Charlie and Carmen had squirmed their way through the ventilation shaft behind the wall and had put a good distance between them and their prison. Within a few minutes they had passed the room that they had eaten dinner in. Progress was tortuous because of the lack of room for them to move in. Charlie pulled himself along with his elbows through the thick dust and grime, which disturbed by his movement, clogged his nose and blinded his eyes in choking clouds. Knowing that silence was imperative, Charlie had restrain the urge to cough, his throat tightening, his lungs wheezing. Eventually, with sore toes, skinned knees and bleeding elbows, the two children emerged into an open space.

"Hold on a minute!" Charlie rooted around in the bag he had been given by his father. Within it were some packages that he presumed contained food but his fingers brushed over the metal casing of a familiar object. Removing it, he switched on one of the emergency lamps they had used earlier on in their exploration of the darkened bunker. The beam revealed a small chamber that their ventilation duct led into, as well as a number of other openings that indicated other, similar ducts disappeared to other destinations. A set of steel rungs set into the wall led to another opening not far above them that appeared to be heading in the direction that Charlie wanted to go in.

As he was looking, his beam was joined by another, less bright one. "I think we'd better use this one, Charlie," Carmen said as she brandished the torch from the survival kit. "We'll draw less attention to ourselves."

"You had the survival kit?"

"Yeah," Carmen answered, a little puzzled by his reaction.

"You had the survival kit all the time, with the multi-tool in it? The multi-tool I could have used to get the ventilation grill off?"

"Oh," Carmen replied with a small smile, "But you looked so happy fiddling about. I didn't want to disturb you!"

"Fiddling about!" he fulminated between clenched teeth. "Fiddling about! Remind me not to fiddle about in future!"

"Come on, Charlie, I'm only kidding! I just forgot that we had it."

Mollified, Charlie realised that he had forgotten about the survival kit too. In fact he was really glad they still had it and had to thank Carmen for remembering to carry it.

Directing their attention to the rungs they quickly agreed to continue up. For one thing they were becoming uncomfortably aware that Suzuki would be checking on them at some point and would pretty quickly discover how they got out. They did not want to still be in the camber if the Japanese decided to send a couple of bullets down the ventilation shaft. It was time to get out of the way.

It was as they clambered up the rungs and swung themselves into the next ventilation shaft, about ten feet above the chamber floor, that they heard Suzuki's roar of rage.

"Better get a move on, Charlie!" Carmen grinned, the only sign of her smile being her teeth just catching the dim light of the survival torch. She directed it down the shaft, its feeble light barely illuminating the darkness. Thankfully, it seemed a little wider and little taller. Groaning under their breath, the two children continued on their laborious way.

***

The sun had risen on yet another day on Solitude. Winthrop-Smythe still sat on the gunwale over the stern of the launch, which still rocked in the gentle swell of the bay. His first reaction to Hargreaves had been one of fear but as one wise man had once commented, familiarity breeds contempt. Hargreaves was now nothing more than an irritation to Winthrop-Smythe and, worse still, an obstruction.

It was the waiting that had done it. At first, Winthrop Smythe had been only too willing to go along with the monster. Now after several hours of looking at its back and what seemed a lifetime with the snivelling Dusty Miller, Winthrop-Smythe simply wanted to get away from Solitude. In Winthrop-Smythe's experience, obstructions needed to be removed. His military training forced him to look beyond Hargreaves obvious advantage over him. After all, he could not kill Hargreaves. How could you kill anything that was already dead? However, he had begun to think about how he could incapacitate Hargreaves.

Hargreaves was strong, unnaturally so. Winthrop-Smythe had discovered it when the apparition's iron grip had closed around his wrist back at the camp and disarmed him. He had been frog-marched through the forest by the creature to the launch and so was under no illusions about his own ability to overpower Hargreaves. However, that did not mean that he could not dispose of the monster, or disable it.

What he needed was to overbalance the creature. Get it off balance and force it back to the gunwale on either side of the launch, he mused. It was there that it was lowest, more of a low obstruction to stop kit being swept away than to protect the crew. It barely reached a man's knees. A quick shove and over you'd go, into the drink. Then old Winnie could get the launch underway and head for the bright lights of the big city, where he could forget about this ghastly island in the first bar he came to.

Surreptitiously, he began to inspect the boat's fittings. He spotted some oars, a boat hook, all of which he rejected. They weren't enough, he needed something with a bit of weight behind it. At last he saw exactly what he was looking for. The spare anchor rested beneath the seats at the rear of the launch. That'll do, he thought to himself, grinning at the prospect of getting away from Solitude.

***

Grunting with the strain, Munro began to turn the wheel of the manual release. It had taken a while to find the access hatch but, after a certain amount of careful searching, they had finally found it under a discarded tool box left by some careless engineer.

Even accounting for the likelihood of favourable gear ratios to help open the Confinement Chamber, it was still going to be a long, slow process turning the manual release by hand. For every turn of the wheel the hundreds of tonnes of concrete, that made up the clamshell construction of the Confinement Chamber, would barely even move a millimetre along the curving rails.

Savanarolova watched expectantly. There was little that betrayed the sense of excitement that was growing inside her, save the tapping of her left foot. She had long become accustomed to the idea of confronting the primary objective but now that she was here, she could not quite believe that the moment had arrived. As the Confinement Chamber began to open, she wondered what she would find inside. What state would it be in after all these years, starved of its vital nourishment? Would she even be able to achieve what she wanted? Would her tools be hard enough or sharp enough to cut efficiently? Would it be dead?

Suppressing the rather pessimistic thought that with her luck, and the way the mission had been progressing, the latter probability was most likely, she continued her observation.

There was a sudden explosive hiss. All along the line of the clamshell opening, dust was disturbed in clouds as air was sucked in to the Confinement Chamber with tremendous force. Just as soon as it started, it stopped, and silence descended on the Production Floor again.

Munro paused and looked at Savanarolova with concern. With some irritation, she waved for him to continue. She was beginning to suspect that Munro was something of an old woman and despised him for it. Decisiveness, ruthlessness and resolution were character traits she admired, not caution and hesitation. After all this was done with, Munro would have to go, she mused, he was too much of an old woman. Amused by the thought of Munro wearing a grey wig, carpet slippers and a floral pattern dress, Savanarolova chuckled to herself.

***

"One, two..." Rick whispered to George.

"Wait a minute," interrupted George. "Do we go on three or four?"

"Does it matter?"

"No, I guess not."

"Well, then. One, two..."

"Three or four?"

"For crying out loud, three! Who ever heard of going on four?"

"OK, three it is."

Rick tried again, slightly flustered by George's interruptions, "One, two, three! Go!"

George bolted through the door of the Production Floor, sub-machinegun pulled tight into his shoulder as he glared down the gun sights. As he burst through the doorway, he headed to the left, getting out of the way of Rick, who followed closely behind him then headed right.

"Freeze!" George bellowed. "Get your hands on your heads! I will fire if you go for that gun!"

Munro had partly swung his Tommy gun round on its sling and had reacted lightning fast to George and Rick's explosive entry into the Chamber. However, he was still too slow for George who had closed half the distance to the Scot and had already begun to tighten his finger on the trigger of the SMG.

"I'd really like you to try it!" George growled. "I don't think I'd even blink putting one burst into you! I'm keen to find out!"

Rick was covering Savanarolova whose initial surprise at their appearance had been replaced with a sour looking smirk. Her Skorpion was still holstered and she had put her hands behind her head.

"Why the smile, Iphigenia?" Rick said with a sinking feeling.

"Well, I'm not sure that I want to tell you, Rick. I'd be kind of pleased for you to find out the hard way," she retorted. "But I'm inclined to be merciful for the moment. You see, I'm holding the trigger for two claymore mines behind my head. The mines are covering all the ground in front of the door, about where you're standing. If you would like to continue risking me detonating them then please carry on pointing your guns at me and my associate."

"Detonate them? You'd never set 'em off, you'd be caught in the blast just as much as we would be." Rick was incandescent. Claymore mines! He knew only too well what those could do. A nasty little remnant of the Vietnam War, a claymore mine packed hundreds of ball bearings in front of an explosive charge, all set into a curved steel plate. They could be triggered remotely, or by tripping a wire, but the result was the same. The explosive fired out the ball bearings in a hideously murderous hail that would fan out, shredding anything in their path.

"Yes, I know. That would be inconvenient, I must admit." Savanarolova's eyes flashed with rage and her mouth twisted into a snarl, "But then, I expect your desire to live is not quite as strong as my desire to see you dead. I promise you Rick Bravo, I will kill you where you stand, right now, if you don't put down your gun. One, two..."

Rick could not believe it. How many times could the tables be turned on him on this godforsaken island? His shoulders sagged and the muzzle of his SMG dropped from its target.

"Put it down, George," he ordered quietly. "Put it down. She's got us covered."

Munro whipped his Tommy gun up in one swift move as soon as both Rick and George' guns hit the floor. Rick winced momentarily as he thought that Munro was about to fire, flinching at the thought of the burst of forty-five calibre bullets tearing through him.

Instead, the huge Scot dashed over to the guns and kicked them aside, the muzzle of his own gun never once leaving them. "Down on your knees!" he barked.

Humiliated, frustrated and just plain terrified, Rick and George meekly sank to the floor.

Munro stood over George like a triumphant big game hunter. "God how I hate an uppity islander!" he laughed cruelly. With that, he raised the Tommy gun and flicked the butt sharply into George's face, breaking his nose. "Eat that, fat boy!"

---

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