He pulled himself away from the blur of the spinning blades and rolled to one side as a huge portion of the catwalk smashed into the roof, spitting up sparks and tearing out chunks. He rolled into the foetal position, covering his head as debris rained down around him. Then the ruins of the structure were dragged by its own weight into the depths of the accelerator. The impact was deafening, resounding through the tunnel.
He uncovered his head and looked up, just in time to see Gibbs’ boot come slamming down onto his skull. Caught unawares, he reached up to cushion the impact but the other man’s sole still crunched into his nose and slammed his skull against the metal roof.
He screamed in agony, his vision going blank, his head thundering. Then Gibbs slid his boot down Raine’s face to his throat. He tried to resist but, in his dazed state, his attempt was feeble. Gibbs’ boot pressed into his windpipe, slowly crushing it.
Raine gasped, struggling in vain to suck oxygen into his lungs. He fingers scrabbled at Gibbs’ calve muscle, digging in but Gibbs was beyond pain now, beyond reason.
Raine’s eyes bulged, his face turned purple. Still, the pressure on his throat continued. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, the sounds of destruction around him faded to womb-like silence.
This was the moment of his death, he knew.
The only thing was, he wasn’t ready for it.
Without even contemplating the move, he reached up with his right hand and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the knife still protruding from his shoulder. He tried to pull it free but his strength faded with every passing moment. He tried again, felt the blade shift, sending knew tendrils of white-hot pain searing into every nerve in his body. He tried to scream but nothing came out.
The burst of pain sent his last reserves of adrenaline flooding through his system and, with a war-cry that sounded terrifying in his head but a pathetic strangled whine in reality, he wrenched the knife free, upturned it, and slammed it into Gibbs’ thigh!
Gibbs howled in pain, stepped off of Raine’s neck and staggered. Raine sucked a minute amount of air in through his bruised windpipe, hacked, rolled forward and wrenched the knife from his opponent’s leg before digging it back in his other limb.
Gibbs dropped to both knees, coming face to face with Raine, his disfigured, horrific visage glaring at him in fury. But his fury was matched only by Raine’s own. Through the blood smeared across his burnt and bruised face, his icy blue eyes shot daggers into Gibbs’ own.
He wrenched the knife free again and jabbed it into the soldier’s belly. “That’s for Sid!” he growled, his throat raw. Gibbs’ eyes went wide, blood spurted from his mouth. He reached forward to wrap his hands around Raine’s throat once more.
Raine ripped the knife free them slammed it into his belly again. “That’s for Rudy!”
Blood ran like a river down the other man’s chin, but still he would not surrender. His hands wrapped around Raine’s neck but he pushed them away, pulled the knife out one last time.
“And this is for me,” he growled. Then he slipped the razor-sharp blade of the knife across Gibbs’ throat, feeling the flesh slice open. A look of shock registered on Gibbs’ face. He brought his hands up to hold the wound, as if he could hold the severed flesh together with nothing else. Then, realising he could not, he looked down at his bloody hands and rolled backwards. His body hit the rooftop and slid into the circular depression that had almost claimed Raine.
There was a whine of motors, a squelch of flesh and then a burst of blood and gore. For a moment, the man’s feet, upside down, thrashed wildly, but then they too were sucked into the propeller-like blades of the fan and were gone.
Raine wheezed in a painful lung-full of air then dropped face first onto the roof of the control room, exhausted.
A booted pair of feet appeared before his eyes. He strained his neck to look up at an ugly brute of a man, levelling at assault rifle at his head. Defeated, Raine lowered his head to the roof.
In halting English, tinged with a Russian accent, the man barked an order at him; “Get up!”
62:
The Power of God
Nadia tried to hide her shock as she saw Raine stagger into the control room. His face was crusted with blood, his nose was twisted to one side, his hair was singed, his skin red with blisters, and an angry purple bruise was swelling around his throat.
“Sit!” his escort ordered, pushing him into a chair next to King. King for his part, Nadia noticed, barely registered his ‘friend’s’ injuries. After she had established some sort of order in the control room following the destruction wrought by the Chinese jet, King hadn’t said a word. Instead, he glared defiantly at her, a simmering rage which bit into her every time she made eye contact.
“Say please,” Raine quipped, his voice raw and husky.
The Spetsnaz soldier, one of the three under her command, pushed him down hard, bringing the butt of his rifle up to smash his face.
“Enough!” Nadia barked at the man.
Raine smiled at her. “New boyfriend?”
“No,” she snapped, and immediately felt a pang of annoyance for letting the comment bother her. Raine had gotten under her skin, in more ways than one. He had indeed ‘melted’ the Ice Queen and even now she felt her heart race at the memory of their night together.
“If he moves,” she told the soldier, “kill him.”
She slung her pack from over her shoulders and pushed her way to the semi-circular control desk. The lead blast door blocking the next chamber had been raised and she glanced for a second at the completed Moon Mask.
Attaching the Ushakov flying submarines to the Eldridge’s hull below the waterline, they had gained access to her lower levels from a submerged maintenance hatch which led them into the lower part of the particle accelerator. From there, she and the three Spetsnaz soldiers had made their way up the ladder to the control room just before the Chinese plane had struck.
Now, emergency lights bathed the control room in red. Glass was smashed over the deck, shattered from the screens of the numerous computer monitors. The acrid stench of burned ozone permeated the air, the air-conditioning system evidently off line. The two American technicians had both been killed in the blast. The lead scientist, Doctor Tobias, sat beside King, shaken and bruised. Around her, throughout the length of the particle accelerator, the sound of the ship’s tortured hull groaned. Weakened by the impact, she would not hold up well to the storm raging outside, Nadia knew.
She pulled a laptop out of her pack and proceeded to connect it to the work station’s main computer terminal. She brought up a schematic of the ship and frowned.
“The particle accelerator is still functioning,” she told one of her three soldiers. “But the nano-fibres have been damaged. Reconfigure for Plan B.”
“Plan B?” Tobias scoffed. “If the nano-fibre network has been damaged and you try to activate the process again, you’ll rip the ship apart. Different sections will fall out of phase with one another—”
“The nano-fibres in the mask chamber are still intact,” she replied, annoyed at having to explain something so simple. “We’ll simply disengage all other fibre bundles, lower the lead shield and confine the effect in there. The ship won’t go anywhere,” she admitted, “but the wormhole will still open. All we have to do then is step through it.”
“The wormhole won’t open,” Tobias told her with a sneer. “It doesn’t work. The mask doesn’t emit enough tachyons to reach the energy level required.”