The sixth interlock has been modified to accept an elimination command by VHF radio signal. Once the interlock goes there’s no way to prevent the bomb from exploding.
But—and this is a very big but—I’ve added something to the hardware. When you finish this letter, look at the rear of the assembly and you’ll find ten numbered buttons. They come alive every fifteen minutes. Shortly after you read this, you’ll see a red light start to flash just above the panel of buttons. At the same time a warning tone will come on. It’s a nasty screech.
Now, everything here is critical.
When the red light and the tone signal are activated, you have exactly five minutes in which to complete an action that puts the bomb back on interlock safety. In other words, when you see the flashing light and hear the signal that device is alive and counting down to detonation. You’ve got to stop that auto-sequence.
The way you do that is to depress three of the ten buttons. You depress them in a specific sequence—they are the same three numbers I’ll use for identification in case we have to reach you directly.
The first, third, and fifth numbers of your USAF serial number.
If you depress these numbers properly you cancel out the auto-sequence. If you fail to do so then I’ve lost one hell of a pilot. At the end of the five minutes that begins with the red flashing light and the tone signal, the bomb detonates.
There’s no way to stop it.
If you punch the right numbers in wrong sequence, no damage done. A yellow light flashes. That’s when you should take a deep breath and start over again.
If you punch the proper numbers in proper sequence, you win a cigar. The red light also goes out and the tone signal cuts off. A green light comes on and stays lit until the timer inside the bomb begins the new sequences and you get the red light and the tone signal again, fifteen minutes later.
I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that there’s a way to shut down the whole system and to renew all six interlocks, but it’s better not to tell you how. Temptation is bad for the soul. That information will be provided to the American authorities when we confirm payment. It will be another numbered sequence.
Sorry to stick you in the middle like this, moon man, but you’re the best I’ve got and the American government is likely to stay just a bit more on its toes because of your name.
Stay loose.
Sam
Steve made an instant decision and shouted at the watchdogs. One was by his side at once. Not the other. He stayed in the doorway with his automatic rifle pointed at both men.
Steve handed the letter to the man by his side. “Read this,” he told him, “and be sure to read it carefully.” The guard looked up at Steve, then turned to the other man.
“This isn’t a game,” Steve said harshly. “You read the letter one at a time.” He went to a couch and sprawled across the cushions. “One of you can cover me while the other reads.”
The first guard turned white as he went through the letter. Without a word he crossed the room, turned to face Steve with the weapon leveled at him, and handed the letter to his companion. Again Steve waited until he saw awareness grow in the face of the second man.
“Okay. You both know the rules,” Steve said. “If at any time I seem to go ape, and you don’t understand what I’m doing, for God’s sake don’t bother with me until I follow that insanity you’ve just read. Do you understand? Because if I mess up were all gone. The time between punching those numbers doesn’t let you get far enough away from that thing”—he pointed to the bomb—“to do you a bit of good. Being around an exploding hydrogen bomb can ruin your whole day.”
The guards stared at one another. Not a word between them. They weren’t being the strong silent types right now. They had just found out there was a nightmare going on and they were right in the middle of it.
Damn you, Sam . . .
He let the anger rush through him. Maybe it would clear his head. And maybe it wouldn’t make any difference. He didn’t know, he couldn’t really think. Being pinned to this building. Worse. If the intricate negotiations and payment of a billion dollars somehow fell apart, then Sam, or any of several people clued in to the details of the system, could detonate the hydrogen bomb at any time.
Just send off that VHF radio signal . . .
Again he reviewed his immediate options. He could try to kill both guards. If he did, what then? He couldn’t use the phone in the apartment. That rigged explosive charge. Which meant getting out of the building to the phone booth on the corner. To do that he had to kill both guards, quickly, run the gauntlet of whatever security teams Sam Franks had set up outside the building, find the booth in working order and—
Would he get through to McKay or Goldman in time? Because if he didn’t . . .
Even if he were to kill the guards and run for his own life—which he knew he could never do—it would be a waste of energy. No chance of getting far enough away to escape the fireball and the thermal yield and the punch of the shock wave and—
He cut off the thought. He was trapped. He had to stay with the bomb, play punch-the-buttons, hope negotiations went as planned and—
And what . . . ?
So what if everything went exactly as Sam Franks and Jonathan Sperry and that miserable Kuto wanted? What then? Well, if Sam had told the absolute truth, and everything went perfectly, how could he be sure that Sam still wouldn’t set off the bomb?
He didn’t know.
He had no way of knowing what was happening or actually planned.
Or who might decide to send the radio signal.
Or when.
The red light began to flash.
CHAPTER 20
No one moved.
They stared at the terrible weapon that had suddenly come alive. Time for mental exercise was over.
The tone signal knifed into their ears, twisting and stabbing with its screech.
Move, Austin!
He went slowly to the bomb. He stared at it, the light almost hypnotic, the screech grinding through his teeth and his bones. The guards stared no longer at the bomb but at him. In that instant Steve had become their life.
He leaned forward, studying the numbers. His fingers moved to the panel.
Two.
He felt the sweat trickling down his face, the tremble starting in his muscles.
Nine.
He hesitated, the awful signal. Salt from his sweat now smarting in his eye. He shook his head.
Four.
The signal went out. Green. Steady.
Silence, broken only by the sound of one of his guards throwing up on the floor.
The moment he completed the numbered sequence they had fifteen minutes before the next sequence began with the light and the signal. And five minutes more before the thing would go off.
He found some relief in taunting the guards. “If we ever got out of here we’d waste a minute or two getting outside. What about the reception committee Franks is sure to have left across the street? Okay, forget about that. We get outside and what happens? We’ve got to get a vehicle. We’re in the middle of a city. During the day the traffic would slow us. Night? If we could do sixty miles an hour—which we can’t—we could put twenty miles between us and this thing.” He gestured at the bomb. “It would be more like ten or twelve miles. And that’s at least thirty-two million tons of explosive power there. No way, troops.”
With no way out they resorted to the only thing they could do, which was to guard Steve Austin. They needed to keep him alive and well and on the premises to do his job. They also knew Sam Franks well enough to suspect that the numbered sequence stabbed out by Austin might be only one part of what had to be done.
The strain on Steve was mental and physical. There could be nothing more than snatches at sleep, and those were brief minutes of yielding to total exhaustion. When the tone screeched through the room he came violently awake, his subconscious howling at him to stay awake, to be alert, to stab his fingers into the numb
ers in the demanded sequence.
The bomb was more than a thing now. It was alive and it was malignant. It was immediate death on an overwhelming scale, and it brooded malevolently, seeming to expand in size, to taunt them. The more hours that passed the more distant became the men with him. Steve recognized their entrapment with him and came to ignore them.
Nothing existed but the bomb and its obscene call for attention. Steve dragged the couch so that it stood just in front of the panel of numbers. When he slept it was with a guard standing nearby, always ready to prod him awake should his growing stupor take over.
Two days came and went.
His eye was, he knew, bloodshot. Even his hands had begun to shake. He held up his bionics arm in front of his face, studying it, turning the hand and flexing the steel fingers.
And the man-made miracle trembled, because not even steel and cabling and electronics and nuclear drive could overcome the connections to his shoulder stump, which led to his brain, which was profoundly weary. The effect of repetition was brutal. A sense of suffocating weight drove against him. He wandered from vague introspection to towering rage.
And all the while he punched buttons and stared at the panel and the green light that wavered in front of his eye now as the flashing red faded away, except for the glow burned into his retina, and the screech echoed forever, leaving and coming back, ringing through the farthest reaches of his exhausted, aching mind.
Again.
Sitting with his elbows on his knees, his head weighing a ton, his throat dry, his tongue swollen, his back twisted and agonizing. He slept this way, a near-zombie permitted faint escape in stolen moments of sleep before being whipped back to the fading reality of the present.
He was worshipper, servant, priest and sacrificial lamp before this ultimate thermonuclear god.
The bomb had become truly alive to him. Gone from his consciousness was the recollection that this was a machine, a mass of steel and uranium and deuterium and plastic and gold cones and explosive lenses. The innards of the Thing had taken on sentience, they throbbed and hummed and life coursed through their cables and wires.
And Steve groped at the altar, and pressed the buttons to please It.
What drove Steve near to a special sort of madness was that he didn’t know if the sequence of numbers he punched again and again really did the slightest bit of good.
Would the bomb really detonate if he failed to punch the numbers on command of the screeching sound and the blinking red light? How could he know this for certain?
Was it possible he was victim to a monstrous perversion concocted by the twisted humor of Sam Franks?
He didn’t know and he couldn’t know, and he couldn’t do anything except follow the instructions Franks had used to chain him to the bomb. Because—
Because Butukama had been real.
And so had the nuclear flash that destroyed the Dorina.
Even during the brief interludes of sleep, he dreamed. He kept seeing that awful fireball—in the middle of the night, a terrible lash of a star gutting a city, the heat flash stabbing out a hundred miles in every direction, the fireball erupting to miles above the city, mottled and horrible, crushing and grinding, spawning the shock wave, tons of radioactive earth hurled out in every direction.
He would shake the vision from his mind. In that escape he would be back in Apollo, rushing away from the earth, climbing up an invisible line, farther and farther from Hell, bathing himself in the sweet nothingness of space.
A quarter of a million miles gone from It, and he would look back on the blue-and-white marble rolling through the velvety blackness of space, a half-earth suspended against infinity. And on the dark side, beyond that thin reddish line, a spark would appear. A single pinpoint of light, brighter than the sun and the stars, a light to prick the balloon of darkness, flaring swiftly. The entire globe began to burn—and he came bursting from the dream, soaked in perspiration . . .
Three days.
Four.
Groggy, mouth dry, once more he forced himself to turn, to face It.
But there was something else . . . He fought to clear his head, felt the beard on his face. He turned.
The guards stood in front of him, one close, the other across the room, automatic weapons pointed at him.
He tried to understand . . . there was something else in the room . . . standing on the other side from the bomb. Who—? Familiar. A woman . . . He’d seen her before . . . ?
She was holding a gun on him.
Voice. She was talking and he knew her voice.
“Bring in a chair from the kitchen” Of course he knew it, but not like this. Before it had been . . . ? Still couldn’t remember.
“Get in the chair, Steve.”
He shook his head. There it was. Right on time . . . right on the old button. The flashing light and the screech signal. Giddy with weariness, he stabbed buttons.
Yellow.
Yellow? Yellow is wrong. Do it again. Stab.
Good old green light.
The fog went away as he was jerked roughly from the couch onto the straight-backed chair. Immediately rope coiled about his arms and chest and—
Not rope, thin cable in a plastic liner. What was going on? Cable around his arms and legs. He couldn’t move.
She motioned with the gun in her hand. “Be sure,” she ordered the guard next to him. “Check the binding.” The guard leaned down behind him.
Hissing noise.
He stared. The woman had barely moved the gun but had squeezed the trigger several times. No explosive charge. That hiss. He knew the weapon. Compressed-air needle gun, spring backup, holding ninety frangible needles each filled with a poisonous derivative of nerve gas. You added the poison from a scolopendra or some other type of tropical centipede to the nerve poison. The effect of scolopendra—immobilizing pain. Shock so great you can’t control your body. In the time it takes to fight the agony the nerve-gas poison does its work. Takes maybe ten, fifteen seconds to die, but from the instant the frangible needle explodes within the body a person’s totally helpless.
The guard threw out his arms in violent reaction to the needle darts entering his body. Moments later, the second guard, reacting with the instinct of his years of training and experience, was spinning around, weapon in his hands. He needn’t have bothered. He took one needle in the face, another in the neck, several in his chest and stomach. His body twisted in agony. He collapsed to the floor. It was over.
The woman turned back to Steve, replacing the weapon in her purse. She walked toward him. Finally it was beginning to get through.
He stared, not believing. The sound of her voice . . . but that perfume . . .
The perfume. That woman in his room who’d tried to kill him. It was the same.
But she had a different voice. One he was sure he knew.
“Oleg. Mikhail Oleg!”
CHAPTER 21
“Michèle,” she said in a voice very different from the one he’d just heard. “Michèle when I’m myself.”
The voice changed. “And when it is necessary to be Mikhail”—she shrugged, smiled—“You seem surprised, Colonel.”
“Hardly the word for it.”
“You also look a mess.”
“Lousy room service. By the way, how’d you get in?”
“You seem to forget, Colonel, that I’m also Oleg, a very important part of this operation. Naturally I was able to discover and use Franks’ ID. The guards have seen me before, except at such times I went by the name Yvette Rochelle—a much safer courier for my government than the infamous Mikhail Oleg—so well known to Pentronics and presumably a missing traitor to my own country.”
“You really are a woman?”
“I should hope so.” And in that moment whatever male mannerisms he remembered of Mikhail were entirely gone. Only Michèle (alias Yvette) remained. Of course. That night in his room. Enough light, just enough to see the woman she wanted him to see.
“You are no
doubt also wondering, Colonel, how I managed the masquerade for so long within a world of men?”
“That thought was crossing my mind.”
“There is little time. But for a man with your remarkable number of lives, nothing should be a surprise. Actually, it was rarely a problem. To be properly cautious I took chemical injections to produce a light beard and suppress the uniquely feminine attributes. The voice was a simple matter of training. And the luxurious life-style affording so much privacy that Pentronics specializes in took care of the rest. Fortunately one was not obliged to use communal facilities, and—as you may have noticed—I have made a point of being something of a recluse.”
No wonder they could never get a handle on who was trying to kill him. If they trapped the woman, Mikhail Oleg was always able to appear suddenly on the scene, and who the hell was going to doubt him?
But this was something else. “For a woman,” he said, remembering her in that MiG-21 fighter, “you’re one hell of a pilot.”
Found a nerve there, he thought, watching her face.
“Colonel Austin, for you to discriminate between male and female where flying is concerned, well, you disappoint me. And if you’re wondering why my government sent a woman to do what you assume to be a man’s job, the explanation is simple. Not only could I play different roles with less risk of detection. I also happened to be the best man”—she almost smiled—“trained and available for the job.”
“Like you say, Michèle, or whatever your name is, you’re obviously very good. I don’t think Sam ever has suspected the Russian government was on to him. Especially that they had a plant right in the front office.”
She moved a chair in front of him. “Which is our next topic, Colonel. I have questions to ask you. You will provide the answers. Would you please strain against your bonds to break loose?”
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