Godzilla at World's End (19 page)

As the airship circled the city the day before, Shelly Townsend got an aerial view of some of those slums. It wasn't pretty. She saw many unpleasant details, despite the clinging fog that hovered over this part of the country from April to December. The mist, called
garua
, blotted out the sun and blanketed the city, trapping car exhaust and other pollutants.

All in all, Shelly's first impression of Peru wasn't a good one. But she had to admit that the sound of the bells, which had been ringing all morning from dozens of churches and cathedrals, was quite beautiful.

After she thought about it for a while, Shelly wondered if shantytowns like the ones in Lima would be the future home of many of her own countrymen. Things just seemed to be getting worse everywhere in the world - including in the United States. At least the people of South America had their faith to sustain them. Shelly wasn't sure what she believed, now that a pit had opened up at the bottom of the world.

Is this Armageddon?
Shelly wondered gloomily.
And does the world die with a whimper, or a bang?

Shelly knew that her melancholy state of mind sprang from the knowledge that she would soon lose control of her beloved airship ... and get booted off, too.

Just like the INN reporters and those poor kids who won the contest.

Even now the teenagers were packing their bags, and the reporters - who traveled light - were sitting in the observation deck awaiting the ground transportation that would take them from the park to El Condado, a four-star hotel on the other side of the Rio Remac. INN, through the American embassy, was footing the bill.

Shelly refused to pack, however. She decided that her father and Captain Dolan would have to drag her kicking and screaming off this airship before she'd leave.

And they would need some of those Army Rangers stationed at the bottom of the elevator tower to do it, too!

That little drama would unfold when her father came back from a briefing in a government building across town. When Simon Townsend returned, he would do so with a U.S. Army colonel named Briteis. The colonel would lead the expedition to Antarctica, in command of two squads of Airborne Rangers.

***

At the very heart of the old city of Peru was the Plaza de las Armas. The plaza was the center of government in this capital city. The largest building on the plaza was a centuries-old cathedral. The second-largest structure was the Government Palace. Inside, in a briefing room provided for the Americans by Peruvian authorities, Simon Townsend fought the battle of his life.

For more than an hour, Townsend had listened to, and argued against, the U.S. Army's request to requisition his airship. Now, in order to convince Townsend of the urgency of the crisis confronting the entire planet, Colonel Briteis brought in a thin, gawky young scientist with a frizzy beard and a faraway stare.

Though unimpressed by the man's demeanor, Townsend listened in stunned silence and with mounting apprehension to the top-secret briefing given by the kaijuologist named Dr. Max Birchwood. Townsend had never imagined the unexplained and unexplainable events that had occurred on the south polar continent over the past several weeks.

As a slide projector cast pictures on a white screen at the front of the room, Dr. Birchwood laid out the situation to the man who had built the
Destiny Explorer
.

"The abyss at the pole is now almost one hundred miles in diameter," Dr. Birchwood said. "In this series of images, you can see how fast the hole grew."

Simon Townsend stared mutely. In each photo - taken only hours apart, as the numbers in the upper right-hand corner indicated - the hole continually expanded.

"These photos were taken by a high-altitude spy plane that took off from Australia several days ago. That plane was the last manned aircraft permitted to overfly the abyss -"

"Permitted?" Townsend asked. "What do you mean by 'permitted'?"

"Twelve hours after the first spy plane completed its mission, the Royal Air Force sent its own spy plane over the site. That aircraft vanished without a trace."

"It could have crashed," Townsend argued.

Dr. Birchwood shook his head. "The first plane might have crashed, except for the fact the next six aircraft sent over the Antarctic disappeared, too."

"You risked other pilots' lives like that?" Townsend asked incredulously.

Dr. Birchwood shook his head. "Only the first two planes had pilots - volunteers. The other four were remote-control drones. None of them made it back with their intelligence information intact."

"So you don't know what is going on right now, do you?" Townsend asked.

"Not true, Mr. Townsend," Dr. Birchwood stated. "Which brings us to your remarkable airship ..."

Dr. Birchwood nodded to the soldier at the projector, and more slides appeared on the screen.

"Yesterday, we sent a U.S. Navy remote-control blimp over the abyss. The ship took twelve hours to cross over the opening and circle back. But it made it, and it brought back new photographs of the pit and its surroundings."

Townsend studied the pictures. It appeared that the abyss had stabilized and was no longer growing, but no matter the angle from which the pictures were taken, the hole in the ice seemed to have no bottom.

The last photo had two dark blots on it, standing out in stark relief against the ancient ice. The objects seemed to be flying or hovering above the mouth of the abyss. The picture flashed by, and only one dark object could be seen in the next photo - the other one was gone.

"What were those things over the pit?" Townsend asked.

Dr. Birchwood smiled. "What, indeed?" he said cryptically.

But before the kaijuologist could say more, the army colonel spoke up. "Encouraged by the blimp's success, another unmanned aircraft was sent over the area," Colonel Briteis added. "It, too, was destroyed or crashed -"

"So we think that whatever intelligence may be driving events in Antarctica, it does not regard lighter-than-air craft as a threat for some unknown reason," Dr. Birchwood said, completing the colonel's thought.

Simon Townsend's eyes widened in comprehension. Then he shook his head in disbelief.

"So you are telling me that on the basis of this thin and rather dubious theory that whatever is in that pit
likes
airships, you are willing to risk my life, the lives of the U.S. soldiers who are going on this crazy expedition, and the
Destiny Explorer
itself?"

Dr. Birchwood paled as if the words stung him. Townsend knew he'd hit a nerve. But it was Colonel Briteis who answered the airship designer's question.

"As far as the soldiers are concerned, they are trained for this. If it means death, they will accept that," the colonel said icily.

Then he stood up and leaned over the table toward Simon Townsend. The colonel's voice dropped an octave.

"Though this is not yet general knowledge," Colonel Briteis announced, "I am authorized to inform you of this, Mr. Townsend ...

"Right now, even as we speak, a previously unknown monster is raging through the Russian Republic. That creature came from the mysterious pit in Antarctica - we
know
that - and so did at least
two other creatures
who have not yet shown their ugly faces."

The colonel paused and stood up to his full height.

"Someone or
something
at the South Pole has declared war on humanity, Mr. Townsend, and it's up to the Airborne Rangers to put a stop to it."

Yuri Gagarin Highway
Five kilometers outside Baikonur Cosmodrome

"Yes, yes, run along to Moscow, you chicken-turd little peasant cowards!" the officer bellowed loudly from his position in the command hatch of the speeding T-80 main battle tank.

"The big, bad monster has you all on the run. And whom do you call? Why the heroes of the Russian Army, of course!"

Sergeant Yuri Chevakov twirled the corners of his handlebar mustache as he directed more venom at the fleeing populace who choked the two-lane highway. The refugees were fleeing in the opposite direction from which the tanks were coming, hindering the soldiers sent to do battle with the mysterious creature.

"Get out of the way, you fools!" Chevakov cried, waving a group of people away from a stalled Russian-built automobile that had died in the middle of the roadway. Without slowing, the T-80 slammed into the car, smashing it off the road, over a guardrail, and into a drainage ditch that ran parallel to the raised roadway.

Chevakov laughed as a civilian shook his fist at the passing column of tanks.

"Yes, we are here to save your skins, comrades!" Chevakov cried. "You don't have to
thank
us."

The civilian was left to choke on the diesel exhaust of the tanks, which was polluting the late-afternoon sky.

With his bluster and bellicose voice, the Russian sergeant reminded his men of a parody of an arrogant czarist officer from the old days of the Russian Empire. Of course, no one ever said that to Chevakov's face.

If someone did, he would probably give him a good beating - and then buy the man a vodka, if he had any rubles in his pocket.

Yuri Chevakov was not the kind of man who held a grudge.

As the tank rounded a curve in the road, a boxy Russian-built Zil limousine came right at them at a fast clip. At the last minute, the driver of the car lost the game of chicken with the nearly fifty-ton tank. He swerved off the road and into the drainage ditch.

Before the car flipped over, Chevakov saw the pale face of a woman peering out from the backseat window of the black vehicle.

She was screaming.

"Yes, well," Chevakov said fatalistically as the tank rolled by. "Maybe next time you will remember to pay us soldiers more regularly with the money you earn from your capitalistic factory collectives!"

In the 1950s, when the cosmodrome was constructed, the area around Baikonur was a vast empty steppe. Since then, because of the huge and sprawling space center, a whole city called Leninsk had grown up in the desert. It was a town of schools, tradesmen, businesses, and even a Palace of Culture.

But on this day, the inhabitants of Leninsk were fleeing their homes in the wake of the monster that had dropped out of the night sky hours before.

Now, as morning brushed the horizon, Sergeant Chevakov, at the head of the fast-moving column of T-72 and T-80 main battle tanks, could see the red fires of the cosmodrome burning in the distance.

"Here we come, monster," Chevakov cried, shaking his fist at the inferno that flickered on the horizon.

"Maybe the capitalists cannot kill giant monsters, but we Russians can!"

As he shouted those words, another huge explosion lit up the distant horizon. A plume of fire and smoke rose hundreds of feet into the sky. The initial blast was followed by several secondary explosions.

Chevakov pulled a map from his pocket and scanned it in the dim glow of his flashlight. He tried to orient himself and discover where the explosion had actually occurred.

"It looks as if our nation's space program has been dealt another serious blow," the sergeant announced to no one in particular. "That fire over there was once the
Energia-Buran
pad ..."

Bridge of the
Yuushio
-class submarine
Takashio
Sea of Japan

Captain Sendai slapped the control console in front of him.

"Course and speed?" he demanded.

The sonarman replied without looking up from his screen. "Still moving in the same direction and at the same speed, Captain," the man replied with crisp precision.

Sendai turned to his first mate. The second-in-command's face glowed softly in the red lights of the bridge.

"Estimated time of arrival?" Captain Sendai asked the first mate.

The man glanced down at the illuminated map table in front of him. "If Godzilla continues to move at his present course and speed, he will reach Honshu in less than five hours, Captain Sendai," the first mate replied. As he spoke, his fingers traced the probable path of the monster.

Captain Sendai slumped into his command chair. "That's it, then," he announced. "We must notify the government of a possible landing by Godzilla."

Three hours before, Captain Sendai's sonar had first picked up Godzilla. The captain hadn't expected to find the monster in the Sea of Japan - the last time he'd tracked the creature, he'd been in the Sea of Okhotsk, and he had been moving
away
from Japan.

Something had turned the creature around. For some mysterious reason, Godzilla was returning to the shores of Sendai's homeland.

"Helm," Captain Sendai barked, rising from his chair. "Blow the main ballast, and take her up ... We must break radio silence and send a warning immediately."

Fifteen minutes later, the
Takashio
floated on the water's choppy surface. The communications mast had been raised, but the radioman had failed to make a satellite link. Captain Sendai checked his computer log and knew exactly where the Japanese satellite should have been ... but for some inexplicable reason it was gone, or dead.

Sendai tried to raise another Japanese vessel. When that failed, he attempted to contact a U.S. Navy ship. But that effort was unsuccessful as well.

"Damn!" Sendai cursed. "Try to raise another ship. There must be some way to warn the mainland that Godzilla is coming!"

Government Palace
Plaza de las Armas
Lima, Peru

The meeting had just ended, and the details of the shift in command of the
Destiny Explorer
had been worked out. Now, Simon Townsend watched as the U.S. Army Airborne Rangers piled into two trucks parked outside the Government Palace.

The soldiers were in full combat gear and carried M-16 assault rifles, grenades, and an assortment of light weaponry. They were clad in camouflage BDUs and Kevlar "Fritz" helmets, and each man's bulky backpack seemed big enough to tip him over at any time.

Colonel Briteis directed the men as they mounted the trucks and loaded crates of spare ammunition. Simon closely watched the man who would now be commanding him. The airship designer had a definite distrust of soldiers, though Briteis seemed honest enough, if a little aggressive.