Len didn’t hesitate for the fraction of a heartbeat.
The hunter’s body launched forward into the grease-smoke cloud on the left side of the chamber. Then, Len lunged from the threshold brick onto the cherry-red copper plates.
He didn’t crawl. He drove his boots hard against the stonework, throwing his body forward in a low, level dive across the burning floor, his right hand leading with the six-pound bronze wrench clutched like an iron dagger in his asbestos glove.
The heat that struck his knees and shins was an immediate, blinding agony.
Even through the layered wool felt of his trousers and the heavy cowhide of his boots, the four-hundred-degree copper plates felt like plunging into a cooking pot of boiling lead. His trousers began to scorch, releasing a pungent stench of singing flax. A wave of pure, blistering heat seared through the soles of his boots into the arches of his feet.
He ignored it. A courier whose boots were burning didn’t stop running until the parcel was across the river.
He reached the bronze bypass valve in two wild, sliding thrusts of his right elbow.
The valve was an eight-inch cast-bronze gate valve, bolted into the heavy high-pressure return pipe hub. Its eighteen-inch cast-iron handwheel was crusted with white lime scale and black sulfur cinders, frozen solid by twelve winters of unvented pressure.
