72 metres beneath the English Channel
‘What the fucking hell is going on?’ Adam Franklin exclaimed as Pete and Josh ran through the doorway into the storeroom of the Maintenance Hub. The Englishman’s forehead was wet with perspiration and the terrible stress he was under was clear in the lines of his face. One of his trouser legs had been cut at the knee and he had a bandage around his calf. Mai had cut the ties at their wrists.
Behind him stood Louis Chabon and the steward, Gabir. Mary sat on the floor at the back of the room cradling Billy, the biohazard suits they had used lying in a heap beside them. Mai saw Josh and ran over to embrace him.
‘Ow!’ he exclaimed and lifted his hand. Pete had cut the ties but the middle fingers of his right hand were bruised black. ‘Busted, I think.’
Mai ran her medscan over Josh’s hand and shook her head. ‘Not broken, dislocated joints.’ She removed a Vasjet, a needleless injection, from her med-kit and shot some painkillers into Josh’s hand. ‘You should start to feel that in a few seconds.’
Josh nodded and smiled. ‘I know! Thanks.’
‘Okay, so the two youngsters were terrorists,’ Pete began, turning to the three men. ‘They’re both dead.’
‘Fuckers!’ Adam spat and pushed back against the wall, letting himself slide to the floor. ‘This is just ridiculous!’
‘So what do we do now?’ Gabir asked.
‘Please tell me the tunnel you found is real,’ Louis sighed and looked to Josh.
‘Oh, it certainly is.’
Pete nodded. ‘Josh described it on our way back here. It has to be our best hope.’
Pete led the way, Josh beside him, Mai following from the rear.
‘So we have no comms with Tintara?’ Josh said.
‘No, too deep.’
‘But there is a way.’
‘Oh?’
Mai caught up with them.
‘We linked up with you earlier using this,’ Josh said, holding up the wireless phone from the storeroom of the Maintenance Hub. ‘Has a pretty good range – reaches all around these passageways in the Hub.’ He waved the phone in a semicircle.
‘Yeah, we can link up with Sangatte but it’s a pretty inefficient way to communicate with Base One.’
‘Better than nothing.’
‘Hold on,’ Mai interrupted. ‘We can do better than that.’
The two men turned to her.
‘We can use the power booster on the Silverback at the entrance to the Chunnel on the French side.’
‘Sorry, you’ve lost me,’ Pete said.
‘We used the Pram’s booster earlier remember? To talk to Tom?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So we can use this wireless phone, pump the output through our comms to the Silverback at Sangatte. The plane’s booster will get a signal to Tom. He should also be able to use the BigEye sensors to do the whole thing in reverse – use the Silverback to boost the power of the detectors on the BigEye so he can see where we are.’
Pete was nodding. ‘Very clever.’ He turned to Josh. ‘May I?’
Josh handed him the wireless phone. He keyed in an encoded call signal through his cybersuit comms and waited to see if the wireless would pick it up. A tech on Base One responded almost immediately and patched Pete through to Tom in his quarters. The beep of the comms cut in over the music in the background – Echo and the Bunnymen’s Bring on the Dancing Horses – and automatically paused the song.
‘Tom,’ Pete said.
‘Pete. You going through Sangatte?’
‘No, Mai had a great idea.’ He explained how they had boosted the signal.
‘Well, we are a smarty pants, aren’t we?’ Tom laughed.
‘We’ve hooked up with Josh. He’s found a tunnel that links up with the Paris-bound tunnel.’
‘No kidding?’ Tom sounded surprised. ‘Can you put him on?’
Pete indicated to Josh and moved back to walk beside him, the wireless phone on speaker.
‘Dude. How they hangin’?’
‘Oh, they’re hanging,’ Josh responded with a chuckle. ‘Good to hear your voice again, Tom.’
‘You too. Now what’s this about a tunnel? I’ve got all the latest schematics from Eurostar and I’ve gone back through the archives. Seen zip.’
‘Well, it’s there, Tom. I explained to the others. I found an old manual, a plastic clip folder on the floor of the passage. It was a technical file on the construction program. I reckon the tunnel itself is Victorian, but it was used by at least one of the teams who worked on the Chunnel construction back around the late 1980s.’
‘And it definitely links up?’
‘Yep, saw the signs in the main London–Paris tunnel.’
‘We drove right past it earlier,’ Pete added. ‘Didn’t see the door, but then that’s not surprising as there are dozens of small openings and hatchways on either side.’
‘Okay,’ Tom said. ‘You know how to get back there?’
‘Sure,’ Josh responded. ‘We’re on our way now.’
‘All right, listen. I have an idea. We can do the opposite of the comms link. I can pick up on sensors from the Big –’
‘We’ve thought of that already,’ Mai cut in.
‘Oh, have you now?’ Tom said indignantly. ‘How about you just concentrate on getting out of there and leave the clever stuff to me?’
The three of them laughed.
There was a silence the other end for a few seconds. Then Tom’s voice came back on. ‘Gotcha. You’re headed southeast and . . . well, what do you know? I’ve got the tunnel Josh discovered. It’s about 100 metres down –’
‘On the right,’ Josh said.
‘On the right. Well done . . . Oh shit!’
‘What?’
Pete, Josh and Mai stopped. Mai called out to the others and beckoned to them to catch up. Mary carrying Billy, who had fallen asleep, was the last to reach the group. They were all fatigued but Mary looked totally wiped out.
‘What’s wrong?’ Louis asked. His shirt front was soaked with sweat. A rivulet of perspiration ran down his left cheek and he was limping from the wound he’d sustained when the train was hit.
Pete raised a hand. ‘Tom? What the hell is it?’
‘There’s an electrical power substation close to your location. I can see from the thermal sensors of the BigEye that it’s getting critically hot.’
‘What? How?’
‘I’m not sure but I can only assume the explosion in the Paris-London tunnel that stopped the train damaged the cooling system.’
‘How serious, Tom? Where is it?’
‘Very serious. It’s about to go. It’s behind you about 20 metres away. You’ve gotta get away from there . . . now!’