Circus

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Call out and you’re a dead man.’

  Clearly, the idea did not appeal to the prisoner. The combination of fear and the cold gave him the impression of one who was frozen stiff. As soon as the guard had turned the corner into the main street – he did not have the appearance of one who was about to glance back suspiciously over his shoulder – Bruno marched his captive down to the line of parked trucks: once safely abreast of these they were hidden from the sight of anyone on the other side of the lane.

  Pushing the man in front of him, Bruno moved out cautiously between the third and fourth parked trucks and glanced to his right. A second guard had just appeared round the south-east corner and was on his way up the south lane. Bruno retreated to the pavement. There was no guaranteeing that his captive would not suddenly screw his courage to the sticking point and, moreover, it was now safe, because free from observation, to have an unconscious man on his hands, so Bruno repeated the earlier blow, although this time with considerably more force, and eased the man to the ground. The guard passed unwittingly by on the other side. Bruno hoisted his captive to his shoulder and carried him to the rear of the van just as one of the doors opened: someone had been keeping a good watch through the windscreen. Kan Dahn had the unconscious man inside in a second and Bruno followed.

  ‘Is Roebuck on his way? To get that little toy for me from the train, and the cassettes?’

  ‘On his way.’ Kan Dahn jumped down followed by Manuelo, who hid behind the end of the van. Kan Dahn lay down in the middle of the lane, produced a bottle of Scotch from his pocket, poured a liberal amount over his face and shoulders and lay still, the bottle still clasped in his hand. His arm covered his face.

  A guard came round the south-east corner and saw Kan Dahn almost immediately. He stood stock still for a moment, looked around warily, saw no danger and broke into a run towards the prostrate man. As he approached he unslung his machine-pistol and advanced slowly and cautiously, the barrel trained on the massive bulk. At fifteen feet it was unthinkable that he should miss. At twenty-five feet it was equally unthinkable that Manuelo should miss. The hilt of the knife caught the guard squarely between the eyes and Kan Dahn, courteously breaking his fall, had him inside the van in five seconds.

  In another ten seconds Manuelo had retrieved his knife and retreated into his former hiding position while Kan Dahn resumed his recumbent position. Such was Bruno’s faith in the two that he did not even bother to watch the painful proceedings but concentrated instead on the process of immobilizing, gagging and blindfolding the prisoners. Within six minutes there were five men lashed to the side of the furniture van, completely helpless and silenced, three of them already conscious but none of them able to do anything about their circumstances. The people of the circus are pastmasters in the art of tying knots: their lives too often depend on this very expertise.

  The three men left the van. Kan Dahn had a pair of canvas shoes in a pocket and carried a finely chiselled but massive crowbar, Bruno carried a pocket flash, three bound poles slung from his shoulder, and a polythene-wrapped and very peculiar packet in his pocket; Manuelo, in addition to a variety of throwing knives, carried a pair of rather fearsome-looking and heavily insulated wire cutters. The amatol explosives Bruno had left behind in the van.

  They walked eastwards along the lane. Occasionally the moon shone through and their presence there was readily to be seen by anyone with eyes to see. Even so, they had no option other than to carry on as unobtrusively as they could – although it was questionable whether any close observer would have found anything unobtrusive about the crowbar, wire-cutter and poles. By the time they had reached the power station, some three hundred yards distant from the prison side of the Lubylan, the moon had slid behind some barred cloud again. There were no guards to be seen or heard, and the only form of protection appeared to be a heavy steel mesh mounted on ten-feet hollow steel tubes, with one cross-railing at the top and one six feet up. The top railing was liberally festooned with very unpleasant barbed wire.

  Bruno took the crowbar from Kan Dahn, pressed one end firmly into the earth and let the other fall against the mesh, at the same time taking two prudent backward steps. There was no pyrotechnical display, no blinding coruscation of arcs, sparks and flashes. The fence was not electrified nor had Bruno for a moment thought it would have been. Only a madman would put two thousand volts through a fence at ground level; but Bruno had had no guarantee that he wasn’t dealing with madmen.

  Manuelo began to snip his way through the mesh. Bruno took out his red pen and thoughtfully pushed down the end button. Kan Dahn looked at him curiously.

  ‘Left it a bit late to write your last will and testament?’

  ‘A toy Dr Harper gave me. Fires anaesthetic darts.’

  One by one they stooped and passed through the hole Manuelo had made. Five paces they took and then they discovered that the lack of human guards was compensated for by the presence of canine ones in the form of three Dobermann pinschers that came at them out of the gloom. Manuelo’s knife flickered forward in an underhand throw and the leaping dog died in mid-air, the blade buried to the hilt in its throat. The dog jumping for Kan Dahn’s throat found itself with one iron forearm under its lower jaw and the other behind its ears: one effortless twist and the vertebra snapped. The third dog did succeed in knocking Bruno down but not before the steel dart had lodged in its chest. The dog landed heavily, rolled over twice and lay still.

  They advanced to the powerhouse itself. The door was made of metal and was locked. Bruno put his ear to the door and moved away quickly: even on the outside the high-speed whining of turbines and generators was an assault on the eardrums. To the left of the door and about ten feet up was a barred window. Bruno glanced at Kan Dahn, who stooped, caught him by the ankles and hoisted him effortlessly: it was like going up in a lift.

  The powerhouse was deserted but for one man seated in a glass-enclosed control room. He was wearing what Bruno at first took to be a pair of headphones: they were, in fact, earmuffs for excluding sound. Bruno returned to earth.

  ‘The door, please, Kan Dahn. No, not there. The handle side.’

  ‘Designers always make the same mistake. The hinges are never as massive as the securing bolts.’ He inserted the chisel edge of the crowbar between the door and the wall and had the door off its hinges in ten seconds. Kan Dahn looked at the bent crowbar in some vexation, grasped it in his hands and straightened it out as if it were made of putty.

  It took them no more than twenty seconds, making no attempt at concealment, to reach the door of the control box. The duty engineer, facing rows of breakers and gauges, was no more than eight feet away, completely oblivious to their presence. Bruno tried the door. This, too, was locked. Bruno looked at the two men. Both nodded. With one scything sweep of his crowbar Kan Dahn removed most of the glass from the door. Even the ear-muffed engineer could not have failed to hear the resulting racket, for when Kan Dahn shattered a sheet of plate glass he did it conbrio. He swung round on his swivel chair and had only the fleeting fraction of a second to register the impression of three vague silhouettes outside the control room when the haft of Manuelo’s knife caught him on the forehead.

  Bruno reached through the hole and turned the key. They went inside and while Kan Dahn and Manuelo immobilized the hapless engineer Bruno scanned the metal labels on the breakers. He selected a particular one and yanked the handle down through ninety degrees.

  Kan Dahn said: ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure. It’s marked.’

  ‘If you’re wrong?’

  ‘I’ll be electrocuted.’

  Bruno sat in the engineer’s vacant chair, removed his shoes and replaced them with the pair of canvas shoes he used on the high wire. His own shoes he handed to Kan Dahn, who said: ‘You have a mask, a hood?’

  Bruno looked at his red and brown suit and mustard socks. ‘If I wear a mask they won’t recognize me?’

  ‘You have a point.’

  ‘For me, it doesn�
��t matter whether I’m recognized or not. I don’t intend to hang around when this lot is over. What matters is that you and Manuelo and Roebuck are not recognized.’

  ‘The show must go on?’

  Bruno nodded and led the way outside. Curious to see the duration of the effect of the anaesthetic darts, he stooped and examined the Dobermann, then straightened slowly. It appeared that Dobermanns had nervous systems that differed from those of humans: this Dobermann was stone dead.

  There were several pylons, each about eighty feet high, inside the compound. He made for the most westerly of those and started to climb. Kan Dahn and Manuelo left through the hole in the compound mesh.

  The pylon presented no problem. Dark though the night was – the moon was still behind cloud – Bruno climbed it with no more effort than the average person would have encountered with a flight of stairs in daylight. Reaching the top crossbar, Bruno unslung the bound poles, undid the bindings, which he thrust into his pocket, and screwed the three pieces solidly together: he had his balancing pole. He stooped and reached out to touch, just beyond the retaining insulator, the heavy steel cable that angled off towards the south-east corner of the Lubylan. For a moment he hesitated, then fatalistically concluded that hesitation would serve no purpose. If he had switched off the wrong breaker then at least he would never know anything about it. He reached down and caught the cable.

  He’d switched off the right breaker. The cable was ice-cold to the touch but, all-importantly, it was not ice-sheathed. There was some wind, but it was slight and fitful. The cold was close to numbing but this was not a consideration to be taken into account: by the time he’d traversed that interminable three hundred yards he’d be, he knew, covered in perspiration. He waited no longer. Balancing his pole, he made his gingerly way along the insulator anchoring wire and stepped out on to the power cable.

  Roebuck took a couple of steps down towards the track, craned forward and peered cautiously fore and aft, saw no one in sight, descended the remaining steps, then left the train at a measured pace. Not that he had not the right to leave the train whenever he wished, nor even to be seen with what he had then, two canvas sacks clipped together at their tops and slung over his shoulders, for those were the containers he habitually used to transport his ropes and the metal pins he used as targets in his act: what might have aroused a degree of passing curiosity was that he had left the circus train at a point four coaches distant from where he had his own quarters.

  He climbed into the small Skoda he’d arrived in and parked it a hundred yards short of the Lubylan. He walked briskly on until he came to a small lane. He turned in here, crossed through a gate in a fence, jumped for and pulled down the spring extension of a fire-escape and climbed quickly until he’d hauled himself on to the roof. Crossing to the other side of the roof was akin to hacking one’s way through the Amazonian jungle. Some arborealist whom Roebuck, in his total ignorance of central European horticultural matters, presumed to have been of some distant English extraction, had seen fit to plant, in earth-filled tubs or troughs, shrubs, bushes, conifers extending to the height of twenty feet and, incredibly, two transverse and immaculately trimmed privet hedges and one lateral one that lined the edge of the roof overlooking the main street. Even in this egalitarian society the passion for privacy was not to be denied. This was, in fact, the same roof garden that Dr Harper had remarked on their first trip from the station to the Winter Palace.

  Roebuck, a latter-day Last of the Mohicans, parted the lateral hedge and peered across and up. Across the street and about fifteen feet above the elevation where he stood was the watch-tower at the south-west corner of the Lubylan. In size and shape it was very much like a telephone box, metal or wood for the first five feet then glass above. That it was manned by only one guard was clear, because a light was on inside the tower and Roebuck could clearly see the solitary occupant. Suddenly, a remote controlled searchlight, mounted about two feet above the top of the tower, came to life, stabbing along the western perimeter of the roof, but depressed so that it would not blind the guard in the north-west tower. The light died then came on again, this time playing along the southern perimeter, then again faded. The guard appeared to be in no hurry to put out his light. He lit a cigarette, then lifted what appeared to be a hip flask to his mouth. Roebuck hoped that the light would remain on: as long as it did the guard’s night vision was virtually useless.

  The curving spikes of the electrified fence were on a level with the base of the watch-tower. The distance, allowing for the angled increase of height, was about forty-five feet. Roebuck stepped back from the hedge, blessing the person whose sense of privacy had driven him to such horticultural lengths, removed the coil of rope from his shoulders and took about eight loops in his right hand. The free end of the rope had already been made into a running noose. The rope itself, hardly as thick as the average clothes-line, looked as if it might be fit for tying up a parcel but no more than that. It was, in fact, made of steel-cored nylon with a breaking strain of 1400 pounds.

  He parted the hedge again and peered down. Kan Dahn and Manuelo were standing, apparently chatting aimlessly, at the corner of the main street and the south lane. The main street was empty of all life, except for passing cars, which were of no concern: not one driver in a thousand ever looks upward at night.

  Roebuck stood on the parapet, swung the rope once round his head and on the second circle let it go. With what seemed a childishly simple inevitability, the rope snaked outwards and upwards and the loop settled over precisely the two spikes he had chosen. Roebuck did not attempt to draw the noose tight; he could easily have pulled it off the outward curving spikes. He gathered up all the remainder of the rope and threw it across the street to land precisely at the feet of Kan Dahn and Manuelo. They picked up the rope and disappeared along the south lane: the rope tightened and settled down on the base of the spikes.

  The first half of the journey along the power cable towards Lubylan Bruno accomplished without too much difficulty. The second part taxed all his powers, his innate ability, his reaction, his superb sense of balance. He had not appreciated that there was such a sag in the cable nor that he would be faced with so steep an upward climb: nor had he bargained for the increasingly frequent gusts of wind. They were slight enough, to be sure, but to a man poised in his precarious position even the sharp increase of five miles an hour in wind speed could have been lethal. As it was it was strong enough to make the cable sway in a highly disconcerting fashion. Had there been the most infinitesimal coating of ice on the wire he could never have made it. But make it he did.

  The cable was clamped into a giant insulator held in place by two anchoring wires attached to the wall. Beyond the insulator, the cable looped upwards through another insulator in the base of a heavy switched breaker covered by a plastic hood. To switch off that breaker would nullify the danger that might be caused by someone discovering the power-station break-in and switching on the circuit that Bruno had already broken: but that twin-pronged switch, sunk though it almost certainly was in a bath of oil, might make enough noise on release to alert the guard in the southeast watch-tower, no more than ten feet distant. Bruno decided to leave it for the moment.

  He unscrewed the balancing pole, bound it together and suspended it from an anchoring wire, unlikely though it was that he would be using it again. Getting over the fence of those outward curving spikes would be no problem. It was only about three feet above his head, and all he had to do was to hoist himself up to the top of the breaker and almost literally step over. But here was also the moment of greatest danger – the first time he would be completely exposed to observation.

  He threw a loop of rope over a spike, hoisted himself up until he was standing on the breaker, his head at least four feet above the top of the spiked fence. The massive flat-topped wall was at least thirty inches thick. A five-year-old who didn’t suffer from vertigo could have toddled around the top perimeter with ease; but the same five-year-old would have bee
n suicidally open to the repeated and irregular probings of the watchtower searchlights along the perimeter walls.

  And, just at that moment when he was about to step over the curved spikes of the steel fence, a searchlight bloomed into life. It came from the north-east tower and the beam traversed the length of the east perimeter wall he had been about to mount. Bruno’s reflex action was instantaneous. He crouched below the top level of the wall, holding on to the loop of the rope to keep himself from toppling outwards. It seemed very unlikely that the guard would pick up any object as small as the tiny bight of the rope round its anchoring spike and so in the event it proved. The searchlight beam moved away through ninety degrees, briefly traversed the north wall then died. Five seconds later Bruno stood on top of the wall.

  Five feet below on the opposite side was the roof of the detention block. The entrance to the watch-tower had to be from there. Bruno lowered himself to the roof and made his crouching way along to the base of the tower.

  A flight of eight angled wooden steps led up to the tower platform. As Bruno glanced upwards a match inside the tower flared and he had a glimpse of a figure with a fur hat and turned-up collar of a greatcoat lighting a cigarette. Bruno unscrewed the cover of the gas-pen and soundlessly mounted the stairs, putting his left hand on the door. He waited until the guard drew heavily on his cigarette, opened the door without undue haste, aimed the pen at the red glow and pressed the clip.