The professor straightened his white hat and leaned more heavily on his cane. He doddered to the front and called out in Russian, “Dobraye utro!”
Masterson spoke fluently. All Elizabeth understood were the words London Times. Masterson must be attempting to pass them off as visiting press.
The soldier lowered his weapon. “You are Englishers.”
Masterson nodded with a broad, embarrassed smile. “You speak English. Brilliant. We’ve gotten ourselves lost and could not find our way back to the Polissia Hotel. If you’d be so kind, perhaps you could escort us back there.”
From the crinkling of the soldiers’ brows, they must not have understood him that well. Masterson was using their own lack of fluency to unbalance them, to deflect them from questioning the cover story. But the soldier with the rifle did understand their goal.
“Polissia Gostineetsa?” he asked.
“Da! Now there’s a good chap. Could you take us there?”
The pair spoke in rapid snatches of Russian. Finally one shrugged and the other turned with a nod.
Behind them, a scream of a motorcycle erupted, shattering the quiet town. Far down the street, in the direction of the jail, a motorcycle with a flashing blue light and sidecar swung into the road, bearing two soldiers with furred caps. They were spotted. Shouts called out in Russian toward them.
Suddenly the pair of soldiers in front of them stiffened.
“Trouble,” Masterson said and pushed Elizabeth down the street. “Run!”
Rosauro spun on a heel and snap-kicked the closest soldier in the face. Bone cracked, and he fell stiffly backward. The other guard lifted his weapon, but Luca was quicker on the draw with his pistol. Blood exploded from the soldier’s shoulder, twisting him around as if mule-kicked, but his weapon chattered with automatic fire, sweeping toward them.
Masterson rolled and shielded Elizabeth, while both Luca and Rosauro dropped flat to the street. The professor fell against her and knocked her to her knees. Luca’s pistol cracked again, and the gunfire ended.
Masterson slid off her and slumped to the road. Elizabeth had felt the shuddering impacts into his body. He rolled to his back while blood pooled under him.
“Hayden!”
He waved her off, still holding his cane. “Go!”
The motorcycle screamed down the road toward them all.
Rosauro yanked her up.
Luca fired at the motorcycle, but it swerved behind cars and debris for cover. Return fire from the soldier in the sidecar sparked the pavement around them.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” Masterson said again, blood bubbling at his lips.
“Hayden…” She covered her mouth, unable to find the words to thank him, to forgive him.
Still, he saw it in her eyes and gave a tiny nod of acknowledgment with a shadow of a smile, content. “Go…,” he said hoarsely, eyelids closing.
Rosauro pushed her down the street toward the next intersection. Luca kept firing one-handed behind him as he ran—then the slide on his pistol popped open, out of ammunition. Strafing fire chased them.
Rosauro guided them alongside the edge of the road, putting a rusted truck between them and the cycle. “Around the corner!”
But they’d never make it.
No longer under fire, the cycle roared straight for them.
Elizabeth looked over her shoulder. As the motorcycle swerved through the bodies in the street, Masterson suddenly rolled with the last of his strength and jammed his cane into the front wheel of the bike. The stout rod snapped and sent the cycle flipping up on its front tire and over. It crashed upside down and slid across the rough pavement, casting sparks and leaving a bloody smear.
Rosauro urged them all onward. “Hurry!”
Hopefully the cycle’s roar had covered most of the gunplay, but they had to be away from here as quickly as possible. Reaching the intersection, they headed along the next street. A quarter mile down the road stood a bright hotel, freshly painted, lights glowing. A few polished black limousines waited at the curb.
They hurried toward it. Luca tossed aside his empty pistol, and they did their best to straighten and dust off their clothes into some semblance of normalcy. They slowed when they reached the hotel and strode toward it, as if they belonged. No one accosted them. The hotel was mostly deserted, just a pair of drivers lounging in the lobby. A few staff members also worked behind a desk. Everyone else appeared to be at the ceremony.
Rosauro crossed to the front counter. “Is there a phone we could use? We…we’re with the New York Times.”
“Press room…over there,” a tired-eyed young man said in halting English. He pointed toward a door off the lobby.
“Spazeebo,” Rosauro thanked him.
She led them through the door. The room was square with a low counter that ran along the full perimeter of the space. A central table held mounds of office supplies: reams of paper, stacks of pads, pens, staplers. But what drew Elizabeth’s attention were the two-dozen black telephones that rested along the wall counter.
Rosauro headed to one side, picked up the receiver, and listened for a dial tone. She nodded her satisfaction. As she dialed, she said, “I’ll alert central command. They’ll spread the word and get an evacuation started.”
Elizabeth sank into a neighboring chair. In the momentary calm, she began to tremble all over. She could not stop. Masterson’s death…it broke something inside her. Tears started flowing—grieving for the professor, but also for her father.
Rosauro finished dialing and waited. A frown slowly formed, and her eyebrows pinched together.
“What’s wrong?” Luca asked.
She shook her head, worried. “There’s no answer.”
12:50 A.M.
Washington, D.C.
Painter knocked lightly on the locker room door and pushed it cautiously open. He was met by a pistol pointed at his face. Kat lowered the weapon, her eyes relieved.
“How’s everyone?” he asked and followed her inside.
“So far, so good.”
A Sigma corpsman took up her position at the door. Kat led Painter into the main room, lined by banks of metal lockers and benches. At the back was an archway that led to the showers and sauna.
Kat led him to a neighboring aisle. He found Malcolm on a bench, and Lisa seated on the floor, her arm around Sasha. The girl stared up at him with large blue eyes and rocked slightly. Her gaze found Kat’s, and her entire body relaxed.
Lisa stood. She had changed into a fresh pair of scrubs, no longer covered in blood. Kat bent down, picked up Sasha, and sat on the bench with her. She whispered in the girl’s ear, which drew a small smile from the child.
Lisa slipped into Painter’s arms, then stared up at him for a breath. “What’s wrong?” she whispered, concerned.
Painter thought he’d been hiding it well, but how did one completely mask the fury and grief that filled him now?
“It’s Sean,” he said.
Kat and Malcolm glanced over to him.
Painter took a deep breath. “The bastard killed him.” He could still hear the gunshot, the snap of feedback, and see his friend’s body fall.
“Oh, God…,” Lisa mumbled and pulled tighter to him.
“Mapplethorpe’s heading down here, searching for the girl.” Painter checked his watch.
Kat noted his attention. “The fail-safe?”
“Set for four minutes.” Painter prayed he had everything prepared correctly. The air was now heavy with the sweet-smelling accelerant.
“If we have to defend the room,” Kat asked, “do we have to worry about the gunfire igniting the air?”
He shook his head. “The compound functions like aerosolized C4. It takes a strong electrical spark to set it off, not a flash of fire.”
Lisa kept to his side. “Then what do we do from here?”
Painter waved them to their feet. He wanted to protect them as best he could. He would lose no others. But he didn’t have much to offer.
> “We’d better hide.”
Mapplethorpe followed his commando team down the hall.
He had employed this same group of men many times in the past, a mercenary team that included former British S.A.S. and the South Africa’s Recces. They were his muscle across the world political map. They shied at nothing that was asked of them: assassinations, kidnappings, torture, rape. Whatever clandestine operation he needed run, these men would get it done. Best of all, afterward they would simply disappear, leaving no trace, just shadows and ghosts.
It was hard men such as these who kept the country secure. Where others feared to tread, these soldiers did not balk.
The point man reached a door at the end of the hall. Its sign read LOCKER ROOM. The soldier held up a fist. In his other hand, he clutched an electronic tracker.
Earlier, Trent McBride had reported that the child’s microchip transmitter was still functioning. There was no place she could hide. They’d picked up her signal on this level.
The commando waited upon his order to proceed.
Mapplethorpe waved him through the door. He checked his watch. The fail-safe was set for another three minutes. In case Painter Crowe decided not to abort the firestorm, he wanted the girl nabbed and evacuated. If they were quick enough, it should not be a problem. An emergency exit lay at the other end of the hallway and led off to an underground garage.
Ahead, the soldiers burst through the door and ran low and fast into the next room. Mapplethorpe followed in their wake, closing the door behind him. He heard quiet orders flow among the group as they spread through the rows of lockers.
Mapplethorpe followed the commando with the tracker, flanked by two more soldiers. The lead man ran along the lockers, his arm held high. He finally reached the source of the signal, dropped his arm, and pointed.
In the silence, Mapplethorpe heard a faint whimper coming from inside the locker.
At last.
A padlock secured the door, but another soldier whipped out a small set of bolt cutters and snapped the lock off.
Mapplethorpe waved. They were running out of time. “Hurry!”
The head commando tugged the locker’s handle and yanked the door open. Mapplethorpe caught a glimpse of a digital tape recorder, a radio transmitter—and a Taser pistol wired to the door.
A trap.
Mapplethorpe turned and ran.
Behind him, the pistol fired with a pop and a crackle of electricity.
Mapplethorpe screamed as he heard a loud whuff of ignition, sounding like the firing of a gas grill. A flash of heat, and a fireball blew outward. It picked him off his feet and carried him down the row. His clothes roasted to his back. He breathed flames, his scalp burned to bone. He struck the wall, no longer human, just a flaming torch of agony.
He rolled and burned for a stretch of eternity—until darkness snuffed him away.
A floor below in the gym locker room, Painter heard the screams echoing down from the medical locker room directly overhead. He had set the trap above, knowing Mapplethorpe would come searching for the girl’s signal. He had planted one of the Cobra radio transceivers used to draw off the helicopters back at the safe house. Like before, he set the device to mimic the girl’s signal.
As a boy, Painter had often gone hunting with his father on the Mashantucket Reservation, his people’s tribal homelands. He had grown skilled at the art of baiting a trap and luring prey. Today was no different.
His false trail had drawn the others like moths to a flame.
And like those moths, they met a fiery end.
Painter felt no remorse for his trap. He still pictured Sean McKnight falling to the floor. Two other staff members had also been killed. Painter checked his watch. The second hand swept past the twelve, crossing the fail-safe deadline set for one o’clock.
He held his breath, but nothing happened.
Earlier, after setting the fail-safe, he had fled to the mechanical room and manually disabled the electronic sparking system. He had needed the levels flooded with the accelerant gas, but Mapplethorpe had been right. Painter could not let the men and women captured by the commando team die, not even to protect the girl. So he had set the trap instead, localizing the firestorm to the one room and luring Mapplethorpe and his team to it.
With a majority of the soldiers dispatched and its leader killed, the others would likely disperse and vanish into the night.
Lisa leaned against him. “Will the fires spread?”
The answer came from above. Sprinklers engaged and rained both water and foam over them.
“Is it over?” she asked.
Painter nodded. “Right here it is.”
Still, Painter knew things elsewhere were far from settled.
10:53 A.M.
Pripyat, Ukraine
Gray sprinted toward the closing steel door at the back end of the massive hangar. He pounded down the roadway between the tall rails. He passed the bodies of two dead workers, shot in the head.
His heart thundered in his ears, but he still heard cheers echoing from the distant grandstands, as if this were a track meet and he was sprinting for the finish line in the four-hundred-meter dash. Only in this race, the spectators’ lives depended on him crossing the finish line in time.
With a final burst of speed, he reached the hatchway and dove on his belly under the descending door. It was like entering a crawl space beneath a house. The door was yards thick, composed of plates of steel. He scrabbled forward as the edge continued to drop, pressing down on him. Panic fired his heart. He kicked and paddled, worming his way forward as he was flattened farther under the thick door.
Finally, he reached the end and rolled out into a cavernous space. He took in the sight in a heartbeat: a vast interior, lined by scaffolding, enclosing a ten-story blocky structure of concrete and blackened steel. It was the infamous Sarcophagus, the gravestone over reactor four. By now, the hangar had been hauled almost completely over the crypt. Beyond the Sarcophagus rose a wall of concrete. The hangar would end its crawl and butt up against that wall, sealing the Sarcophagus completely.
But for now, an arch of sunlight spanned the Sarcophagus like a fiery rainbow. It was all that was left open to the world. As Gray stared, the sunlit rainbow grew incrementally narrower.
Off to the left, Gray heard someone speaking in Russian outside the hangar, proud and bold, broadcasted loudly from the grandstands. He also heard the continual steady drone of the hydraulic jacks as they pulled the hangar the last few feet.
Then to the right, a pistol fired.
Gray pictured the bodies outside.
Nicolas was leaving an easy trail of bread crumbs to follow.
As Gray sprinted in that direction, he kept low as he dodged around several stacks of plate steel, a pile of broken concrete, and a forklift. The air smelled of oil and tasted rusty. As he reached the corner of the Sarcophagus, he freed the pistol from his belt.
Peering around the corner, he spotted a figure limping toward the narrowing arch of sunlight. He was about twenty yards from escaping. Gray leveled his pistol.
“Nicolas!” Gray barked at him.
Startled, the man tripped around.
“Don’t move!” Gray shouted.
Nicolas searched for a second, then turned and fled. Gray could not risk killing the man. Not until he found out what was planned. So he took careful aim and shot. Nicolas’s good leg went out from under him. He sprawled onto the floor.
Gray rushed toward him, but a man such as Nicolas did not rise to his height of power by folding under stress. The senator rolled behind a stack of steel I-beams. Shots fired back at Gray, forcing him to duck to the side. He took shelter behind a pallet of lumber.
“Chyort! Rodilsya cherez jopu!” Nicolas cursed at him in Russian, his voice edging toward hysteria. He yelled at Gray. “We can’t stay here, you svoloch! We have less than three minutes.”
Beyond the man’s hiding place, Gray watched the sliver of sunlight between the massive concrete wa
ll and the trundling hangar pinch ever closer together. There was only four feet of space left. No wonder Nicolas was in a hurry.
“Then tell me how to stop Operation Uranus!” Gray called back.
“There is no way to stop it! It’s all been set in motion. All we can do is get out of the way…now!”
“Tell me what you’ve done.”
“Fine! Concussion charges! Planted inside the pillars on the other side of the Sarcophagus. They’ll rip a wall down and expose everyone on that side to a lethal dose of radiation. There’s no way to defuse them. We MUST go now!”
Gray attempted to digest what he’d heard, trying to seek a solution. Even if he ran outside and screamed for an evacuation, it would be too late.
“There’s no reason for us to die with them,” Nicolas continued. “The world needs a new direction. Needs strong men. Like myself. Like you. Our group’s goal is to better the state of mankind, to forge a new Renaissance.”
Gray remembered the senator’s earlier discussion about propping up a new prophet onto the world stage. So this is how he planned to do it, creating world chaos, then offering a solution, one promoted by a figurehead who was guided by the prescience and knowledge of augmented children.
“Even if we die here,” Nicolas pressed, “it won’t be the end. Plans are already in motion that cannot be stopped. Our deaths would serve no purpose. Join us. We can use such men as yourself.”
In truth, Gray could think of no way to stop what was to come.
Beyond Nicolas, the walls continued to close.
“Two minutes!” he called to Gray. “There’s a lead-lined control booth just outside. We can still make it if we leave right now!”
Nicolas shifted behind his hiding place, plainly considering making a run for it. But with a twisted ankle on one side and a wounded leg on the other, he must know that path was certain death.
Then again, so was staying here.
Nicolas finally tossed out his pistol and stepped into the open. He faced Gray, arms out to either side, tottering on his legs. “If this is the only way to live, so be it!”
Gray cursed under his breath. Unable to stop the deaths to come, his only recourse was to apprehend the mass murderer who had orchestrated the deadly operation. Gray stepped out into the open with his pistol leveled.
The Last Oracle: A Sigma Force Novel Page 34