Earthfire North

Ten

The truck led them south of Reykjavik, down a little-used two-lane blacktop. There was absolutely no other traffic, and only the glow of the city behind them lent any evidence to the fact that civilization was near.

"Cut your lights and stay with him," Carter said.

The big transport disappeared over the crest of a hill. Carter and Roberta reached the top minutes later, but the valley beyond was empty. The truck was nowhere to be seen.

"Where'd it go?" Roberta asked, slowing down.

"There," Carter said, picking out a rooster tail of dust on a track that trailed off the highway between twin mounds of pumice.

Roberta turned off the pavement, and they slowly bumped along the uneven track. This was volcano country. Carter unfolded the map that had come with the car and studied it for several moments with the aid of his penlight. Ahead was an oddly shaped, flat-topped cone.

"Mount Hekla," he said.

"Isn't that the one that erupted not so long ago?" Roberta asked.

"In 1973," Carter read from the inscription on the map.

The truck suddenly appeared as they came around a bend in the road. Its brake lights were on, and Carter cautioned her to slow down and then stop. In the dim Arctic twilight he could barely make out the shape of a guardhouse on the road ahead.

"It's a checkpoint," he said. He turned around and looked the way they had come. "We'd better turn around here and see if there is some way around it."

She made a quick U-turn and backtracked nearly half a mile until they came to what appeared to be a very old track in the sand leading off to the east. She swung on to it and carefully picked her way around huge boulders strewn everywhere.

"This is nothing but a dried creek bed," she shouted. The car was bouncing and pitching all over the place. The car wouldn't take much of this.

"Can we make it to the top of the ridge ahead?" Carter shouted.

"I'll try."

They bottomed out several times, and the temperature gauge began to climb as the car labored over the extremely rough terrain.

The ridge, when they reached it, turned out to be the rim of a wide, shallow canyon. Lights twinkled far out in its center.

They eased up over the final rise and stopped. Roberta shut off the engine. "What is it?" she asked, looking down at the floor of the canyon.

"I'm not sure," Carter said. He got out of the car and walked to the edge of the overlook. A hundred yards down the hill a chain link fence ran along the landscape, topped by three strands of barbed wire. On the other side a huge hole had been dug out of the valley, and in the distance he could see that some sort of huge building project was rising. The wind brought sounds of engines running.

He motioned for Roberta, and when she joined him she strained to listen. "They're working on it now." She looked at Carter. "You were right after all; they've already started it."

"And we're going to un-start it," Carter said.

"How?"

"I don't know, but…" Carter started to say when a movement below, just at the fence, caught his eye. "Down," he whispered urgently, and he shoved Roberta down behind a jumble of rocks.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"A guard, I think," Carter said. As he watched a uniformed guard sauntered along the fence from the west. An automatic rifle was slung over his shoulder. It looked like an M-16.

He stopped for a moment or two almost directly below them, then continued on. When he was out of sight, Carter sat back.

"It's a reactor, all right, and probably the processing plant for the spent fuel rods as well," he said.

"Odessa's own little bomb factory," Roberta said. "So how do we stop it?"

"We blow it up, what else?"

They got back to the hotel a couple of hours later, after they had hiked along the fence line for a short distance so that they could get a better view of what was going on below.

Carter dropped Roberta off, telling her to keep watch on the harbor, but he refused to tell her where he was going despite her indignant questions.

"Are you going back out there tonight?" she demanded.

"No, I promise you, Roberta. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

She looked at him. "What do you plan to do alone? I want a chance at Ziegler for what he did to me," she said.

"You'll have it. I'm not doing anything tonight except gathering information. Nothing more."

After he left her, Carter drove immediately across town to the American embassy on Laufasvegi, where he woke up a sleepy chancellery clerk who telephoned the charge d'affaires; the charge d'affaires checked with the ambassador himself, and the ambassador ended up calling in the embassy's chief military officer.

"Do you realize what time of the morning it is?" the officer, an air force colonel, fumed when he arrived.

"Thank you for coming down on such short notice, Colonel," Carter said.

"What do you want?"

"The use of your crypto facilities."

"What?"

"I need to set up a crypto teletype circuit with D.C. It can be routed through the Pentagon."

"Impossible," the officer said.

They were sitting in the chancellery office. Carter turned to the clerk. "Telephone the ambassador for me like a good sport."

"Yes, sir," the man said, and he reached for the telephone.

"I suppose you have the clout," the colonel said. The clerk hesitated.

"Yes," Carter said. "But if you want to check with someone, I'll understand."

"It's not necessary; the ambassador vouched for you. Highly irregular, though, I might say."

They went down to the basement, where the colonel and Carter were let into a small room filled with electronic equipment. The colonel explained Carter's needs to the young technician on duty, and Carter supplied the routing code for the circuit he wanted.

Within fifteen minutes it was set up, and Carter had an encrypted teletype line open with AXE's technical section in the basement of the Dupont Circle building.

The colonel and the tech moved off to the other side of the room while Carter operated the teletype.

Carter sat back and lit a cigarette. It was one of his custom-made cigarettes that he picked up from a small shop around the corner from his apartment building. The paper was black, and his initials were stamped in gold near the tip. Cairnes was back before Carter finished his smoke.

As completely as possible, Carter described for the head of AXE's technical section what he and Roberta had seen outside Reykjavik.

When he was finished, the teletype was silent for nearly an hour until Cairnes came back on.

Carter smiled to himself He typed:

Again the teletype was silent for at least an hour. The colonel had become fidgety, and he finally left. The tech remained across the room, his feet up, reading a magazine, totally unconcerned about Carter.

When the teletype came to life again, it clattered at a hundred words per minute. The chief scientist had evidently cut a tape and was running it off now.

Carter lit another cigarette as the teletype spewed out various specifications for explosives, for placing the charges, and for probable effects.

When it was finished, Carter teletyped back his acknowledgment, then shut down the circuit. He reread the instructions, then pulled off the paper, the carbon, and the ribbon, and brought them to the shredder set up in one corner where he destroyed them.

"Get the colonel back down here, if you would," he asked the tech, and by the lime he had finished destroying the message and copy, the colonel was back.

Carter quickly explained what he needed, and within half an hour, his trunk loaded with plastique and the timers, he drove back to the hotel and parked at the back of the lot.

He went up to their room. Roberta had been asleep, but she woke up when he came in.

"You "re back," she sighed sleepily, and she came into his arms.

He kissed her neck, and she moaned deep in her throat as she moved even closer. "Nick?" she said.

He pushed her back, then kissed the nipples of her breasts, her flat stomach, and soon they were making love, her body soft and yielding, while at the same moment one part of his mind was thinking about the night to come.

It was going to be difficult to get close enough to plant the plastique. Besides the fence, which he was reasonably certain was alarmed, there wasn't a hell of a lot of cover out there. A few rocks here and there, but no tall grass or trees or anything of that sort.

He didn't think there was any way around their personnel security. He did not think he'd be able to get in through the front gate. Not this time. No… it would have to be over or through the fence. Down the hill. Plant the charges. And then get the hell out.

By that night, when for the second time in twenty-four hours they had driven up the dry creek bed toward the rim overlooking the installation, Carter was ready to move. He had a debt to pay for the way Ziegler had treated them, and he meant to return it tonight.

He parked the car well down from the lip of the rim after he had turned it around. He was not planning on coming out the same way he got in. Once he breached the fence, the alarms would sound, and the clock would begin ticking. He'd not have a lot of time to get down to the reactor site, plant the charges, and then get clear.

The one plus point, however, was that while he was making a retreat in the opposite direction, the perimeter security people would be concentrating on his entry point.

He shut off the car and turned to Roberta. "I want you to return to the hotel. If I'm not back by morning, I want you to get in contact with your boss. Tell him what happened. He'll contact mine."

She had argued earlier that she had wanted to go with him. But he had told her no. She tried again.

"I told you I wanted to be a part of it," she said.

"And I told you that when I went after Ziegler you'd be able to help. Right now I'm just going to put a damper on his reactor, that's all. He'll come later."

"Watch yourself, Nick. I want there to be a later."

Carter smiled, kissed her, then got out of the car. He opened the trunk and pulled out the pack containing the plastique and detonators, as well as the large wire cutters.

He shouldered the pack, then slammed the trunk, and scrambled up the hill where Roberta was crouched behind a rock.

"He just went by," she whispered.

"Wish me luck," he said, and kissed her again.

"Luck," Roberta said as he scrambled away from the rock and down the hundred yards to the fence.

He could hear the sounds of construction machinery below in the valley, but nothing else. Crouching next to the fence, he raised the wire cutters, hesitated for just a moment, then cut the first strand.

There were no alarms, no sparks or lights, nothing. But as he cut strand after strand of the wire mesh fence, he was certain that somewhere within the huge compound a light was flashing, pinpointing exactly where the fence had been penetrated.

When he had the hole large enough, he tossed the wire cutters back up the hill, waved to Roberta, then ducked through the hole and took off in a crouching run down the hill.

"Good luck." he heard her call from behind, and then he was out of earshot as he hurried toward the first line of buildings that made up the perimeter of the vast complex.

Roberta watched until he was out of sight, then walked back over the crest of the hill to where the car was parked. She stripped off her jumpsuit. Underneath she wore a summer dress with a V-neck that accentuated the deep milky white of her cleavage. She smoothed the wrinkles from the dress with her hands, and from beneath the seat she pulled out a pair of high-heeled shoes. She untied the sneakers she was wearing and slipped on the dressy sandals. Her makeup was in her handbag, which she dug out and applied in the rearview mirror. When she felt she was ready, she started the car and drove back to the main road, but instead of turning left into town, she went right, toward the checkpoint into the complex.

Halfway there she stopped the car, shut off the engine, got out, and raised the hood. She reached in and gently pulled two wires from their sockets in the distributor cap. Then she closed the hood and got back behind the wheel. When she got the car started again, the engine was sputtering and bucking.

By the time she reached the gate, the car was backfiring every tenth or twelfth revolution, and clouds of unburned gasoline were being expelled from the exhaust. She let it bang a final time, cut the engine, and let it coast to within twenty-five yards of the guardhouse.

She tried the starter twice to no avail. She was about to try it a third time when she heard a soft tapping at the window.

She looked up. A guard was there, an automatic slung over his shoulder. She rolled down the window. "Where is this?" she asked in English.

"Is something wrong with your car, miss?" the guard asked, his German accent strong in his halting English.

"It keeps stalling. I turned off the main road. I saw the lights. I need help."

This is a government installation," the man said, his eyes straying to her breasts.

"Perhaps you could help me," she said. "I know nothing about cars."

He smiled and licked his lips.

"I would be ever so grateful," she purred.

He went around to the front of the car. She pulled the hood release, then got out. A second guard had come from the gate. She could see no others in the small guardhouse.

"Can you see what the problem is?" she asked, coming around to the front. She pulled her Beretta nine-shot automatic from her purse.

"There are wires loose…" the guard started to say.

Roberta turned around and shot the guard by the gate two times. When he started to go down she turned back. As the guard under the hood was scrambling for the rifle over his shoulder, she shot him once through the side of the head.

He fell forward onto the engine, then turned and slumped to the pavement, hanging at an absurd angle from his rifle strap which had become tangled in the bumper.

Working quickly, Roberta unhooked him, then dragged him by the cuffs onto the road shoulder and into the rocky field beyond. She hurried back to the gate and dragged the second guard out into the field. She took their weapons, returned to the car, reattached the spark plug wires, then drove several hundred feet off the road into the darkness.

The guards had left the gate ajar. She slipped through the opening with a delicious, coppery taste of fear at the back of her throat. But her purse swung as she walked through, hiding the steel mesh of the gate. Inside the guardhouse a light began to flash.