Stratton walked into the cavern, turning around to take it all in. ‘How much of the prison’s air does this place scrub?’ Stratton asked.
‘These only run the mine and inmate levels now. You’d need twice the number of scrubbers, all working efficiently, plus a couple thousand litres of oxygen a day to cover the entire place. There’s a mother of a surface barge takes care of the living quarters . . . The desalinators over there only provide part of the potable water. Those pumps’re pretty essential, though,’ he said, indicating four squat machines along one of the far walls, two of them running and responsible for much of the noise. ‘They dump a lot of the water. If they fail you’re lookin’ at shuttin’ down the entire lower sections, including the mine.’
‘If this place is so important how come they let you down here on your own?’
‘They got pretty lax with me over time. I do a good job, I’m twenty-four seven, and I’m free. I guess they think I’m harmless. There’s nothin’ serious I can do down here - or so they think. But they don’t know Tusker Hamlin as well as they think they do.’
Stratton chose not to question the remark and walked over to dozens of large steel gas bottles stacked in frames along a wall. They were an argon-oxygen mix, all connected together through an array of high-pressure pipes.
‘OCR emergency gas,’ Hamlin said. ‘It ain’t essential, though. Just a back-up.’
Stratton reckoned that two men could barely lift one of the bottles, never mind carry it very far. He had no specific interest in them and was simply filing away anything that might be of value.
‘Shall we get on with it, then?’ Hamlin asked, standing behind him.
Stratton had not heard him draw close. He looked around at the man and saw that he was wearing a strange smirk.
‘The door,’ Hamlin said. ‘Let’s test your theory.’
‘You mean open it?’
‘Sure. What else?’
‘It’s not something you can test and put away for another day. They’ll know in OCR as soon as it opens. We’ll only get one hit.’
‘Time’s running out for the both of us, especially for you,’ Hamlin said. ‘Gann ain’t the patient type. He’s gonna make his move soon.’
Hamlin was attempting to manipulate him by playing up the Gann threat. But the older man did not know how right he was. Gann was coming after him because he was the only witness to the ferry sabotage. This was no longer just a mission to get the tablet from Durrani. It had also become largely about Stratton’s survival.
He suddenly felt overwhelmed, his confidence about completing the mission in tatters.There was no way out for him, either. Even giving himself up and telling the truth about why he was in Styx was not going to save him. It would only make matters worse since his credibility as a witness would be too high. Stratton had bounced into the operation, all cocky and confident, not only about getting hold of the tablet but also making an historic escape.What an arrogant prick he was, he thought.
Stratton could feel his temples tighten as he realised the true level of his desperation. He was well and truly screwed. And now Hamlin wanted to open the door. But into what? Stratton had no idea where to go or what to do.Was everything down to waiting in ambush in some dark corner in the hope that Gann would amble past so that he could jump him? That was the best Stratton could come up with. It was pathetic. He felt like an amateur.
He looked at Hamlin who now represented the last vestige of hope he had to cling on to. His survival depended now on the plans of an old lunatic. Things could not get any worse. ‘Where’re you going if we get through that door?’
‘Let me explain somethin’ to you. I’ve spent two years, ever since the first day I walked into this joint, figuring out how to get out of here. One thing I hadn’t been able to figure were the doors and you walked into my life with the answer.That’s providence and I’m grabbing it with both hands. But I don’t owe you anything.’
‘Nothing for showing you how to open the door?’
‘You need that as much as I do. Maybe more. At least I have time on my hands. Yours is running out.’
‘You don’t even know it’ll work.’
‘It’ll work. You gave me the missing piece of the puzzle.’
‘Why can’t you take me with you to the ferry? That’s the only way out.’
‘Why don’t you just concentrate on your own problems? ’
‘Getting out that door doesn’t get me to Gann.’
‘Oh, I dunno. A resourceful guy might stack things in his favour.’
‘You’re full of shit, Hamlin. You’re just a crazy old man. I don’t see why I should help you if you can’t help me.’
Hamlin started to grin widely, displaying his stained and cracked teeth. ‘Maybe I can.’
‘I’m beginning to think you’re just an old windbag.’
Hamlin was still smiling. ‘I don’t know why I like you, ferryman. But I do . . . I know this place better’n anyone, even the people who built it, because I know the changes that were made when the corporation moved in. The original experiment needed independence from a surface barge. A life-support system floating on the surface defeated the whole idea. Failure in that department was probably why it got cancelled. The current surface barge was put in for the prison. They depend on it. It’s the key to helping the both of us. We need confusion. The barge provides air, water, power. We screw the barge up and we got ourselves a pretty neat diversion, just like a military operation.’
‘How can you do that from down here?’
Hamlin gave him a knowing smile once again. ‘This room houses all the distribution conduits for the prison since it was intended to be the main life-support factory. When they brought the barge in it made sense to utilise the distribution system that was already in place. That’s what I figured, at least. So I searched around. I discovered I was wrong to a certain extent. They rebuilt the water- and air-distribution system, added water pumps to level three, shut down the sterilisers and desalinators, reduced the workload for the air scrubbers. But what they did end up utilising was some eighty per cent of the power-distribution conduits.’
Hamlin walked over to a metal staircase and climbed to the top. ‘Come take a look,’ he said.
Stratton followed.
Hamlin led him along a gantry, around a corner, behind the line of scrubbers to an ordinary door. He reached for a small rock in the stone wall, removed it, put his hand inside the hole and withdrew a key. ‘One of the service engineers always used to leave the key in the door while he was working in here. I made a mould out of putty, took the key out of the lock one day and made an impression. Took me a while to make a copy of the key,’ he said as he put the key into the lock.‘It ain’t a perfect copy,’ he said, concentrating while manipulating it, massaging it back and forth. The key finally raised the tumblers and turned. ‘But it works in the end,’ he said as he opened the door.
Inside were several large dust-covered electrical cabinets. ‘These are just two of the transformers. But they’re an important pair - if you wanna screw up the others, that is.’
Hamlin opened the cupboards and Stratton looked at the complex array of high-powered cables, switches and junctions. ‘How do you know what feeds what?’ he asked.
Hamlin was still wearing that know-it-all grin. He reached behind one of the cabinets and retrieved a long tube of paper, placed it on a table and unrolled it. It was an electrical blueprint, a complex diagram that was practically meaningless to Stratton. ‘I took this off one of the engineers about a year ago. I know every damn circuit on here.’
‘You can control the prison’s circuitry from here?’
‘No. Can’t do that. But I can sure as hell screw it up. I can trip circuit-breakers all over that damned barge. The barge isn’t manned twenty-four seven. Even if there was an engineer on board it’d take him a while to figure it out.And no engineer would reconnect a circuit before they knew why it broke in the first place.’
‘You can cut the power to the prison?’
‘Some of it.’
‘But there’s an auxiliary power system.’
‘Sure. But it only runs essentials. In this place that’s mostly life support. Security always comes second to safety. I’d say you’d have as much as eight hours before the system was back on line.That long enough for you?’
‘Internal doors?’
