Starkman angrily fired another burst at the door, which remained unscathed. “Motherfucker!”
“If there’s one thing I hate,” said Chase, “it’s a smug bastard.”
“You think he was lying? About the virus, I mean?”
“If the plane hasn’t taken off yet, we still have a chance. If it has, we’re fucked, and so’s the rest of the world. Either way…” He took out his own CL-20. “We do what we came here to do-and blow this place to fuck.”
The Mercedes stopped beneath the massive wing of the Airbus A380. The huge cargo plane was waiting on the runway apron outside its hangar, engines idling. Kari pushed Nina up the boarding steps, the two guards following.
The A380 had three decks; on an airliner model the middle floor they entered would have been the lower of the two passenger levels, but all three decks of the cavernous freighter version were designed for cargo containers. They entered the crew room. A door at the rear opened into the hold. Nina glanced through it. The windowless deck was about a third full.
Somewhere among the containers, she knew, was the virus, waiting to be released…
A steep flight of stairs led up to the top deck. Kari directed her up it. Nina expected to see another huge cargo space, but was slightly surprised to emerge in a luxurious cabin.
“My father installed a private office,” Kari explained. She unfastened Nina’s handcuffs. “Please, sit.”
Nina reluctantly did so, looking around. Portholes lined each side of the cabin, and a door in the rear wall presumably opened into the upper hold. An L-shaped desk had a computer monitor and a pair of telephones built into it.
Kari sat facing her on a leather sofa. The two guards hadn’t come up the stairs with them, staying in the lounge below. Nina wondered if she might be able to overpower Kari and flee the aircraft before it took off… but dismissed the idea even as it took form. She had no chance of beating Kari in a fight.
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish,” Nina said. “If you think I’m going to happily go along with what you’re doing…”
“I don’t expect you to come around with a click of the fingers. I know the whole thing is hard for you to accept. But you have to accept it-it’s going to happen.”
“You are deluded! No, you’re insane! Do you seriously think I want anything to do with you, ever again?”
Kari looked wounded. “Please don’t be like that, Nina! Don’t you understand? You’re one of us. You’re a true Atlantean, the very best of humanity! You deserve to be one of the rulers of the world!” She rose and came across the cabin. For a moment Nina thought she was going to hit her again, but instead she knelt down before her. “I don’t want to kill you, I don’t! Just say that you’ve changed your mind-you don’t even have to be telling the truth! Once everything changes, then I know you’ll come around, that you’ll realize we were right. But you have to say it if you want to stay alive.”
“You’d still kill me even though I’m one of the best of the best?” sneered Nina.
“I can’t disobey my father. I won’t.” Kari tried to reach for Nina’s hands, but she pulled them away. “Just one word, that’s all I ask. Lie! Please, I don’t care!”
“Not a chance,” Nina told her.
The low noise of the engines rose in pitch. The lights flickered, then the A380 shook itself from its torpor, starting to move.
“The first batch of the virus will be released about fifteen minutes after takeoff,” said Kari, going back to the sofa. “That’s how long you have to change your mind. Nina, please. Don’t make me kill you.”
Nina turned away to stare through the starboard portholes at the landscape across the fjord, feeling lost.
Chase could hear intermittent gunfire from outside as he, Starkman and his companions ran for the exit. His gun was in his hands, but he wouldn’t have time to aim it at anybody when he emerged. All that mattered now was getting as far from the biolab as possible.
They sprinted into the open. Chase saw the last of the civilians running away across open ground, a pair of white Jeep Grand Cherokees parked to block the road two hundred feet away. Taking cover behind them were a number of uniformed guards, a couple of bodies lying on the ground nearby. They were shooting at the two other surviving members of Starkman’s team.
And across the fjord, he saw an aircraft slowly moving towards the runway, a gleaming A380 freighter.
The virus was on board-maybe there was still a chance to stop Frost’s plan.
Nina was on board as well.
He didn’t have time to think about it. The guards behind the Jeeps had seen them, and were shooting at the men running from the biolab. Chase fired back one-handed, knowing that the chances of hitting them while running were almost zero-but he only needed to keep them off-balance long enough to get clear of the building.
Lime crashed to the ground as a bullet ripped into his hip. Every ounce of Chase’s training told him to go back and drag him to safety, but in this case there was no safety.
The CL-20 would detonate any second now-
One moment, Nina was looking numbly at the distant biolab buildings. The next, she jumped in her seat as the complex disintegrated, multiple explosions pulverizing it and sending tons of debris spinning hundreds of feet into the air. A torus of dust swept outwards like the shockwave of a nuclear bomb. “Jesus!”
Kari leapt up and ran to the portholes. “Oh my God!”
“That’s one hell of a last stand,” Nina said triumphantly. Qobras’s men had succeeded!
Then it hit her. It didn’t make any difference.
The virus was already out of the lab, on the plane. In fifteen minutes, it would be released. The Brotherhood had destroyed the wrong target!
Ears ringing, Chase staggered upright. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the hailstone-sized pieces of debris still dropping from the sky and looked around.
Nobody was shooting at him anymore. Both Jeeps had been caught sidelong by the blast and flipped over, crushing the men behind them.
The biolab had been almost completely obliterated. What few sections remained were smashed beyond recognition, walls jagged and tilting like broken teeth. Bent and twisted steel girders protruded from the rubble.
Chase squinted through the drifting cloud of shattered concrete, trying to see how much damage had been caused to the underground containment area. Its entrance was blocked by debris.
But that wouldn’t take long to clear-and to his dismay, he saw that the exposed part of Frost’s office farther up the hill was more or less intact. While the facade was cratered and cracked, it was still all in one piece-and even the windows had survived the blast, apparently made from the same transparent armor as the airlock doors.
That meant Frost and the virus had also survived.
The virus…
“Shit!” He looked across the fjord. The A380 was still trundling towards the eastern end of the runway. Once there, it would turn and accelerate down the long concrete strip, taking off and heading along the coast to release its deadly cargo.
Starkman groaned nearby. Aristides was several yards behind him, eyes wide in death. Chase rushed over and grabbed the American, hauling him up. “Come on! The virus is on the plane-we can still stop it!”
Starkman wiped dirt off his face. “It’s heading for takeoff, Eddie.” He indicated the bridge spanning the fjord. “We’ll never get there in time.”