massive crowbar; Bruno carried a pocket flash, three bound poles slung from his shoulder, and a polythene wrapped and very peculiar packet in his pocket; Manuelo, in addition to a variety of throwing knives, carried a pair of rather fearsome-looking and heavily insulated wire cutters. The amatol explosives Bruno had left behind in the van.
They walked eastwards along the lane. Occasionally the moon shone through and their presence there was readily to be seen by anyone with eyes to see. Even so, they had no option other than to carry on as unobtrusively as they could — although it was questionable whether any close observer would have found anything unobtrusive about the crowbar, wire-cutter and poles. By the time they had reached the power station, some three hundred yards distant from the prison side of the Lubylan, the moon had slid behind some barred cloud again. There were no guards to be seen or heard, and the only form of protection appeared to be a heavy steel mesh mounted on ten feet high hollow steel tubes, with one cross-railing at the top and one six feet up. The top railing was liberally festooned with very unpleasant barbed wire.
Bruno took the crowbar from Kan Dahn, pressed one end firmly into the earth and let the other fall against the mesh, at the same time taking two prudent backward steps. There was no pyrotechnical display, no blinding coruscation of arcs, sparks and flashes. The fence was not electrified nor had Bruno for a moment thought it would have been. Only a madman would put two thousand volts through a fence at ground level; but Bruno had had no guarantee that he wasn’t dealing with madmen.
Manuelo began to snip his way through the mesh. Bruno took out his red pen and thoughtfully pushed down the end button. Kan Dahn looked at him curiously.
“Left it a bit late to write your last will and testament?”
“A toy Dr Harper gave me. Fires anaesthetic darts.” One by one they stooped and passed through the hole Manuelo had made. Five paces they took and then they discovered that the lack of human guards was compensated for by the presence of canine ones in the form of three Dobermann Pinschers that came at them out of the gloom. Manuelo’s knife flickered forward in an underhand throw and the leaping dog died in mid-air, the blade buried to the hilt in its throat. The dog jumping for Kan Dahn’s throat found itself with one iron forearm under its lower jaw and the other behind its ears: one effortless twist and the vertebra snapped. The third dog did succeed in knocking Bruno down but not before the steel dart had lodged in its chest. The dog landed heavily, rolled over twice and lay still.
They advanced to the powerhouse itself. The door was made of metal and was locked. Bruno put his ear to the door and moved away quickly: even on the outside the high speed whining of turbines and generators were an assault on the eardrums. To the left of the door and about ten feet up was a barred window. Bruno glanced at Kan Dahn, who stooped, caught him by the ankles and hoisted him effortlessly: it was like going up in a lift.
The powerhouse was deserted but for one man seated in a glass enclosed control room. He was wearing what Bruno at first took to be a pair of headphones: they were, in fact, ear muffs for excluding sound. Bruno returned to earth. “The door, please, Kan Dahn. No, not there. The handle side.”
“Designers always make the same mistake. The hinges are never as massive as the securing bolts.” He inserted the chisel edge of the crowbar between the door and the wall and had the door off its hinges in ten seconds. Kan Dahn looked at the bent crowbar in some vexation, grasped it in his hands and straightened it out as if it were made of putty.
It took them no more than twenty seconds, making no attempt at concealment, to reach the door of the control box. The duty engineer, facing rows of breakers and gauges, was no more than eight feet away, completely oblivious to their presence. Bruno tried the door. This, too, was locked. Bruno looked at the two men. Both nodded. With one scything sweep of his crowbar Kan Dahn removed most of the glass from the door. Even the ear-muffled engineer could not have failed to hear the resulting racket, for when Kan Dahn shattered a sheet of plate glass he did it con brio. He swung round in his swivel chair and had only the fleeting fraction of a second to register the impression of three vague silhouettes outside the control room when the haft of Manuelo’s knife caught him on the forehead.
Bruno reached through the hole and turned the key. They went inside and while Kan Dahn and Manuelo immobilized the hapless engineer Bruno scanned the metal labels on the breakers. He selected a particular one and yanked the handle down through ninety degrees.
Kan Dahn said: “Sure?”
“Sure. It’s marked.”
“If you’re wrong?”
“I’ll be barbecued.”
Bruno sat in the engineer’s vacant chair, removed his shoes and replaced them with the pair of canvas shoes he used on the high wire. His own shoes he handed to Kan Dahn, who said:
“You have a mask, a hood?”
Bruno looked at his red and brown suit and mustard socks.
“If I wear a mask they won’t recognize me?”
“You have a point.”
“For me, it doesn’t matter whether I’m recognized or not. I don’t intend to hang around when this lot is over. What matters is that you and Manuelo and Roebuck are not recognized.” “The show must go on?”
Bruno nodded and led the way outside. Curious to see the duration of the effect of the anaesthetic darts, he stooped and examined the Dobermann, then straightened slowly. It appeared that Dobermanns had nervous systems that differed from those of humans: this Dobermann was stone dead. There were several pylons, each about eighty feet high, inside the compound. He made for the most westerly of those and started to climb. Kan Dahn and Manuelo left through the hole in the compound mesh.
The pylon presented no problem. Dark though the night was — the moon was still behind cloud — Bruno climbed it with no more effort than the average person would have encountered with a flight of stairs in daylight. Reaching the top crossbar, Bruno unslung the bound poles, undid the bindings, which he thrust into his pocket, and screwed the three pieces solidly together: he had his balancing pole. He stooped and reached out to touch, just beyond the retaining insulator, the heavy steel cable that angled off towards the south-east corner of the Lubylan. For a moment he hesitated, then fatalistically concluded that hesitation would serve no purpose. If he had switched off the wrong breaker then at least he would never know anything about it. He reached down and caught the cable. He’d switched off the right breaker. The cable was ice-cold to the touch but, all importantly, it was not ice- sheathed. There was some wind, but it was slight and fitful. The cold was close to numbing but this was not a consideration to be taken into account: by the time he’d traversed that interminable three hundred yards he’d be, he knew, covered in perspiration. He waited no longer. Balancing his pole, he made his gingerly way along the insulator anchoring wire and stepped out on to the power cable.
Roebuck took a couple of steps down towards the track, craned forward and peered cautiously fore and aft, saw no one in sight, descended the remaining steps, then left the train at a measured pace. Not that he had not the right to leave the train whenever he wished, nor even to be seen with what he had then, two canvas sacks clipped together at their tops and slung over his shoulders, for those were the containers he habitually used to transport bis ropes and the metal pins he used as targets in his act: what might have aroused a degree of passing curiosity was that he had left the circus train at a point four coaches distant from where he had his own quarters. He climbed into the small Skoda he’d arrived in and parked it a hundred yards short of the Lubylan. He walked briskly on until he came to a small lane. He turned in here, crossed through a gate in a fence, jumped for and pulled down the spring extension of a fire-escape and climbed quickly until he’d hauled himself on to the roof. Crossing to the other side of the roof was akin to hacking one’s way through the Amazonian jungle. Some arborealist whom Roebuck, in his total ignorance of central European horticultural matters, presumed to have been of some distant English extraction, had seen to plant, in earth-filled tubs or troughs, shrubs, bushes, conifers extending to the height of twenty feet and, incredibly, two transverse and immaculately trimmed privet hedges and one lateral one that lined the edge of the roof overlooking the main street. Even in this egalitarian society the passion for privacy was not to be denied. This was, in fact, the same roof garden that Dr Harper had remarked on their first trip from the station to the Winter Palace.
Roebuck, a latter-day Last of the Mohicans, parted the lateral hedge and peered across and up. Across the street and about fifteen feet above the elevation where he stood was the watchtower at the south-west corner of the Lubylan. In size and shape it was very much like a telephone box, metal or wood for the first five feet then glass above. That it was manned by only one guard was clear, because a light was on inside the tower and Roebuck could clearly see the solitary occupant. Suddenly, a remote-controlled searchlight, mounted about two feet above
