Seven Silent Men by Noel; Behn Page A

California-based ultrasonic alarm company could not be found, H.L. Jessup, the seniormost FBI agent at the scene, was asked to join the vault room confab. Jessup, after hearing the specifics of the situation, confessed to having little knowledge of ultrasonic alarm systems and volunteered to phone Bureau headquarters in Washington for expert advice. Detective Hogan said if someone was trapped inside, they’d best try to contact whoever it was before the person suffocated. Hogan had seen too many vaults to suspect this one of being booby-trapped. His offer personally to check for explosives and try to contact anyone inside was accepted.
    Hogan moved toward the vault. The others in the room moved back, far back. The detective, without touching, studied the hydraulic door. Finding no indication of booby-trapping, he began feeling it with his hands … tapped on it with a finger … made a fist and knocked on it … knocked again hard.
    A rumbling occurred. The room quivered. Hogan jumped back. Others bolted up the stairway. A mighty and echoing crack resounded. The vault tilted to one side. A second, louder cracking reverberated. Atilt, the vault sank straight down into the cement floor. Stopped after a foot’s descent. The cement cracked further. The vault sank deeper. Tilted more. Stopped.

THREE
    Martin Leo Brewmeister was a native-born Prairie Portian. Like many other boys of the area, he had spent a goodly part of his childhood at the Mississippi River. He swam there and boated there and, on two occasions, took courage by the flying mane and rode the Treachery. Much more time had been given to the river’s western bank. Specifically, the sheer rock-faced palisades running from Warbonnet Ridge down past Lookout Bluff. Martin, from the earliest of years, had been an inveterate spelunker. Hardly a cave existed on the cove side of Lookout Bluff he hadn’t explored. His prepubescent thirst for suspense and discovery was slaked by these often perilous forays into uncharted darkness. The passion later mingled with a more sophisticated interest, geology. He had briefly entertained hopes of going to the Colorado School of Mines, where, among other electives, two lecture courses in speleology were offered. Martin’s parents, a proud and proper Hessian married to a, proud and practical Junker, which was which didn’t matter all that much, counseled their seventeen-year-old son that whereas geologists and speleologists were each a stalwart and noble breed, examining rocks and exploring caves was hardly an endeavor to provide bread for the table of the children they expected him to have after wedding Elsie Heeren that coming June. If he wished to be a criminal lawyer, as he always professed he wanted to be, or attend a proper agricultural college, the family would see to many of his and his wife-to-be’s needs during the ensuing years of higher education. But he might as well stay home on the family farm for all the good a university degree in anything else, speleology included, would do him, for all the help he would get from his parents. Or his betrothed’s parents, who were lifelong friends of his parents. Though he was reverential toward his family, threats of such disenfranchisement hadn’t mattered to Martin. What had were his future wife’s desires. He explained to Elsie that he might like becoming a geologist. That geology, even more than criminal law, had been a devotion. He told Elsie he had no idea where a geologist could work or live in this day and age or how much money the two of them would have in the beginning. But he thought it best she should know how he felt. He asked her opinion on their future. What she wanted, expected. Elsie told him she possessed but one desire after their marriage … to have children as soon as they could afford to.
    Martin Brewmeister married his childhood sweetheart, Elsie Louise Heeren, and sired their first son his freshman year at Illinois