Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25)

by Fletcher, John

  Maria D’Orlez seemed disturbed; certainly not pleased. A dark shadow of anger crossed her face.

  “I’d better take you home now,” I said when we returned to the car.

  “Not yet.” She glanced at a clock on a public building; the hands stood at eight-ten. “Let’s go up on the hill, Dr. Roswell, and look down at the city—one more look at the bright lights before they’re gone.”

  It was after nine when I parked at the viewpoint on the crest of the hill. The night was unusually clear. The lighted city streets spread out below us in a geometric checkerboard. We could see the endless columns of headlights moving away from the city on the freeways—like an army of marching fireflies.

  “Americans are gilt-edged fools,” Maria said suddenly. “They’ll lose this war, but there was a time once when they could have wiped out the Reds—when they had weapons the Russians couldn’t match.”

  “Not fools, Maria; humanitarians. We put our faith in justice instead of brute force.”

  “Force is justice, Dr. Roswell. To win: that’s the only thing that counts.”

  “And you believe they will?”

  “The Communists have planned this for a long time; they’ve calculated all the risks. Tonight the strength is on their side, and they won’t be afraid to use it.”

  “Only material power, Maria. There’s something else—”

  She laughed.

  A blast of fire and flame shot up from the entrance through the harbor breakwater, followed rapidly by a dozen more explosions. Something—enemy submarines?—had triggered the mines protecting the harbor. Cold fear rose in my throat. Maria looked at her watch, and flung her arms around my neck.

  “I’m frightened—terribly frightened,” she whispered. I felt her lips warm on mine, her fingers tearing, like cat claws, at the back of my skull.

  There were more explosions in the harbor. Debris fountained up from the navy installations. Enemy submarines were there; that much was clear. A suicide squad had come first, exploding the mines; the rest were pouring through the gap.

  I tried to pull Maria’s hands away from my neck. I felt the pinprick of the needle and I heard her say,

  “We still have a use for you intellectuals, Dr. Roswell—for a while yet.”

  I wanted to push her from me. I wanted to fling myself out of the car. But my body went limp and a black nightmare closed over my mind. The last thing I saw was the Madonna smile on Maria’s face, lit by the scarlet fire of the explosions in the harbor.

  IV. The Highway—Thursday 11:00 P.M. Jerry Bonhill

  “JERRY! JERRY, your father’s dead!” The shrill scream came from far away. I felt cold hands pulling at my shirt, dragging me back from the emptiness. Pain throbbed in my head. I opened my eyes.

  I couldn’t have been out for more than a minute. The planes were still diving at the highway, slashing bullets into the shambles. All the traffic had stopped, held up by the wreckage.

  People were running from their cars and leaping into the ditch. A poor concealment, for the gasoline left no sheltering darkness. The planes came again, firing into the ditch. I could hear the cries of the dying and the wounded, above the jet-blast of the motors.

  Mom helped me out of the car. With her handkerchief she dabbed at the cut on my forehead, where my head had struck the windshield. When I heard the swelling roar of the planes a third time, I jerked Mom down on the earth. We rolled beneath the car. A bullet hit one of the windows and the fragmented glass clattered against the open door.

  In five minutes it was over: that first taste of hell. Flights of planes came out of the east, with wing-mounted guns blasting at the enemy. The air battle joined high above us. We heard the angry clatter of machine guns and the roar of motors. Sometimes a plane fell, making a comet-trail of fire in the night sky.

  Men were hauling the wreckage off the highway. I joined them. In ten minutes we had one lane clear. The refugee cars began to move again.

  We were still clearing the highway when the Red Cross helicopters came, settling into the field beyond the grove. Army Medical Corpsmen lifted the seriously wounded into stretchers and loaded them in the waiting ships. One of the pilots told me the unit came from March Field. He gestured toward the air battle thundering overhead.

  “They’re our boys up there, what’s left of them. They must have tangled with the whole, damn Red air force.”

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “This is one of the neatest sneak attacks on record.” He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a cigarette. “First they fouled up the roads so we can’t get any transports to go through, and then—”

  “You mean the evacuation of L.A.? It was on the radio. I heard it myself.”

  “Half a dozen sympathizers, could hold a station long enough to make the announcement. Afterward they wrecked every transmitter in the city, so the C.D. couldn’t broadcast a correction. That’s the way we have it doped out.”

  “But the Russian planes—”

  “A couple of hours after the highways were nicely jammed, Red subs broke through into the Los Angeles harbor. We don’t know how many—none of our boys have got close enough to see—but it’s a damn big chunk of their fleet. The subs launched the fighter planes, and they’re probably putting men ashore by this time. They’ve bought themselves a beachhead, unless we can move transports down these roads mighty quick.”

  “Don’t we have any bases closer to the city?”

  “The Soviets have given us the works—everything in one knockout attack. Most of our fighter planes were shuttled north to intercept the big bombers. This L.A. landing has us where the hair is short. All we have at March Field are the cadets, still in flight school.”

  “And the navy?” I asked.

  “Most of the Pacific Fleet is at Hawaii—that is, the ships the Red subs haven’t sunk. The Reds will probably hold their beachhead for a while. But if they want to exploit it, they’re going to need a hell of a lot of manpower. How will they get it here? Tonight they’re throwing away their air force and a big piece of their submarine fleet. And don’t forget: no Soviet city is going to survive our H-bombs. We aren’t licked yet, kid; not by a long shot.”

  There were only four people still in the grove—Mom, a leather-faced old man, a girl of about my age, and a small boy of nine. And, of course, the dead, laid out in rows under the trees.

  The three people were strays Mom had taken under her wing. It was a habit of hers. The man said his name was Pat Thatcher. He had lost his car in the pile-up.

  The child was Jim Riley. His parents had been killed in the strafing. We knew nothing about the girl. She sat motionless, in a state of shock. She had been like that when they pulled her out of the shambles. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was well put together. Red hair cut short, like a boy’s; blue eyes; a tiny, turned-up nose; and freckles on her cheeks.

  I examined the car. Except for the broken windshield and side window, it seemed undamaged. But the wheels were bogged deep in the soft soil. With Pat Thatcher’s help I dug out the back wheels and began to push the car toward solid ground.

  Little Jim Riley and the redheaded girl squeezed in the back beside our cartons of canned food and the bundles of clothing.

  Mom and Thatcher sat in front with me. I started the motor and put the car in gear. That was my first indication that we had anything wrong. The engine pounded as if it had a bad case of mechanical asthma; the front wheels shimmied on the highway.

  “You’ll have to fix it,” Mom shouted.

  “Nothing he can do,” Thatcher replied.

  The shimmy of the front wheels became steadily worse. After we started up the grade, it was impossible to push the car any faster than fifteen miles an hour. It was midnight before we reached the three-thousand-foot level.

  I tried the car radio again. I couldn’t raise San Francisco, but I brought in the faint, fading signal of another station—probably Salt Lake City. The announcer was saying,

  “…first rumor of a Sovie
t landing at Los Angeles, and the government spokesman declared the rumor was without foundation. In a second bulletin…” Static for half a minute. The radio came up loud again, “…the bombing of Boston and Tacoma. There is as yet no reliable estimate of casualties in Detroit and Chicago; both cities were partially evacuated before the H-bombs fell. Our only news out of Europe is still three hours old. During the first twenty minutes of the war, Soviet planes dropped H-bombs on the major English cities; the British had insufficient time to carry out any effective evacuation of their larger centers of population. British heavy bombers made retaliatory raids on the continent, but we still have no confirmation…”

  The voice was choked out by static. We couldn’t bring in the station again; I snapped off the radio. Mom began to twist her hands together, frowning uncertainly.

  “Jerry,” she asked, “does that mean England’s fighting on our side?”

  “It’s their war, too, Mom, just as much as it’s ours.”

  “But Dr. Clapper always said they wouldn’t—they wanted to knife us in the back. I’m—I’m actually glad Dr. Clapper was wrong for once.” Her lips began to tremble; I saw tears on her cheeks. She added, wistfully, “I wish I could have made myself say that while Chris was still alive.”

  The car wheezed past the four-thousand-foot marker.

  Suddenly a flash of white lit the northern sky, beyond the ridge of the mountain. Two or three seconds passed. Waves of concussion bent the tops of the pines, like a storm wind; a thunder of sound shook the earth. Jim Riley awoke and started to cry.

  “The H-bomb!” Mom gasped.

  “No farther north than Santa Barbara,” Thatcher added. “That’s my guess.”

  Then we heard the roar of big bombers, growing louder and louder in the night sky. I saw them in the moonlight. Not one or two, but scores. They swept low over the city. Tiny figures dropped in rhythmic precision toward the earth. In a moment thousands of dark-colored parachutes ballooned in the air.

  INTERIOR ILLUSTRATION #2

  Artist Unknown

  V. The City—Thursday, Midnight Dr. Stewart Roswell

  I RECOVERED slowly from the opiate Maria D’Orlez had given me. I saw her behind the wheel of my car. The dashlight reflected upward gave her face a saintly expression—the Madonna mask.

  Slowly I pushed myself up on the seat beside her. I hadn’t the strength to do anything else. My mind was in a stupor.

  Maria turned south on the oceanfront boulevard, high on the bluff above the beach. The moving panel of moonlight on the water passed across the submarines surfaced in the harbor. I saw the catapults launching the fighter planes, and the crowded landing barges moving toward the shore.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Roswell,” Maria said suddenly, in a sultry voice.

  “You help to betray your own country—” My voice was high-pitched, unrecognizable, the voice of a stranger. “—and that’s all you can say?”

  “We need spokesmen, respectable men to explain our position to the American people.”

  “And you honestly believe you can force me to spread Communist propaganda?”

  “Truth, Dr. Roswell. You and the others. You were my assignment tonight. I followed your car when you went downtown; that’s how I met you at the hotel.”

  “But force, Maria—”

  “Education.” That one word was crisp and granite-hard. “When your mind is washed clean of all the bourgeois rubbish you’ve been taught to believe, you’ll know how to speak for the people. It is a great awakening, Dr. Roswell, a wonderful awakening to a glorious, new world.”

  She brought my car to a stop in front of a large mansion on the oceanfront, one of the gaudiest, pseudo-Spanish cathedrals of Millionaire’s Row. I was still too weak to stand alone; Maria had to help me up the brick walk.

  I recognized the house. It belonged to Marvin Harlip Dragen III, the addle-witted fourth-generation heir of a nineteenth century robber baron who spent a good part of his life dabbling at matrimony. What time and energy he had left over he devoted to Causes. He was in the strangely inconsistent position of controlling an enormous fortune, while at the same time loudly condemning the means by which it had been acquired. He was the angel of American Communism.

  “You’ve brought us another guest, Miss D’Orlez!” He beamed. “How delightful.”

  “Dr. Stewart Roswell,” she said.

  “The historian? We are pleased to have you join us, Comrade Roswell.” Dragen rubbed his hands together. “It goes straight to the heart, doesn’t it?—so many prominent men volunteering their help.”

  “Where’s his room, Marvin?”

  “Yes, a room—of course.” Dragen took a list from his pocket and studied it carefully. He was a little, soft man. His round face rode above rolls of fat. His eyes were small, dark, agate beads set too close together in a wad of pink clay. His yellow hair was plastered back on his skull to hide the balding crown. The unreal coloring of his cheeks, the bright slash of his mouth, obviously cried his use of cosmetics. “We still have one empty room for Dr. Roswell—third floor, on the corner. Though I’m afraid we’ll have to start doubling up when our other friends arrive.”

  Marvin rang a bell. Two strong-arm boys, armed with pistols, came from a side room and pushed me roughly toward the stairway. Still unsteady on my feet, I stumbled and fell. Grinning, one of the men kicked me viciously in the groin. I lay against the steps, paralyzed by pain.

  Dragen waddled toward me, fluttering his pudgy hands. “I do hope you aren’t hurt, Dr. Roswell. It was an accident; you understand that, naturally. These Comrades are really as gentle as doves. They save their anger for the enemies of the people.”

  Maria D’Orlez said, without feeling, “I’m sure Dr. Roswell doesn’t want to be an enemy of the people.”

  “A bloated plutocrat,” Dragen added.

  “But he may require a little education…” Maria’s voice trailed away in a frightening silence.

  The strong-arm boys laughed and jerked me to my feet. They dragged me up three flights of steps, pushed open a bedroom door and flung me into the room. I heard the key turn in the lock. I lay on the floor, aware of nothing but pain. I felt myself retching. I tried to crawl away. My hand touched the leg of a chair. Slowly I pulled myself up until I could rest against the chair. After a time the pain subsided.

  The door key grated in the lock. I swung around, instinctively afraid. (Had I learned my first lesson, then, so soon ?—to respond to every new stimulus with fear?) I expected Dragen’s bullyboys; but it was Maria D’Orlez. She slid into the room stealthily, pressing her finger on her lips.

  She handed me a small glass containing a milky liquid. “I know what Dragen’s men did. Drink this, Dr. Roswell. It will take away the pain.”

  I pushed the glass away. “Or drug me again.”

  “Don’t say that. I can’t stand that look of accusation in your eyes. I want to help you.”

  “Is that why you brought me here?”

  “We must have you on our side, Dr. Roswell. We need men of your intelligence and ability.”

  “Possibly, when your goons finish what you call education—”

  “But you don’t have to go through that.” She put the glass on the dresser and came closer to me. I smelled the gardenia scent of her hair and, even in the darkness, I saw her fragile, Madonna smile. “That’s why I had to risk talking to you again. The others don’t know I’m here. You must never tell them.” She put her hand unexpectedly on mine. “Or may I—may I call you Stewart?”

  Her air of timid conspiracy was contrived. I knew how they operated: first the mailed fist, then soft words—any device that won their dialectic objective.

  “Please, Stewart, forget your bitterness.” Her tears were surprisingly real. “It’s true I forced you to come here; that was my assignment. But I sincerely admire your books; the whole party does. In spirit you’ve always been one of us. We ask only peace and freedom for all humanity, an international democracy of goodwill and brotherhood.
”

  “Word games, Maria.”

  She drew away from me and her face became cold marble. “All right, Stewart. Let’s forget that—junk your idealism—and talk about practical things. You want to save your own neck; every man does. When the Soviets win this war—”

  “You seem sure of that, Maria. Why?”

  “Because we put our bets on material reality, the logistics of weapons. We’re not waiting for any vague spiritual nonsense to work a miracle for us. Tonight, Stewart, Soviet H-bombs will wipe out nearly every industrial city in the United States. Except one.”

  “You think the Russian cities are immune?”

  She shrugged. “They’re part of the gamble.”

  “And the people who die?”

  “Martyrs in our great crusade for peace. We’ll build them a fine memorial in the new Moscow.” She gestured toward the harbor, where the explosions were becoming less frequent. “This is what counts, Stewart; this one industrial center which is going to survive. Four hundred of the bombers in the second wave that crossed Canada tonight are carrying paratroops—not bombs. The issue is being settled here, Stewart. By midnight we’ll have our beachhead in America: a harbor for our submarines, refineries to turn out fuel, heavy industry still undamaged. With Los Angeles as our base of operations, what problem will we have conquering a nation already in chaos from the bombing? America will surrender within a week.”

  Maria D’Orlez was no longer an enigma, but a tragic symbol of our failure to achieve our own ideals.

  For myself, I knew the choice was very close. The strong-arm boys would be back to resume the farce they called education. Did I have the guts to hold to what I believed? Did I have the faith and the conviction of the Christian martyr?—for only that could overturn the empire of the Politburo.

  VI. The Ridge—Friday morning, 12:30 A.M. Jerry Bonhill

  JIM RILEY was still crying. Mom reached over the seat and tried to comfort him. I felt her body stiffen. “Jerry!” she gasped. “The girl…”