The Alpha Deception (36 page)

He had somehow made it to his knees when the first of the figures appeared before him. He didn’t know where they had come from but he knew they must be Paz’s men come to finish him off. Then his vision cleared long enough for him to see a pair of grizzled characters, one with a gut hanging well over his belt and the other whose frame amounted to flesh wrapped around a beanpole.

“Afternoon, friend,” one of them said.

Everything had gone well for Natalya until the private plane holding her and Vasquez’s commandos neared Zurich. The soldiers, also his sons, were as well schooled as any she had worked with. They possessed all of their father’s arrogance but none of his girth and had little in common, physically, except cold staring eyes. It was as if the fat man had fathered many sons just so he would have at least this many expertly trained and trustworthy killers. In his business, you could never have too many.

She and Vasquez had made it to Morocco from the Biminis in just over ten hours. The commandos were waiting with another fueled jet on the runway. After a brief inventory of equipment, they took off with their plans to be detailed as they flew.

Their intended landing at Zurich three hours later proved unsuccessful when they learned the airport there was hopelessly fogged in. The plane had no choice but to divert to another airport at Winterthur, where Vasquez would have vans waiting to spirit them by road into Zurich. It would take three hours to reach the city and another twenty minutes on top of that before they reached the Bahnhofstrasse. By Natalya’s calculations that would leave little time to demolish Raskowski’s base of operations and destroy his means of ordering the generator beam in Pamosa Springs to fire.

The centerpiece of the plan was surprise. All of them were dressed as Swiss electrical workers. Their blue uniforms would permit them easy, casual entry to any building especially at night.

The final deception. And perhaps the most important.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Blaine started wearily, speaking to both of the apparitions. “You’re out collecting for the Red Cross, right?”

“If we were,” said Dog-ear McCluskey, “we could do a helluva lot better than you.”

The men moved to either side of him, one of them limping, and helped lift him to his feet.

“Mind telling me who you are?” Blaine asked them.

“We were about to ask you the same question,” said the one with the limp.

“Just a guy who had a few drinks too many and missed a turnoff.”

McCracken felt better on his feet, the world seeming more balanced. Still, he had to throw his arms around the men’s shoulders for support.

“A few good belts might be in order when we tell you what’s been going on down in our town,” said the one with the limp.

“We saw what you did,” the man Blaine had come to know as Mayor Dog-ear McCluskey told him when they had reached a clearing higher up the mountain. “If the crash didn’t kill ya, Sheriff Junk Heep and I figured you might be the kind of man who can help us.”

“Help you what?”

“Get our town back.”

Blaine listened to their whole story with a compress of cold spring water pressed against his fresh head wound, feeling much better already. Mayor Dog-ear was careful to stress the bestiality of Paz and the unexplained killings that had riddled the town.

“Now it’s your turn,” McCluskey beckoned him. “Since you’re here, I gotta figure you got a line on what’s really going on.”

Blaine nodded. “Actually, you boys have put it together pretty good yourselves. The element they’ve been digging out of that hillside isn’t a gem. It’s something called Atragon.”

“Atragon?” raised the sheriff. “What the hell’s that? Is it worth much?”

“Until recently no one even knew it existed. But right now, conservatively speaking, I’d say it’s the most precious mineral on the face of the earth.”

“That’s a relief,” sighed Junk.

And Blaine told them everything, as best he could, from the beginning, ending with his failed attempt to destroy the generator gun using the Hind-D.

“So this Russian general blows up a town,” said Dog-ear when he was finished, “and his satellite gets fucked in the process.”

“Yup,” said McCracken, “so he’s got to resort to a new plan and he’s got to do it fast. First he needs more Atragon to power the beam weapon, then he needs a new means of delivering it.”

“And we helped on both accounts,” noted Junk grimly.

“My guess,” said Blaine, “is that he caught on to your reserves after you sent samples to the National Assayer’s Office.”

“Pretty short notice to put a hundred men together, especially considering this is all super-high tech,” noted the mayor.

“Raskowski already had the men and plenty of them were very likely already inside the country. Besides, the man’s relentless. The word impossible doesn’t exist for him.”

“So he mines this Atragon stuff,” started Sheriff Junk, “and then what? Can you just pack it into that gun like batteries?”

“No, he’d have to store power in the crystals first in order to generate the beam. You said the power into town was rerouted into the hills. Lots of that went straight into the crystals, immeasurable amounts.”

Junk looked at Blaine closely. “Be nice if you told us the cavalry was waitin’ over the next ridge for your signal to nuke the sucker.”

“Be nice, but it’d also be a lie. I got word out but it’s a big country, and lots more man distance is probably holding the cavalry up. I gave it my best shot with the chopper. Came up a little short, though.”

“Would you try it again?”

“Sure, Dog-ear. Just lead me to the nearest army weapons surplus store and we’ll have a go at it.”

Mayor McCluskey smiled.

Just to be on the safe side, Guillermo Paz had posted guards in the freight yard between the mountains and the town. If the sheriff and mayor, the last threats to his command now that the flier had been killed, were still close by, he wanted to be in a position to thwart any efforts they might mount to disrupt the final stages of General Raskowski’s plan. The generator gun was impregnable, true, but too much had already happened that defied the odds. First, the strange murders, then last night’s escape, and finally the return of the stolen Hind-D.

Paz wasn’t about to let a fourth mishap ruin this command.

McCluskey spoke as Blaine inspected the crates full of grenades and Laws rockets Sheriff Junk had retrieved from their hiding place.

“Way I see it, friend,” explained Mayor McCluskey, “the only chance we got of disablin’ that monster gun is to borrow some of the explosives those bastards got stored in town. Means we gotta launch a raid. Might as well save the townspeople while we’re at it.”

Blaine nodded. “Your strategy’s not far off. We’ve got to knock the gun out all right, but we won’t stand a chance of even getting close until we eliminate Paz’s troops. Not that the three of us have a prayer of accomplishing that by ourselves… .”

“Don’t like your attitude,” snapped Junk.

“You didn’t let me finish. There’s a whole church full of reinforcements waiting for us—if we can free them. Way you boys have described it, there’s plenty of people in your town who’ll know what to do if given the opportunity.”

“And the rest might not have until ten days back.”

“Especially since a few leaders, example setters, will be all it takes,” Blaine explained. “That’s what subversive activities are all about to an extent: making people rise up and be noticed themselves.”

Dog-ear almost laughed. “So we become the subversives in our own town.”

“I’ve been all over the world,” Blaine told him. “It’s not as strange as it seems.”

“So all we need now is a plan,” advanced Heep.

“The progression’s simple,” Blaine told him. “We take the town back first and then use whatever we can to blow the fuck out of that generator gun.” He checked his watch. “A lot to accomplish in just under ninety minutes.”

“Three of us ought to give ‘em a run for their money.”

“I’m starting to think we just might, Sheriff. Let me lay it out for the two of you… .”

Blaine explained the details of the plan to them as quickly and simply as he could. The operation had several independent components, each of which must be successful if all were to work. McCracken’s job was to infiltrate the town and free the residents trapped in the church, so that they might join the battle. To accomplish this, he would need plenty of distraction and cover in the form of grenades and Laws rockets. This task was given to Sheriff Junk, whose specialty was munitions. First, he would use grenades on the soldiers in the railroad yard. Then he would fire his Laws rockets down into the town, hoping to create total havoc. He would then use the rest of his armaments to disable the still intact western battery of guns. With those still functional, they stood no chance of reaching the gulley, no matter what else transpired.

Similarly, Blaine could not let the fifteen soldiers remain on the mountainside. Not only could they provide a strong defense of the stronghold from that position, but they also could rush back into the town to lend support from the rear. The mayor, a crack shot, would come in here. As soon as Junk began hurling his grenades, McCluskey would begin picking off the soldiers guarding the gulley. He would remain up there to shoot any more of the soldiers who rushed to the gulley’s defense after the battle began. Junk, meanwhile, would join McCracken in the town center, once his rockets were expended, to take charge of the eager mob freed from the church.

McCracken calculated that little more than an hour remained for them to accomplish their plan before the generator gun fired its beam of death. The mayor and sheriff of Pamosa Springs nodded their understanding.

There were fifty-four minutes left by the time Blaine worked his way around to the other side of town. He had circled to better his position in relation to the church. He expected to find a rear entrance, guarded but not nearly as well fortified as the front.

The best he could do for proximity was fifty yards, his cover being a doghouse in somebody’s front yard, which, thankfully, was empty.

The guards posted around the church were superfluous when measured against the huge mounds of C-4 plastic explosives that had been packed close enough to the windows for all to see. Clearly if his plan was to be successful the explosives had to be disabled. Cutting the fuse line at any point would do the job since a continuous current was required to set this type of
plastique
off.

Blaine checked his watch. It was 3:26. In four minutes Dog-ear would begin shooting and Sheriff Junk Heep would start hurling his grenades. The rest would be left to him. He had anticipated the timing up to this point and took that as a good omen.

Omens … Ah, to have Johnny Wareagle and a team of Indian warriors to help him now… .

He was glad the timing provided him only a few minutes to be alone with his thoughts. He had spent so many years living with violence that he believed he had become inured to it. He could excuse such acceptance in himself because he realized his actions were necessary. But now he was using innocent people, and was willing to sacrifice their lives.

To rid the world of senseless killing, he had become a killer. The knowledge chilled him. But in this case, he told himself, the only hope the people had was to fight back themselves. In the complex code of ethics he lived with and so often had nearly died with, nothing was clear-cut; there was plenty of gray but almost no black and white. And now he was having trouble with the gray.

He could see the whole world in Pamosa Springs. He would save Pamosa Springs.

His watch moved to 3:30.

Dog-ear and Sheriff Junk had taken cover within sight of each other to ensure their assaults would begin simultaneously. Heep had left all his rockets and most of his grenades in the brush twenty yards back because there was no sense in lugging them with him, and his damn creaky joints forced him to rest every other yard, or so it seemed. He’d stuffed his pockets and shirt full of grenades to hurl, even slid one into his mouth and dangled another from the dogtags he had never shed since Korea, jingling in soft counterpoint to the creaking.

A simple nod from Dog-ear was all it took for him to yank the pins out of his first pair of grenades. They were in the air an instant before McCluskey began picking off the soldiers watching over the gulley and the promised death it contained.

Lyman Scott was reaching for the phone even before Sergeant Major Cleb Turner was finished relating the story passed to him by Johnny Wareagle.

“Get me NASA, Ben,” he said nervously into the receiver. “Now!”

Turner stopped. The President eyed him.

“I’m not sure what to make of what you said, Sergeant, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to check it out. An Indian named Warbird, you say… .”

“War
eagle
, sir.”

NASA came on the line.

The President knew there was trouble as soon as NASA failed to report back that they had carried out his orders. Four minutes passed before his phone rang again.

“Sir,” the NASA mission chief of the satellite launch said at last, “we have lost control of the satellite.”

“I didn’t tell you to control it, son,” the President snapped. “I told you to blow it up.”

“Yes, sir, I’m aware of that, but the problem’s a bit more complicated. The satellite isn’t responding to any of our commands, including self-destruct.”

“Then just abort, damnit, abort!”

“We tried, sir. No response on that one either.”

“What about shooting it down?”

“It’s too high up, sir, prepared to achieve geosynchronistic orbit in … forty-nine minutes now.”

“So you’re telling me you put the damn thing up there and there’s not a damn thing you can do to get it back under control?”

“Sir, we may have put the satellite up, but someone else has got control of it now.”

“We have forty-nine minutes left to mission activation,” Raulsch said into the microphone which channeled his voice throughout the huge control room. “All personnel begin engaging final control tests.”

On the electronic aerial map before him, the single light representing the aluminum reflector flashed over the center of the United States.