And gasped.
McCracken reached the first mounds of plastique, eyes and hands working feverishly, both ablaze with sweat. When the turn of the detonator had brought no explosion, the obvious explanation was a break somewhere in the fusing. He had to trace down the break, the time frame buried in his consciousness because consideration of it was pointless, could only lead to frustration and from frustration invariably to failure. He knew he didn’t have time enough to cover the entire swirling length, and so elected to focus his search at the rockiest part of the hillside, where a sharp shard could easily have split the fuse.
Almost back to the hilltop, his hand following the fuse was sliced by something that felt like a knife. He drew it back in pain, saw the blood first and the break in the fusing second.
There it was!
The jagged rock had cleanly severed the steel. Blaine twisted it together, ripping the flesh of his fingertips in his resolve to get it tight fast. He never considered there might be another break somewhere else; it was pointless to. Instead he lunged to his feet and waved his arms as he started running back down the hillside.
“Blow it!” he screamed to Sheriff Junk below. “Blow it!”
Screamed in full awareness that the rubble might kill him even if the blast didn’t, his tomb shared with a gun that might otherwise have taken millions of lives.
Heep closed his eyes and turned the detonator switch.
McCracken’s ears seemed to shatter at the initial explosion, the earth giving way with a rumble beneath him. Then there was only air.
“Twenty seconds,” announced Raulsch. “Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen …”
And Raskowski leaned back with the feeling of triumph warm within him and edged his hand over the button that would activate his beam in Pamosa Springs.
Natalya had frozen for an instant upon reaching the rooftop. The satellite dishes were everywhere before her, at least fifteen of varying sizes. But which was Raskowski’s? With a shudder, she realized they all were, placed up here to disguise a single one. Still she had to try. Knowing only seconds remained, she ordered the commandos to hurl their grenades to destroy all the dishes in one final effort.
Perhaps forever.
After the initial burst of rubble upward, the hillside seemed to settle in motion, rolling downward for the gulley like floodwaters after ten days of rain, gathering speed and mass as it tumbled. The pile grew, absorbed, became huge in scope as it neared the generator gun’s huge steel housing and rose over it like a tsunami ready to crash.
Heep held his breath, forgetting in that long instant that the rubble had swept away the man responsible for saving him and the town and wondering if the generator gun was going to perish beneath the tons of earth and rubble pouring down.
“Four seconds, three, two, one … System activation has been achieved.” With those words spoken, Raulsch turned back to General Vladimir Raskowski.
The general had already depressed the button, finger frozen there to savor the moment. The signal had been beamed at the speed of light to his generator gun in Pamosa Springs which in the next second would fire its beam upward at his reflector. All lights flashed green signaling the process had begun, impossible to stop from this point on.
His satellite dish was hidden on the roof, disguised as a ventilation outlet, with all the others serving as decoys.
Victory was his.
The generator gun and its housing had been utterly buried by the mound of earth and rock which continued to roll onward, settling at the lowest point at the gulley’s bottom and continuing to pile up. Not even the slightest bit of its bore was visible when Sheriff Heep could have sworn he felt the ground rumble beneath him in a way that shook all his insides.
The pile of moving debris trembled, starting at the very top and within seconds spreading all the way down through the mass. Heep knew the beam had been activated and dove for cover out of fear of what was coming next.
The beam had fired, but as it struck the mounds of rocks and earth covering its bore, they melted instantly and drained down. Superheated to unfathomable temperatures, the liquified molten earth, much like lava, flowed in a continuous stream straight down the barrel through the honeycombed tops. The beam continued to pulse for a time until the flow reached the bottom of the bore and filled the firing receivers, which accepted the Atragon-charged beam from the generator to send it skyward. At that point, a massive overload occurred, combustion on a near-nuclear level achieved, as the tremendous energy stores broke free of their bonds and sought a vent.
Virtually all the rocks and dirt forming the mound melted into a heat-driven flow that leaped into the air like a huge splash of filthy water, settling down almost as quickly with a sizzling hiss as the vapors and liquified solids began to cool, solidifying once more.
The rubble was gone by this point, replaced by a smooth, grainy mound which glowed with a red translucence as it hardened into black volcanic glass. The hissing continued as Heep rose cautiously in the still-blowing, heated wind. The sight before him in the gulley was awe-inspiring, a lava tomb effectively encased over the generator gun and its housing.
Suddenly Heep felt chilled through his sweat. What of McCracken?
Natalya had resigned herself to failure. She was beaten, and so was the world. She had no reason for hope because she had no way of knowing what had transpired in Raskowski’s command vault.
His computers in Zurich had been beaming a continuous set of commands to the generator complex in Pamosa Springs. The overload there had been so great that a huge charge of feedback sped back over the open line, tracing the path of the original command to fire. The charge was so potent that upon receiving it, everything electrical within the vault began to short-circuit. Control boards fizzled and smoked, some giving way to full-scale eruptions which showered sparks everywhere. The lighting died. All power ceased to function.
More of the circuit boards and panels crackled and smoked, fire popping up in one after the other. The flames spread quickly through the oxygen-rich air, attempts to fight them abandoned after a short time in favor of escape. But the vault remained electronically sealed. And the flames were widening, reaching outward in tentacles coated with poisonous vapors and fumes. The bulk of the personnel rushed the vault door and pushed on it futilely, coughing, dying, while the whole time General Vladimir Raskowski clung to the command dais, pressing the firing button over and over, his features contorted into a mad stare until the flames swallowed him.
By the time investigators drilled through the vault door hours later, most of the bodies were unrecognizable. Those that remained in any form were charred black and continued to smolder. The facts as to what had happened were ambiguous, and always would be.
A woman, whom each investigative authority assumed worked for another, spent only enough time in the vault to linger over a body in the center. No one saw her smile as she lowered a hand to the corpse’s shoulder area. No one saw her remove the blackened gold stars which labeled the man a general in the Soviet army.
And then she was gone.
Chapter 35
Sheriff Junk Heep was kneeling over the body of Dog-ear McCluskey when he heard the footsteps shuffling toward him.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, almost managing a smile. “Now look who’s having trouble walkin’.”