“What are you going to do?” asked Thor. “Blow up the planet?”
Jonnie said, “You, Thor, collect every man here we had with us at the lode and a lot of Chinese.”
Stormalong was there. “Get ready to transport explosives and men across that lake,” Jonnie told him. “The instant they are through with this first hour’s firing, we’ve got to be ready to roll.”
He scribbled a note for a communicator to give to Angus the instant he was finished with firing boxes: “You are going to lose all power for two hours. Inform us when you are through with this first run as we’ll be running motors and blasting. Don’t start firing again until you get an all-clear from us. Communicate with me by mine radio.”
Men were being sent through the passage to the outside. Some of them were veterans from the raid, and hospital cases. Dr. Allen looked on with disapproval, especially at Jonnie. But he said nothing.
Jonnie got outside. It was daylight now, thank heaven. He could see what he was doing. He looked at the dam. Yes, indeed. Silt! There was silt splattered all over the place. What a muddy job this would be. Where the top of the dam had been broken, piles of silt lay there. There was silt all up the cliff sides. Splattered as if with a gigantic paintbrush. Wet silt. One of the biggest dangers here was slipping and sliding.
He had his mine radio on so he could be told when they were done with the first hour’s firing. Men were running dollies out of deep magazines, getting explosives to a plane. Pilots were standing by. Two mine passenger planes were loading personnel. A dozen Chinese raced into the powerhouse equipped with big wrenches: they would need them to move levers and controls frozen in place for a thousand years.
Jonnie walked to the dam edge and looked up the lake.
He couldn’t believe his eyes. He would have thought the plunge through the atmosphere would have destroyed more of it than that.
There was the capital ship, a gigantic wreck, dug sideways into the silt five miles uplake from the dam.
And it was contributing its share to the disaster.
The twisted, charred hulk was blocking fresh water flow to the dam! Above it, a new lake was forming.
He got Dwight. “You pick about three men. Put them on a flying platform. Lay blast cord on the east side of that wreck and blow a new water channel around it. I’ll give you the time to fire the cord. Get it laid and come back to me.”
Dwight rushed off to find his men and more explosives.
Jonnie walked over to a point where he could see the opposite end of the dam. It was a very curved dam, its lake side jutting into the lake like a half-moon. Yes, there sure was water escaping. Because of the shape of the dam, a hard push of concussion against it would cause the ends to thrust much more strongly into the banks. The far end over there was firm enough against the cliff, but the bottom of the dam must have moved. Water was roaring out under that far edge like a gigantic fire hose.
Possibly ancient cracks at the far base had been filled with silt until now. But the blast had torn them open. The only thing that would plug that was about half a million tons of rock dumped upstream from it. And this was no time to be dumping rock with blade scrapers and cranes.
The half-formed plan he had made had been right. He looked at the cliffs on the far side of the gorge. If he blew one of them down to fill the breach, would the concussion also rip out the rest of the dam?
The defense cable also ran along those cliffs. He did not dare sacrifice that too.
Angus’s voice on the mine radio. “First stage of firing is complete. Ready to shut down!”
“Shut down!” said Jonnie into his mine radio. “Powerhouse! Take the power off! Stormalong! Fly them!”
The sizzle of the armor cable vanished. There was a patter of burst shell fragments, dead birds and leaves and they dropped to the ground, no longer held there by the ionization armor.
The planes took off with a blasting roar.
Jonnie had spotted an unused flying platform and he stepped aboard and hit the console. He went streaking out over the dam and lake, heading for the tops of the far cliffs.
Dwight was there. Jonnie eyed the texture of the rock in the cliffs. He estimated the rush and flow of water which must be occurring at this side bottom of the lake. His task was to dump enough rock off these cliffs into the lake and get it carried into that break to plug it. A tricky calculation.
Three holes. He needed to drill three holes, each about a hundred feet deep and each at an exact angle. These would be at the points where the cliff must be sheered off.
He pointed, racing along back of the cliff edge. One, two, three. About two hundred yards uplake from the dam. Down at an angle of about fifteen degrees from the vertical.
Men got the port-a-pack drills in operation. They were usually used to deep-core a vein. But they could drill a fast hole. Fast enough? He only had two hours.
The cable! This section lay closer to the lake than they were drilling. He mustn’t sacrifice it. If left where it was it would get severed by any blast and slide into the lake.
“Stormalong!” yelled Jonnie. The pilot had just climbed out of a mine passenger plane. “What’s the biggest motor we’ve got here now?”
Stormalong looked at the planes. They had brought over four. One was a marine-attack plane. Stormalong pointed at it.
“Get some technicians down to this end of the dam. There’s a cable junction box there according to this old defense map. Get them to unhook it. And then you put a heavy line on that end and fly this whole section of it out of the ground and dump it up there.”
This was right where Stormalong lived. What a crazy idea! To take the unfastened cable end and secure it to a plane and fly the plane southwest up the lake and tear the cable out! He needed no further instructions. He knew the weight of a tenth of a mile of cable might well crash the plane. He’d put a quick release trip on it. He sent technicians racing to disconnect the dam end of it.
Jonnie looked at the drills. There were armored bits and they could stand an awful lot of heat. But they were smoking. How fast could they drill? He looked at his watch and saw how many sections they were down already. This was going to be close!
Up the lake, five miles away, the old mine hand that Dwight had sent and two assistants were sliding and slithering around in the silt beside the battleship wreck. They were sinking almost to their hips. The flying platform they had taken had to be reflown by its operator every few minutes to prevent it from simply sinking out of sight in the ooze.
What a gigantic wreck! No wonder they couldn’t put those down in atmosphere. They must assemble them on that moon, Asart, above Tolnep. Probably they flew the pieces up there section by section. Only intricate calculations of planetary gravity and gravitic force flows would let those things fly at all.
He wondered for a sad moment whether Glencannon’s body was in there somewhere. But even a Mark 32 couldn’t stand up to that internal blast. That ship was really a graveyard. There must be charred chunks of fifteen hundred Tolneps in that twisted, blackened wreck. How long was it? Two thousand feet? Three thousand? Hard to tell from here, so much was buried. But it was sure making a great dam. One would have thought it would have buried itself deeper. Then he saw what really was the case. It had made a sort of crater and it was the crater edge that was restraining the water.
He took a small scope from his pocket to see exactly what the men were doing. Yes, they were doubling up blast cord over the far crater edge and then another one of them was doing the same thing on the near crater edge. They needed no advice.
The drills were screaming through the rock, steam shooting up from their overheated water-coolant jets. Twenty men were rigging a line from the lake water to a mine pump. They were getting more cooling water.
Ow, the silt! It was hard to walk without sliding and nearly all the crews by now were caked with mud.
He looked at his watch. It would be very touch and go. To drill a hundred feet of hole in three hours would be a bit of a
feat; they had to do it in about one and a half! They were really leaning on those drills. Four men on each were adding their weight to the handles.
He hoped that flashing signal on the small gray man’s ship would hold good. They had skeletonized their defense force to handle this dam and they were wide open to attack with no cable armor.
His mine radio came alive. It was the party at the wreck calling Dwight. They were ready to fire. Dwight looked over to Jonnie.
With his scope, Jonnie tried to see the generator intake ports in the dam. Were they closed? Muddy, muddy water. He couldn’t see from here. He called the Chinese engineers inside the dam. Chief Chong-won was in there.
“It needs five minutes to close the last port,” the chief’s voice came back. “They’ve got the excess spillway ports closed. I am sorry, Lord Jonnie. I don’t think these levers and wheels have been moved for years.”
“Make it a thousand,” said Jonnie. “How many men have you got in there?”
“Seventy-two,” said the chief.
Good Lord, he had half his force inside that dam.
“You’re doing great. Finish it up and then get everyone out of there. That dam could go, the whole thing, with these blasts.”
“We’ll hurry,” said the chief.
There was a roar and Stormalong took up slack on the defense cable. He was using his plane’s bullhorns. “Ready to rip!” he yelled. “Tell me when everyone is clear!”
The big marine-attack plane was hanging in the air at the dam end. Grapnels had the cable and it was loose from the junction box. Men were scrambling away there.
Jonnie yelled to the men on the port-a-packs. “Stand clear!”
Unwilling to leave their drills, they nevertheless shut them off and went slipping and sliding away from the cliff edge.
Jonnie checked it. They were in the clear all along what must be the cable path. “Let her rip!” he yelled into his mine radio.
In the plane, Stormalong poured it on. The cable, like a gigantic snake, jerking and resisting, began to come out of the ground. It was stalling the plane. Stormalong began to dance the huge ship up and down, yanking at the cable. Foot by foot and yard by yard it worked free of the ground. The plane rose higher and higher, working along the cliff edge.
He had almost half of it out of the ground!
There was a ripping pop.
The cable parted!
Stormalong’s ship catapulted toward the sky, trailing two hundred yards of cable.
He checked the rise. That Stormalong could fly. He took the broken piece up the lake and laid it on the shore. He triggered his quick release and dropped it.
Stormalong came back overhead. Someone in the plane was lowering the grapnels. “Hook me up!” yelled Stormalong through the bullhorn above.
Men went slithering down to the cliff edge. They caught the grapnel and got it securely fastened to the torn cable end.
It could be patched. But all this was taking time and the drill crews weren’t drilling.
They got it fastened again and once more Stormalong was pulling the remaining length from the bed in which it had rested for centuries.
He got it free of the blast area and dropped it.
The men raced back to their drills.
“We’re all finished here!” came Chief Chong-won’s voice on the mine radio.
“Excellent,” said Jonnie. “Now clear every man out of there and tell me when they’re gone, including you!”
He could see them streaming out of the powerhouse and up the far roadway, tiny figures in blue work clothes. At last they were safely away from the dam. “All clear, Lord Jonnie,” said Chief Chong-won.
It wouldn’t stop the drilling. Jonnie signaled Dwight. Dwight gave the crew at the wreck their orders. “Fire in the hole!” yelled Dwight. Jonnie could see them setting fuses. Then they slipped and slithered and plowed through the ooze to their flying platform and boarded it. They had to bodily haul the last one onto it by his collar and fly off with his legs still dangling. The platform went over to a safe area and landed. Jonnie watched the wreck area.
Blowie! Blowie! The sharp cracks of blast cord exploding.
A long line of mud catapulted into the sky. Smoke and spattering goo obscured the wreck for a moment.
A shock wave made the ground tremble. A small roll of water ran down the lake. Twenty-four seconds after the blast the sound of it reached them like a hard buffet with a big hand.
The smoke was clearing away up there. The enormous wreck had not moved but a channel had been cut through the upper and lower crater edges. A trickle of water started through the farther one. Just a trickle?
Jonnie held his breath, eyeing it with a scope, afraid that in their shortness of time they would have to shoot again. “Come on! Come on!” he was saying. “More, more!” He knew water was very erosive and tended to chew and widen its own way. “Come on!”
The farther side was at least two feet higher than the lake at the dam. It should have more push than that!
Right then some object in the way of the flow was worked out by the water. It was a big blast gun. It twisted in the swirl and then at last went tumbling away.
The water burst through the far crater wall. It swirled and surged in the crater, a boiling, frothing churn of discolored mud. Water thrust the upper channel wider. More water burst through.
Now it was working at the nearest ditch the blast cord had dug. It gnawed at obstruction and debris. And then it started through!
A third surge in the upper crater. Pieces were tearing loose. There was a roaring torrent there now. The bowl was filling; it was emptying into the lower lake.
They had gotten the river running again. Jonnie told Dwight to give them a very well done.
The drills were raving and smoking. Jonnie looked at his watch. They only had about twenty minutes left. Where had the time gone? “How many drill sections have you gotten into those holes?” asked Jonnie to Thor.
“Five. That’s seventy-five feet.”
“It will have to be enough. Get those drills out of there. Stormalong!” he barked into his radio. “Start pulling these crews and equipment out of here!”
He could see Chief Chong-won, a speck way over on the far side. He spoke into his mine radio. “Chief, you are going to see one awful flash over here in a few minutes. Wait to make sure the whole dam doesn’t go out, and the instant it’s safe, send a picked crew in there to open two generator ports and get the power back on to the cone cable and pagoda area only. Got it?”
“Yes, Lord Jonnie.”
“And be sure to be under cover for this blast,” added Jonnie.
They had the port-a-packs out and were clattering them in plane holds.
“Dwight!” said Jonnie. “Take those three drums of liquid explosive and pour them in those holes and then set the empty drums on top of them. Fast!”
Dwight pointed with his good arm and got men running. They began to pour a big drum of explosive into each hole. The holes were still so hot, the explosive was almost boiling. It was hard to get it to flow down against the trapped air. The air came bubbling and steaming back up.
Jonnie raced along, stringing blast cord. He put a big loop of it around each place where they would set a drum. The drums would be like bombs with the explosive vapor still in them.
“Fuses!” yelled Dwight.
“We’ve got no time,” shouted Jonnie. “I’m going to set this off with a plane’s guns!”
“What?” gawked Thor.
They had the barrels empty and were putting them in place in the circle of blast cord at each hole. A shot into any one drum would set off the lot.
“Leave me that plane!” Jonnie pointed at a single battle plane they’d brought. “Get the rest of them out of here with all men right now!”
Stormalong started to protest and then started hurrying men into the remaining ships. As their equipment went slamming into the planes, Stormalong yelled over to Jonnie, “Shoot it from way up! This th
ing is going to skyrocket!”
Jonnie was looking at his watch. They only had nine minutes left.
The planes were taking off, Dwight was being dragged into the last one. Jonnie looked at this setup. All okay.
He rushed to the battle plane and got ready to start it.
There was nobody left in the area.
He took off. He jumped the ship to about two thousand feet. The dam still looked big.
The planes were landing in sandbag abutments on the other side. Stormalong had really gotten across and slammed them down in an awful hurry.
Chief Chong-won and his men were under cover.
“Fire in the hole!” said Jonnie on his mine radio.
He flipped the guns to “Flame,” “Narrow,” and “Maximum.” He checked his security belt.
Now for some nice gunnery. At this moment it all looked pretty peaceful down there. The blackened wreck was spilling flotsam as water went through its broken girders. The river was flowing right up to the dam lake.
But the increased water was spilling under the dam below the lake and it would be tearing that hole wider and wider.
Jonnie closed all windows with a flick of switches, made sure doors were all secure. Should he back up to three thousand? No. This was the best range. A battle plane could take a lot. But he had never heard of anybody setting off a hundred fifty gallons of liquid explosive before. Plus a thousand feet of number five blast cord.
He put his sights carefully on the center barrel. He pushed the gun trip.
There was a flash across the whole sky before him. A curtain of green fire three thousand feet high.
Crash!
The recoil hit him and the plane went spinning skyward like a thrown toy.
The yank of the security belt was like a blow. It knocked the wind out of him.
Three seconds later he found he was upside down. He punched the console. The plane’s balance motors caught up and righted it. He was flying backward.
The whine of engines fought against the wrong direction.
The plane steadied. Somebody would have to replace the windscreen. It had a diagonal crack in it.
And then he saw the cliff. The smoke had cleared. And the whole cliff front was sliding down toward the lake in slow, slow motion.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 94
