Wind screamed all around us, and in the whipping, swirling gusts of snow we could barely see each other. Garth wrapped the silver, life-preserving shroud tightly around me, then lifted me up in his arms in order to keep my stocking-clad feet out of the snow. We might have been somewhere in a blizzard-whipped Arctic, except for the huge, towering black shapes of surrounding buildings which occasionally came into view when the wind shifted. Off to our right, McCloskey and Palorino were conferring with three parka-clad policemen. When they had finished, the three men nodded, then walked away, quickly disappearing into the blinding snow. A few moments later we heard an approaching roar, and then we were surrounded by men on snowmobiles. McCloskey and Palorino replaced two of the drivers. At McCloskey’s signal, Garth sat me down on the seat behind Palorino; I pulled my feet up as far as possible, adjusted my silver shroud, then wrapped my arms tightly around his waist, burying my bare hands in the deep pockets of his down-filled parka. Garth climbed on behind McCloskey, and then we were off in a roar of unmuffled engines.
Speeding, bumping, sliding, carving through the Arctic night that had somehow descended over New York City, I was completely disoriented. I knew where we had to go, and how to get there, but it was as if the world had been turned upside down, and the swirling white made it impossible—for me, at least—to tell direction. But McCloskey and Palorino somehow managed to keep going. Occasionally we swerved sharply, or flew through the air; after a few of these tricky ground and aerial maneuvers, I realized that we were running an obstacle course of abandoned cars that were three-quarters buried in the snow. With my cheek pressed tightly against Frank Palorino’s back, I could see only to my right, and, although we were making our way through midtown Manhattan, I could not make out a single landmark through the slit in my silver wrapping. I wasn’t exactly warm; but, with Palorino’s body acting as a wind screen, I wasn’t exactly cold, either, and I knew that I would be all right as long as I kept the foillike material wrapped around me. I felt like a candy bar. Oddly enough, my feet were giving me the most problems—not from cold, but from the heat from the manifold on which I was resting them; I kept pulling them up and trying to lock my knees against the front of the carriage rack.
The amphetamine and antibiotic injection notwithstanding, I kept passing out for brief but dangerous periods; wrapped in my thin cocoon in a world of darkness, I kept segueing in and out of semiconsciousness. Every once in a while I was conscious of Palorino’s hand on my hip or thigh as he reached back to make certain I was still centered on the seat behind him. Once I woke up to find that we had stopped, and we were surrounded by a number of National Guardsmen who were talking to us excitedly—nodding, gesturing, pointing. There was the acrid smell of gasoline, and then the delicious aroma of coffee right under my nose. I grabbed at the Styrofoam container and drank greedily, burning my tongue and the roof of my mouth and not caring. Then came the deafening roar of the motors, and we were once again on our way.
Sometimes I dreamed fever dreams, and in one of my dreams I glimpsed a great silver object in the snow, white on white, a potential weapon in our thus far decidedly one-sided battle against insane men and mindless nature. “SST!” I shouted against the thick material of Frank Palorino’s parka. “SST!”
But Palorino couldn’t hear me over the roar of the engine, or maybe I was only dreaming that I was shouting, because there was no response. Time lost meaning, and I just focused all my attention on the need to hang on to my driver. Once when I woke up, my surroundings seemed clearer, and I realized that it was dawn. I drifted back to sleep.
14.
I awoke with a start, started to sit up, and grabbed at my head as a sharp pain shot through my skull. For a moment I couldn’t figure out where I was or what had happened—and then I remembered. I sat up straight, ignoring the pain in my head, and looked around me. It took me a few moments to orient myself, and then I realized that I was alone on the backseat of an olive-drab-colored National Guard Sno-Cat, which had been left with the motor running and the heater turned on full blast. Above the steady, throaty growl of the Sno-Cat’s engine, I could hear wind screaming outside the frosted Plexiglas windows. The storm had not let up, but the milky light pouring in through the windows told me that it was day. I glanced at my watch, then realized that it had been thoroughly disabled during my tussle and dousing with Tanker Thompson.
Cursing under my breath, I yanked on the door handle and pushed open the door with my shoulder; the door was promptly caught and yanked back off its hinges by a powerful gust of wind. I stuck out my head, squinted against the swirling snow; the Sno-Cat, along with the two snowmobiles we had been riding on, was parked atop a massive snowdrift near the entrance to the control tower at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Still cursing Garth for leaving me behind, I eased back into the interior of the Sno-Cat to take stock of myself. I felt groggy, to be sure, but I thought that my fever might be down. I took the plastic bottle of amphetamines out of my pocket, shook out one of the green pills, and swallowed it. Then I rewrapped myself in my foil shroud, slid back across the seat, and fell out into the snow. I slid down the face of the drift on my back, got up, hippety-hopped and waded through the snow in my stocking feet to the entrance to the control tower. I went through the door, paused long enough to brush as much snow as I could off my socks, then hurried up the stairs.
I found Garth, McCloskey, Palorino, and two National Guardsmen up in the glass dome at the top of the control tower talking to two unshaven, obviously exhausted air traffic controllers who kept shaking their heads and gesturing out the windows.
Garth turned and saw me as I came through the door. “Mongo!”
“What time is it?”
“Four o’clock,” Garth said quietly.
Eight hours left.
“Are the telephones working?”
Garth shook his head.
“We can’t wait.”
“Mongo, there’s nothing we can do but wait and hope,” McCloskey replied in a weary voice. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark circles around them. “Nothing can get out of here; even if it could, it’s debatable whether we could get to Idaho in time to do anything. Our only hope is that we’ll get telephone communications back in time for the Air Force to send planes to find and destroy the place.”
“There’s at least one child in there, McCloskey,” Garth said evenly, “and probably more. If you bomb Eden, you’ll kill children.”
The muscles in McCloskey’s jaw clenched, and he looked away. “I know that—but it won’t be my decision. That’s certainly what they’ll have to do. It’s the only course of action that makes sense. You said you don’t know exactly where Eden is, and you don’t even know where the transmitter is inside Eden. The Air Force certainly isn’t going to want to waste time looking for it; there’s too much risk, and too little time.”
“There’s already too little time for us to waste any of it standing around here and having this conversation,” I said. “The place to establish communications is in the air, away from this storm. There’ll at least be military planes in the air. We can communicate with them, and they’ll find a way to get through to Shannon or Mr. Lippitt.”
“For Christ’s sake, Frederickson, you’ve got eyes! Can’t you see what’s going on out there?!”
I turned to one of the air traffic controllers, a slight, blue-eyed man with blond hair that was now greasy and plastered to his forehead. “The Concorde. Does Air France or British Airways have one parked here now?”
The blue-eyed man looked at his equally disheveled companion, who nodded. “Yes,” he said, turning back to me. “British Airways—it was the last plane in before we closed down the airport. But I don’t see how … Even if the captain agreed to make the attempt, it would be suicidal to try to take off in this storm. The wind shear factors alone would be almost beyond belief, and—”
“Where are the captain and his crew staying?!” I snapped, grabbing Garth’s wrist and bending it around in order
to look at his watch. It was 4:28.
“The International Hotel, up the way.”
“I know where it is,” I replied, turning to the senior National Guardsman. “Captain, do you suppose you could round up some of your men and plow out a corridor of sorts in front of the British Airways hangar?”
The guardsman looked at McCloskey, who nodded. “I can try,” the guardsman replied tersely.
I said, “I don’t want it plowed right down to the tarmac; it would only drift in again. See if you can level off the drifts and leave a cushion of, say, two or three feet. The path should be at least as wide as the hangar doors, and as long as you can make it. And make sure there are no buried planes or machinery out there. Okay?”
“I’ll do my best, Frederickson. Good luck to you guys.”
“And to you.” I turned back to the blue-eyed air traffic controller. “Can I borrow your watch?”
Without a word, the man removed the stainless steel watch from his wrist, handed it to me. I put it on.
“Let’s get going,” Garth said. “We’ve got to get up the road to the hotel.”
Leaving the two stunned air traffic controllers staring after us, the two policemen, Garth, and I hurried back down the stairs. Once again Garth picked me up and carried me up the side of the drift to one of the two snowmobiles. It was almost completely dark now, and I huddled in my silver wrap behind Frank Palorino as the snowmobile engines roared to life and we raced ahead through the blizzard.
The International Hotel was bathed in a dim, eerie glow, the power supplied by emergency generators which I was vaguely surprised to see were still working. We drove right up to the entrance, got off, and walked into a lobby that was overflowing with men, women, and children huddled in overcoats, blankets supplied by the Red Cross, whatever they could find. We went to the front desk, where McCloskey showed his shield to a weary-looking middle-aged man who looked about to fall asleep on his feet. McCloskey asked what room the British Airways captain was staying in, and after some fumbling through file cards the desk clerk found the information. The elevators had been shut down to conserve emergency power; we hurried up the stairs to the third floor, where Garth knocked on the door to Room 315.
I glanced at the loose-fitting watch the air traffic controller had given me; it was 5:30.
Six and a half hours.
The door was opened by a bleary-eyed, unshaven man in a thoroughly rumpled flight attendant’s uniform. McCloskey showed the man his shield. The man turned on the light, and we stepped into the first of what was actually a suite of rooms in which all of the dozen or so crew and flight attendants of the British Airways Concorde were sleeping on beds, couches, in chairs, or on the floor. The attendant stepped over three snoring men on the floor, shook the shoulder of a man who was sleeping in a chair with a yellow blanket wrapped around him. He stirred; the attendant whispered something in his ear, and he sat up quickly, then stood up.
The man was about six feet tall, with sharp features, deep brown eyes, and a firm set to his jaw and mouth. Even dressed only in boxer shorts and an undershirt, he had the bearing of a man used to command.
“I’m Captain Jack Holloway,” the man said as he came across the room to us. “Which of you is the police lieutenant?”
“I am,” McCloskey said, and then proceeded to tell Captain Jack Holloway the purpose of our visit.
McCloskey spoke unhurriedly, but in a firm, clear voice as he related the events that had occurred in the past few days, concluding with his description of finding us strapped to a B-53 hydrogen bomb—which, by now, we hoped had been deactivated—in a penthouse suite at the top of a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan, and the existence of at least two other such bombs, on opposite sides of the world, that would explode unless a way was found to destroy the transmitter that would send the signal to set them off.
By the time McCloskey had finished, all of the people in the suite were awake. Female crew members who had been sleeping in the other room were huddled just inside the doorway, eyes wide with shock and faces pale. One of the women suddenly began to sob uncontrollably.
“Captain,” I said when McCloskey had finished, “the whole idea is to somehow find a way to get up in the air—high enough and far enough away from the storm so that Garth—my brother here—and I can make contact with certain powerful people we know in Washington; even if the phones there are still out—and we don’t know that they are—there should still be lines of military communication that can be used. If we can get through to them, either of the two men will act as quickly as humanly possible to mobilize forces to infiltrate the structure that houses the transmitter, which is somewhere outside Boise, Idaho. But it’s going to take time for us to get them the message, and it will take them time to get planes into the air, and then find the place. Time is something we’re rapidly running out of.”
“Are you sure of your information?” Holloway asked in a firm voice.
“Yes,” Garth replied in an equally firm voice. “We all saw the bomb in Manhattan, and there’s absolutely no reason to doubt the existence of at least two others—in Detroit, and near Israel.”
I said, “Captain, right now there are men plowing snow in front of the hangar where your Concorde is parked. Not all of the snow—they’re trying to plow it down to a level of two or three feet, enough to belly-slide on if that’s what has to be done. My thinking is that if there’s one plane that’s sleek and powerful enough to slice its way up and out of this blizzard, it’s the SST—if we can only get it going, and off the ground.”
“And you think we might be able to do that by sliding the plane on its belly in the snow?” Holloway asked evenly.
“You’re the only man who can answer that.”
“It’s impossible, Captain,” a very thin, tall man standing over in a corner said in a tense voice. “Even if you could gain enough speed to lift off the ground, which is unlikely, the wind shear out there would certainly tip your wings, or even slam you right back into the ground. It would be suicide to even try.”
I swallowed hard, licked my cracked lips. “Is that right, Captain?”
Jack Holloway drew back his shoulders and adjusted his boxer shorts. “Frankly,” he announced in his clipped British accent, “the odds of us even getting off the ground before we tip over and explode are not at all favorable.”
“Captain,” I said with a heavy sigh, “naturally, we have no right to—”
“But we must attempt it, of course,” Holloway continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “After all, the lives of millions of people depend on us, no?”
“Yes,” Garth said softly. “You’re a good man, Captain.”
“Captain Holloway,” one of the women in the doorway said, “I’ll go.”
There was a chorus of murmured assents as every member of the British crew started forward and pressed around us.
Holloway held up his hand, and everyone fell silent. “That won’t be necessary, Evelyn,” he said in an even voice. “After all, we’re not carrying the Queen, are we? None of you will be going on this trip.”
“I will be going, sir,” the tall, thin man who had described the attempt as impossible said. “Although it’s possible for you to pilot the plane alone, that certainly won’t increase your odds, will it? I suggest you could use a copilot and navigator.”
Holloway’s brows knit slightly as he thought about it. Finally he nodded. “Very well, Nigel,” he said. “I do believe you’re right. Gentlemen, this is Lieutenant Nigel Fickley, my copilot and navigator.”
We all exchanged nods. Crew members brought the two men their uniforms, and they began to dress.
“Captain, what’s your fuel situation?” I asked. “I understand yours was the last flight in before the airport shut down, so you didn’t have time to refuel.”
“That’s correct,” Holloway said as he carefully adjusted his tie and brushed a speck of lint off his jacket. “But we have sufficient fuel to get up—if that’s possible—and ride beyond th
e radius of the storm.”
“Do you have enough fuel to get us to Idaho? It’s about two thousand miles.”
Holloway turned to his slim navigator, who gave a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders. “Perhaps we can scrape up some fuel somewhere in the terminal.”
“Captain,” Garth said, “I know it’s asking a lot when you’ve already agreed to risk your life, but Mongo and I have to get to Boise, if we can. There’s no telling how close a margin the Army and Air Force will be working on by the time we can get our message out and they can get mobilized. The logic of choosing the greatest good for the greatest number of people dictates that they’ll just fly in and bomb the biosphere to bits if the time margin is too close. There’s at least one innocent in there—a little girl. Mongo and I would like to try to get her out before the bombs fall, if that’s what’s going to happen.”
“Even if the bombs end by falling on you?”
Garth’s silence, our answer, was most eloquent.
“Well, then,” Holloway said as he slipped on a fur-lined parka and zipped it up, “I guess we’ll just have to find fuel, or coax sufficient mileage out of the aircraft, to get you to Idaho. We certainly won’t have enough to get back, but I’m sure Her Majesty will understand. Shall we go and see how the plowing is coming along?”
“Just one more thing, Captain,” Garth said. “We know you can fly an SST—probably by yourself, if you had to. Can you drive a snowmobile?”
Ah. I thought I had a pretty good idea why my brother had asked the question; I caught his eye, gave a curt nod of approval.
Holloway looked slightly taken aback. “Actually, we don’t get that much snow in England.”
“I can handle it, Garth,” I said as I walked quickly to a desk set against the opposite wall. I opened a drawer, took out a pad and a ballpoint pen.
“You can hardly stand up.”
Second Horseman Out of Eden Page 20
