“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.