Second Horseman Out of Eden

by George C. Chesbro

  “I believe I can drive a snowmobile,” Nigel Fickley announced. “I’m somewhat of a winter sports enthusiast, you might say.”

  “Hey, wait just a minute,” Malachy McCloskey said, seeming slightly bewildered as he looked back and forth between Garth and me. “What the hell’s the matter with the chauffeurs you’ve got? We can fit—”

  That was all he managed to say before Garth hit him on the point of the jaw with his fist. It was a pretty good pop—what I estimated to be a half-hour punch.

  “The man’s scheduled to retire in a few hours,” Garth said to a startled Frank Palorino as he caught the unconscious McCloskey and eased him down onto the floor. “He’s got children and grandchildren. We could die in the plane—or in Idaho. There’s no way he’d stay behind if we gave him the choice, but there’s no reason for either of you to come along. Your jurisdiction ends if and when we get in the air, and it’s better that the two of you stay here—first, to follow through to make sure they’ve deactivated that bomb back in Manhattan, and second, to make the necessary calls if we crash and explode. Don’t think about it, Frank, because we know you want to come too. But you’d just be excess baggage.”

  “Here,” I said, handing Palorino a slip of paper on which I had written two telephone numbers. “These are direct lines to the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and President Kevin Shannon. I’ve also written down a code word you use to make sure you get no hassle from anyone who may be answering the phones for them.”

  Palorino looked at the paper, shook his head. “Valhalla?”

  “Tell whoever answers that this is a Valhalla priority.”

  “This will get me through to the president of the United States?” The policeman seemed stunned.

  “Actually, the Director—Mr. Lippitt—is harder to get hold of than Shannon, but that’s neither here nor there.” I paused, smiled thinly. “Have McCloskey tell them you got the numbers from the famous Fredericksons.”

  “Let’s go, Mongo,” Garth said from where he, Holloway, and Fickley were standing by the door. “Schmooze later.”

  Frank Palorino quickly unholstered his service revolver and gave it to me. Then he slipped McCloskey’s automatic out of the unconscious detective’s shoulder holster, handed it to Garth. “Take these,” he said. “You may need them where you’re going.”

  “Mongo,” Garth said tersely, “let’s go.”

  “Be right with you,” I said, and turned to the flight attendant who had first volunteered to go up with us. She looked like she had the right size feet. “Evelyn, I don’t suppose you have a pair of sneakers you could lend me, do you?”

  Shod in a pair of pink sneakers that were only a tad too small for me, I hurried back out into the storm with Garth and the two British Airways pilots. Garth got on one of the snowmobiles, with Jack Holloway behind him, and I got on the second snowmobile behind Nigel Fickley, pulling the silver wrap tightly around me. Throughout the long night and day I’d been running on adrenaline and amphetamines, and I had almost forgotten just how weak I was. Now my mind and body reminded me. I suddenly experienced a wave of dizziness, and I came close to falling off the snowmobile. Garth seemed to be holding up just fine without stimulants, but I knew that I was perilously close to not being able to hang on unless I got a little chemical help. As Fickley fumbled with the starter switch, I groped in my pocket for the bottle of amphetamines, found it. I shook out two pills and swallowed them both. I’d just managed to get the bottle back into my pocket when the engines of both snowmobiles roared to life and we shot off into the gelid, snow-swept darkness.

  The two pills hit me fast and hard. One thing was certain, I thought; I wasn’t cold anymore. Nor was I hot with fever. I was alternately numb from head to toe, and then tingling. I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t want to soil myself, and I was afraid that I’d fall off the snowmobile if I leaned out too far. Swallowing bitter bile, taking deep breaths of the frigid air through my nostrils, I cursed myself for taking two of the pills. In my desperate desire to be on stage at the final act, I’d placed myself in danger of falling into an empty orchestra pit where—because Garth would be concerned and distracted by my condition—I’d be worse than useless. I kept sucking in deep breaths, tried to will myself to remain conscious.

  But the double dose of greenies was coursing through my system, addling my brain.

  My world of darkness, driving snow, and wind rolled around a few times, and for a moment I thought the snowmobile had tipped over. But it was only my brains rolling around, and I somehow managed to keep my grip on the navigator’s jacket and my pink sneaker—clad feet on the riding bar. Suddenly, without warning, the snowmobile ran up the side of a huge snowbank, flew through the air, then came down with a teeth-rattling jolt into a field of intense white light in which the rumble, clank, and grinding of gears of heavy machinery was even louder than the roar of the wind. We swooped across a wide swath of relatively flat, hard-packed snow, came to a stop in front of a soaring structure that, in my blurred field of vision, looked as high as a mountain, but was only a hangar. I rolled off the back of the snowmobile, fell into a mound of snow. I stuck my face into the icy powder, trying to clear my vision and my thoughts.

  Strong hands gripped the back of my shirt and pulled me to my feet. I turned, found myself looking up into my brother’s face.

  “Mongo!” Garth cried in alarm. “What’s the matter with you?! You’re cross-eyed!”

  I managed to mumble, “If you think my eyes are crossed, you should see the circuitry inside my head. What time is it? I can’t see my watch.”

  “You lost your watch. It’s six fifteen.”

  I hoped the fact that I couldn’t keep a working watch on my wrist wasn’t a bad omen. I stepped to the side, raised my hands to shield my eyes from the driving snow, looked out over the area in front of the hangar, and felt my heart constrict. The National Guardsmen had done a good job in mobilizing equipment and personnel, because I estimated that there were at least a dozen pieces of heavy machinery rumbling around in an attempt to clear a path in the snow. But it wasn’t enough. I had no idea how long a runway an SST needed to take off, but it was certainly more than the hundred yards or so that the snow movers were operating in. And as soon as the plows moved farther out, snow blew and drifted back in behind them, accumulating at an alarming rate. Just in the few minutes I’d been standing in front of the hangar, huge flakes had collected on my hair, lashes, shoulders, and sneakers.

  Less than six hours to Armageddon, and it was looking more and more like the second horseman out of Eden was going to be riding forth, killing untold millions in the initial explosion of his appearance and more untold millions in the radioactive wake of his passing. I clenched my fists in frustration, choked back a sob of grief and rage.

  “We’re not going to make it, Garth,” I murmured, and immediately hated myself for saying it.

  “Let’s get you out of the cold, brother,” Garth said, and started to haul me up the side of the snowbank.

  I angrily shook off his grip—and promptly fell on my face in the snow. He grabbed me again, and half-pulled, half-carried me to the top of the mound of snow. We slid down the other side, found a door, went into the hangar. As soon as the steel door was shut, there was an almost eerie silence inside the cavernous space, which was filled with a ghostly, yellowish glow cast by spotlights powered by emergency generators.

  In the center of the glow sat a magnificent, sleek airplane, its metal skin glistening in the light, its needle nose almost touching the closed hangar door. Even as I watched, two men in maintenance uniforms came around from the opposite side of the plane; they opened hatches under the rear of the fuselage, shone flashlights up into the compartments, checked hoses and dials.

  Garth grabbed me as I started to sag, picked me up and carted me over to a corner, set me down on top of a pile of folded blue tarpaulins. I started to get up, but he put a hand on my chest and shoved me back down, covering me with a flap of the top tarpau
lin.

  “Rest, Mongo,” Garth said in a low, firm voice. “You’re going to need it. I’ve got a nose for other things besides evil, and it tells me that we’re going to get up. I know it.”

  “It would take a miracle, Garth.”

  “We’re going to make it.”

  “Garth, don’t leave me behind.”

  “I won’t, Mongo.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “You know I have to be there, the same as you.”

  “I know.”

  “Promise again that you won’t leave me behind.”

  “I promise again.”

  My brother didn’t lie—not usually. But I didn’t trust him; not this time, since he was certainly capable of lying—and leaving me on the ground—if he thought it would save my life. Consequently, I struggled to stay awake. The result was a kind of surreal semiconsciousness in which blurred images moved about, accompanied by the muffled howl of wind and roar of machinery.

  Segueing in and out of consciousness, I suddenly heard something begin to whine; the whine quickly grew in volume until it became a roar of sound cascading against my senses. I came fully awake, panicky, afraid that the plane was about to take off without me. I sat bolt upright—and saw Garth hurrying across the hangar toward me. He looked exhausted, his brown eyes glassy and sunken deep in their sockets. At the same time, there was an almost eerie serenity reflected in his features.

  “Ready to roll, brother?” he said softly, smiling down at me as he brushed a thin, greasy strand of wheat-colored hair back from his eyes.

  “Oh, yeah.” I struggled to get to my feet, fell off the pile of tarpaulins onto the concrete floor. I was feverish again, bone-deep exhausted, and still nauseated from the amphetamine overdose. “I’m sorry, Garth. Help me, please.”

  He did, pulling me to my feet and supporting me with one arm as we walked toward the ramp that was extended from the center of the SST’s fuselage. I glanced at his watch; it was 9:00.

  “The phones …?”

  “Still out.”

  “Did they manage to plow …?”

  “No. But we’re going anyway.”

  With Garth supporting me by the back of my shirt, I managed to walk up the ramp and into the plane. Garth steered me left, through a thick steel door that Nigel Fickley was holding open for us, into a spacious cockpit that was in semidarkness except for the light cast by a glittering array of instrumentation that seemed to be all around me. Jack Holloway was strapped into the pilot’s seat, and he gave a thumbs-up sign to me as we entered.

  “Strap yourselves in, gentlemen,” Holloway said in his clipped tones. “And please allow me to apologize in advance for what may be a slightly bumpy takeoff.”

  Garth and I sat down in two seats at the rear of the cockpit, on either side of the steel door, and strapped ourselves in. Nigel Fickley eased his lanky frame down into the copilot’s seat, buckled himself in.

  Holloway tilted his head back. “Ready, gentlemen?”

  “Hit it, Captain,” Garth replied evenly.

  Holloway signaled to someone below him, and a few moments later the huge hangar door opened—onto a nightmare. In the glare carved out of the darkness by the plane’s lights I could see that the snow-removing equipment had been removed—but it was almost as if nothing had changed; snow was everywhere, and I knew that in the darkness beyond the light there were huge drifts. Also, undoubtedly, there were trucks, perhaps even stalled planes—dozens of snowbound, buried obstacles that could kill us.

  Holloway pushed the wide handle of the throttle forward, and I could feel as well as hear the power surging through the plane. But we didn’t move.

  “Release the brakes on my mark, Lieutenant, and raise the landing gear on my second mark.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fickley said easily. “Luck.”

  “Luck.”

  Holloway eased the throttle even further forward, and the roar of the engines grew in volume; the plane began to vibrate as tens of thousands of horsepower howled in a kind of mechanical dismay and outrage, demanding that their awesome power be unleashed.

  “Mark!”

  “Aye!”

  The screaming, gargantuan silver bullet that was the Concorde shot out of the mouth of the hangar into the maelstrom of night, wind, and snow.

  “Mark!”

  “Aye!”

  For the first few seconds, before the landing gear came up into the belly of the plane, there was tremendous drag on the plane as the wheels ground through the snow. The muscles in Holloway’s forearms bunched and stood out as he pulled back on a control. Then the wheels were up and the SST became an improbable ballistic sled catapulting us out across unknown territory.

  Suddenly I suffered another dizzy spell; my vision blurred, and the cockpit began to spin. I screwed my eyes shut, opened them again just as the plane began to sideslip, its tail yawing over to the left. Holloway, his hands virtually flying from one control to another, struggled for control. I felt as if I were hurtling down a roller coaster, and I was afraid I would vomit. The plane yawed sharply in the opposite direction, shuddered, then finally straightened out and shot forward with even greater speed; but now I was certain it was heading in a different direction, toward—whatever. Dark, terrifying black shapes that I was certain were planes or trucks or hangars flashed by, and great waves of snow splashed like water against the windows as we sliced through huge snow drifts. Again the plane yawed from side to side, again Holloway managed to correct.

  Again, everything began to spin—but this time I was certain it was the plane itself, and not my head. We were out of control. The last thought in my head before everything exploded in brilliant flashes of red, black, and green was that this time Garth’s nose had been wrong. We were about to die, only a couple of hours ahead of millions of other people.

  15.

  “Hey, Mongo. Wake up.”

  Somebody, undoubtedly Garth, had unbuckled my seat belt, and I sat upright. My brother pushed me back into the seat, handed me a plastic cup filled with something that was redolent with the delicious aroma of, of all things, fresh coffee.

  “What—?! Garth, what—?!”

  “It’s all right. Just sit back, relax, and think of me as your happy steward. I was a bit worried about you; your face was the color of those pills when you passed out. I do believe you’re looking better now.”

  “I feel better,” I said, sipping at the steaming coffee. It hit my stomach, spreading a warm, tingling glow throughout my body. The coffee was very sweet. “You look terrible.”

  “Now I’m ready for one of those pills. You got the bottle?”

  I dug the bottle out of my pocket, handed it to him. He shook out one of the amphetamines, swallowed it with his coffee. When he proffered the bottle back to me, I shook my head. I’d had enough of the greenies, and would now settle for whatever energy I could get out of the sugar in the coffee. For however long we had left.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten thirty.”

  “Could you get through to Lippitt or Shannon?”

  “Yes. You passed out on us, so you missed the takeoff. Once we got off the ground, our good captain here took us right out over the ocean, and up. We cleared the storm in minutes. It was quite a ride.”

  “I’m just as happy I slept through it, because I certainly didn’t care for the first part. But you did get through?”

  Garth smiled. “I said I did. To both of them.”

  “And?”

  “They’re working on it.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Lippitt brought up a good point, Mongo. We may have a problem.”

  I pushed Garth’s hand aside, sat up on the edge of my seat. “What would that be?”

  “First, he pointed out that the signal could be sent out manually—before midnight, Eastern Time—if the people inside that biosphere get wind that somebody’s trying to interfere with their plans.”

  “You said
Thompson and the other two ex-jocks told you they didn’t know where the transmitter was.”

  “Other people will. Vicky Brown’s father is a caretaker; he knows. A lot of people could know. We have to assume that every single person in there is as loony as the creeps we’ve run into, and just as dedicated to their Armageddon fantasy. Lippitt argues—and I agree with him—that somebody in there might just traipse off and trip off the transmitter prematurely if an Army battalion comes knocking at their door.”

  “Oh, Christ, you mean they’re just going to go ahead and bomb the place with everybody in it?”

  “No—not yet. He also pointed out that there’s no guarantee that the initial bomb run would destroy everyone, or the transmitter. Assuming the transmitter can be manually operated, and somebody gets to it, that’s the ball game. Ten acres is a lot of area; if the first bombs don’t destroy the transmitter, the shocks might trip it.”

  I licked my lips, swallowed hard. “What about … something nuclear?”

  Garth shook his head. “I didn’t even ask, and Lippitt didn’t bring it up. If that’s an option, he’ll be talking it over with Shannon. Eden may be too close to Boise.”

  “So it’s up to us.”

  “Right. Lippitt is counting on us to get in there, find the transmitter, and shut it down. It means we have a chance to save the girl.”

  I thought about it, shook my head. “Shit, Garth. That’s too much responsibility. What if we can’t find the transmitter?”

  “The bombers start their run at five minutes to midnight, Eastern Time. If we’re not out of there by then, we’ve celebrated our last New Year’s Eve.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  Again, Garth smiled. “I told him we’d take care of it, naturally, and that he should have somebody bring along a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of Scotch.”

  “That’s cute, brother,” I said tersely as I grabbed his wrist and twisted it around in order to glance at his watch. It was 10:40. “How long before we get to Idaho?”

  “The captain tells me we’re there—have been for the last ten minutes. That’s why I woke you up. It seems we’re sort of circling around the borders of the state. This is an SST, remember? They’re trying to find the place, which isn’t the easiest thing to do from this high in the sky, at night.”