Earthfire North

by Nick Carter

  "There's something here you're not telling me, Roberta," Carter said. She was holding something back. He could see it in her eyes, and the way she held herself when she talked about Ziegler.

  She said nothing.

  "Is there some kind of personal thing?" he asked. "Have you got a vendetta against Ziegler?"

  "No," she snapped.

  "You're lying."

  "Don't press me on this, Nick," she said. She got out of the bed, pushed past him, and went into the living room where she poured herself a second drink.

  "We can't work together if you won't tell me the truth," Carter said. This was beginning to feel sour. If he were smart, he told himself, he'd have her pulled off the case and he'd do it alone.

  "I just need a little time, Nick. But Ziegler has got to be stopped He and men like him ruined my country, and very nearly the entire world. It can't be allowed to happen again."

  He nodded. "All right," he said. "I'll give you the time, Roberta." He got up. "Get some more rest. I'm going to stretch out on the couch. We have to be out of here and to the airport by ten."

  She nodded, and he went out to the living room. He turned off the light, tossed down the rest of his drink, and lay down on the couch.

  For a long time he lay there, thinking about Roberta and about Ziegler and about going back to Iceland. Lydia had been murdered there. Of that there was no doubt now. If for nothing else, he told himself, he wanted to see this thing through to the end.

  The bedroom door slowly opened, and Roberta came out. She was wearing nothing.

  "Go back to bed," Carter said, half sitting up, but she came across to him and lay down beside him, her body cool and incredibly soft.

  "Nick?" she sighed.

  "Damn," Carter swore softly, but he didn't mean it. Soon he was undressed, and they were on the carpeted floor together, her long legs wrapped around his body, her lovely breasts crushed against his chest, and they were making love — slowly, tiredly, but with great comfort and pleasure.

  * * *

  They went into the bedroom together, where they finally got to sleep a couple of hours before dawn. When they woke, traffic was bustling in the street below, and it was already getting hot outside.

  Carter got up and made coffee while Roberta showered and dressed. When she was ready he showered and dressed too. AXE had set him up with a new Luger, another stiletto in a chamois sheath, and a new gas bomb and pouch; in Germany, Schmidt had promised to see what he could do about finding Carter's original weapons. He packed these things in his suitcase so that he would have no trouble through Icelandic customs, and then he called a cab.

  "Last night…" Roberta began on the way out to National Airport.

  Carter smiled.

  "It was lovely. I'm going to enjoy being your wife for this job… I'm going to enjoy it a lot."

  Carter had to laugh, the good feeling lasting all the way out to the airport, the hour-long wait there, and then the five-hour flight to Reykjavik.

  When they touched down, however, the mood was gone. Completely. This was enemy territory, and they had a job to do.

  The weather, particularly after the hot and sunny Washington morning, was terrible. Low, sullen-looking clouds hovered over the city, and a very chill wind blew in from the ocean.

  They checked in at the Saga and registered under the names Angus and Marta McDonald. He was a salesman from Vancouver. He and his wife were here on a combined business trip and vacation.

  They asked for and got a room on the top floor with a view of the harbor — which took several Canadian twenties — and when the bellboy left and Carter threw back the drapes covering the large windows, the entire harbor lay spread before them.

  After room service had brought up a bottle of cognac and some sandwiches, Carter locked and chained the door, then set up a pair of high-powered binoculars on a tripod in front of the window. He pulled a chair over, sat down, and focused the glasses on the harbor. The ships leaned up at him. He could read the names with ease.

  "I'll take the first shift," he said, pouring himself a drink and opening his notebook.

  Roberta pecked him on the cheek. "I'll be a good little wifey and go shopping."

  "Be careful," Carter said, and she left.

  He locked the door after her, then went back to the binoculars. In his notebook he began drawing a detailed map of the harbor, along with the names and relative positions of every ship. When one came in, he added it; when one left, he scratched it.

  There was a lot of activity in the harbor, so it kept him busy for several hours until Roberta came back and he let her in.

  "Anything yet?" she asked. She had brought some more food and drink with her.

  "Nothing suspicious," Carter said.

  She put her packages down on the bureau and came over to where he was seated. She looked through the binoculars.

  "If anything at all comes in from Argentina, from Ziegler's warehouses, we'll see it here," Carter said.

  She looked away from the glasses. "That could take time."

  Carter shrugged.

  She made him a sandwich and opened a bottle of beer for him around four, when she took over the watch. He lay down on the bed for a while, watching the single Icelandic television channel.

  A freighter. The Delfin, came in at six. But after she was tied up, nothing happened. No crew came to unload her.

  Roberta watched until eight, then Carter took up the post again. The hotel window faced west into the harbor, into the selling sun; in Iceland, in August, the sun remains at the horizon for a very long time. The slanting rays played havoc with his vision.

  At about eleven Carter fell asleep in the chair. Roberta was asleep in the bed, the television a static blank, having gone off at ten.

  At 12:45 Carter woke with a start. Quickly he scanned the harbor, then trained his glasses on The Delfin. Something was happening. He sat up straighter. Lights were on over the ship's hold, and a gigantic crane was swinging a load onto the dock, where a heavy truck was waiting to receive it.

  "Roberta," Carter called.

  She sat up, rubbed her eyes, then came over to the glasses. "What is it?" she asked sleepily.

  "Take a look," he said, getting up.

  She looked through the binoculars. "The Delfin," she said. "They're unloading something… Is it what I think it is?"

  "Possibly," Carter said. He had pulled his weapons out of his specially designed radio-cassette player. He strapped them on now.

  Roberta grabbed her bag, and together they hurried downstairs to the hotel parking lot, where they retrieved the car they'd rented and headed immediately toward the dock where The Delfin was tied.

  "If they're unloading reactor parts, they'll be taking them out to the construction site."

  "Maybe they haven't started yet," Roberta said. "Maybe they're just stockpiling the equipment until they're ready."

  Carter shook his head. "Hawk and I have already discussed that possibility. From what we can learn, discussions in the Althing about the nuclear alternative have stalled. The Odessa cannot take the chance it'll be defeated, not at this stage of the game, so it's my guess they've already started construction, When Iceland's geothermal energy does run out, they'll unveil the reactor. A fait accompli, and the Althing will have no choice but to accept it."

  "A dangerous game."

  "Exactly. It's why Ziegler and his people will stop at nothing to protect it."

  The streets near the docks were dark and empty. Carter pulled up and parked in the shadows beside a warehouse.

  "The Delfin is just around the comer, I think," Carter said. The other side was lit up. "I'm going to take a look. Give me fifteen minutes, then get the hell out of here."

  She pulled a small Beretta automatic out of her purse, then nodded. "Careful."

  Carter went the rest of the way on foot, and at the corner he looked out across the dock. The truck had been loaded. As he watched, the driver and another man climbed up into the cab, started the bi
g diesel, and the truck lumbered forward.

  Carter had to duck back out of the way as the truck passed, but then he raced back to the car where Roberta was behind the wheel.

  He jumped in on the passenger side. "That's it," he shouted. "Don't lose him."

  Roberta started the car and screeched away from their parking place, picking up the truck's headlights in the next block.

  Ten

  The truck led them south of Reykjavik, down a little-used two-lane blacktop. There was absolutely no other traffic, and only the glow of the city behind them lent any evidence to the fact that civilization was near.

  "Cut your lights and stay with him," Carter said.

  The big transport disappeared over the crest of a hill. Carter and Roberta reached the top minutes later, but the valley beyond was empty. The truck was nowhere to be seen.

  "Where'd it go?" Roberta asked, slowing down.

  "There," Carter said, picking out a rooster tail of dust on a track that trailed off the highway between twin mounds of pumice.

  Roberta turned off the pavement, and they slowly bumped along the uneven track. This was volcano country. Carter unfolded the map that had come with the car and studied it for several moments with the aid of his penlight. Ahead was an oddly shaped, flat-topped cone.

  "Mount Hekla," he said.

  "Isn't that the one that erupted not so long ago?" Roberta asked.

  "In 1973," Carter read from the inscription on the map.

  The truck suddenly appeared as they came around a bend in the road. Its brake lights were on, and Carter cautioned her to slow down and then stop. In the dim Arctic twilight he could barely make out the shape of a guardhouse on the road ahead.

  "It's a checkpoint," he said. He turned around and looked the way they had come. "We'd better turn around here and see if there is some way around it."

  She made a quick U-turn and backtracked nearly half a mile until they came to what appeared to be a very old track in the sand leading off to the east. She swung on to it and carefully picked her way around huge boulders strewn everywhere.

  "This is nothing but a dried creek bed," she shouted. The car was bouncing and pitching all over the place. The car wouldn't take much of this.

  "Can we make it to the top of the ridge ahead?" Carter shouted.

  "I'll try."

  They bottomed out several times, and the temperature gauge began to climb as the car labored over the extremely rough terrain.

  The ridge, when they reached it, turned out to be the rim of a wide, shallow canyon. Lights twinkled far out in its center.

  They eased up over the final rise and stopped. Roberta shut off the engine. "What is it?" she asked, looking down at the floor of the canyon.

  "I'm not sure," Carter said. He got out of the car and walked to the edge of the overlook. A hundred yards down the hill a chain link fence ran along the landscape, topped by three strands of barbed wire. On the other side a huge hole had been dug out of the valley, and in the distance he could see that some sort of huge building project was rising. The wind brought sounds of engines running.

  He motioned for Roberta, and when she joined him she strained to listen. "They're working on it now." She looked at Carter. "You were right after all; they've already started it."

  "And we're going to un-start it," Carter said.

  "How?"

  "I don't know, but…" Carter started to say when a movement below, just at the fence, caught his eye. "Down," he whispered urgently, and he shoved Roberta down behind a jumble of rocks.

  "What is it?" she whispered.

  "A guard, I think," Carter said. As he watched a uniformed guard sauntered along the fence from the west. An automatic rifle was slung over his shoulder. It looked like an M-16.

  He stopped for a moment or two almost directly below them, then continued on. When he was out of sight, Carter sat back.

  "It's a reactor, all right, and probably the processing plant for the spent fuel rods as well," he said.

  "Odessa's own little bomb factory," Roberta said. "So how do we stop it?"

  "We blow it up, what else?"

  * * *

  They got back to the hotel a couple of hours later, after they had hiked along the fence line for a short distance so that they could get a better view of what was going on below.

  Carter dropped Roberta off, telling her to keep watch on the harbor, but he refused to tell her where he was going despite her indignant questions.

  "Are you going back out there tonight?" she demanded.

  "No, I promise you, Roberta. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

  She looked at him. "What do you plan to do alone? I want a chance at Ziegler for what he did to me," she said.

  "You'll have it. I'm not doing anything tonight except gathering information. Nothing more."

  After he left her, Carter drove immediately across town to the American embassy on Laufasvegi, where he woke up a sleepy chancellery clerk who telephoned the charge d'affaires; the charge d'affaires checked with the ambassador himself, and the ambassador ended up calling in the embassy's chief military officer.

  "Do you realize what time of the morning it is?" the officer, an air force colonel, fumed when he arrived.

  "Thank you for coming down on such short notice, Colonel," Carter said.

  "What do you want?"

  "The use of your crypto facilities."

  "What?"

  "I need to set up a crypto teletype circuit with D.C. It can be routed through the Pentagon."

  "Impossible," the officer said.

  They were sitting in the chancellery office. Carter turned to the clerk. "Telephone the ambassador for me like a good sport."

  "Yes, sir," the man said, and he reached for the telephone.

  "I suppose you have the clout," the colonel said. The clerk hesitated.

  "Yes," Carter said. "But if you want to check with someone, I'll understand."

  "It's not necessary; the ambassador vouched for you. Highly irregular, though, I might say."

  They went down to the basement, where the colonel and Carter were let into a small room filled with electronic equipment. The colonel explained Carter's needs to the young technician on duty, and Carter supplied the routing code for the circuit he wanted.

  Within fifteen minutes it was set up, and Carter had an encrypted teletype line open with AXE's technical section in the basement of the Dupont Circle building.

  The colonel and the tech moved off to the other side of the room while Carter operated the teletype.

  CARTER HERE FOR CAIRNES

  STAND BY N3

  Carter sat back and lit a cigarette. It was one of his custom-made cigarettes that he picked up from a small shop around the corner from his apartment building. The paper was black, and his initials were stamped in gold near the tip. Cairnes was back before Carter finished his smoke.

  CAIRNES HERE

  HAVE YOU SOMETHING FOR ME?

  As completely as possible, Carter described for the head of AXE's technical section what he and Roberta had seen outside Reykjavik.

  When he was finished, the teletype was silent for nearly an hour until Cairnes came back on.

  UNITS YOU DESCRIBE ARE PROBABLE REACTOR TO WEST PROCESSING PLANT NEAREST PERIMETER.

  WHAT DO YOU DESIRE, N3?

  Carter smiled to himself He typed:

  MEANS FOR CERTAIN DESTRUCTION.

  STAND BY.

  Again the teletype was silent for at least an hour. The colonel had become fidgety, and he finally left. The tech remained across the room, his feet up, reading a magazine, totally unconcerned about Carter.

  When the teletype came to life again, it clattered at a hundred words per minute. The chief scientist had evidently cut a tape and was running it off now.

  COMMENTS ON METHODS OF DESTROYING A NUCLEAR REACTOR AND/OR A NUCLEAR FUEL PROCESSING INSTALLATION.

  IF THE CORE IS ALREADY IN PLACE DESTRUCTION OF THE REACTOR COULD LEAD TO SERIOUS AIR AND WATER CONTAMINATION LO
CALLY.

  IN AN EFFORT TO INSURE COMPLETE DESTRUCTION AND NOT MERELY A DELAY IN CONSTRUCTION, CONSIDERATION MUST BE GIVEN TO THE VULNERABLE AREAS.

  AT THE BASE OF THE REACTOR CORE ITSELF WILL BE SEEN A LARGE BLOCK OF REINFORCED CONCRETE WHICH SUPPORTS THE MECHANISM WHICH IN TURN CONTROLS THE CONTROL RODS.

  DESTRUCTION OF THIS CONSTRUCTION COULD RESULT IN A MAXIMUM DELAY IN CONSTRUCTION FOR THE MINIMUM USE OF FORCE.

  SPECIFICATIONS TO FOLLOW.

  Carter lit another cigarette as the teletype spewed out various specifications for explosives, for placing the charges, and for probable effects.

  When it was finished, Carter teletyped back his acknowledgment, then shut down the circuit. He reread the instructions, then pulled off the paper, the carbon, and the ribbon, and brought them to the shredder set up in one corner where he destroyed them.

  "Get the colonel back down here, if you would," he asked the tech, and by the lime he had finished destroying the message and copy, the colonel was back.

  Carter quickly explained what he needed, and within half an hour, his trunk loaded with plastique and the timers, he drove back to the hotel and parked at the back of the lot.

  He went up to their room. Roberta had been asleep, but she woke up when he came in.

  "You "re back," she sighed sleepily, and she came into his arms.

  He kissed her neck, and she moaned deep in her throat as she moved even closer. "Nick?" she said.

  He pushed her back, then kissed the nipples of her breasts, her flat stomach, and soon they were making love, her body soft and yielding, while at the same moment one part of his mind was thinking about the night to come.

  It was going to be difficult to get close enough to plant the plastique. Besides the fence, which he was reasonably certain was alarmed, there wasn't a hell of a lot of cover out there. A few rocks here and there, but no tall grass or trees or anything of that sort.

  He didn't think there was any way around their personnel security. He did not think he'd be able to get in through the front gate. Not this time. No… it would have to be over or through the fence. Down the hill. Plant the charges. And then get the hell out.