AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"I hope you've been working out at the gym," said Weatherhill as he slipped the rope through the clips in his harness. "Because your little old muscles will be taxed tonight."
She smiled and pointed to a pulley she'd already attached to one line and a water pipe. "It's all in the leverage," she said slyly.
Weatherhill clamped the small but powerful flashlight around one wrist. He bent down and took what looked like an exact replica of an airconditioning compressor out of his tote bag. He had constructed it to replace the one he was about to steal. Then he nodded. "Might as well get going."
He leaned into the vertical shaft and slowly dropped down headfirst, extending the dummy compressor beyond his head as Stacy took up the strain on one line. There was plenty of room here, but when he came to the elbow into the horizontal duct, he had to contort his body like a snake and squeeze through.
He entered on his back in order to bend his body around the narrow curve. And then he was in.
"Okay, Stacy, pull away," he spoke into his wrist radio.
"How's the fit?"
"Let's just say I can hardly breathe."
She pulled on a pair of gloves and began to heave on one of the nylon ropes that wound around the pulley on the hedgehog and attached to Weatherhill's harness, pulling him through the narrow confines of the ventilation duct.
He could do little to help her, except exhale when he felt her tug on the rope. He began to sweat inside the nylon suit. There was no airconditioning running through the ventilator, and the outside atmosphere that wafted down from the opening on the hotel roof was hot and stifling.
Stacy wasn't enjoying mild temperatures either. The steam pipes that ran through the utility room kept the heat and humidity close to that of a steam bath.
"I can see the hedgehog and ventilator screen," he reported after eight minutes.
Another five meters and he was there. The blueprints had not shown any TV cameras in the vault, but he peered into the darkened interior for signs of them. He also removed a small sensor from a sleeve pocket and checked for laser or heat-seeking scanners. His inspection thankfully came up dry.
He smiled to himself. The elaborate defense and alarm measures were all on the outside of the vault, a flaw that was common in many security systems.
He twisted off the screws, tied a small string to the screen and lowered it to the floor quietly. He slipped the lever that released the hedgehog anchor prongs and lowered it into the vault along with the bogus compressor. Then he slowly descended headfirst until he finally rolled onto the concrete floor.
"I'm inside," he told Stacy.
"I read you."
He shined the light around the
vault. The bomb cars seemed doubly menacing, sitting ominously in musty blackness and surrounded by thick concrete walls. The awesome destruction in such a cloistered area was difficult to imagine.
Weatherhill came to his feet and detached his harness. He moved around the nearest bomb car and laid out a small packet of tools that had been tied around one leg and spread it on one fender. The replica compressor he set on the floor. Then without bothering to glance inside the car, he reached in and pulled the hood lever.
He stared at the actual bomb unit for a moment, sizing it up. It was designed to explode from a coded radio signal. That much he knew. Activating the detonation mechanism by a sudden movement was doubtful. Suma's nuclear scientists would have built a bomb that could absorb the shock from an automobile driven at high speeds over rough roads. But he wasn't about to take chances, especially since the cause behind the blast on the Divine Star was still unknown.
Weatherhill brushed all dire thoughts from his mind and set to work removing the pressure hoses from the compressor. As he'd discovered earlier, the electrical leads to the evaporator coils that acted as an antenna were quite elementary. The electronics were exactly as he would have designed them himself. He delicately spliced off the leads and reconnected them to the fake compressor without breaking their circuits. He could now take his time to remove the bolts on the compressor's mounting brackets.
"Bomb safely out of the car," he reported. "Will now make the switch."
Six more minutes and the fake compressor was in place and connected.
"Coming out."
"Standing by to retrieve you," Stacy answered.
Weatherhill stepped back to the ventilator opening and snapped on his harness. Suddenly he noticed something he'd missed in the darkness of the vault.
Something was sitting in the front seat of the car.
He flashed the light around the vault. He could now see that all four cars had some sort of mechanism seated behind the steering wheels. The vault was cool, but Weatherhill felt as if he was in a sweat-box.
He was soaked inside the nylon suit. Still holding the flashlight in one hand, he wiped his face with a sleeve and crouched until his head was even with the window frame on the driver's side of the car.
