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At last the pyramid was complete.

Sliding painfully down its smooth slopes, the few remaining workers dismantled the battered forms, letting their equipment lie where it fell at the foot of the pyramid. One by one, peering up briefly at the gray apex shining above them into the black reeling air, they made their way over to a single trap door sunk into a shaft between the two ramparts. Quickly they disappeared from view, until only a single figure remained, in the shadow of the buckling windshields. For a moment he stood in the shower of dust carried over the shields a hundred feet above, his body swaying in the air exploding around him. Then he too turned and stepped through the trap door, sealing it behind him.

The wind mounted. Raging into the shields, it tore at the plates, snapping the hawsers one by one, cracking the concrete pylons at their bases, driving through the great rents.

Suddenly the pressure became too great. With a gargantuan paroxysm the shattered screen exploded and the splitting plates careened away into the air, bouncing off the sides of the pyramid, dragging with them the frayed remnants of the tangled hawsers, the roots of the pylons and buttresses. No longer protected, the lines of vehicles parked in the lee of the screens dragged' and crashed into each other, and finally broke loose, rolling end over end across the lower slopes of the pyramid, rapidly picking up speed, and then spinning away into the darkness with the flying sky.

Now only the pyramid remained.

6 Death in a Bunker

Pausing in the doorway to allow the shower of plaster falling from the ceiling to spend itself, Marshall stepped through into the Intelligence Unit. A skeleton staff of three-Andrew Symington, a corporal and one of the navy typists-sat in the dim light of the emergency bunker, surrounded by the jumble of teletypes, radio consoles and TV screens. The scene reminded Marshall of the last hours in Hitler's fuhrerbunker. Discarded bulletins and typed memos lay around everywhere, a clutter of unwashed teacups stood on the lid of a forgotten suitcase, cigarette ash spilled across the desks.

Above the chatter of the teletypes and the muted cross-talk of the R/T he could hear the sounds of the wind echoing through the ventilator shaft that reached up to the Mall 6o feet above. Almost everyone had gone now. The last War Office and COE personnel had left in their Centurions early that morning for the peripheral command posts. Admiralty Arch had collapsed half an hour later, pulling down with it the complex of offices that had housed COE for the previous three weeks. Intelligence was by now a luxury that would soon be dispensed with.

The wind had reached 250 mph and the organized resistance left was more interested in securing the minimal survival necessities-food, warmth and 50 feet of concrete overhead-than in finding out what the rest of the world was doing, knowing full well that everywhere people were doing exactly the same thing. Civilization was hiding. The earth itself was being stripped to its seams, almost literally-six feet of topsoil were now traveling through the air.

He sat down on the desk behind Symington, patted the plump bald man on his shoulder, then waved at the other two. The girl wore headphones over her straggling hair, and was too harassed answering the calls coming in endlessly from mobile cars and units trapped in basements and deep shelters to have had any time to look after her appearance, attractive as she had once been (Marshall had deliberately kept her on at COE as a morale booster) but when she saw him she ran a hand over her hair and gave him a brave smile.

"How's it going, Andrew?"

Symington sat back, massaged his eyes for a moment before replying. He looked exhausted and ashen faced, but managed a thin smile.

"Well, chief, I guess we can start getting ready to surrender. Looks to me as if the war's over."

Marshall laughed. "I was just thinking the place feels as if the Russians are two hundred yards away. How are the PM and the Chief of Staff?"

"They reached Leytonheath a couple of hours ago. The mine at Sutton Coldfield had been flooded by underground springs-water must have driven through a fault leading in from the North Sea -so they've been forced to dig into the shelters at the airfield. They're O.K. there for three weeks, but after that there'll have to be a general election."

A wry smile crossed Marshall 's face. For a moment he looked reflectively at Symington, then said: "What's the latest from the Met people? Any hope of a breakthrough on the weather front?"

Symington shrugged. "They went off the air about an hour ago. Pulled out to Duiwich. I don't think they've known any more for the last week than you or I. Just about all they've done is lick their fingers and hold them over their heads. The latest wind speed is 255. That's an increase of 4.7 over 11 A.M. yesterday."

"An effective drop, though," Marshall said hopefully.

"Yes, but it's accounted for by the tremendous mass of soil particles being carried. The sky's jet black now."

"What about overseas?"

"Had a signal in from a USAF field in New Jersey. Apparently New York is a total write-off. Manhattan 's under hundred-foot waves, most of the big skyscrapers and office blocks are down. Empire State Building toppled like a falling chimney stack. Same story everywhere else. Casualty lists in the millions. Paris, Berlin, Rome -nothing but rubble, people hanging on in cellars."

The bunker shuddered under the impact of a building falling above, like a depth charge shaking a submarine. The light bulbs danced on the ends of their flexes. Dust filtered down from the ceiling. Involuntarily Marshall 's eyes moved to the mouth of the ventilator shaft, his mind crossing the interval of compacted clay up to the garage in the basement above where the big supertractor waited to take him to safety.

The corporal by the TV screens spoke up. "When do we pack this lot in, sir?" he asked anxiously. "Seems to me we're cutting it a bit fine."

"Don't worry," Marshall told him. "We'll get out safely enough. Let's try to hang on here as long as we can. You three are just about the only intact intelligence outfit still operating in the whole of Europe." There was a hint of pride in Marshall 's voice, the pride of a man who has created a perfect team and hates to see it disbanded even after it's outlived its purpose. He gave them all a wide encouraging grin. "You never know, Crighton; you may be the first person to see the wind reach its peak and slack off."

Symington shifted a stack of teletype memos, spread them out on his desk, anchoring them from the draught with a stack of pennies.

"This is the provincial set-up. Birmingham: an estimated 300,000 people are sheltering in the coal mines around the city. Ninety-nine per cent of the city is down. Tremendous fires from the refineries at West Bromwich swept across the ruins yesterday, finished off what little the wind had left. Estimated casualties: 200,000."

"Sounds low," Marshall commented dourly.

"Probably is. Homo sapiens is pretty tenacious, but if London is any guide most people went down into their basements with -one packet of sandwiches and a thermos of cocoa." He went on, " Manchester: heavy casualties were caused yesterday when the roof of London Road station caved in. For some reason the authorities have been concentrating people there, there were something like 20,000 packed between the platforms."

Marshall nodded while Symington continued in a low steady voice. There seemed to be a depressing uniformity about the reports. When he had heard one he had heard them all. The same picture emerged; the entire population of one of the world's most highly industrialized nations, equipped with an elaborate communications and transport system, huge stores of fuel and food, large armed services, yet caught completely unprepared by a comparatively slight increase in one of the oldest constants of its natural environment.