"Launch!"
With a grim expression, Pyotr Koldunov flipped up the red protector over the ignition button and depressed it with a heavy thumb.
The lights dimmed further. The air was chill with electrical tension. Every man in the control booth felt the hair on his body lift. Bitter ozone filled their noses.
A sound came from the EM Accelerator. Even muffled by the sealed breech, it was loud. It was a sharp screech of metal like a steel god in anguish. Koldunov placed his hands over his ears to block it out. In his mind, it was a predecessor of the screaming of a thousand U. S. souls who were about to be extinguished in a single brutal blow.
The La Maquinista locomotive sat in the darkness barely a minute.
Its blunt nose pointed up the long tunnel. Then the far end opened and searing sunlight bathed the gleaming monster.
Suddenly electricity crackled along the power rails. Blue lightning spat off their copper surfaces. The rails charged, their opposing polarities took hold of the 204-ton engine. And from an inert start, the locomotive went from zero to twenty thousand miles an hour as the howling magnetic field expelled it from the barrel.
The locomotive emerged from the EM Accelerator at a steep angle. It went up so fast that had there been any bedouins in this remote area of the Lobynian Desert to watch it, they would have seen the locomotive as a blurred shadow passing before the sun.
The concrete hatch that covered the outside end of the Accelerator slid back into place after the locomotive had cleared it. The hatch was painted the color of the shifting red sands so that no spy satellite could read it.
The locomotive shot up like a beam of light, its eight wheels spinning so fast the drive rods jerked in a frenzy of articulated motion. It reached the top of its arc over the Atlantic Ocean, where it slowed as gravity began to pull it to earth. The leading edges of the vehicle began to redden with heat. Smoke spurted from some of the thinner surface pipes and they vaporized from the heat of reentry. Other components, more heat-resistant, tore free. The entire engine strained at every rivet. It was traveling faster than its designer had ever dreamed, faster than the stresses of atmospheric flight which threatened to tear it apart. Down, down the locomotive fell, its twin buffers glowing like fiery fists.
The Magnus Building was lucky.
It only lost the upper six stories as the La Maquinista struck it at a shallow angle.
But the North Am complex stood directly behind it. The engine had mashed into a ball of metal going through the Magnus Building. When it struck the eighth floor of the North Am complex, the building's three towers shuddered for a fantastic second. Then the North Am complex exploded outward in a glittering mosaic of blue glass, concrete, and steel girders. The debris that did not rain all over the surrounding streets fell onto the bottom stories, pulverizing them.
Windows shattered for six blocks in all directions. Cars in the street were beaten into submission. They collided like bumper cars, careening off light posts and clots of pedestrians.
Oddly, there was silence ten minutes after the last explosive sound. A cloud of brownish-gray dust hovered over the area.
Then someone coughed.
It was as if the single human sound reminded the survivors that they, too, lived. A woman cried. A man sobbed. Someone, discovering a loved one dead, sent up a scream of soul-tortured anguish.
Then the first siren wailed. And from that point on the survivors made every human sound imaginable.
Remo and Chiun arrived in the middle of the second hour.
By then fires blazed in the ruins of the two skyscrapers. And in the streets, every fire hydrant for six blocks had been opened, as if flooding the streets might help. Fire hoses played on the fires. Other hoses sent streams up into the cold air. The firemen were trying to cut the dust that hampered breathing and made all rescue attempts impossible.
"Looks like an earthquake," Remo said, surveying the damage from behind police barricades.
"This is a terrible thing," Chiun agreed.
"Someone will pay for this," Remo vowed.
"Indeed. When I assure an emperor that there is no danger, I expect it to be so."
"Forget your image. We gotta do something."
"I fear everyone within the zone of death is beyond our help."
"Let's find out," Remo said, vaulting the barrier.
A well-meaning policeman attempted to keep Remo back.
With a casual flick of his wrist, Remo sent him skidding on an ice patch.
"Looks like they can't get through this dust," Remo pointed out.
"We can."
Chiun took a deep breath. Remo followed suit. Then the two men plunged into the swirling cold air.
They rounded the Magnus Building, whose top had been sheared off. The missing spire lay in a shattered pile on the other side of the building. It had landed in the middle of an intersection. The hoods of demolished cars poked out from under the ruins.
"I hear people inside," Remo said. Already his clothes and hair were colored by fine grit. He moved by touch because even his sensitive eyes could not see through the swirling clouds.
"No words," Chiun admonished. "They waste the breath." Remo nodded even though Chiun could not see him. Remo zeroed in on the sounds of ragged breathing.
He felt the twisted blocks of the building spire in front of him. Vibration told him of movement behind the concrete. Carefully he began to feel along the wall, looking for an opening or weak spot. Sensing one, he attacked it with jackhammerlike blows of his hands.
The wall parted. Remo squeezed in and touched a human form. It felt warm. But even as Remo made contact, it shuddered and something fled from it.
Whoever it was had just died, Remo knew. A cold anger welled up within him.
He pushed into the ruins.
Although he was deprived of sight, Remo's skin served him well as a sensing organ. It was one of the reasons he seldom wore clothes that covered his arms. He didn't know how it worked, but the short hairs of his forearms rose as he came close to a living thing. He felt the hair on both arms rise. The place was filled with people. Some sobbed in pain.
Remo encountered something with his toe. He reached down and grazed a sharp object. He touched it. A sharp scream rewarded him. He felt flesh around the sharp object and realized he was touching the protruding bone of someone's shattered femur.
Repressing a curse, he found the person's neck and squeezed until the person's breathing shifted into patterns of unconsciousness. Then carefully, blindly, he forced the sharp bone back into place and carried the person out to the clear air near the police barricades.
He handed the limp form of what he saw was a teenage girl to a waiting paramedic.
Chiun had an elderly man in his arms. Solemnly he laid him on the ground. A paramedic immediately knelt beside the man.
"I do not think that one will live," Chiun intoned. "Let's get the ones who will."
"Even we cannot rescue everyone alone. We must do something about this infernal dust."
"Any suggestions?"
"Do as I do," Chiun said. He found a ladder truck where three firemen wrestled with a high-pressure hose. They were spraying the air with water. The thick jet didn't have much covering strength. It was designed to concentrate a stream of water in order to knock down stubborn fires.
Chiun took the hose away from the astonished firemen as if it were a garden hose and not a monster gushing water. He grasped the nozzle in one hand and proceeded to cap it with the other. He splayed his fingers. The water turned from a spurt into a spray. Chiun waved the hose in all directions.
"See?" he told Remo.
"Good thinking," Remo said, commandeering another hose.
"I don't believe this," said one of the firemen to the other. "You could knock a strong man twenty feet with the force of one of those things: That old guy's playing with the hose like it's a kid's toy."