“It’s the end of the world as we know it. I don’t want to miss any more than I absolutely have to.” Diana had on a clean green blouse and jeans. She held out her hand. “Patrick.” Slayne shook it. “Diana.”
“I’m glad to see you made it.”
“I had special incentive.”
“Anyone I know?”
Slayne looked into her eyes. “Looked in a mirror today?”
“Come see me tonight. We’ll look in it together.” Kurt Carpenter cleared his throat. “What was that nonsense about my being held in awe? I trust you were joking.”
“Look around you. Haven’t you noticed the stares? Or how nervous they are around you?” Diana swept an arm toward the drawbridge and the walls. “This is all your doing. You’re the mastermind, the guiding genius. This place wouldn’t exist except for you. They look up to you. They revere you. And yes, some even hold you in awe.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s human nature.”
Carpenter began to reply, but just then Slayne’s cell jingled. “Excuse me.” He moved to one side and answered it.
“Hello, Arthur. Yes, this might be our last contact for a while. The atmospheric disturbance will be severe and we can’t predict how long it will last. Stick to the plan. Get to Switzerland, to the shelter under the chateau. Stay there until it’s over, and if you can, take up the reins. Yes, yes, try to contact me then. With any luck at all—” Slayne stopped. “Arthur? Arthur?”
“Who was that?” Diana asked.
“Arthur Banning, Vice President of Tekco. He was in London on a stopover. The line went dead.” Carpenter said, “It’s amazing he even got through.” A gust of wind struck Carpenter, drawing his gaze to the approaching thunderhead. “Say. Do either of you notice anything strange about that storm front?” Slayne and Diana looked.
“What are those flashes of light high up in the clouds? See them? The purple and green that comes and goes. That’s not lightning.” Carpenter turned to Slayne. “Would you be so kind as to get everyone into their assigned bunkers and then join me in C Block?”
“Consider it done.”
Diana watched Slayne hurry off. “Ever notice how he moves? Just like a leopard or a jaguar.” Carpenter’s mouth curved. “No, I can’t say as I have.”
“It’s about to hit the fan, isn’t it? The moment you’ve been waiting for.”
“The moment I’ve been dreading, Diana. All I’ve done, all my preparations, are about to be put to the test, and I honestly don’t know if it’s enough.”
A purple streak lit the sky, but there was no boom of thunder. The wind began to whistle and shriek. Carpenter watched his followers scurry for cover. “These people have put their lives in my hands. What if I get them killed?”
“Didn’t I hear Patrick say something about not second-guessing yourself? You’ve done all you can. Now we ride it out and pray for the best.”
“I thought you were agnostic?”
“What’s that old saying? In a foxhole—and when the world comes to an end—there aren’t any agnostics or atheists. There are only believers, wetting themselves.”
Carpenter gave the world a last scrutiny. The end of days had come. He supposed he should feel pleased his dire predictions had proven true but it was hard to get excited over what might prove to be the death knell of an entire planet. “How could we do this to ourselves?” The dark clouds and the purple flashes now filled half the sky and swept toward the compound like a swarm of ethereal demons.
Slayne was hastening a few stragglers toward the bunkers. “A penny for your thoughts?”
“You can have them for free, Diana.” Carpenter nodded at the atmospheric upheaval. “The human race has rolled the dice on its existence, and the dice have come up snake eyes.”
13. Havoc in A-Major
It had long been reasoned, by sane and reasonable men who assumed that the majority of their fellow humans were equally sane and reasonable, that no one in his or her right mind wanted nuclear war. Nukes were a deterrent. They kept tyrants from overstepping the accepted bounds of tyranny. They kept despots from spreading the borders of their despotism. They kept nations from waging all-out war on other nations.
To these sane and reasonable men, this had seemed a sane and reasonable system. It had worked for so long— admittedly, not perfectly—but reasonably well, enough that planet Earth had enjoyed an extended period of relative peace and global prosperity.
Toward the end, more and more countries had acquired more and more nukes. The superpowers, those who had had nukes first and hoarded them as they hoarded gold on the theory that an enemy who was afraid of one nuke would be terrified of ten thousand, built their stockpiles to a point where they were perfectly happy to sign treaties that forced them to dismantle a few each year, after which they would have 9,997 left.
But since envy holds true for nukes as much as it does for fancy cars and palatial homes, the little countries had seen how smug the big countries were behind their wall of nuclear deterrence, and they wanted deterrents of their own. So it wasn’t long before a dozen small countries had nukes. Only one country on the whole face of the planet had developed a nuclear program out of necessity. Israel’s survival depended on nukes its government denied having, but they didn’t mind one bit when word of the secret hoard was “accidentally” leaked and the country’s enemies found out about the weapons.
At the outset of Armageddon, no one had known the exact number of nukes in existence. Experts had said that this or that country possessed this or that many, but the experts had been doing what experts always did when they didn’t know, yet were being paid to pretend they did: they blew wind. The truth was that keeping complete and accurate track of the manufacture and development of all the components that went into the making of a nuclear bomb or missile, from the plutonium to the housing, was impossible. So the experts had given their best guesses, and those who paid them had been content. It didn’t help that the experts vehemently disagreed. One had said the total was 27,304. Another had said that that was preposterous, and there were only 10,563. Still another had claimed that surely the total tally of warheads must exceed 50,000.
Kurt Carpenter hadn’t trusted any of the assessments. All that mattered to him was there were a lot of nuclear weapons, and when the next world war came, odds were that a lot of them would be used. That wasn’t all.
Biological and chemical weapons had become all the political rage. Treaties had been signed to limit their production, usually with public fanfare so the politicians who signed the treaties would be perceived as great humanitarians. But those same politicians had required their militaries to secretly develop new and ever more lethal stockpiles. Just in case, had been their mantra.
There had also been reports of even more exotic weapons. Weapons spun from the pages of science fiction. Devices so terrible, they were spoken of in hushed whispers behind locked doors. Kurt Carpenter had done the math, and the conclusion he’d reached was that the next global war would result in horrors the likes of which had never been seen.
But Carpenter did his math a little differently from most.
The common consensus had been that if X number of nuclear bombs and missiles were set off, it would result in Y amount of destruction and Z amount of radiation.
The common consensus had been that if bio weapons were used, they would do what they were designed to do— induce disease, shrivel the brain so it resembled a fig, produce a quantifiable number of fatalities, and that would be that.