The Kill Call

like blind sea creatures lurking on the ocean bottom.
    Cooper remembered Peter Massey’s description of his friend’s eyes, looking back up at him like dark pebbles under water, in the last moment before he died. But beyond the surface reflection there were no eyes, no floating body, nothing visible at all in the dark, oily liquid filling the bottom half of the shaft.
    Fry drew back from the opening, covering her nose and mouth against the stench.
    ‘You can’t do this,’ she said.
    But Cooper ignored her, concentrating on climbing over the slimy edge of the hatch and feeling for the top rungs of the ladder. As he clambered carefully down, the counterweight for the hatch bumped against his back, tap-tapping like a heavy hand on his spine, on his shoulders, and touching the back of his head as his feet touched the water. Then he looked up again at the light, saw Fry silhouetted against the sky, her coat and hair filmed with rain.
    ‘I know the layout. I’ll be OK.’
    ‘How can you know it?’
    ‘They’re all the same. A standard design.’
    ‘You don’t know what else might be down there.’
    ‘I’ll be careful,’ said Cooper.
    ‘Famous last bloody words. You’re mad.’
    Cooper summoned his recollection of the Edendale post. Beneath him was the bottom of the shaft, behind him an overhang and a wooden door – the chemical toilet and generator room. To the left would be the other doorway, into the monitoring room. He could see the top of the frame, was relieved to see that the door stood open.
    If he had been Michael Clay, trapped down here with the water rising, where would he have made his way to? Where would have been the best place to eke out the last bit of remaining air? The shaft itself, surely? There was a good six feet of space above the water line.
    But he touched the walls and felt how wet they were. Slippery with a foul-smelling sheen of mud and mould. So the level of the water was actually falling. At its peak last night, or in the early hours of the morning, the shaft must have been flooded right up to the top, only the locked hatch preventing water from seeping out on to the surface.
    So if Michael Clay had known the layout of an ROC bunker, what else would he have done? He would have gone for a ventilation outlet. Of course. Cooper pictured a rusty louvred steel opening in the far wall of the monitoring room. And somewhere in the ceiling was the lower end of the blast pipe, wide enough to detect the pressure from a fireburst explosion, so it must allow the passage a bit of air, too.
    Cooper sucked in a long breath and ducked his head under water, pulling himself towards the open doorway. Moving into pitch darkness, he was blinded by the sudden contrast with the light in the shaft and its splintered reflections on the surface of the water. He was so disorientated that he had to break the surface and take a new breath, panicking for a moment that he wasn’t going to be able to do it, at the thought that he would have to admit defeat and go back up to the surface, just sit and wait for the experts with their wet suits and oxygen tanks, which could take forever.
    He shook his head and clutched at the walls to orientate himself again, feeling the handle of the pump tangle in his legs until he kicked away. The cold was already creeping into his bones and turning his fingers and toes numb. He didn’t have very long to do this. It had to be now, or never.
    Cooper’s head went under again, and then he was in the doorway, pushing against the wooden frame. It was too dark to see anything in front of him. But he could hear David Headon’s voice in his head, telling him that the monitoring room was only sixteen feet long. He remembered thinking that it was a small space for three men to spend so many hours in. Seven feet wide and sixteen feet long, like a giant coffin. He could reach the end of it in two strokes.
    His violent movements stirred up silt and debris from the concrete floor. Floating objects bumped against him as he kicked forward, like invisible creatures swimming around him in the black water. A plastic bucket, a jerry can that spun away when he cracked his elbow against it. And something rough and fibrous that flapped slowly towards the floor.
    Then a long, loosely jointed shape swung into his face. A familiar shape. A human arm. His lungs aching, Cooper grabbed at a sleeve and began to kick backwards towards the door. For a long second, he felt something holding him down, the