13th September – Judgement Day
Smashed sections of marble lay strewn across the floor of the Lincoln Memorial building.
Paul, Robin, Elliot and Angela moved into the tunnel entrance that had once lain beneath the statue of Lincoln. Each carried a two metre long pole.
As they walked forward in a line, four abreast, they prodded the ground in front of them.
The first trap door sprang open about one hundred metres into the tunnel. Robin’s dream had accurately predicted its size. It was easily possible to step over the hole, once it was exposed.
They continued down the tunnel, their poles triggering a trap every few hundred metres.
‘That’s the bend in the passage that I saw in my dream,’ said Angela, pointing ahead. ‘The trip wire was about twenty metres beyond.’
As they reached the bend, they noticed that the gradient of the tunnel increased steeply, dropping away from them. ‘That’s what keeps the boulder rolling, I expect,’ said Angela, looking up at the ceiling. ‘I think it came from about there,’ she added, pointing to a place on the ceiling where the colour of the rock slightly changed.
She shone a torch down the tunnel. ‘I can’t see the trigger wire,’ she said.
Paul and Robin removed rucksacks from their backs, placed them on the ground and opened both to reveal basketballs. They each selected one ball and bowled it down the slope.
They all heard the echo of the balls bouncing along the ground. After about thirty seconds, there was silence.
‘Nothing, so far,’ said Robin. ‘Let’s bowl the next two – more slowly this time – so they can’t bounce over any wire.’
Two more basketballs echoed away down the tunnel.
‘Are you sure the trigger wire was close to the ground?’ Robin asked Angela. ‘We don’t seem to be tripping it.’
As he finished speaking there was a reverberating clang, like the sound of a metal door opening. A slab fell from the ceiling about ten metres in front of them, and the boulder left its hiding place, racing away down the tunnel.
‘So far; so good,’ said Angela as they once more moved forwards, carefully prodding each small area of tunnel floor as they went.
The hole through which the boulder had left the tunnel was as Angela had predicted. The tunnel was slightly wider at that point to allow a walkway to pass the gap in the floor.
‘I guess they didn’t want to make the tunnel impassable after the traps and the boulder had done their jobs,’ said Elliot.
Five more traps were sprung before they stood before the door they recalled from Eisenhower’s film.
Next to that door was the lever that Eisenhower had said would open it.
Robin and Paul drew their weapons and stood by the door.
Elliot stood by the side of the door with one hand on the lever.
Robin and Paul both nodded at Elliot.
Elliot pulled the lever.
The door sprung open – but not fully. It stopped when a gap had opened of about a third of a metre. There was a metalling whining sound – as if some mechanism was straining.
Both Robin and Paul threw their weights against the door, which suddenly sprang fully open, causing them both to fall forwards onto the floor of the bunker.
The delay in entering the bunker had given time for both Hemmingway and Carson to grab guns. Carson fired, and a bullet ricocheted from the concrete floor of the bunker – just centimetres from Paul’s head.
Robin was very aware of the need not to kill Carson or Hemmingway, but as he looked up from the floor, Carson was taking aim at Paul once more. He pointed his gun at her and instinctively fired three shots.
The purpose of firing three shots in a life threatening situation was to maximise the chance killing a target and thus not giving the target an opportunity to respond. That strategy worked too well. Carson was killed instantly.
Hemmingway took cover behind a solid console, which allowed time for Robin and Paul to take shelter in a corridor adjacent to the door through which they had entered.
‘Put your gun down!’ shouted Robin.
‘No problem,’ Hemmingway replied. ‘I’m the only one in the world who knows the password, and there’s no way I’m going to tell you. I don’t need to use it again. All the clean launch bases, except Waterford, are destroyed, and even if your people get to Waterford, they can’t do anything. WAR has a welcoming committee going there to meet them. If they survive that, Theta won’t have the password anyway.’ He paused. ‘I’m throwing my gun away. I surrender, but WAR has won.’
Hemmingway tossed his gun down the second bunker corridor, raised both hands above the console desk and slowly began to stand up.
Less than thirty seconds later Elliot, Angela, Robin, Paul and Hemmingway were standing in the bunker. No gun was trained on Hemmingway as it was clear that he had no intention of further aggression. He had done all he could do in his cause.
The room was silent. It felt to Angela, Robin, Paul and Elliot as if there was nothing to say. There was clearly no way that Hemmingway would tell them the password, and that was their sole, ultimate objective.
Hemmingway had won.
‘I know the password.’ Maria’s voice came from the corridor.
A look of alarm filled Hemmingway’s face.
He thought back to his own earlier clear statement of the password. He had given no thought to the fact that Maria may have heard it.
Hemmingway dived for the gun that that he had thrown into the corridor that contained Maria’s cell.
He was shielded from Robin and Paul in that corridor. He grabbed the weapon and rushed to the bars of Maria’s cell.
He took aim through the bars.
Six rapid gunshots followed.
~*~*~*~*~
Angela knew that she must get a message urgently to Joan. There was no mobile signal in the bunker, so she ran back up the tunnel, carefully avoiding the trap doors.
Exhausted, she reached the tunnel entrance and noted that her phone had a signal.
She called Joan’s number.
As she waited for a reply, her mind returned to events in the bunker: it had all seemed to happen in slow motion: Hemmingway had disappeared along the corridor; Paul and Robin had rushed across the bunker and fired down that corridor at him.
The ringing tone from Angela’s phone stopped, and she heard an unfamiliar male voice. ‘Hello, this is Joan’s phone,’ said the voice.
‘Judgement Day – capital J, capital D, and with a gap between the words,’ said Angela. ‘Repeat: Judgement Day – capital J, capital D, and with a gap between the words.’
As she finished speaking, the line went dead. She tried to ring once more, but a recorded message simply told her that the phone was switched off.
She prayed that the message about the password had got through. It would be tragic if they had failed at this very last moment – after the good fortune that had taken them so far.
It had been blind chance that Maria had been held prisoner in the bunker and that she had heard the password. Had Robin and Paul been a fraction of a second slower in responding, Hemmingway might, even then, have killed her before she could reveal it.
As it had happened, Hemmingway had died without firing a shot.
They had been very, very lucky or, perhaps, it had been God’s will.