Thunderbirds

The Annual Adventures

by Lee Homer

Disclaimer: All rights reserved. This a collection of adapted text stories from various Thunderbirds annuals from across the years. I wanted to help make these short stories available to fans who don't own any of the annuals or are unaware of the cool stories that they contain. The Annuals are the property of Century 21 Magazines LTD. This collection is for fan fiction purposes only. I hope you enjoy them.

The Violent Mountain

Lady Penelope languidly raised her eyes from the awesome panorama stretching away below the terrace of the mountain villa and frowned at Parker with a tired smile as he placed the breakfast tray on the table beside her. She lifted a delicate hand and patted a yawn, stifling it at birth.

"Thank you, Parker. Life can sometimes be a boring business."

Parker grinned. "Yes, milady, 'specially for miners."

Penelope winced. "Your wit is a trifle crude at times, Parker. I think you watch too man comedies, but to come to the point, I am tired with this enforced inactivity. I wish we'd never left England."

"But, milady! We only arrived last night."

"Did we? It seems like a million years."

Her voice trailed away as she stared over the white marble balustrade of the terrace across the deep valley below. Like a vast wall, gleaming in the bright Italian sun, swept the majestic span of the great Toroni dam, to which a dozen Alpine villages had been sacrificed and whose massive turbines generated power for half the country's electrical installations.

"Parker," she said quietly. "Do you see what I see?"

"I don't see anything, milady."

"Look at the mountain slope across there, Parker."

Parker stared puzzled at the dark rocky slopes of Monte Fiori. His eyes fixed onto the spot that startled Penelope. A dark crack appeared below the brownish stratum on the mountain. Penelope claimed that it hadn't been there ten minutes ago. She wanted to alert the dam below, but there was a hiccup. Before they arrived, she insisted on there being no telephones so she couldn't be contacted. She had come for a peaceful holiday at Jeff Tracy's instance after she was injured during a mission in Bereznik. She rose to her feet and slipped a pink corduroy house-coat over her cerise satin pyjamas.

"Get the Rolls! At least it'll give us something energetic to do."

"Yes, milady."

A few moments later, FAB One was screaming along the winding road which led along the mountain ridges to the hydro-electric control centre twenty miles away. Penelope, reclining in the rear seat, focused powerful binoculars on the mountain slope across the valley. Parker clocked his speed at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. A short while later, the resident engineer frowned as he listened impatiently to Lady Penelope. He refused to accept the idea that the dam was in any real danger. Penelope removed her long jewelled cigarette holder from her mouth and spoke with a sharpness foreign to her. The engineer muttered something, but switched on a TV monitor screen. The blue-grey rocky slope of Monte Fiori appeared. The distant cameras panned the slope as the engineer manipulated the controls, and then he gasped and brought a section into close-up.

"You were right, signorita! There is a fault. Already it is a foot wide. If it slips further..."

He turned and stabbed a button. Bells rang urgently in the distance, He switched on an intercom and gabbled orders. Penelope drew on her cigarette and calmly watched the picture on the screen, but inside her there was a tension that belied the schooled lack of emotion on her face. From the speaker above the monitor screen came an ominous roaring and before their eyes a huge section of the mountainside below the crack slid away out of sight. With an anguished cry the resident engineer leapt to the controls and the distant electronic eye followed the colossal mass of rock as it plunged down into the glistening waters of the dam lake below.

Dust and debris mushroomed, obscuring the image for some seconds, and when it cleared, a great wash of water rose half-way to the fault line. Then a vivid blue-white flash obliterated the picture and the screen went blank. The engineer switched on another screen and the dam itself came into view. The water at its base was boiling as great waves chased each other across the lake to fling themselves in fury against the huge pyrocrete structure. They leapt dozens of feet up the sloping wall of the dam before crashing back in foaming frustration. The situation has taken a drastic turn. The engineer explained to Penelope that construction crew were working on a tunnel through Monte Fiori. It was likely that the rockfall had severed their airlines and sealed their only exit.

Penelope raised her eyebrows at Parker while the agitated man dashed away to alert the local rescue services. The pair turned and left the control building. They realised they had to do something. Inside, FAB One, Penelope picked up the radio microphone.

"International Rescue. Lady Penelope calling International Rescue."

Jeff's face appeared on the screen. "Go ahead, Penny. How's your vacation going?"

"Jeff, listen. This is an emergency."

Sitting in the Rolls, which was stationary on the broad highway which ran along the top of the dam, Lady Penelope watched the frantic scene below. Rescue teams were scrambling like ants over the huge pile of rocks. Reinforcements with more equipment were speeding in launches across the still agitated waters of the lake. Debris still slithered down the raw slope, endangering the frantically labouring men below. Overhead, a helicopter zoomed down, its powerful engine awakening echoes from the mountain slopes. Casually, Penelope raised her eyes and studied the cloudless blue of the sky to the east.

"Can you hear that Parker?" she drawled. "I believe Scott is dead on time."

Suddenly, Thunderbird One appeared from behind the snow capped slope of the mountain and came to a hover over Penelope's position. At the controls of the magnificent rocket-plane, Scott reported in with the London agent.

"International Rescue calling Lady Penelope. Is there a suitable landing place close by?"

"Yes, Scott. The top of the dam seems eminently suitable. The police have closed it to traffic at my request."

"FAB,"

Thunderbird One's landing gear unfolded as she circled the huge lake in a great shallow spiral before descending and settling gently on the dam highway a hundred yards from the Rolls. The toiling rescue workers poised briefly to gaze up in wonder, and then resumed their grimly urgent task. As Scott alighted from the aircraft, he found Penelope and Parker waiting for him. She led him calmly down towards the scene. An auto-hydraulic lift took them to the base of the dam. Presently, they were standing with the uniformed controller of the rescue operation, who had been flown up from Milan with special rescue units. The controller looked curiously at Scott's blue uniform with the extended hand insignia on it's sash.

"International Rescue, huh? Well, every little helps,s signor."

Scott ignored the slight snub. He could see the controller was a worried man.

"What's the exact position?" he asked.

The controller gestured at the rescue squads. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the whine of a high speed drill that just started up. He explained the situation to Scott.

"Twenty men have been buried under a hundred thousand tons of rock. They've got enough air in their auxiliary cylinders to last maybe two hours. We're boring through to them, a feed line, but at the rate of progress, we've been making it'll take at least another three hours. We've broken two drill heads already, just trying to reach them. There's no other way out of the mountain."

He broke off as a cry of exasperation rose from the drill crew and, with a protesting speech, the powerful machine stopped working. They had lost enough drill head. Scott moved away and switched on his mobile control unit.

"Mobile Control calling International Rescue," he reported. "I'll need heavy rescue equipment. Request Thunderbird Two and The Mole."

Jeff's voice cut in over the receiver. "Virgil is already on his way. He should reach you in approximately ninety minutes."

Scott left the transmitter on and turned to Lady Penelope.

"Ninety minutes," he said bitterly. "And those poor guys down there have got two hours air supply. That will give Virgil about thirty minutes."

Penelope smiled at him. "Chin up, Scott. Has International Rescue failed yet?"

"Nope, and I guess we won't this time either." Scott grinned. "You're as good as a shot in the arm., Lady Penelope. If you can spare Parker to lend me a hand, I'll get my equipment down here. Maybe a seismic probe will find the shortest way to get to those guys.

Scott glanced at his chronometer and then up at they sky. Thunderbird Two touched down on the Monte Fiori end of the dam., where a special squad of grim faced men were waiting. The aircraft rose on its hydraulic stilts, leaving the pod behind, and Scott hurried forward with Penelope to greet his brothers Virgil and Gordon when they alighted. At a signal from Scott, Virgil manoeuvred the Mole from Pod Five and across to a massive construction elevator, which took it down to water-level. As they approached the rescue operation, the controller, his face grey from dust and anxiety, regarded the Mole wearily.

"You really think you make it in that?" he asked Scott. "Through solid granite?"

"The Mole can tackle any rock,"

"Perhaps, but in what time?"

Scott shrugged. "That we'll have to see."

Inside the Mole, Virgil looked at the mass of tumbled rocks, some of them huge slabs as big as the wall of a house and as thick as a truck. The controller had shown Scott a layout of the tunnel. Scott swiftly relayed the details to his brother. Virgil pursed his lips.

"A hundred feet? Some going. Now if it was shale or sandstone or limestone," He looked at Scott. "Any suggestions?"

Scott pointed to a wide reddish-yellow stratum running down at an angle across the face of the exposed rock towards water level.

"Sandstone, Virgil. I calculate that passes twenty-five feet above the tunnel. "

"Then that's the way to go," Virgil said. "Stand clear, everybody!"

The Mole's motors whined and the weird boring machine glided away over the rubble to where the sandstone stratum vanished almost at lake level. The point of the screw nose touched the centre of the stratum and then began to whirl rapidly, cutting through the soft rock like a gimlet through deal. The men watched anxiously as Brains' invention bored steadily into the mountainside on it's urgent mission of mercy. Soon, Virgil was steering blind by means of his sensitive instruments which registered the slightest change in density of the rock through which he was boring, As the Mole slowly advanced, pressurised concrete was pumped through the valves to seal the wall of the tunnel behind it.

Virgil kept one eye grimly on the chronometer. Sandstone was easy to negotiate, but some unforeseen deviation of the stratum might upset his calculations. There might even be a sudden subsidence below him that would drag the Mole down into some deep bore-hole of Nature's own contrivance. He might be able to find his way back to the surface in the machine, but all hope for the slowly suffocating tunnel crew would be gone. Five minutes...ten...He was travelling through sandstone. He briefly consulted the plan. Any moment now he should be above the tunnel. Then a downward bore through the primeval rock that would yield slowly and reluctantly to the bite of the screw.

Three minutes later, he stopped the machine, using the seismic probe, sounding for the tunnel. He got no reading but but solid rock for hundreds of feet. Had he miscalculated? Slowly, he went on, grimly aware that time was running out fast on him now, He hoped that the men he was seeking had been able to conserve their meagre air supplies somehow. He stopped again, instruments probing. Then he heard it, a repeated, constant knocking. It was coming from somewhere below him, as if the trapped men were frantically trying, with their last remaining strength, to batter a way out of their prison. Eagerly he took a depth reading. Only five feet! The plan had been wrong, but it was a fault on the debit side.

He reversed and then cut a fresh channel, boring through the yielding sandstone at a sharp angle until he felt the screw bite on the harder rock. He revved up the drive. The sound of the whirling screw rose to a shrill whine that penetrated even the stout hull of the machine. Then suddenly, he became aware of a change in the pitch if the sound. Abruptly he cut the drive and tested with his instruments. In the tunnel below, sweating, panting men lifted pale faces from which hope had almost drained. They stared up incredulously in the light of torch beams at the screw cone which had burst through the roof of what they had almost reconciled themselves to being their tomb. A micro-transmitter probed through the gloom and a calm voice said ;

"Stand clear, boys! I'm dropping in on you!"

A little while later the rescue operation controller gazed up at the two rescue craft screaming back eastwards over the white-capped mountain peaks.

"The miracle happened," he said gratefully to Lady Penelope. "Luckily they got here as quickly as they did. They must have a pretty wonderful organisation to learn they're needed to soon."

"Yes, they must," she said with a smile as she raised her eyebrows at her butler. "Didn't I say that life could sometimes be a very boring business, Parker? Let's get back to the villa and finish breakfast."

"Yes, milady, but I fear the tea will cold."

END