The Wind From Nowhere

7 The Gateways of the Whirlwind

"How is he?"

"Not too bad. Mild concussion, hairline fracture above the right ear. Second-degree burns to the palms and soles."

"He'll pull through, though?"

"Oh, yes. If we do, he will."

The voices drifted away. Donald Maitland stirred pleasantly, half asleep, almost enjoying the sensation of drowsy warmth coupled with a slight nausea. Now and then the voices would return. Sometimes he could only hear the rise and fall of their tones as they moved among the patients; at other times, when they discussed his own case, standing over him, he could hear them plainly.

He was on the mend, atleast. Turning lazily, he tried to make himself comfortable, tried to feel the stiff caress of crisp sheets against his face.

Yet he could never find them. Whenever he searched, the bed and pillow were hard and unyielding as he realized his hands were in plaster casts.

He wished he could wake. Then sleep would come again, numbing the pain in his head and across his shoulders, dulling the nausea that made him want to vomit.

"Looks a lot better. Don't you agree?"

"No doubt about it. But those burns are a little worrying. How the hell did he get them?"

"Forget exactly. I think he was trapped in the boiler room at a generating station. They may be carbide burns…"

Their voices moved away as consciousness returned, paused and then faded. Maitland stretched and flexed his legs, pressed his feet against the foot of the bed.

_Burns?_

How? He remembered being trapped in the Underground station at Knightsbridge. Had he been transferred to another hospital center, perhaps had his identity confused?

The voices drifted beside him, murmuring over another patient. Maitland felt cold, his head pounded. He wanted to call them, tell them they were overconfident.

They moved off slowly, their voices lost in the sounds of some enormous fan.

_Burns?_

With an effort, he opened his eyes, slowly moved his head.

He was blind!

He sat up and groped at the bed around him, half expecting them to come back, to feel restraining hands press him back onto the pillow, hear the first words of consolation.

He picked up something large and angular, heavy in his hand.'

A brick!

He nestled it between his knees. What was this doing in bed with him? His fingers groped at its rough surface, pulling away pieces of fine mortar.

He looked around, hoping to attract their attention, but their voices had vanished: the ward was silent.

Exhausted suddenly, he dropped the brick, lay back limply.

Instantly the voices returned.

"How did the grafts come along?"

"Very well, all in all. We'll take his arms out of the cradle tomorrow…"

Maitland smiled to himself. Perhaps they were in darkness, unable to see that his hands were under the sheet.

He flexed his fingers, picked another object off the bed. A torch.

Instinctively, he switched it on.

The beam filled his tiny cubicle, illuminating piles of shattered bricks on either side of him, a concrete beam two feet broad running across his knees, supporting a large sign.

Huge letters ran along it. They read: CLEARANCE SALE.

For a moment Maitland stared at it, sitting upright, tracing the letters with his fingers.

Then, abruptly assembling his mind again, he shone the torch around himself.

So he was not in a hospital as he had imagined, but still trapped in the tunnel. The voices, the diagnoses, the warm bed, had all been products of fantasy, wish fulfillments summoned by his ex hausted body.

His head throbbed. Maitland shone the torch at his hands, kneading the broken skin. He was half surprised to see that they were not badly burned, and wondered why his mind should have produced this curious piece of circumstantial detail. Perhaps he bad remembered a case history of one of his former patients.

Looking around him, he searched for some possible exit, but the narrow space in which he lay seemed completely sealed.

Exhausted, he lay back, still shining the torch.

"I think we can move him out tomorrow. How do you feel?"

"Pretty good, thank you, sir. I'm very grateful to you. Any news about the wind?"

The voices had returned. Even the patient had now joined in. Too tired to understand why these delusions should persist so powerfully even when he was fully conscious, Maitland lay back, rotating his head to find a more comfortable position.

He listened interestedly to the voices, the first hallucinatory agents he had ever encountered, his mind automatically analyzing them.

Moving his head, he noticed that a wide circular shaft about two feet in diameter formed part of his pillow. It moved diagonally downward at an angle of about 30°, and he found he could hear the voices more clearly when his left ear was pressed against the shaft.

Abruptly he sat up, pulling himself roughly onto his knees. Clearing away as much of the loose masonry as he could, he examined the shaft, pressing his ear against it.

In the majority of positions he could hear nothing, but, by some acoustical freak, in a small area of a few square inches the voices were clearly magnified. Obviously the ventilator shaft, now disused, led down into the station only a few yards below, and was reflecting the voices of the doctors moving about their patients, particularly a burnt power-station worker whose cot was directly below the mouth of the shaft.

The galvanized iron plating was only an eighth of an inch thick, but there was nothing in the rubble around him which he could use to cut it. He pounded on it with his fists, shouted against it, pressing his ear to the focal area to hear any answering call. He hanged it tirelessly with a brick, to no avail.

Finally he picked up the torch, carefully selected the focal area and began to tap patiently with it, whenever he heard the doctors below, the "shave-and-a-haircut, shampoo" rhythm of childhood4

Two hours later, several eternities after the battery had exhausted itself, he heard an answering shout below.

After 6 o'clock the lounge would begin to fill. One of the stewards behind the bar switched on the phonograph and turned up the recessed lighting, masking the thin cream-and-chartreuse paint on the fresh concrete, and so the transformation of a recreation bunker 150 feet below USAF Brandon Hall into a Mayfair cocktail lounge would be acceptably complete.

Donald Maitland never ceased to wonder at the effectiveness of the illusion. Here at least was a small oasis of illusion. Beyond the lounge, with its chromium bar and red leather, its tinsel and plastic lighting, were service sections as bleak as anything in the Seigfried Line, but as the uniformed officers and their wives and the senior civilians began to make their way in there was little hint of the 350 mph gales at present ravaging the world.

His five days at Brandon Hall he had largely spent in the recreation lounge. Fortunately his injuries at Knightsbridge were comparatively minor, and half an hour from now, at 6:30 P.M., he would officially report for duty again.

He watched Charles Avery carry their drinks over to the table, and stirred himself pleasantly. Americans were expert at providing the civilized amenities of life with a minimum of apparent effort or pomp, and in his five days at Brandon Hall he had begun to forget Susan's tragic death and its implied judgment on himself.

"Up to three-fifty," Avery remarked somberly, trying to straighten the creases in his black battledress jacket with its surgeon's insignia. "There's damn little left up there now. How do you feel?"

Maitland shrugged, listening to the low rhythm of a foxtrot be had last heard years earlier when he had taken Susan out to the Milroy. "O.K. I wouldn't exactly say I was eager to get back into action, but I'm ready enough. It's been pleasant down here. These five clays have given me my first real chance in years to see myself calmly. Pity I've got to leave."

Avery nodded. "Frankly, I wouldn't bother. There's little you'll be able to do to help. The Americans are still sending out a few vehicles, but in general everything's closing down. Contact between separate units seem pretty limited and outside news is coming through very slowly."

"How's London holding out?"

Avery shook his head, peered into his glass. " London? It doesn't exist. No more than New York, or Tokyo or Moscow. The TV monitor tower at Hammersmith just shows a sea of rubble. There's not a single building standing."

"It's amazing casualties are so light."

"I don't know whether they are. My guess is that half a million people in London have been killed. As far as Tokyo or Bombay are concerned it's anybody's guess. At least fifty per cent, I should think. There's a simple physical limit to how long an individual can stand up to a 350-mile-an-hour air stream. Thank God for the Underground system."

Maitland echoed this. After his rescue at Knightsbridge he had been astounded by the efficient organization that existed below street level, a sub-world of dark labyrinthine tunnels and shafts crowded with countless thousands of almost motionless beings, huddled together on the unlit platforms with their drab bundles of possessions, waiting patiently for the wind to subside, like the denizens of some vast gallery of the dead waiting for their resurrection.

Where the others were Maitland could only guess. A fortunate aspect of the overcrowding of most major cities and metropolitan complexes around the world was that expansion had forced construction to take place not only upward and outward, but downward as well. Thousands of inverted buildings hung from street level- car parks, underground cinemas, sub-basements and sub-sub-basements-which now provided tolerable shelter, sealed off from the ravaging wind by the collapsing structures above. Millions more must be clinging to life in these readymade bunkers, sandwiched in narrow angles between concrete ledges, their ears deafened by the roar above, completely out of contact with everyone else.

What would happen when their supplies of food began to run out?

"Six-fifteen, Donald," Avery cut in. He finished his drink and sat forward, ready to leave. "I'm working at Casualty Intake from now on. The Americans are shipping most of their top brass over to their bases in Greenland -the wind's about fifty miles an hour lower than here. Rumor has it that they're converting some big underground ICBM shelters inside the Arctic Circle, and with luck a few useful Nato personnel may be invited along to do the rough work. From now on I'm going to keep my eyes open for some amenable twostar general with a sprained ankle to whom I can make myself indispensable as back-scratcher and houseboy. I advise you to do the same."

Maitland turned and looked curiously at Avery, was surprised to see that the surgeon was perfectly serious. "I admire your shrewdness," he said quietly. "But I hope we can look after ourselves if we have to."

"Well, we can't," Avery scoffed. "Let's face it, we haven't really done so for a long time. I know it sounds despicable, but adaptability is the only real biological qualification for survival. At the moment a pretty grim form of natural selection is taking place, and frankly I want to be selected. Sneer at me if you wish-I willingly concede you that posthumous right." He paused for a moment, waiting for Maitland to reply, but the latter sat staring bleakly into his glass, and Avery asked: "By the way, heard anything of Andrew Symington?"

"As far as I know be's still with Marshall 's intelligence unit over at Whitehall. Dora's just had her baby; I mean to look in on her before I leave."

As they made their way out of the lounge, they passed a tall American submarine commander who had come in with a slim blonde-haired girl in a brown uniform with Press tabs on its sleeves. Her face and neck were covered with minute abrasions, the typical wind-exposure scars, but she seemed so relaxed, following the American closely with unforced intimacy, that he realized these two, who had obviously come through a period of prolonged exposure together, were the first people he had seen who had managed to preserve their own private world intact.

As be took his seat in the briefing room in the Personnel Reallocation Unit he wondered how far his own character had benefited by the ordeals he had been through, how much it had gained. merit, as the Buddhists would say. Could he really claim any moral superiority over Avery, for example? Despite his near death at knightsbridge he had so far had little choice in determining his own fate. Events had driven him forward at their own pace. How would be behave when he was given a choice?

Maitland was assigned to one of the big Titan supertractors ferrying VIP's and embassy personnel down to the submarine base at Portsmouth. Many of the passengers would be suffering from major injuries sustained before their rescue, and required careful supervision.

Listening to the briefing, Maitland had the impression, as Avery bad suggested, that the Americans were withdrawing in considerable numbers, taking with them even severe surgical cases. When the last convoy had set sail for Greenland, would Brandon Hall have outlived its usefulness? The nearest British base was at Biggin Hill, and if the wins continued to rise for the next week or so it would be difficult to reach. Besides, what sort of welcome would they receive if they did go there?

The captain confirmed his doubts.

"How far is there any effective contact between the bases around London?" Maitland asked as the meeting broke up. "I feel we're all pulling the lids down over our respective holes and sealing them tight."

The captain nodded somberly. "That's just about it. God knows what's going to happen when they decide to close this place. It's cozy down here now, but we're on board a sinking ship. There's only about one week's supply of generator fuel left in the storage tanks, and when that's gone it's going to get damned chilly. And when the pumps stop we'll have to climb into our diving suits. The caissons below the foundations have shifted and water's pouring in from underground wells. At present we're pumping it out at the rate of about a thousand gallons an hour."

Maitland collected his kitbag from the hospital dormitory. On the way out he looked in at the woman's ward, and went over to Dora Symington's cubicle.

"Hullo, Donald," Dora greeted him. She managed a brave smile, made a space for him on the bed among the feeding bottles and milk cans. She raised the baby's head. "I've been telling him he looks like Andrew, but I'm not sure he agrees. What do you think?"

Maitland considered the baby's small wizened face. He would have liked to think it symbolized hope and courage, the new world being reborn unknown to them in the cataclysmic midst of the old, but in fact he felt grimly depressed. Dora's courage, her pathetic little cubicle with its makeshift shelves and clutter of damp clothes, made him realize just how helpless they were, how near the center of the whirlpool.

"Have you heard from Andrew yet?" she asked, bringing the question out carefully.

"No, but don't worry, Dora. He's in the best possible company. Marshall knows how to look after himself."

He talked to her for a few minutes and then excused himself, taking one of the elevators up to the transport pool three levels below the surface.

Even here, some 75 feet below ground, separated by enormous concrete shields ten feet thick, designed to provide protection at ground zero against megaton nuclear weapons, the presence of the storm wind raging above was immediately apparent. Despite the giant airlocks and overlaying ramps the narrow corridors were thick with black sandy grit forced in under tremendous pressure, the air damp and cold as the air stream carried with it enormous quantities of water vapor-in some cases the contents of entire seas, such as the Caspian and the Great Lakes, which had been drained dry, their beds plainly visible.

Drivers and surface personnel, all sealed into heavy plastic suits, thick foam padding puffing up their bodies, hung about between the half-dozen Titan supertractors grouped around the service station.

His own Titan was the fifth in line, a giant six-tracked articu lated crawler with steeply raked sides and profile, over 80 feet long and 20 feet wide, the tracks six feet broad. The gray-painted sides of the vehicle had been slashed and pitted, the heavy three-inch steel plate scarred with deep dents where flying rocks and masonry had struck the vehicle, almost completely obliterating the U.S. Navy insignia painted along the hull.

A lean-faced big-shouldered man in a blue surface suit looked up from a discussion with two mechanics who were sitting inside one of the tracks, adjusting the massive cleats. Royal Canadian Navy tabs were clipped to his collar, a captain's rank bars.

"Dr. Maitland?" he asked in a deep pleasant voice. When Maitland nodded he put out his hand and shook Maitland's warmly in a powerful grip. "Good to have you aboard. My name's Jim Halliday. Welcome to the Toronto Belle." He jerked a thumb at the Titan. "We've got just over half an hour before we take off, so how about some coffee?"

"Good idea," Maitland agreed. Halliday took the canvas grip out of his hand, to his surprise walked around to the front of the tractor and slung it up over the hood onto the driver's hatchway. As Halliday rejoined him, Maitland said: "I was going to leave the grip in the mess in case we have to make a quick getaway."

Halliday shook his head, taking Maitland's arm. "If you want to, Doe, go ahead. Frankly, I recommend that you make yourself at home aboard the ship. Can't say I feel any too confident about this place.

As they collected their coffee in the canteen and sat down at the end of one of the long wooden tables Maitland examined Halliday's face carefully. The Canadian looked solid and resourceful, unlikely to be swayed by rumor.

They exchanged personal histories briefly. By now, Maitland nodeed, there were so many disaster stories, so many confirmed and unconfirmed episodes of heroism, such a confusion of dramatic and tragic events that those still surviving confined themselves to the barest self-identification. In addition, there was the gradual numbness that had begun to affect everyone, a blunting of the sensibilities, by the filth and privation and sheer buffeting momentum of the wind. The result was an increasing concentration on ensuring one's own personal survival, a reluctance, such as he had just seen in a basically confident man like Halliday, to put any trust in the durability of others.

"Our last trip we carried only three passengers," Halliday explained, "so a medic wasn't needed. It's obvious they'll soon be closing the unit down."

Maitland nodded. "What will happen to us then?"

Halliday glanced up at him briefly, then flung his cigarette butt into the coffee dregs. "I'll leave you to guess. Frankly, we rate a pretty low order of importance. As long as movement above surface is possible, the big tractors have a valuable role, but now-well… Just about all the VIP's have got where they want to be; the perimeter's really being pulled in tight. Have you been up top recently?"

"Not for about a week," Maitland admitted.

"It's hard to describe-pretty rough. Solid roaring wall of black air-except that it's not air any more but a horizontal avalanche of dust and rock, like sitting right behind a jet engine full on with the exhaust straight in your face. Can't see where the hell you're going, landmarks obliterated, roads buried under tons of rubble. We steer by the beam transmitted between here and Portsmouth. When the stations close down our job will be over. Only yesterday we lost one of the big rigs-their radio broke down when they were somewhere south of Leatherhead. They tried to make it back by compass and drove straight into the river."

As they neared the tractor Maitland saw a small group of passengers waiting, two men and a young woman. All the hatches were being secured on the rear section of the vehicle, and it looked as if these three were the full complement and would travel in the forward section, leaving the rear empty. As Halliday had said, it seemed a complete waste of fuel and personnel-the Titan would have been better employed rescuing Andrew Symington and Marshall-and Maitland felt a sudden sensation of resentment toward the three passengers.

One was a small plump-faced man with a brush moustache, the other two a tall American in a navy trench coat and the girl wearing a leather helmet, goggles over her forehead. As he approached she slipped her hand under the American's arm, and he recognized the couple who had passed him in the lounge bar.

Halliday gestured Maitland over, introduced him briefly to the passengers. "Commander Lanyon, this is Dr. Maitland. He'll be riding down to Portsmouth with us. If you want your temperature taken, Miss Olsen, just ask him."

Maitland nodded to the trio and helped the young woman, an NBC television reporter, carrying her tape recorder over to the starboard hatchway. She and Commander Lanyon had just reached England from the Mediterranean, had come up to London with the third member of the group, an Associated Press correspondent called Waring, in the hope of getting material for their networks back in the States. Unfortunately their hopes that the wind would have subsided had not been fulfilled, and they were returning empty-handed, en route for Greenland.

Ten minutes later the seven of them-three passengers, Maitland, Halliday, the driver and radio operator-were sealed down into the forward section of the Titan, a narrow compartment 15 feet long by six feet wide, packed with equipment, stores and miscellaneous baggage. Canvas racks folded down from the sides and Maitland and the passengers sat cramped together on these, the three crew members up forward, Halliday at the periscope immediately behind the driver, the radio operator beside him. A single light behind a grille on the ceiling cast a thin glow over the compartment, fading and brightening as the engines varied in speed.

For half an hour they hardly moved, edging forward or backward a few yards in answer to instructions transmitted over the R/T. The roar of the engines precluded any but the most rudimentary conversation between those at the back, and Maitland let himself sink off into a mindless reverie, interrupted by sudden jolts that woke him back to an uneasy reality.

Finally they began to move forward, the engines surging below them, and at the same time the vehicle tilted backward sharply, at an angle of over 10°, as they climbed the exit ramp.

The air in the tractor became suddenly cooler, as if a powerful refrigerating unit had been switched on in the compartment. They appeared to be moving along a tunnel carved through an iceberg, and Maitland remembered someone at the base telling him that the surface air temperature was now falling by a full degree per day. The air stream moving over the oceans was forcing an enormous uptake of water by evaporation, and consequently cooling the surfaces below.

The Titan leveled off on the final exit shelf, then labored slowly up the last incline.

Immediately, as the huge vehicle slewed about unsteadily, its tracks searching for equilibrium in the ragged surface, the familiar tattoo of thousands of flying missiles rattled across the sides and roof around them like endless salvos of machine-gun fire. The noise was enervating, occasionally appearing to slacken off slightly, then resuming with even greater force as a cloud of higher-density particles drove across them.

Standing behind the driver, Halliday steered the Titan by looking through the periscope. Occasionally, when they moved across open country, he left the driver to follow the compass bearing pro. vided by the radio operator, and came back to the passengers, crouching down to exchange a few words.

"We're just passing through Biggin Hill," he told them after they had been under way for half an hour. "Used to be an RAP base here, but it was flooded out after the east wall of the main shelter collapsed. About five hundred people were trapped inside; only six got away.

"Can I take a look outside, Captain?" Patricia Olsen asked. "I've been underground so long I feel like a mole."

"Sure," Halliday agreed. "Not that there's a damn thing to see."

They all moved forward, swaying from side to side like straphangers on a rocking Underground train as the tractor slid and dragged under the impact of the wind.

Maitland waited until Lanyon and Patricia had finished, then pressed his eyes to the binocular viewpiece.

Sweeping the periscope around, he saw that they were moving along the remains of the M5 Motorway down to Portsmouth.

Little of the road was still intact. The soft shoulders and grass center pieces between the lanes had disappeared, leaving in their place a four-foot-deep hollow trough. Here and there the stump of a concrete telegraph pole protruded from the verge, or a battered. overpass, huge pieces chipped from its arches, spanned the roadway, but otherwise the landscape was completely blighted. Occasionally a dark shadow would flash by, the remains of some airborne structure-aircraft fuselage or motor car-bouncing and cartwheeling along the ground.

Maitland leaned against the periscope mounting. With the topsoil gone, and the root-system which held the surface together and provided a secure foothold for arable crops against the erosive forces of rain and wind, the entire surface of the globe would dust bowl in the way that the Oklahoma farmland had literally disappeared into the air in the 1920's.

As he turned away from the periscope, Halliday was right beside the radio operator. A signal was coming through from Brandon Hall, and the operator took off his headphones and passed them to the captain.

"Bad news, Doctor," the operator said. "Flash in from Brandon Hall about a friend of yours, Andrew Symington. Apparently the emergency intelligence unit in the Admiralty bunkers were attacked yesterday. Marshall and three of the others were shot."

Maitland gripped the strap over his head. "Andrew? Is he dead?"

"No, they don't think so. His body hasn't been found, anyway. Marshall managed to get an alert through before he died. The gunmen were working for someone called Hardoon. As far as I could make out he's supposed to have a private army operating from a secret base somewhere in the Guildford area."

"I've run into Hardoon before," Maitland cut in. " Marshall was also working for him." Quickly he recounted his discovery of the crates of paramilitary equipment in Marshall 's warehouse, the uniformed guards. "Hardoon must have decided to get rid of Marshall; probably he'd outlived his usefulness." He looked up at the strap in his hand, and jerked it roughly. "What the hell could have happened to Symington, though?"

Halliday lowered his head doubtfully. "Well, maybe he's O.K.," he said, managing a show of sympathy. "It's hard to say."

"Don't worry," Maitland said confidently. "Symington's a top electronics and communications man, far more valuable to Hardoon now than a TV mogul like Marshall. If his body wasn't found in the bunker he must still be alive. Hardoon's men wouldn't waste time carrying a corpse around." He paused, listening to the hail drive across the roof. "All those crates were labeled ' Hardoon Tower.' This secret base must be there."

Halliday shook his head. "Never heard of it. Though the name Hardoon is familiar. What is he, a political big shot?"

"Shipping and hotel magnate," Maitland told him. "Something of a power-crazy eccentric. ' Hardoon Tower '-God knows where, though."

"Sounds like a hotel," Halliday commented. "If it is, it won't be standing, that's for sure. Sorry about your friend, but as you say, he'll probably be O.K. there."

Maitland nodded, leaning on the radio set and searching his mind for where Hardoon Tower might be. He noticed the radio operator watching him pensively, was about to turn away and rejoin the trio at the rear of the compartment when the man said:

"The Hardoon place is just near here, sir. About ten miles away, at Leatherhead."

Maitland turned back. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I can't be certain," the operator said. "But we get a lot of interference from a station operating from Leatherhead. It's using a scrambled vhf beam, definitely not a government installation."

"Could be anyone, though," Maitland said. "Weather station, police unit, some VIP outfit."

The operator shook his head. "I don't think so, sir. They were trying to identify it back at Brandon Hall; there was even an MI5 signals expert there. I heard him refer to Hardoon."

Maitland turned to Halliday. "What about it, Captain? He's probably right. We could make a small detour out to Leatherhead."

Halliday shook his head curtly. "Sorry, Maitland. I'd like to, but our reserve tank only holds two hundred gallons, barely enough to get us back."

"Then what about uncoupling the rear section?" Maitland asked. "It's no damn use anyway."

"Maybe not. But what are we supposed to do, even if we find this character Hardoon? Put him under arrest?"

Halliday returned to the periscope, indicating that their argument was closed, and hunched over the eyepiece, scanning the road. Maitland stood behind him, undecided, watching the radio-compass beam on the navigator's screen. They followed the beam carefully, driving along a razor edge between a stream of dots-leftward error-and a stream of dashes-rightward error. At present they were deliberately three degrees off course, in order to take advantage of the motorway's firm foundations. Halliday was following a bend in the road, and the radio compass rotated steadily, from 145° to 150°, and then on around to 160°. Unoccupied for the moment, the operator was searching the waveband of the vhf set. He picked up a blurred staccato signal and gestured to Maitland.

"That's the Hardoon signal, sir."

Maitland nodded. He stepped over to the operator as if to hear the scrambled signal more clearly, and slowly eased his torch out of his hip pocket, clasping the heavy cylinder with its steel-encased reflector firmly in his right hand. He edged between the operator and the compass, which was still revolving. When he was satisfied that the operator would no longer remember the precise bearing, he raised the torch and with a quick backhand stroke tapped in the glass screen.

Quickly he began to hammer away at the set, smashing in the compass and plunging the torch into the valve-crammed cabinet. Shouting to Halliday, the operator struggled to his feet and tried to pull Maitland away. Then Halliday swung back from the periscope and flung his arms around Maitland's shoulders. The three men wrestled together, their blows muffled by the swaying vehicle and their heavy clothing, then fell to the floor.

As they struggled onto their knees, the tractor, still following the circular course Halliday had been giving to the driver, tipped over sharply as it left the roadway and ran rapidly down the incline.

Halliday pulled Maitland to his feet, his face thick with anger. Lanyon had joined them, and helped the radio operator to rise. The corporal stumbled over to the set and stared blankly at the wrecked console, his fingers numbly tracing the ragged outlines of the compass.

He looked wildly at Halliday. "The set's a write-off, Captain, a total wreck! God knows what our bearing was! We were moving around that bend. I wasn't watching it."

Halliday wrenched at Maitland's jacket. "You damn fool! Do you realize we're completely lost?"

Maitland shook himself free. "No you're not, Captain. I hate to force your hand, but it was the only way. Look."

He reached across to the vhf set and turned up the volume, so that the staccato gabble of the mysterious station sounded out into the compartment over the noise of the wind beating against the tractor. With one hand he rotated the set in its bearings until, at an angle of 45° to the lateral axis of the tractor, it was at maximum strength.

"Our new direction beam. Follow that and it should take us straight to Hardoon Tower."

"How can you be sure?" Halliday snapped. "It could be anything!"

Maitland shrugged. "Maybe, but it's our only chance." He turned to Lanyon, quickly explained what had happened to Andrew Symington.

Lanyon pondered this for a few minutes, then turned to Halliday, who was peering through the periscope.

"Seems as if we've no alternative, Captain. As it's only a few miles away, a short detour won't hurt us. And there's always the chance that if this fellow Hardoon is planning some sort of takeover when the wind blows out, we may be able to anticipate him."

Halliday clenched his fists, scowling angrily, then nodded and swung back to the periscope.

Five minutes later they reversed onto the highway and moved off down a side road toward Leatherhead, following the vfh signal. Maitland had expected that they would have difficulty in locating Hardoon Tower, but Halliday soon noticed something that confirmed his suspicions about Hardoon.

"Take a look for yourself," Halliday said. "This road has been used regularly all through the last four or five weeks. There's even wire mesh laid down at the exposed corners."

Lanyon took the periscope, confirmed this with a nod. "Heavy tracked vehicles," he commented. "Must have been carrying some really big loads." Grinning, he added: "Looks as if Pat may get a story after all."

They followed the signal, steadily increasing in strength, toward the Hardoon estates at Leatherhead, as much guided by signs of recent activity along the road as by the radio beam, the wind pushing them on at a steady 25 mph.

Two hours later they had their first sight of Hardoon Tower.

Maidand was doing his 15-minute turn at the periscope when the operator told him that they had entered the zone of maximum signal strength.

"Could be anywhere within a couple of square miles of here," be reported, swinging the direction-finder aerial without influencing the volume. "From now on we'll have to make visual contact."

Maitland peered through the periscope. Ahead the roadway had broadened into a furrowed band of shattered concrete and wire mesh about 1 oo yards wide, stained with huge white and gray patches which suggested some enormous roadwork had recently been in progress. The tractor edged forward along the center at 15 mph, tacking from left to right across the band. Two hundred yards away the road disappeared into the dim whirling mass of the wind stream. Beside the roadway the ground was black and dark, devoid of all vegetation, dotted with a few huge rolling objects, stumps of giant trees, blocks of masonry, all moving from left to right across their path.

Ahead, high in the air, something loomed for a moment, a lighter patch of sky, apparently an interval in the dust cloud. Maitland ignored it, searching the ground carefully for any hidden side turning.

A few seconds later he realized that the strip of lighter air was still in front of him.

Straight ahead, its massive bulk veiled by the duststorm, an enormous pyramidlike structure reared up, its four-angled sides 100 feet across at the base, tapering to the apex 80 feet above. The tractor was now about a quarter of a mile away and, although partly obscured, the pyramid was the first structure Maitland had seen for weeks which retained hard clean outlines. Even at this distance he could see its straight profiles, the perfectly pointed apex, cleaving the dark air stream like the prow of a liner.

He gestured Halliday over to the periscope. As the captain whooped in surprise, Maitland gestured to Lanyon.

"It looks as if Hardoon's strongpoint is up ahead. About three or four hundred yards away. A huge concrete pryamid."

"It's fantastic," Halliday said over his shoulder, centering the periscope. "Who does the maniac think he is-Cheops? Must have taken years to build."

He handed over the periscope to Lanyon, who nodded slowly. "Either years or thousands of men. The roadways indicate there's been a pretty big construction force on the job."

They edged nearer the pyramid; its great bulk rising above into the flickering sky. Two hundred yards away the tractor struck a low obstacle with its offside front track, and they looked down at a low wall, ten feet high, rising out of the ground and running in the direction of the left-hand corner of the pyramid. The wall was ten feet wide, a massive reinforced concrete buttress. As they moved along it, a second rampart appeared out of the gravellike soil on their right, and they found themselves entering a long approach system of parallel concrete walls, partly intended as windbreakers for the pyramid, and partly to screen entering vehicles.

Maitland searched the face of the pyramid for apertures, but its surface was smooth and unbroken. Gradually, as the height of the supporting walls increased, it was lost from sight and they entered a narrow ramp that led below an overhanging shoulder and then around a right-angle corner into what appeared to be a dead end.

Halliclay tilted back the periscope, craning to look up at the great bulk of the pyramid obscured by the stream of dust and gravel cascading across its surface.

"Looks as if this isn't an approach road after all," Halliday commented. "No entrance bays or locks. We'll have one hell of a job reversing out of here. Why don't they put up some signs?"

Suddenly they swayed on their feet, grabbed at the ceiling straps. The tractor had dropped abruptly, was moving steadily downward like an elevator.

Maitland dived for the periscope, just in time to see the walls around them soar upward into the air, the apex of the pyramid disappear. Seconds later the rectangular outlines of an elevator opening rose above them. The black sides of the shaft ran past, then slowed down as the elevator reached its floor. A horizontal lock slid across the opening and sealed it, shutting out the daylight.

"Well, they must be friendly," Halliday decided. "I was beginning to wonder how we'd get in if they didn't want us."

The driver cut the engines, and as the din subsided they heard mechanics outside the tractor shackling exit ladders to its turret. Halliday began to unlock the hatchway, motioned to the others to get to their feet.

"Stretch your legs, everybody. May be our last chance for days."

He opened the hatch, raising it a few inches, and someone on the roof pulled it back. He climbed out, followed by Maitland and the radio operator.

The tractor was at the bottom of a large freight-elevator shaft, part of an underground bunker from which high driveways led off to dark transport bays. Men in black plastic suits and helmets stood around the tractor, most of them with holsters on their belts. Maitland recognized the uniforms he had seen in Marshall 's Park Lane basement.

As he swung down, a tall, rough-featured man with a white pyramid-shaped triangle on the front of his helmet stepped over to him.

"What are you clowns playing at?" he snapped. "Why the hell aren't you using your radio?"

His voice was a snarl of irritation and violence. He looked at Maitland, then grabbed him in surprise, glancing up at Halliday, who was helping the radio operator out of the turret.

"What's all this?" the big man snapped. He wrenched Maitland around roughly, fingering his navy weather jacket. "Where's Kroll? He was supposed to bring Symington. Who are all you people?"

"Isn't Symington here?" Maitland asked him.

The big man stared at him angrily, then looked over his shoulder and gestured toward a squad of guards who were encircling the tractor. At the same time he reached for his holster.

Halliday was still standing on the roof, gesturing back the radio operator, who was about to join Maitland on the ground.

The squad of black-suited guards closed in around the Titan, two or three of them swarming up its sides. Maitland found himself seized by the neck, jabbed an elbow into his attacker and fell backward with him against one of the tracks. He kicked himself loose from the man and struck out at two others who closed in on him, butting them with his head. One of them punched him hard in the face, the other grabbed him around the waist and pulled him downward onto the ground again. As he lay there struggling he saw the big guard backing away from the tractor, a heavy.45 automatic in his hand. Everyone seemed to be shouting, and then the.45 roared out twice, the flashes from its barrel lighting up the sides of the Titan.

A figure, apparently Halliday, came lurching down the ladder, stumbled a few feet across the floor and then fell onto its face.

Maitland slammed a fist into the back of one of the men lying across him, managed to free himself for a moment. He was trying to sit forward, when someone ran up and kicked him heavily in the side of the head.

His brain exploding like a roman candle, he fell backward into a deep roaring pool of darkness.