The first two out suffered wounds, sacrificing themselves to pinpoint the positions of the gunmen. This accomplished, more grenades were hurled to clear the way for a rush by the others. Raskowski’s security troops were severely depleted now and the commandos met with only sporadic resistance as they funneled through the corridor in search of a room suitable for what they knew must be the command center.
“My God,” muttered Natalya when she came upon the huge steel vault door bearing an electronic entry system. “This must be it!”
One of the commandos whose specialty was demolitions felt the steel. “We’ll never be able to blast through this,” came his grim report.
“Try, damnit, try!”
Paz readied his machine gun, sighting on the men and women trudging up the hill. Somehow he had lost the bearded bastard who’d been at their lead and now must have melted into the center of the crowd. No matter. His spray would do the job well enough and even if the bearded one was spared, he would be powerless alone.
Paz pawed the trigger, waiting for his targets to draw a little closer. No reason to rush. Every reason to be sure.
Just a little bit more …
A branch snapped behind him. Paz spun. And froze.
Ten feet away McCracken held a pistol in line with his face.
“Thought I’d leave you a chance,” Blaine told him.
Paz tried to bring his rifle up to fire. McCracken’s gun exploded twice and Paz’s face disappeared.
They found Dog-ear’s body not far from where Paz ended up after tumbling partway down the hill. The sight of his murdered best friend seemed to charge Sheriff Junk with a fresh resolve. All doubt vanished and the pain with it, as he determinedly directed the packing of the C-4 plastic explosives into the side of the hill looking down over the gulley.
“You sure this is the right way?” McCracken asked Heep as together they strung the fusing which linked the individual mounds of plastique together.
“Look, bud,” Heep snapped, joints and limbs cracking up a storm, sounding like popcorn over a fire, “this stuff might be more advanced than what we had in Korea, but principles is principles. Mountains still fall the same way they used to.”
With all the explosives packed into the gulley side of the hill, the idea was to create a landslide that would move only in the generator gun’s direction, the hope being that the rubble would be enough to bring the big gun down. Blaine gazed down upon it yet again. The steel casing must have been a hundred feet in diameter, the circle almost perfect. Extended from its top and poised at a seventy-five-degree angle upward (in line with the reflector no doubt) was a huge tabular extension. It had looked more like a gun barrel from above but from closer Blaine could see its bore was finished with a honeycomb pattern, indicating the crystals would actually generate a dozen or so individual beams which would join up as soon as they blazed from the tube stretching forty feet into the air. Wrapped around its one-meter circumference was black, lead-encased housing which would undoubtedly maintain a constant pumping of water to keep the tube cooled while the incredible energy in the form of the particle beam was pulsing through it. Inside the vast superstructure, resembling a turret, would be the self-contained computers which communicated with Raskowski’s headquarters in Zurich to accept commands and then instruct the gun to execute them, all of which took place in a fraction of a second.
But long enough to assure the deaths of millions.
“Six minutes to system activation….”
Another of his closed-circuit monitors showed Raskowski the feebly futile efforts of the commandos in the corridor to gain entry to his command vault. He actually laughed at their desperation.
After a few seconds the woman Tomachenko gazed in the camera and their eyes met. It seemed as if both of them knew it. Raskowski grinned. Natalya hoisted her Uzi upward and shot the camera out.
“It’s like I told you,” the demolitions specialist told her after two attempts to blast through the door had failed. “No way.”
Natalya’s thoughts were already moving in another direction. The computers within the vault controlled the generator gun but not directly. There had to be some sort of dish that would beam the command signals to a receiving device in Pamosa Springs. And knowing Raskowski, the dish would have to be close by…. The roof, Natalya realized! Had she noticed a large dish from the street? No, the roof was flat, impossible to pick anything out from ground level.
“Half of you come with me!” she screamed. “The rest keep trying to get through that door. Throw everything we’ve got at it!”
And then she was sprinting down the corridor back toward the main stairwell. Just one flight up and the roof was hers.
The commandos were at her side as she charged up, the door already in sight. One threw his shoulder into it as he worked the knob.
It was locked.
McCracken and Heep were working feverishly now. They had separated to easier facilitate the joining of the many individual mounds of the plastic explosives together with the fusing. Once completed, the end of the wire would be connected to the electronic detonator they had found among the invaders’ mining equipment, the switch to be turned once all the residents were free of the blast zone and the hill itself.
Most had already fled to a safe distance, and now Blaine and Sheriff Junk were alone. They reached the hill’s top again at the same time, Heep twirling the individual ends of their fusing together and taping them tight. They had two hundred yards of fusing left, plenty to give them a safe pillow from the blast. The ends joined, they hurried down the hillside, almost tumbling, Blaine holding fast to Heep so he wouldn’t fall. At the bottom, the sheriff dragged his feet quick as he could parallel to the town, already looping the wire around the conduits that would channel the signal through the hill and bring it down upon the generator gun.
Heep had to pause with hands on his knees when the fusing lost its slack. Again Blaine supported him, taking the detonator until Junk was upright again. He was still huffing as he turned the switch all the way to the left. The red test light flashed on.
“Wanna do the honors?” he asked.
“All yours,” Blaine told him.
Heep turned the switch to his right, flinching against the expected jolting series of explosions.
Nothing happened.
“Two minutes to system activation….”
Raskowski had seen Tomachenko rushing down the corridor through another of his monitors. He knew immediately she was headed for the roof and only wished he had placed cameras up there so he could have seen the expression on her face when she came upon his final surprise. He had anticipated her moves perfectly, anticipated all their moves perfectly, always one step ahead. It was fitting that his mind should be the one charged with remaking civilization with the proper rules in place. He had never lost sight of the goals set for himself, never failing to accomplish them with only one remaining unfulfilled.
But not for much longer.
“Give me an explosives pack!” Natalya ordered one of the commandos who produced it instantly. Before it was even firm in her hand she had jammed it against the heavy door’s latch area and stuck a five-second delay fuse into it.
The group backed halfway down the final flight of stairs to avoid the spraying of fragments. A poof followed and the door opened outward onto the roof. Natalya rushed through.