LABYRINTH

LABYRINTH When asked about the ring Jung responded: " It is Egyptian. Here the serpent is carved, which symbolize Christ. Above it, the face of a woman; below the number 8, which is the symbol of the Infinite, of the Labyrinth, and the Road to the Unconscious. I have changed one or two things on the ring so that the symbol will be Christian. All these symbols are absolutely alive within me, and each one of them creates a reaction within my soul." start-up When you are outside the maze you are looking for the way into the centre. When you are inside the maze, you are looking for the way out. By definition a maze must have an inside and an outside. If not, then it is a pure trap, from which there is no escape. Metaphorically, it is the whole set of questions which must be answered before one finds the solution... 1 It's best not to be caught. As a qualified professional, as much as anybody, I know my job. I don't make mistakes. You have to know the ropes, and I spend a lot of time learning the new ones. Get it right: I only know one way: "Can do". That's me. The last thing I want is the details, 'cause I end up with empirically based comprehension. Who cares? I don't question - I trust. Even an emergency landing brings you down. It's like, there are lots of things coming at you, even if it's only routine, and you can only remember so much - that and that they keep enlarging your sector, and you get tired. Like normally an escort wouldn't have to substitute his area, that I did, and well, there's the old calculations shot to hell. But I adjusted. We were two hours out of Berlin, heading south west on the old A2 at night. The little Palestinian hadn't said a word, hadn't even glanced at me. He pulled out his worry beads, staring ahead into the night. I clicked for the destination address ETA. The screen blinked "02.12 ". That was still several hours away. I calculated I could be back home by eleven, assuming, of course, that nothing went wrong. The ministry had recently lowered the cruise speed from 120 to 110, "Energy-Saving", again. Fuck them. Fuck you. The car, a Mercedes series 343, even if I used the cheapest governor option, was capable of double that, but I couldn't use it unless I got down off the Autobahn, and that wasn't safe, for a whole lot of reasons. We were in the inside lane with the cruise-control maintaining a fixed time interval between us and the vehicle ahead. The 343s still use microwave, whereas I prefer the infra-red image processing systems myself. Still you can't beat the Merc. for comfort and stability and what the 2 hell, the client was paying anyway, so why bother with one of those Indonesian models, where the ashtrays always fill up? Six lanes of yellow sodium light stretching out ahead of me. I lit up a vietnamese West and flashed back to the day before. I was sitting at my terminal, broke, contemplating a bunch of angry demands- for-payment. The phone buzzed and the screen switched to Archer's suave and urbane face - a masterful CGI composite of old italian TV actors - his eyebrows were from Claudio Bigagli, the mouth was Massimo Wertmuller, the eyes had belonged to Pierro Caputti. I appreciate these little details 'cause I'm an expert in italian nineties trivia. I had never met Archer in person, God knows what he really looked like. He rang occasionally via a swedish provider and tossed me some odd jobs, always of dubious legality. He said, "Hello Fall. I've got a little something for you." I composed my face into a passable employer/employee mask and asked, "What?" "An escort. You free?" "Yeah... How long?" "You'll see. Nina has the details." "Good. Thanks, Archer." "That's alright, Fall, what are pals for? But remember..." He gave me that famous Massimo Wertmuller smile. "What?", I asked. "It's better to be punished for what you did than for what you didn't do - but it's best not to be caught at all." I laughed politely and buttoned off, the telescreen imploding to black with a slight electronic hiss. I was saved. It wasn't safe to call Tina. I would have to go there in person, and her street address was on the other side of Berlin. Outside; rain fell from a fluorescent black sky. Sooty water trickled down my collar. I jumped a street car which rattled past the crumbling facades of the Zone. There were still a lot of police in the neighbourhood after last week's riot, cooped up in their green, stone-dented armoured personal carriers bored shitless and spoiling for a fight. The riot had gone on for a day and a 3 night. An apocalypse of losers established a no-go area between the overhead and the Zone wall. I had seen the body of a policeman dangle under the railway, strobed by blue-light and flame. "Uniform equals target", the refugees had chanted until a special Einsatzkommando hit them with one of the new chlorine-based crowd dispersants. As if this town wasn't poisoned enough with fallout from the Lithuanian A.B.M.K. meltdowns, the goddamn gas seeped into the U-bahn system, forcing the closure of two lines. I got off the tram and inserted my ID chip to get through the crossover-point turnstiles into Tina's world of clean streets, new cars and well-fed people. Tina's apartment has been under surveillance for several weeks. I rang her bell, not glancing at the closed circuit camera which followed my movements from the moment I entered the hall. I said, "I'm looking for Gunter." She replied, "He's gone swimming." Then, "You're Rick aren't you?" "Yeah" "He's talked about you. Won't you come in?" I went inside, dropping the little act I had been putting on for the benefit of the camera. In the light, I could see her bruises. "You had a fight with a bus recently, Tina?" She walked over to the couch and sat down. "He's annoyed at me 'cause I'm having a scene with someone who he considers beneath me. Truth is, he's right." She grimaced. "I don't know why I do it, except I don't see why I shouldn't." She lit a cigarete with little nervous movements. "I've got an exhibition of my holograms and it's very important to me and then this affair with Emil just started - I couldn't even stop myself." "We're all like that" I said, "first you eat and then you say grace." She dragged on her cigarete, blowing the topic away in a puff of smoke. "It's an arab." She handed me a sheet of paper. "He's going south. You're to drop him off at the Luxembourg border." "Luxembourg's a long way out of my sector." "Everybody's sector is being expanded. You order the car direct from 4 Peko. Get enough chips to get you to the border and return. There's no backloading." I pocketed the address, saying, "Can you credit the fee direct to my account? I'm completely broke." "That will be up to Gunter. I'll tell him." I walked over to where she was sitting and held her face in my hands. "If you need somewhere, Tina, you can stay at our place while I'm away. You should end it." She shook her head slowly and pushed me away. Outside; the black clouds were now pink fringed. I sought out the wind direction - an instinct I couldn't shake - pulling my collar up and covering my face. I was hungry but didn't have any cash for food. And I didn't want to risk using my credit cards. I needed to walk a bit, to think. Escort service is strictly a side-line with me. I don't like the work. I do it 'cause I have a current driver's permit. The passengers are people who can't travel by air or rail because they don't have valid I.D.'s. And they need a lot of money to afford the price that people like Archer charge for the service. The ARMAC system controls the car and driver, not the passenger. The driver, (that's me), has to file a DAP - a Destination Address Plan before setting out on a journey longer than 50 kilometers. To file the plan he needs to hold a current Driver's License and ID. He must travel along the route specified in the plan. The car's progress is checked automatically by infra-red scanners at the side of the Autobahn which read the bar-code printed on the side of the vehicle. In principal you can still get pulled over for a spot check but I had never heard of it happening in Germany. Not yet. But the new war with with Jihad Alliance states had made things so unpredictable that I didn't like to drive so far out of my normal sector. But the hell, I needed the money. The sun came out. I put on my shades, took out a tube of cream and smeared it generously over any exposed areas of skin. I walked a few blocks then dived into the U Bahn, avoiding the beggars, buskers and assorted basketcases that bred below in the timeless neon. I rode a few stations at bright light velocity. Popping out at a crossover station, I swiped my chip again to get through the barrier. Once across, I sipped a cup of machine coffee in the old mainline departure hall. Flask-vodka nomads were bunched around in the corners, drinking and arguing. From the huge overhead video display, Sun-and-Surf images advertising a Somalian Club Med holiday washed over the hall. At 5 the sight of the african sun I went into a dream. I did a peace-keeping tour in Africa. We had gone out on a long patrol, driving for days through a heatblasted waste of sand and stone. The famine had depopulated the area and the only living things we saw were camels and wild goats. On the return run we came across a village. I was on point so I spotted the pallets first. They were still laying where they landed alongside the first huts, the plastic wrapping busted open and the Euraid food packages scattered around on the ground, half covered by sand. The wind puffed up the corners of the 'chutes, making a soft flapping sound in the silence. The relief drop was accurate enough- but just a little too late, everybody in the village was already dead. We were lucky, at least there had been no cannibalism. I dropped the polystyrene cup into an overflowing trash can and left, trying to shake the memory. Outside; night was falling. I saw a group of east Europeans with a dog, an old drunk german standing right next to them screaming at the top of his voice. He called them dirty foreigners and communists, while the dog cowered, with its ears down. The German snaped into a nazi salute as a radio played a patriotic song. All those years of anger and resentment clutched like a wind-wrapped newspaper around his leg, and now he had a chance to settle a few scores. The east Europeans ignored him, they quite possibly didn't understand a word he was saying. I was on my way back to my apartment when there was a flash and a loud explosion in the west, followed by an echoing roar. The street shook as I dove into the gutter. Lights flickered and died. I got up and continued, in the darkness. I took off my shoes at the door and put on slippers. All the tenants had agreed to leave their shoes in the hall. But as usual, apathy had won and now the floor was covered in dust dragged in from the street. Nobody bothered to sweep. "Has anyone seen the radreader?" my voice echoed in the hall. The house seemed deserted. I entered the moonlit apartment. The moisture-cured polytherene coated windows had survived the blast. At least that was something. I got a kerosine lamp out of the cupboard and lit it with my zippo. "Have you seen the geiger counter?", I shouted to Anna. "Silvie didn't bring it back." 6 "Is there anything to eat?" "I went to the supermarket today." I pulled down a few cans, chosing one with the earliest expiry date egyptian okra in tomato sauce. "Get any milk?" "Sorry, Rick - only powdered." Last week there had been some fresh New Zealand milk. Its levels had been high, just beneath the new recommended ceiling. We had bought ten liters and given most away to friends with children. I carried the lamp through to the bedroom where Anna was clicking through the channels. "... construction of the East Wall... Anti-refugee measure..." A twin-rotor helicopter lowering pre-fab tower sections onto a dark, barren plain. click "...particularly high levels in Hungary and Hawai." The glowman was standing before an isometric map. "So if you are traveling to the east this weekend we suggest you avoid Hungary. Those levels might drop considerably by Tuesday due to the operation of this high over the Caucasus which should bring a clearing south wind..." click Anna said, "There was an Incoming a while ago. It was very close." "Yeah, I saw it. It must have come down in Tegel." "Did you find Tina?" "Yeah, I leave to-morrow afternoon. Gunter's expanded the fucking sector again. But I shouldn't be gone more than half a day." I settled in to bed beside her. The monitor warning was flashing yellow and emitting an annoying high pitched buzzing sound. My passenger spoke for the first time, "What is it?" "Stau", I said, using the German word for traffic jam. "There's been an accident serious enough to trigger the ARMAC alarm". I dialled in a slower speed. "How far ahead is it?", he asked. "Let's see", I said and punched up the route. "It'll come up in a moment, keep your eye on the monitor." I peered into the night ahead of me but there were no stopped vehicles or flashing lights. The other cars had all slowed down to the regulation yellow-alert speed of eighty kilometers an hour. The route map was up now and I could see the problem. It was the exchange on the other side of Braunschweig. It appeared to be completely blocked. There went my calculations all shot to hell. 7 I punched up a traffic report and said, "Shit." "What does it say?" "A fucking turkish missile has come down on the main A2-A14 exchange. Apparently one of the spans is down. Jesus." He said coldly: "God is great. We never use the name of a prophet in vain." His voice put a shiver down my spine. The Turkish missiles are Iranian copies of old Russian SS27s. They've been retrofitted with better guidance systems but they are still wildly inaccurate so it was just chance that one caught the Autobahn. Bad luck for me, 'cause my DAP took me right across that exchange. I requested an alternative route and saw that we would have to get down at the next exit. That meant we wouldn't be controlled by the ARMAC system. Officially we had no right at all to be driving on routes not entered into our Destination Address Plan. He said, "What now?" I didn't know anything about my passenger, not even his name. It was policy never to ask questions. But now I had to. "We've got two options. Either we turn back to Berlin or we leave the Autobahn and travel on secondary roads until we can get back into the net after Braunschweig. The trouble is that we might be controlled by spot police checks on those roads. You're not entered into this vehicle's DAP as a passenger. If we get stopped, I'm in trouble. My papers are in order. What about yours?" "I don't have any valid papers." he said. "Well, that's that, then. We have to go back. I can't take the risk." "We can't go back", he said, still looking ahead of him, not at me. "I have to make my connection in Luxemburg. How late will we be?" "You're going to very late, pal, 'cause I'm not getting down off this freeway. I told you, I can't take the chance." He said, "You're trying to make sense of events that are quite accidental and calamitous. Allah is great and decides all. There is always risk, my friend. Submit yourself to his will." But the way he said it sounded like he wasn't about to enter into a theological discussion. If he had a gun he was probably carrying it - or was it in his bag on the back seat? I could see the exit sign up ahead - only five kilometers to go. I said, "Maybe you don't understand. We could get caught if we get out of the stream. This car will trigger off any police scanner that we drive past. We're not supposed to be anywhere that's not on our route-plan, see?" He turned to look at me for the first time, "Do as I tell you. The secondary roads will be full of unauthorised vehicles because of the missile hit. The whole sector will be in chaos. The police can't stop every car and 8 anyway they will be too busy with damage control." He looked ahead again. "The exit is in one kilometer - take it." I put on the indicater and drove off the autobahn. A LED blinked an alarmed shade of red - informing me I was deviating from the pre-set route.... It was two a.m., approximately the time we should have arrived at the drop point, and I was still driving, somewhere in west Germany to the south of Kassel. All the local roads had been hopelessly blocked with traffic and I had been forced to loop far to the south. I had caught a glimpse of the Braunschweig interchange from the top of a mountain in the Harz. It was far away to the north, a flood of flashing emergency lights. It looked like a little polaroid from hell. The arab hadn't even closed his eyes. He just sat silently in the glow from the instrument panel telling his worry beads. He didn't smoke. My own fear and anxiety were growing with every passing kilometer. I said,"If we're stopped say you were hitchhiking and I picked you up. OK?" He smiled, "My friend, let us pray that we will not be stopped. The police would be very interested to find me and it would not go well with you, either. It would be better for you to concentrate on your driving. You are getting tired? No matter - it is not far to the border and soon you may sleep." I hit the steering wheel with the palm of my hand, "Look pal, it's only fair you fill me in on what sort of situation I got here." "Allah has forbidden the believers from taking the disbelievers as intimates and telling them their secrets, for these disbelievers only bring harm to the believers." "In fact I'm not an infidel, I don't believe in anything, except myself." He snorted, "Disbelief and pride walk hand in hand with Satan. If you believe in nothing, you are nothing." "Yeah? Well what are you then? " "I am an imperfect vessel of Allah's will." I yelled, "Yeah? Well I'm just a professional doing a badly paid job which I don't particularly want to go to jail for." He smiled and settled back into his seat - the mercs really do have the best seats - and said quietly, "In a few days, if God wills, I will be in Tunis. After that I might never again get the chance to speak with an infidel. You are taking a risk for me, even if it is only your job, so I'll tell you - do you remember the Bradford railway bombing?" 9 Suddenly I was very awake. I said, "Sort of. About five years ago. A few hundred people got killed, wasn't it? Why?" The Arab's Story. It started to rain. The wiper switched in, sweeping back and forth across the windscreen with a soft plodding sound. We were driving through a forest, along an empty country road and I had the sensation of being sucked into the funnel of my own headlights. "I was charged under the Salzburg Agreement with conspiricy to commit a terrorist bombing, and got life imprisonment. I was innocent, of course." Great, I thought, aiding and abetting the escape of a terrorist convicted under the Salzburg Laws, what would that get me? Fifteen years, twenty? I saw Archer smiling again on the phone screen saying, "It's better to be punished for what you did than for what you didn't do." I will kill that bastard if I ever see him. "Mistakes can happen and the security forces need their little victories. What is a man's life? It is all God's will. Under Islamic law for a similar offense I would have been simply executed. Your secular humanistic society has developed more refined forms of punishment. It has washed its hands of its life prisoners without introducing the ethical problem of capital punishment. Do you know anything about the Community's penal system?" "I know it was privatised a few years back." "Exactly. An american penal management company now has the contract for the life prisoners. Maybe you've heard of Submax?" "No." "The idea is brilliantly economical. The company buys old Long March class chinese nuclear submarines. They leave the reactor in place. The interior is stripped and fitted out with basic furniture, all welded to the hull. The propulsion train and all control fixtures are removed. The prisoners are herded in and the exits welded shut behind them. The sub is towed about two miles off-shore into the Baltic and dived gently 50 fathoms to the bottom. An Typhoon class sub can hold 217 life prisoners. It is the perfect maximum security prison." I said, "I remember reading that the chinese sold a bunch of subs. I didn't know some of them had ended up here." I had seen a photo of one of 10 them. It looked like a giant ocean-going barge. His face in the instrument glow was a mask of indifference, "It's a free market. When we went under there was a complete panic among the prisoners. Some scratched at the exit hatches with bleeding hands. I counted six murders in the first few weeks before the population divided out into two equal power gangs." I said, "What about the guards?" "There are no guards - that's one of the economies. They don't need them." He paused and smiled. "A Long March class submarine is like an enormous building. It has three levels and each is longer than a football field. The hull weeps moisture so every surface is covered in rust and dripping condensation. It is impossible to have any privacy. There is no day or night - there are always people making noise. The slightest sound echoes inside like a giant metal drum. The lights are permanently on. Water drips on your head as you try to sleep. The floors are slippery with it. There is a slight pressure differential which causes ear-aches and eye-aches." "There must be some link with the outside, how do they re-supply?" I asked. "Once a month a supply ship comes from the coast. It is all done by remote control. They pump in the fresh air at the same time." He paused, "It smells of salt." He went into a dream for a moment then continued, "In the beginning there was a long-wave radio transceiver to communicate with the surface. But after a few months the company stopped answering our calls. Finally one of the prisoners smashed it in a rage. So that was the end of that. By then I didn't care any more. I fell into a kind of despair and the only thing that stopped me going completely crazy like the rest of them was prayer. The infidels left me alone in my corner, they were all too concerned with their power struggles to pay any attention to the crazy arab." We weren passing through a village and I stopped to check the direction. The rain was falling heavier now. I chose a road that seemed to lead through open farmland, we could smell the fresh manure. The arab continued, "I think I was insane for several months before Allah deigned to lift the scales from eyes and allowed me to see my true situation. God is great. His answer was clear - I had to purify every inch. He showed me that the muslim community is surrounded by a sea of disbelief. Kafr thoughts, practices and systems of life have poisoned us. 11 The muslim community has been tricked and seduced into a disastrous friendship with the disbelievers which has resulted in the abandonment of our religious and judicial nexus for theirs. The ocean that surrounded me was not physical, it was spiritual. He was silent, staring ahead of him at the empty road. I thought of the cavernous dripping steel jail and the hundreds of men buried there without hope. I wondered how I would adjust to that situation. "What about the supply ship? If the company has to get food in, then it might be possible to get someone out, by the same route". "That was also the first escape option I examined. The sub is resupplied through a hatch on the top deck which opens into a flooded chamber. The ship lowers a capsule down which docks with the hatch, opens it and lowers the food and supplies in. Then they close the hatch and pump the water out of the chamber. While all this is going on, they replenish the air. The operation is controlled by closed- circuit television. Then the boat winches up the capsule and heads back to shore. After an hour a time-lock switches off, a bell rings, and the prisoners can access the chamber from inside the sub. They have just twenty minutes to retrieve the supplies before the outside hatch is opened and the ocean floods into the chamber. Failure to have the interior hatch shut by that time will result in the whole sub being flooded." "Couldn't you stay inside the chamber, let it flood, then open the hatch to the upper deck and get out that way?" I asked. "You can't open the hatch from the inside. You would drown in the chamber while you tried. And even if it were possible to open it, where would you be? Without air on the bottom of the ocean. Remember we didn't even know how deep we were. "The pumps have been removed so there is no way to pump out the ballast tanks, even if you could access them. In fact the only way out is to somehow rupture the pressure hull - which would result in everybody on board drowning." "Three years passed, with the only relief from boredom the monthly arrival of the supplies. I scoured every inch of the sub, methodically working my way through all the levels from bow to stern. It is like a giant industrial factory. The walls are latticed with a network of pipes. Most of them are narrow but some are of sufficient diameter to accept the entry of a man, and as you see, I am small." 12 "It was inside one of those pipes that I found it." "Years before in Shanghai some careless plumber had forgotten it inside a pipe, so well hidden that the company had not found it when they stripped and gutted the sub. I carried it back to my corner in secret. At first I didn't know what to make of it. The damp rust-stained pages were stuck together and the text was in chinese. Then I realised - these were diagrams of the submarine's plumbing system." "Can you read chinese?" "No, my nationality is Palestinian but I was educated in Britain as a mechanical engineer. The language of diagrams is international, like electrical circuits. This wasn't a complete set of drawings but I could easily identify the pipe where I had found the manual and I could see that that pipe opened up into an auxillary system of what semed to be air tunnels. There was a chance that I could access this system and crawl through the pipes until I found something." "Find what?" "I didn't know. My only thought was escape. The diagrams were only a starting point. They indicated the relative diameters of the pipes and showed drawings of the valve mechanisms. But they were the key that allowed me to enter the system. "I knew the biggest danger was getting lost in the maze of black, slimy tunnels inside the hull - I didn't even have a lamp. I would need a line that would function as my guide back, even as belief brings as back to God. I found what I was looking for in the ruins of the smashed radio set. It was a curious object, I didn't think they were manufactured any more, an oldfashioned coil, wound round and round with thousands of turns of thin, shiny copper wire." The rain was still coming down hard as we drove into a village. I typed in its name and waited for the map to pop up on the monitor. I scrolled through the maze of roads and saw that there was a possibility ahead to join the A24 near the border. "We're getting close" I said. The arab continued, "I started at the pipe where I originally found the book. I tied one end of the copper wire to the latch handle and fed the rest out behind me as I went along. That tunnel was wide enough to crawl through comfortably. After a while I came to a junction where one pipe went down and the other up. I worked my way upwards by wedging my 13 shoulders and back against the sides. Then I found another tunnel leading off horizontally. As I crawled along in the pitch darkness I could hear the sounds from the other prisoners gradually growing fainter in the distance. This sound was my only orientation. I seemed to be moving in the direction of the pressure hull, but I couldn't be certain. Then I came across what I feared most - a closed valve." "Why were you scared of that?" "Because I wasn't even sure in what part of the system I found myself. If I had entered into a pipe belonging to the cooling system there was a chance that the valve vented directly into the ocean. I didn't know if the sea would come pouring in and I wouldn't be able to force the door shut against the water pressure. I opened it very slowly, turning the wheel a degree at a time. Luckily, there was no water on the other side. By that time I had been in there for hours. The cold was unbearable and I was soaking wet. I had to give up and follow the wire back to the living quarters, which are heated by the reactor." "It took days for me to pluck up enough courage to crawl into the pipes again. In the end I went in many times. My journeys inside were a frustrating sequence of trial and error - when I found one route blocked I had to follow my route back to the last junction and start down a new path. I became easily exhausted - the cold and claustropobia robbed me of energy. I started to think I would go completely mad in there. Every route was blocked, every valve and hatch just opened onto another tunnel that led nowhere. I had no way of telling if I was going around in circles. Then one day I opened a hatch and felt around in the darkness beyond. The tunnel seemed to end there. I tapped on a bulkhead and the sound told me there was a large space. I could hear the sounds of the other prisoners a long way away, echoing through the metal. I tested around the walls and found what seemed to be a power switch. I threw the lever and the lights came on." I interrupted, "So you were back in the reactor power grid?" "Yes. The company hadn't disconnected the power supply to this area. They thought there was no way into it. The room was a giant cavern. Two rows of columns stretched into the distance, like like grain silos - so tall that their tops were lost to sight up in the darkness." "You'd found the missile bank?" "Yes, and more. The floor was strewn with rubbish - bits of piping, steel rod, rope, plastic sheeting, there were even some rusty tools. At the 14 base of each missile cylinder was an entry hatch. I found a lamp with a long extension cable and opened the hatch. It swung inwards." "Weren't you afraid the launch chamber was flooded?" "No, then it wouldn't be possible to open the hatch - it would be safety-locked, like a valve. The inside walls were scorched from firings. I found a recessed ladder which I climbed, pulling the extension cable behind me. I couldn't see the top. When I looked down I could see the cylinder disappearing into the darkness below and the little circle of light at the bottom from the open hatch. "When I reached the top of the ladder, I could see that the launch hatch at the top opened outwards. I looked around and found a lever under a red sliding panel in the side of the chamber." "What was that?" "It was the manual release lever for the launch hatch. The hatch had to open outwards and it made sense that there was some way to open it by hand from the inside. I figured the hatch had to swing open quickly and that compressed air pushed it out against its own weight and the water pressure. If that was true I had found what I was looking for. I knew the ocean was on the other side of that hatch. "It was bitterly cold and I had been away from the prisoner's quarters for several hours. I needed to eat and sleep and I was worried that someone might notice I was missing. I followed my thread back to the entry point, and popped out into the smelly living quarters. I ate and slept. When I awoke I sealed some clothes and my Koran inside a plastic bag and when nobody was looking, I re-entered the tunnel for the last time. " Back at the missile silos I found a length of plastic piping that was lying on the deck. It was strong flexible electrical conduit, about two centimeters in diameter.I had to haul it up the ladder to the top of the chamber and bend it into position so that it formed a tight fit around the inner circumference of the firing cylinder, just inside the top. That was the hardest part - t had to be perfectly round and fit snugly inside the circle of the chamber. It took me several hours, balanced at the top of the launch chamber above a three story drop to the steel floor. I joined the two ends together with an old plumbing fixture. The natural springiness of the plastic forced it tightly against the chamber walls. "I climbed back down, cut a circle out of plastic sheeting, then went back up to the top with it and sewed it around the loop like you might stretch a skin over a drum, only I left the fabric very, very loose. When that was done, I was ready." 15 Ahead, we could see the yellow glow of the Autobahn. I swung onto the entry ramp and the Merc's ARMAC system cut in. The red LED which had been flashing for hours since we left the freeway at Braunschweig went out. I relaxed a bit - at least we were back in the system. Even the rain had stopped, and there was light in the east. The computor informed me that we were fourty kilometers from Luxembourg. The drop off point was the autobahn gas station just before the border. The arab continued, "I closed the inspection hatch behind me and secured it from the inside. That meant I had to leave the lamp. It was now pitch black. I climbed back up and tied myself to the plastic loop with a three point rope harness. I spent over a half an hour in the darkness, hyperventilating. Then I gave myself up to the mercy of God, slid the panel open and pulled the lever." "What happened?" "An alarm sounded. It went on for about a minute, just long enough to give someone inside time to exit the chamber. After it stopped, there was complete silence for a few seconds passed before an explosion swung the hatch open and I shot out of the chamber into the sea like a shell out of a cannon. At the same time I expelled the air out of my lungs." "Jesus? How dieep were you? Isn't there something about extreme water pressure, 'the bends', or something?" "I grew up in Aqaba. I used to be a diving instructor, so I know all about the bends. They are caused by nitrogen bubbles being released into the bloodstream as the body rises to the surface. The nitrogen has been compressed in the blood by the water pressure. However the body has to be under pressure for four minutes before you can get the bends. I wasn't at this extreme pressure for more than a few seconds. "Why not?" "You remember how I had covered inside the top of the launch chamber with a membrane of plastic? When hatch opened, the air inside the chamber shot out in a giant bubble. My plastic sheeting caught the air and ballooned out, shooting me up to the surface at an incredible speed, like a rocket. My rope harness held me to the loop. It was like a parachute in reverse. I went from the surface pressure inside the submarine's hull straight up to the surface of the ocean in less than three minutes. It was quite a trip." "How can you hold your breath so long?" I asked. "I wasn't holding my breath! Before the hatch opened I had emptied my lungs - otherwise they would have burst. I hyper-ventilated before 16 opening the hatch. It is a deep-breathing diving technique used to saturate the bloodstream with oxygen. I was taking a risk with how long it would take to get to the surface because I didn't know how deep we were and I was trusting in Allah that we were in relatively shallow water. Fortunately Allah was kind to me." Looking ahead he asked, "I believe that is the last gas station before the border?" The lights of the Raststatte were the same tone as the dawn sky as I pulled up in the parking lot. I turned the engine off and heard the sighing and ticking of cooling metal. The little bald arab reached over to the back seat and took his bag. I said,"What happened when you got to the surface?" "It was a clear night. I got loose from the harness, looked around and saw the lights of a coastal town. It was only a couple of miles away and I am a strong swimmer. I made contact there with the believers - we are many and it is not difficult for them to arrange money, clothes and transport. Now I must go. I don't know how long my contact will wait." He got out of the car and said, "Thank you for helping me." He hesitated, like he was considering something. Then he did what I wasn't expecting. He reached into his bag and pulled out a small, round bundle wrapped in plastic, saying, "Maybe I can help you, please let me give you this." It was soft in my hands. He said, "God be with you." As he walked away towards the glare of the restaurant he turned and said, "If you believe nothing you are nothing. Ma' as-salamah.". I wanted to ask him if he ever thought of the men he had left behind him in that underwater tomb - but he was already gone, disappeared into a fluorescent pool of light where I couldn't risk following. It wasn't till I had crossed back and was way up the A24 in the homeward direction, after passing the Gasstatte on my left, that I pulled over into a rest area and opened the plastic-wrapped bundle. Inside was a tangled ball of thin, bright, shiny wire. The End. 17