Vance shoved the metal door open just as the roar of the onrushing water reached the confluence at the intersection of the tunnel, a mere hundred yards ahead. The tunnel was almost full now, the water flow increasing.
They're about to turn on the Cyclops, he thought. You've got about fifteen seconds left.
He pulled himself through the metal door, soaked but alive, and rolled onto a cement floor. With his last remaining strength he reached over and tipped the metal door shut, then grabbed the wheel and gave it a twist. Down below he could feel the wall of water surge by.
He thought he was going to faint, but instead he took a deep breath and pulled out the flashlight…
… And found himself in a communications conduit, consisting of a concrete floor with Styrofoam insulation overhead. All around him stretched what seemed miles of coaxial cables, wrapped in huge circular strands. The conduit also contained fiber-optics bundles for carrying computer data to guide the parabolic antennas up on the mountain as they tracked the space vehicle.
The major contents of the conduit, however, were massive copper power-transmission cables. What had Mannheim warned? How many gigawatts per second? The numbers were too mind-boggling to comprehend, or bother remembering. All they meant was that if the Cyclops were suddenly turned on, the Gaussian fields of electromagnetic flux would probably rearrange his brain cells permanently.
He rose and moved down the conduit, feeling along its curved sides, his back braced against the large bundle of power wires in the center while ahead of him the darkness gaped. A few yards farther, though, and the probing beam of his flashlight revealed a terminus where some of the shielded fiber optics had been shunted off into the wall, passing through a heavy metal sleeve.
Although it was welded into a steel plate bolted to the side of the wall, large handles allowed the bolts to be turned without the aid of special wrenches. Whoever designed the fiber optics for this tunnel, he thought, didn't want a lot of Greek workmen down here waving tools around after a long lunch of guzzling retsina. The fibers were too vulnerable to stand up to any banging.
He grasped the handles and began to twist one, finding the bolts well lubricated. After four turns, it opened. The second yielded just as easily. Then the third and the fourth.
He took a deep breath, thinking this might be his first encounter with the hostages, and the terrorists. Then he slid the metal plate back away from the wall and tried to peer through. The opening was approximately a meter wide, with the bundle of fiber-optics cables directly through the middle. Still, he found just enough clearance to slip past and into the freezing cold of the room used to prep the payloads for the vehicles.