The Alpha Deception

Chapter 31

Guillermo Paz completed detailing his orders to his individual unit commanders and dismissed them. In the havoc of last night he had lost a dozen men, a dozen to an old geezer with a pair of six-guns and a trio of middle-aged bureaucrats. Paz cursed himself for underestimating the lot of them, for not killing them when he could have. But his orders had been to stabilize the town and until last night the execution of the six citizens and jailing of the leaders had accomplished precisely that. Even the mysterious murders had ceased, and, if not for lax security, all would still be under control.

Worst of all, a rocket fired during the escape had knocked out the telephone substation containing the outside line on which General Raskowski had been calling him. But his priorities were clear: keep the townspeople where he could control them, and keep the generator gun safe from all possible harm.

With that in mind, Paz had stationed his heaviest artillery at opposite ends of the town to create a grid capable of shutting down virtually any attack from ground or air. Not that it mattered. The generator gun was encased in a shield of tungsten steel, impenetrable and easily defended in its position between two sloping hillsides. Paz gazed toward it stroking his mustache almost continuously in his anxiety. Strands came out in bunches, and he mindlessly tossed them aside. The end was near, just hours away now.

Paz could barely wait.

Blaine McCracken lay low on a rise overlooking the town of Pamosa Springs. What he saw through the binoculars made him gasp. Beneath him in the center of town, men dressed as American soldiers were continuously herding groups of residents forward at gunpoint toward the town’s largest building: a steeple-fronted white church. He watched as dozens upon dozens of townspeople were wedged like cattle through a set of double doors, prodded along with automatic rifle barrels. At the same time, he noticed more soldiers packing plastic explosives against the side of the church, enough to bring down the whole town, never mind that single building. The message to the hostages inside was clear; any attempt at escape would lead to their own destruction.

He turned his attention northwest of the town center, to another phalanx of soldiers standing guard upon a ravaged foothill. In the gulley beyond it, he knew, had to be the generator gun that would fire the particle beam. Once the reflector achieved orbit twelve hours from now, the beam could be bounced anywhere Raskowski chose from his base across the Atlantic.

His mind drifted back to his last moments aboard the Dragon Fish after Vasquez’s custom-made submarine had systematically destroyed the rest of Raskowski’s Bimini forces.

“The general’s not finished with you yet, fat man,” Blaine charged, still uncertain of Vasquez’s intentions. “Me, Natalya and the Indian are the only ones who can finish him off.”

“You’ve forgotten someone, haven’t you, McCracken? Me. I caught you. I won. Now I’m ready to move up to more challenging competition: this Russian who played me for a fool, who dared to enter my waters….”

The discussion continued as they surfaced and steamed fast for Vasquez’s private port in the Biminis. Foremost on Blaine’s mind was that the failure of Raskowski’s assault teams here would alert the general that there still existed a dangerous threat to him. The element of surprise on all fronts was gone. Their best approach now would be a three-pronged attack in which at least one of the prongs would be assured of success.

Blaine would proceed from here straight for Pamosa Springs. Wareagle would head to Washington with a plea to get troops to the area while there was still time and to abort the satellite launch at all cost. Natalya, meanwhile, would travel back to Europe with Vasquez. The fat man would provide a commando team to be used in an assault on Katlov’s current position and what must certainly be Raskowski’s headquarters — in Zurich, as it turned out.

“Are you sure your men are reliable?” she asked him.

“Reliable, my dear? They are all my sons, ten from six different wives, and they all take after their father.”

They had gone their separate ways only eighteen hours before Raskowski’s murderous strike on the United States would begin. In his position atop the small rise, McCracken knew Natalya must still be on her way to Europe. His would surely be the first blow struck.

Shifting his body slightly, McCracken checked his watch: eight hours to go. He swept his binoculars through the small center of Pamosa Springs, and his eyes locked through the lenses on the short and cocky figure of Guillermo Paz.

Paz’s reputation alone had nearly led Blaine to cancel his recent Nicaraguan mission to hijack the Hind-D. And now the little man was here, fingers toying with his mustache as always, linked obviously to Raskowski and forced to prove his mettle yet again. Challenging the same man twice in so short a time was not something Blaine looked forward to. One of the things that had kept him alive this long was not tempting the law of averages.

In this case, however, Paz seemed the least of his problems. He had counted ninety soldiers and enough firepower to hold off ten times that many. He had only an Uzi Vasquez had given him and the nearly full tank of gas in the rented compact he’d driven in from Durango.

What he needed was a miracle. And it was just a few minutes later that it occurred to him where one was waiting for him.

Sheriff Junk and the mayor hadn’t gone very far into the San Juans at all. The concentration of Paz’s forces searching for them would have prevented it, even if a bullet wound in Dog-ear’s leg hadn’t. At first he pleaded with Heep to go on without him but the sheriff was hearing none of that. He cut down a great pile of thick branches and used them to camouflage a sheltered space between three large rocks. This hideout kept them dry and safe. They had to move their shelter only once in the hours since their escape, but on several occasions they had actually held their breath while Paz’s troops searched close by.

Before the pursuit began, they had buried Clara in a makeshift grave of rocks and branches. Her efforts had saved them and they said their own silent prayers for both her and Isaac T. Hall before pressing on. Further up the trail, Dog-ear’s leg stiffening, they had found a spot to conceal the crates of rockets and grenades which were too bulky to carry. As time went on, McCluskey’s wound grew more and more painful and swollen, and Sheriff Junk had to carry him most of the way to the place where he built their shelter.

They didn’t talk much because there wasn’t much to say. They had escaped but done their town no good in the process. They may even have made matters worse. With two men free now to tell the world what was happening in Pamosa Springs, Paz was capable of anything.

What they needed, Sheriff Junk supposed, was a doctor to set Dog-ear’s leg just right. Then they could take the rest of the grenades and rockets back down the pass and wage their own private war on Paz’s troops.

But what they really needed was a miracle.

Three hours after leaving Pamosa Springs, Blaine pulled up to the gate of the Air Force Research and Testing station in Colorado Springs. He had no clearance to enter, but he managed to convince the guards at the front gate to put in a call to Lieutenant Colonel Ben Metcalf who, thankfully, was listed as present on the base. After learning his visitor was McCracken, Metcalf instructed that he be immediately passed through.

The base was generally simple in design, composed as near as Blaine could tell of little more than several barracks, a dozen hangars, numerous runways and assorted stations for drilling.

Metcalf met him outside the tri-level office building and pumped his hand happily when he climbed out of his grimy compact.

“Have you switched to the economy model?”

“My Porsche is in the shop. You know how it is.”

“Sure do. Temperamental engines are what I deal with all day.” They stood facing each other. “So what the hell brings you back here so soon?” Metcalf asked him.

“I need a favor.”

“God knows we owe you. Just name it.”

“Don’t say that until you hear what it is.”

“I’m listening.”

“Let’s go into your office.”

When Metcalf had closed the door behind him, Blaine picked up again. “Tell me about the Hind-D.”

“Not much to tell. We haven’t done a hell of a lot with it yet besides pasting American instructions over the Russian ones. Apparently there’s been a jurisdictional snafu. Everyone in the armed forces is claiming it belongs to them.”

“Then you haven’t disassembled it yet.”

“Hell no. The only thing we’ve done since you dropped it off was give it a fresh fill of fuel for testing that hasn’t been conducted yet.”

“That’s just what I needed to hear.”

“Why, Blaine?”

McCracken hesitated. “Now comes the favor I told you about. I need you to lend me the Hind … just for the afternoon.”

Metcalf’s face turned serious for the first time. “Blaine, what’s going on?”

“I won’t bother with explanations because they wouldn’t make any sense to you. Can I have the bird or not?”

Metcalf shrugged. “Everything else aside, I’d love to help you. Problem is, I haven’t got the authority to check the Hind out to anyone; nobody does until this jurisdictional dispute gets settled. I’d like to help you but I can’t. Christ, Blaine, I know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a damn good reason to be, but I just don’t have the authority to fill your request.”

Blaine pulled out his gun. “That’s what I figured.”

“You don’t need that,” Metcalf told him calmly.

“It’s for your own good that I brought it along. This way, all the cooperation you’re going to give me can take place under coercion. Might save your career.”

“And fuck yours royally.”

“Mine doesn’t exist anymore. Less so now than ever, believe me.”

Metcalf started with him to the door, then stopped. “Whatever you’re going up against, you’re obviously going to need help. Let me—”

“No offense, Ben,” McCracken interrupted, “but you’re just a bureaucrat now and I haven’t got time to go through channels. The country hasn’t got time.”

“That bad?”

“Oh yeah.”

“At least tell me where you’re headed. I might get lucky and—”

“No, can’t do that either, but thanks just the same. That kind of exchange would make you an accomplice for no good reason I can see. The wheels spin too slowly to take the risk. This one’s mine.”

“Then put your gun away and follow me.”

“I’ll keep it out, Ben, just for show.”

Every day this time of year, Cleb Turner, Sergeant Major in the United States Army, took a stroll around lunchtime to the first hot dog vendor he could find. Turner would take a pair of dogs and a can of diet Coke into the shade and linger over them lavishly before returning to his stale office in the Pentagon and the start of equally stale afternoon meetings.

Cleb Turner was never meant to be a bureaucrat. Damn business was too confining, especially for a man who’d served in both Korea and Vietnam. Just as bad, Cleb knew that as the first black sergeant major in army history, his appointment had been earned on the political battlefields as much as the real ones. But what the hell? He’d earned the appointment on his own merit; he just didn’t like the job, kept at it mostly because he figured that having more real soldiers behind the desks might help avoid future debacles.

It was the bullshit he had to go through en route to this goal that made lunch outside the Pentagon his favorite part of the day. Since the morning had been relatively quiet, he allowed himself relish along with the usual mustard on his pair of hotdogs. He was trying to balance them in one hand and handle his soda in the other, when he turned smack-dab into a huge figure whose chest was even with his head.

“What the hell….” Then Turner saw the figure’s face. “Johnny Wareagle?” he said in amazement.

“With regards from the spirits, Sergeant.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“Only for a time.”

Chapter 32

McCracken kept the Hind-D low, beneath the reach of air defense radar which was constantly watching for out-of-place and potentially dangerous aircraft with no registered flight plan. It was well over two hundred miles from Colorado Springs to Pamosa Springs and Blaine figured he could cover that easily in just over an hour.

Blaine insisted on leaving the colonel bound and gagged in the Hind’s hangar to further promote his cover. Metcalf reluctantly agreed after pointing McCracken in the direction of the airstrip he had already reserved. By the time anyone realized something was wrong, Blaine would already be over Pamosa Springs.

He had spent two months of his life learning everything there was to learn about the Hind-D before activating the Nicaraguan operation. Then escape had been his only goal. Today’s mission was considerably more complicated.

He spent the balance of the flight refamiliarizing himself with the setup of the Hind’s cockpit. It was designed as a three-person aircraft but had been outfitted to allow one man to both fly it and operate its weapon systems in the event of an emergency. The English labels Metcalf had stuck over the Russian ones made life much easier in this respect, for at least on this flight Blaine wouldn’t have to guess which button was which. Extremely sophisticated weapons counters gave him precise data on his laser-guided air cannons and his rocket and missile launchers. He had ninety of the .27-millimeter missiles remaining, and well over half the ammo left in his air cannons, which followed the line of his eyes once the guidance system rigged into his helmet was activated. He would save the full complement of six antitank missiles for the generator gun.

His greatest concern at this point was how to make all this technology work for him. His target, of course, was the guarded gulley where the generator gun was set up. But with heavy artillery at either end of the town, a direct attack was impossible. High in the air, at a standard altitude, the guns would chew him to pieces. But if he …

Blaine swallowed hard. His only hope lay in doing the unexpected, however dangerous it might be. A low-altitude run would significantly reduce the effectiveness of the gun batteries while exposing him to potential destruction from ground level. It was a chance he could live with, though. Come in and take them by surprise. Knock out the main gun batteries and the generator gun was his.

McCracken shifted uneasily in his seat. The Hind could be controlled either by wheel or joystick, both containing firing buttons for the air cannons. He would have to launch missiles and rockets with his free hand when required, leaving him only one hand for all the rest of the controls. As Pamosa Springs drew closer, Blaine practiced the procedure again and again without engaging the weapons systems. According to his instruments he was barely five minutes from the town. The Hind’s controls felt smooth and easy, tight as a sports car.

The San Juans came up fast and Blaine had to climb substantially to rise over them, keeping the Hind’s bottom precariously close to their tips. The gunship obeyed his commands with immediate grace, bucking just a bit as if aware of what lay over the next ridge.

Guillermo Paz was quite proud of himself. All things considered, he had stabilized matters in Pamosa Springs so brilliantly that his few failures were certain to be overlooked in the face of his undeniable success. The last of the townspeople had been herded into the church, which was wired and ready to blow. That would keep his captives still while his guards at the gulley would easily fend off any assault the escaped mayor and sheriff might put together.

Paz stood proudly erect in the center of Main Street with one hand on his hip and the other stroking his mustache affectionately. His men saluted as they passed and Paz genially saluted back. All in all things were going to turn out pretty damn well. Soon the death beam would be fired and Paz would be among the only witnesses to actually see it.

The shallow whining sound confused him at first. It sounded like a chain saw echoing in the stiff wind. Then it grew louder. With a shudder Paz realized what it was and at the same time knew it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be! His eyes scanned the sky.

The Hind-D roared out from the cover of the mountains. Paz’s eyes locked on it as it dropped to tree level. He knew it must be the one he had lost in Nicaragua, knew it had been flown here to be used against him. And its pilot had planned his strategy well. He was coming in beneath the range of his main guns.

Paz could see the air cannon chambers turning an instant before the clack-clack-clack reached his ears. The Hind’s first spray bore into the area of his first gun battery, clanging sharply against steel where it connected and kicking dust up where it didn’t.

The Hind came in still lower. You’re crazy, Paz wanted to scream at the pilot, but this flier knew exactly what he was doing Paz realized as he watched the steel bird drop straight for him. He dove to the ground behind the cover of a jeep as the first sound of cannon fire came. It shattered the jeep and sent pieces of metal showering down on Paz. A small group of his men who had roared into the street at the first sign of fire had their frames torn apart by the warship’s huge bullets.

Paz crawled out from behind the burning jeep and made for the armory, prepared to defend the generator gun himself if that’s what it came to. He wouldn’t fail now.

He couldn’t.

McCracken had picked out Paz as soon as he cleared the ravaged front gun battery. He cut back the warship’s speed to steady his aim and might have hit Paz with his next burst. He wasn’t sure. Of the other men who had rushed into the street with their rifles ready, there was no question. McCracken saw their punctured corpses as he came round for his second pass, amazed at the accuracy of his air cannon fire.

Halfway to the second gun battery, he turned his attention to the thick barrels struggling for a bead on him from the foothills on the town’s western perimeter. He estimated they could not possibly sight down on him before he was over and past them. Instead, they should have anticipated their fire ahead for the gulley as he soared over it. They were opening the door for him, and damned if he wasn’t going to move right on through it.

McCracken fired a rocket and one of the truck-mounted guns exploded in a wall of flames. He followed up immediately with a barrage from the air cannons. This gained him the advantage he needed as he swept over the battery and climbed over the hill on the other side of which was the gulley.

The guards on the hill pelted him with rifle fire as he soared close, but the armor-piercing shells made barely a dent in the Hind’s reinforced steel carcass. He drove the big bird past the gulley to facilitate a turn. He wanted to come straight over his target with plenty of time to assure himself of accurate missile launches. He figured he could fire three times before having to pull up again and three should finish the generator gun for good.

Blaine brought the Hind around and was chilled as he gazed downward. From this angle, the generator-gun complex had the look of a massive turret with an exposed barrel poking upward. It was of vast size, a dome encased in dusty gray steel. It amazed him that such an impregnable defense could have been erected so swiftly.

Blaine gulped down air as he punched in commands to the missile-targeting computer. Finger on the firing button now, one hand steadying the wheel.

He had asked for only one chance. He was about to get it.

Fire from the gun battery at the far side of town exploded in the air near him, a close call. McCracken drove the Hind into a weaving pattern as he fired his three missiles in rapid succession, the laser guides doing the rest. He was actually over the generator-gun complex and past it before he was certain of impact, but he banked the Hind back so he could see the effect of three direct hits.

Nothing! The only evidence of any impact was a few scattered fires sprouting from minor splits in the steel over-skin.

Blaine’s stomach sank. He had struck the generator gun dead center with three shells that could level a city block, with no apparent effect. Already his mind was working in another direction. His only hope was to bide his time over Main Street long enough to ready another pass, and this time he would fire his missiles straight for the exposed barrel from which the ray would be emitted, a far more difficult shot but his only hope of knocking the weapon out.

He plunged closer to the ground as he crossed over Main Street again, firing his air cannons in random patterns just to buy himself time. Hitting the barrel would be a tough shot. He narrowed the firing grid at the small computer display screen on the console just to his right. The warship was fitted with an infrared camera on its underside, which broadcast the shape of whatever the missiles were aimed at on the monitor. When his target appeared on the screen all he had to do was lock into it and a missile would trace for the target from wherever it was fired.

McCracken dropped the Hind as low as he dared, barely fifty feet up, firing his laser-aimed cannons at windows where gun barrels protruded. The greatest congestion of resistant activity had been centered around three buildings in the town’s center, obviously headquarters and perhaps armory for Raskowski’s men.

The first, unbeknownst to him, was Sheriff Junk Heep’s office, the facade of which was obliterated by his first rocket. The second was what looked like a general store. He gave it a missile and enough of the building exploded outward to make the soldiers in the street dive to the ground.

When he neared the eastern edge of town, the regrouped gun battery aimed a volley at him which missed the mark widely. He sped up and peppered the guns with as many missiles as he could fire until he passed them, leaving smoke and flaming steel behind as he headed back west to deal with the second battery.

Four of Paz’s men rushed into the street beneath him holding what he recognized as Laws rockets. He aimed his helmet at them and fired, but his increased speed had the warship already beyond the shooters and his cannon bullets dug chasms out of the street’s fresh tar surface. He was boxed in, the Laws behind and the western battery ahead.

He wasn’t sure how many of the rockets actually struck the Hind-D. The controls seemed to lock up in his hands just for an instant. When the give came back, they were stiff. A pair of red lights flashed on his console board indicating aft fires too large for the automatic systems to fight. Blaine drove the warship on, faster, halfway to the gun battery now.

He could see the gun operators had gotten it right this time. Three of the four big guns were already aimed toward the gulley to lay down suppressing fire that would make it impossible for him to cross. The fourth fired token rounds which forced him to climb sooner than he would have wished. His maneuverability was reduced, as well as his chances of avoiding the blasts once over the gulley again.

His target, the exposed barrel, was frozen in his mind, but it needed to be equally frozen on his CRT grid if he was going to have any chance at all. The gulley came up fast as he crossed over the western battery. Blaine’s hand moved to the targeting computer to lock in.

The fire of the three guns came and kept coming. He was headed straight for the generator complex now, seconds away, with the barrage of shells exploding everywhere around him, the percussion ringing in his ears as the Hind buckled. He adjusted its nose angle lower for smoother release and focused on the narrower target grid waiting for the gun barrel to lock on.

There it was, square in the center! McCracken went for the firing button.

A huge blast tore into the Hind from the rear, kicking it skyward. The warship fluttered in midair, seeming almost to stall, and smoke began to flood the cabin. Red lights flashed up and down the instrument board.

The missiles hadn’t fired! They hadn’t fired!

Paz’s gunners had beaten him by an instant, but Blaine wasn’t giving up yet. He still had three missiles and intended to find a way to fire them. He coughed through the smoke and struggled to regain control of the Hind. More blasts rocked him as he brought the sputtering bird around in a wide bank that took him back over the San Juans. More red lights flickered to warn him all his weapons systems had shorted out and the fuel line was ruptured. The Hind was limping in the air, refusing to go further. He was flying it to its death. And his.

With the last burst of strength he could grab from it, Blaine veered deeper over the foothills of the San Juans. The huge artillery shells followed him every inch of the way, a final one finding him just as the foliage of the mountains was beneath him and he had begun to try some sort of landing.

But that final blast had finished the ship. Black smoke instead of gray flooded the cockpit and filled his lungs. Blaine was aware of a terrible grinding noise and of a tumbling sensation as the brave bird plummeted. He dimly recorded the whiplash of collision, certain at that point he would never know anything again.

Chapter 33

Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse is unquestionably the city’s most fashionable and elegant avenue. Combining the qualities of Wall Street and Fifth Avenue along a three-mile stretch bordered by lime trees, the Bahnhofstrasse houses numerous banks, investment firms, insurance companies and brokerage houses. It is lined from one end to the other with business and commercial buildings of various sizes and architectural styles, the more modem ones seeming to compete with each other for uniqueness of design.

In one of the largest, the Kriehold Building, the top three floors are leased by a computerized mail service that specializes in a worldwide investment newsletter. In reality, the newsletter does not exist. The mail service is a cover. The three floors contain the technological headquarters of General Vladimir Raskowski.

Raskowski had chosen the Zurich locale personally, believing that his enemies wouldn’t expect him to set up shop in one of the world’s busiest business centers. Besides, Raskowski found directing his project from Zurich entirely fitting, for soon even the Bahnhofstrasse would belong to him if he desired. He could have it all, he could have anything.

The computers that controlled the generator gun in Pamosa Springs and the aluminum reflector soon to be in geosynchronistic orbit were on the top three floors, encased by concrete and steel on all sides. In effect, the control room was a massive vault a hundred feet square and employing three dozen men and women.

Raskowski inserted his command card into its slot outside the control room. The huge entry door parted electronically from its seal and swung open. He entered, men rising to attention as he passed. Raulsch, the old German scientist who had designed and built the entire headquarters, rose and saluted crisply. Raskowski’s favorite post was a chair from which he could gaze up at a huge electronic map of the United States. Now the map showed a rising green light — the path of the satellite containing his reflector as it climbed toward its deadly orbit. The various angles required of the reflector to achieve the destruction of specific American targets had been preprogrammed, and now those targets appeared in the form of dozens of flashing red lights all across the country.

“How long?” Raskowski asked Raulsch.

“Three hours, twenty-nine minutes, seventeen seconds,” the scientist replied.

The general settled back and fidgeted in his elevated chair. Word from the Biminis had not been good. Somehow McCracken and Tomachenko had found the means to defeat the force he had dispatched to the islands. This meant they were still at large, though cut off from their respective governments. They would therefore have to stop his operation on their own, which was impossible of course.

Raskowski still fidgeted.

In the end, the trees had saved his life. That’s what Blaine figured as he gazed back at the Hind’s smoking, twisted carcass, one wing protruding upward in imitation of Johnny Wareagle’s wooden one in Nicaragua. The treetops had torn out the warship’s bottom, then accepted its weight long enough to cushion his fall. He had maintained consciousness through it all and had made a quick escape, aware that Paz would be sending troops out to finish him. He had no choice but to flee, even if he had to stumble and crawl to get away, clinging to the hope that either Natalya or Wareagle could succeed where he failed.

Twenty yards into the woods his balance failed him and he slid to the ground. He wiped blood from his brow, but the warm fluid drenched him again as quickly as he cleared it. He tried to grab hold of something to pull himself to his feet but his strength was gone. His vision was clouded and hazy. The ground spun beneath him. Blaine clutched at it to make it still and fought to remain conscious. Back on the ridge, the carcass of the Hind went up in a final explosion and in that instant everything was clear to him again.

He had somehow made it to his knees when the first of the figures appeared before him. He didn’t know where they had come from but he knew they must be Paz’s men come to finish him off. Then his vision cleared long enough for him to see a pair of grizzled characters, one with a gut hanging well over his belt and the other whose frame amounted to flesh wrapped around a beanpole.

“Afternoon, friend,” one of them said.

Everything had gone well for Natalya until the private plane holding her and Vasquez’s commandos neared Zurich. The soldiers, also his sons, were as well schooled as any she had worked with. They possessed all of their father’s arrogance but none of his girth and had little in common, physically, except cold staring eyes. It was as if the fat man had fathered many sons just so he would have at least this many expertly trained and trustworthy killers. In his business, you could never have too many.

She and Vasquez had made it to Morocco from the Biminis in just over ten hours. The commandos were waiting with another fueled jet on the runway. After a brief inventory of equipment, they took off with their plans to be detailed as they flew.

Their intended landing at Zurich three hours later proved unsuccessful when they learned the airport there was hopelessly fogged in. The plane had no choice but to divert to another airport at Winterthur, where Vasquez would have vans waiting to spirit them by road into Zurich. It would take three hours to reach the city and another twenty minutes on top of that before they reached the Bahnhofstrasse. By Natalya’s calculations that would leave little time to demolish Raskowski’s base of operations and destroy his means of ordering the generator beam in Pamosa Springs to fire.

The centerpiece of the plan was surprise. All of them were dressed as Swiss electrical workers. Their blue uniforms would permit them easy, casual entry to any building especially at night.

The final deception. And perhaps the most important.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Blaine started wearily, speaking to both of the apparitions. “You’re out collecting for the Red Cross, right?”

“If we were,” said Dog-ear McCluskey, “we could do a helluva lot better than you.”

The men moved to either side of him, one of them limping, and helped lift him to his feet.

“Mind telling me who you are?” Blaine asked them.

“We were about to ask you the same question,” said the one with the limp.

“Just a guy who had a few drinks too many and missed a turnoff.”

McCracken felt better on his feet, the world seeming more balanced. Still, he had to throw his arms around the men’s shoulders for support.

“A few good belts might be in order when we tell you what’s been going on down in our town,” said the one with the limp.

“We saw what you did,” the man Blaine had come to know as Mayor Dog-ear McCluskey told him when they had reached a clearing higher up the mountain. “If the crash didn’t kill ya, Sheriff Junk Heep and I figured you might be the kind of man who can help us.”

“Help you what?”

“Get our town back.”

Blaine listened to their whole story with a compress of cold spring water pressed against his fresh head wound, feeling much better already. Mayor Dog-ear was careful to stress the bestiality of Paz and the unexplained killings that had riddled the town.

“Now it’s your turn,” McCluskey beckoned him. “Since you’re here, I gotta figure you got a line on what’s really going on.”

Blaine nodded. “Actually, you boys have put it together pretty good yourselves. The element they’ve been digging out of that hillside isn’t a gem. It’s something called Atragon.”

“Atragon?” raised the sheriff. “What the hell’s that? Is it worth much?”

“Until recently no one even knew it existed. But right now, conservatively speaking, I’d say it’s the most precious mineral on the face of the earth.”

“That’s a relief,” sighed Junk.

And Blaine told them everything, as best he could, from the beginning, ending with his failed attempt to destroy the generator gun using the Hind-D.

“So this Russian general blows up a town,” said Dog-ear when he was finished, “and his satellite gets fucked in the process.”

“Yup,” said McCracken, “so he’s got to resort to a new plan and he’s got to do it fast. First he needs more Atragon to power the beam weapon, then he needs a new means of delivering it.”

“And we helped on both accounts,” noted Junk grimly.

“My guess,” said Blaine, “is that he caught on to your reserves after you sent samples to the National Assayer’s Office.”

“Pretty short notice to put a hundred men together, especially considering this is all super-high tech,” noted the mayor.

“Raskowski already had the men and plenty of them were very likely already inside the country. Besides, the man’s relentless. The word impossible doesn’t exist for him.”

“So he mines this Atragon stuff,” started Sheriff Junk, “and then what? Can you just pack it into that gun like batteries?”

“No, he’d have to store power in the crystals first in order to generate the beam. You said the power into town was rerouted into the hills. Lots of that went straight into the crystals, immeasurable amounts.”

Junk looked at Blaine closely. “Be nice if you told us the cavalry was waitin’ over the next ridge for your signal to nuke the sucker.”

“Be nice, but it’d also be a lie. I got word out but it’s a big country, and lots more man distance is probably holding the cavalry up. I gave it my best shot with the chopper. Came up a little short, though.”

“Would you try it again?”

“Sure, Dog-ear. Just lead me to the nearest army weapons surplus store and we’ll have a go at it.”

Mayor McCluskey smiled.

Just to be on the safe side, Guillermo Paz had posted guards in the freight yard between the mountains and the town. If the sheriff and mayor, the last threats to his command now that the flier had been killed, were still close by, he wanted to be in a position to thwart any efforts they might mount to disrupt the final stages of General Raskowski’s plan. The generator gun was impregnable, true, but too much had already happened that defied the odds. First, the strange murders, then last night’s escape, and finally the return of the stolen Hind-D.

Paz wasn’t about to let a fourth mishap ruin this command.

McCluskey spoke as Blaine inspected the crates full of grenades and Laws rockets Sheriff Junk had retrieved from their hiding place.

“Way I see it, friend,” explained Mayor McCluskey, “the only chance we got of disablin’ that monster gun is to borrow some of the explosives those bastards got stored in town. Means we gotta launch a raid. Might as well save the townspeople while we’re at it.”

Blaine nodded. “Your strategy’s not far off. We’ve got to knock the gun out all right, but we won’t stand a chance of even getting close until we eliminate Paz’s troops. Not that the three of us have a prayer of accomplishing that by ourselves….”

“Don’t like your attitude,” snapped Junk.

“You didn’t let me finish. There’s a whole church full of reinforcements waiting for us — if we can free them. Way you boys have described it, there’s plenty of people in your town who’ll know what to do if given the opportunity.”

“And the rest might not have until ten days back.”

“Especially since a few leaders, example setters, will be all it takes,” Blaine explained. “That’s what subversive activities are all about to an extent: making people rise up and be noticed themselves.”

Dog-ear almost laughed. “So we become the subversives in our own town.”

“I’ve been all over the world,” Blaine told him. “It’s not as strange as it seems.”

“So all we need now is a plan,” advanced Heep.

“The progression’s simple,” Blaine told him. “We take the town back first and then use whatever we can to blow the fuck out of that generator gun.” He checked his watch. “A lot to accomplish in just under ninety minutes.”

“Three of us ought to give ‘em a run for their money.”

“I’m starting to think we just might, Sheriff. Let me lay it out for the two of you….”

Blaine explained the details of the plan to them as quickly and simply as he could. The operation had several independent components, each of which must be successful if all were to work. McCracken’s job was to infiltrate the town and free the residents trapped in the church, so that they might join the battle. To accomplish this, he would need plenty of distraction and cover in the form of grenades and Laws rockets. This task was given to Sheriff Junk, whose specialty was munitions. First, he would use grenades on the soldiers in the railroad yard. Then he would fire his Laws rockets down into the town, hoping to create total havoc. He would then use the rest of his armaments to disable the still intact western battery of guns. With those still functional, they stood no chance of reaching the gulley, no matter what else transpired.

Similarly, Blaine could not let the fifteen soldiers remain on the mountainside. Not only could they provide a strong defense of the stronghold from that position, but they also could rush back into the town to lend support from the rear. The mayor, a crack shot, would come in here. As soon as Junk began hurling his grenades, McCluskey would begin picking off the soldiers guarding the gulley. He would remain up there to shoot any more of the soldiers who rushed to the gulley’s defense after the battle began. Junk, meanwhile, would join McCracken in the town center, once his rockets were expended, to take charge of the eager mob freed from the church.

McCracken calculated that little more than an hour remained for them to accomplish their plan before the generator gun fired its beam of death. The mayor and sheriff of Pamosa Springs nodded their understanding.

There were fifty-four minutes left by the time Blaine worked his way around to the other side of town. He had circled to better his position in relation to the church. He expected to find a rear entrance, guarded but not nearly as well fortified as the front.

The best he could do for proximity was fifty yards, his cover being a doghouse in somebody’s front yard, which, thankfully, was empty.

The guards posted around the church were superfluous when measured against the huge mounds of C-4 plastic explosives that had been packed close enough to the windows for all to see. Clearly if his plan was to be successful the explosives had to be disabled. Cutting the fuse line at any point would do the job since a continuous current was required to set this type of plastique off.

Blaine checked his watch. It was 3:26. In four minutes Dog-ear would begin shooting and Sheriff Junk Heep would start hurling his grenades. The rest would be left to him. He had anticipated the timing up to this point and took that as a good omen.

Omens … Ah, to have Johnny Wareagle and a team of Indian warriors to help him now….

He was glad the timing provided him only a few minutes to be alone with his thoughts. He had spent so many years living with violence that he believed he had become inured to it. He could excuse such acceptance in himself because he realized his actions were necessary. But now he was using innocent people, and was willing to sacrifice their lives.

To rid the world of senseless killing, he had become a killer. The knowledge chilled him. But in this case, he told himself, the only hope the people had was to fight back themselves. In the complex code of ethics he lived with and so often had nearly died with, nothing was clear-cut; there was plenty of gray but almost no black and white. And now he was having trouble with the gray.

He could see the whole world in Pamosa Springs. He would save Pamosa Springs.

His watch moved to 3:30.

Dog-ear and Sheriff Junk had taken cover within sight of each other to ensure their assaults would begin simultaneously. Heep had left all his rockets and most of his grenades in the brush twenty yards back because there was no sense in lugging them with him, and his damn creaky joints forced him to rest every other yard, or so it seemed. He’d stuffed his pockets and shirt full of grenades to hurl, even slid one into his mouth and dangled another from the dogtags he had never shed since Korea, jingling in soft counterpoint to the creaking.

A simple nod from Dog-ear was all it took for him to yank the pins out of his first pair of grenades. They were in the air an instant before McCluskey began picking off the soldiers watching over the gulley and the promised death it contained.

Lyman Scott was reaching for the phone even before Sergeant Major Cleb Turner was finished relating the story passed to him by Johnny Wareagle.

“Get me NASA, Ben,” he said nervously into the receiver. “Now!”

Turner stopped. The President eyed him.

“I’m not sure what to make of what you said, Sergeant, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to check it out. An Indian named Warbird, you say….”

“Wareagle, sir.”

NASA came on the line.

The President knew there was trouble as soon as NASA failed to report back that they had carried out his orders. Four minutes passed before his phone rang again.

“Sir,” the NASA mission chief of the satellite launch said at last, “we have lost control of the satellite.”

“I didn’t tell you to control it, son,” the President snapped. “I told you to blow it up.”

“Yes, sir, I’m aware of that, but the problem’s a bit more complicated. The satellite isn’t responding to any of our commands, including self-destruct.”

“Then just abort, damnit, abort!”

“We tried, sir. No response on that one either.”

“What about shooting it down?”

“It’s too high up, sir, prepared to achieve geosynchronistic orbit in … forty-nine minutes now.”

“So you’re telling me you put the damn thing up there and there’s not a damn thing you can do to get it back under control?”

“Sir, we may have put the satellite up, but someone else has got control of it now.”

“We have forty-nine minutes left to mission activation,” Raulsch said into the microphone which channeled his voice throughout the huge control room. “All personnel begin engaging final control tests.”

On the electronic aerial map before him, the single light representing the aluminum reflector flashed over the center of the United States.

“Prepare to jettison protective cone,” said Raulsch.

“Ready, sir,” responded a technician.

“On my mark … now.”

A single button was pressed. Twenty thousand miles above the surface of the Earth, the top part of the satellite launched to replace Ulysses jettisoned and fluttered into space, a fact recorded by a series of green lights in the command vault.

“Prepare to open reflector,” Raulsch ordered next.

“Ready, sir,” followed another technician.

“On my mark … now.”

This time a series of switches were flipped. In outer space, the exposed aluminum spread out to the sides like a fan, a full seventy yards across at its widest point, its precise angle of tilt controlled by the preprogrammed targeting computer.

General Raskowski sat in his elevated chair just behind Raulsch’s station, observing it all the way a father might the birth of his first child. His attention focused primarily on the flashing lights which indicated the preprogrammed selection of targets. Before him, on a small control desk, was a single black button. As soon as the reflector achieved orbit, he would press it and the beam in Pamosa Springs would begin to fire. The initial strikes would center on the eastern seaboard, starting with Washington. In a matter of a few short minutes, nearly forty million people would perish. Black carbon dust would swirl over vast metropolitan graves, soon to encompass the entire dying nation. He shifted impatiently in the stiff confines of his uniform, stopped from enjoying these final moments by concern over the whereabouts of McCracken and Tomachenko. They were out there, aware of what he was about to do, and until he at last depressed the black button he would not feel safe.

“Forty-seven minutes until system activation,” announced Raulsch.

Natalya’s vans made great time through the night from Winterthur to Zurich, but late-night road construction had shut down all three lanes on her side of the road. Natalya felt the grip of frustration. She breathed rapidly, fought to steady herself. The road was a sea of headlights, shining ahead into the murk for as far as she could see. On the other side of a six-inch median strip, sparse traffic moved in the opposite direction. She reached over for her driver’s shoulder.

“Cross it!” she ordered.

“We’ll be going in the wrong direction. No turnoffs for—”

“Cross it and go in the right direction!”

The man looked at her only briefly before turning the lead van’s tires over the strip and against the flow of oncoming traffic, with the other van close behind.

It had been over thirty years since Sheriff Junk had lobbed grenades, and these felt totally different from any he had handled way back then. He was glad they were lighter because had they been too heavy the best he’d have been able to manage was three before his arm went. His first two lobs were right on target in the abandoned freight yard and the next four almost as good. Troops crumbled from left to right; the rest scattered in the direction of the town instead of offering resistance. Heep scrambled back for his rockets.

McCluskey, meanwhile, met no resistance at all. The soldiers on the hillside seemed numbed by inactivity and they fell like the targets in a shooting gallery. Dog-ear loved the feel of the M-16. Its gas-propelled shells made it a breeze to control. No kick whatsoever. He’d read all about the problems with the M-16, how the gas got stuffed up somehow and the thing would jam or misfire. Well, this one was behaving just fine, thank you.

He had taped a pair of clips upside down against each other, so when it came time to reload, a quick snap in and out and he would be ready to keep firing. A second or two was all it took but even that was too long, for it allowed a soldier who had found his rifle along with his senses time to put a bullet in Dog-ear’s side followed by a second which grazed his head. Dog-ear gritted the pain down long enough to sight down on the bold gunman and send a dozen bullets in his direction. Enough found him, the rest Dog-ear saved for those soldiers searching futilely for cover.

The pain had him down by the time the second clip was exhausted but, lying prone, he managed to snap a fresh one home and maintain his vigil. He could forget all about joining the others in town but, what the hell, you can’t have everything.

From his position of cover in Pamosa Springs, Blaine had no way of knowing just how successful the efforts of Dogear and Sheriff Junk had been. He knew little for sure until the Laws rockets started jetting in. From his doghouse, he couldn’t see the immediate blasts, just the smoke, debris, and flames kicked up in their wake. Four came in rapid succession, a pause, and then two more blasts on Main Street itself. Perfect!

Blaine saw Paz’s soldiers spilling into the street, firing their rifles blindly through the showering debris. The three soldiers charged with guarding the church’s rear, though, held their positions stubbornly, only their eyes cheating around the corner.

Move, Blaine urged them silently. Move!

He had hoped to avoid using his rifle on them for fear the resulting clamor would drag reinforcements to the area. But if he timed the shots with the backlash of the rocket explosions, the rest of Paz’s men would never hear them. Blaine estimated the angle involved. From his present position, he did not have a clear shot at the soldiers as they were standing. And there was the fuse line that needed to be severed to be considered as well. A rush into the open was called for. Three men to cut down before they got him or, worse, managed to set off the plastique….

McCracken timed his charge into the street for the next rocket blast which came fifteen seconds later and hurled blasted debris high into the air. He rushed forward and sideways, directly into the line of possible fire from the church guards and did not fire himself until he was sure he had them. The guards saw him but took too long to react. Blaine hit his trigger and rotated the barrel of his gun. All three crumbled. One dropped to the base of the steps and two spilled down from the porch. Blaine pulled the fusing down toward him and snapped it with his teeth. The wire dug into his lip but with the explosives disabled the blood didn’t faze him.

McCracken lunged up the steps and crashed his shoulder against the door, turning the knob as he did. The door was locked and took his charge without so much as giving. Blaine heard heavy boots clacking down the side street adjacent to the church and reached back for his rifle.

For his part, Sheriff Junk figured his depleted supply of Laws rockets signaled it was time to turn the remaining ones on the primary targets composing the artillery battery on the western edge of town. The firing of the rockets had become routine. It was the numbness of his ears that bothered him along with a stiffness in his arms and shoulders he fought down. The range to the battery was longer, but Junk was expecting no problems. He adjusted the range meter accordingly and raised another of the disposable bazookas over his shoulder.

Biting his lip against a sudden bolt of pain in the joint area, he focused through the sight on the guns. They were big and menacing, yet as a demolitions man, he knew disabling them was as simple as knocking out their stands to send them crashing downward.

Heep fired the rocket and watched a black streak whisk through the air, gathering speed. The expected burst of flames was brief and hardly dramatic, but the first of the big guns tumbled sideways like a slain giant. He got even luckier on his next two shots, finding ammo dumps with both of them, which coughed fire and smoke high into the air.

“Fucking A,” Heep muttered through his pained grimace, starting another Laws upward.

No time to play it safe …

Blaine leaped over the church’s porch and met the charging soldiers head on. There were just two of them but they were spaced apart and firing as they ran. McCracken caught one in his first spray and exhausted his clip in the other’s direction as he rolled out of line of that man’s burst. His arms were scraped raw by a poor dive and he looked up to see huge mounds of plastic explosives wedged into the church’s brick construction.

The sight seemed to recharge him. He rolled behind the cover of an adjacent building as rifle bullets kicked cement fragments up everywhere around him. He came to a halt with his pistol out and aimed at the shape still moving toward him. He took the man down with two shots, then lurched back to his feet and bolted for the church’s rear doors once more. The windows were too high to utilize as a viable escape route so he was left with the heavy, chained doors.

“Stand back!” he screamed and stripped a grenade from his belt, hoping those inside could hear him.

He pulled the pin and rolled the grenade across the porch, lunging to the ground for safety.

The explosion coughed splinters and shards everywhere. From inside, the door was ripped off its hinges. A stream of humanity started out; a screaming, wild pack with no clear path or destination, though a clear purpose lay before them.

“Follow me! Hurry!” McCracken shouted and took the lead toward Main Street.

A soldier staggered before him with his guts hanging out as Guillermo Paz made his way in a crouch across the street to a shop containing additional weapons. He was halfway there when the front of the building exploded outward. All of Main Street seemed to be burning, buildings reduced to flaming shells that sent splinters into the smoky air. The crackling continued, easily mistaken for gunfire, causing still more confusion in troops still rushing about the street looking for someone to shoot at.

All the jeeps he could see were demolished. Worst of all, Paz had lost contact with his men on the hillside. They were either dead or disabled and could no longer be relied on for help. But the generator was going to remain safe even if he had to defend it himself.

The horrible roar of the mob crossed onto Main Street, as Paz scrambled behind a building en route to the hills.

Once freed, only a few of the residents, women carting children and old people, had veered away from the battle. And only the very first to emerge noticed McCracken at all, the rest giving no consideration to the means of their freedom, just glad for the freedom itself.

Blaine hid himself among them, blending, slowing his pace occasionally as those around him reached down for a stray rifle or one still gripped by a soldier’s corpse. Others opted for sections of wooden planks or steel shards separated from the structures that had once occupied Main Street.

McCracken searched for Paz as he ran in the center of the mob. His troops had been reduced to chaos, the ones still in the streets trying hard to run from the mob once their clips were exhausted. Those soldiers the enraged citizens of Pamosa Springs were able to catch were pummeled with whatever the citizens were able to get their hands on. Buildings continued to burn and cough up fragments, smoke dissipating with the wind to reveal jagged holes in walls and roofs courtesy of Sheriff Junk’s rockets. The residents seemed not to notice. Their fury continued, increased, fed on itself.

Heep had stopped firing the rockets at the first sign of the mob rushing into the street. Exuberantly, almost near tears, he stuffed a host more grenades into his pockets and grabbed his M-16. Signaling his intention to the wounded Dog-ear, he started down for Pamosa Springs, hobbling the whole way.

McCracken moved with the stride of a commander who knew his troops were winning. The fires at the western edge of town signaled the ruin of the final gun battery, which left only foot soldiers between him and the gulley containing the generator gun. And at this rate men would prove little bother so long as the tide in the battle of Pamosa Springs continued to go his way.

His greatest enemy remained time, one perhaps too great to overcome with barely twenty-five minutes to go before the beam was activated.

Before him, Sheriff Junk emerged from the side of a building, steadying himself against it with his M-16 blasting toward a congestion of fleeing soldiers. Blaine veered away and had reached Heep’s side just when the spits started. Just more crackling, he thought at first, but soon all around him bodies of the residents of Pamosa Springs began to go down. Blaine hit the cement hard and rolled to the sidewalk within the cover of a still-standing drugstore as bullets traced the ground around him. He judged their trajectory and knew instantly they were coming from above, from soldiers who had strategically managed to gain rooftop positions where they could fire down at will.

Sheriff Junk hit the ground wincing in pain next to him. “What the fuck….”

A squad of Paz’s soldiers had charged out from positions of cover they had fled to, grabbing the offensive again, firing into the hordes of helpless who had delivered themselves into a slaughter.

Blaine saw the grenades hanging from Heep’s belt. “The grenades! Quick!”

Heep passed a few over, realizing his intention, and together they rose, ripping the pins out with their teeth and hurling the promised death upward in the direction of the rooftops. Not being sure where the fire was coming from, they relied on instinct to aim their lobs. The blasts followed quickly and just as quickly the fire from above ceased.

But the issue seemed only delayed, for Paz’s troops had control of the town again and were massing in the center of Main Street, moving in a fast walk forward, shooting at anything that moved. A few broke off toward Blaine and Heep, who were firing desperately in an attempt to subdue them. Blaine heard Junk’s clip click empty and leaped sideways to shield him with the rest of his bullets. Hardly enough, though, to stop the soldiers, a fact Blaine had just accepted when he caught the sound of heavy-caliber machine gun fire an instant before he was ready to accept death. Nothing else registered besides the fact that Paz’s soldiers were dropping all about him, cast once again in the role of the ones scurrying for cover. Blaine looked up into the sun and caught the extension of a machine gun’s barrel supported by a tripod peering down from the rooftop of a building further up the street.

Who, damnit, who?

He recalled Dog-ear’s story of a mystery avenger as he lunged back to his feet after casting a quick glance toward Heep who was scrambling for one of the downed soldiers’ guns. Again the tables of the battle had started to turn with the residents of Pamosa Springs confronting the rest of their captors.

McCracken joined the battle at its center. He alternated between downing what soldiers he could with a stray rifle lifted from the ground, and dragging several of the wounded townspeople to safety. From the roof well beyond him, single gunshots continued to pour down, the work of an expert marksman picking off Paz’s men one at a time. Blaine had been in many battles before, including firefights in Nam in which a hundred lives were lost in a minute, but this was the worst of any he’d seen. The soldiers’ numbers severely dwindling, they nonetheless held the advantage of weaponry and position, while the residents relied on raw determination and the aid of a phantom from a rooftop above. Things improved for the townspeople when several grabbed the rifles of dead soldiers, but only a few of them could make the weapons work in any effective way. The hits they recorded were lucky. The remaining soldiers paid them little regard.

Main Street of Pamosa Springs was a sea of bodies, stirring and otherwise. The battle was now receding into the areas between and behind buildings, with soldiers and townspeople shooting at each other from positions as fortified as they could gain. Neither side controlled any special area. The distribution was random and the bullets blazed in the same manner. With vastly superior numbers, though, it was the residents who were now wearing the soldiers down. Blaine even had time to gaze up at the rooftop, but found no further sign of the phantom. It seemed as if things were winding down, Paz’s men on the verge of surrender.

Then he heard the rumbling. He knew what it was even before he saw the squat, ugly-looking monster lumbering down the street with four machine guns blasting away in every direction from within its armored walls. The army called it the “Jungle Buster,” an all-terrain vehicle featuring six-foot-high tires and a frame impenetrable to anything but a direct rocket hit. The Jungle Buster was actually of Israeli design and was used by the armed forces there in raiding the fortified and secluded terrorist training camps in Lebanon. It looked like one of those monster car-crushers with machine gun barrels poking out from where its windows should have been.

These barrels blazed orange toward all concentrations of townspeople. McCracken saw dozens felled immediately, thinking their positions to be safe and themselves victorious until the very last. Even those who tried to run were no better off, since the incredible range of the Jungle Buster’s fire made escape impossible.

“No!” Blaine screamed and bounded to his feet as the Jungle Buster squealed closer.

He had seen enough. The shallow ache in the pit of his gut was directing him now. He could take no more. Someone was going to pay for all this and it was going to start now. In the next instant he was sprinting forward on an oblique angle with the Buster’s fire. He reached it and leaped between exposed barrels on the vehicle’s side and pulled himself upon its roof with a grenade poised in his hand. McCracken yanked the pin out with his teeth and leaned his arm over to make sure he wedged it through one of the thing’s firing slats. He hurled himself off and rolled aside just before the blast sounded, sending bursts of flames through the openings which had spewed death only seconds before. The Jungle Buster kept lumbering forward for a time, then swung sharply to the right, where it rolled into the debris of a ruined building. And died.

McCracken lunged back to his feet. Sheriff Junk hobbled over to his side and around them amidst the rolling smoke, the gunfire had turned sporadic, fading out by the second.

“We did it!” Junk roared. “We fuckin’ did it!”

“Not yet,” Blaine reminded him. “The generator gun, remember?”

“Shit.”

It had to be blown up, at the very least disabled. But if there had been any hope of using Paz’s armaments to accomplish that, the flames and smoke seemed to smother it. There was no time to find the explosives required, even if they knew where to look. Their best bet in retrospect would have been to leave the western artillery battery intact and have a go at the monster beam with it. Blaine’s thoughts spun. Explosives, there had to be something he could use….

And then he realized. What he needed was right before him. Thanks to Paz.

He started to move away, beckoning Heep to follow. “Grab as many of your people as you can and follow me.”

“What?”

“Just do as I say!”

Blaine glanced at his watch. There were exactly twenty minutes left to go.

Chapter 34

The vans swung onto the Bahnhofstrasse, Natalya’s in the lead and setting the pace for the other as it sped through the thin, late-night traffic, making fast for the Kriehold Building. Their drive on the wrong side of the road had lasted for one agonizing mile, Natalya herself squeezing her eyes closed through much of it. Suddenly she felt the brakes being applied an instant before the headlights illuminated a steel rail directly before them, blocking their way.

Damn! How could I have been so stupid?

Most of the Bahnhofstrasse had long ago been converted into a large sidewalk mall, with all traffic prohibited other than the tramcars referred to here as “Holy Cows.” The vans had now come to the mall area, and it was impossible to crash their way through the steel rail fencing which detoured all traffic to the right or left. They were barely ten blocks from the Kriehold Building, with just under twenty minutes left before the reflector would achieve orbit.

With no choice, Natalya told her driver to pull over.

“We go on foot!” she ordered as the second van came up along side.

The commandos spilled out onto the Bahnhofstrasse mall, still heavily populated by pedestrians even past midnight, since its bright lights and beautiful fountained walkways and all-night shops invariably drew a crowd. The blue-garbed figures slung rifles over their shoulders and grasped knapsacks full of explosives and ammunition as they raced down the center of the mall for the Kriehold Building which nestled with a few others near the center.

Natalya managed to stay at the head of the pack, thoughts swimming frantically through her mind. She resisted all temptation to gaze at her watch, knowing its message was useless to her now. She and the others could run no faster. The best they could do was reach the Kriehold Building and hope they were in time.

Guillermo Paz had stopped to watch the end of the battle from the outskirts of town. Right until the end he had maintained the hope that his troops would be triumphant and save him the indignity of losing his command. He was horrified to see them admit defeat by stepping into the street with their hands in the air.

It was only then that Paz got a clear look at the man who, he had come to realize, was responsible for the greatest portion of his defeat. Never mind the rest of the town, this man was a one-person army. His face was familiar. The black, gray-speckled beard and dark eyes … but from where?

Paz shuddered with fury. It was the man who had disgraced him in Nicaragua, the very same one who had stolen the Hind-D, no doubt the very same one who had strafed the town and gone after the generator gun with it just hours before! And now he was …

Paz stopped his thoughts as the next phase of the bastard’s plan grew clear beneath him. He went cold with fear. The gun wasn’t safe yet, but if he could save it, then his entire mission could be salvaged. Raskowski would pin him with a medal. He could accomplish it by himself; he had to.

He sprinted to the hillside, clambering up the slope on his short, muscular legs. The bodies of his men were littered in the dirt and rocks. He cursed them as incompetent slugs. As he neared the top, his strategy became clear: Find the most easily defensible position and use it to slow the coming approach of the townspeople. Just minutes was all he had to buy.

“Drop that rifle and turn around real slow,” a familiar voice ordered.

Paz did as he was told, coming face-to-face with the mayor of Pamosa Springs. The man was crouching on one knee and bleeding rather badly from his left side. He was breathing hard.

“Kick that rifle away from you now.”

Again Paz did as he was told. His exposed, stubbly head poured sweat, and he fought to keep the rage from showing on his raw-boned features. He positioned himself so the mayor had no hope of seeing the pistol holstered in his belt.

“I been waitin’ for this for the longest time, you bastard,” McCluskey said and Paz knew in that moment the man wasn’t going to kill him right away, which meant he wasn’t going to kill him at all. “Put your arms in the air,” came the next order. “Straight up so the fingertips touch the sky.”

Paz started to oblige, smiling warmly to display his submission. When his arms were almost fully outstretched, he launched his taut body into a dive and used his left hand for leverage as he rolled across the ground with his right going for his pistol.

The wounded mayor sprayed the dirt with fire, bullets coming close but not close enough. Paz felt their heat as he brought his pistol up and fired it repeatedly. The first bullet spun the mayor violently around and the next two dropped him. Paz smacked one more into his writhing frame just for good measure and lurched back to his feet, grasping his Kalishnikov on the way. Beneath him the people of Pamosa Springs were rushing toward the hillside, a large stream collectively holding the potential instrument of his failure in their hands with the bearded bastard at their lead.

Paz scrambled into position.

“You really think this is going to work?” an out-of-breath and hobbling Sheriff Junk huffed to McCracken, catching up to him en route to the hill.

“You’re the demolitions man. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Fuck…. You would put it on my shoulders, wouldn’t you? ‘Case you haven’t noticed, they’re not in the best of shape.”

“They’ll do,” said McCracken.

On Blaine’s orders, a throng of residents had lifted the mounds of C-4 plastic explosives from the church’s perimeter and hurried after him toward the sloping hill which overlooked the gulley containing the generator gun. His plan was to plug the hill with the plastique, wiring it in a way that would bring the whole bulk of land mass down upon the huge gun. Thousands of pounds of rocks and dirt and sand entombing it just might stop the generator from firing its beam, redirect it at the very least in a direction where it would do no harm.

So long as Sheriff Junk could get it wired properly.

So long as there was time for him to try.

“Fifteen minutes to system activation,” announced Raulsch in his gravelly voice.

Activity in the command vault had stabilized. As long as all readout lights continued to flash green, there was little the personnel could do other than wait for a dreaded malfunction as they sat attentively behind their monitors or CRT screens.

For Raskowski, the minutes had already passed into an eternity. He should have been savoring these final moments, but instead he was nervous, on edge, a feeling of foreboding filling him with the certainty that the enemies he had let slip from his grasp had one final card to play.

He was so caught up in these thoughts that he was not aware of Katlov’s breathless presence until the man grasped his shoulder.

“General,” came his agitated report, “deployed ground security spotters have just reported armed commandos rushing down the Bahnhofstrasse in our direction. Just blocks away now.”

Raskowski rose from his chair, still towering above the one-eyed Katlov who had spoken from floor level. “Who?” he wanted to know.

Katlov swallowed hard. “Tomachenko is at their lead.”

“The bitch!” Raskowski roared drawing attention from nearby technicians but not seeming to care. Fighting to calm himself, he turned to Katlov. “Deploy all our defenses. Condition Red. You know the procedures.”

“Da,” Katlov replied and rushed out after making the semblance of a salute.

Raskowski waited for the electronic door to close behind his security chief before speaking again. “Seal the vault,” he ordered Raulsch.

Raulsch began flipping switches on his console, deactivating the mechanism that permitted entry and switching the vault’s air supply to its own tanks, so that no foreign gases could be introduced. The vault could now be opened only from the inside and only with the special cards that both Raulsch and Raskowski possessed.

“Twelve minutes to system activation,” Raulsch announced.

The general leaned back, confident. With all these precautions taken, Natalya Tomachenko and whoever her friends were stood no chance of getting in to stop him now.

The shooting began when Natalya and the commandos were still a block away from the Kriehold Building. The building was fronted by a giant fountain adorned with falls and spouts. The first line of Raskowski’s defenses had taken cover behind it, cloaked by the night.

“They were expecting us!” one of Vasquez’s men screamed as he ducked for cover.

“It doesn’t matter!” Natalya shouted back.

The commandos responded instinctively. With their fire-power infinitely superior to that of the guards, they knew this resistance was futile. But any resistance took time, and time was the one weapon they didn’t possess. They hurled grenades immediately, a pair landing in the fountain and ripping away parts of its structure. Water gushed everywhere, adding to the chaotic rush of people screaming and charging for cover. More grenades followed the first and a path was cleared through the floodlit darkness to the building’s main entrance.

A lead phalanx had already lunged ahead of the grenade hurlers and encountered more enemy fire from inside the Kriehold’s lobby. This, too, was ended with a few grenades that shattered the glass in the huge doors, demolishing them. Natalya was impressed with the ruthlessness of Vasquez’s men. Their loyalty was fierce. Their orders were to help penetrate the madman’s stronghold and nothing was allowed to get in their way. The commandos were of one mind, one purpose. With Natalya just behind the first group, they rushed into the lobby and used their machine guns to fell the remainder of Raskowski’s inadequately armed security guards, hardly prepared to deal with such a full-scale assault.

“What floor?” one of them screamed at her.

“Fourteen!” Natalya returned, and they rushed along toward the elevators.

One of the commandos pushed the UP arrow again and again. At last the doors slid open. Only Natalya’s surprisingly strong grasp stopped the first of the men from entering.

“No!” she ordered. “No elevators! We enter them and he turns the power off in mid-flight. The stairs, it’s got to be the stairs!”

Raskowski watched all this transpire on one of the seven miniature closed-circuit monitors on the console directly before his chair. The enemy was coming up the stairs. His men could not possibly hold them off. But they would still have to find the command center and even then there would be the vault door to contend with.

Impregnable. He had won. Everything was on his side.

“Ten minutes to system activation….”

Including time.

The resistance within the stairwell was heavier than expected. Grenades were dangerous to use in so narrow a space because of their percussion qualities and potential to roll back or send clouds of deadly debris showering in their wake. It came down to hand-held weapons, then, and the commandos were well up to the task, seeming to find it preferable.

They never stopped, even when the enemy fire was at its strongest. Soon Raskowski’s forces were pinned with their backs against the exit door from the stairwell onto the fourteenth floor. They were out of bullets and fighting to reload when the commandos killed them. The door proved only a small hindrance to them and they were through it in an instant to the sound of more enemy fire trying to cut them down as they surged into the corridor in what had to be single file.

The first two out suffered wounds, sacrificing themselves to pinpoint the positions of the gunmen. This accomplished, more grenades were hurled to clear the way for a rush by the others. Raskowski’s security troops were severely depleted now and the commandos met with only sporadic resistance as they funneled through the corridor in search of a room suitable for what they knew must be the command center.

“My God,” muttered Natalya when she came upon the huge steel vault door bearing an electronic entry system. “This must be it!”

One of the commandos whose specialty was demolitions felt the steel. “We’ll never be able to blast through this,” came his grim report.

“Try, damnit, try!”

Paz readied his machine gun, sighting on the men and women trudging up the hill. Somehow he had lost the bearded bastard who’d been at their lead and now must have melted into the center of the crowd. No matter. His spray would do the job well enough and even if the bearded one was spared, he would be powerless alone.

Paz pawed the trigger, waiting for his targets to draw a little closer. No reason to rush. Every reason to be sure.

Just a little bit more …

A branch snapped behind him. Paz spun. And froze.

Ten feet away McCracken held a pistol in line with his face.

“Thought I’d leave you a chance,” Blaine told him.

Paz tried to bring his rifle up to fire. McCracken’s gun exploded twice and Paz’s face disappeared.

They found Dog-ear’s body not far from where Paz ended up after tumbling partway down the hill. The sight of his murdered best friend seemed to charge Sheriff Junk with a fresh resolve. All doubt vanished and the pain with it, as he determinedly directed the packing of the C-4 plastic explosives into the side of the hill looking down over the gulley.

“You sure this is the right way?” McCracken asked Heep as together they strung the fusing which linked the individual mounds of plastique together.

“Look, bud,” Heep snapped, joints and limbs cracking up a storm, sounding like popcorn over a fire, “this stuff might be more advanced than what we had in Korea, but principles is principles. Mountains still fall the same way they used to.”

With all the explosives packed into the gulley side of the hill, the idea was to create a landslide that would move only in the generator gun’s direction, the hope being that the rubble would be enough to bring the big gun down. Blaine gazed down upon it yet again. The steel casing must have been a hundred feet in diameter, the circle almost perfect. Extended from its top and poised at a seventy-five-degree angle upward (in line with the reflector no doubt) was a huge tabular extension. It had looked more like a gun barrel from above but from closer Blaine could see its bore was finished with a honeycomb pattern, indicating the crystals would actually generate a dozen or so individual beams which would join up as soon as they blazed from the tube stretching forty feet into the air. Wrapped around its one-meter circumference was black, lead-encased housing which would undoubtedly maintain a constant pumping of water to keep the tube cooled while the incredible energy in the form of the particle beam was pulsing through it. Inside the vast superstructure, resembling a turret, would be the self-contained computers which communicated with Raskowski’s headquarters in Zurich to accept commands and then instruct the gun to execute them, all of which took place in a fraction of a second.

But long enough to assure the deaths of millions.

“Six minutes to system activation….”

Another of his closed-circuit monitors showed Raskowski the feebly futile efforts of the commandos in the corridor to gain entry to his command vault. He actually laughed at their desperation.

After a few seconds the woman Tomachenko gazed in the camera and their eyes met. It seemed as if both of them knew it. Raskowski grinned. Natalya hoisted her Uzi upward and shot the camera out.

“It’s like I told you,” the demolitions specialist told her after two attempts to blast through the door had failed. “No way.”

Natalya’s thoughts were already moving in another direction. The computers within the vault controlled the generator gun but not directly. There had to be some sort of dish that would beam the command signals to a receiving device in Pamosa Springs. And knowing Raskowski, the dish would have to be close by…. The roof, Natalya realized! Had she noticed a large dish from the street? No, the roof was flat, impossible to pick anything out from ground level.

“Half of you come with me!” she screamed. “The rest keep trying to get through that door. Throw everything we’ve got at it!”

And then she was sprinting down the corridor back toward the main stairwell. Just one flight up and the roof was hers.

The commandos were at her side as she charged up, the door already in sight. One threw his shoulder into it as he worked the knob.

It was locked.

McCracken and Heep were working feverishly now. They had separated to easier facilitate the joining of the many individual mounds of the plastic explosives together with the fusing. Once completed, the end of the wire would be connected to the electronic detonator they had found among the invaders’ mining equipment, the switch to be turned once all the residents were free of the blast zone and the hill itself.

Most had already fled to a safe distance, and now Blaine and Sheriff Junk were alone. They reached the hill’s top again at the same time, Heep twirling the individual ends of their fusing together and taping them tight. They had two hundred yards of fusing left, plenty to give them a safe pillow from the blast. The ends joined, they hurried down the hillside, almost tumbling, Blaine holding fast to Heep so he wouldn’t fall. At the bottom, the sheriff dragged his feet quick as he could parallel to the town, already looping the wire around the conduits that would channel the signal through the hill and bring it down upon the generator gun.

Heep had to pause with hands on his knees when the fusing lost its slack. Again Blaine supported him, taking the detonator until Junk was upright again. He was still huffing as he turned the switch all the way to the left. The red test light flashed on.

“Wanna do the honors?” he asked.

“All yours,” Blaine told him.

Heep turned the switch to his right, flinching against the expected jolting series of explosions.

Nothing happened.

“Two minutes to system activation….”

Raskowski had seen Tomachenko rushing down the corridor through another of his monitors. He knew immediately she was headed for the roof and only wished he had placed cameras up there so he could have seen the expression on her face when she came upon his final surprise. He had anticipated her moves perfectly, anticipated all their moves perfectly, always one step ahead. It was fitting that his mind should be the one charged with remaking civilization with the proper rules in place. He had never lost sight of the goals set for himself, never failing to accomplish them with only one remaining unfulfilled.

But not for much longer.

“Give me an explosives pack!” Natalya ordered one of the commandos who produced it instantly. Before it was even firm in her hand she had jammed it against the heavy door’s latch area and stuck a five-second delay fuse into it.

The group backed halfway down the final flight of stairs to avoid the spraying of fragments. A poof followed and the door opened outward onto the roof. Natalya rushed through.

And gasped.

McCracken reached the first mounds of plastique, eyes and hands working feverishly, both ablaze with sweat. When the turn of the detonator had brought no explosion, the obvious explanation was a break somewhere in the fusing. He had to trace down the break, the time frame buried in his consciousness because consideration of it was pointless, could only lead to frustration and from frustration invariably to failure. He knew he didn’t have time enough to cover the entire swirling length, and so elected to focus his search at the rockiest part of the hillside, where a sharp shard could easily have split the fuse.

Almost back to the hilltop, his hand following the fuse was sliced by something that felt like a knife. He drew it back in pain, saw the blood first and the break in the fusing second.

There it was!

The jagged rock had cleanly severed the steel. Blaine twisted it together, ripping the flesh of his fingertips in his resolve to get it tight fast. He never considered there might be another break somewhere else; it was pointless to. Instead he lunged to his feet and waved his arms as he started running back down the hillside.

“Blow it!” he screamed to Sheriff Junk below. “Blow it!”

Screamed in full awareness that the rubble might kill him even if the blast didn’t, his tomb shared with a gun that might otherwise have taken millions of lives.

Heep closed his eyes and turned the detonator switch.

McCracken’s ears seemed to shatter at the initial explosion, the earth giving way with a rumble beneath him. Then there was only air.

“Twenty seconds,” announced Raulsch. “Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen …”

And Raskowski leaned back with the feeling of triumph warm within him and edged his hand over the button that would activate his beam in Pamosa Springs.

Natalya had frozen for an instant upon reaching the rooftop. The satellite dishes were everywhere before her, at least fifteen of varying sizes. But which was Raskowski’s? With a shudder, she realized they all were, placed up here to disguise a single one. Still she had to try. Knowing only seconds remained, she ordered the commandos to hurl their grenades to destroy all the dishes in one final effort.

Perhaps forever.

After the initial burst of rubble upward, the hillside seemed to settle in motion, rolling downward for the gulley like floodwaters after ten days of rain, gathering speed and mass as it tumbled. The pile grew, absorbed, became huge in scope as it neared the generator gun’s huge steel housing and rose over it like a tsunami ready to crash.

Heep held his breath, forgetting in that long instant that the rubble had swept away the man responsible for saving him and the town and wondering if the generator gun was going to perish beneath the tons of earth and rubble pouring down.

“Four seconds, three, two, one … System activation has been achieved.” With those words spoken, Raulsch turned back to General Vladimir Raskowski.

The general had already depressed the button, finger frozen there to savor the moment. The signal had been beamed at the speed of light to his generator gun in Pamosa Springs which in the next second would fire its beam upward at his reflector. All lights flashed green signaling the process had begun, impossible to stop from this point on.

His satellite dish was hidden on the roof, disguised as a ventilation outlet, with all the others serving as decoys.

Victory was his.

The generator gun and its housing had been utterly buried by the mound of earth and rock which continued to roll onward, settling at the lowest point at the gulley’s bottom and continuing to pile up. Not even the slightest bit of its bore was visible when Sheriff Heep could have sworn he felt the ground rumble beneath him in a way that shook all his insides.

The pile of moving debris trembled, starting at the very top and within seconds spreading all the way down through the mass. Heep knew the beam had been activated and dove for cover out of fear of what was coming next.

The beam had fired, but as it struck the mounds of rocks and earth covering its bore, they melted instantly and drained down. Superheated to unfathomable temperatures, the liquified molten earth, much like lava, flowed in a continuous stream straight down the barrel through the honeycombed tops. The beam continued to pulse for a time until the flow reached the bottom of the bore and filled the firing receivers, which accepted the Atragon-charged beam from the generator to send it skyward. At that point, a massive overload occurred, combustion on a near-nuclear level achieved, as the tremendous energy stores broke free of their bonds and sought a vent.

Virtually all the rocks and dirt forming the mound melted into a heat-driven flow that leaped into the air like a huge splash of filthy water, settling down almost as quickly with a sizzling hiss as the vapors and liquified solids began to cool, solidifying once more.

The rubble was gone by this point, replaced by a smooth, grainy mound which glowed with a red translucence as it hardened into black volcanic glass. The hissing continued as Heep rose cautiously in the still-blowing, heated wind. The sight before him in the gulley was awe-inspiring, a lava tomb effectively encased over the generator gun and its housing.

Suddenly Heep felt chilled through his sweat. What of McCracken?

Natalya had resigned herself to failure. She was beaten, and so was the world. She had no reason for hope because she had no way of knowing what had transpired in Raskowski’s command vault.

His computers in Zurich had been beaming a continuous set of commands to the generator complex in Pamosa Springs. The overload there had been so great that a huge charge of feedback sped back over the open line, tracing the path of the original command to fire. The charge was so potent that upon receiving it, everything electrical within the vault began to short-circuit. Control boards fizzled and smoked, some giving way to full-scale eruptions which showered sparks everywhere. The lighting died. All power ceased to function.

More of the circuit boards and panels crackled and smoked, fire popping up in one after the other. The flames spread quickly through the oxygen-rich air, attempts to fight them abandoned after a short time in favor of escape. But the vault remained electronically sealed. And the flames were widening, reaching outward in tentacles coated with poisonous vapors and fumes. The bulk of the personnel rushed the vault door and pushed on it futilely, coughing, dying, while the whole time General Vladimir Raskowski clung to the command dais, pressing the firing button over and over, his features contorted into a mad stare until the flames swallowed him.

By the time investigators drilled through the vault door hours later, most of the bodies were unrecognizable. Those that remained in any form were charred black and continued to smolder. The facts as to what had happened were ambiguous, and always would be.

A woman, whom each investigative authority assumed worked for another, spent only enough time in the vault to linger over a body in the center. No one saw her smile as she lowered a hand to the corpse’s shoulder area. No one saw her remove the blackened gold stars which labeled the man a general in the Soviet army.

And then she was gone.

Chapter 35

Sheriff Junk Heep was kneeling over the body of Dog-ear McCluskey when he heard the footsteps shuffling toward him.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, almost managing a smile. “Now look who’s having trouble walkin’.”

McCracken stopped near him, grimacing with pain, covered with dirt and dust, flesh torn and scratched from face to ankles. He had just managed to avoid the brunt of the blast, pummeled by layers of rebellious debris that hadn’t joined the molten flow in the gulley. Gazing at the mound he saw the red translucence had now faded slightly, the generator complex’s tomb becoming almost crystalline black.

“Least you can do is help me back into town,” McCracken said lightly as a pair of silver jet fighters soared overhead. His eyes turned to an army convoy on the access road leading into town. “Looks like we got company.”

“In more ways than one.” Heep gazed over McCracken’s shoulder at the dirty figure moving down toward them, a number of townspeople in his tracks. Heep rose all the way up. “Shit, that’s Hal Taggart’s boy.” The figure was closer now. “What’s left of him, anyway.”

The left side of the figure’s body was dragging noticeably behind the right. And the left half of his face was creased with scar tissue that covered even the eye.

“He was a marine in the Mideast,” Heep continued. “We all thought he died. Taggart told us so.”

“Apparently he came close.” McCracken had seen that kind of appearance before. There were parts of the young man’s brain that would never work again, others that were as good as ever. “Taggart must have brought him back here and hid him from the world.”

Heep managed another look. “After the bastards killed his father, the kid figured he’d take things into his own hands. Had those murdering shits guarding their own assholes when he started knocking ’em off one at a time.”

“Not to mention the fact that he saved our asses today. Must have been him on that rooftop.”

“Guess he brought more than memories back with him from the Mideast.”

McCracken shrugged at that and the motion sent a bolt of pain surging through him. Heep dragged himself over and started to lower himself under Blaine’s shoulder.

“Guess it’s my turn to do the helpin’,” he said, grimacing almost as much as McCracken was as they started forward.

“This oughtta be fun.”

McCracken approached the men climbing from the lead jeep by himself.

“You McCracken?” asked the one in charge.

Blaine nodded. “Wareagle send you?”

“Don’t know any Wareagle. My orders came straight from the Pentagon. Woulda been here sooner but had trouble arranging for proper air support,” the commander explained as the jets streaked overhead again. He gazed about him at the bodies strewn throughout the town, littered among the smoldering buildings. “Hell of a mess.”

“You missed the action.”

“Looks like you had matters well in hand without us.”

Blaine thought of Dog-ear McCluskey and of the son of Hal Taggart. “You might say that,” he returned distantly. “You in touch with Washington, Commander?”

“Open line.”

“You made my day.”

“I think the time has finally come for me to retire to the woods too, Indian, or at least to some lonely island somewhere,” Blaine told Wareagle as they strolled down the mall fronting the Washington Monument.

“That was forced upon you once already, Blainey. The five years in France. Remember?”

“And every day I prayed to be let back in, to be a part of things again.”

“And you think this time the same prayers would not come?”

“I think this time I’d be praying to be left alone.”

Wareagle stopped and gazed down at him. “No, Blainey. You can close your eyes during the day but the light remains. And sooner or later you must open your eyes again and face that.”

“I wasn’t talking about myself, Indian. It’s the others I’m fed up with, the mindless ones for whom day and night don’t exist, for whom it’s always dusk because that way there’s no firm commitment in any direction.”

“They exist to remind us of our own failings, to keep us in touch with what is pure and holy so we never take the words of the spirits for granted.”

“That doesn’t justify the way they handle things, or mishandle them.”

“I didn’t mean it to. Actions are their own justifications, Blainey. Do not search for that which does not exist because then you become no better than them.”

“That’s the point, Indian. I already am no better than the others because I’ve been a part of this too long. What I did needed to be done, right? My private justification.”

Wareagle touched his shoulder tenderly. “Blainey, you see others in the shadow of your own reflection, believe their concerns for completion to be the same as your own. You expect their manitous to reflect the same colors yours does, and now you find that many reflect nothing because they are black, colorless.”

“So what’s the point?”

“The universe exists in a delicate balance as much as each individual does. They cannot help what they are any more than you can help what you are. Each of you provides the other with balance, both needed to justify the actions of the other.”

“Then you’re saying I shouldn’t quit once we wrap this thing up, once it’s finished.”

“I’m saying that for you the finishing does not exist. Yes, maybe for this single affair but where this one leaves off another picks up. Extension follows extension, with the distinctions negligible.”

McCracken shook his head reflectively. “I got to Washington half-certain I was going to forget about my meeting with the President. I guess there is one last thing I’ve got to take care of.”

“At least,” said Wareagle.

“You’ll be happy to know the Farmer Boy business has been cleared up as well,” the President told Blaine as they sat at a wrought iron table in the Rose Garden with the Secret Service guards out of earshot. “George Kappel turned himself in when the outcome was final. Figured we might go easy on him that way.”

“And will you?”

“Not at all. My first inclination was to go public with everything, Kappel included. But I’m not certain the country can handle another travesty of government.”

“Might stop the next one from happening.”

“It hasn’t yet and won’t in the future. We hold our own, which is the best we can do because people are imperfect. This hasn’t been easy for me. George Kappel’s been my friend since I got elected to the House. He used me from the beginning. I guess that’s a microcosm of life.”

“Not life, Mr. President, just politics. But not mine, because I haven’t got any.” McCracken was silent for a while, then brought up the subject Lyman Scott was hesitant to broach. “I suppose you’re interested in the coordinates of the Atragon reserves I wasn’t able to bring up.”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Perish it. I’m going to give you those coordinates, Mr. President, but not for the reasons you think.”

“What, then?”

Blaine told him, making it fast.

“That’s impossible!” the President roared when he had finished.

“Amazing the miracles the Oval Office can work, though.”

Lyman Scott swallowed hard. “Think of the risks if we carry this madness out.”

“Think of the risks if we don’t,” Blaine returned, his meaning clear.

“Mr. McCracken, with further stores of Atragon in our possession, we need never face a threat like this again. We should have learned that from these past two weeks, if nothing else.”

“What we should have learned is that there are things in this world that are better left alone. I don’t pretend to know where Atragon really comes from, but I do know plenty more innocent people will die if I let you salvage it.” Then, after a pause, “We’re not ready to control its power yet. I’m not sure we’ll ever be.”

Lyman Scott nodded to himself. “I came into office committed to peace at any cost. That much hasn’t changed. What you say makes sense, Mr. McCracken. Something like Atragon, well, I’m not sure we could allow the Soviets to possess it either. If I agree to carry out your request, you’ll agree to sit on everything you’ve got, correct?”

“Absolutely. So long as you get what I need to Miami within twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours? Impossi—”

“I’m feeling generous today. Make it twenty-five.”

The navy ship docked in Biscayne Bay at the Port of Miami at noon the next day. Blaine had spent most of the morning watching a few cruise liners come in and out, overcome by their size but equally impressed by the small tugs which nudged and maneuvered their vast bulks at will. He leaned over the railing to support his battered frame. The pain was bad today, and he did his best to hide his many bandages from passersby, just wanting to be left alone.

He looked up to find Natalya by his side, looking solemn and somber.

“They tell you what this was about?” Blaine asked her.

“They told me. And they must have told you about Zurich.”

“Yup.”

“Then you must believe in the myth when it comes to the origin of those crystals. How else can you account for what happened in Raskowski’s command vault?”

“I leave the accounting to the scientists.”

“And let them explain things for which there is no explanation? No, with what you’ve convinced your government to do, you must believe!”

“In Atlantis you mean? Haven’t really thought about it much. I only know that those crystals Vasquez discovered and Raskowski almost blew up the world with are better buried forever.”

“The same lesson the Lost Continent — and Raskowski — learned. Both too late.”

“Maybe so,” Blaine conceded. “And I’ve learned a few things lately as well, like how to see the truth. I’ve been at this for fifteen years, and all I’ve seen are the lies. They’re everywhere around me and for all that time I mistook plenty of them for the truth. I haven’t helped the world out of its hopeless lot; I’ve just added to it by accepting other people’s truths, their myths, so maybe I’m the wrong person to speak with on the subject.”

Natalya shrugged. “I think we have fooled ourselves more than we have allowed ourselves to be fooled. So full are we with ideals and beliefs that helped us accomplish the impossible. Our governments turned to us because we were more than good; we were willing. And when we aren’t willing anymore, they have come to know us so well that it is not hard for them to make us willing again. My father, your romantic nature — if not these, there would be others.”

There was a pause when both of them turned their attention to the speedboats splashing through Biscayne Bay.

“What will you do now?” Blaine asked finally.

“Finally I have enough on them to get my father out,” she replied. “Only I will have to accept the fact that I too will never be able to return.”

“Does that bother you?”

“All my work these long years would be futile if it didn’t.” The pain was evident in her voice. “And what about you, Blaine McCracken?”

“I’m thinking about finding an island where no one else has ever been and staking a claim for a while.”

“Could be dangerous,” Natalya told him. “Much safer to explore in pairs.”

“That sounds like the truth to me,” Blaine smiled.