The second junction of the extraction baffle opened into an irregular granite pocket where two drainage channels came together before plunging down into the lower sump. Here, the air was thicker, choked with rolling plumes of white steam that hissed from the packing glands of an overhead spreading joint. The mist was so dense that Len could barely see his own boots. But his fingers found what he was seeking along the right-hand wall at knee height.
It was an emergency guide cord. A three-strand rough rope line, tarred against moisture, secured to iron eyebolts driven into the dark rock every fifteen feet. Urel’s riggers had installed it forty-eight hours earlier so that pipe tenders blinded by escaping steam could find their way back to the main access ladder without tumbling into the four-hundred-foot upright chimney pipe.
To an ordinary courier, the cord was a lifeline. To a double armed with the ninth milestone, it was an open telegraph wire.
Len knelt in the freezing sludge that pooled around his ankles. He drew his postal skinning knife with his uninjured right hand, wedging the spine of the blade against the iron eyebolt. Then he sawed through the taut rough rope fibers with three short, forceful strokes. The cut cord whipped through the steam with a wet slap, dropping limp into the drainage ditch. He moved four paces down the wall to the next bracket, slashed the line again. Then he kicked the thirty-foot length of loose cord into the muck.
