by Graham Brown
Danielle sprang to her feet, suddenly realizing that the bells could be a warning. She grabbed her gun and ran outside.
A pair of armed men waited there, aiming weapons at her. Two others held a couple of the town folk as hostages, and an older man, who seemed like their leader, stood off to one side.
“Put it down,” the scruffy-faced leader said.
She dropped the pistol as he walked toward her. “I’m Ivan Saravich,” he said. “And you have something that belongs to me.”
* * *
Twenty miles away, Hawker was picking his way toward the fourth ridge. He had hiked through the night, one hour on, ten minutes off. Upon crossing a small canyon, he’d taken a slight detour and flung the radioactive pellet down into it. If he was lucky Kang’s men would track the pellet to the canyon and begin a search there. With all the nooks and caves he’d seen, it might be awhile before they knew they’d been had.
Since then he’d come five miles, though exhaustion was slowing his pace considerably. He stumbled on, scratched and cut from the briars and thornbushes, drenched in grime and sweat. He was exhausted, trudging forward, not thinking anymore, not looking at anything but the ground right in front of him.
In that semi-oblivious state, he failed to hear the sound of danger until it became too loud to ignore. A buzzing noise in the air, not a plane or a helicopter, it sounded more like a flying lawn mower.
He turned and ducked down, then glanced around, scanning sections of the sky. A mile or so behind, he spotted a small object cruising directly toward him. He knew what it was: a remotely operated drone. It meant Kang had found him.
He ran from the sound of the drone. He didn’t bother ducking or hiding in the scrub; the drone had seen him. His only hope was to get to some real cover. The ridge-line up ahead looked like a possibility.
As he scrambled through the brush, the drone made a pass, buzzing by so closely that it almost clipped him.
He glanced at the stubby wings and gave thanks for the fact that it seemed unarmed. Then he heard a second drone coming in behind him, followed by the shrill whistle of an unguided rocket.
He dove to the ground. The missile whipped past him and exploded a hundred feet ahead. He felt the shock of the concussion and a wave of heat, but it was far enough away to be safe.
As the second drone passed him and broke into a turn, Hawker sprinted to the ridge and clambered up and into the rocks. He took cover, near the top, surrounded by a crown of boulders.
Safe for the moment, he looked around for the drones. They had pulled up higher, cruising in a lazy circle above him like mechanized buzzards. That could mean only one thing: They were there to keep their quarry treed. The real hunters were still on their way.
* * *
At gunpoint, Danielle was forced back inside the guesthouse. The man who identified himself as Saravich followed. Father Domingo and several of the townspeople were brought in. Danielle recognized Maria, the woman who had cared for Yuri and had given her the dress. They were ordered to their knees.
“Don’t do this,” Danielle pleaded. “They have nothing to do with me.”
Ivan raised a vodka bottle to his lips. “You deceive yourself, young lady. They are here only because of you. They’re hiding the boy,” he said, “just as you did.”
Danielle looked at Ivan’s men. They were young, with hard faces, the same type of men who’d come to the hotel. Undoubtedly they would want revenge for their friends. She could see it in their faces.
And Ivan … Ivan had a look in his eyes that suggested he’d done this work before, done it for a long time.
For the first time in many years Danielle felt a type of fear she could not control.
She was ordered to sit next to Father Domingo.
“Where is the boy?” Ivan asked.
She did not want to give up Yuri, but she was certain that the Russian would kill everyone if she didn’t.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You lie!” he shouted, flying into a rage and smacking her in the side of the head with his Makarov pistol.
She fell and he aimed and fired. The crack of the powder charge shook the room. Everyone jumped and dust drifted upward from a hole in the floor just inches from Danielle’s face.
Cautiously she returned to her kneeling position, her hands raised up beside her. Saravich stepped back and took another long swig from the bottle, like a man preparing for something he didn’t want to do but could not avoid.
“We have already searched the church and the house of this woman and each of the houses on this street. And still the boy is not found,” he said.
“He’s missing,” Maria said. “We don’t know where. He must have run off.”
Saravich wandered behind her to where McCarter lay. With a finger he flicked the IV line.
“I’m not afraid of you,” McCarter said.
“You don’t look so good,” Ivan said. “Maybe I should put you out of your misery.”
Danielle held her breath, realizing any response might be enough to set him off. She relaxed only slightly as the sound of Ivan’s footsteps circled away from McCarter.
He walked out in front of the prisoners, eyeing them, waving a finger at them.
“You have all spoken the same,” he said, sounding as if he approved. “But a well-concocted lie is not equal to the truth.”
Danielle’s mind whirled, desperately searching for a method of escape. It seemed impossible. The four younger Russians stood near the exit, weapons aimed at the floor, but ready and eyeing her and the other prisoners. Ivan continued to pace. She could sense his patience growing shorter.
He pounded the floorboards, slow and ponderous.
He crouched in front of her. “You know how this is going to end,” he said. “I will kill everyone and kill you last. Spare them. Tell me where the boy is.”
She looked down toward the floor, avoiding eye contact with him and hoping to disguise the fact that her emotions had gotten the best of her. But the position caused the tears to stream across her face. She watched the drops fall and splatter on the simple wooden floor.
She closed her eyes, tight. And when she opened them, there were no more tears left to come. The fight had returned to her.
She met his gaze.
“I know who you are, Ivan Saravich,” she said. “And so do the people I work for. We take care of our own. A man from your era should know what that means.”
“‘A man from my era,’” he laughed. “Yes, once we were professionals. Now we are just roaches scavenging for what we can get.”
“If you harm me,” she said, “or any of these men and women, my people will hunt you down. You know that. So shoot me if you want, but dig your own grave while you’re at it.”
Danielle thought she saw a flicker of concern cross Ivan’s weather-beaten face, but then a sickening laugh bubbled up from deep in his being. He took another drink, then offered her the bottle, but she refused it.
“Mine was dug long ago,” he whispered.
For just an instant he looked sad, remorseful. And in that moment she recognized him: the round face, the flat bridge of his nose, and the sharp eyes that seemed to miss nothing.
“I know you,” she said.
He stood and raised the Makarov slowly, as if it were heavy in his drunken hand.
“You knew my brother,” he corrected. “The man who kidnapped Yuri.”
“He was trying to save him,” she said.
“Yes,” Saravich said, as if it were some hated admission. “And he failed.”
Turning, Saravich centered the gun on the back of Father Domingo’s head.
“No,” Danielle pleaded.
“I’m afraid it’s time,” he said.
“May God forgive you,” Father Domingo said.
“We can only hope,” Ivan replied. He flicked the gun to the right and fired two quick shots. Two of the Russians fell. A quick turn to the left and three more shells crashed.
Bang, bang, bang.
Father Domingo and the other prisoners dove in opposite directions. Maria scrambled out the door. Danielle pushed back to the wall and froze beside McCarter as Saravich aimed the gun her way.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“It is simple,” he said. “I do not wish to die today.”
“Neither do I,” she replied.
“You won’t,” he said lowering the gun. “Not by my hand, at least. But these men would have buried us all.”
Before she could ask anything else, Ivan turned to Father Domingo. “Do you have Yuri?”
“I swear, we don’t know where he is,” Father Domingo said.
“I hope for his sake you’re lying,” Ivan replied. “I hope you have hidden him well and just find it impossible to trust me. But do not worry. I have no intention of taking him back to Russia.”
Father Domingo shook his head. “I don’t know where he is.”
“Hmm …,” Ivan grumbled. “You must look for him, then. If you find him, or if he comes back once we’ve left, please keep him safe. I will tell the men who sent me that he died.”
Danielle studied Ivan’s face. It seemed etched with regret.
“I still don’t understand,” she said.
“All this time,” he told her, “I have been thinking that my brother disgraced me. That it was he who had ruined our names. But it was I who disgraced him and what he tried to do.”
“And now?” Danielle asked.
“Now?” he repeated. “Now an army of men and machines are speeding toward your valiant friend, the one called Hawker. And though he seems to be very resourceful, he will soon be involved in a battle he cannot hope to win.”
Ivan offered a hand. “Unless we help him.”
“He’s a long way from here,” she said.
“I know,” he replied, “and Comrade Kang has helicopters with him. But I promise you, they’re nothing like the one I’ve brought.”
Danielle found herself dizzy from the sudden reversal, but the thought of Kang killing Hawker was something she could not allow her mind to grasp. She reached out and grabbed Ivan’s hand, pulling herself up.
“Then let’s go help him.”
CHAPTER 63
In the darkness of the Yucca Mountain tunnel, Arnold Moore jumped out of the Humvee before the driver had even stopped. He raced toward the trailer laboratory and burst in.
Nathanial Ahiga, Byron Stecker, and the rest of the two science teams looked up. With only half an hour to go, they had been discussing the procedure for destroying the stone.
“Where the hell have you been, Arnold?” It was President Henderson’s voice over the speaker on the flat-screen monitor.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been working on a new theory,” he said.
“Oh, please,” the director of the CIA grumbled.
“Shut up, Stecker!” Moore shouted, then turned back to the president.
“It’s a little late for this, Arnold,” Henderson said.
“Just hear me out,” Moore answered. “Then do whatever you want. Shoot me if you want. Just listen for two minutes.”
Without taking a breath or giving the president the chance to say no, Moore continued. “Stecker’s information was correct, but the numbers weren’t the perfect match he told you they were. They massaged the data to fit it into the graph, but for reasons that would take too long to explain, if you extrapolated the numbers in either direction, their graph diverges from reality.”
“Stecker?”
“It’s called rounding, Mr. President. Other than that I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
The president looked open to suggestion but he glanced at the clock nervously. “Be quick, Arnold.”
Moore took a breath. Light-headed and sweating, he looked around. Stecker rolled his eyes, Moore’s staff members looked at the ground, and Ahiga shook his head sadly and looked away. Not a friend in the room. He didn’t care.
“Mr. President, standard geology holds that earth’s core is a huge, spinning ball of liquid metal, mostly nickel and iron. Because those elements are conductive, the spinning motion creates the magnetic field that protects us.”
It was the quickest primer Moore had ever given.
“The problem is, no one knows this for sure; no one’s dug down that far to find out. And no one has been able to match this theory up with an explanation of why the earth’s field reverses at seemingly random intervals, a million years between one changeover, fifty thousand between the next.” Moore ran a hand through his hair, tamping down his wiry mane, trying to look like something less than a lunatic.
“The reason is,” he said, “it’s not a single magnetic field — I mean in the aggregate it is — but it’s being generated by three separate layers interacting with each other.”
“Oh, come on,” Stecker mumbled.
Moore ignored him. “A similar thing happens in the sun. Even though the sun is a million times more massive than the earth, and it creates a magnetic field millions of times more powerful, its magnetic field reverses every eleven years. And it doesn’t go easily. The sun’s equator rotates faster than the sections near the poles. As a result the magnetic lines of force get dragged across the face of the sun, much like spreading a sheet out over your bed and then pulling it only from the middle. The center moves, the edges stay. Instead of nice parallel lines everything gets skewed.
“In the sun, the lines get so tangled that they can snap like a rubber band stretched too tight. This is what causes solar flares and other events like the coronal mass ejections. Both events release incredible amounts of energy in a single instant.”
“How much energy are we talking about?” the president asked.
“Enough to fling a hundred billion tons of material into space at a single moment,” Moore said.
The president looked drawn. “How does this apply to us?”
“We keep acting as if the earth’s core is a single, uniformly rotating thing, and for the most part it is, but the inner layer is solid and the outer layer is liquid. In the simulation I’ve run we can line up the graphs of field strength and reversal timing, allowing that this outer layer is spinning at a different rate near its equator than it is at the poles. That’s the second field.”
“You said there were three.”
“Yes,” Moore said. “The third is created by the stones. It’s only been present for the last three thousand years. Sent here in an effort to stabilize that second field to stop it from doing what it’s about to do.”
“Which is?”
“Snap exactly like the loops on the sun.”
The president cleared his throat. “And what happens when this, um, rubber band snaps?”
Moore took a breath. “There won’t be any mushroom clouds, if that’s what you mean, but there may be some physical effects, possibly minor earthquakes or tremors, but mostly just a massive electromagnetic burst. I don’t have all the numbers, but you can expect something close to ten thousand times the energy of the burst we felt here.”
“Ten thousand times?” The president’s voice trailed off as if the concept were inconceivable to him.
“A tsunami wave of electromagnetic energy rampaging from the current pole across North America and downward, wiping out every electrical circuit in the Western Hemisphere. It will blind every satellite in near-earth orbit at the same moment, while a weaker shadow wave crosses Asia and central Russia and the northeastern corner of Europe. Unfortunately for us, the wave crossing Russia and China will be lighter, meaning they will be stung hard and blinded, but some of their hardened military equipment will survive, especially missiles in hardened silos. They will likely retain the capability to wage war, both on each other or on us, at a time in which we will be utterly defenseless against any foreign attack.”
“And the stones’ part in this?”
“Designed t
o counter it while they were hidden, to hold the wave back so the rubber band never stretches in the first place,” Moore said. “But something went wrong. When the Russian stone exploded that plan began to falter. But I think they have a fail-safe mode, and if we bring them up to a place where their signal is not blocked, they can find each other and they can vent this wave safely into space, channeling it like a lightning rod. But to have any chance we must surface all of them: the ones in Mexico and the one we have here.”
The president was quiet. The room was quiet. Finally, even Moore was quiet.
He did not know whether he had convinced the commander in chief, but he’d exhausted himself in the attempt.
“Clear the room,” the president said finally. “I will speak with the director of the NRI alone.”
Sitting next to Moore, Nathanial Ahiga grabbed his soda bottle. “You put on a good show,” he said somberly, sounding like he was talking to a valiant but defeated warrior.
As Ahiga stepped back into the lab section of the trailer and shut the door behind him, the other scientists picked up their notes and exited into the tunnel. Stecker followed them, a smirk on his face as he stepped out into the darkness.
CHAPTER 64
Pinned down by the circling drones, Hawker had cowered in the crown of boulders as three lumbering helicopters approached. In a flat area between the ridges, two of them touched down, disgorging a small army.
He saw twenty men fan out from the lead craft, while the second helicopter released what looked like a group of pack mules, moving in a precise and ominous fashion.
Through his binoculars he could see that these “pack mules” were some kind of mechanical walking machine, like four-legged donkeys with machine-gun turrets where their heads belonged.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he mumbled.
The men hung back, allowing the strange walking machines to take the lead. He watched their hydraulic legs propel them forward, their turreted heads swiveling from side to side. He counted six of them, and all he could be certain of was that he didn’t want to see them up close.
Wedging the assault rifle into a gap between the rocks, he sighted the lead machine and opened fire. Shells from the rifle ripped into the lead beast. Sparks flew and it stumbled. But somehow it regained its balance and continued on its course, climbing the slope toward him. He fired at another with the same result and then let the rifle whale away on full automatic.