Red Notice

113

Delphine braced herself as Laszlo reached past her once again and scooped down to propel their skateboard along the smooth interior of the pipe. He sat behind her on the board, his legs either side of her, as if they were kayaking. They were deep under the English Channel, and for many miles each breath she had taken from her compressed-air tank had echoed down the cylinder like the air bubbles of a diver in the ocean depths.

The skateboard slewed from side to side, rolling up the curve until gravity took over. She could feel the rush of gas as she lay there, and see wisps of it streaming over her mask. Her breathing accelerated with her rising fear of Sambor’s imminent return.

Sucking hard from Sambor’s oxygen mask, Tom wasn’t sure how far Delphine and Laszlo were ahead of him. There was hardly any light, just a dim white glow every five hundred metres or so, through the glass panels on the airlock doors. Tom had no idea what he was going to do when he caught up with them. His head was empty of all thought; his body was using up every reserve of energy to make best speed on Sambor’s board. For now thinking was pointless. The work he needed to do was physical, not mental.

Tom paddled his hands along the floor of the pipeline and felt the skateboard pick up speed. It swooped up to the right. Tom instantly knew it was going too high. He tried to compensate, leaning hard left, but was too late. He came off like a bobsleigh rider on a fast bend.

His oxygen tank slammed into the metal superstructure and the clank of steel-on-steel echoed along the cylinder. Tom skidded fifteen feet, eyes closed, expecting the friction to ignite the gas at any moment.

He finally managed to bring himself to a halt and listened to the skateboard doing the same somewhere ahead of him. There was no time for him to take a breath or thank the pipeline designers. He rolled over onto his chest and started crawling forward.

Laszlo seemed to be moving more cautiously as they approached the next circle of light. He must have been concentrating hard: he didn’t seem to hear the loud metallic echo that washed over them.

Delphine did, and it immediately filled her with dread. It meant Sambor was alive. But then she realized that Tom wouldn’t have come to that conclusion if their positions had been reversed. Until he knew otherwise, Tom would have thought it was Delphine coming for him. She needed to think the same. She needed to believe it was him.

They came to a stop next to another steel door. She saw numbers stencilled on the glass panel. Laszlo crawled off the skateboard, allowing Delphine to take deep breaths to re-oxygenate her numb body. The respite lasted no more than two seconds before he grabbed her and made her kneel alongside him as he worked the handles.

She needed to slow him down. She needed to stop him blowing the pipeline. She eyed his recently acquired day-sack.

She lay there asking herself one question, over and over. What would Tom do? Until he caught up with them, she would have to take matters into her own hands. Whatever it was going to be, she had to do something.

The sequence of airlocks was designed to allow safe passage of maintenance engineers and emergency crews between the pressurized interior of the gas pipe and its exterior. Laszlo had done his homework.

An LED glowed and he heard the suction of gas as the air pressure in the chamber equalized with that of the environment beyond the outside door.

He glanced at Delphine. Laszlo knew exactly what was going through her mind. He’d heard the crash behind them, but decided it was pointless to react. There was no reason to believe it wasn’t Sambor. And sooner or later he would know for sure. The most important objective for now was getting himself and his brother out of the pipeline and into a safe position from which he could trigger the detonation.

Another LED illuminated and he swung open the outside door. He turned and grabbed the tube that led from Delphine’s oxygen tank to the mask. As the mask started to lift from her face she soon followed. Laszlo pushed her into the chamber, slammed the steel door shut behind them, and pushed a yellow button. The floor vent inside the airlock sucked out the gas and another above them replaced it with oxygen. The noise was deafening.

The sudden slam on the other side of the door they’d just come through made Delphine give an involuntary cry.

Tom’s masked face appeared at the window.