Vance shoved the metal door open just as the roar of the onrushing
water reached the confluence at the intersection of the tunnel, a mere
hundred yards ahead. The tunnel was almost full now, the water flow
increasing.
They're about to turn on the Cyclops, he thought. You've got about
fifteen seconds left.
He pulled himself through the metal door, soaked but alive, and rolled
onto a cement floor. With his last remaining strength he reached over
and tipped the metal door shut, then grabbed the wheel and gave it a
twist. Down below he could feel the wall of water surge by.
He thought he was going to faint, but instead he took a deep breath and
pulled out the flashlight. . . .
. . . And found himself in a communications conduit, consisting of a
concrete floor with Styrofoam insulation overhead. All around him
stretched what seemed miles of coaxial cables, wrapped in huge circular
strands. The conduit also contained fiber-optics bundles for carrying
computer data to guide the parabolic antennas up on the mountain as
they tracked the space vehicle.
The major contents of the conduit, however, were massive copper power-
transmission cables. What had Mannheim warned? How many gigawatts per
second? The numbers were too mind-boggling to comprehend, or bother
remembering. All they meant was that if the Cyclops were suddenly
turned on, the Gaussian fields of electromagnetic flux would probably
rearrange his brain cells permanently.
He rose and moved down the conduit, feeling along its curved sides, his
back braced against the large bundle of power wires in the center while
ahead of him the darkness gaped. A few yards farther, though, and the
probing beam of his flashlight revealed a terminus where some of the
shielded fiber optics had been shunted off into the wall, passing
through a heavy metal sleeve.
Although it was welded into a steel plate bolted to the side of the
wall, large handles allowed the bolts to be turned without the aid of
special wrenches. Whoever designed the fiber optics for this tunnel, he
thought, didn't want a lot of Greek workmen down here waving tools
around after a long lunch of guzzling retsina. The fibers were too
vulnerable to stand up to any banging.
He grasped the handles and began to twist one, finding the bolts well
lubricated. After four turns, it opened. The second yielded just as
easily. Then the third and the fourth.
He took a deep breath, thinking this might be his first encounter with
the hostages, and the terrorists. Then he slid the metal plate back
away from the wall and tried to peer through. The opening was
approximately a meter wide, with the bundle of fiber-optics cables
directly through the middle. Still, he found just enough clearance to
slip past and into the freezing cold of the room used to prep the
payloads for the vehicles.