Order of the Black Sun Box Set 5

by Preston William Child

  ‘Now.’

  Sam knew that although he could not manipulate Kemper's mind, the skinny commander would be easy to subdue physically. Rapidly Sam's dark eyes checked the back of the front seats, the foot well and the items lying on the seat within reach of Kemper. The only threat to Sam was a Taser device next to Kemper, but Highland Ferry Boxing Club taught a pre-teen Sam Cleave that surprise and speed trumped defense.

  He took a deep breath and began to latch on to the chauffer's mind. The big gorilla had physical prowess, but his mind was like cotton candy to the battery Sam was packing in his skull. Not even a minute later Sam had gained complete control of Dirk's brain and decided to get nasty. The suited thug stepped out of the car.

  “Where are you g…?” Kemper started, but his effeminate face was obliterated by a devastating punch from a well-trained fist bent on freedom. Before he could even think of grabbing the Taser, Klaus Kemper received another hammer – and a few more – until his face was a mess of swollen bruises and blood.

  On Sam's command, the chauffer pulled his gun and started opening fire on the workmen on the giant truck. Sam took Kemper's phone and slipped out of the back seat, heading for a secluded place near the lake they had passed on their way into town. With the ensuing chaos, the local police arrived quickly to arrest the gunman. When they found the battered man in the backseat, they assumed it was Dirk's doing. As they tried to capture Dirk, he took one last shot – to the roof of his mouth.

  Sam scrolled through the tyrant’s contact list, adamant to make his call quickly before having to discard the cell phone to prevent getting tracked. The name he was looking for appeared on the list and he could not help but throw an air fist pump for it. He dialed and waited anxiously, lighting up when the call was answered.

  “Detlef! It’s Sam.”

  34

  Nina had not seen Purdue since she had struck him against the temple with her two-way radio the day before. However, she had no idea how much time had passed since, but by her exacerbated condition she knew it had to have been a while. Tiny blisters had formed on her skin, and her inflamed nerve endings had made it impossible to touch anything. Over the past day, she had attempted to contact Milla several times, but walloping Purdue had rattled the wiring out of place and left her with a device that could only produce white noise.

  “Just one! Just give me one channel, you piece of shit,” she wailed softly in despair as she pushed the talk button incessantly. Only the hiss of white noise persisted. “I'm going to run out of batteries soon,” she muttered. “Milla, come in. Please. Anyone? Please, please come in!” Her throat was on fire and her tongue swollen, but she held on. “Christ, the only people I can contact with white noise are ghosts!” she shouted in frustration, aggravating her throat. But Nina did not care anymore.

  The smell of ammonia and coal and death reminded her that hell was closer than her last breath. “Come on! Dead people! Dead…fucking Ukrai…dead people of Russia! The Red Dead, come in! Over!”

  Hopelessly lost inside the bowels of Chernobyl, her hysterical cackle traveled through the underground system the world had forgotten decades ago. Inside her mind everything was nonsensical. Memories flashed and melted with plans for the future, becoming lucid nightmares. Nina was losing her mind faster than losing her life, so she just laughed and laughed.

  “Didn’t I kill you yet?” she heard a familiar threat in the pitch darkness.

  “Purdue?” she sniffed.

  “Aye.”

  She could hear him lunge, but she had lost all feeling in her legs. Moving or fleeing was not an option anymore, so Nina closed her eyes and welcomed the end of her pain. A steel pipe came down on her head, but her migraine had numbed her skull, so the warm blood only tickled her face. Another blow was due, but it never came. Nina's eyes grew heavy, but for a moment she saw a mad whirling of lights and heard the sound of violence.

  She was lying there, waiting to die, but she heard Purdue scuttling away into the dark like a cockroach to get away from the man standing just outside the reach of his light. He bent over Nina, gently lifting her into his arms. His touch hurt her blistered skin but she did not care. Half awake, half lifeless, Nina felt him carry her toward a bright light overhead. It reminded her of the accounts of dying people seeing white lights from heaven, but in the sharp whiteness of daylight from outside the well mouth Nina recognized her rescuer.

  “Widower,” she sighed.

  “Hey sweetheart,” he smiled. Her tattered hand caressed his empty eye socket, where she had stabbed him, and she began to sob. “Don't worry,” he said. “I lost the love of my life. An eye is nothing compared to that.”

  When he gave her fresh water outside, he explained that Sam had called him, having had no idea that he had no longer been with her and Purdue. Sam was safe, but he had asked Detlef to find her and Purdue. Detlef had used his security and surveillance training to triangulate radio signals coming from Nina's cell phone in the Volvo until he had been able to pin her location to Chernobyl.

  “Milla broadcast again, and I used Kiril’s CB to tell them that Sam was safely away from Kemper and his compound,” he told her, while she was cradled in his arms. Nina smiled through cracked lips, her dusty face riddled with bruises, blisters and tears.

  “Widower,” she dragged the word with her swollen tongue.

  “Yes?”

  Nina was about to pass out, but she forced her apology. “I’m so sorry I used your credit cards.”

  Kazakh Steppe – 24 Hours Later

  Kemper was still nursing his brutalized face, but he was hardly crying about it. With the Amber Room beautifully converted to an aquarium of decorative gold carvings and stunning bright yellow amber over wooden patterns. It was a substantial aquarium right in the middle of his desert fortress, about 50m in diameter and 70m high, dwarfing the tank Purdue had been kept in during his stay there. Well-dressed, as always, the refined monster sipped his champagne, waiting for his scientific staff to isolate the first organism to be implanted into his brain.

  A storm was raging over the Black Sun compound for the second day. It was a freak storm, unusual for that time of year, but the occasional bolts of lightning that struck were majestic and powerful. Kemper looked up to the sky and smiled. “I am God now.”

  In the distance, Misha Svechin’s IL 76-MD cargo plane appeared through the raging clouds. The 93-ton aircraft careened along the turbulence and fluctuating currents. Aboard were Sam Cleave and Marko Strensky to keep Misha company. Tucked and safely secured in the bowels of the plane there were thirty drum loads of sodium metal, covered with oil to prevent contact with air or water – for now. The highly volatile element used in reactors as a heat conductor and coolant had two naughty traits. On contact with air it combusted. On contact with water it exploded.

  “There! Down there. You cannot miss it,” Sam told Misha as the Black Sun compound came into view. “Even if his fish tank is out of reach this rain will do the job for us.”

  “Correct, Comrade!” Marko laughed. “I have never seen it done on large scale before. Only in laboratory with small pea size sodium chunk in beaker. This is going on YouTube.” Marko always filmed everything he enjoyed. In fact, he had a questionable amount of video clips on his hard drive that had been recorded in his bedroom.

  They circled the fortress. Sam winced with every flash of lightning, hoping it would not hit the plane, but the crazy Soviets seemed fearless and chirpy. “Will the drums break that steel roof?” he asked Marko, but Misha just rolled his eyes.

  On the next turn, Sam and Marko cut loose the drums one by one, rapidly pushing them out of the aircraft to fall hard and fast through the roof of the compound. The volatile metal would take a few seconds on contact with water to ignite and explode, breaking the sheeting over the Amber Room plates and exposing the Plutonium to the heat of the explosion.

  Once they had dropped the first ten drums, the roof in the middle of the UFO-shaped fortress collapsed, exposing the tank in the middle of
the circle.

  “There you go! Aim the others at the tank and then we must get the fuck out of this place quickly!” Misha shouted. He looked down on the scattering men and heard Sam say, “I wish I could see Kemper’s face one last time.”

  Laughing, Marko looked down as the dissolving sodium started to build up. “This one is for Yuri, you Nazi bitch!”

  Misha piloted the giant steel beast as far away as he could in the short time they had so that they could land a few hundred miles north of the impact zone. He did not want to be in the air when the bomb went off. They landed just over 20 minutes later in Kazaly. From the hard Kazakh ground, they looked to the horizon, beer in hand.

  Sam hoped Nina was still alive. He hoped that Detlef had managed to find her and that he had refrained from killing Purdue after Sam explained that Carrington had shot Gabi while being in a hypnotic state under the influence of Kemper's mind control.

  The sky was yellow across the Kazakh landscape as Sam stared over the barren terrain of whipping gusts, just as in his vision. He had no idea that the well he had seen Purdue in had been significant, only not to the Kazakhstan portion of Sam's experience. At last, the final prophecy came true.

  Lightning had struck the water in the Amber Room tank, igniting everything inside. The power of the thermonuclear explosion disintegrated everything within range, rendering the Kalihasa organism extinct – for good. As the bright flash turned into a pulse that shook the heavens, Misha, Sam and Marko watched the mushroom cloud reach up to the gods of the cosmos in terrible beauty.

  Sam raised his beer. “To Nina.”

  THE END

  THE BABYLONIAN MASK

  Where is the sense in the senses when there is no face?

  Where walks the Blind when there is but dark and holes, empty?

  Where speaks the Heart without the release by tongue the lips to fare?

  Where tracks the sweet scent of roses and lover’s breath when absent lies smell?

  How will I tell?

  How will I tell?

  What hide they behind their masks

  When their faces are secret and their voices compel?

  Do they hold Heaven?

  Or do they wield Hell?

  ~ Masque de Babel (circa 1682 - Versailles)

  1

  The Burning Man

  Nina blinked profusely.

  Her eyes listened to her synapses as her slumber fell into REM, abandoning her to the cruel talons of her subconscious mind. In the private ward of the University Hospital of Heidelberg, the lights buzzed through the dead of night where Dr. Nina Gould had been admitted to reverse, if possible, the dreaded effects of radiation sickness. So far, it had been difficult to diagnose how critical her case really was, as the man who’d accompanied her had inaccurately relayed her level of exposure. The best he could say was that he’d found her wandering the underground tunnels of Chernobyl a few hours too long for any living creature to recover.

  “He did not tell us everything,” affirmed Sister Barken to her small group of subordinates, “but I had a distinct inkling it was not half of what Dr. Gould had endured down there before he claimed to have found her.” She shrugged and sighed. “Unfortunately, short of arresting him for a crime we do not have any proof of, we had to let him go and deal with the little information we had.”

  Obligatory sympathy played on the faces of the trainees, but they were only masking the boredom of the night behind professional guises. Their young blood sang for the freedom of the pub, where the group usually met after their shifts together or for the embraces of their lovers at this time of night. Sister Barken did not tolerate their double entendres and missed the company of her peers, where she could exchange actual cogent verdicts with those equally qualified and passionate about medicine.

  Her protruding eyeballs combed them, one by one, as she imparted Dr. Gould’s condition. Slanting at the corners, her thin lips fell downward in an implication of discontent that she often mirrored in her harsh, low tone when she spoke. Apart from being a stern veteran of the German medical practice adhered to at the Heidelberg Uni, she was also known to be quite the brilliant diagnostician. It was a surprise to her colleagues that she never bothered to further her career by becoming a physician, or even a resident consultant.

  “What is the nature of her circumstances, Sister Barken?” asked a young nurse, shocking the Sister with a show of actual interest. The fifty-year-old buxom superior took a moment to answer, looking almost happy to have been asked the question instead of having to stare into the comatose gaze of entitled runts all night.

  “Well, that was all we could find out from the German gentleman who brought her in, Nurse Marx. We could find no corroboration as to the cause of her illness, save that which the man told us.” She sighed, frustrated by the lack of background pertaining to Dr. Gould’s state. “All I can say is that she seems to have been rescued in time to be treated. Although she exhibits all the signs of acute poisoning, her system seems to be able to combat it satisfactorily…for now.”

  Nurse Marx nodded, ignoring the scoffing reaction of her colleagues. It intrigued her. After all, she had heard much of this Nina Gould from her mother. At first, by the way she babbled on about her, she had thought her mother actually knew the petite Scottish historian. It didn’t take long, however, for medical student Marlene Marx to find out that her mother was simply an avid reader of the journals and two books published by Gould. Thus, Nina Gould was a bit of a celebrity in her house.

  Was this another of the clandestine excursions the historian had undertaken, like those she had lightly touched on in her books? Marlene often wondered why Dr. Gould did not write more about her adventures with the well-known explorer and inventor from Edinburgh, David Purdue, but rather hinted upon the many journeys. Then there was the well-accounted association with the world-renowned investigative journalist, Sam Cleave, that Dr. Gould had written about. Not only did Marlene’s mom speak of Nina as if she were a friend of the family, but speculated about her life as if the feisty historian were a walking soap opera.

  It was only a matter of time before Marlene’s mother would start reading books about or published by Sam Cleave himself, if only to find out more about the other rooms in the great Gould mansion. All this mania was precisely why the nurse had been keeping Gould’s stay at Heidelberg a secret, fearing her mother would stage a one-woman march into the west wing of the 14th Century medical facility in protest to her captivity or something. It made Marlene smile to herself, but at the risk of provoking the carefully avoided anger of Sister Barken, she hid her amusement.

  The group of medical students did not know about the creeping convoy of injury approaching the emergency room a floor below. Under their feet a team of orderlies and night staff nurses were surrounding a screaming young man who was refusing to be strapped to a gurney.

  “Please, sir, you have to stop screaming!” the head nurse on duty begged the man as she cordoned off his furious path of destruction with her rather large frame. Her eyes flashed toward one of the male nurses armed with a shot of succinylcholine surreptitiously approaching the burn victim. The horrible sight of the wailing man had two of the newer staff members gagging, barely composing themselves as they waited for the head nurse to shout her next order. For most of them, however, this was a typical panic scenario, although every circumstance was different. They had, for instance, never had a burn victim running into the ER before, let alone one that was still exuding smoke as he skidded, losing clumps of flesh from his chest and abdomen along the way.

  Thirty five seconds felt like two hours for the stumped German medical professionals. Soon after the big woman cornered the victim with the blackened head and chest, the screams halted abruptly, changing into rasps of choking.

  “Airway edema!” she roared in a powerful voice that could be heard throughout the emergency ward. “Intubation, now!”

  The stalking male nurse lunged forward, planting a needle in the asphyxiating man’s crisp sk
in and pushing the plunger without reservation. He winced as the syringe crackled through the epidermis of the poor patient, but it had to be done.

  “Christ! That smell is sickening!” one of the nurses huffed under her breath to her colleague, who nodded in agreement. They covered their faces momentarily to catch their breath as the stench of cooked flesh assaulted their senses. It was not very professional, but they were only people after all.

  “Get him to O.R. ‘B’!” the robust lady thundered to her staff. “Schnell! He is in cardiac arrest, people! Move!” They fitted an oxygen mask on the convulsing patient as his coherence waned. Nobody noticed the tall, old man in the black coat on his trail. His long, stretching shadow darkened the pristine door glass where he stood watching the smoking carcass being wheeled away. Under the brim of his fedora his green eyes glinted and his wasted lips sneered in defeat.

  With all of the chaos in the emergency room, he knew he would not be noticed and slipped through the doors to haunt the ground floor locker room a few feet past the reception area. Once inside the locker room he escaped detection by eluding the bright luminescence of the small ceiling lights above the benches. As it was the middle of night shift, there would not likely be any medical staff in the changing room, so he procured a pair of scrubs and made for the showers. In one of the obscured cubicles the old man shed his clothing.

  Under the tiny, circular lights above him, his skeletal, powdery form revealed itself in the reflection in the Plexiglas. Grotesque and gaunt, his elongated limbs shook off his suit and sheathed themselves in the cotton scrubs. His laden breath wheezed as he moved, mimicking a robotic, skin-wearing android pumping hydraulic fluid through its joints during every shift. When he removed his fedora to replace it with the scrub cap, his deformed skull mocked him in the mirror image of the Plexiglas. Each dent and protrusion of his skull was accentuated by the angle of the light, but he kept his head bowed as much as he could during the fitting of the cap. He did not want to be confronted by his biggest handicap, his mightiest deformity – his facelessness.