On the High Road to Oblivion

Chapter 20—City Lights

Sorensen shoved Nora away, causing her to stumble into Dodge’s arms, and then casually leveled the enormous pistol at them. Von Heissel and Anya moved away in order to give him a clear shot. Dodge felt Nora’s embrace grow tighter as she steeled herself for what was to come.

Then, Sorensen crumpled to the deck. Hurricane Hurley reached over the pilot’s motionless form and plucked the gun from the man’s grasp.

Dodge did not waste a moment enjoying the unexpected reprieve. He released Nora and hurled himself toward Von Heissel.

For her part, Nora found herself only a step away from Anya, who was gaping in disbelief at Sorensen’s limp body. Anger flashed in the blonde woman’s eyes and she remembered that she still held Dodge’s Colt in her hand, but as she started to bring it up, Nora closed the distance and delivered a roundhouse punch that connected solidly with Anya’s jaw and sent her reeling. She tried again to bring the pistol to bear, but Nora, emboldened by her initial success, rushed her and seized Anya’s gun hand, twisting the arm away before the trigger could be pulled.

Von Heissel may have been twice Dodge’s age and accustomed to soft living, but he was no pushover. Trained as a youth by the finest military instructors, he knew how to fight with his bare hands as well as he knew how to command armies. He struggled out of Dodge’s tackle, and in a single deft motion got behind Dodge. Dodge felt an arm wrap around his neck, and felt the crushing power of Von Heissel’s other forearm at the back of his neck. Breath and blood were instantly cut off and Dodge saw dark spots begin to swim across his vision.

An experienced wrestler himself, Dodge immediately understood how his foe had gained the advantage, but he knew a few tricks too. As he writhed and twisted on the deck, trying to keep the other man from getting more leverage, he brought one hand up and slipped it into the small gap between his Adam’s apple and the crook of the baron’s elbow. For a moment, his efforts served only to increase the pressure at his throat, but as he got his hand in, he was able to push out, exerting more pressure against the hold than Von Heissel’s interlaced fingers could withstand. He didn’t try to break the hold completely, but instead twisted around, so that he was face to face with the other man.

Von Heissel’s face was bright red with fury and exertion as he struggled to regain the advantage. Dodge wasn’t about to let that happen. He drew back and then slammed his forehead into the bridge of the baron’s nose.

Von Heissel gave a howl of unrestrained rage and reflexively let go of Dodge, throwing his hands up to protect his already ruined face. Dodge pushed away, and then as soon as he had the room to do so, brought both feet up and rammed them into Von Heissel’s chest. The force of the kick sent the baron shooting across the deck toward the resonance wave generator.

And then he was gone.

From the midst of her own struggle with Nora, Anya saw her grandfather vanish through the opening in the floor. Nora tried to twist the gun out of the other woman’s grasp, but Anya, still shocked by Von Heissel’s exit, instinctively tried to yank the gun back.

The pistol barked once, bucking like a living thing in both women’s hands, and Nora was sprayed with a fine mist of gun oil residue. Anya’s eyes widened in disbelief and she let go of the gun to press her hands to her abdomen, but her fingers could not stem the sudden eruption of her own lifeblood.

Nora, still a little rattled from the unexpected discharge, scooped up the gun and scrambled to put some distance between herself and the woman. Only then did the gravity of what had just occurred sink in.

Dodge was at her side an instant later. He gently took the pistol from her hands and turned her away. “It’s okay,” he whispered, soothing. “Now let’s get out of here.”

As he guided her back to where Hurricane was retrieving his other pistol from Sorensen’s belt, Dodge said: “I didn’t expect you for another five minutes.”

“Sorry if I came at a bad time.” The big man grinned, but then his expression hardened. “I ran into one of our Nipponese friends upstairs. I think that’s who came in the glider. Him and his friends.”

“That must be who took control of Majestic. They’re hijacking her in order to steal the wave device.”

“Well, it won’t matter much. The charges are all set; this gasbag is going down.”

“Let’s find the others so we can all be somewhere else when that happens.”

As they stepped out into the stairwell, the door leading to Majestic’s central corridor swung open. Hurricane’s guns were out in a flash, but thankfully he withheld firing long enough to identify his target.

“Newton!”

The scientist squinted behind his inadequate eyeglasses. “Hurricane? Dodge? How on earth—?”

“Time for all that later,” Dodge said quickly. “Are the others with you?”

“We’re right here,” Fiona called over Newcombe’s shoulder. “Brilliant timing, too.”

“Yes,” Lafayette added, trying to sound braver than he obviously felt. “Nice of you to finally show up. Now can we get out of here?”

Dodge gestured up the stairwell. “The last flight out leaves in a few minutes. Don’t miss it.”

Tyr Sorensen snapped to consciousness like someone waking from a nightmare. As he sat up, a spike of pain stabbed through his skull and he touched a finger to the rising goose-egg just above his right ear.

Someone cold-cocked me, he thought bitterly. He couldn’t fathom how someone had gotten the drop on him; the last thing he recalled was….

As his memories caught up, he jumped to his feet looking for the others; Anya, the baron, but also Dalton and the woman. They were all gone. The only movement in the bay was the rush of air blowing up through the opening in the floor.

No, not all gone. He spied a motionless form near the edge of the opening, and as he took a step closer, his heart became a lump of lead in this chest. “Anya!”

Her eyes fluttered open as he knelt beside her. “My love!”

For perhaps the first time in his long and storied life, Sorensen was paralyzed with dread. He had fought in the skies above Europe, engaged the world’s deadliest aces and emerged victorious, though not always unscathed, but he had never felt such utter terror. He wanted to pull his lover into his arms, take her pain into his own body, but he feared that even his gentle touch might hasten her descent.

“Grandfather is gone,” she whispered. “Dalton killed him. And I will soon join him.”

“No. I will save you. I’ll get you to the doctor. Hold on, my beloved.”

She smiled, and a stream of blood flowed from her lips. “It is too late for me, my love. You must go.”

“I will never leave you.”

“You must.”

Sorensen’s mouth worked, but no more words could rise past the grief in his throat. He felt her hand tighten on his. “Do this for me,” she said. “Remember me only in life, and I will live forever in you.”

He nodded, but the dread of losing her kept him rooted in place.

Then, his beloved Germanic princess opened her eyes wide and something other than love filled her gaze. “They are escaping. You must hunt them down. Go quickly. Avenge me.”

Her commanding tone broke the spell. He bent down and kissed her forehead, then without another word, rose and sprinted from the room.

As Dodge worked the mechanism to open Majestic’s tail section to the sky, he felt a tremor ripple through the aircraft — an explosion had occurred somewhere on the ship.

Hurricane glanced up at the suspended helium envelope. “Not one of mine.”

“Doesn’t matter, I guess.” Dodge signaled Fiona to start up her autogyro. “We’re finished here anyway.”

He hurried back to the second gyro as the engine on the first roared to life. The propeller blades started beating the air as it revved up for takeoff, and by the time Hurricane got situated, the gyro with Fiona, Newcombe and Lafayette was already gone, escaping doomed Majestic once and for all.

Nora climbed into the forward passenger well with Hurricane. “Looks like I’m sitting on your lap again.”

“Right back where we started.”

Dodge loosened the ties securing the aircraft to the deck, and then climbed inside. For just a moment, he was stymied as he stared at the unfamiliar controls, but he reached down into his memory and started putting names to the switches, dials and levers. He found the starter, and the engine turned over with a noise like a gunshot.

He found the lever to engage the rotor axle and felt the airframe shudder with the torque as it started to spin. Okay, gonna have to keep that in mind.

After a few seconds however, the blades were spinning too fast to see. He ran through the procedures for controlling the craft, trying to find parallels with the fixed-wing controls with which he was more familiar. The rudder was more or less the same, but to change pitch and yaw required tilting the rotor assembly using the collective control. That would take some practice, but he didn’t plan on doing anything fancy. He released the wheel brakes, tilted the rotor forward, and opened the throttle to full.

Just as the craft started to roll, Sorensen, with murder in his eyes, erupted from the stairwell and ran straight for the gyro. He timed his intercept perfectly, throwing an arm over the lip of the cockpit as if he might, with nothing more than his passion, prevent it from taking off. Overloaded as the aircraft already was, it did not seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility.

Regardless, Dodge wasn’t about to take on one more passenger. He released the stick just long enough to drive a fist into Sorensen’s unprotected face, and the saturnine pilot went sprawling backward.

Dodge got both hands back on the controls just as the edge of the platform fell away beneath him. For a few sickening seconds, the autogyro plummeted like a brick, but Dodge fought back the impulse to panic and methodically did everything the manuals said to do. Almost grudgingly, the aircraft responded.

“Dodge! Turn!”

Hurricane’s shout reached him just as he was feeling a measure of relief at having figured out how to fly the gyro, but he knew the big man wouldn’t have made that urgent suggestion unless it was absolutely necessary, so he banked hard to starboard before finally looking up from the cockpit.

A column of bright colored light flashed by to his left, almost close enough to touch, and although he was past the unexpected obstacle before he could make sense of what it was, the landscape of lights below helped him recognize it instantly.

He had almost crashed into the Empire State Building.

He had been so consumed with finding his hostage friends, that he had been unaware of the airship moving through the skies, but he recalled Von Heissel’s accusation — someone, he now realized it had been the Japanese hijackers — had moved Majestic away from the valley, and in the brief time between their parachute drop and their escape, the airship had sped through the skies like an arrow aimed at Manhattan.

Well, at least I won’t get lost.

He nosed down and began looking for an airport or any open area big enough to set down, but directly ahead there was only the dark band of the East river and beyond, the lights of Queens and Brooklyn. Then a different kind of light flashed by beneath him, streaks of light like meteors arcing through the sky.

Tracers! He craned his head around and saw the muzzle flash of a pair of Browning machine guns. “Sorensen.”

He brought the gyro’s nose up again, and started climbing for the sky. The overburdened craft responded sluggishly, but stayed ahead of the sporadic discharge of tracer rounds. Dodge caught a glimpse of Sorensen’s Sparrowhawk as it zipped past beneath him, already starting to turn for another run.

A memory of his last aerial encounter with Sorensen sprang unbidden to his mind, and he knew he was no more able to outfly the ace in the rotor-wing craft than he had been in the Catalina; the liability of his inexperience made it even less likely. But the gyro was more maneuverable than even the nimble Sparrowhawk. It could turn on a dime and move almost vertically. Moreover, the sky above Manhattan was a very different battleground than the open sea.

Dodge spun the gyro around and headed for the beacon of the Empire State Building. He dared not hope that Sorensen would hold back for fear of hurting civilians with stray rounds; the man was an unapologetic killer. But as long as he kept the buildings between them and the fighter plane, there was a chance.

He cut a tight corkscrew around the lofty aerial that crowned the world’s tallest building, and glimpsed Sorensen whizzing past once more. Now he was behind the ace, and if the autogyro had been equipped with guns, he would have had a perfect shot. But it was not, and in an instant, Sorensen came around again.

Lower, Dodge thought. The autogyro would be able to move easily down in the urban canyons between the buildings, while the Sparrowhawk would be forced to move in long straight lines, unable to turn.

Sorensen must have sensed this, for he came in low, firing right where Dodge was trying to go, forcing the gyro once more into the sky. Dodge watched the phosphorescent tracers streak down into the metropolis, and knew that somewhere down there, people might be getting hurt because of his attempt to evade the killer.

There was only one place he could think of where Sorensen might not be so quick to unleash a stream of lead. Dodge banked around the Empire State Building, and headed once more for the Majestic.

Anya imagined the Valkyries were coming to bear her off to Valhalla. She did not put any great faith in religion or the mythology of her ancestors, but the idea brought her some comfort as the cold darkness closed around her. Her father, whom she had never known, had died on the field of battle, and if those legends were true, then he would be waiting for her in the halls of Asgard.

But the array of lights she saw passing below was not the Bifrost Bridge to the afterlife. As she recognized the skyline of New York City, she saw one last chance to strike a blow that would haunt Dodge Dalton for the rest of his life.

She struggled to sit up, and then used the rail to get her feet under her. The resonance wave projector rose before her like some kind of futuristic monument, but she knew how to release the catches that held it steady, and with the barest of efforts, she disengaged the locks, allowing it to rotate freely on the gimbal arm bolted to the ceiling above.

She turned the device so that its emitter was aimed down at the Empire State Building, and then flipped the power switch, sending out a constant pulse of destructive vibrations.

What Anya did not realize, what she could not have imagined, was that the threats her grandfather had made to coerce Newcombe into crafting the emitter had not been completely successful.

Although the scientist had, to all appearances, been cooperative, he knew that he could not simply deliver such a lethal device into the hands of a madman like Von Heissel. Newcombe had realized that the baron would test the device, perhaps several times, before relaxing his ever-vigilant security enough to afford the hostages a chance at escape, so he knew the emitter had to actually work. But when he had cast the amalgam of adamantine and quartz crystal, he had also placed several glass vials of sulfuric acid into the mold. Though hidden from view, the vials would almost certainly shatter when the resonance waves began to propagate from the device. The resulting flaws in the surrounding material would spread the acid, further destabilizing the emitter. Newcombe had reckoned that the device would not survive more than fifteen or twenty minutes of operation, and even when it sat idle, the acid would continue to erode the bonds between the crystal and the adamantine.

When Anya activated the device, it took only a few seconds for the vibrations to put the finishing touches on his act of sabotage.

The resonance wave generator came apart in an eruption of kinetic energy, flinging pieces of metal in every direction. One piece, no bigger than a baseball, tore through Anya’s body, speeding her along to whatever afterlife she deserved. Another much larger piece ripped clear through the rear bulkhead, into the bay where a score of amatol bombs were neatly lined up to do their part in Von Heissel’s aborted scheme to destroy the world. The flying shrapnel had expended most of its energy tearing through the wall, and when it struck one of the bombs, it didn’t have enough force to trigger a detonation. Instead, the bomb simply began rocking back and forth precariously in its cradle, as if unsure of what to do next.

Majestic continued lumbering forward across the sky, passing the edge of Manhattan Island and moving out over the East River. Dodge caught up to her a few seconds later and angled the autogyro low, coming in under the tail section. The stream of tracers relented immediately.

Okay, that worked. Now what?

As soon as he was clear, he nosed up and cut back around, climbing up the side of the airship, and saw the Sparrowhawk shoot past underneath. Sorensen turned again, but by the time he was lined up for another pass, Dodge had cruised over the top of Majestic and was dropping back down on the other side.

He kept one eye on the sky above, waiting for the Sparrowhawk to soar over once more, but Sorensen was too canny for that. As the autogyro descended, the fighter plane moved under the airship, lined up for a perfect kill shot.

Suddenly, Majestic’s exterior swelled as if had taken a deep breath. Dodge was too focused on the stream of bullets arcing his way to even recognize that the timed explosive Hurricane had placed around the helium envelope at last had done their job, rupturing the gas bladder and splitting seams all over the dirigible’s outer skin.

It wasn’t enough to send the airship plunging immediately into the East River.

But it was enough to decide the fate of the teetering amatol bomb. Seven hundred and fifty pounds of the volatile high explosive compound slammed into the deck and vaporized in an instant. The rest of the bombs, fifteen tons worth of ammonium nitrate mixed with trinitrotoluene, went critical an infinitesimal fraction of a second later.

The back end of Majestic blossomed with fire and force.

Sorensen’s plane was instantly consumed by the fireball. Only a little further away, Dodge felt the heat and energy buffet the autogyro, and for a moment he was sure they would share the fighter pilot’s fate. Instead, the hot wind caught the rotor craft like a giant hand flinging a child’s balsawood glider. He fought for control, but for several seconds, the gyro simply rode the shockwave like a piece of driftwood on a tsunami wave.

The explosion fairly threw them back to the city. The autogyro gradually began to do what Dodge wanted, but he could hear creaks and moans from the airframe that hadn’t been there before the explosion. There was no time anymore to be picky about a landing area; he needed a space big enough to set down without clipping a building, streetlamp or tree with the rotors. It would have to be a street, one of the wide thoroughfares that ran the length of the city….

The answer was right in front of him.

He brought the gyro down as fast as he could, letting the drag of gravity spin the rotor instead of forward motion, so that the craft behaved more like a glider, seemingly hanging in the air. Floor after floor of the Empire State Building flashed by as the aircraft descended only a stone’s throw away, and on Fifth Avenue directly below, the gathering crowd of onlookers realized the gyro was about to land squarely on top of them.

The gyro came down with sufficient force that the wheel struts bent and the bottom of the fuselage crunched into the macadam.

But they were alive, and Von Heissel and Majestic were gone, and with them, their potential to send the world to oblivion. The nightmare was over.