Craig Kreident #2 Fallout (37 page)

“That’s the whole idea,” Paige growled as she lunged for the steering wheel again.
 

But Sally clenched her right fist and swung hard backhandedly, striking Paige squarely on the bridge of her nose.
 
The militia woman knew exactly where to hit, as if she had been trained in hand-to-hand combat.
 
The blow caused a silvery explosion of pain behind Paige’s eyes.
 
Fresh, warm blood spurted from her nose.
 

Paige gasped, seeing the scarlet stain spill onto her shirt.
 
She held her head against the pounding pain, wondering if the other woman had broken her nose.
 
“Damn you,” Paige said, her voice clogged and gurgling from the flowing blood.

“You don’t have a clue what could happen, do you?” Sally snapped.
 
“I should have shot you.”
 
She tromped on the accelerator.
 
Loose rocks spewed from under the rear tires, and the land rover leaped forward again, frantic to increase the distance.
 
“Nothing’s going to stop me now.”

Paige looked up, blinking the red haze from her eyes.

Suddenly something glittered overhead, a silent flash of motion that seemed nothing more than a blur across the sky, lower than the dark clouds.
 
Then the noise came — a muffled passage, a
whoosh
that sounded as if a high-speed invisible truck had just roared past them.
 

The land rover rattled and jerked from the shockwave.
 

Through the biting pain in her head, Paige had a fleeting thought that the warhead had exploded after all and the distant shock front had just rocked them — but she knew that couldn’t be true.
 
From this distance the flash would have blinded them both, and the blast front would have squashed the land rover like a recycled can.

“What the hell was that?”
 
Sally grabbed the steering wheel, craning her neck to stare up through the windshield, then looking out the side to see what had just soared by, what had attacked them.
 

The sound came on again, tremors in the sky but not thunder — the rushing, roaring passage of something cruising just above them, close enough to touch.

Paige could see nothing, and neither could Sally.
 
The secretary grew frantic, wrenching the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, attempting to drive an evasive path — but she didn’t know what could be pursuing them.

Paige caught an odd glitter out the corner of her own eyes: flashing lights moving incredibly fast, then nothing . . . like a mirror in the sky, as if it
almost
wasn’t there. . . .

“What is happening here?” Sally demanded, then tugged the land rover to one side to avoid a rugged cluster of boulders.
 
She accelerated all out to get away from the mysterious invisible attacker.
 

Paige discerned an oval shape beneath the clouds, glowing, indistinct, which emitted a shower of lights that she couldn’t quite see.
 
Then the strange craft moved faster than she could follow with her eyes.
 
The image disappeared in the air, swallowed up in an illusion of the sky, once again soaring directly over the land rover.
 

Sally saw it too and jerked the vehicle to the left as the shockwave hit again — but then, without warning, the dashboard erupted in a shower of sparks.
 
The land rover’s engine went dead, as if it had been smothered by a heavy pillow.
 
All the lights and gauges winked out.
 
The ventilator fan stopped.
 
All power systems shorted out.

Sally could no longer steer, but the vehicle’s momentum pushed it along a few more feet until it bumped into a boulder and came to an abrupt stop.
 
Dead.

Furious, Sally pounded on the steering wheel, on the horn, but even
that
emitted no peep, no sound at all.
 
She turned the key, trying to start the engine again and again, but the vehicle didn’t cough, didn’t even try to turn over.

Flinging open the land rover’s door, Sally yanked out her handgun, jabbing it toward Paige who still sat trying to stanch the flow of blood streaming from her nose.
 
She stumbled out of the vehicle into the rain, waving her gun around in search of a target.
 
“What is this?
 
What the hell is going on!” she yelled.

But Paige had no answer for her.
 
She was as mystified as the militia woman.
 
She thought of Doog and his hippie friends, coming up here to search for the hidden flying saucers. . . .

Sally stood, her feet planted on the muddy ground, turning back and forth.
 
The secretary looked behind her toward Dreamland and the armed nuclear warhead, several miles distant.
 
They had not come far enough to escape the atomic blast or the immediate fallout, Paige knew.
 
Not nearly far enough.
 
And their time must be dwindling to zero.

Then Paige heard the invisible enemy again, an approaching whine in the air that developed into a steadily building rumble, the roar of engines so powerful it sounded like an avalanche in the sky.
 

Enraged, Sally turned to look up, holding her handgun out as if she might fire upon the mysterious craft in a futile gesture — but instead Sally just stared, gaping open-mouthed in astonishment.
 

“I don’t believe it!
 
The nutcases were right all along.”
 
She gasped in amazement.
 
“It’s a fuckin’ UFO!”
 

Then the blurry mirage thundered past like a self-contained sonic boom, streaking so low and so close that the entire land rover shuddered from side to side.
 
The windows rattled.
 
The open driver’s side door was nearly torn from its hinges.
 

The shockwave hurled Sally to the ground.
 
Seeing her chance again, Paige leaped out, ignoring her bloodied nose and her aching ribs.
 
She tumbled out of the land rover and scrambled to where the secretary lay stunned.
 

As Sally tried to pick herself up from the dirt, Paige crashed into her, tackling the secretary back down to the mud.
 
She used both of her knees to trap Sally’s forearm.
 
Wet dirt and sand splashed both of them.
 
She pounded on the militia woman’s hand, trying to get her to release her grip on the gun.
 
When Sally’s fingers only clenched tighter, Paige picked up a rock and smashed her knuckles.
 

With a yelp of pain, the other woman finally released her hold on the weapon, and Paige grabbed it up, standing above the snarling secretary, swaying.
 
Her vision blurred, and the blood flowed down her face again.
 

But Paige drew herself up tall, her legs spread, both hands tightly wrapped around the handgun.
 
Her finger slipped around the trigger guard.
 
She had watched this woman gun down her Uncle Mike in cold blood.
 
“Just stay right there,” she said, pointing the gun.

Sally struggled to her knees, her expression cold and furious.
 
“We’ve got to run!
 
If we don’t get to shelter before that warhead blows, we’ll be disintegrated in an instant!
 
We’re still too close to ground zero.”

“It’s too late for that,” Paige said, feeling a remarkable clarity coming to her fuzzy thoughts.
 
“But if it happens, you’ll have about a microsecond to say ‘I told you so’ before the flesh gets blasted from your bones.”

Paige gave the militia woman a little smile just to show that she really meant it.

CHAPTER 47

Friday, October 24

8:02 A.M.

Dreamland

Sweat rolled off Craig’s forehead as he struggled with the land rover’s locked door.
 
Locked!
 
What a stupid reason for a delay.
 

In the back cargo compartment, the red LED blinked down seconds on the makeshift timer.
 
A countdown to Armageddon.
 

He smeared his arm across the back window, wiping away the rain.
 
The warhead itself was a dark, hazy shape half hidden by tinted windows and a sheet of scuffed plastic thrown over the device.
 
Mike Waterloo’s limp body lay sprawled in the front seat, stuffed into an awkward position.
 
Blood pooled from wounds in his chest, and his head lolled to one side.

And all the doors were locked.

Behind them, Terrell’s Air Force helicopter shot into the air, leaving them.
 
The rotor’s noise rolled away as the helicopter thundered straight upward like an elevator being yanked to the top floor, buffeted from side to side in the high winds.
 

Craig looked up in despair at being abandoned so utterly.
 
Ursov shook his fist.
 
But then he realized with relief that the lieutenant colonel must have directed the helicopter to hover overhead and mark the spot for the approaching NEST and EOD crews as they flew in from the southern part of Nellis.
 
Just in case they could get there in time.

Through the tinted glass, though, he could see that the countdown showed less than ten minutes — not nearly enough time for a team to get here, set up, and accomplish anything.
 
Craig thought that the smarter move might have been just to evacuate everyone out to a safe distance and let the warhead blow.

Now he didn’t even have that option.

“Before we can disarm bomb,” Ursov said, “we must get inside this truck.”

Craig stepped back and kicked at the vehicle’s door handle, hoping to smash the locking mechanism with his shoe.
 
Nothing.
 
The side window didn’t yield to his kicks either.
 
He needed a crowbar to smash the safety glass.
 
A rock.
 
Anything hard enough to penetrate.

Ursov yanked off his uniform jacket, revealing a white shirt now smeared with dust and dampened with perspiration — and with good reason.
 
The rain poured down, soaking them both.

The general barely glanced at Waterloo’s body, but turned back to peer again at the nuclear device through the tinted glass.
 
He looked up at Craig, an intense look of worry on his face.
 
“You must get inside.
 
Now.
 
Time is running out.
 
If this warhead explodes, the fallout will be a thousand times worse than Chernobyl.
 
People will be dying for decades.”

“This damned locked door is a simple, but effective delaying tactic.”
 
Craig kicked at the window again.
 
The heel of his black wingtip merely bounced off the tinted glass.
 

The military helicopter hovered above them, a thousand feet up, serving as a beacon for the NEST team.
 
But Craig saw no sign of anyone coming to help.
 
Not that it would make much difference.
 
Nine minutes.

Craig pulled the Beretta from his shoulder holster and leveled his weapon at the driver’s side window.
 
“Step back.”
 

Raising his forearm to shield his eyes, Craig fired at an angle into the window, which splashed into a spray of cobwebbed cracks.
 
He fired again, and this time the remains of the safety glass shattered.
 
Craig turned to the side and lashed again with his foot, this time kicking in the sheet of glass shards held together with fiber strands.
 

Panting, Craig said, “Now that we’re inside, I don’t have the first idea how to disarm that thing.
 
All yours, General.”

Ursov crossed his arms over his white shirt.
 
“I have helped to disassemble this model of weapon.”
 
He peered inside the land rover.
 
“Perhaps I can figure out something to do.”

“You’d better hurry, comrade.”
 
Craig reached in and unlocked the doors.
 
“Quick!
 
Open the back!”

Ursov jogged around to the rear of the vehicle.
 
He fumbled with the latch and yanked the back hatch open.

“What can I do to help?” said Craig, feeling terror claw up his throat.
 
Stay calm
, he thought.
 
The last thing he needed to do was to spook Ursov.

“Nothing — yet,” said Ursov, bending over the warhead.
 
He ripped the plastic sheet away and let it drift across the rocky ground.
 
The wind caught it and whipped the plastic away like a lost kite.
 
“Give me room to work.”

Craig backed off, feeling awkward and desperate for something to do.
 
“I’ll, uh, see if they left any clues on how to stop this thing.”

Craig stuffed his pistol back in its shoulder holster, then hauled Mike Waterloo’s body out of the front seat.
 
No time for ceremony, no time for sadness or anger.
 
He dumped the DAF Manager on the muddy ground, then frantically began to search the vehicle.
 
He sprawled across the front seat and banged on the glovebox.
 
It fell open, and he rummaged through it.
 

In back Ursov stood over the warhead, studying the device as if he had all the time in the world.
 
But a sheen of sweat sparkled across the blustery Russian’s forehead — and that frightened Craig most of all.