Stormbreaker

Story of Cornwall’s Oldest Mine.
    He carried it over to a table, opened it, and quickly skimmed through it, wondering why a history of Cornish tin should have been of interest to Ian Rider. The story it told was a familiar one.
    The mine had been owned by the Dozmary family for eleven generations. In the nineteenth century there had been four hundred mines in Cornwall. By the 1990s there were only three. Dozmary was still one of them. The price of tin had collapsed and the mine itself was almost exhausted, but there was no other work in the area and the family had continued running it even though the mine was quickly exhausting them. In 1991, Sir Rupert Dozmary, the last owner, had quietly slipped away and blown his brains out. He was buried in the local churchyard in a coffin, it was said, made of tin.
    His children had closed down the mine, selling the land above it to Sayle Enterprises. The mine itself was sealed off with several of the tunnels now underwater.
    The book contained a number of old black-and-white photographs: pit ponies and canaries in cages.
    Groups of figures standing with axes and lanterns. Now all of them would be under the ground themselves. Flicking through the pages, Alex came to a map, showing the layout of the tunnels at the time when the mine was closed:
    It was hard to be sure of the scale, but there was a labyrinth of shafts, tunnels, and railway lines running for miles underground. Go down into the utter blackness of the underground and you’d be lost instantly. Had Ian Rider made his way into Dozmary? If so, what had he found?
    Alex remembered the corridor at the foot of the metal staircase. The dark brown unfinished walls and the lightbulbs hanging on their wires had reminded him of something, and suddenly he knew what it was. The corridor must be nothing more than one of the shafts from the old mine! Suppose Ian Rider had also gone down the staircase. Like Alex, he had been confronted with the locked metal door and had been determined to find his way past it. But he had recognized the corridor for what it was—and that was why he had come back to the library. He had found a book on the Dozmary Mine—this book. The map had shown him a way to the other side of the door.
    And he a made a note of it!
    Alex took out the diagram that Ian Rider had drawn and laid it on the page, on top of the map. Holding the two sheets together, he held them up to the light.
    This was what he saw:
    The blue lines that Rider had drawn on the sheet fitted exactly over the shafts of the mine, showing the way through. Alex was certain of it. If he could find the entrance to Dozmary, he could follow the map through to the other side of the metal door.
    Ten minutes later he left the library with a photocopy of the page. He went down to the harbor and found one of those maritime stores that seem to sell anything and everything. Here he bought himself a powerful flashlight, a jersey, a length of rope, and a box of chalk.
    Then he climbed back into the hills.
    Back on the quad, Alex raced across the cliff tops with the sun already sinking in the west. Ahead of him he could see the single chimney and crumbling tower that he hoped would mark the entrance to the Kerneweck Shaft … it took its name from the ancient language of Cornwall. According to the map, this was where he should begin. At least the quad had made his life easier. It would have taken him an hour to reach it on foot.
    He was running out of time and he knew it. The first Stormbreakers would have already begun leaving the plant, and in less than twenty-four hours the prime minister would be activating them. If the software really had been bugged with some sort of virus, what would happen? Some sort of humiliation for both Sayle and the British government? Or worse?
    And how did a computer bug tie in with what he had seen the night before? Whatever the submarine had been delivering on the jetty, it hadn’t been computer software. The silver boxes had been too large. And you don’t shoot a man for dropping a diskette.
    Alex parked the quad next to the tower and went in through an arched doorway. At first he thought he must have made some sort of mistake. The building looked more like a ruined church than the entrance to a mine. Other people had been here before him. There were a few crumpled beer cans and old potato chip packets on the floor and the usual graffiti on the wall. JRH WAS HERE. NICK LOVES CASS. Visitors leaving the worst parts of