There had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic in the
incoming shift in the rooms where its members were screened before
admission to work. Somebody had tried to establish complete confusion
there by firing revolver shots in the crowd, expecting the workers to
break through to the floor and assigned gentlemen with slabs of
explosive to get to the Platform with them. The gentlemen with the
explosives had run into Major Holt's security reserve, and they got
nowhere. The creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescued
from their shift-mates and more or less scraped up from the
screening-room floor--they were in very bad shape--and carted off to be
patched up for questioning. The members of this group had been
impractical idealists, and besides, some of them had lost their nerve,
as was evidenced by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonators
in the locker room and men's room of the Shed.
The most dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned and
co-ordinated assault which had been merely carried out at its original
time, without either being hastened or delayed by Mike's activities.
That plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly have
been successful but for the machine-gun bullets from the gallery and the
fight Joe's followers put up underneath the Platform.
The exact instant when the whole Shed would be most nearly empty had
been fixed upon, and three separate units had worked in perfect timing.
There'd been the man in the stalled truck. He'd delayed his exit from
the Shed to the precise fraction of a second to get the doors open at
the perfect instant. The explosive-laden trucks had raced in at the
exact second when they were most certain to get underneath the Platform
and detonate their cargoes. There'd been a perfect diversion planned for
that, too. Smoke bombs and explosions in the outgoing screening rooms
had created real panic, and but for Joe's order for his group's
walkie-talkies to be turned off would have drawn every security man on
duty to that spot.
Mike's trick, then, had brought some saboteurs into the open, but had
merely happened to coincide with the most dangerous and well-organized
coup of all. However, it was due to his trick that the Platform was not
now a wreck.
There was also another break that was sheer coincidence. It was a
discovery that could not possibly have turned up save in a situation of
pure chaos artificially induced. Joe had had to react in a personal and
vengeful way to the manner in which his especial antagonist had fought
him. One expects a man to fight fair by instinct, and to turn to
fouls--if he does--in desperation only. But Joe's personal opponent
hadn't tried a single fair trick. It was as if he'd never heard of a
fist blow, but only of murder and mayhem. Joe felt an individual enmity
toward him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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