by Gabriel Hunt
Internal batteries shall concentrate energy of southern sun but shall not exceed nine hundred kilojoules; any excess to be released in the form of ambient radiation…
And this, underlined heavily at the bottom of a page: Of paramount importance, please note, once activated, device cannot be deactivated.
“Hell,” Gabriel said. Looking up, he saw Millie looming over them, the pair of spears in hand once more. “Get her out of here. Take her to the plane and tell Rue to get the damn thing ready to fly.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Gabriel said. “But I’ve got to do something.” He reached out for the nozzle, thinking maybe he could bend it backward or break it off, but the instant he touched it he discovered it was burning hot. He snatched his hand back, cursing.
“You can’t stop it, Gabriel,” Velda said in her suddenly affectless voice. “It’s done. They’ll pay for what they did to my father.”
“I said get her out of here,” Gabriel growled.
Millie reached for her. She shrank back, but he scooped her up in one big arm and dragged her to his chest. He looked her in the eye. “If you don’t want what those two got, Velda, you’ll come quietly. No biting, no hitting, no kneeing, no gouging. You try anything, you’ll be out cold before you know it.”
“Do you enjoy manhandling women,” Velda said, struggling in his grip, “because your daddy gave you a sissy name?”
“No, ma’am,” Millie said. “I like my name just fine. Now quiet down or I’ll show you what real manhandling’s like.” He tightened his grip on her and headed off, ignoring her demands that he put her down and leaning on the spears in his other hand for support.
Gabriel turned back to the machine. If it couldn’t be shut off, maybe it could at least be redirected? He took hold of the dial and turned it. The coordinates on the readout changed as he did so and he heard a grinding noise from the inside of the machine, as of some sort of internal mechanism laboriously being shifted to a new setting. So it wasn’t too late for that: he could aim it at a different target.
But…what target? He’d turned the dial at random; he didn’t recognize the new coordinates, didn’t know what location he’d set it to. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, it looked like—maybe Russia. But he couldn’t leave it there, obviously. The people there didn’t deserve the destruction Velda had set in motion any more than the people of Berlin did. It was a Sophie’s Choice he was facing, he realized, only on a monumental scale: to have to select not an individual but an entire city on earth to be destroyed.
Unless—
He was finding it hard to concentrate, hard to think at all, with the buzzing and the pain in his head, but he forced himself to focus.
Could he choose a location so remote, he thought, so unpopulated, that what ever effect this device had wouldn’t hurt anyone—somewhere in the middle of a desert or the ocean, say?
It was an idea—but to make it work he’d need to know the coordinates of such a location, and he didn’t. He knew the coordinates for plenty of places, but they were all places he’d been, and there wasn’t one of them he’d be prepared to consign to destruction. There probably were some completely barren areas the Untergang device could target without harming anyone—the sort where governments conducted nuclear tests, for instance. But he was damned if he knew where they were, certainly not with the pinpoint accuracy that setting this machine required. He might be able to come close, to make a reasonable guess—but if he was off by a few degrees in specifying the coordinates, it could mean hundreds of thousands of lives. Or millions.
He looked over the notebook again. Any deviation will reduce intensity in inverse proportion to the square of the distance…
Maybe there was a way at least to choose a better rather than a worse target. Not by trying to decide what city deserved destruction, but by limiting the extent of the destruction itself. The Nazis had sent their mission here to the South Pole because this was apparently the perfect location from which to strike at Washington, D.C. A strike originating here that was directed at a different location would have “reduced intensity,” Groener had written, with the reduction being greater as the target’s distance from Washington increased. So the best possible place to strike if you wanted to do the least possible damage would be a location as far as possible from Washington, D.C. But where would that be?
He’d have been able to think more clearly if only his head hadn’t been pounding and his vision hadn’t been going blurry. It felt like his skull was being crushed in a wine press.
Where, damn it? Where could he direct the Untergang device to strike so it would do the least possible damage?
The answer came to him with sudden clarity.
He even had the coordinates.
He flipped back through the notebook, looking for a particular sentence he’d seen earlier.
Finding it, he turned the dial. His hand was shaking as he did so and his ears were ringing. The edges of his vision were not blurry any longer but blood red, and the borders of this red patch were encroaching on the center—it was as if he were looking at the world through a narrowing tunnel. But at the end of the tunnel he could still make out the panel showing the coordinates, and he kept working the dial until it reached the setting he wanted.
What was the farthest target from Washington, D.C.?
Right here.
To target Washington, device must be placed at precisely the following coordinates…
He got to his feet when the coordinates showing on the panel matched the ones shown in the notebook—the very spot where Gabriel was now standing. Let the Untergang machine target itself. At minimum intensity, in the barren wastes of Antarctica—there weren’t a lot of places less populated, certainly. That is, if you ignored this anomalous valley itself; even at minimum intensity, it might be irreparably damaged, maybe destroyed. But if he could get the people of the valley on the plane and make it out before the machine went off…
A new light flickered on above the coordinate panel, a bright yellow bulb that slowly blinked on and off. Then a man’s voice, crackling with static, spoke, a recorded voice out of the distant past, perhaps Dr. Groener himself.
“Fünfzehn minuten zur aktivierung…Fünfzehn minuten zur aktivierung…”
Fifteen minutes to activation.
Not much time to load a half-century-old plane with two dozen hostile women, only one of whom spoke any English. Not to mention getting that plane in the air.
Which meant he had to leave now.
Gabriel turned to make his way out—and saw Velda storm through the doorway, Millie’s two spears clutched in her hands.
Chapter 27
“Step away from that machine, Gabriel,” Velda said, coming toward him. Her gown was in shreds, leaving her naked to the waist and barely covered below.
He didn’t move. “What did you do to Millie?”
“Made him put me down,” she replied flatly as she crossed the room, raising the spears to point at Gabriel’s chest. “Remarkable what a kick to a broken ankle will do.”
“You shouldn’t have done it, Velda,” Gabriel said. “He was taking you to safety. This place is going to be destroyed in minutes.”
“This place? What are you talking about?” Her voice suddenly wasn’t affectless anymore.
“I reset the device,” Gabriel said. “To target itself.”
“You did what?” Velda came to a stop.
“I can’t let you kill millions of innocent people. No matter what the women here did to your father. Or what the Germans did to him sixty years ago.”
“You had no right,” she snarled. She jabbed one of the spears at him. He knocked its point aside with his forearm.
Velda lunged for him with the other spear, its sharpened stone blade whistling through the air directly toward his face. He ducked at the last second and it clanged against the metal sphere behind him. She pulled it back while stabbing out with the first spear again. It caught him high
on one thigh, drawing blood.
He reached out, seized the shaft right behind the blade, and yanked it out of her grip. Spinning it in a circle like a staff, Gabriel brought the point around toward Velda. They faced off, weapons aimed at one another.
“Vierzehn minuten zur aktivierung…”
“If we don’t get out of here, we’re going to die,” Gabriel said. “This thing’s going off in fourteen minutes.”
“So let me change the goddamn settings back, Hunt!” She swung her spear at his head. He tried to duck it, but the rapid motion of his head brought on a powerful wave of dizziness. He tried to stay upright, but couldn’t. He put out one hand and caught himself as he tumbled to the floor. The spear fell from his grasp.
Velda was still standing. She was wincing, but she hadn’t been in the room with the machine as long as he had, so she hadn’t been affected as strongly yet. She strode forward, raising her spear high above her head with both hands, preparing to plunge it down into his neck.
“Don’t, Velda,” he said. He could barely hear his own voice over the thrumming of the machine and the rush of blood in his ears. “Please. Your father wouldn’t want this sort of vengeance. His own daughter killing millions in his name? How could anyone who survived what he did want that?”
“Don’t you dare presume to tell me what my father would have wanted,” Velda shouted, her eyes blazing with fury. “Don’t you dare!” The silver pocket watch hung by its chain between her sweat-streaked breasts, its cover having snapped open as she ran. Inside, he saw the tiny photo, the older man and the loving daughter. She still saw herself as a loving daughter, he knew—but the savage hatred on her face now had nothing in common with the girl in the photo. Nothing in common with a sane human being.
If there had been more time, maybe he could have helped her, or someone could have; she could have recovered; this madness could have passed.
But there was no more time.
“Okay,” Gabriel said, his voice soft. “Change it back. Do what you have to.”
She lowered her spear and stepped forward. She was just a foot shy of the machine, and he was in the way. “Move,” she said.
He tried to look her in the eye, but from where he lay she seemed miles away. “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “I really am.” And he rolled backward, hard, ramming with all his strength into the narrow metal legs of the frame that held the Untergang machine in place.
For an instant, the machine stayed where it was, just rotating as the structure beneath it tipped; the body of the sphere turned, the side with the heavy lens attached sliding down toward Gabriel and Velda, the side with the red-hot nozzle swinging up and out of reach. Then Gabriel rammed the frame again and the metal ball toppled from its perch.
Velda had time enough to raise one arm, as though to ward off a blow. The device plunged toward her. The thick, riveted metal skin narrowly missed her—and so did the heavy glass surface of the lens. They passed just inches away, the metal in front of her and the glass behind her. But any feeling of relief or triumph on her part must have been infinitely brief. Gabriel ducked his head and rolled out of the path of the sphere, so he didn’t see what happened—but he heard the gruesome sizzle, saw the blinding flash of magnesium-white light, and smelled the strong, nauseating scent of ozone. When he looked back, she was gone.
The device itself rolled till it fetched up against the wall. The nozzle, miraculously, was still attached, still protruding from the sphere like a stem from an orange. The lens had snapped off and lay in pieces on the floor. Painted in soot across the surface of the largest piece he saw the silhouette of a woman, head thrown back, one arm raised above her head.
“Good-bye, Velda,” he whispered as he staggered to his feet.
Was there any chance the thing was irreparably damaged, that it wouldn’t go off…? Any hope he might have harbored was dashed when he heard the crackly recorded voice, still counting down.
“Zwölf minuten zur aktivierung…”
Twelve minutes. He grabbed the spear he’d dropped and raced out of the room.
His head began clearing as soon as he got out into the open air. It was sticky, it was hot, it was humid—but it wasn’t filled with deadly radiation or that intense, unnatural, unbearable pressure the machine had somehow created. He oriented himself quickly and headed off in the direction of the plane. He couldn’t hear the voice any longer, but he knew what it would be saying: zehn minuten…neun minuten…acht minuten…
“Millie!” he called as he ran, pushing branches and enormous fronds out of the way. “Millie!”
“I’m here,” came a pained reply a hundred yards later, and as Gabriel rounded a bend he saw the big man crawling toward him on his hands and knees, his face a mask of pure agony. The splint was still on his ankle, but the foot was bent crookedly inside it. Gabriel threw the spear to him and Millie reached up to snatch it out of the air. Gabriel rushed over to his side and helped him up. Millie leaned heavily on the spear and slung his other arm around Gabriel’s shoulders. He stood on one leg, kept the other bent at the knee. He couldn’t put any weight at all on it.
“Where’s Velda?” Millie whispered through his grimace.
“She’s dead,” Gabriel said.
“Feel better already,” Millie muttered.
“Bad news is, we’ll be joining her if we don’t get to that plane in ten minutes or less.” He thought for a second. “Less.”
“Seriously?” Millie said.
“Seriously,” Gabriel said.
“Fuck.” Millie took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s do it.”
They ran—or anyway Gabriel ran, as best he could with Millie’s weight bearing down on his shoulders. The big man hopped along on one leg, planting the foot of the spear in the dirt each time and using it to pull himself forward with enormous heaves. The foliage grew thicker around them, slapping them in the face and chest as they lunged through it. But they kept pushing forward. Gabriel’s heart was hammering and his breath was painful and ragged when they finally glimpsed the H-shaped tail fin between two trees up ahead.
“That’s it,” Gabriel said, “we’re almost there—”
He heard a rustling in the undergrowth beside them. With a falling heart, he turned halfway around to face it. If it was another Tasmanian tiger, or god forbid one of those birds…
But when Millie, balancing on one leg, used the butt end of the spear to push aside a screen of leaves, Gabriel saw it hadn’t been an animal making the noise. Crouched low to the ground, her half-strung beads clutched tightly between her hands, was the young girl from the village.
“Oh, god,” Gabriel said. He looked back toward the village. The top of the tall central building was still in view, and as he watched, it crumpled inward.
He thought of the two unconscious guards he’d left behind on the floor. He thought of the old women by the well, who’d disappeared to who knew where. He thought of the pitiful sufferers in the men’s tent. Even if Gabriel and Millie made it to the plane, even if Rue managed to get them off the ground, there’d be no shortage of death in this valley.
Not this one, too.
“Come on,” he said to the girl, knowing she couldn’t understand a word. She shrank away from him.
“Millie, you do it. Talk to her.”
“I don’t speak their—”
“Just talk, you goddamn horse whisperer,” Gabriel said, and Millie steeled himself, forced the pain off his face and out of his voice, and began talking to the girl, low and soft, his words a trickle of sweet, slow molasses. “Come here, beautiful, it’s okay, we’re not gonna hurt you, you’ll be okay—but you’ve got to come with us, that’s it, come here…”
Gabriel looked back at the village again. The central building was completely gone, and a hot wind had started to blow in their direction, rattling the branches of the trees.
“Come on, Millie,” Gabriel whispered. “Now or never.”
The girl had crept forward. She was within reach. “I can�
�t carry her and walk,” Millie said.
“Put her on your back,” Gabriel said.
“Honey, don’t run, I’m gonna pick you up, you understand me?” He made a lifting gesture with his arm. “Up, okay? It’ll be fine, just trust me.” Gabriel looked in the girl’s eyes. She seemed a bit less frightened, or at least he told himself she did.
“Now, Millie. Now.”
With one sweep of his arm, Millie lifted the girl off her feet and tossed her onto his back. She squealed with momentary terror, but he kept talking to her, and when he let go of her skinny waist she didn’t jump off. Instead, she wrapped her legs around his thick neck and took fistfuls of his hair in both little hands.
“That’s great, honey,” Millie said, “now we’re going for a ride.”And sweeping the spear out in front of him, he resumed his lurching forward march, Gabriel running alongside him, keeping him up.
The hot wind pursued them, gaining strength. It felt like it had reached gale force by the time they finally broke out into the clearing where the plane stood. A loud buzz of exclamations arose from the crowd of women when they saw Millie and Gabriel stagger into view with the wind at their back. Rue looked up. She was crouched on the plane’s wing, twisting a wrench in the innards of the fuselage, but she leapt down and ran to them, pushing taller bodies out of the way till she was at Millie’s other side and could grab him around the waist.
Looking down, Gabriel saw that one of Rue’s small bare feet was wrapped with bloody barkcloth.
“Jesus,” Gabriel said.
“Don’t worry,” Rue said. “It’s not my clutch foot.”
She steered them toward the open ramp at the rear of the plane.
“Have you got it working?” Gabriel asked.
“Like a charm,” Rue said. “A cranky, leaky, rusty, sixty-five-year-old charm.”
“Well, you’ve got five minutes to get us in the air,” Gabriel said.
Rue’s face couldn’t properly be said ever to go pale, but she blanched all the same. “Five minutes…?”
“Fünf minuten,” Gabriel said. “Not a minuten more.”