by Paul Kenyon
She threw away the automatic rifle and drew the Spyder. His back was a tempting target. The explosive piton would detonate in his spine, spreading its little steel claws, and she could reel him in like a fish.
But she mustn't. If he dropped the capsule, it might crack.
She aimed low and fired at the snowmobile's stubby rear. The plastic thread hissed across thirty feet of space. Instantly she was jerked off her feet. She held onto the Spyder's butt with both hands and went bouncing painfully over the snow at twenty miles an hour.
She was the fish. And now she was going to reel herself in.
She slid on her belly across the slick surface, going faster and faster. It was only a matter of time before she hit a rock or a tree stump that would kill her. She worked the Spyder's clutch like a deep-sea fisherman, gaining an inch of line here, a foot there, every time there was some slack.
The Chinese bent over his handlebars, oblivious to her presence.
She was getting closer. By God, her body was bruised all over, but she was pulling herself closer and closer to the runaway vehicle!
Her body slammed into a little hollow, knocking the breath out of her. She almost lost consciousness, but she hung on. A little more! Ten feet! A yard! A foot! And then her fingers were clawing at the snowmobile's rear trim, and she was pulling herself up over the whirring rubber tread.
He looked over his shoulder when her weight settled in the rear saddle. His mouth gaped in shock. He reached for his gun, dropping the capsule.
She grabbed for the capsule. The hell with the gun! She caught it and hugged it to her, holding herself on the leather perch with her strong thighs.
He was fumbling with his holster, having an awkward time of it. He got the revolver in his hand and twisted in his seat, trying to see the target riding behind him. She embraced him with her free arm, squeezing as close to him as she could get. His arm, clumsy in the heavy quilted sleeve, crossed his chest to fire over his left shoulder. She leaned to the right, and the bullet whistled past her cheek. She got her right arm further around his torso and grabbed the revolver by its cylinder. He pulled the trigger again, and she felt the cylinder trying to revolve under her fingers.
The snowmobile was zigzagging erratically, slowing down and swaying from side to side as they wrestled for the gun. His broken leg dangled inches from the ground. She kicked at it, where she thought the broken edges of the bone would be.
He didn't utter a sound. She had to give him credit for that. But she could feel his body jerk in a spasm of pain. He let go of the revolver and she plucked the revolver from his hand.
He grabbed for her forearm, but she had already shifted her grip to the handle of the Colt. She put the long barrel to his head, cocked the hammer, closed her eyes and squeezed. There was a deafening explosion, and she could feel the powder burns on her forehead and eyelids. She opened her eyes in time to see the side of his head fly away.
The snowmobile lurched to a stop. She dismounted and propped the heavy moon capsule in his arms for safekeeping. He looked as if he were cradling a baby. Blood from his ruined head dripped down over the dull metal, giving the cylinder a darker cap.
The firing had stopped back there at the scene of the battle with the Chinese. Skytop and the others had finished mopping up. They'd be coming after her soon, following the track of her snowmobile. There was a clump of stunted birches about fifty yards away. Wearily, she walked over and rested her bruised back against one of the trunks.
Sumo arrived about ten minutes later, riding by himself on a captured Chinese snowmobile.
"Eric and Inga are chasing after your machine's track. I thought I'd branch off in this direction. Dan and the Chief will be along as soon as they tidy things up back there."
Sumo untied a bulky squarish parcel from the back seat. With an effort he set it down on the ground and unwrapped it. It was the laser autoclave.
"I thought you'd want to cook some virus," he said with a grin.
Together they assembled the panels into the miniature coffin shape that would hold the moon capsule. Sumo adjusted the cylindrical laser housing at one end and turned on the switch.
"We're pumping photons," he said. "It'll take about five minutes for this thing to warm up."
"I'll get the moon capsule," the Baroness said.
She started toward the Chinese snowmobile with its grisly burden. There was a strangled cry from Sumo.
"Stop!" he choked.
She stopped and looked at the corpse of the Chinese officer she'd killed.
It was moving. Moving in a queer, unnatural way. A boneless flow, like some soft-bodied sea creature, as if inside the quilted jacket, tissues were slumping. As she watched, the body slipped off the saddle to the ground, holding the moon capsule in an abnormal embrace.
"The virus," she whispered. "It must have eaten through the capsule."
She and Sumo could see the head of the corpse growing softer. It sagged like jelly. It was a viscous blob that began visibly to flatten and spread over the snow. And now the upper torso of the body was growing shapeless.
Sumo turned to her, horror on his face. "Did any of that stuff get on you?" he said.
"I don't think so. I'd be feeling something by now. The virus must have broken through after I came over here."
Instinctively they both backed away a few more feet.
"Not much wind," Sumo said. "And it's blowing away from us, thank God! The virus must be working fast, with all that blood and those open wounds to gobble up."
The corpse was bubbling now as a fermenting mass forced its way through the fabric of the clothing. There was a brownish foam over the quilted jacket.
"Get back," the Baroness said. "I don't know how fast the contaminated circle is growing, but I don't want to be within a hundred yards of that thing. An hour from now I don't want to be within a mile."
Sumo faced her, the pupils of his eyes wide with dread. "I'll do it," he said in a small voice. "What the hell, I'm dead anyway. I might as well put the capsule in the autoclave. Fifty million degrees Centigrade. Even the virus can't survive in that."
He started walking toward the corpse. The Baroness pulled him back.
"Forget it, Tommy," she said. "It's too late. We were supposed to vaporize a sealed container. You can't put that body in the autoclave. You can't fit yourself inside."
His slight body went rigid. "It's the end of everything, then. Man. Plants. Animals. Life itself."
She faced the thought. It was a big one. It took a while to get adjusted to it.
"That's about it, Tommy," she said. She gave him a pale smile. "We made a nice try, though."
Chapter 17
Wharton was the first to arrive. He was driving one of the big Chinese machines. It was towing a long sledge that carried a twenty-foot metal pole with a red flag flapping from its rear.
Sumo ran toward him, waving his arms. "Back!" he cried, "back!"
Wharton jerked to a stop. The sledge, continuing on its own momentum, banged into the snowmobile's rear.
"What's up, Tommy?" he said.
They told him.
Wharton looked at them without saying anything. Then he turned toward the corpse, lying fifty yards away. The disintegration of the body was continuing. It looked flat inside its uniform, like a giant gingerbread man. There was a foul brown leakage from the sleeves and collar, staining the snow. The deadly cylinder had sunk deep into the chest, a pair of empty-looking sleeves wrapped around it.
"Jesus!" Wharton said.
The Baroness touched his arm. "We'd better get out of here, Dan," she said. "We can't outrun the virus forever, but for now we'd better put some distance between us and it."
"Maybe we can still lick it," he said.
"What do you mean?"
He jerked a thumb toward the sledge with its metal boom. "I found something interesting among the Chinese equipment. I thought I'd better bring it along for Tommy to look at."
They went over to examine it. Up close the
y could see that it was some kind of steel casing, its sections riveted together, with little service hatches spaced along its sides. Chinese characters were stenciled on each hatch. Sumo read one of the groups, his eyes widening. He looked up at Wharton and the Baroness.
"A nuclear bomb," he said. "The Chinese brought a nuclear bomb with them."
"They probably planned to blow up the piece of peninsula with the Russian laboratory on it, if they couldn't get inside," Wharton said. "If they couldn't have the virus, the Russians couldn't either. Or maybe they wanted to set off a nuclear explosion to cover their getaway. Leave the bomb behind at the coast to blow up a couple of square miles of Russian troops."
The Baroness leaned forward, her eyes gleaming. "Tommy, can you make that thing work?"
"I think so. The arming mechanism seems pretty straightforward. And here's the timer."
"What class bomb would you guess we've got here?"
He pondered. "Probably twenty megatons."
"That's my guess, too. The radius of total destruction will be on the order of eight miles. How hot is it going to get here at the center?"
He grinned. "About three hundred million degrees Centigrade."
"Hot enough to vaporize our virus, wouldn't you say?"
"And any of the landscape it may have contaminated."
"Get to work, Tommy. And hurry!"
It took Sumo about a half-hour to arm the bomb. He worked quickly, deftly, blowing on his fingers to keep them warm, glancing nervously over his shoulder from time to time. Skytop and Eric arrived and were warned from the immediate area. Inga pulled up shortly afterward, driving the Baroness' snowmobile, which she'd retrieved.
Sumo straightened up and put his gloves back on. "Let's get the hell out of here," he said.
* * *
They stood on the barren shore of the Kanin Peninsula's northern tip, gazing past the tumbled ice floes toward the sea. Somewhere out there was the nuclear submarine that was going to pick them up. "We have to get in these rubber laundry bags again, huh?" Skytop said.
"Unless you want to swim the whole twenty miles," the Baroness said dryly.
Inga was coaxing one of the borzois into her waterproof sack. Eric would take the other dog. It was going to be easier this time, without the load of weapons and equipment they'd had to struggle with before.
Sumo made a last-minute inspection of the laser signal device. They couldn't risk any kind of radio this close to the Russian defenses — not even a high-speed burst. But the submarine was equipped to detect a laser flash in the invisible part of the spectrum. It would surface just long enough to pick up six bags of people and dogs. It had been waiting out there, raising periscope twice a day at a predetermined time, for a week. It had been told to wait out there until the end of the world, if necessary.
But the end of the world didn't seem so close any more.
"Something's bothering me," Eric said. "When that hydrogen bomb goes off, it's going to destroy a sixteen-mile circle of Russian territory. Including the bodies of all those Chinese soldiers and their equipment. But they planted all that false evidence at the germ lab which made it seem that America was responsible for their raid. And now a nuclear explosion. We may have saved the world from the moon virus. But haven't we risked starting World War Three?"
The Baroness shook her head. "We're planting some evidence of our own. The Chinese will get the blame."
"What do you mean?"
"Hydrogen bombs leave fingerprints."
"Yes, but…"
"This one's going to leave Chinese fingerprints. Russia's been keeping tabs on the fallout from the Chinese tests, just as we have. When they make their radio-chemical analysis of the debris from the explosion, they'll be able to tell what kind of bomb went off, the size, the design — and what country made it. The United States will be off the hook."
"Besides," Sumo grinned, "sooner or later somebody's going to come across these Chinese snowmobiles we're leaving on the beach."
Joe Skytop was pacing restlessly, casting nervous glances southward.
"Why doesn't that damn bomb go off?" he said.
Sumo glanced at his watch. "Any minute now. And you'd better not look in that direction. You don't want to take a chance on burning your retinas."
They hunkered down among the immense jagged blocks of ice that the spring thaw had thrown up on the beach, and waited. Inga and Eric had tied scarves around the borzois' eyes and were patting them and soothing them. Sumo had found some dark glasses among the stolen Chinese equipment, and now he passed them out.
The Baroness strained to see through the lenses. They seemed to be solid black. She couldn't see a thing.
And then there was a brilliant flash through the opaque glass, bright as the sun. Even through the protective lenses, the Baroness was temporarily blinded.
She waited a few seconds, tears running from her eyes, then snatched off the glasses. Far away to the south, a gigantic column of smoke was shooting high into the sky. As she watched, it widened at the top into a mushroom cloud.
The shock wave hit them three minutes later. The ground trembled under their feet. There was a prolonged rumbling, like thunder. A wind buffeted them.
She turned to the members of her team. Unabashed awe showed on their faces.
"Don't look so gloomy," she said. "We've just cured a virus."
* * *
Operation Doomsday had taken over the Underground War Room. It would take all the resources of the Defense Department to get the plan rolling, now that the final deadline had passed. America was closing up shop forever. Army trucks and military transport planes would be needed to ferry supplies and key personnel to the secret underground caverns. The Marines would have to move in to guard vital communications links, take over television stations, put potential troublemakers under arrest. Troops would have to be deployed to keep the civilian population under control.
The President turned weary eyes toward his Secretary of Defense. Neither of them had slept for forty-eight hours.
"I never thought when I took my oath of office that I'd be the President who'd go down in history for ending two hundred years of American democracy," he said.
"Look at it this way, Mr. President," said the Secretary of Defense. "There isn't going to be any history."
The Majority Leader spoke from the vantage point they'd given him in the corner of the glass-walled observation booth.
"You've done your best, Mr. President," he said. "No one's going to blame you. This is your last responsibility — an ugly one. Doing what you have to do to save a little seed stock to start over again." He and the President had been political enemies for more than two decades, but now his voice was soft and gentle.
"Thank you, Senator," the President said. "I appreciate the way you've kept your people quiet so far." He shook his head. "But in the next few hours, all hell's going to break loose."
"It's a gamble anyway," said the Secretary of Defense. "Dr. Kolbe doesn't guarantee that we'll be safe from the virus even in the underground shelters. One speck — two or three molecules of virus DNA getting through an air filter — and…" He broke off and stared glumly at the scene below.
The enormous chamber was as busy as an anthill that has been poked with a stick. Couriers scurried back and forth, handing sealed messages to the men working at pushbutton consoles, or to the shirtsleeved Action Groups huddled together at their tables. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were in another observation booth, across the floor. Here and there, on the floor itself, were various command posts for the military services and government agencies.
Dr. Kolbe pushed his way past the guard and came into the booth. "I've rechecked the computer figures as you requested, Mr. President," he said. "There's no mistake."
"The virus is loose, then?"
The thick-bodied epidemiologist consulted his watch. "The virus would have eaten its way through the capsule about four hours ago. By now, the area of prime contamination should be approximately a mile in di
ameter. I would expect that birds and other wildlife would begin to accelerate the spread at this point"
The President looked at his Defense Secretary. "And no word from Coin?"
"I'll get Sam. He's on the floor somewhere." The Secretary picked up a phone.
The NSA Director had just shouldered his way into the booth when the CriCon alarm went off. The President looked at the Secretary and leaned past the technician on duty to punch a button on the console.
"Yes?" he said.
The map on the President's private screen faded. It had been showing the location of supply routes and Marine checkpoints throughout the country as they were established. Now the earnest face of the DIRNSA duty officer appeared.
"Mr. President?" The duty officer squinted at something off-screen: his own TV monitor, as he made sure of his identification.
The NSA Director poked his head into the monitor camera's field of view. "It's all right, Hotchkiss," he said. "You've really got the President. And I'm here."
"Yes sir. We've got a report of an aboveground nuclear explosion. Russia, on the Kanin Peninsula. About twenty megatons, from the seismograph readings. No other information yet."
The President turned to the Secretary of Defense. "What do you know about this?"
The Secretary was sweating. "It's not one of ours. I swear it. It couldn't be!"
The President stared at the NSA Director, his face dark with foreboding. "What the hell has your Coin been up to?"
NSA leaned toward the screen. "Stay on it, Hotchkiss. I want all the raw data from the VELA Nuclear Test Detection Satellite as soon as it comes in. And get a plane with a nose scoop into that cloud of fallout right away, and I don't care how close to the Russian coast it has to fly!" He turned to the President, visibly shaken. "Coin wasn't carrying any kind of nuclear device, Mr. President. You know we'd have to go through the AEC and the Defense Department, and it would have come to you for review."