The Talbot Odyssey (67 page)

“I want you to call it off.” She looked at her watch. “You have eighteen minutes before Molniya explodes. I want you to open this door and let me broadcast a message over your radio.”

Androv replied, “I’ll call Moscow. I’ll be back to you in a few minutes.”

Ann screamed, “You’re lying! You’re not allowed to mention this over the air. Don’t bullshit me! Open this door. Now!”

Androv did not reply.

Ann shouted, “Your situation is hopeless, you fool!”

There was no reply.

Sutter said, “You can’t reason with them, miss. They’ve gotten used to getting their own way.”

Llewelyn had wedged the last of the plastic explosive in the corner where the brick wall met the chimney. He said to Sutter, “The wall is stress-bearing.” He nodded up at the rafters. “If we rock it a bit, it might collapse from the weight of the roof.” He looked at Ann. “But it’s your show now.”

Ann looked again at her watch, then said, “May as well. There’s nothing left to lose.”

Abrams, Katherine, and Cameron reached the top of the tightly winding staircase and stopped in a small windowless interior room about the size of a large closet. A sloping ladder with steps led to a hatch in the ceiling.

Cameron turned his attention to the overhead hatch. “Stand back.” He had unslung a small cardboard tube from his back, about the size of a roll of wrapping paper. He extended the periscoping tube, which held a sixty-millimeter rocket, and placed it on his shoulder in a firing position. Cameron knelt, “Hold your ears and open your month.” He squeezed the electric detonating button and a flame roared out of the rear of the tube, charring the floor as the rocket streaked up to the ceiling. The rocket hit the wooden hatch but didn’t detonate against the thin wood, passing through it and streaking up to the slate-covered roof boards. The rocket exploded inside the attic, sending shrapnel spreading out across a bursting radius of fifty feet.

Abrams was already on the ladder. He pushed up on the hinged hatch, lobbed a concussion grenade through the aperture, then dropped the hatch as the grenade detonated. Sheets of plaster fell from the ceiling above them, covering them with white powder. Abrams sprang upward and knocked open the hatch, scrambling up to the attic floor and rolling away. Cameron and Katherine followed. They all lay motionless on the floor, weapons pointed outward to form a small defensive perimeter.

The pressure of the concussion grenade had blown out every light, and Abrams could see a small piece of the night sky through the hole in the roof. The floorboards were covered with hot shrapnel from the rocket. As the ringing of the explosion faded from his ears, Abrams heard the sound of dull moaning.

Cameron rose to one knee, turned on his flashlight, and rolled it across the floor. It didn’t draw fire and they all stood.

They searched the large attic room and found three men and two women, all in shock from the concussion grenade and suffering from shrapnel wounds.

Cameron shot each one with his silenced pistol, not asking Abrams or Katherine to give him a hand, or commenting on the business in any way.

Katherine called out quietly, “Look at this.”

Abrams and Cameron came up beside her.

She said, “It’s a television studio.”

Abrams stepped onto the raised set and shone his light over the desk, the fireplace, the American flag. Katherine stooped down and picked up some papers that had been blown around the set, and read the typed script. She looked at Abrams. “This is my father’s speech to the American people. . . . He was to be the next President.”

Abrams glanced at one of the sheets. “I didn’t even know he was running.”

Cameron directed his beam across the room and played it over a brick wall, chimney, and steel door. “If Pembroke is on the other side,” he said, “then we’ve taken both arms of the T. The main stem is still in their hands, but Stewart ought to be on the flat roof above it. We’ve got them boxed in.”

Katherine replied, “But we are boxed out.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve got about sixteen minutes until the EMP detonation and less time than that before George’s mortar rounds begin crashing through this roof. We’ve got to get in there and take control of the radios.”

Cameron nodded toward the steel door. “We can blow that door.”

Abrams heard sounds below. “They’re coming up the stairs.” He took the last hand grenade from Cameron, went to the hatch door, opened it, and threw the grenade down, then moved back. The fragmented grenade exploded, throwing the hatch door into the air and ripping apart the ladder below. Cameron pressed a kilo of the claylike plastic around the doorframe, embedded the detonators, and ran the detonation fuse fifty feet back from the door.

Cameron looked at his watch. “Damned little time left.” He looked at Katherine and Abrams. “Well, let’s assume everyone is in place.”

Abrams replied, “If they’re not, they’re dead.”

Katherine nodded agreement. “We can’t turn back. Go ahead and blow the door. We have people to see in there.”

Abrams struck a match.

George Van Dorn looked at the partly decoded telex message on his desk, then looked at the two men standing in the room, Colonel William Osterman and Wallis Baker. He said, “Someone must have hit the wrong code key. This is completely garbled.”

Baker replied, “I’ve sent a request for a repeat, but nothing’s come through yet.”

Van Dorn glanced at the mantel clock. Less than sixteen minutes remaining.

He suddenly grabbed the telephone and called the Pentagon, going through the identifying procedure, then he said, “Is Colonel Levin still on leave? I want to speak to him.”

The voice answered, “He’s still on leave, sir.”

“Why can’t I seem to be able to speak to anyone but you?”

“Because I’m the duty officer.”

“Put your sergeant on.”

“He’s not available.”

“Put anyone on. Anyone but you.”

There was a pause, then the voice said, “Is there a problem, sir?”

Yes,
thought Van Dorn
, there is a serious problem
. A cold chill ran down his spine. He said, “You may be dead in the next few minutes.”

“Sir?”

“Tell Androv I’m going to fire the last of my fireworks. Twenty high-explosive mortar rounds. Through his fucking roof. Hold your ears.”

“I’m not following you.”

Van Dorn hung up the phone and looked at Osterman and Baker. “Well, I guess I’ve been warning the Russians that the Russians are coming.”

No one spoke. Then Van Dorn said, “My fault. I never underestimate the enemy, but I sometimes overestimate our technology and the loyalty of the people who tend to it.”

Osterman smiled grimly. “There’s always that mortar, George. That won’t let us down.”

Van Dorn nodded and walked to his field phone on the sill of the bay window. He turned the crank. “Mr. LaRosa, I’m afraid we may have to proceed with the fire mission. Yes, within the next few minutes. Stand by, please. And please accept my compliments on a fine display. Everyone enjoyed it.” He hung up and looked back at the two men. “No one likes to call fire in on their own people, but they understood that when they left here.”

Baker said, “Give it a few more minutes, George. They may be close.”

Van Dorn seemed lost in thought a moment, then looked at the clock again. “Molniya may be closer.” He added, “All we know of our operation for certain is that the Kuchik kid got back and reported mission complete. We confirmed from my spotter on the pole that the lights went on and off as they were supposed to. He also tells us that the parachute drop looked bad from where he was standing. Kuchik swears he and Joan gassed the bomb shelter, but for all I know he dropped the fucking crystals in a laundry chute by mistake. Joan is missing. Also, the directional microphones are picking up what sounds like shooting above the noise of the aerial torpedos. And we also know our people haven’t reached the communications room or I wouldn’t be talking to that imposter.” He paused a moment, then concluded, “It smells to me like a defeat.” He looked at the two men.

Osterman said, “But Androv knows the jig is up for him, even if we haven’t reached the Pentagon. He must also know the personal danger he and his people are in. Perhaps they’ll call Moscow and abort this operation.”

Van Dorn shook his head. “The Russians move like Volga barges. Slow, steady, and relentless. They can’t change course so easily.”

Osterman said, “Well, we’ve played all our cards and they’ve played theirs.”

Van Dorn stared through the bay window at the people in his yard. He was certain that the Russians would show no mercy to him or his guests after what Pembroke’s strike force had done to them. He could conceive of the Russian survivors coming to his house and slaughtering everyone, regardless of what happened in the larger sense. He turned and walked back to his desk, took a key ring out of a drawer, and handed it to Osterman. “These are for my arms room. I’d like you both to go outside, get the weak, infirm, drunk, and cowardly into the basement, and have everyone else arm themselves.” He added, “Let Kitty help you. She’ll be good at making sure everyone has the right gun.”

The two men nodded grimly and walked to the door.

Van Dorn called after them, “If anyone feels like praying, encourage them, but don’t tell them what they’re praying for. Only God knows. To everyone else it’s classified information.”

Van Dorn walked to the coffee table and picked an hors d’oeuvre from the tray. “Tried to poison my canapés, did you, Viktor? You turkey.” He popped the pâté in his mouth.

Van Dorn walked to his memento wall and stared at a picture of himself, O’Brien, Allerton, and Kimberly taken in London just a few weeks before the war ended. The last time the four musketeers were all together.
My God,
he thought,
how little we know of men’s
hearts and souls
.

Abrams lit the fuse and it flashed in the dark attic room. The plastic exploded and the heavy steel door leaped off its locks and hinges, crashing to the floor.

The attic wing that held the communications area was three or four steps down, and Abrams had a clear view of a large open space, about half the size of a football field, he thought, separated into work areas by half-wall partitions. The room seemed to be lit mostly by the lighting on its electronic consoles. A number of men and women dressed in brown overalls could be seen running away from the explosion.

Abrams, Katherine, and Cameron began firing from a kneeling position, single well-aimed shots, as they tried to avoid hitting the electronic units.

Llewelyn, Sutter, and Ann heard and felt the explosion at the opposite end of the attic. Sutter said, “Well, they’ve made it. All right, our turn.” He lit the fuse on the charge and they dived for the floor behind a row of file cabinets.

The plastic exploded and the brick wall and chimney seemed to leap a few inches, lifting the roof beams. The beams resettled and the brick and mortar cracked, then bulged and crumbled, creating a large V-shaped opening in the wall.

Ann stared up through the cement dust and saw the great electronics room framed in the wide V. Even a cursory look revealed to her trained eye a very advanced multicapability array of technology.

Sutter and Llewelyn were standing behind the file cabinet, firing unsilenced single shots over the heads of the Russians, keeping them pinned down. There was little return fire from these technicians, Ann noticed.
We’ve cracked through the hard shell of the
KGB and we are about to enter the soft nerve tissue.
She called out, “Go easy on the equipment.”

Llewelyn called back, “They
know
we’re after the bloody radios, and unless we keep them busy, the KGB chaps in there will destroy what you’re trying to get your hands on.” He fired three quick shots at a man who was swinging a metal bar at what looked to Ann like an encrypting machine. The man fell over, but the machine was hit and sparked. Llewelyn said, “Sorry. It’s a trade-off.”

She looked at her watch. Nearly midnight.
The very witching
time of night when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
contagion to this world.

Molniya was dropping rapidly toward its low orbit point, where it would consume itself in a nuclear fireball. For that half second it would light up the continent and set the world on a new and terrible course.
Where the light is the brightest,
she thought,
the
shadows are the deepest.

Tom Grenville stood at the large roof hatch, Johnson beside him. Stewart was propped up on his elbow close by. A misty wind blew across the rooftop, and Grenville could see that the threatened storm was blowing out to sea. In the far northeast, stars appeared on the horizon and Grenville looked at them as though for the last time.

Along the edge of the roof hatch sat twelve CS gas canisters in a neat row. They heard and felt the two explosions below and Grenville was startled out of his stargazing. He said, “It sounds like the time has come to chuck these canisters down there.”

“Correct,” said Stewart, “and you’ll follow the canisters.” He nodded toward two nylon rappelling lines tied to the bases of two antennas. “Ready?”

Grenville didn’t think he was. He glanced at his watch. “Isn’t this supposed to end soon?”

“Ready! Open it!”

Grenville opened the heavy, hinged roof hatch and heard more clearly the sound of gunfire and pandemonium below.

Johnson and Stewart began pulling the pins on the canisters and throwing them down at various angles. The CS canisters popped and disgorged billows of white nausea and tear-producing gas. Grenville threw the last two canisters down, then slammed the hatch cover closed. “We’ll give that five minutes to work.”

Stewart glared at him. “We’ll give it sixty seconds.” Stewart looked at his digital watch, then commented, “You’ll be down there in less than five seconds if you do it properly, Tom. Don’t panic and hang on the rope or you’ll be a sitting duck. And don’t let go, for God’s sake, or you’ll break every bone in your body. Saw that happen once.”