Now he watched as the digital readout climbed over 80.
Good God, he’s going for it.
The back stretch swept under Marza and Di Fiere as the car moved out, climbing steadily without faltering, the digital reader flicking faster and faster.
82 ... Falmouth’s mouth turned to cotton as his fingers nimbly punched away at the calculator. Sweat dribbled down the side of his face and, annoyed, he swept it away with the back of his hand.
89.9.
‘E stupendo! Marza yelled.
They hit 90 and the C-4 went off on order.
When it exploded, the main force of the blast was directed down toward the ground, lifting the front of the car and instantly separating the tie rods that held the wheels in line. They popped apart like brittle sticks. The wheels went haywire. At the same time, the phosphorus wire fuse sizzled straight back along the frame toward the gas tank.
Marza was heading into the turn, leaning with the car, his arms extended almost straight out in a classic driving position, when he felt the blast in front of his feet. The fire wall shattered and a hot burst of gas rushed into the cockpit. A moment later the wheel was wrenched from his hands. The car went wildly out of control as he grabbed frantically for the steering wheel and tried to get it back. It swerved, ripping into the inside wall of the turn at about forty-five degrees, and the left front side of the car shattered. The fenders peeled back with the agonized scream of tearing metal, the engine was torn from its mounts and the air bags under the dash whooshed full and jammed Marza and the Professor into their seats.
The car careened off the wall and a moment later the gas tanks exploded. The Milena was catapulted across the track toward the other wall when Marza felt the rear blow out, felt the sudden, ghastly rush of heat and then the flames boiling through the back seat, enveloping both him and Di Fiere, and then the air bags burst.
The old man screamed once as the fire rushed into his nose and mouth and scorched his lungs. Then he was dead.
For Marza, it seemed to take forever, although it was no more than a second or two. As the car spun crazily across the track he saw his old enemy, that grinning, obscene apparition he had seen so many times before and shunned, sitting on the wall straight ahead of him, wrapped in flames, motioning to him, drawing him on, and as the car crashed headlong into the wall, Death opened his arms and the driver rushed to his embrace.
VI
Falmouth did not relax until the train was out of Verona station and well on its way north toward the Alps.
His heart was rapping at his ribs and his shirt was damp with sweat when he found his compartment and sat down. He leaned back, closed his eyes and hummed to himself, slowing everything down. He clocked off the list in his head, making sure it had gone right.
He was certain no one had seen him leave the house. The drive to Verona had gone off smoothly; he hadn’t even seen a policeman. He parked the car and checked the case in a locker, from which, he assumed, somebody had already claimed it. He looked at his watch.
Hell, by now someone in Verona was probably melting down the barrel.
He felt the train lurch under him. As it moved Out of the station he went into the bathroom, took off the wig, combed his red hair and shaved off the moustache. Then he burned the wig, driver’s license and passport issued to Harry Spettro and flushed them down. By the time the conductor tapped on the door, he was Anthony Falmouth again.
The ticket man, a short paunchy little fellow in his sixties with watery eyes, took his papers, ‘You are inglese?’ he said in a hushed, quivering voice.
‘Si,’ Falmouth replied.
‘And have you heard our tragic news?’
Falmouth did not want to hear it. Dumbly, he shook his head.
‘Marza is dead. Our great champion. The greatest sportsman in Italy since Novalari. Numero Uno è morto.’
A chill moved up Falmouth’s back. He said, ‘I’m very sorry.’ Then, after a moment, he added, ‘And how did he die?’
The conductor punched several holes in his ticket and then said, rather proudly, ‘In a car, of course,’ and went on.
When the conductor was gone, Falmouth sagged, It all went out of him and suddenly he was drained and overcome with sadness and he felt tears beginning to sting the corners of his eyes.
Hell, he said to himself, I’m getting too old for this kind of shit.
2
Harry Lansdale paused while making his customary rounds, leaning against the bulkhead of the towering Henry Thoreau and staring grimly through the porthole at the deck of the largest oil rig in the world. He had seen storms before, in every part of the world, but this one, this one was going to be a killer.
It was nearing midnight, and the sea was running 3° to — 40 Celsius and dropping. A harsh Arctic wind had been moaning down from the Beaufort Sea and across the barren grounds north of the Brooks Range since the night before. The temperature was still falling, the sea continuing to grow colder as the sun cast its gray, persistent dusk across the frigid north Alaska wastelands. The wind cried forlornly through the stub pines and grasslands, and the white foxes, foraging for lemmings, lamented their skimpy hunt with mournful dirges to the constant twilight. Chunks of ice were beginning to appear, drifting down from the Arctic Ocean into the Chukchi Sea, where the misting whitecaps tossed them about like wafers.
Now the winter gale, sweeping with fury across the open sea, assaulted the floating oil rig, one hundred and twenty-two miles from land, screaming through its rigging and snapping at its guy wires.
Lansdale was not concerned about the rig. It was built to take anything the Arctic furies could toss at them. From the air the Thoreau looked like a giant bug, with its four enormous steel legs dipping down deep into the thrashing sea. The rig was a monster, twice the length of a football field, its deck sixty feet above the water and the superstructure rising almost five stories above that. Its spidery legs thrust down two hundred feet below the surface of the sea and were anchored to the bottom, two hundred feet farther down, by steel cables.
Lansdale held the flat of his hand against the wall. Not a tremor. Not even the six-foot waves arid the brutal winds could shake his baby.
The Thoreau was indeed Lansdale’s crowning achievement; the largest semisubmersible rig ever built, a floating city, its towering concrete blocks containing apartments for the 200 man crew; three different restaurants, each serving food prepared by a different chef; two theatres showing first-run movies; and a solar dish that beamed in ninety different television channels from around the world to 21 inch TV sets in every apartment.
Everything possible was provided for the crew to make the endless days bearable, for the structure sat off the northwest coast of Alaska, one hundred and forty miles northeast of Point Hope, at the very edge of the polar car, possibly the loneliest human outpost in the world. And it s at on top of one of the richest oil strikes ever tapped.
Lansdale was not only chief engineer and manager of the project, he was its creator. For eighteen years he had dreamed of this custom-built Shangri-La at the edge of the world. It had taken him four years of planning, of fighting in board rooms and lobbying in bars and restaurants, to convince the consortium of four oil companies to take the chance.
What had finally swayed them was the man himself. Harry Lansdale knew oil; knew where to find it and how to get it. He was as tough as the Arctic and as unshakable as the rig he had built, a man who had devoted his life to pursuing the thick black riches bottled up beneath the earth. He had worked on rigs all over the world and, to prove it, had a list of them tattooed proudly down his right arm, like the hash marks on the sleeve of an old-line Army top kick — from Sweet Dip, the old Louisiana offshore rig, to Calamity Run in the North Sea, to the endless, sweeping desert fields of Saudi Arabia they had nicknamed the Sandstorm Hilton.