The Alpha Deception

by Jon Land

  Blaine gulped down air as he punched in commands to the missile-targeting computer. Finger on the firing button now, one hand steadying the wheel.

  He had asked for only one chance. He was about to get it.

  Fire from the gun battery at the far side of town exploded in the air near him, a close call. McCracken drove the Hind into a weaving pattern as he fired his three missiles in rapid succession, the laser guides doing the rest. He was actually over the generator-gun complex and past it before he was certain of impact, but he banked the Hind back so he could see the effect of three direct hits.

  Nothing! The only evidence of any impact was a few scattered fires sprouting from minor splits in the steel over-skin.

  Blaine’s stomach sank. He had struck the generator gun dead center with three shells that could level a city block, with no apparent effect. Already his mind was working in another direction. His only hope was to bide his time over Main Street long enough to ready another pass, and this time he would fire his missiles straight for the exposed barrel from which the ray would be emitted, a far more difficult shot but his only hope of knocking the weapon out.

  He plunged closer to the ground as he crossed over Main Street again, firing his air cannons in random patterns just to buy himself time. Hitting the barrel would be a tough shot. He narrowed the firing grid at the small computer display screen on the console just to his right. The warship was fitted with an infrared camera on its underside, which broadcast the shape of whatever the missiles were aimed at on the monitor. When his target appeared on the screen all he had to do was lock into it and a missile would trace for the target from wherever it was fired.

  McCracken dropped the Hind as low as he dared, barely fifty feet up, firing his laser-aimed cannons at windows where gun barrels protruded. The greatest congestion of resistant activity had been centered around three buildings in the town’s center, obviously headquarters and perhaps armory for Raskowski’s men.

  The first, unbeknownst to him, was Sheriff Junk Heep’s office, the facade of which was obliterated by his first rocket. The second was what looked like a general store. He gave it a missile and enough of the building exploded outward to make the soldiers in the street dive to the ground.

  When he neared the eastern edge of town, the regrouped gun battery aimed a volley at him which missed the mark widely. He sped up and peppered the guns with as many missiles as he could fire until he passed them, leaving smoke and flaming steel behind as he headed back west to deal with the second battery.

  Four of Paz’s men rushed into the street beneath him holding what he recognized as Laws rockets. He aimed his helmet at them and fired, but his increased speed had the warship already beyond the shooters and his cannon bullets dug chasms out of the street’s fresh tar surface. He was boxed in, the Laws behind and the western battery ahead.

  He wasn’t sure how many of the rockets actually struck the Hind-D. The controls seemed to lock up in his hands just for an instant. When the give came back, they were stiff. A pair of red lights flashed on his console board indicating aft fires too large for the automatic systems to fight. Blaine drove the warship on, faster, halfway to the gun battery now.

  He could see the gun operators had gotten it right this time. Three of the four big guns were already aimed toward the gulley to lay down suppressing fire that would make it impossible for him to cross. The fourth fired token rounds which forced him to climb sooner than he would have wished. His maneuverability was reduced, as well as his chances of avoiding the blasts once over the gulley again.

  His target, the exposed barrel, was frozen in his mind, but it needed to be equally frozen on his CRT grid if he was going to have any chance at all. The gulley came up fast as he crossed over the western battery. Blaine’s hand moved to the targeting computer to lock in.

  The fire of the three guns came and kept coming. He was headed straight for the generator complex now, seconds away, with the barrage of shells exploding everywhere around him, the percussion ringing in his ears as the Hind buckled. He adjusted its nose angle lower for smoother release and focused on the narrower target grid waiting for the gun barrel to lock on.

  There it was, square in the center! McCracken went for the firing button.

  A huge blast tore into the Hind from the rear, kicking it skyward. The warship fluttered in midair, seeming almost to stall, and smoke began to flood the cabin. Red lights flashed up and down the instrument board.

  The missiles hadn’t fired! They hadn’t fired!

  Paz’s gunners had beaten him by an instant, but Blaine wasn’t giving up yet. He still had three missiles and intended to find a way to fire them. He coughed through the smoke and struggled to regain control of the Hind. More blasts rocked him as he brought the sputtering bird around in a wide bank that took him back over the San Juans. More red lights flickered to warn him all his weapons systems had shorted out and the fuel line was ruptured. The Hind was limping in the air, refusing to go further. He was flying it to its death. And his.

  With the last burst of strength he could grab from it, Blaine veered deeper over the foothills of the San Juans. The huge artillery shells followed him every inch of the way, a final one finding him just as the foliage of the mountains was beneath him and he had begun to try some sort of landing.

  But that final blast had finished the ship. Black smoke instead of gray flooded the cockpit and filled his lungs. Blaine was aware of a terrible grinding noise and of a tumbling sensation as the brave bird plummeted. He dimly recorded the whiplash of collision, certain at that point he would never know anything again.

  Chapter 33

  ZURICH’S BAHNHOFSTRASSE IS UNQUESTIONABLY the city’s most fashionable and elegant avenue. Combining the qualities of Wall Street and Fifth Avenue along a three-mile stretch bordered by lime trees, the Bahnhofstrasse houses numerous banks, investment firms, insurance companies and brokerage houses. It is lined from one end to the other with business and commercial buildings of various sizes and architectural styles, the more modem ones seeming to compete with each other for uniqueness of design.

  In one of the largest, the Kriehold Building, the top three floors are leased by a computerized mail service that specializes in a worldwide investment newsletter. In reality, the newsletter does not exist. The mail service is a cover. The three floors contain the technological headquarters of General Vladimir Raskowski.

  Raskowski had chosen the Zurich locale personally, believing that his enemies wouldn’t expect him to set up shop in one of the world’s busiest business centers. Besides, Raskowski found directing his project from Zurich entirely fitting, for soon even the Bahnhofstrasse would belong to him if he desired. He could have it all, he could have anything.

  The computers that controlled the generator gun in Pamosa Springs and the aluminum reflector soon to be in geosynchronistic orbit were on the top three floors, encased by concrete and steel on all sides. In effect, the control room was a massive vault a hundred feet square and employing three dozen men and women.

  Raskowski inserted his command card into its slot outside the control room. The huge entry door parted electronically from its seal and swung open. He entered, men rising to attention as he passed. Raulsch, the old German scientist who had designed and built the entire headquarters, rose and saluted crisply. Raskowski’s favorite post was a chair from which he could gaze up at a huge electronic map of the United States. Now the map showed a rising green light—the path of the satellite containing his reflector as it climbed toward its deadly orbit. The various angles required of the reflector to achieve the destruction of specific American targets had been preprogrammed, and now those targets appeared in the form of dozens of flashing red lights all across the country.

  “How long?” Raskowski asked Raulsch.

  “Three hours, twenty-nine minutes, seventeen seconds,” the scientist replied.

  The general settled back and fidgeted in his elevated chair. Word from the Biminis had not been good. Somehow McCrack
en and Tomachenko had found the means to defeat the force he had dispatched to the islands. This meant they were still at large, though cut off from their respective governments. They would therefore have to stop his operation on their own, which was impossible of course.

  Raskowski still fidgeted.

  In the end, the trees had saved his life. That’s what Blaine figured as he gazed back at the Hind’s smoking, twisted carcass, one wing protruding upward in imitation of Johnny Wareagle’s wooden one in Nicaragua. The treetops had torn out the warship’s bottom, then accepted its weight long enough to cushion his fall. He had maintained consciousness through it all and had made a quick escape, aware that Paz would be sending troops out to finish him. He had no choice but to flee, even if he had to stumble and crawl to get away, clinging to the hope that either Natalya or Wareagle could succeed where he failed.

  Twenty yards into the woods his balance failed him and he slid to the ground. He wiped blood from his brow, but the warm fluid drenched him again as quickly as he cleared it. He tried to grab hold of something to pull himself to his feet but his strength was gone. His vision was clouded and hazy. The ground spun beneath him. Blaine clutched at it to make it still and fought to remain conscious. Back on the ridge, the carcass of the Hind went up in a final explosion and in that instant everything was clear to him again.

  He had somehow made it to his knees when the first of the figures appeared before him. He didn’t know where they had come from but he knew they must be Paz’s men come to finish him off. Then his vision cleared long enough for him to see a pair of grizzled characters, one with a gut hanging well over his belt and the other whose frame amounted to flesh wrapped around a beanpole.

  “Afternoon, friend,” one of them said.

  Everything had gone well for Natalya until the private plane holding her and Vasquez’s commandos neared Zurich. The soldiers, also his sons, were as well schooled as any she had worked with. They possessed all of their father’s arrogance but none of his girth and had little in common, physically, except cold staring eyes. It was as if the fat man had fathered many sons just so he would have at least this many expertly trained and trustworthy killers. In his business, you could never have too many.

  She and Vasquez had made it to Morocco from the Biminis in just over ten hours. The commandos were waiting with another fueled jet on the runway. After a brief inventory of equipment, they took off with their plans to be detailed as they flew.

  Their intended landing at Zurich three hours later proved unsuccessful when they learned the airport there was hopelessly fogged in. The plane had no choice but to divert to another airport at Winterthur, where Vasquez would have vans waiting to spirit them by road into Zurich. It would take three hours to reach the city and another twenty minutes on top of that before they reached the Bahnhofstrasse. By Natalya’s calculations that would leave little time to demolish Raskowski’s base of operations and destroy his means of ordering the generator beam in Pamosa Springs to fire.

  The centerpiece of the plan was surprise. All of them were dressed as Swiss electrical workers. Their blue uniforms would permit them easy, casual entry to any building especially at night.

  The final deception. And perhaps the most important.

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Blaine started wearily, speaking to both of the apparitions. “You’re out collecting for the Red Cross, right?”

  “If we were,” said Dog-ear McCluskey, “we could do a helluva lot better than you.”

  The men moved to either side of him, one of them limping, and helped lift him to his feet.

  “Mind telling me who you are?” Blaine asked them.

  “We were about to ask you the same question,” said the one with the limp.

  “Just a guy who had a few drinks too many and missed a turnoff.”

  McCracken felt better on his feet, the world seeming more balanced. Still, he had to throw his arms around the men’s shoulders for support.

  “A few good belts might be in order when we tell you what’s been going on down in our town,” said the one with the limp.

  “We saw what you did,” the man Blaine had come to know as Mayor Dog-ear McCluskey told him when they had reached a clearing higher up the mountain. “If the crash didn’t kill ya, Sheriff Junk Heep and I figured you might be the kind of man who can help us.”

  “Help you what?”

  “Get our town back.”

  Blaine listened to their whole story with a compress of cold spring water pressed against his fresh head wound, feeling much better already. Mayor Dog-ear was careful to stress the bestiality of Paz and the unexplained killings that had riddled the town.

  “Now it’s your turn,” McCluskey beckoned him. “Since you’re here, I gotta figure you got a line on what’s really going on.”

  Blaine nodded. “Actually, you boys have put it together pretty good yourselves. The element they’ve been digging out of that hillside isn’t a gem. It’s something called Atragon.”

  “Atragon?” raised the sheriff. “What the hell’s that? Is it worth much?”

  “Until recently no one even knew it existed. But right now, conservatively speaking, I’d say it’s the most precious mineral on the face of the earth.”

  “That’s a relief,” sighed Junk.

  And Blaine told them everything, as best he could, from the beginning, ending with his failed attempt to destroy the generator gun using the Hind-D.

  “So this Russian general blows up a town,” said Dog-ear when he was finished, “and his satellite gets fucked in the process.”

  “Yup,” said McCracken, “so he’s got to resort to a new plan and he’s got to do it fast. First he needs more Atragon to power the beam weapon, then he needs a new means of delivering it.”

  “And we helped on both accounts,” noted Junk grimly.

  “My guess,” said Blaine, “is that he caught on to your reserves after you sent samples to the National Assayer’s Office.”

  “Pretty short notice to put a hundred men together, especially considering this is all super-high tech,” noted the mayor.

  “Raskowski already had the men and plenty of them were very likely already inside the country. Besides, the man’s relentless. The word impossible doesn’t exist for him.”

  “So he mines this Atragon stuff,” started Sheriff Junk, “and then what? Can you just pack it into that gun like batteries?”

  “No, he’d have to store power in the crystals first in order to generate the beam. You said the power into town was rerouted into the hills. Lots of that went straight into the crystals, immeasurable amounts.”

  Junk looked at Blaine closely. “Be nice if you told us the cavalry was waitin’ over the next ridge for your signal to nuke the sucker.”

  “Be nice, but it’d also be a lie. I got word out but it’s a big country, and lots more man distance is probably holding the cavalry up. I gave it my best shot with the chopper. Came up a little short, though.”

  “Would you try it again?”

  “Sure, Dog-ear. Just lead me to the nearest army weapons surplus store and we’ll have a go at it.”

  Mayor McCluskey smiled.

  Just to be on the safe side, Guillermo Paz had posted guards in the freight yard between the mountains and the town. If the sheriff and mayor, the last threats to his command now that the flier had been killed, were still close by, he wanted to be in a position to thwart any efforts they might mount to disrupt the final stages of General Raskowski’s plan. The generator gun was impregnable, true, but too much had already happened that defied the odds. First, the strange murders, then last night’s escape, and finally the return of the stolen Hind-D.

  Paz wasn’t about to let a fourth mishap ruin this command.

  McCluskey spoke as Blaine inspected the crates full of grenades and Laws rockets Sheriff Junk had retrieved from their hiding place.

  “Way I see it, friend,” explained Mayor McCluskey, “the only chance we got of disablin’ that monster gun i
s to borrow some of the explosives those bastards got stored in town. Means we gotta launch a raid. Might as well save the townspeople while we’re at it.”

  Blaine nodded. “Your strategy’s not far off. We’ve got to knock the gun out all right, but we won’t stand a chance of even getting close until we eliminate Paz’s troops. Not that the three of us have a prayer of accomplishing that by ourselves… .”

  “Don’t like your attitude,” snapped Junk.

  “You didn’t let me finish. There’s a whole church full of reinforcements waiting for us—if we can free them. Way you boys have described it, there’s plenty of people in your town who’ll know what to do if given the opportunity.”

  “And the rest might not have until ten days back.”

  “Especially since a few leaders, example setters, will be all it takes,” Blaine explained. “That’s what subversive activities are all about to an extent: making people rise up and be noticed themselves.”

  Dog-ear almost laughed. “So we become the subversives in our own town.”

  “I’ve been all over the world,” Blaine told him. “It’s not as strange as it seems.”

  “So all we need now is a plan,” advanced Heep.

  “The progression’s simple,” Blaine told him. “We take the town back first and then use whatever we can to blow the fuck out of that generator gun.” He checked his watch. “A lot to accomplish in just under ninety minutes.”

  “Three of us ought to give ‘em a run for their money.”

  “I’m starting to think we just might, Sheriff. Let me lay it out for the two of you… .”

  Blaine explained the details of the plan to them as quickly and simply as he could. The operation had several independent components, each of which must be successful if all were to work. McCracken’s job was to infiltrate the town and free the residents trapped in the church, so that they might join the battle. To accomplish this, he would need plenty of distraction and cover in the form of grenades and Laws rockets. This task was given to Sheriff Junk, whose specialty was munitions. First, he would use grenades on the soldiers in the railroad yard. Then he would fire his Laws rockets down into the town, hoping to create total havoc. He would then use the rest of his armaments to disable the still intact western battery of guns. With those still functional, they stood no chance of reaching the gulley, no matter what else transpired.