Jackdaws

An authoritative voice said in German, "Who closed the main door?"

She heard Greta reply, but in a man's voice, "It seems to be stuck."

The German cursed. A moment later there was the scrape of a bolt.

Flick reached another door. She opened it and shone her flashlight again. It contained two huge wooden coffers the size and shape of mortuary slabs. Greta whispered, "Battery room. Go to the next door."

The German man's voice said, "Was that a flashlight? Bring it over here!"

"Just coming," said Greta in her Gerhard voice, but the three Jackdaws walked in the opposite direction.

Flick came to the next room, led the other two inside, and closed the door before shining her flashlight. It was a long, narrow chamber with racks of equipment along both walls. At the near end of the room was a cabinet that probably held large sheets of drawings. At the far end, the beam of her flashlight revealed a small table. Three men sat at it holding playing cards. They appeared to have remained sitting during the minute or so since the lights went out. Now they moved.

As they rose to their feet, Flick leveled her gun. Jelly was just as quick. Flick shot one. Jelly's pistol cracked and the man beside him fell. The third man dived for cover, but Flick's flashlight followed him. Both Flick and Jelly fired again, and he fell still.

Flick refused to let herself think about the dead men as people. There was no time for feelings. She shone her flashlight around. What she saw gladdened her heart. This was almost certainly the room she was looking for.

Standing a meter from one long wall was a pair of floor-to-ceiling racks bristling with thousands of terminals in tidy rows. From the outside world the telephone cables came through the wall in neat bundles to the backs of the terminals on the nearer rack. At the farther end, similar cables led from the backs of the terminals up through the ceiling to the switchboards above. At the front of the frame, a nightmare tangle of loose jumper wires connected the terminals of the near rack to those of the far one. Flick looked at Greta. "Well?"

Greta was examining the equipment by the light of her own flashlight, a fascinated expression on her face. "This is the MDF-the main distribution frame," she said. "But it's a bit different from ours in Britain."

Flick stared at Greta in surprise. Minutes ago she had said she was too frightened to go on. Now she was unmoved by the killing of three men.

Along the far wall more racks of equipment glowed with the light of vacuum tubes. "And on the other side?" Flick asked.

Greta swung her torch. "Those are the amplifiers and carrier circuit equipment for the long-distance lines."

"Good," Flick said briskly. "Show Jelly where to place the charges."

The three of them went to work. Greta unwrapped the wax-paper packets of yellow plastic explosive while Flick cut the fuse cord into lengths. It burned at one centimeter per second. "I'll make all the fuses three meters long," Flick said. "That will give us exactly five minutes to get out." Jelly assembled the fire train: fuse, detonator, and firing cap.

Flick held a flashlight while Greta molded the charges to the frames at the vulnerable places and Jelly stuck the firing cap into the soft explosive.

They worked fast. In five minutes all the equipment was covered with charges like a rash. The fuse cords led to a common source, where they were loosely twisted together, so that one light would serve to ignite them all.

Jelly took out a thermite bomb, a black can about the size and shape of a tin of soup, containing finely powdered aluminum oxide and iron oxide. It would burn with intense heat and fierce flames. She took off the lid to reveal two fuses, then placed it on the ground behind the MDF.

Greta said, "Somewhere in here are thousands of cards showing how the circuits are connected. We should burn them. Then it will take the repair crew two weeks, rather than two days, to reconnect the cables."

Flick opened the cupboard and found four custom-made card holders containing large diagrams, neatly sorted by labeled file dividers. "Is this what we're looking for?"

Greta studied a card by the light of her flashlight. "Yes."

Jelly said, "Scatter them around the thermite bomb. They'll go up in seconds."

Flick threw the cards on the floor in loose piles.

Jelly placed an oxygen-generating pack on the floor at the blind end of the room. "This will make the fire hotter," she said. "Ordinarily, we could only burn the wooden frames and the insulation around the cables, but with this, the copper cables should melt."

Everything was ready.

Flick shone her flashlight around the room. The outer walls were ancient brick, but the inner walls between the rooms were light wooden partitions. The explosion would destroy the partition walls and the fire would spread rapidly to the rest of the basement.

Five minutes had passed since the lights went out.

Jelly took out a cigarette lighter.