They hollowed out a mountain to build this place. Where do you think they put it all?'

Angelique bit her lip. 'You were right,' she said. 'I don't like your theory. I just wish it was because I could find a big hole in it.'

'So do I,'

'Hang on, I've got one. If they flooded Cromlarig and they've taken out the road south, how are Simon and his pals supposed to get away afterwards?'

'Boats,' Ray remembered. "They had two speedboats on trailers back at the farmhouse. Have we come to that bridge we need to cross yet?'

Angelique got out her mobile phone. 'It sure sounds like it. Time to call in that cavalry. And before you say anythin', jet fighters don't need to cross bridges. Let's see how he likes an airstrike up his arse.'

'He'll like it fine. He's inside a mountain, and the entrance tunnel's got a shield door that was designed to withstand nuclear war.'Angelique began dialling. 'I'm beginning to wish I hadn't brought you,' she said. 'Me too.'420.

Ray watched her walk outside for privacy - classified privacy no doubt - and turned back to the model. Over at the counter, the receptionist was keying something into her computer, cheerfully oblivious of what had just landed on the shoulders of her visitors.

Even before Angelique returned to tell him, Ray knew what was coming. The First Minister was officially opening the Games at three, and Ray's watch said five past twelve. The nearest sizeable police or army presence was at least two hours away on the wrong side of a big hole in the only road that led to Dubh Ardrain from the south, with the alternative route involving a three-hour detour.

'We are the cavalry, aren't we,' he asked as Angelique walked back in.

Her face confirmed it. 'I was going to say ,I am, but thank you for volunteering.'

'Are they at least going to evacuate the town?'

'Not yet.'

'Not yet? What, are things not quite cliff-hanging enough for them so far?'

'Two good reasons, Ray. One, this theory of yours is still just that until we see somethin' solid to back it up. And the other is that he wouldnae be the Black Spirit if he wasnae ready for it. He's taken steps to prevent anyone intervening while he and his chinas are at work, so he's got contingencies against us findin' out where he is. It's not a major leap to assume he's got a contingency against us findin' out what he's up to as well. He could have a remote camera or just a bloke up a hill with binoculars, but if we start evacuatin' people now, he could just blow the dam ahead of schedule. He might not get the First Minister, but he'd get two or three thousand others.'

421.

'I take it the VIP won't be running the same unknown risk as his constituents?'

'He's been told, but he's still comin'. He's travellin' by helicopter, so they've the option to abort at any time.'

'Lucky him.'

'It makes sense. If Darcourt thinks everything's hunky- dory, at least that gives us-'

'Less than three hours,' Ray stated. 'That's what it gives us. Less than three hours for the two of us, unarmed I might add, to get inside a heavily guarded subterranean fortress and take down one of the world's most dangerous terrorists.'

'And yet you're volunteering.'

'Well, just like you, I've got two good reasons. One is that they're gaunny hunt me down and kill me anyway. Kate too, for a motive that I think I made clear, and probably Martin just for what he represents. Simon might forget, but he never forgives, and when he saw me at the airport it would have reminded him of a very big unsettled score,'

'What's the other reason?'

'I fancy our chances.'

'You do?'

'Yeah. You might be up against the Black Spirit, Angelique, but I'm up against that fanny of a flatmate. He might be a world-feared terrorist these days, but I'll bet he's still a wank.'

422.third-degree Burns.Simon looked at his watch, aware that if he maintained the current frequency, he was in very real danger of developing a twitch before this was all over. The problem was, there was nothing else to occupy his time other than watching it trickle away, the spare hours being steadily eroded while the buttress walls were steadfastly not. He lifted his radio from the control-room console and called May.

'What's the situation? Any progress?'

'Yes. We're approximately ten minutes further forward since the last time you asked, ten minutes ago.'

'Watch the fucking lip, okay? Can you get Deacon to give me some kind of ETA?'

'No. Deacon's busy trying to fix the equipment. Why don't you just pick a time at random and add the duration of these calls. That way your guess would be as accurate as his.'

'I should have shot you while I had the chance, if you weren't going to be any fucking use to me anyway.'

'You'd be better shooting whoever fucked our equipment.'

'I will, I promise, if we ever find the bastards. There's about twenty miles of tunnels around this place, plus access shafts, vents, surge chambers. It's a shitey place to be playing hide-and-seek if you're "it".'

'There's also the possibility that they aren't here at all.

423.

If they got out of those crates while we were taking the control room, they could have doubled back out of the entrance tunnel.'

May was right. They hadn't posted anyone on the front gate because the next shift wouldn't arrive until around eight and they needed all hands elsewhere at that stage. Their gatecrashers could have snuck out and might already have flagged down a passing car. To make matters worse, the road collapse was bound to be public by now, meaning that the first vehicle they were likely to encounter would be a cop car on its way to or from the accident site.

'It's been a couple of hours,' Simon said, thinking aloud. 'If they'd raised the alarm, I think we'd know about it by now.'

'I wouldn't be so sure. These backwoods cops would hardly just come screaming up here if they'd been told we were heavily armed.'

'That's a very good point,' he conceded. 'We should put somebody on look-out topside and lock the shield door until the morning shift is due.'

The landline phone rang on the console, as if he didn't have enough on his plate. If it was someone from the National Grid, he'd have to retrieve whoever was in charge from among the hostages. It was something he had planned for, but he wasn't expecting it to come up until daytime, as the plant was in non-supply mode overnight.

'Radio silence,' he told May, then lifted the phone. 'Control room, Dubh Ardrain,' Simon answered.

'Maybe we should consider aborting while the going's good.'

Simon walked to the window and looked across the machine-hall floor to the gathering around the sabotaged equipment. He saw May staring back up at him, holding 424.

the receiver of a wall-mounted telephone. May wisely didn't want the conversation relaying around every radio in the team, but it was well seeing the bastard didn't have the balls to suggest this face-to-face.

'That's a little premature, Brian. We've a few problems to solve, but nothing's desperate yet. I think it's a bit early to hit the ejector button.'

'It's never too early to walk away, Freddie, but it can be too late. And you know what too late means, don't you. You've been a guest on the good ship Black and Decker too, I assume.'

Simon took a breath. It was understood (if seldom discussed) among the inner circle that they all had Shub in common, but nobody knew how close anyone else might be to the man in the middle. Some might never have met him; others, particularly lower down the food chain, might not know he was their conduit into a given operation. This was the first time anybody had directly acknowledged so much, and it certainly helped explain why May had been so jumpy about whether Simon knew Ash.

'I didn't hear that and you didn't say it,' Simon told him. 'That's about the biggest favour I can do either of us right now, agreed?'

'Agreed.'

'If we walk away, we're finished, and I mean even if we walk away clean. Never mind reputations. You're only as good as your last job, so a failure on this scale wipes everything else from your CV. There isn't a seniors tour for our game. If you fuck up, you disappear, forever; and if you're lucky, you perform the vanishing act yourself.'

'We've all made provisions,' May said.

'So you see yourself lyin' on a beach somewhere, livin' off your savings? Fuck off. You'd go nuts.'

425.

'Yeah, those cocktails and blowjobs would really start to wear me down.'

'Don't kid yourself, Brian. I know what kind of blowjob gets your rocks off, and we've got one lined up right here.'

'She seems to be playing hard to get, though. And her over-protective big brother could be paying us a visit any minute.'

'That's why I always make sure we have options. MacDonald will be there until at least five, so that's two extra hours, if we need them, to hit our primary target. Knowing you, your demolition plans are probably very belt-and-braces, so we can space the bores a bit wider and put more explosive in each one.'

'If you're going to cut corners, I'd recommend instead that we concentrate more explosive on the central buttress. Take that out, and the water should do the rest.'

'See? Power of positive thinking, Brian. Whistle a happy tune while you're at it and we're laughin'.'

'Fuck you. And what if the cops show up outside?'

'We've got eight hostages now, about twenty more due in a few hours, and we're holed up inside a mountain with a nuclear shield door. Even if we end up with half the British Army outside, there's not a lot they can do except negotiate, which suits us fine. We ask for a helicopter. We set a deadline. The negotiators try and stall to get more time, which is cool because it's time we want.'

'For what?'

'Worst-case scenario is we miss MacDonald because we're late, but we'd get the dam rigged eventually. Whether it's three in the afternoon with nobody knowin' we're here, or three in the mornin' with a column of tanks outside, sooner or later that dam is gonna blow. And when it does, anybody standin' in front of this place will 426.

be hangin' ten all the way to Cromlarig.'

'If Deacon gets the gear fixed,' May reminded.

Simon wanted to kill him, but knew he'd just be shooting the messenger. That was why he was on tenterhooks and calling for bloody progress reports every ten minutes. At the planning stage, he always tried to isolate the individual elements that the operation was reliant upon, because a failure in any single one could be calamitous. They therefore brought extra explosives, extra ammo, extra guns, extra Dubh Ardrain uniforms. They even brought two drills, for fuck's sake, and factored in enough time in case they were for any reason reduced to one. Simon had planned for the authorities being alerted and he had planned for a siege. He had even planned for the scheme being rumbled and Cromlarig being evacuated. His response to that was contingent upon early (both appliances) - or at least punctual (single appliance) - completion of the drilling; while his response to everything else was contingent on the drilling taking place at all.

No mouse and no man planned for sabotage. Maybe that was what the lecherous, drunken Ayrshire bastard meant. After all, he wrote it out of remorse after demolishing a nest with his plough. Whoever had done this to Simon wouldn't be writing any poems about it, but they would certainly be fucking sorry.

He lifted his radio.

'Everybody listen up. We're going to Def-Con Two. I'm closing the shield door. Simonon, grab your goggles and get topside. Look-out duty's starting early. You keep one eye on the road and one eye on Cromlarig. May and Steve Jones, you go topside with Simonon. May, you booby-trap the reservoir approach road; remote-detonator. Jones, you'll stay up there with your finger on the button. Use your 427.

discretion. The cops are unlikely to be driving a tractor and the farmer doesn't represent a threat. Everybody else, unless Deacon tells you otherwise, you're joining the search. I'm shutting down both turbines so we can use our ears as well as our eyes. That means radio silence too. Unless it's an emergency, the first message I Want to hear is that you've got these fuckers. Mercury out.''I'm brickin' it, man,' Murph whispered.

'Shhh,' Lexy replied, the quivering in his breathing surely enough to confirm that he felt the same. Though he was cold, his fingers were sweaty where he gripped the machine gun, the metal warmed by his constant touch. Wee Murph had started off holding his weapon like a guitar; now they were both holding them like they Were teddy bears, cuddled for comfort in the darkness of a long night where the only adults around were not going to tuck them in and tell them it would all be okay. Lexy was beginning to wish they hadn't brought them at all. Neither of them knew what they were doing with the things, and he was terrified one of them would go off by accident, which would at best give away their position and at Worst save the bad guys the bother.

He was starting to shiver, though it was hard to tell how much was through cold and how much through fear. They had been stuck in the damp, dark drainage tunnel for ages, terrified they could be discovered any second, but too scared to move because they could be walking straight into capture.

It had felt okay at first, sitting there in the light of Murph's torch, a rush of blood in his ears, thumping in his chest and nervous giggling from the pair of them out of relief that they had made it this far and found a half-decent 428.

hiding place. Though it had seemed a lot more, it had probably only been a matter of minutes between getting out of the crates and reaching this spot, and Lexy felt like he'd been holding his breath the whole time.

It had seemed a miracle they didn't feel the crate throb to the rhythm of his pounding heart as they lifted it out of the truck, though there was a loud, low sound filling the place and covering up any noise he might have made. Once on the floor, he had waited nervously for the chance to get out, hearing voices or the sound of boots on concrete every time he was planning to edge it. After a while, he became convinced he was imagining the noises simply out of his own understandable anxiety, and was about to just get it over with when he definitely felt something brush against the crate. He had tensed up into a ball before it even occurred to him to ready the gun, by which time the lid had been pulled off and Murph was standing over him.

'Fuck's sake, were you sleepin'? Hurry up.'

He hardly had time to look around, enough only to observe that they were in some kind of cave, before they ran for the first doorway they could see, light shining out from it on to the dim, smaller passageway that intersected the main tunnel. The doorway led, via a short corridor and a left turn, to another runnel, walled on one side by concrete and the other by bare rock, the passage running parallel to the one the truck was parked in. Striplights overhead lit the way, Lexy wondering what kind of cave could have such an extensive electrical supply. Forward of the crossroads, the passage continued out of sight as it bent gently to the left; but behind, instead of leading to the entrance, it sloped downwards towards another parallel doorway, this one closed.

'Bad guys went that way, intae the big cave,' Murph said, pointing.

429.

'Okay,' Lexy acknowledged, then followed him in the opposite direction. The door opened with a creak of metal, leading them on to a steel platform inside another tunnel, this time even bigger than the main one, but with water running through it beneath their feet. It was dark, only the light spilling in from the passageway illuminating the circular chamber. The sound was louder here too, as though it led directly to whatever was making it.

'It's an underground stream,' Murph announced, but Lexy doubted it. The tunnel was straight as an arrow and the water, barely a foot deep, was running down the centre of a semi-circular concrete channel. It looked like some kind of sewer or drain, clearly designed to accommodate a lot more fluid than was currently trickling through.

Lexy read the sign on the front of the door they had come through. It said Tailrace access 4', and above it were the words Highland Hydro and a logo built around two Hs, rendering one a simplified mountain with blue water on top, and the other a pylon.

'It's a hydro-electric plant. Mind we did it in Geography.'

'Maybe you did. We've got Miss Galloway for Geography, so the only thing we pay attention to is her tits. Can we get oot this way?'

'Naw. If this is a hydro station, it'll lead tae a loch or a river or somethin'. It's shallow here, but it'll lead under water for a good bit at the end. Plus I think they put mesh up tae stop fish an' that comin' in.'

'Whit's at the top end, then?'

'Turbines. That's whit the noise is.'

'So where we gaunny go?'

Lexy looked along the platform. It didn't lead anywhere, so it had to just be for keeping an eye. However, the sign did say 'access'. More than that, it said 'access 4', meaning 430.

there were at least three others. He leaned over the edge and saw that there was a built-on ladder hanging from the far end of the steel grid, allowing the workies down into the water.

'Doon here, an' alang. 'Mon.'

'Where tae?'

'The next wan o' these.'

'Where's that gaunny take us?'

'I don't fuckin' know. Have you got a better idea?'

Murph's silence answered the question. Lexy climbed down and dreeped the last few feet, shuddering as he hit the ground in concern that the jolt would set the machine gun off. He looked up and watched Murph practically slide down the thing like it was a chute in a playpark.

'Careful. Watch the gun doesnae go off.'