Hemstadt’s face was surprisingly young-looking for a man in his late eighties. His hands were gripping the arms of his chair, his lower body covered in a blanket.
“You are Russian,” Hemstadt said. “I recognize the accent. A Russian pig. I killed many of your kind in the—”
“You killed many prisoners,” Yakov said. “Where is the cure?”
“Not here.”
Corsen was dead, the control panel smashed against his chest. Turcotte had narrowly escaped the same fate. He kicked out the front Plexiglas and rolled onto the deck. He got to his knees and noted green tracers flashing by perilously close. He rolled left.
The sound of a SAW firing roared in his ears and red tracers tracked back down the green ones. Sergeant Gillis was standing on top of the wreckage of the chopper, firing rolling bursts with the automatic weapon, the recoil slamming into his shoulder.
Gillis swept right, then left. In a matter of seconds, he got off five twenty-round bursts before a bullet caught him in the head and knocked him backward on top of Colonel Mickell and Kenyon, who had been trapped below him in the wreckage of the chopper.
By that time, Turcotte had maneuvered up the left side of the ship’s superstructure. He killed the man who had shot Gillis with one round through the head, knocking him off the wing of the bridge.
Turcotte blew out the bridge windows with a burst, then threw a flash-bang grenade through the opening. He dashed up the metal ladder onto the bridge. There were two men doubled over, hands pressed against their heads, suffering the aftereffects of the grenade.
“Freeze!” Turcotte yelled, knowing they probably couldn’t hear him.
One of the men reached for a pistol on his belt, and Turcotte shot him. The second man saw that and paused in his grab for a weapon. Then the man reached for a lever on the instrument panel.
“No!” Turcotte yelled.
The man’s hand closed around the lever. Turcotte fired, hitting him in the shoulder, knocking him back against the wheel. The man’s right arm flopped, useless. He reached with his left hand for the lever. Turcotte fired again, hitting him in the chest. The man grinned, then pulled the lever. Turcotte put a round right between the man’s eyes.
He ran forward to the console. A digital timer welded into the metal frame was counting down second by second from one hundred. As Turcotte watched, it went from 98 to 97.
Yakov placed the muzzle of the MP-5 on Hemstadt’s chest. “Where is the cure?” “Gone.”
“The Mission,” Yakov said. “Where are they?”
Hemstadt smiled. “‘They’—as you call them — are long gone. You will never find them.”
“Who are they?”
Hemstadt simply shook his head. “Far beyond you. You don’t have a clue about what is really going on. What has been going on throughout history. Nothing is as you were taught.”
“They helped you in the camps during the Great War.”
Hemstadt snorted. “Helped? They invented the camps. We helped them. You have no idea—”
Yakov jabbed the steel barrel into the old man’s frail chest. “Why don’t you tell me, old man.”
Hemstadt laughed, the sound echoing off the stone walls. “You think you have accomplished something here? You haven’t stopped us. The launches have already been aborted and this plan abandoned. They’re taking the cure out to sea to sink it.”
Turcotte left the bridge and raced aft. Kenyon and Mickell were pushing pieces of the helicopter out of the way. There were several large plastic cases tied down on the deck.
“You’ve got a minute,” Turcotte yelled.
“What?” Kenyon was at the cases.
“This ship’s going to blow in a minute.”
Kenyon flipped open the latches on the first one. A large stainless-steel cylinder rested on the cut-out foam, about three feet wide by six in length.
“One of the satellite dispersers,” Kenyon said. He turned to the next case. It also held one of the satellite payloads.
“Thirty seconds.” Turcotte knew that the concussion from an explosion carried well in water. Even if they got off in time, the blast would kill them as they tried to swim away.
Kenyon skipped the next two cases, which were the same size.
The fifth, smaller box was different. Kenyon opened the lid and the top of rows of glass test tubes appeared, each one inserted in the foam padding. “Black Death?” Turcotte asked.
Kenyon pulled one out and read the German label. “Yes.”
He opened the next box. Pulled out a tube. “More Black Death.”
Turcotte looked up. A bouncer was hovering overhead. A voice spoke in his earpiece — Duncan had arrived. He swung the boom mike for the FM radio in front of his lips to tell her what he needed.
Two more boxes of Black Death.
“Twenty seconds!” Turcotte yelled.
There was only one box left.
“Grab the cargo net!” Turcotte ordered as the bouncer came in low, hovering just above their heads. Kenyon and Colonel Mickell jumped.
Turcotte grabbed the last box with one hand and with the other grabbed hold of the cargo attached to the bottom of the bouncer.
His arm was wrenched in its socket as the bouncer accelerated straight up, the case almost torn from his grip. Below him there was a thunderous explosion and pieces of the boat flew by.
“I’ll tell you something to show you how ignorant you are,” Hemstadt said. “Nineteen oh eight. Tunguska. The great explosion. You should know what caused that, but you don’t, do you? Your own government hid that from you. And you are Section Four, aren’t you? You are a naive child.”
Yakov saw that the old man’s right hand had slipped under the blanket. He ripped the blanket off the German’s lap. The hand flopped down, a small needle clenched between two fingers. When Yakov looked up, Hemstadt’s face was slack with death.
The bouncer came down very slowly over the courtyard of the prison on Devil’s Island. Turcotte’s feet touched the ground and he collapsed, cradling the case. The bouncer slid over to the side and touched down. The top hatch opened and Lisa Duncan slid down the outside and ran over.
“Are you all right?”
Turcotte didn’t have the strength to reply. He forced his other hand to let go of the handle of the plastic case. Kenyon unsnapped the latches and opened the lid. Rows of glass tubes were nestled in the foam lining. He pulled a tube out and held it up.
CHAPTER 24
Inside of Qian-Ling, Elek had been in contact with the guardian for the past hour. He stepped back, the golden glow retreating from his head. “I have sent a message,” he said.
“To who?” Che Lu asked.
“To my superior. She will get us the key.”
Four hundred meters down, the crew of the Springfield also waited. The foo fighters had not moved. Admiral Poldan, commanding the USS Washington on the surface, fifty kilometers from Easter Island, spent most of his time imploring his chain of command for permission to attack the island with nuclear weapons. So far, he had not received permission.
Deep inside Rano Kau on Easter Island, the guardian received input from The Mission. The Black Death mission had been aborted because the attempt to seize the mothership had failed.
The news was noted, but it was only a stone thrown in the stream of action the guardian had planned.
The power from the thermal vent had the guardian running at 100 percent. In a corner of the cavern, the microrobots had been working. In a curious assembly line, the production of each successive generation had grown smaller. A circle of half-inch-long microrobots were at work on a new model. When they were done, a quarter-inch-long robot skittered across the floor on six tiny legs. Then it joined the production line.