He turned around to face the docking hatch when, to his utter amazement, a stream of bubbles began to escape from around its edges and it slowly opened. Gann’s reaction was immediate.
Mandrick stood with the two controllers, staring at the images on the OCR monitors. The screens appeared to be split, the bottom half white, the top black, with a murky white ferry in the middle dropping deeper into the white section. They all saw the blurred images of movement on the top of the ferry just below the cable struts.
‘Looks like someone getting out,’ the senior controller said.
‘It’s the emergency escape hatch,’ said his assistant.
‘We’re going to lose them in the milk,’ the senior controller said as he grabbed the mike. ‘Send in the divers. Now!’ he shouted into the handset.
Gann pushed himself towards the figure coming out of the hatch. He had no idea who it was but that did not matter. No one could survive the ferry now, and not just because it was the original plan that every prisoner should perish. A survivor could accuse Gann of the sabotage. With the power of the water at his back he struck the man forcefully, wrapping his arms around him and hauling him from the opening.The momentum and the force of the water carried them along the top of the ferry and off the end.
Stratton was just below the other prisoner when he felt him shoot from the hatch as if snatched by something passing overhead. But there was not a second to spare to consider what had happened. He pushed himself free of the hatch and up towards the cables. The ferry began to slow to a crawl, cancelling any thoughts he’d had about simply hanging on and hoping he could last until it reached the dock.
He hit the cables and grabbed hold of one, immediately dragging himself forward. He could make out a dim light ahead and pulled for all he was worth. He kept telling himself that the dock was within his range and he could make it. But suddenly the light ahead disappeared and everything became murky white. Stratton immediately remembered the ‘milk’ that was known to surround the prison most of the year round. The cable had dropped into it, dragged down by the weight of the flooded ferry.
Stratton’s lungs began to cry out for air. The lights had been a psychological hub, something he could have used to focus on and help blank out the pain. All he could do now was imagine them getting closer with each pull and simply keep going until he rose up into the dock or went unconscious.
He pulled in a rhythmic motion, one arm over the other, his legs trailing behind him. He fought the urge to increase the pace and concentrated on keeping the pulls firm and controlled.The last time Stratton had swum underwater for any distance had been many years before. Fifty metres was the distance he’d been required to swim that day, two lengths of the camp pool as part of a general diving-fitness test. And he’d had to collect a brick off the bottom of the five-metre deep end before finally surfacing. But on that occasion he’d had a chance to practise a couple of times. Even then he had only barely made it. This time he had the additional incentive of avoiding death - which had to be worth a few metres more.
His face began to tighten and the palpable increase in fear made him pick up the pace. He prayed the cable would rise out of the milk, which would mean he was very close. He wanted to see the lights again. They would give him hope for another few seconds. If not, this was it. Stratton was going to perish at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico after all. For a split second, in desperation, he almost let go of the cable to swim out of the milk. But his cold logic kept hold of him and refused to give his hands the permission. The cable led to air and dragging himself was quicker than swimming. It was that or die.
But the urge to open his mouth and suck in anything to relieve the increasing pain of oxygen debt only grew. His face tightened further and felt as if it was going to explode. His arms pulled faster, all discipline gone now. His fingers tingled, his temples throbbed. He had seconds to arrive in the dock or he was finished. His lungs were on fire, his heart pounding in his chest like a drum. His mouth started to open and his grip on the cable loosened. There was nothing left, no more oxygen, his last drop of will-power. The carbon dioxide saturating his body demanded that he open his mouth, insisting he draw in whatever there was. He entered the state of madness that accompanies a total lack of oxygen and he stopped, released the cable and inhaled.
The spasms began and he fought to hold on to his soul. The white changed to dark and he could see a light ahead. And then suddenly it all went quiet and serene. The pain that had tightened his face and body had gone and he drifted like a spirit in space, as if he had already left the water, all human senses gone. He could see himself, knew he had passed into another place and he did not care. The power that drove his life had ceased. Stratton was dead.
Mandrick walked out through the hissing airlock of the OCR as it closed behind him and headed along a broad steel walkway suspended inside a black rock cavern. The OCR entrance hissed again seconds later as the senior controller emerged from it at a pace calculated to let him catch up with Mandrick before he reached the top of a broad stairway.The cavern echoed with the clatter of their feet as both men hurried along briskly. The controller, wearing a slender headset over one ear, listened intently as he followed Mandrick closely along a lower platform to another airlock door. A small red glass screen required Mandrick’s thumbprint which it analysed before turning green. As with just about every other door in the facility, any minor pressure difference on either side of it needed to be equalised before the air-seal was withdrawn and access permitted.
‘The standby diver’s brought in a body, sir,’ the controller said, pressing the earpiece closer to his ear to help cut out the sound of vents and metallic clunking that filled the everyday air in Styx. ‘And one more . . . alive . . . it’s Gann, sir.’
The door opened and Mandrick walked through while listening to the operations controller but without making any form of acknowledgement. He needed to act like a warden who had just experienced the worst catastrophe of his career, dealing with the horror of half a dozen souls lost, not all of them inmates, while at the same time maintaining calm and control. But he was having problems acting the horrified-warden part - acting was something he had never been any good at anyway. Mandrick had other things on his mind. Now that the deed was done something else was disturbing him, a premonition he’d had shortly after accepting the order to neutralise the new arrivals.Whatever had been achieved this day was going to give birth to even greater problems. And greater problems usually meant having to formulate proportionately more drastic solutions.
The two men made their way down a short flight of broad steps cut into the stone and reinforced with steel and concrete.Vegetation grew down the walls, large clumps of it in places. At the bottom was a bulky, robust steel door made of layers of riveted plates and covered in a dozen coats of thick red paint that had failed to prevent patches of corrosion. The area had become noticeably more humid, the walls moist and covered in mildew, the rock ceiling dotted with stalactites that dripped onto their opposite numbers on the uneven rocky surface beneath the metal-grid floor.
‘The ferry’s come to a stop below the dock,’ the controller reported as he moved ahead to open the door.
The door was an exterior access point and required a higher level of clearances as well as a series of preliminary safety and security checks.
‘Senior OC requires access to gate four Charlie,’ the controller said into his mike as he punched a code into a keypad on the wall. ‘Release four Charlie dock primary.’
After a brief pause a heavy clunk came from inside the door. The controller checked the pressure levels on several gauges beside the door as part of a mandatory procedure before punching in another code. ‘Pressures are equalised . . . Release four Charlie secondary.’
Another clunk and the controller grabbed a large wheel on the side of the door and, with a little difficulty at first, began to turn it. After a couple of heaves it practically spun around at only a light touch. When the dozen cleats that surrounded the frame were clear of the breaches the massive door moved perceptibly outwards as cold air rushed in through the seams. The controller gave it a shove to help the electric motor on the hinge and the door slowly opened.
Mandrick stepped through into a large cavern hewn out of the rock and reinforced by steel girders and
