The door slammed, and the monster, too, was gone.
69
Halter burst out of the woods at a full run. He had the automatic rifle at his shoulder and was firing up at the clearly silhouetted snipers on the roof. He had the element of surprise and, with his weapon on full auto and at this range, even moving, his fire suppression was instantly effective and deadly. He saw two snipers pitch forward and plummet four floors to the snowy ground below. The deaths of two comrades caused a sudden, if momentary, cessation of fire from above. Heads disappeared beneath the parapet.
His wholly unexpected appearance and the Bizon’s vicious firepower gave him a few precious seconds to reach his fallen comrade. Hawke lay on his back in a spreading pool of blood-soaked snow. He was conscious and breathing, Halter saw, quick shallow breaths, but he was grievously wounded in any number of places and losing a lot of blood. Another second or two out here, and they’d both be dead.
“Give me a hand here, will you, old sport?” Hawke gasped, his voice hoarse with pain.
Halter couldn’t carry him, but he got an arm under him, and Hawke made use of his one good leg, getting to his feet with a rush of pure adrenaline. The two men moved surprisingly swiftly toward the woods. Halter was deceptively strong, and Hawke was hobbling but determinedly keeping up with him as best he could. They were totally exposed, and both men fully expected to die before they reached the tree line.
Suddenly, more sporadic fire erupted from the roof, rounds thunking into the ground all around them as they struggled toward the safety of the tree line barely twenty yards away.
Halter paused, turned, and unleashed another lethal burst of heavy fire with the Bizon on full auto, great thumping rounds that blasted chunks of cement from the parapet and either killed or wounded at least some of those still trying to bring them down. Hawke was still on his feet, using Halter for support, and he emptied the Walther’s magazine at the remaining guards visible on the rooftop. Two more pitched forward into space, and under this final bit of covering fire, the two men were able to dive into the relative safety of the thick woods.
THEY QUICKLY FOUND the bearskin in the small clearing, and Halter gently lowered Hawke to the ground. Rounds were still striking the trees around and above them, whistling and cracking in the branches, sending showers of freshly fallen snow down on the two men. Halter took a moment to examine the worst of Hawke’s wounds.
“You’ll live if you’re lucky,” Stefan told Hawke. He’d ripped his own shirt into strips and was applying tourniquets to the gravest injuries, pressing a folded piece of his white shirt into the very worst of them, the shoulder. The thigh and the rest of his injuries were flesh wounds, superficial. “That should do it. You’ll be all right, at least until we can get you to a doctor.”
“Goes without saying,” Hawke murmured. He knew it was standard procedure to tell a dying man he was going to be perfectly all right.
“Just hold this compress on with your left hand, press it deeply into the shoulder wound. Now, where’s that damn Zeiss scope of yours?” Hawke managed to pat the outside of his jacket, and Halter pulled the thing from the inside pocket.
“Time?” Hawke asked weakly.
“Three minutes. A bloody eternity, eh?”
Halter held the scope to his eye and peered up at the rooftop. The lights had been extinguished. But in the moonlight, he saw the Tsar running at a low crouch for the airship’s bow entry stairway, surrounded by his cordon of security forces. He could see the liveried Maybach driver’s cap, the big fellow named Kuba cradling the Beta machine attached to his wrist, two steps behind Korsakov as they mounted the steps and disappeared inside the hull.
A second later, two more men emerged from inside the house, bearing a stretcher. He couldn’t make out any faces, but there was clearly a woman on the stretcher. He saw an arm fall limply, only to dangle over the side as she was lifted up inside the ship. Drugged, no doubt. He saw the sleeve of the full-length white ermine coat she’d been wearing at the Nobel ceremony and knew without a doubt it was the Tsar’s daughter, Anastasia, on that stretcher.
“What’s happening?” Hawke whispered.
“He’s getting aboard. He’ll be aloft in a few seconds.”
“Is he-alone?”
“No, Alex. I’m sorry. She’s traveling with him.”
“Give me that bloody machine,” Hawke said, his voice weak but grim.
“Alex, no. I’ll do it. It’s better if I do it.”
Halter had the detonator in his hands now, his forefinger poised on the illuminated red trigger button. Hawke had lost a lot of blood. His mind might not be clear. Halter eyed him carefully. Could he, even in this very last moment, try to save the woman he loved? It was not at all beyond the realm of possibility.
The great silver airship separated from the mooring mast and quickly rose twenty feet above the rooftop before commencing a slow turn to the east. She’d probably be headed out over the Baltic, across tiny Estonia, making her Russian landfall at St. Petersburg.
Halter, transfixed, watched the ship sail directly over him, clearly visible from the small clearing where he and Hawke remained on the bearskin.
“I want to do it, Stefan,” Hawke said, his voice stronger now, perhaps, but full of strain and heartbreak. “It’s my responsibility. The president ordered me to take this man out. It’s my duty.”
“Nonsense. I’m going to detonate, Alex. Ship’s out over open water now. No danger of any fiery wreckage falling on the houses below. Can’t wait a minute longer.”
Hawke managed to sit up, his hands bloody from the gunshot wounds, his whole body shaking terribly. He held out both hands to Halter, his eyes following the endless passage of the airship.
“Please?” Hawke said.
“Why? Why must you do it?”
“I don’t think I could ever forgive you, or me, if I sat here and watched you do it. But I might be able to forgive myself one day. I might. Because it’s my duty, Stefan.”
Halter handed him the detonator, helping him hold it, because Hawke’s hands were shaking so badly and slippery with his own blood.
They could still see the majestic airship plainly through the bare treetops of the forest. She had sailed out over the fjord, her powerful motors helped by the prevailing winds. She was lovely to see, a gleaming silver arrow in the full moonlight. Her winking red lights reflected on the surface of the water below as she sailed away, bound for the opposite shore.
“What are you waiting for, Alex?”
“Nothing,” he said, his voice already dead, moving his finger to the trigger.
Hawke wasn’t thinking of Korsakov or the evil that madman intended to wreak upon the world as the final minutes and seconds wound down.
He was thinking only of his beloved Anastasia as he rested his finger on the blinking red button that would end her life.
How she’d looked emerging from the water that sunny afternoon on Bermuda so long ago. How grand and full of life she’d been racing the sleigh across the snowy Russian landscape, the reins of the troika in her hands, shouting commands at her chargers. And the warm, perfumed nearness of her in the darkened box at the Bolshoi, that moment when she’d leaned over and whispered those words, telling him he was going to be a father.
He hadn’t saved her, hadn’t saved either of them, had he?
He had loved her so.
His finger moved of its own accord and pushed the button.
IT BEGAN WITH a crack in the sky. The sound of the explosion was unimaginable, as if atoms were splitting. A great thunder rolled through the forest, a shockwave bending the trees in its path. The world was suddenly illuminated with false daylight, a supernova of blinding orange, and the high branches of the trees above Hawke’s head stood in stark relief, like skeletal images in an X-ray.