by Ani Fox
“Dammit, Cujo, no.” The kid yanked on the dog and the FBI guy sighed. “False, um, positive. Sir, what is this?”
They allowed me to walk over. I pulled my windbreaker tighter and peered into the back seat. “Charlene’s box of tampons?” My driver’s license claimed I was Jeff Beck (Section 22 lacked a proper sense of American names). Jeff looked bewildered and spoke with a mild Georgia twang.
“No, sir, the liquid on the seat.” As in, the stuff the dog had just licked.
“Oh, yeah. Somebody spilled a drink yesterday and no one would fess up.”
The FBI man came over. “What kind of drink?” He had a notebook and gave the look that said: This will go down on your permanent record.
“Um, Coke. Maybe that red crap they love to drink?”
The black trooper edged in. “Big Red?”
“We never say its name.” I was solemn. “We are a strict Dr. Pepper household. They want to drink the red crap, they drink it. But I shall not pander.” Strictly speaking, fanatical love or hate of Big Red was a Deep South cultural artifact. Jeff was originally from Alabama.
The K-9 unit prowled over the rest of the car looking for explosive and weapons, contraband of any kind, under my elite sleeping bags and wrappers. Cujo might have found a few Corn Nuts to the annoyance of pimply officer. The back reeked of perfume and sports creams, old soda and sweat socks. (I’d traded the homeless man for some of his clothes in exchange for several useful survival items Donnie had generously donated to him).
The trooper got things back in hand. “Why is the vehicle empty, sir?” She didn’t really care but she had a checklist and the FBI was watching her.
“Hmm. Oh, the girls are sleeping and someone needed to go get Nadya.”
She gave the FBI agent a look and he rolled his eyes a bit. “Nadya who, sir?
“Oh, sorry. I’m a little tired. Been driving a while. She’s the power forward for the team. Got stuck in Bowling Green at a different tournament. If we’re going to make the playoffs, I have to go get her and come back to Nashville for the, uh, rest of the girls.”
FBI guy couldn’t leave it alone. Behind him, Cujo woofed again and attacked a Panera wrapper smeared with Twinkie frosting. “Where are the mothers, sir?” He didn’t sound like he meant the sir. Jeff felt scared, which made him let slip his aggravation.
“Probably at a Chippendales drunk on margaritas.”
That made the Black trooper laugh. “Got stuck on convoy duty, huh?”
“She’s my stepdaughter and it was like, you know, the bonding thing. I have three boys. Who knew girls could be so…” Jeff held out his hand and waved in disgust at the back of the Suburban.
FBI guy nodded sagely. “My daughter does Judo. Her gis reek like dead fish.” When the black cop gave him a look he followed: “They do, Trudy. It’s horrifying. She’s like this little princess and then bam, so much sweat.”
Trudy sighed, as if men would never change, then turned to pimples and dog. “Christ, Harry, are you done yet?”
Harry gave them a harassed look. “Damn dog thinks we found world war three here. Except it’s girls’ underwear and Twinkies.” He could not possibly look more embarrassed as the German Shepherd chewed gleefully on some slightly stained panties. The Elephant Room’s back closet had a great Lost and Found section. It also helped that I rubbed some C4 on the panties before the trip, ditto the Twinkie wrappers.
Jeff blanched. “Um, sorry. That’s so… Maybe you keep that, huh?” I had three more stashed in a bag under the passenger’s seat.
Trudy waved off the K-9 unit, handed me the keys. “If you’re going much past Bowling Green you’re gonna do this again.”
“Oh, okay. Should I try to clean up the van? I mean the dog really went a little bonkers.”
“Damned thing’s just hungry. Been working all night. Some jackass at Homeland raised the threat to Severe and we’re out here on every interstate freezing our butts off, you know.”
“But if it stops the terrorists, it’s worth it right?”
Trudy gave me her best White People Know Nothing look and sighed. “Ain’t no terrorist going to drive down the interstate. You’re the most dangerous guy we saw all night.” Then she handed me my keys and sent me on my way.
The Suburban survived two more roadblocks before making the Boston city limits. In that time, not a single member of the American gendarmerie ever asked to see my license or did more than rifle through the back storage area lightly. That’s the power of Gap chinos and a pastel button down. The spilled tampons and dirty panties didn’t hurt. Americans are fabulous prudes.
Trudy had been right on a few counts. The terrorist did not take the interstate. He used a ship to haul his crew to Boston. I was also the most dangerous person she met that night. I pulled over into a gas station and got prepared for the next fight.
When Francis had shown me the photos, I’d seen the markings for the port. Hans had elected to use a Section 22 owned front. They called the place Brighter Horizons Import Export and, of course, they did a brisk trade in white slavery and drugs. Even Hans and Cassandra had needed to fund their mad designs. While loaning out their eugenic warriors had always been a brisk trade, Cassandra had a number of gruesome needs that required genetic stock. The white slave trade, where men dealt in the abduction and export of young women for sexual slavery, offered her a rare chance to experiment upon and extract genetic material, eggs, embryos and such, from educated, usually white women.
Brighter Horizons specialized in providing blonde Nordic women to clients in the Middle East, Russia, Africa, and South America. Section 22 provided heroin or methamphetamine addiction, sterilization, removal of tongue (and teeth for certain men), tracking chips, and general examination for STDs. In return, they charged a far higher premium and delivered a stream of victims to the labs. They had port privileges in Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and fourteen locations outside the US.
When Frankie Spoonface leaked the terrorist ID onto the Anonymous feed, some spy for Section 22 would relay back to Hans that the Boston locale had been blown and he’d be forced to move. He might still try to stay behind the doors of the front. The port offered little hardened infrastructure. They be swapping bullets in a firefight and it would quickly draw the police. I’d hoped that, instead, Hans would bolt from the safe place and try to get into the city where I could hunt him by myself.
As much as he would likely want to avoid being trapped at the port, I wanted it less. I could not really win that fight. Section 22 represented the most lethal force on the planet when their backs were against the wall and they had time to prepare. Using Anonymous to send the message, I had tried to do both. Going after them in their place of power would be suicide. Effective, show stopping suicide, but that did me little good. Hans might survive it, and then nothing would stop him from launching his viral attack at some point in the near future. This had to be final and, for Hans, it needed to be lethal or he won by default. It meant that I had just driven thirty hours to likely die. That called for donuts, lots of them.
It took a while to down the coffee and donuts I’d acquired. But I needed the fuel. I stripped to my skivvies and started strapping on knives, body armor, an ankle gun, and some C4 with detonator in the small of my back. I got piano wire and two dowels, built myself a quick garrote, and wrapped it around my left ankle. Then I donned the most placid tourist outfit possible—light khakis, green and white windbreaker, some cheerful sneakers that had very quiet soles, and a corduroy shirt of bubblegum pink. I added the tacky yellow glasses, a corduroy red Kangol worn bill forward, and clipped a large cell phone to my belt. The HK and extra magazines lay on my stomach inside a hollowed out pillow that made me look forty pounds beyond my proper weight. The magnesium bars went into the dad wallet in my left back pockets. My epic cat bag was filled with the ice axes, extra ammunition, some duct tape and detonators, the remainder of the C4, and a large McDonalds bag filled with drink cups of gasoline sealed with clear tape. Someone had abandoned a Canon camera
at a rest stop. It now held C4 with a little gasoline in the lens and a detonator. I hung it around my neck and got back into the SUV.
Hans and his people were using a slip near the Conley Container Terminal. I drove there slowly, the SUV now sporting Massachusetts plates. The van I’d seen in the pictures had been offloaded and was missing. Hans would need to be on hand for the festivities. I checked the adventure watch. T-Minus 150 minutes. He would be close to the scene, able perhaps to walk. I rolled the SUV out into the city and cruised Boylston, driving past the Mandarin. I could feel more than see the Culper Ring’s emplacements. Too many moving parts moving well and in synchronicity to not be rehearsed. They weren’t trying to hide, merely deter a frontal assault. I turned onto Commonwealth and doubled back using Newbury. Hans had parked the Flowers Van outside Fluevog’s Boots and Shoes, across from the Architectural school.
I found a spot in front of a hydrant, ditched the SUV, and went towards the van, cat bag in my right hand, masking the handgun pointing down. In this case, I’d gotten a set of Steyrs from the Section 22 goons. The largest one was in my hand, with eighteen shots loaded and ready to go. I made it to the parked van without incident. Inside, a blond man listened to music and stared into space. I walked past the passenger side of the van, which sported a second man, staring every direction at once. He locked onto me for a fraction of a second and kept moving. With my left hand I dropped the camera behind the left front wheel and moved quickly to the rear.
I’d rigged the detonator to pop three second after an impact. The front end of the van blew apart in a rage of thunder, spewing chunks of van into the windows to the Architectural College. The Mandarin was six blocks away. In seconds, Team Culper would have eyes on the area and start coordinating defenses. I saw the street cameras tilting towards the wreckage as I moved. I swapped the bag to my left hand and opened fire with my Steyr. I put all eighteen shots through the door in a spread pattern—high, low, left, right, and four through the lock mechanisms. Then I slapped a reload, attached a small charge to the door, hit the detonator (also rigged for 3 seconds), rounded the corner back to the passenger side yelling, “Fire in the Hole,” in Russian and waited for the door to blow.
Once the explosives popped, I gave it a two count and came in low. Five men were inside, rammed against that steel cage. Two were clearly dead, two struggling. Behind them, Hans sagged against the wall, smothered in blood. Endgame. I shot both guards in the head, repeatedly. Then using my left hand to pull them out, surveyed the damage to Hans. He’d gotten hit in the left leg. The bullet had shattered his tibia and his fibula looked like it had snapped in the confusion. Blood flowed out of his leg in rhythmic pulses.
He raised a gun, which I hammered out his hand with my pistol butt. I took the time to break both hands with three vicious blows to each wrist, palm, and set of knuckles. He screamed in agony and I put an elbow into his nose for good measure. His head made a satisfying crack against the cage. The old man staggered and slumped against the mesh. Behind me, I heard boots. Three men in expensive suits with perfect cheeks and lovely blond hair were charging down Newbury Street with HK Assault rifles. At the same time, five more Section 22 operatives were storming from a white van on Hereford, armed for all-out war. They started shooting the moment they had boots to pavement.
I put six measured shots into the charging men in front of me, then tossed the cups of gasoline out the side of the van in twos. One of the bullets ignited a puddle and, in half a second, I had a respectable wall of flame licking the side of the van, igniting the rear tires and causing a major amount of smoke. I pulled the wallet with the magnesium bars, timed the soldier’s approach, and dumped it out the side when they were within three meters. The flash was initially spectacular but started to burn out the flame. Magnesium does not burn in block form. Unless very, very hot. That would come soon.
I emptied the mag through the door and heard a scream. The cab was riddled with bullets. Two hit me in the vest and one creased my left calf. Hans moaned. One of them had hit him in the gut.
I took the entire remaining wad of C4, winked at my mentor, and tossed it out into the fire. The explosion knocked the whole van a good fifteen meters into Hereford Street, through the manicured gate and lawn of the Fluevog store, and bouncing off the brownstone’s stairs. The result was that I got banged up as much as a man with five bodies for padding can expect—it hurt less than dropping out of the hotel but more than the wound to my leg. I can ignore much more intense levels of pain.
I took a moment, blocked out all extraneous sensation, and exited the crippled van with the HK. Miraculously one of the Section 22 team had also survived. He’d lost the use of his right arm and was limping like a zombie. I shot him in the head twice, then put kill shots in his comrades and walked out to see what was left of the scouting team in suits. Two lay stunned but still breathing. The HK fixed that with sharp clacks. Most of the block lay in disarray. The initial blast had scared off tourists and passersby. The main explosion had torn windows and gates from every shop for nearly a klick in each direction. Small fires were everywhere but they smoldered rather than burned. The explosion had robbed them of fuel. A thick layer of black char lay across the whole of the landscape, as if it had snowed darkness. Nothing moved. In the distance, sirens blared and people screamed. Nearby the whole street lay stunned and still.
The interior of the van had been sheared in two and the payload spilled out into the avenue. I’d expected to see jars and jugs. The blast and the fire were excellent ways to incinerate medical cargo. Instead, a huge sarcophagus of steel lay bent in the street, the frame split open at one end. It was nearly ten meters long. In fact, it had taken the whole of the van interior save the rear crawlspace. The cage I’d seen in the photos had been an edge of the sarcophagus. I blinked and got closer. Whatever this was, it was not a bioweapon.
Beside it lay Hans Gutlicht. He had managed to neither die nor pass out. In fact, he looked to be in better shape than a minute ago, which meant nanomeds and drugs were flowing through his blood at a rapid rate. He looked at me, patted the steel enigma, and laughed. Fluid had filled his lungs and he spit a huge gob of black soot onto my shoes. Inside the steel, I saw a globe and a long shaft leading to a much larger globe, wrapped with what looked like three red metal donuts. On the inside of the case there was a large Cyrillic plate with serial numbers and the name. Tzar Bomba. The Emperor Bomb AN1106. I stared in horror. Neatly attached to the side of the small globe was a digital timer counting backwards.
It read 00:15:32:XX as the last two digits blurred with the hundredths of seconds.
Hans Gutlicht had smuggled the world’s largest and most deadly hydrogen warhead into Boston. In just over fifteen minutes, the Emperor Bomb would vaporize some extensive portion of the city and irradiate the Eastern Seaboard. The name plate informed me that this was a product of the Soviet Experimental Directorate, built in 1989 in the Vladivostok Premium Facility; 285 Mt yield.
I looked at Hans and he gave me a warm smile. “Endgame, my son. I win.”
I wiped my face and pondered. “They’ll cancel flights after this.”
“Not forever. I have trusted people with the packages. Eventually they will fly again and then, with you and me both dead, it’s so simple.”
It was. He’d likely lured a significant portion of the ruling powers to Boston under some guise of making full peace. Eventually, The Syndicate and other players would rebuild, a new player would take control. But before then, flights would resume and the weakened Powers would not find the agents and their cargos. All Hans had to do was lay down and die. He’d be taking Pina, Bernard, and me with him.
If the yield was correct, he might have just killed the planet anyway. Nuclear game theory had been a topic of continuous discussion during my formative years. We knew down to the megaton how many grays an air burst or ground burst delivered to the target area and ionosphere. Castle Bravo, which wiped out a Japanese ship 140 klicks away, was 15 Megatons. The bomb ticking d
own to zero would deliver a very dirty explosion, likely dropping 100 grays onto everything that survived the blast. Four grays will kill an adult in under forty-eight hours.
The ground blast, coupled with the proximity to Gulf Stream and Atlantic Ocean, would dump 50 grays worth of atmospheric radiation into the air and spread it across the globe over a period of a week. All it took was four grays total accumulation. If Hans’ bomb put 2% of its radiation anywhere, the cumulative effect would be near extinction for 90% of the local populace within ninety days. It wasn’t guaranteed, but Hans had found a pretty smart way to extinguish most of the world populace while ensuring Zeus and his other children survived. Genius really.
“Then the Culper people will disarm it. We have time.”
He laughed and waved at where he thought the bomb was. One of his eyes had caved in from the blast. “Touch it and it triggers the warhead immediately. Dismantle the apparatus, try to get at either plutonium core. Boom. Cut a wire? Boom. It’s rigged to blow, my child. Accept your doom.”
“Okay. What the hell are the red rings for then?”
He chuckled again. “Russians. Always trying to outfox the fox.” He coughed again. Some blood flecked the spittle. He seemed unfussed. Hans knew he had less than fourteen minutes to live. He was unlikely to die before the blast took him. “The Eff Ess Bee had a hit team. A final solution for us, for the Abschnitt.” His voice was indignant.
He coughed and continued in German. “They wanted to wipe us out. This weapon…” He waved at the sarcophagus, “was their ultimate weapon. Their doomsday device.” He laughed at some joke only he understood. “The rings extend the blast, make it spew more dirty radiation. This will deliver three hundred grays to ground zero.”
“That’s a fatal dose for the planet.”
Hans shrugged. “Mother Russia, acceptable losses. Except I think the apparatchiks simply didn’t understand math. Everyone lied to them about crop yields and armed forces and rubles. The morons just expected the physicists to be liars too.”