resourcefulness. "Crazy fool! Couldn't you make her come down here?"

"I told her, Doctor, believe me. She was there only yesterday. Said she wanted to stay and watch the houses falling."

"_Watch_ them? Where is she? In the basement?"

The porter shook his head. "Up in your flat, Doctor. The windows are all smashed and she's living in the lift now. It's stuck on the sixth floor."

Maitland hesitated, looking over his shoulder. His two companions were just disappearing around the first bend in the tunnel. They would reach Hammersmith in 45 minutes, probably have more than an hour to wait before Brandon Hall got around to picking them up.

"Can I still get to Lowndes Square?" he asked the porter. "The tunnels are standing?"

The porter nodded. "Follow the one down Sloane Street, then cut through the Pakistan Embassy garage. Takes you straight into the block. Watch it though, Doctor. There's big stuff coming down all the time."

Maitland jumped onto the platform and retraced his steps up the escalator. He reached the entranceway and pressed through the late arrivals pushing in from the tunnel, even less well equipped than those already there. Many of them were without bedding or food, holding a milk bottle full of water as their sole rations for the next few weeks. Maitland checked each one of them carefully in case Susan had decided to take shelter, then crouched down and entered the tunnel.

Crude signposts had been put up at junction points within the tunnel system. Turning right into Sloane Street, he ran with his head down, feeling his way along the irregular corridor of bursting sandbags. A few cracks of light added to the scanty illumination provided by the storm lanterns. Gusts of air poured in, spuming white cement dust like escape valves blowing off steam.

Two hundred yards down Sloane Street the tunnel ended in a short flight of steps into a small fortified basement below one of the office blocks. This had recently been used as a temporary first-aid post. Two or three cubicles stood against one wall, behind a boiler. There was a tin desk littered with forms and empty dried-milk cartons.

Crossing the basement, he kicked back a door into the garbagedisposal unit and climbed another staircase into a fortified passageway, where pit props were placed at two-yard intervals. This branched left and right when it reached Lowndes Square. The lefthand section ended abruptly in a heap of rubble where one of the older houses had collapsed into the road. The other ran in the direction of the apartment house, and Maitland climbed through a breach in the wall into the basement garage of the Pakistan Embassy.

In the ramp outside, a long black Cadillac limousine sagged back on a broken rear axle, tires flat, windows shattered, a collection of half-packed suitcases abandoned by the open trunk. Protecting his face from the stones and tiles ricocheting between the high walls, Maitland dived through into the service doorway of the apartment house.

All the apartments had been abandoned, and air whirled around the stairway, changing its direction every few seconds, driving clouds of dust and rubble up and down the steps.

Maitland pulled himself up to the sixth floor and looked into the elevator. A small leather armchair stood inside it, two dirty cushions and a screwed-up blanket revealing the outline of some small figure.

Maitland raced up the next three floors to his own apartment, pushed back the door. The hall was in darkness; air swirled through from the lounge, dragging at the litter of old newspapers and magazines. He ran through, steadying himself as he reached the door. The French windows had been torn out and the steel frames quivered as the wind rushed past the end of the building, an enormous turbulent vortex bursting explosively around the ragged stonework. The outside balcony had been ripped off and all the furniture in the room had been sucked out by the vortex and carried away over the roof of the Embassy below.

For a moment he felt that he was standing over the propellors of some gigantic aircraft carrier, gazing out at the writhing wake as the vessel plunged through boiling seas, shielded from the sky by the overhanging flight deck. He was looking westward across the city, the storm-driven rooftops stretching to the horizon like huge ragged waves, obscured by a spray of dust and grit.

"Quite a view, isn't it, Donald?" he heard someone say quietly at his shoulder. He turned to see Susan in the doorway behind him.

"Susan! What are you doing here?" He reached out to her. "Get your things together and come down to the Underground Station. Everyone's sheltering there."

Susan shook her head and stepped past him into the lounge, swaying as the wind caught her. Her hair clung in a matted net around her face, gray with dust and dirt. She still wore the cocktail dress he had last seen her in. The full skirt was torn and stained, the net underskirt trailing at her heels. One of the shoulder straps had gone and the front of the dress hung down loosely, revealing her scratched dirty skin.

He caught her as she rode a gust of air that swept out through the balcony, pulled her against himself.

"Susan, for God's sake, what are you playing at? This is no time for putting on an act."

She leaned against him, smiling wanly. "I'm not, Donald," she said mildly, "believe me. I just like to watch the wind. The whole of London 's starting to fall down. Soon it'll all be blown away, Peter and you and everybody."

She looked tired and hungry. Maitland wondered whether she had eaten. Perhaps the porter had bartered a little food for a decanter of whiskey, tried to keep her going.

Maitland put his arm around her shoulders, began to draw her into the corridor. "Come on, darling. This whole building will be coming down too in a few hours. You've got to get out of here. The Underground's the only place."

She twisted away from him, revealing a sudden unexpected strength.

"Not for me, Donald," she said evenly, stepping backward into the lounge. "You go, if you want to. I'm staying here." When he reached out to her again she stepped back quickly, only nine or ten feet from the inferno raging outside the balcony, and poised there, her hair swept back off her head.

When he hesitated, she glanced at him pityingly for a moment, then turned and looked over the rooftops. "I've been frightened for too long, Donald. Of Daddy, and you and myself. Now I'm not any longer. You go and dig a hole in the ground somewhere if you want to-"

Her eyes were away from him and Maitland dived forward and seized her arm. Clenching her teeth, she kicked out at him, her slim body uncoiling like a frantic spring. They struggled silently, then Susan wrenched away and stepped back.

"Susan!" Maitland shouted at her. For a moment she stared wildly at him, then moved away. She was only a few feet from the open window. Suddenly the wind caught her. Before he could move it whirled her back off her feet against the door frame; then spun her head over heels into the open air.

Down on his knees, Maitland saw her for an instant, catapulted through the updraught rising from the street, bounce off the roof of the Embassy building and then spin away like a smashed doll into the maze of rooftops beyond. A few feet from him the air pounded at the door frame, ripping away the masonry from the exposed edge.

For five minutes he lay on the floor, head pressed to the dull parquet, the pain and violence of Susan's death stunning his mind. Then, slowly, he pulled himself backward to the door and got to his feet.

The strength of the wind had increased significantly as he retraced his steps through the Pakistan Embassy and along the tunnel to the first-aid post. Somewhere the system of emergency tunnels had been badly breached. As he stepped through the aid post something struck the ceiling above his head, splitting the concrete and sending down a shower of dust. The building began to quiver restlessly, indicating that the roof had been breached. Soon heavy sections of masonry would come toppling through the floors, knock out the central transverse supports and allow the wind to push the walls in like cardboard hoardings.

Maitland climbed into the Sloane Street tunnel. A hundred yards away a single lamp flickered dismally, illuminating the narrow corridor of leaking sandbags, the moisture exuded from the wet cement making it resemble an abandoned sewer. Head down, he hurried along to the station entrance.

He ran down the steps, then pitched forward on his knees, banging his head against the far wall. Picking up his torch, he shone it around the floor, feeling for the steps with his hands.

Halfway down the staircase, heavy steel shutters had been sealed into place, an immovable lid of three-inch plate that cut him off from the sanctuary below.

Trying not to lose his self-control, he climbed out of the staircase and re-entered the tunnel. He switched the torch off to conserve the battery and groped along the walls, his only hope to get out of the tunnel before it collapsed and find a deep basement in one of the buildings off the street that would remain intact when its upper floors gave way.

Above him, apparently far away to the left, a dim rumbling had started. He stopped and waited as it grew nearer, flicking on the torch. Then, ten yards away, in a cataract of dust and noise, an enormous section of masonry plunged straight through the roof of the tunnel, letting in a tornado of exploding brickwork that drove Maitland backward off his feet. As he pulled himself upright the entire roof of the tunnel bulged inward, then collapsed in a vast avalanche of debris that poured in around him, shutting out the light that had burst through the first aperture.

Maitland stumbled back, shielding his head from the falling rubble. Massive tremors struck the walls of the tunnel, and its floor began to tilt in awkward jerks.

Maitland waited, ready to retreat back into the entranceway, watching the dust swirl around him in the thin beam of the torch. After a few minutes he edged forward carefully. The quake had ended, the building that had collapsed across the tunnel-Harvey Nichols, one of the big department stores-had settled itself.

A few yards ahead the tunnel ended abruptly. An entire floor section had sliced through it like a guillotine, sealing it off as cleanly and absolutely as the bulkhead ten yards behind him. Maitland started to kick away the debris around the slab, then gave up and backed away from the acrid dust.

He was trapped neatly, like a rat in a pain corridor, except that here there would be no further signals. He had a runway about ten feet long, bounded at either end by impassable walls. Disturbed for half a minute, the air quickly settled, soon was completely still.

Suddenly he felt weak, and dropped to his knees. Putting his hand up to his head, he felt blood eddying from a wide wound across the back of his scalp. He sat down and started to take out his first-aid kit, then realized he was losing consciousness. He managed to switch off the torch just as his mind began to spin and fall, plunging through the surface of a deep inky well.

Around him, the rubble began to shift again.

____________________

By now the pyramid was almost complete. Its apex overtopped the steel windshields, and a subsidiary line of shields, staked to the upper slopes of the pyramid, protected the men scaling the peak. They moved slowly, strung together by long cables, forming the last cornices and lynchstones, dragged and buffeted together like blind slaves.

Below, most of the huge graders and mixers had turned away, were laying and forming the long ramparts which led into the wind from the base of the pyramid. Ten feet thick and twice as high at their deepest point, they rose from the black earth, stretching from the body of the pyramid like the recumbent forelimbs of some headless sphinx.

Watching them from his eyrie in the pyramid, the iron-faced man christened the ramparts in his mind, calling them the gateways of the whirlwind.