by Jon Land
“Try, damnit, try!”
Paz readied his machine gun, sighting on the men and women trudging up the hill. Somehow he had lost the bearded bastard who’d been at their lead and now must have melted into the center of the crowd. No matter. His spray would do the job well enough and even if the bearded one was spared, he would be powerless alone.
Paz pawed the trigger, waiting for his targets to draw a little closer. No reason to rush. Every reason to be sure.
Just a little bit more …
A branch snapped behind him. Paz spun. And froze.
Ten feet away McCracken held a pistol in line with his face.
“Thought I’d leave you a chance,” Blaine told him.
Paz tried to bring his rifle up to fire. McCracken’s gun exploded twice and Paz’s face disappeared.
They found Dog-ear’s body not far from where Paz ended up after tumbling partway down the hill. The sight of his murdered best friend seemed to charge Sheriff Junk with a fresh resolve. All doubt vanished and the pain with it, as he determinedly directed the packing of the C-4 plastic explosives into the side of the hill looking down over the gulley.
“You sure this is the right way?” McCracken asked Heep as together they strung the fusing which linked the individual mounds of plastique together.
“Look, bud,” Heep snapped, joints and limbs cracking up a storm, sounding like popcorn over a fire, “this stuff might be more advanced than what we had in Korea, but principles is principles. Mountains still fall the same way they used to.”
With all the explosives packed into the gulley side of the hill, the idea was to create a landslide that would move only in the generator gun’s direction, the hope being that the rubble would be enough to bring the big gun down. Blaine gazed down upon it yet again. The steel casing must have been a hundred feet in diameter, the circle almost perfect. Extended from its top and poised at a seventy-five-degree angle upward (in line with the reflector no doubt) was a huge tabular extension. It had looked more like a gun barrel from above but from closer Blaine could see its bore was finished with a honeycomb pattern, indicating the crystals would actually generate a dozen or so individual beams which would join up as soon as they blazed from the tube stretching forty feet into the air. Wrapped around its one-meter circumference was black, lead-encased housing which would undoubtedly maintain a constant pumping of water to keep the tube cooled while the incredible energy in the form of the particle beam was pulsing through it. Inside the vast superstructure, resembling a turret, would be the self-contained computers which communicated with Raskowski’s headquarters in Zurich to accept commands and then instruct the gun to execute them, all of which took place in a fraction of a second.
But long enough to assure the deaths of millions.
“Six minutes to system activation… .”
Another of his closed-circuit monitors showed Raskowski the feebly futile efforts of the commandos in the corridor to gain entry to his command vault. He actually laughed at their desperation.
After a few seconds the woman Tomachenko gazed in the camera and their eyes met. It seemed as if both of them knew it. Raskowski grinned. Natalya hoisted her Uzi upward and shot the camera out.
“It’s like I told you,” the demolitions specialist told her after two attempts to blast through the door had failed. “No way.”
Natalya’s thoughts were already moving in another direction. The computers within the vault controlled the generator gun but not directly. There had to be some sort of dish that would beam the command signals to a receiving device in Pamosa Springs. And knowing Raskowski, the dish would have to be close by… . The roof, Natalya realized! Had she noticed a large dish from the street? No, the roof was flat, impossible to pick anything out from ground level.
“Half of you come with me!” she screamed. “The rest keep trying to get through that door. Throw everything we’ve got at it!”
And then she was sprinting down the corridor back toward the main stairwell. Just one flight up and the roof was hers.
The commandos were at her side as she charged up, the door already in sight. One threw his shoulder into it as he worked the knob.
It was locked.
McCracken and Heep were working feverishly now. They had separated to easier facilitate the joining of the many individual mounds of the plastic explosives together with the fusing. Once completed, the end of the wire would be connected to the electronic detonator they had found among the invaders’ mining equipment, the switch to be turned once all the residents were free of the blast zone and the hill itself.
Most had already fled to a safe distance, and now Blaine and Sheriff Junk were alone. They reached the hill’s top again at the same time, Heep twirling the individual ends of their fusing together and taping them tight. They had two hundred yards of fusing left, plenty to give them a safe pillow from the blast. The ends joined, they hurried down the hillside, almost tumbling, Blaine holding fast to Heep so he wouldn’t fall. At the bottom, the sheriff dragged his feet quick as he could parallel to the town, already looping the wire around the conduits that would channel the signal through the hill and bring it down upon the generator gun.
Heep had to pause with hands on his knees when the fusing lost its slack. Again Blaine supported him, taking the detonator until Junk was upright again. He was still huffing as he turned the switch all the way to the left. The red test light flashed on.
“Wanna do the honors?” he asked.
“All yours,” Blaine told him.
Heep turned the switch to his right, flinching against the expected jolting series of explosions.
Nothing happened.
“Two minutes to system activation… .”
Raskowski had seen Tomachenko rushing down the corridor through another of his monitors. He knew immediately she was headed for the roof and only wished he had placed cameras up there so he could have seen the expression on her face when she came upon his final surprise. He had anticipated her moves perfectly, anticipated all their moves perfectly, always one step ahead. It was fitting that his mind should be the one charged with remaking civilization with the proper rules in place. He had never lost sight of the goals set for himself, never failing to accomplish them with only one remaining unfulfilled.
But not for much longer.
“Give me an explosives pack!” Natalya ordered one of the commandos who produced it instantly. Before it was even firm in her hand she had jammed it against the heavy door’s latch area and stuck a five-second delay fuse into it.
The group backed halfway down the final flight of stairs to avoid the spraying of fragments. A poof followed and the door opened outward onto the roof. Natalya rushed through.
And gasped.
McCracken reached the first mounds of plastique, eyes and hands working feverishly, both ablaze with sweat. When the turn of the detonator had brought no explosion, the obvious explanation was a break somewhere in the fusing. He had to trace down the break, the time frame buried in his consciousness because consideration of it was pointless, could only lead to frustration and from frustration invariably to failure. He knew he didn’t have time enough to cover the entire swirling length, and so elected to focus his search at the rockiest part of the hillside, where a sharp shard could easily have split the fuse.
Almost back to the hilltop, his hand following the fuse was sliced by something that felt like a knife. He drew it back in pain, saw the blood first and the break in the fusing second.
There it was!
The jagged rock had cleanly severed the steel. Blaine twisted it together, ripping the flesh of his fingertips in his resolve to get it tight fast. He never considered there might be another break somewhere else; it was pointless to. Instead he lunged to his feet and waved his arms as he started running back down the hillside.
“Blow it!” he screamed to Sheriff Junk below. “Blow it!”
Screamed in full awareness that the rubble might kill him even if the blast didn’t, his to
mb shared with a gun that might otherwise have taken millions of lives.
Heep closed his eyes and turned the detonator switch.
McCracken’s ears seemed to shatter at the initial explosion, the earth giving way with a rumble beneath him. Then there was only air.
“Twenty seconds,” announced Raulsch. “Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen …”
And Raskowski leaned back with the feeling of triumph warm within him and edged his hand over the button that would activate his beam in Pamosa Springs.
Natalya had frozen for an instant upon reaching the rooftop. The satellite dishes were everywhere before her, at least fifteen of varying sizes. But which was Raskowski’s? With a shudder, she realized they all were, placed up here to disguise a single one. Still she had to try. Knowing only seconds remained, she ordered the commandos to hurl their grenades to destroy all the dishes in one final effort.
Perhaps forever.
After the initial burst of rubble upward, the hillside seemed to settle in motion, rolling downward for the gulley like floodwaters after ten days of rain, gathering speed and mass as it tumbled. The pile grew, absorbed, became huge in scope as it neared the generator gun’s huge steel housing and rose over it like a tsunami ready to crash.
Heep held his breath, forgetting in that long instant that the rubble had swept away the man responsible for saving him and the town and wondering if the generator gun was going to perish beneath the tons of earth and rubble pouring down.
“Four seconds, three, two, one … System activation has been achieved.” With those words spoken, Raulsch turned back to General Vladimir Raskowski.
The general had already depressed the button, finger frozen there to savor the moment. The signal had been beamed at the speed of light to his generator gun in Pamosa Springs which in the next second would fire its beam upward at his reflector. All lights flashed green signaling the process had begun, impossible to stop from this point on.
His satellite dish was hidden on the roof, disguised as a ventilation outlet, with all the others serving as decoys.
Victory was his.
The generator gun and its housing had been utterly buried by the mound of earth and rock which continued to roll onward, settling at the lowest point at the gulley’s bottom and continuing to pile up. Not even the slightest bit of its bore was visible when Sheriff Heep could have sworn he felt the ground rumble beneath him in a way that shook all his insides.
The pile of moving debris trembled, starting at the very top and within seconds spreading all the way down through the mass. Heep knew the beam had been activated and dove for cover out of fear of what was coming next.
The beam had fired, but as it struck the mounds of rocks and earth covering its bore, they melted instantly and drained down. Superheated to unfathomable temperatures, the liquified molten earth, much like lava, flowed in a continuous stream straight down the barrel through the honeycombed tops. The beam continued to pulse for a time until the flow reached the bottom of the bore and filled the firing receivers, which accepted the Atragon-charged beam from the generator to send it skyward. At that point, a massive overload occurred, combustion on a near-nuclear level achieved, as the tremendous energy stores broke free of their bonds and sought a vent.
Virtually all the rocks and dirt forming the mound melted into a heat-driven flow that leaped into the air like a huge splash of filthy water, settling down almost as quickly with a sizzling hiss as the vapors and liquified solids began to cool, solidifying once more.
The rubble was gone by this point, replaced by a smooth, grainy mound which glowed with a red translucence as it hardened into black volcanic glass. The hissing continued as Heep rose cautiously in the still-blowing, heated wind. The sight before him in the gulley was awe-inspiring, a lava tomb effectively encased over the generator gun and its housing.
Suddenly Heep felt chilled through his sweat. What of McCracken?
Natalya had resigned herself to failure. She was beaten, and so was the world. She had no reason for hope because she had no way of knowing what had transpired in Raskowski’s command vault.
His computers in Zurich had been beaming a continuous set of commands to the generator complex in Pamosa Springs. The overload there had been so great that a huge charge of feedback sped back over the open line, tracing the path of the original command to fire. The charge was so potent that upon receiving it, everything electrical within the vault began to short-circuit. Control boards fizzled and smoked, some giving way to full-scale eruptions which showered sparks everywhere. The lighting died. All power ceased to function.
More of the circuit boards and panels crackled and smoked, fire popping up in one after the other. The flames spread quickly through the oxygen-rich air, attempts to fight them abandoned after a short time in favor of escape. But the vault remained electronically sealed. And the flames were widening, reaching outward in tentacles coated with poisonous vapors and fumes. The bulk of the personnel rushed the vault door and pushed on it futilely, coughing, dying, while the whole time General Vladimir Raskowski clung to the command dais, pressing the firing button over and over, his features contorted into a mad stare until the flames swallowed him.
By the time investigators drilled through the vault door hours later, most of the bodies were unrecognizable. Those that remained in any form were charred black and continued to smolder. The facts as to what had happened were ambiguous, and always would be.
A woman, whom each investigative authority assumed worked for another, spent only enough time in the vault to linger over a body in the center. No one saw her smile as she lowered a hand to the corpse’s shoulder area. No one saw her remove the blackened gold stars which labeled the man a general in the Soviet army.
And then she was gone.
Chapter 35
SHERIFF JUNK HEEP was kneeling over the body of Dog-ear McCluskey when he heard the footsteps shuffling toward him.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, almost managing a smile. “Now look who’s having trouble walkin’.”
McCracken stopped near him, grimacing with pain, covered with dirt and dust, flesh torn and scratched from face to ankles. He had just managed to avoid the brunt of the blast, pummeled by layers of rebellious debris that hadn’t joined the molten flow in the gulley. Gazing at the mound he saw the red translucence had now faded slightly, the generator complex’s tomb becoming almost crystalline black.
“Least you can do is help me back into town,” McCracken said lightly as a pair of silver jet fighters soared overhead. His eyes turned to an army convoy on the access road leading into town. “Looks like we got company.”
“In more ways than one.” Heep gazed over McCracken’s shoulder at the dirty figure moving down toward them, a number of townspeople in his tracks. Heep rose all the way up. “Shit, that’s Hal Taggart’s boy.” The figure was closer now. “What’s left of him, anyway.”
The left side of the figure’s body was dragging noticeably behind the right. And the left half of his face was creased with scar tissue that covered even the eye.
“He was a marine in the Mideast,” Heep continued. “We all thought he died. Taggart told us so.”
“Apparently he came close.” McCracken had seen that kind of appearance before. There were parts of the young man’s brain that would never work again, others that were as good as ever. “Taggart must have brought him back here and hid him from the world.”
Heep managed another look. “After the bastards killed his father, the kid figured he’d take things into his own hands. Had those murdering shits guarding their own assholes when he started knocking ’em off one at a time.”
“Not to mention the fact that he saved our asses today. Must have been him on that rooftop.”
“Guess he brought more than memories back with him from the Mideast.”
McCracken shrugged at that and the motion sent a bolt of pain surging through him. Heep dragged himself over and started to lower himself under Blaine’s shoulder.
“This oughtta be fun.”
McCracken approached the men climbing from the lead jeep by himself.
“You McCracken?” asked the one in charge.
Blaine nodded. “Wareagle send you?”
“Don’t know any Wareagle. My orders came straight from the Pentagon. Woulda been here sooner but had trouble arranging for proper air support,” the commander explained as the jets streaked overhead again. He gazed about him at the bodies strewn throughout the town, littered among the smoldering buildings. “Hell of a mess.”
“You missed the action.”
“Looks like you had matters well in hand without us.”
Blaine thought of Dog-ear McCluskey and of the son of Hal Taggart. “You might say that,” he returned distantly. “You in touch with Washington, Commander?”
“Open line.”
“You made my day.”
“I think the time has finally come for me to retire to the woods too, Indian, or at least to some lonely island somewhere,” Blaine told Wareagle as they strolled down the mall fronting the Washington Monument.
“That was forced upon you once already, Blainey. The five years in France. Remember?”
“And every day I prayed to be let back in, to be a part of things again.”
“And you think this time the same prayers would not come?”
“I think this time I’d be praying to be left alone.”
Wareagle stopped and gazed down at him. “No, Blainey. You can close your eyes during the day but the light remains. And sooner or later you must open your eyes again and face that.”
“I wasn’t talking about myself, Indian. It’s the others I’m fed up with, the mindless ones for whom day and night don’t exist, for whom it’s always dusk because that way there’s no firm commitment in any direction.”
“They exist to remind us of our own failings, to keep us in touch with what is pure and holy so we never take the words of the spirits for granted.”