Lanyon went over to them. He indicated the vaulted ceiling, and said: "Why don't we get up to the street, see if we can spot a military transport?"

Luigi shook his head siowly with a grim smile, and spoke to the interpreter, who took Lanyon's arm and led him up a ramp to the gallery above. They climbed a further staircase, leaving Patricia and two men in a small circle of light far below, then moved along a ledge across the massive blocks of the city wall. Ahead of them was a foot-wide arrow slit. The interpreter gestured Lanyon over to it and he craned up and saw that a thick piece of perspex had been fitted into the hole, affording a view over the entire city.

Directly below were the ragged remains of some building which had collapsed, exposing this section of the city wail. The rectangular outlines of the foundations suggested that it had been a multistoried office block, but almost nothing of it was left.

Beyond it Genoa stretched toward the sea a mile away.

To Lanyon it appeared to be undergoing a massive artillery bombardment. On all sides the remains of houses and shops were collapsing, exploding in clouds of debris and rubble that vanished in a few seconds, swept out toward the sea on the endless conveyor of the air stream. The scene reminded Lanyon of World War II Berlin, a vast desert of gutted ruins, isolated walls that ran up five or six stories, buildings stripped to their steel superstructures, streets that had vanished under the piles of masonry, leaving a dead land as shapeless and amorphous as a slag heap.

To the southwest, half a mile away, an enormous blur of spray hung over the port area, for once obscuring the ceiling of red-brown dust that had covered them for the last week. Lanyon could just make out the square roofs of the naval base, revealed now that the intervening buildings had come down, but the pens themselves were too low to be visible.

The interpreter called to him, and left the window and made his way down to the others below. Suddenly Lanyon began to doubt whether they could possibly reach the pens. It was plain that no surface transport was moving around, and the tunnels would never extend as far as the dock area, let alone below the boundary of the base.

Patricia was watching him anxiously and he gave her an encouraging smile. Together they moved after Luigi as he climbed down a narrow spiral stairway that led off one of the side tunnels. Here the stonework was of more recent origin. The steps were less worn, and a hand rail of extruded piping had been fitted. Lanyon was wondering where the stairway led when Luigi reached a door at the bottom and wrenched it back.

Immediately a gust of foul air drove up into their faces.

They had entered the sewers. Hands shielding their mouths, they stepped out of the stairway into a narrow stone landing that overlooked the sewer, a long cavern 15 feet in diameter that wound away from them. It had almost run dry, but a narrow stream of fluid a few inches deep trickled along the bottom of the course, its surface rippled by the air driving across it.

Flashing his torch, Luigi examined the roof and the arching semicircle of damp brickwork, dented here and there by the impact of the buildings collapsing above. They began to move along the ledge. A hundred yards ahead they crossed a small bridge that took them through a narrow archway into a parallel sewer, which divided and curved westward toward the harbor. Smaller branch sewers joined it, but most of the way they were able to stay on the ledge, only twice having to get down into the course itself to surmount an obstruction.

The sewer was widening almost the size of a subway tunnel. Trying to guess where they were being led, Lanyon suddenly noticed a second odor, sharp and tangy, overlaying that of the sewer. Brine! They were nearing the sea. Then he remembered that, as he berthed the _Terrapin_, he had seen the vents of half a dozen sewer pipes just below the harbor wall some two hundred yards from the sub-pens. A long concrete breakwater, topped with double wave barriers and guard towers, had reached out into the harbor, separating the pens from the rest of the basin. He racked his brains wondering how they could surmount it.

"Steve! Look out!"

He stopped and glanced back at Patricia, who was pointing into the tunnel ahead. Luigi and the others had halted, watching a powerful torrent of water sweep through the tunnel, sluicing in from the sea outside. It swilled past, ten feet deep, only a few inches from the ledge on which they were standing, and then slowly slacked off and was sucked out again.

"Looks as if something just caved in and let the sea back for a moment," Lanyon told Patricia. "These sewers are slightly below water level, but with luck the wind will have lowered the surface enough for us to get out."

The speed of the air moving past them increased sharply. They rounded a bend and suddenly saw daylight 50 yards ahead, the ragged end of the sewer mouth. Beyond, the sea rose up like a range of massive gray mountains, flecked with huge whitecaps, driving offshore into the distant blur of spray.

Cautiously they edged toward the sewer's mouth, Luigi waving them on. Ten yards or so of brickwork had collapsed, recessing the mouth below the overhanging ledge of the jetty above. The heavy caissons of the concrete pier rooted down through the now exposed mud flats. Luigi pointed to the right toward the sub-pens, and Lanyon saw that the breakwater had been smashed and lay on its side in huge battered sections a hundred yards out in the harbor.

"We leave you here," the interpreter told him. "To the right, one hundred meters, you get into the dock. Then O.K."

Lanyon nodded, took Patricia's arm. Leaning over the edge of the sewer, where the last of the seawater was dripping out, he lowered her down to the mud flat ten feet below, letting her drop when she was a few feet off the ground. She sank to her knees in the slimy ooze, paddled slowly through the mud toward the firmer ground under the sewer, supporting herself against the concrete pillars.

Lanyon turned to Luigi, held his square hand firmly and patted his shoulder.

The big man smiled back then pulled the.45 out of his belt and passed it to Lanyon.

Lanyon turned to the interpreter. "Tell him I'll vote for him if he'll run as next mayor of Genoa."

Luigi roared, slapped Lanyon on the shoulder and helped him down over the edge of the sewer.

Lanyon dropped up to his thighs in the soft black mud, waved to the figures above for the last time and waded siowly between the pillars to where Patricia was sheltering on a narrow flat against the rear wall of the pier. He took her arm and they edged along the wall, straddling the tangle of twisted girders that were all that remained of the breakwater. Inside the submarine base they were still sheltered by the overhang of the pier, but the air roaring past sucked at them like a giant vacuum.

They clung to the tangled seaweed fronds and barnacles encrusted to the pillars, and Lanyon pointed out the jutting roof of the first sub-pen 50 yards away. With a jolt of fear he realized that the receding sea had exposed the floor of the pen, and that although this would enable them to get into the pens it meant that there might be insufficient water to float out the _Terrapin_. Fortunately the sub was berthed in the farthest of the semicircle of pens, and the wind would be driving the sea across it.

They reached the first pen and pulled themselves around the lip into the gateway, their feet gripping the concrete floor. Ahead of them the steel shutters towered up to the roof. They ran over to the grille, and through the slits Lanyon could see the stranded hull of one of the K-class subs, lying on its side in the dim gray light.

The vanes of the grille were open, leaving two-foot gaps. Lanyon lifted Patricia up onto the lowest gap, and she clambered through into the great hall of the pen. Lanyon followed her and they ran under the towering underbelly of the stranded submarine, its moorings snapped and hanging loose, conning tower tilted at a 450 angle.