by Greg Cox
Seated behind him, Ament provided Khan with informed commentary on the tragic scene beneath them. “Preliminary reports suggest that over twenty villages have been largely obliterated, rendering an estimated 130,000 people homeless. To make matters worse, the quake struck at exactly 3:53 A.M., when most of the residents were asleep in their homes. “Fatality rates remain unclear, but the final death toll may climb as high as 30,000 victims.”
Khan struggled to grasp the enormity of the catastrophe. An entire population bombed out of existence, he marveled with growing fury, and all Hunyadi’s fault. He clenched his fists, ignoring the pain to his raw and bandaged palms. The helicopter passed above a ruined brick schoolhouse, now nothing more than a heap of collapsed masonry, and Khan’s desire for vengeance against the ruthless Romanian superman took on new dimension and urgency. Hunyadi had not only tried’ to eliminate Khan, he had also callously butchered thousands of innocent souls whom Khan considered under his protection.
A twinge of guilt reminded Khan that he had once contemplated a similar atrocity, deploying Morning Star against the population of Bosnia. But that had been in a moment of anger, ultimately superceded by Ament’s appeal to his conscience. Hunyadi had shown no such restraint.
[171] Justice demanded that Hunyadi pay for his crimes against Khan’s people, and Khan could think of no one better than himself to carry out a mandatory sentence of death. “Fiat justitia et ruant coeli,” he murmured solemnly, as the harsh rain splattered against the transparent canopy of the ’copter.
Let justice be done though the heavens fall.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
VIC’S LOUNGE
DUNES HOTEL & CASINO
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
UNITED STATES
OCTOBER 1, 1993
“NO THANKS, I’M EXPECTING SOMEONE.”
Roberta sighed wearily as yet another amorous lounge lizard cruised away from her table, after offering to keep her company. Here I am trying to keep a low profile, she thought, and suddenly I’m more popular than Heidi Fleiss.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t chosen the darkest, most shadowy corner of the lounge in which to wait for her rendezvous. From where she was sitting, at the rear of the stuffy, smoke-filled lounge, she could barely see the stage, where low-wattage country star Sonny Clemonds was performing his novelty hit, “Don’t Send Me No E-Mail Unless You’re a Female,” to a mostly oblivious and/or intoxicated audience. Judging [173] from the way Sonny kept slurring his lyrics, she wasn’t sure he was all that sober either.
Oh well, she reflected philosophically, taking a sip from a very watered-down cocktail, I guess I can’t complain too much if I’m still a wolf magnet at age forty-four. She methodically scanned the lounge, keeping a watchful eye for any sign of genetically engineered superassassins. Nothing like a life on the lam to keep you in shape.
She glanced at her watch, wondering what was keeping her contact. Bored, and momentarily confident that Khan’s goons were nowhere to be seen, she flipped open a newspaper she had picked up on her way to the lounge. A front-page headline caught her attention: “Human Genome Project Sets Out to Map DNA.” Roberta groaned aloud as she skimmed the article about the ambitious attempt, beginning today, to map and sequence the entire structure of human DNA. She and Seven had known this particular endeavor was in the works, of course, but it still came as a shock to see it spelled out in black-and-white on page one of the paper, especially after all the obsessive secrecy concerning the true origins of Khan and his ilk.
Here we go again, she thought. She prayed that this new project would yield more positive results, like cures for various genetic diseases and disorders, than Sarina Kaur’s late and unlamented Chrysalis Project. We can always hope, she reassured herself. Seven says that humanity can learn from its mistakes, no matter how slow and painful the process.
“Helen?”
A familiar voice snapped Roberta out of her mournful reverie. She looked up to see Shannon O’Donnell, [174] her favorite future astronaut, peering down at her through the lounge’s dim lighting. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but something came up at the lab, and I couldn’t exactly explain that I had a more urgent appointment.” She brushed a lock of auburn hair away from her eyes. “As far as the top brass know, I’m just here in Vegas for a little R&R.”
“No problem,” Roberta said. She glanced around quickly, to make certain no one was listening to them, then lowered her voice. “So how’s life at Area 51?”
Shannon slid into the seat across from Roberta. “The design for the impulse engine is still giving us problems. The power yield ratios are steeper than I’d like; we’re burning up way too much deuterium in order to get the sort of power output we need to approach lightspeed.” She leaned across the table toward Roberta. “Perhaps you might be able to shed some light on the problem?”
“Perhaps,” Roberta allowed. Recovering her handbag from the floor between her feet, she removed a manila envelope from the bag and scooted it across the table to Shannon. “You may find some useful ideas here.”
The younger woman couldn’t resist taking an immediate peek at the contents of the envelope. Despite the lounge’s murky ambience, she opened the envelope and drew out several pages of diagrams and equations. Her chestnut eyes widened as she perused the papers. “Of course,” she murmured to herself, with obvious excitement. “I would have never thought of that!” Hastily sliding the documents back into the envelope, she gazed at Roberta with a mixture of awe and gratitude. “Thank you so much, Helen! I can tell already—this is going to save us months, maybe years, of development!”
[175] Roberta winced inwardly, feeling a twinge of guilt every time Shannon addressed her as “Helen.” The young NASA engineer was putting her career—and her security clearance—on the line every time she met Roberta like this, yet the older woman still used the alias “Helen Swanson” whenever she dealt with Shannon. It was unavoidable, though; the fewer people who knew about Roberta Lincoln, and her connection to Gary Seven, the better.
“I wish I could take credit for the dazzling scientific insights,” she joked, “but I’m just the go-between, you know.”
“So you keep telling me,” Shannon said skeptically She looked like she didn’t entirely believe it.
Roberta had first met Shannon O’Donnell seven years ago, when the older woman had teleported into Area 51 to recover a few items of twenty-third century technology that the Enterprise crew had accidentally left behind during their 1986 whale-napping expedition. Shannon had impressed Roberta at the time, and, in the weeks and months that followed, Roberta had, cautiously and discreetly at first, cultivated Shannon as a useful ally inside Area 51. With Seven’s blessing and encouragement, “Helen” had been feeding Shannon occasional tips on starship engineering for years now, while keeping the extraterrestrial origins of the info a secret even from the eager young aerospace worker.
“Dr. Carlson is still the only person at Groom Lake who knows about our special arrangement?” Roberta asked, determined to keep Seven’s covert assistance to the DY-100 project on a strictly need-to-know basis.
“Absolutely,” Shannon insisted. A regretful look [176] passed over her face. “I wish there was some way to bring Shaun—Lieutenant Christopher—in on the secret, but ... no, that’s not possible.” She shook her head sadly. “He’d feel honor-bound to report it. He’s a straight arrow that way. Just like his dad.”
Roberta recalled that Lieutenant Christopher’s father was a decorated Air Force pilot who had once been involved in a minor UFO incident. Roberta herself had later rescued Captain John Christopher from an obsessed alien hunter, little knowing that his then-unborn son would someday be an integral part of one of Seven’s side operations. Forget Kevin Bacon, she thought. We’re all just six degrees of separation from Mr. Spock!
“I think for now it’s best that this remain our little secret,” she said, having difficulty imagining any circumstances in which it would be a good thing to let another person in on this op
eration. Khan’s spies were everywhere.
A waiter swung by to take Shannon’s order, and Roberta took advantage of the occasion to order another mimosa for herself as well. After all, she thought, I’m not exactly driving home.
Shannon carefully tucked the folded envelope into her own handbag, then leaned back to wait for her cocktail. A flutter of applause greeted another Sonny Clemonds ditty. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me, at last, where all this astounding technical know-how is coming from?” She smiled ruefully. “I ask you every time, and you never spill a bean.”
Memories of Reykjavik flashed through her brain. “Er, that’s not entirely true,” she said cryptically. “But trust me, it’s better this way.”
“But what do you get out of it?” Shannon pressed her, [177] the anonymous nature of her benefactor clearly weighing on her mind. She lowered her voice to an urgent hush. “Why are you going to all this trouble to help the U.S. government build a top-secret sleeper ship?”
Roberta squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. How could she tell the idealistic young woman that the DY-100 was Gary Seven’s backup plan, just in case World War III proved unavoidable? If necessary, the high-tech starship could serve as a futuristic ark, capable of ferrying a handful of human survivors to a brand-new beginning on another world. Roberta prayed it wouldn’t come to that, but there was no way to be sure, especially in a world containing Khan Noonien Singh, i.e., the Tyrant Formerly Known as Noon.
“Believe me,” Roberta told Shannon. “You don’t want to know.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
SOMEWHERE BENEATH THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA
FEBRUARY 7, 1994
THIS MUST BE WHAT SPACE TRAVEL IS LIKE, Khan mused as his submarine cruised far beneath the waves. Cocooned within a hull of high-yield steel, in an artificial bubble of air, he traveled in near-silence through the icy depths of an environment utterly inimical to human life—much as he would be on a voyage to the stars. Someday, he thought, after I have subdued the Earth and brought peace to its suffering billions, perhaps I should aspire to conquer space as well. In my old age, possibly, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, setting forth on one last heroic adventure “beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” The notion pleased him, and a private smile lifted the corners of his lips. It would be a fitting end. ...
But that was many long decades from now. First, he had more brutal business to attend to; specifically, the immediate destruction of Vasily Hunyadi and his faithless superhuman lieutenants.
[179] He stood within the control room of the SGK Kaur as the nuclear submarine, the first in an intended fleet, cruised toward the entrance of the Adriatic Sea. Reliable intelligence had placed Hunyadi and his top cadre at a base in the Bosnian city of Dubrovnik, so Khan meant to sail close enough to the city to launch a Tomahawk missile, purchased at great expense on the black market, at his enemy’s lair. Armed with a conventional high-explosive warhead, the missile would reduce the heavily guarded building to ashes before Hunyadi even knew he was under attack.
The element of surprise was crucial to his strategy. Although the effective range of the Tomahawk was over fifteen hundred kilometers, meaning that Khan could have conceivably launched the missile from anywhere in the Mediterranean, Hunyadi’s headquarters was guarded by bootlegged Patriot missiles, of the sort used in the Gulf War to intercept attacking SCUD missiles. By slipping into the Adriatic, and firing the Tomahawk only a few hundred kilometers from Dubrovnik, Khan hoped to give Hunyadi’s forces little or no time to react to the launch; the Tomahawk would strike its target before a single Patriot could be deployed against it.
At least that was the plan. With NATO currently enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia, an attack by submarine had struck Khan as the ideal way to get his revenge on Hunyadi without having to fight his way through contested airspace or war-torn terrain. Even Ament, who customarily frowned on military “adventurism,” had agreed that an underwater approach offered the least chance of exposure and/or open confrontation; it was, in her words, “admirably low-profile.”
[180] For himself, Khan worried less about avoiding public censure and more about taking Hunyadi by surprise, although he granted that there were definite diplomatic advantages to avoiding the United Nations peacekeeping forces patrolling the region. Ament had originally urged Khan to let the U.N., with the military support of NATO, deal with Hunyadi along with several other Balkan war criminals, but Khan had little faith in the abilities of lesser men to mete out justice to the likes of Hunyadi. Besides, he had a personal grudge to settle with the Romanian superman. The souls of thousands of murdered countrymen cry out for vengeance, he thought resolutely, and all because Hunyadi sought my life.
Like a bad marksman, the Romanian had missed his target, but killed countless others in the attempt. By contrast, Khan planned a surgical strike on Hunyadi that minimized the risk to innocent civilians. There you see the fundamental difference between us, he reflected, and why only I was truly born to rule wisely over mankind.
“Lord Khan.” The commander of the Kaur, Captain William Hapka, approached Khan on the raised platform overlooking the rest of the control room. Two cylindrical periscopes, one optical, one electronic, rose like bolted metal pillars from the center of the pedestal. Behind the platform, at the rear of the control room, a team of junior officers charted the sub’s progress on tracing paper stretched over the plotting table. “We are nearing the Strait of Otranto.”
“Excellent,” Khan commended the captain. The Kaur had made good time since departing Bombay almost four days ago. Their route had taken them up [181] the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal undetected. Now, as they headed straight for the mouth of the Adriatic, between the shores of Italy and Albania, Khan already tasted the heady wine of revenge. Only hours remained before the sub came within range of Dubrovnik.
The hushed atmosphere of the control room, where noise was habitually kept to a minimum, provided little indication of the focused attention and efficiency of the crew. From his vantage point on the periscope pedestal, Khan could survey the sub’s busy nerve center. Highly trained personnel, in matching aquamarine uniforms, manned computerized control consoles situated around and ahead of the central platform. The consoles faced away from the pedestal, so that Khan and the captain could effectively look over the shoulders of the seamen as they worked side by side, at navigation, helm, or weapons control. Closed-circuit television screens watched over the engine room, reactor compartment, sonar shack, and other vital compartments. Illuminated gauges and displays cast colored shadows on alert, determined faces representing a wide variety of races and ethnicities. Elbow room was at a premium, but Khan was impressed by how efficiently the crew functioned despite the cramped conditions.
Just as well that Joaquin could not accompany me, Khan thought. It felt distinctly odd, but also strangely liberating, not to have the huge bodyguard shadowing him as usual; still recovering from injuries sustained in September’s horrendous earthquake, Joaquin had been in no condition to embark on this voyage—or to prevent Khan from doing so.
[182] Every one of his advisors had counseled Khan against personally joining the sub’s mission, but he had overruled them all. I am not one to sit by idly while others fight my battles, he reiterated in his mind, nor to miss my flagship’s baptism of fire.
One of a kind, the Ship of the Great Khanate Kaur was a state-of-the-art nuclear submarine, roughly modeled on the U.S. Navy’s Los Angeles-class vessels, but with a few special design features of Khan’s own devising. Costing over forty billion rupees to construct, the ship was only the beginning of what he envisioned as a war fleet to rival that of the United States or Russia. The Kaur, named after Khan’s martyred mother, was a swift and silent undersea predator, as Hunyadi would soon discover.
Khan noticed a stirring of activity below, A message was transmitted from the sonar room, one compartment away, to the Officer of the Deck, who promptly delivered the news to Captain Hapka. The grilled-metal platform rattled sligh
tly beneath his tread. “Passive sonar detects the presence of mines dead ahead, sir.”
“I see,” Hapka said. Khan took a step backward to allow Hapka to deal with the matter. Although all aboard had sworn to live or die by Khan’s command, he did not wish to undermine the captain’s authority unless absolutely necessary. “Can we go around them?” Hapka asked.
“No, sir,” the OOD reported. He was a burly, tattooed sailor from Marseille, who had resigned from the French navy to protest the 1985 bombing of a Greenpeace vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, by French intelligence agents. A name badge on his lapel [183] identified him as Lt. Guillaume Cassel. “The mines are blocking the choke point.”
Hapka stroked his beard as he considered his options. Silver crescents glittered on his collar, while his breast pocket bore an impressive collection of polished medals and decorations. Although not a product of genetic engineering, the captain had already achieved a distinguished reputation as a submariner before joining Khan’s private navy, having served with distinction in the Falklands war. That was many years ago, and Hapka’s rust-colored whiskers were now streaked with silver, yet Khan knew he was fortunate to have such an experienced seaman in command of his flagship.
“Well, we’ve come too far to turn back now.” The captain did not let the threat of mines deter him. “Initiate a phased-energy sweep. Full-strength. Ninety degree dispersal.” He turned toward Khan, as the OOD verbally passed along the captain’s orders to the weapons officer in charge of the Kaur’s forward lasers. “It seems, Your Excellency,” Hapka told Khan coolly, “that we have been given the opportunity to see how your new laser system works in the field.”
