Tsar

by Ted Bell

  “Hang on,” Hawke said, ignoring the question and accelerating out of a turn. “I’m going to drive as fast as I possibly can without killing us. How much time have we got until he starts blowing up the planet?”

  “An hour and ten minutes.”

  “Should be enough.”

  “It has to be enough. Please listen to me. If I see it’s not, I’m going to take this man out, Alex. It’s my sworn duty to do so. As it is yours, I might remind you. I know you’ve got a gun. You can try to stop me. But I swear to you, I will gladly die pushing this button. Understand?”

  Hawke ignored him.

  “Aren’t there any bloody shortcuts to the ferry?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Bloody hell,” Hawke said, braking and fishtailing through another turn. Luckily, most of the local constabulary was busy providing security at the Stadshuset tonight.

  Hawke’s driving that night was either inspired or insane, depending on your point of view. He somehow kept the car out of the icy fjord, remained mostly on the road, at any rate, his eyes always a hundred yards ahead, willing the vehicle to go where it was pointed.

  He fished his mobile out of his pocket and speed-dialed Asia. Answer, answer, answer, he prayed, but all he got was a machine and a beep tone.

  “Hey, it’s me. Look, I’m right behind you. I’m coming for you. When you get to the Morto ferry, you’ll have to stop. That’s when you run, okay? Just jump out and run as fast as you can. I’ll find you. I love you. Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right.”

  Occasionally, he’d look sideways at Halter. The professor’s eyes were always straight ahead. He had the Beta in his lap, programmed with the code, his finger on the trigger. Hawke knew that if Halter should feel the Saab leaving the road, headed for the trees or into the inky waters of the fjord on their left, he’d instantly push the button, no doubt about it. He’d see an enormous flash of light on the road far up ahead, flames climbing into the night sky, an explosion vaporizing the Tsar of Russia and his daughter, Anastasia.

  And so Hawke drove furiously on, waiting, praying to see a blinking brake light on the road ahead. Something, anything that would prove he was gaining ground on the Maybach and the woman he loved.

  But he never did.

  67

  Hawke skidded to a stop at the top of the hill next to a sign for Dalaro. He’d made it there in less than half an hour, nearly going off the road dozens of times, never once catching a glimpse of the bloody black Maybach. Now he was praying Halter had been right about the Tsar’s destination. If he wasn’t-

  “This is it,” Hawke said, putting on the emergency brake and climbing out of the car. “Now, where’s that ferry?”

  Halter got out, too, moving to the front of the car, the Beta in his hands, gleaming in the light of the headlamps. “There,” he said after a few moments of peering at the tiny village at the bottom of the hill.

  “Where?”

  “Down there to your left. Bottom of that little road leading through the woods over there. I saw taillights flash at the edge of the water. It has to be him, Alex. No one else would be going over to the island at this time of night.”

  “Is the ferry already there?”

  “I can’t tell. Maybe. Too far away to see.”

  “Get in.”

  They sledded rather than drove down the tiny road, the Saab now merely a toboggan, careening through heavy woods of pine and spruce down to the sea. Hawke kept his foot on and off the brakes the entire way, only accelerating when they slowed, not minding at all the fact that he was bashing both sides of the car against the trees on the sides of the narrow road as long as he kept the thing moving forward.

  Hawke saw starlit sky ahead and reached down and switched off the headlamps; this was on the slim chance that the Tsar had glimpsed them racing along the fjord in their efforts to catch him.

  If Hawke was driving them right into a trap, he’d like his arrival to be a surprise. And besides, even in the forest, there was enough moonlight reflecting off snow to see by.

  Suddenly, they were out of the woods, the icy road dipping right down to the black water.

  Five hundred yards below, he finally saw the Maybach’s big red brake lights flash.

  The mammoth limousine was pulling slowly out onto the tiny ferry, large enough for only two vehicles. A crewman in dark coveralls was motioning the driver forward, all the way to the bow rail. Inside the yellow glow of the small pilothouse window, Hawke saw the ferryboat skipper’s black silhouette, even noticing the pipe he held clenched in his teeth. Amazing the things your mind took in at times like this.

  “This might be tight,” he said to Halter as they careened toward the ferry. “Can you swim?”

  “Hurry, for God’s sake, they’re about to pull away!”

  It would be a close thing.

  Hawke leaned on his horn, tinny but loud, and flashed his headlamps as he floored the Saab. He accelerated the rest of the way down the steep hill, watching the lone crewman heaving the first of the lines ashore. Hawke was still thinking he just might make it aboard, even if it had to be on the fly, but then he saw the Tsar fling open his door, step out onto the deck, and scream something at the bewildered crewman.

  The ferryman clearly wasn’t going to wait, and now all lines were cast off, and the fluorescent red-and-white-striped gate with the blinking red warning light was descending. Suddenly, the ferry was pulling away, a puff of smoke from its stack, steaming toward the black shape of Morto in the distance.

  “Damn it!” Hawke cried, hitting the brakes, sliding into a spin, yanking up on the emergency brake, and stopping on a patch of dry pavement barely in time to avoid going down the ramp and into the icy waters of the fjord.

  He climbed out of the miserable Saab and stood watching the little ferry make its way across the choppy waters toward Morto Island.

  He’d lost her.

  “Let’s go!” Halter said, climbing out of the car with the Beta machine tucked safely under his arm. Hawke breathed a sigh of relief. For whatever reason, Halter had decided to play this out to the end, give Hawke until the last possible moment before ending this.

  “Where?”

  “I saw a house with a dock out on the end of that point. Where there’s a dock, there might well be a boat.”

  “How much time?” Hawke cried, following Halter across the slippery algal rocks that lined the shore.

  “Forty minutes! We might still save her, Alex. We’ll try, anyway.”

  As logic or fate or luck would have it, there was a boat.

  A beautiful wooden runabout, maybe twenty-five feet long. She looked fast enough, Hawke thought, racing down the dock toward her. She looked well maintained, probably with a big inboard Volvo engine. They could make it over to Morto in a hurry.

  “Check the helm for ignition and keys,” Hawke shouted to Halter. Hawke leaped aboard at the stern and opened the engine-hatch cover as the professor jumped down into the cockpit.

  “No luck!” Halter cried.

  “Never mind, I’ve got it,” Hawke said, two bared wires in his hands. Suddenly, the big 300-horsepower engine roared to life. And just as suddenly, it conked out.

  “What’s wrong, Alex?”

  “I don’t know. Felt as if it wasn’t getting any fuel.”

  “Fuel shutoff valve?”

  “Yeah, but where is the bloody thing on these engines is the problem. I’m looking.”

  “Alex, we have perhaps thirty-five minutes until the beginning of the end of the world. Find it quickly, would you, please?”

  Hawke muttered something obscene as his head disappeared below the hatchway. Halter stood in the cockpit, watching helplessly as the ferry bearing Korsakov moved ever nearer to the long dock emerging from the heavily wooded island, a low-lying black silhouette on the horizon.

  “Cast off all of the lines except the stern,” he heard Hawke’s muffled voice behind him say. “Just in case I find the damn valve. Wait, is this it? Yes? No, d
amn it!”

  Five minutes later, the big Volvo rumbled to life again, and Hawke came up through the engine-room hatch in a hurry. He uncleated the stern line and jumped down to join Halter in the cockpit, grabbing the wheel and shoving the throttle forward. The sleek mahogany runabout surged forward, throwing a wide white wake to either side.

  Five minutes later, they were ghosting up to a rocky beach with the motor shut down. Hawke hopped off the bow with the anchor in his hand, waded ashore, and wedged the hook between two large boulders. Then he hauled the boat in closer to shore and called out to Halter, “Are you coming?”

  “Can’t you get it in any closer?”

  The man was sitting on the stern with his legs dangling over the side, cradling the Beta machine in both hands.

  Hawke was about to tell him to be careful, when the windshield of the runabout exploded into a million pieces. He whirled in the direction of the gunfire. A guard with a German shepherd at the end of a leash was running toward them, shouting something in Russian. He extended his arm again, aiming his submachine gun at Halter on the run. Hawke pulled the Walther from his holster, drew a quick bead, and shot the man once in the head.

  Halter was splashing ashore, holding the detonator above his head, as Alex bent over the dead body.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Halter said.

  “Looking for a radio. See if he called us in.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. No radio. Good. Here, take his gun. Bizon Two. Excellent weapon. Know how to use it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I hope the sound of those shots didn’t carry up the face of that rock. Here are a couple of extra mags of ammunition. Let’s move. I saw the house from the water. It stands right at the top of this granite cliff. But I think I saw a path up through the woods around that point. We’d better hurry. Time?”

  “Nineteen minutes,” Halter said, worry plain on his face.

  “Let’s go.”

  “God, this is close.”

  “I hope God’s watching this channel,” Hawke said, sprinting down the beach and up into the woods at a dead run. His mind was racing, too. Find Anastasia, find a way, any way at all, to get her away from her crazed father before he and Halter killed the man. Five-hundred-yard kill radius? Is that what Kuragin had said about the Beta’s destructive range? He’d do it somehow, get her outside that circle of death.

  But he was fast running out of time.

  And Halter still had his finger on the trigger.

  68

  Hawke was first to reach the clearing at the top of the granite cliff. And first to see why the Tsar had been in such a hurry to get to the island of Morto.

  By Tsarist standards, the house itself was nothing extraordinary. It was a four-story Swedish Baroque mansion, standing in a wide snowfield, pale yellow in the moonlight. The interesting thing was not the old mansion but the silver airship hovering just a hundred yards above a steel mooring mast on the rooftop. The ship was descending, coming in to dock. The same ship Hawke and Anastasia had flown to Moscow.

  Handling lines were even now being tossed down from the bow to a crew waiting on the roof. Red navigation lights fore and aft were blinking, and there was a massive Soviet red star on the after part of the fuselage. On the flank, the word Tsar in huge red letters was illuminated. Korsakov was in a hurry to get out of Sweden and back to Fortress Russia, it seemed.

  The rooftop was well lit. Hawke whipped out his monocular. He could see a number of sharpshooters and armed guards in addition to the ground crew now handling more tether lines as they were tossed down to the roof. At least the damn thing hadn’t already taken off with Anastasia aboard. No, she was still somewhere inside that house. There was still a chance.

  He’d find a way inside. Get her out of that house. And then-

  “Crikey,” Halter said, slightly out of breath, joining him at the edge of the woods. “A bit steep, that.”

  Hawke was too busy calculating the odds to reply. There was open ground all the way around this side of the house. It was perhaps a hundred yards to the covered entranceway at the front door. But he could circle around through the woods. Maybe the house was closer to the tree line around the back. He pulled the Walther from its holster, checked that there was a full mag and a round in the chamber. It wasn’t much of a weapon against sharpshooters with SDV sniper rifles. But then, what the hell were you going to do? Life was seldom perfect.

  “Time?” Hawke asked.

  “Fifteen.”

  “A bloody lifetime,” Hawke said. “I’m going inside that house and bring her out.”

  “That’s insanity! It’s wide-open ground for at least a hundred yards on all four sides of the house. Bloody suicide with those sharpshooters up there, Alex. Use your head, man!”

  But Halter saw a look in the man’s cold blue eyes that told him any argument was a waste of precious time. He slipped out of his fur coat, spread it out on the snow, and placed the machine carefully on top of it. With practiced fingers, he knelt on the bearskin, opened the Beta, and booted it up. Then he flipped an illuminated red toggle, arming the unit.

  “Do what you have to do, Stefan. I’d do the same in your shoes. But I’m going inside that house now. I’ll get her out. Or I won’t. If I’m not back in ten minutes, with or without Anastasia, blow the whole damn house down. Kill the madman and everyone else inside. A million lives are at stake. It doesn’t matter who dies in there to prevent that.”

  “Alex, listen, it’s bloody over. I’m sorry about your friend in there. But you can’t help her now. You won’t get twenty feet across that open ground. They’ve got night-vision equipment. I can’t even give you covering fire with the Bizon, because they’d take me out before I triggered the detonator. Christ, just wait until he boards. We’ll take him out when the ship’s over the fjord. I’m just sorry as hell, but that’s the end of it.”

  “I have no choice, Stefan. I’d rather die out there in the snow than live the rest of my life knowing I didn’t try to save her. All right? You understand that?”

  “I guess I do, Alex, God help me.”

  “Good enough. Give ’em hell when the time comes. Cheers, mate.”

  “Cheers.”

  “Here goes nothing,” Hawke said with a smile, and then he was on his feet and running across the impossibly broad expanse of moonlit snow, head down, arms and legs pumping, the covered entryway to house only sixty or so yards away now…

  He almost made it.

  Shots rang out, three or four bursts of them, heavy automatic-weapons fire from the roof. There were little geysers of snow erupting all around the running and spinning Englishman. He dodged and darted, keeping his head down, sprinting like a madman, desperately zigzagging for the safety of the entryway.

  The first round caught Hawke in the right shoulder and spun him completely around. Halter, watching his new friend from just inside the tree line, found the shocking sight of his red-black blood spraying voluminously over the white snow horrifying. But Hawke managed somehow to keep his feet beneath him and keep moving toward the house. Another round caught him in the left thigh, and he spun again, his left knee barely grazing the snow before he rose again and limped forward, dragging his wounded leg through the crusty snow.

  Halter watched him raise the little Walther and fire at the men above who were killing him, even as yet another and another round struck him, and he collapsed to the ground. Hawke lay there, motionless, gazing up at the stars, small snow geysers erupting all around him, some missing, some of them no doubt finding their target. Halter checked his watch and looked down at the machine.

  Then his eyes returned to his comrade, alone out on the snow, gravely wounded, surely dying.

  He looked at his watch. Eleven minutes. Was that time enough to run out there and try to drag Hawke back to the safety of the woods? And still take out the Tsar before he used his own Beta machine to kill a million people? Maybe just enough time. But he could be shot down himself, of
course, die trying to save this brave man. A man who would so willingly, so cheerfully, sacrifice his own life to save the woman he loved.

  It would be a death well worth dying, he thought, trying to save the life of a man as noble as this one. Yes, he could comfortably live, or die, with that.

  Or he could sit safely in the woods as Hawke died, bled to death out there on the snow, knowing that by staying put, he was perhaps saving the lives of a million souls. It was what Hawke had wanted him to do. What he’d told him to do, in fact. But if he did that, was he any more worthy than the monster they’d both vowed to kill? If he wasn’t willing at least to try to save Hawke’s life, what made him one iota better than his avowed enemy?

  Bugger all, he thought, seeing Hawke’s inert body twitch as another round struck home. He might actually succeed, after all, he told himself. Save Hawke and still pull the Beta trigger in time.

  It would be a very close thing.

  Professor Stefanovich Halter had a decision to make.

  HAWKE WAS ALIVE, for the moment, anyway. But he knew he was not far from death. Blood was pumping out of him from too many places. A gentle snow had begun to fall. He closed his eyes. The snowflakes felt like butterfly wings grazing his cheeks. He knew he’d failed. But he also knew he’d tried. And so it would end. He’d done his duty. There was nothing left to think or say. It was, finally, over.

  THE SCREAMS FROM the third-floor bedroom could be heard throughout the house. The elderly Swedish servants paused and looked at each other, shook their heads, and went on about their duties. They were long accustomed to these horrible cries.

  Every summer, they would come to Morto, the widowed count, his beautiful daughter, and the twin boys. And over the course of every summer, since her childhood, the father had found reason to beat his daughter. Beat her when he was angry. Or depressed. Or had swilled too much vodka after supper. Beat her and whipped her so badly that sometimes the doctor had to be fetched from the mainland.