Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [53]
Kahr lowered himself to the chair. Exhaust from the engines was piped directly outside, but the room still reeked of fuel. The Daimler company had known where these two diesel power plants were destined, and so had covered them with ornamental twists of chrome and brass, and they more closely resembled tea samovars than engines. Air flowed into the room from a grate above the rag hook, but the place was always too warm. On the wall above the panel was a diagram of the ventilation system, showing routes of the piping and the locations of the fans, filters, belowground grates and aboveground outlets and inlets, even the locations of the four cages of canaries. Switches on the panel activated dampers and gates, allowing Kahr to direct the flow of air. In the event of a gas attack he had been trained to shut off the fresh-air intakes and allow only captured air to circulate. Many of the ventilation pipes passed through this cramped room, along the ceiling and the long wall opposite the control panels. These were ribbed pipes, eighteen of them that entered the room from the walls and connected to the fan boxes. Half the pipes were painted red and half were green because they made up two separate, redundant systems. If for some reason smoke or noxious gas were to breach the red set of pipes, that set could be closed off, and the fresh air and exhaust run through the green pipes. The fans were powered by outside electricity or the generators in the room next to them. Each air pipe in Kahr's room had a hatch that could be opened so the pipe could be pumped out in the event of flooding, which had never as yet occurred, or to insert poison to kill rats, which occurred frequently. The ventilation pipes were purposely too narrow to allow even the smallest of men to crawl through them. Near the fan boxes were two air purification systems, each in metal crates the size of a desk, and each with pipes running up the wall to join the other ventilation pipes. The air purification machinery was serviced daily by an outside technician, and Kahr knew little about them, other than how to switch them on should air in the bunker be fouled with smoke or gas.
A large red button on the panel activated the Notbremse, the emergency brake, which was to be punched only in case of fire, explosion, or assassination attempt. This button sealed all the doors and activated the sprinkler system. An identical button was located at the guard captain's station. Also in Kahr's room were emergency controls for the fire-fighting system, large valves to shut off water pipes.
With the dipsticks checked and the canaries fed, Kahr had completed his work for the shift, until the lights went out and he had to bring the generators to life. And with nothing to do, his thoughts invariably returned to his lost sons and his one hope, the return of his boy Max. Kahr had avoided religion all his life, until the death of his second son, and now had turned to it with fervor. Perhaps if he loaded God with prayers, much like loading artillery shells onto the bed of a transport truck, God would allow a small mercy. Kahr did not know theology, but suspected the sheer number of his prayers would not be overlooked. God would not overlook Ulrich Kahr's thousandth plea, or his ten-thousandth. Kahr closed his eyes and whispered a new prayer, softly, hardly audible under the sough coming from the air grate and the ventilator fans'