by Trevor Hoyle
“Cheryl, will you listen to me? Please? Will you try to understand?”
“In a word, no.”
Chase leaned toward her. “Gelstrom isn’t behind this project, can’t you understand that?” His voice had risen, and he glanced at Dan’s door, then went on in a lowered tone. “He’s not involved in any way.”
“Except for the small matter of a couple of billion dollars.”
“Does it matter where the money comes from? Money is money.” Chase had said it without knowing if he actually believed it.
For Cheryl, words were hardly adequate to express what she was feeling.
“I didn’t understand when you first told me about the project, before I knew that Gelstrom was funding it. But now—’’she broke off, fighting down emotion. “How can you, of all people, say that? Knowing what that man has done? My God, it does matter about the money—it does!”
She stood up and he heard her rummaging about in the darkened room. A moment later something solid and heavy with sharp corners hit him on the chest and tumbled into his lap.
“Read your own goddamn book!” Cheryl stood next to the couch, breathing hard. “It’s all in there. How certain companies made fortunes by raping the world and quietly disposing of anyone who got in their way. How a few scientists tried to warn people what was happening and were persecuted or ended up dead for their trouble. My own father, you might remember. You ought to read it. It might do you good— certainly jog your memory about a few things you’ve obviously forgotten.”
Chase smoothed the rumpled dust jacket and placed the book on the table. There wasn’t anything Cheryl could say that he hadn’t already thought about and agonized over. He was even prepared to concede that she was right; morally right, that is. But moral rightness or wrongness wasn’t the issue. He had to work on the project; it was a gut feeling as strong as any he’d ever felt in his life. Right or wrong didn’t stand a chance.
“You’ve spoken to Nick about it. How does he feel?”
“He thinks you’ve taken leave of your senses.”
“Then he must have changed his mind overnight,” Chase said. “I told him about Gelstrom on the way back from Desert Range. His exact words were, ‘Money is the means to an end, not an end in itself. If the guy wants to pay for his sins, why try to stop him?’ ”
“You omitted to tell him that Gelstrom murdered my father.”
“The reason I didn’t tell him that is because we don’t know whether Gelstrom was responsible. We don’t know that anyone was. It could have been an accident.”
Cheryl laughed, an ugly sound in the dim room. “What the hell is this, Gavin? A meeting of the Joseph Earl Gelstrom Appreciation Society?” He couldn’t see her face but he knew its expression. She said with a vehemence he’d never heard before, “At least Nick has principles he believes in—and adheres to.”
Well, well, well. It began to look as though a true-confessions therapy session had been going on here while he was running himself ragged at the UN. Little wonder that when he got back to the hotel he’d walked into an atmosphere you could have cut with a blunt shovel. “Where do we go from here?”
“I guess that’s up to you.”
“I’ve given them my answer. I’m not going back on it.”
“Then I guess you have my answer too.”
“I don’t want to lose you, Cheryl.”
“No?” The word was a bark, short and brutal. “I thought perhaps you were looking forward to working with Ruth Patton.”
“Ruth isn’t involved in the project.” What the hell was this?
“Is she involved with you?”
“What do you mean?”
Cheryl was leaning stiffly against the back of the couch, her face a pale indecipherable blur. “You ought to be more careful, Gavin. Especially in front of your son.”
A sickening chill swept through him. He tasted something vile at the back of his throat. He felt as if the solid foundation of his life had given way, as if he had been betrayed: first Nick, and then Cheryl, and now Dan. There were other emotions mixed in with it, sorrow, self-pity, and a thin streak of stubborn, bitter defiance.
He took a breath and said very calmly, “I’m not doing this for Ruth, for Prothero or Van Dorn, for Gelstrom, or for myself. If you can’t see why I’m doing it, if you won’t try to understand, then you and I have nothing more to say to each other.”
“I didn’t think we had,” said Cheryl, tight-lipped and dry-eyed.
By dawn of the day after the incident at the UN, armored ground forces, airborne troops, and two squadrons of helicopter gunships had been mobilized for a combined assault on an area adjacent to the White River, roughly ten miles south of the small town of Lund in eastern Nevada.
Intelligence reports indicated that members of the religious sect known as the Faith had been living in the vicinity for at least ten years, yet three sorties by reconnaissance aircraft had so far failed to pinpoint the exact location. The army commander in charge of the operation doubted whether the settlement could number much above three hundred people, but even so a community of that size should have been easy to spot in the emptiness of sparse scrub and bare mountain peaks. He ordered another sweep at first light, this time employing the full range of detection devices at their disposal, including high-resolution film, infrared and spectroscopic analysis.
Meanwhile roadblocks were set up on every highway, minor road and backwoods trail within a radius of fifty miles from the target point. Which turned out to be a real headache. There were literally hundreds of unmapped mining trails crisscrossing the valley between Currant Summit and Mount Grafton, and it seemed impossible to seal off the area so that individuals and small groups couldn’t sneak through the cordon.
By ten o’clock the data from the latest reconnaissance had been processed. They revealed extensive cultivation to the east of the river and also showed up a high level of thermal activity, detected by the infrared scan, which could mean one of two things: natural hot springs bubbling up from underground or human habitation.
Yet still, maddeningly, the film and photographs revealed nothing. A few old mine workings and that was all.
Finally, running short of patience and inspiration, the commander made the decision to send in two advance ground units, to approach from north and south respectively. At 1:20 a column of trucks and armored personnel carriers moved along the narrow blacktop of route 38; the southern force comprising 264 officers and men of the Forty-seventh Marine Group. Their orders were to locate the settlement, detain anyone they found there, and radio back the position to headquarters at Caliente.
Fifteen miles from Lund, Maj. Sam Coogan told his driver to stop. Behind them the column crept to a halt. With his second-in-command, Captain Hance, he leaned over a map spread across the wheel cowling of the leading truck.
Major Coogan circled the area with a gloved finger. “It has to be somewhere here. Gotta be. But where?” He shook his head and gazed around at the scrub-dotted hillside. It was cool and the sky was darkening rapidly. Three miles away the peak of Mount Grafton wore a cap of purple thundery-looking clouds.
“Storm coming on, sir,” Captain Hance observed. “Damn, if they can’t give us a fix from the air how do they expect us to find it?” Coogan grunted. “You know what concerns me more? They could be waiting for us. That pyro-suicide was on every telecast and radio bulletin—they must know we’re coming after them. And with a bunch of religious nuts you can never be sure—”
His attention was caught by a staff sergeant farther down the column who was standing on the lip of the road and pointing down into a gully. The two officers went to look. It was the gutted burned-out wreck of a jeep lying on its side, with twisted and blackened Utah plates.
Coogan raised his eyebrows quizzically and looked at the captain, and together they turned to look at the rutted track on the opposite side of the road that wound jaggedly upward through the foothills toward Mount Grafton.
Inside the mountain Bhu
mi Bhap sat cross-legged on the sandy floor of his cell. A wick floating in a bowl of oil provided a dim flickering glow, illuminating the crudely carved walls that sloped up to the conical roof.
From outside the cell there came a low muttered chanting. The inner circle of adepts had been summoned; they were now waiting, preparing for Lift-Off.
It would not be long. Soon men with weapons would come to destroy, in the same way they had blindly and foolishly destroyed the earth. So be it, Bhumi Bhap decided. Everything had been prepared, was ready. He would lead the way to destruction.
I am become death, the shatterer of worlds ...
This world was no longer to be denied the death it craved. Let it perish. Let the species that had defiled and despoiled it drown and choke in its own excreta. Bhumi Bhap rejoiced in the certain knowledge of what was to be. His own mortal body, the self that was “I,” meant nothing to him. The uncountable atoms of which he was made would continue to exist, to circulate throughout the universe, and would eventually, inevitably, form part of another consciousness. From somewhere out there, dispersed across a billion light-years of space, he would witness the end of this clod of mud and still be there, eternally cognizant, waiting and watching for the slow cycle of rebirth to begin.
The chanting died away as he appeared in the doorway.
He moved slowly through their ranks with his crippled, lurching walk. In the light of the lamps and candles the pits of his eyes were cavernously hollow and black. His sticklike figure in the sagging robes seemed to lack substance, seemed almost, despite the lurching gait, to drift in dreadful incorporeal silence along the main gallery.
Bhumi Bhap gave no word or sign. They followed after him, twelve of his youngest and most devout disciples, descending to the lowest level where, in these chambers, resided the machines that provided power for the mountain, feeding off the lake of oil beneath their feet.
When they were gathered, silent and kneeling, Bhumi Bhap spoke softly of the Optimum Orbital Trajectory, reminding them that their lives were dedicated to its attainment. Very few were so fortunate in having been given a purpose; fewer still in having the opportunity to fulfill it.
“We do not fear death,” he told them, “because for us death has no meaning. It is merely a transition, exchanging one form of existence for another. The stuff of your being cannot be destroyed, only that which is the selfish ego, and which anyway you are taught, as adepts of the Faith, to denounce.
“You have no self, no ego, no identity, and therefore death has no sting. It is the gateway to everlasting life.”
A gateway they were about to enter.
These twelve knew what was expected of them. They had been specially chosen to undertake the final sacred ritual, a ritual unknown to the thousands above in the chambers and galleries and cells who went on with their lives in blissful ignorance.
Bhumi Bhap gave the instruction, with his blessing, and each of the twelve took hold of one of the cast-iron wheels that controlled the stopcocks. The greased wheels moved easily. Fumes began to seep into the chamber, forced upward by the immense pressure of oil below. The candles guttered in the heavy, dense, choking vapor. Two went out. A third died. Then the vapor ignited and a fire storm billowed upward through the shafts of the mountain like a gigantic blowtorch.
Fed by the lake, the fire raced along passageways devouring everything in its path. It burst through doors into the tiny cells where people were sleeping, talking, meditating, and consumed every living thing in a single scorching blast.
Within a few minutes the temperature inside the mountain had reached several hundred degrees. Iron girders supporting the tunnels and chambers turned white and writhed in the heat. The hewn walls ran with molten threads of silver and copper. And still the fire raged on, ever more fiercely, feeding greedily on the reservoir of oil.
The temperature continued to rise. Rocks became incandescent. Cracks appeared and split into jagged fissures. The fire surged onward and upward and broke through the mountain’s crust, blasting the rocky mantle high into the storm-darkened sky and spouting angry flames and smoke from a hundred pores.
Two miles away, in the leading truck laboring up the crooked trail, it seemed to Major Coogan that a volcano was erupting. The ground shook and rocks showered down from out of the sky. He stared blankeyed through the windshield at the mountain with its halo of orange fire and curling black smoke outlined against the massing storm clouds.
It was an image of the end of the world, an image he would never forget till his dying day.
In the opinion of Col. Gavril Burdovsky, the woman was perfect.
He had chosen her himself and therefore had cause to feel smug and self-congratulatory. He was also aroused by her—one of the reasons he thought her ideally suited for the assignment. Unfortunately this left him with a gnawing ache that could only be assuaged by Natassya Pavlovitch’s smooth firm body. The fact that he was an obese, balding man of fifty-seven and she a beautiful young woman of twenty-four seemed to him a trivial incompatibility.
“I trust you have everything you require, comrade,” said the colonel, sitting on the corner of the desk and swinging a short bulbous leg in an attempt to make this final briefing casual, friendly—and dare he hope?—intimate. “The black silk underwear is satisfactory?” There was a slight tremor in his voice at the mention of this item.
“Yes. Thank you, sir.” Natassya Pavlovitch was brisk, impersonal. She had been too well trained to display emotion in front of a superior.
Colonel Burdovsky nodded and stroked his pencil-thin moustache. The moustache was real and yet looked artificial, as if a strip of black paper had been stuck to his broad waxlike face with its hanging jowls.
“Good. Excellent,” murmured Burdovsky, for a moment lost in wistful contemplation of the pale curve of her neck at the point where it disappeared into the enticing shadow beneath the collar of her dark-gray woolen suit. That the rest of her should be so soft and warm and pliable ...
He cleared his throat and said gruffly, “You have all you need. Excellent.”
“I do have a question, if the colonel will permit.”
“Yes, of course.” Burdovsky slid down awkwardly from the desk, straightened the tail flap of his uniform with an abrupt tug, and strolled behind her chair, hands clasped over his plump buttocks.
Natassya looked straight ahead, speaking to the desk. “Do we have no intelligence at all, Colonel, regarding Zone Four? The reports give no indication whatsoever of the research being carried out there.”
“There are a number of speculations but nothing definite. The Americans thought they were being very clever in allowing our scientific people to inspect their facilities at Starbuck Island. Of course it was to satisfy us that the research was solely in connection with the Final Solution program.”
He came to stand close behind her, breathing in her perfume.
“We are not that stupid, Comrade Pavlovitch. It was noted that parts of the island were off-limits to our inspection teams, and therefore it was necessary to instigate this series of operations.” Burdovsky unclasped his hands and placed them lightly on her shoulders, experiencing a sensation that was at once stimulating and extremely uncomfortable in his tight uniform. “From the reports we know that the operatives who preceded you met with considerable difficulty in obtaining intelligence on Zone Four, which has led, as you know, to this new type of approach...” His stubby fingers touched her neck. Her skin felt cool and yet his fingertips burned. “And to you, comrade, being personally selected by me to undertake the assignment.”
“I understand that, Colonel.” Her voice was totally without expression. She might have been carved out of soap. His fingers roamed lower, feeling for the hollows formed by her collarbones. Natassya said crisply, “The reports are quite explicit in having discovered nothing at all about the activities in Zone Four.”
Explicit they were, thought Burdovsky, with one crucial omission: that of the three operatives sent to Starbuck as members of
the scientific inspection teams, two had failed to return. Their reports had been culled from notes and tapes left with their colleagues. As for the third operative, who had returned, he had no information to add to the sketchy findings thus far.
“We are satisfied that the Americans have cooperated fully in their research into various techniques of mass extermination.” Burdovsky’s fingers strayed down inside the woolen collar. “But Starbuck Island is being used for some other purpose, which Advanced Strategic Projects do not wish to reveal.” He could feel the gentle slopes of her breasts, rising and falling with each steady breath. “And it is vital that we learn what that is. Absolutely vital.” His voice sank to a throaty whisper. “I know you will not fail me, comrade.”
In a calm, unhurried movement Natassya Pavlovitch removed his chubby paws and rose to her feet, towering statuesquely above him like an Amazon confronting a Pygmy. “You may have every confidence that I will do my duty, Colonel Burdovsky. I thank you for this opportunity to be of service.”
With trembling and regret, he watched her leave, the fleshy palms of his hands damp. What compounded his frustration was that this slender, narrow-hipped, desirable young woman was to employ her charms in the service of the state and that some cretin of an American scientist or security officer would be the fortunate recipient. While he, Burdovsky, lusted secretly and impotently from afar.
And what if she didn’t return? Supposing she went the way of the others? But she must, had to, had to, Burdovsky fumed, giddy with visions of her body sheathed in black silk underwear.
The lip of the sun crept over the straight edge of the horizon: a sharply defined and perfectly symmetrical arc of vivid orange that widened and deepened until the entire glowing orb stood precariously balanced on the rim of the world. At this hour it was possible to stare it full in the face. But not for long; for in minutes the first faint rays lanced through the cool air, bathing the onlooker in a benign radiance of gathering warmth.