Mikail now had a reason to hate.
CHAPTER 15
Tuesday Afternoon – Election Day
It was nearing noon as Klaus von Baron stepped out onto the platform of his multi-million dollar Red Bear Starjump capsule and looked downward, 128,000 feet, toward the blue, grey circle of the earth. In its curvilinear contrast to the deep, black expanse of space, the planet splayed beneath his feet, looking mysterious and malleable, like a floating lump of clay waiting to be formed if only he could get his hands around it.
“Checklist, item seventeen,” Klaus heard through his headset from Starjump Mission Control in Roswell. “Engage capsule release timer. Near your left hand, Red Bear, down below the seat reconnect and next to the O2 injection port. Flip up the guard and throw the red switch.”
The command sounded like a faraway dream reaching into his conscience, the only other sound being the measured rhythm of his own thick breathing. Klaus looked down, as did the millions of people worldwide watching over his shoulder, over the internet, and took in the awesome scene, feeling his smallness against the massive earth.
With the bulky suit restricting his movement, he moved clumsily in response to the instruction. He thought about the millions of dollars that had gone into manufacturing the suit knowing that, in just a moment, he would be plummeting at greater than the speed of sound, the first human to break the sound barrier outside of a vehicle, without a capsule or ship, in a tumbling, rotating freefall. The suit would be the only thing between him and death. In fact, without it, right now he would already be dead.
Klaus was already twice as high as the “Armstrong Limit,” which is the height at which the barometric pressure is so low that water will boil at room temperature. No human can live above the Armstrong Limit in an unpressurized atmosphere. The suit was his life, and it represented all such systems of human dependency. When man throws his life into the dead hands of the machine and counts on the inanimate to operate as it should, he becomes acutely aware of the tenuous miracle of creation. If the suit developed a rip or tear now, his blood would boil and the capsule would be his airy tomb. In that case (if he failed to complete checklist item seventeen), the Starjump capsule would float along, losing atmosphere, until it fell randomly somewhere, probably into an ocean.
If the suit failed at any time during the fall, traveling at 800 M.P.H. or around Mach 1.2, depending on the altitude, Klaus would either flash freeze, or he would pass out and be dead in seconds. Whether his chute opened or not at that point would be immaterial, because it would just be an instrument for delivering his body back to earth for burial.
Klaus knew that his jump was an historic one. He knew it was being played LIVE on YouTube. He knew that once he stepped off the platform and threw his body into space he would have a limited time to stabilize his fall and straighten out his body before he reached the point of no return where he would either have to pull the cord to his parachute and slow his all too rapid descent or push along in the slip of atmosphere until his body passed the wave field that would produce a sonic boom. He knew that only bullets and missiles and spaceships and meteors had ever achieved what he would now be doing with his own flesh and blood inside the mix of chemical-laced fabrics that contained the technology that would keep him alive like an umbilical cord inside a womb. He knew that over eight million people were watching him go through his egress checks as he slid to the edge of the capsule. Beyond that, he knew very little.
He did not know, for example, that when he engaged the capsule release timer that he was not actually activating the capsule’s controlled descent functions. He did not know that, in fact, when he flipped the switch he would set in motion the genesis event that would signal the end of the world as everyone knew it, and the beginning of a whole new era. He did not know that, by innocently throwing the red switch as he’d been commanded to do through the signal in his helmet from mission control, he would sign the death warrant of over 300 million people in the United States alone, and that of over six billion people worldwide. He could not have known that flipping a toggle switch would rip a tear in the pressurized space suit called “the grid,” an artificial system that was absolutely necessary to keep humans alive in the beginning of the 21st Century.
No, Klaus von Baron was innocent when he flipped the switch that started the timer that in four minutes would silently launch a small ultralight craft, no larger than a breadbox, that carried a miniaturized “super-EMP” warhead, that would glide completely undetected through space to its designated vectors. There, when it detonated, it would change the world forever.
Klaus was innocent. At least… he was as innocent as anyone can be who gives his life and the lives of his fellow humans over to be governed and maintained by the machines.
****
“Checklist, item seventeen. Check.”
It will take Klaus about eight minutes to complete his historic jump into the record books, and eight minutes hence, when he stands up and raises his hands in victory on the desert of a pink, dusty New Mexico badlands, he still will not know that he has landed on a completely different world than the one he left only that morning, the one he saw from his perch twenty-four miles up in space.
He does not know, and he will not know, that the moment of his greatest triumph is the moment of humankind’s end… at least, an end to the world the way almost everyone alive has ever known it.
Perhaps it is not too much to say that Klaus von Baron’s jump was one small leap for man, but one giant leap backwards for mankind.
****
In Warwick, the very un-Civil War raged on. While neighbor continued to fight neighbor and ancient rivalries flared back up into contemporary reasons to kill and harm and maim, a search was on.
Sergei Dimitrivich, Vladimir Nikitch, a handful of their Youth Revolutionary Forces, and six Spetznaz soldiers were going door to door in the town looking for Vasily Romanovich Kashparov and whatever other traitors to the Revolution could be found. Truth be told, they wanted Vasily mainly so they could find out what he knew about an escape route out of Warwick.
Frankly, the Spetznaz and their Communist bosses who had sent them to Warwick in the first place could not care less about Vasily Kashparov. They wanted the oldlings, and they wanted all of them. To the Russian Special Forces operatives, capturing the oldlings was the entire reason that they were going through any of this. That was why they had parachuted into Warwick before the planned attacks on the U.S. and the West. Mikail, the Youth Forces, all of them, were just tools—useful idiots—mechanisms used to bring about a necessary end.
Their orders from their commanders in the GRU had been clear. Support and stabilize the town so that the oldlings of Warwick—the ones who had been there since the very beginning—could be intensively interrogated.
The new leaders of the New Soviet Union, after they were done brushing America and the West off the map for eternity, wanted to be able to track down every American Spy in Russia, and Warwick had been the main supplier of authentic Russian American spies since the 1960’s. Every one of those agents of capitalist America would need to be rooted out, and, within the aged minds and feeble memories of Warwick’s oldlings, those names would be stored like they were in a computer databank. Eighty of those oldlings were already being questioned in the locker rooms under the Warwick Gym. There were more out there, at least there ought to be.
Lacking any better options, the Spetznaz troops had thrown their weight behind Mikail in the battle for Warwick. That decision wasn’t turning out well, and they were beginning to have doubts about his ability to deliver on his promises, but for now their primary function took priority over their personal feelings. In addition to the large contingent of troops “manning the walls” so to speak—guarding the village to keep the people in and the rest of the world out—there were specialists involved in the interrogations in the basement of the gymnasium. There were also soldiers still involved in trying to police the town and stop the fighting. These were the un
its traveling with Vladimir, trying to root out all resistance and end talk of revolution or escape.
To the Russians, if this Vasily Kashparov knew a way out of the Charm School, then he would also know if any of the oldlings had already escaped, or if any more were hidden in the town’s many root cellars and basements. They wanted to find Vasily merely so they could find any oldlings hiding from this new Inquisition.
The search for Vasily, like the revolution itself, was not going well. Two of the Youth Forces, untrained and lacking in military skills and tactics, had already been killed executing the searches. That fact had angered Vladimir to no end. The young man, already a brutal sadist, became doubly efficient and intensive in his application of whatever means he deemed necessary to extract information from the people of Warwick.
A proper search, meant an everywhere search, and that meant a systematic, door-to-door examination, even while a pitched and rolling battle was taking place in the town. Warwick was not a normal, modern village. The people were Russian, and mostly agrarian. They liked to dig, and almost every house had storm cellars and basements and even vegetable larders formed of concrete, or crafted from old freezers buried in the backyards. There were a lot of places to hide and therefore, a lot of places to search, to coax the earth to give up her secrets.
Vladimir’s brutality had grated on the Spetznaz soldiers, who, though they were certainly not humanitarians or choir boys in their own right, recognized that if this young Stalin ever intended to lead people, there might need to be some people left to lead. His tactics were more akin to an extermination than a systematic search of the village. They noticed, but did not question (yet) his brutish methods, mostly because they needed him to guide them through the town and its maze-like structures.
Coldly, and violently, the team went from house to house on their mission.
****
In the Warwick Gymnasium, Mikail was doing his best to hold together both his crumbling coalition and his relationship with the Spetznaz soldiers who nominally had the most firepower in the town. The civil war was turning against Mikail, mainly because the splintered and fragmented opposition was starting to coalesce into a loose affiliation of those whose only unifying tenet was their opposition to Mikail and the Communists.
The tide had turned sometime during the mid-afternoon. Mikail couldn’t precisely pin down the moment his short reign in Warwick had come to an end, but he increasingly recognized the signs. Hitler had experienced such a turning point, as had Robespierre and other failed revolutionaries. In fact, almost all agitators who advocate for a takeover of power, unless their cause is backed by consent of the people or sufficient force to ignore such consent – almost all such would-be dictators in their turn come to the realization that all is lost. As a student of history, Mikail knew that there was only one avenue possible once his grip on power released, and that was… recriminations.
Recriminations. That’s a very nice word for “payback,” and such a fancy word does little to describe the awful meting out of revenge that can follow tyrants like a shadow follows a man on a sunny afternoon. Mikail knew his moment in that sun had passed as he felt the fiery orb setting over his small, troubled town.
There was a look in the eye of the Youth Revolutionary Forces, and that look began to evolve and spread, and soon a unit of Spetznaz forces approached with the inevitable official announcement that Mikail was very earnestly encouraged to meet with representatives of the coalition forces in the village. He knew this meant he would be asked to arrange his own surrender for trial.
This was how it had to be. It was destiny. History tends to impress this fact on the mind for those who care to venture into books to learn of the spiritual physics of such things. Mikail had done so, and he knew the implications.
So Mikail met with the “peace” commission, and terms were arranged and agreed to, although he did not go completely quietly into the approaching, dark night. He had a word for them as they departed.
“The only thing you all have in common is your hatred of me!” Mikail shouted at the backs of the opposition commission as they turned to leave the gymnasium. They turned to look at him in contemptuous regard. He laughed out loud. “What will you have when I am gone?” he asked. “You will have civil war and strife until you are all dead!” He said this in the way that prophecies are often uttered, though perhaps even he didn’t realize that what he said was so prophetic. It was more of a statement of fact mixed with the slightest hint of wishful thinking.
“That is what we have now,” Konstantin Kopinsky, the jeweler’s son, shouted back. His anger was emphasized by the sound of the gymnasium door slamming itself shut, effectively ending Mikail’s reign over Warwick. Mikail was given twenty-four hours to cede control of the government and all of his forces to the coalition, at which time he would be arrested and taken to the prison, where he was certain he would be locked away for the rest of his natural life.
That was the deal that he agreed to, though he had no intention of hanging around Warwick long enough to honor it. He would not allow himself to be the subject of his own revolutionary dogma. He would not suffer the indignities of his own interminable crimes. He would not allow his indiscretions to result in the crowd’s recriminations.
****
On Tuesday morning, Peter announced to the other three in the tunnel that they needed to put a watch (or more accurately, a “listen”) back at the tunnel entrance, inside the tunnel but below the bureau in Peter’s basement. They would want to know, he said, if anyone came snooping around the basement and, by listening from the post below the bureau, a person could faintly hear the racket going on outside, in the town. Cole was the first to volunteer, saying he liked the opportunity to read the scene by the details coming from the imagination he applied to the noise.
The battle had raged through the night, and by the morning of Election Day in America, some of the fury and rage in Warwick had spent itself, but not all of it. Upon his return to the dugout, the pudgy intellectual gave a full report. “There is still sporadic fighting. It’s hard to hear from the tunnel, and we only get an idea of what is going on in that one area of town, but the tempest certainly isn’t as loud as it was last night,” Cole said. He took off his glasses and began to clean them. “I wouldn’t say it was all much ado about nothing, but I suppose all’s well that ends well.”
“Oh, you and your Shakespeare!” Natasha said. She shook her head, but you could see that there was the slightest hint of a smile on her face. She looked over to Lang and added, “I’ve had to put up with this my whole life!”
Kolya put his glasses back on to his face. “As you like it, dear sister.” He then turned to Lang and said, “my dearest blood-kin here is a shrew that needeth to be tamed.” He winked.
Peter glared at Cole, not entirely appreciating his humor in such a critical moment, but then his face softened and he smiled. “Well, I’ll not try to keep up with you measure for measure, so we’ll end the Shakespeare titles game and maybe you can give us the rest of your report?”
Cole smiled. “Well, it didn’t sound like anyone has been in the basement. The bureau is still there and secured, and the whole time I listened, I didn’t hear a thing, except for the occasional bark of a pistol or a shout from someone off in the distance.”
Peter nodded his head, but remained silent while Lang shifted his weight, giving an indication that he was uncomfortable just sitting around in the dugout.
“Why don’t we go find this water plant, Peter? We can’t just stay down here for days. Anyway, we can hide out there until things become less… cloudy.”
“I figured we’d just stay here until maybe Friday. It is safe and warm, and besides, we have such nice toilet facilities in here!” Peter pointed his thumb in the direction of the underground “outhouse.” In the dugout, which was at the midway point in the tunnel, Peter and Lev had dug a tiny (and short) little indentation into the dirt, which turned to the left so that the person using it could have a littl
e privacy. The facility consisted of a hole dug three feet deep with a wooden box atop it. The box had a hole cut into it. There was a bucket full of sawdust next to the toilet so that after it was used, the waste could be covered with a thin layer of wood shavings. This kept the scent down. Lev Volkhov and Peter had used the toilet while building the tunnel, so that they didn’t have to go all the way back up to the house each time they needed to eliminate.
“The toilet is fine, Peter. A fine invention it is,” Lang said, smiling. “But I’m getting a bit batty just sitting around. Cole can read the same books over and over again, and I think he’s memorized The Poems of C.L. Richter, but since I didn’t find any Solzhenitsyn in Clay’s backpack, I need some fresh air and some trees over my head. I’m just getting tunnel fever.”
Cole shook his head and tried to change the subject, to divert his younger friend from his growing agitation. “Actually, I’ve come to really appreciate the poems of Mr. Richter, whosoever he is. They have a sort of charm that is lacking in a lot of poetry.”
“Self-indulgent nonsense,” Peter sniffed, kicking a clod of dirt across the dugout floor.
“Be that as it may, Peter,” Cole responded, “the poems are true, and sweet. They come from that place inside of us where everyone touches the poetic imagination. I think that, in a dark world that is crumbling on its rotted foundation,” he pointed upwards with his index finger, “sweet and true is nice to have around.”
Peter took a deep breath and thought for a moment in silence. It seemed that he had been unofficially elected as leader, and the other three younger members of the group seemed to want his approval even as they sought, as youth always does, to act as if their world didn’t hinge on receiving it. He nodded to Cole, as if in resignation, but he thought to himself how perhaps the book’s pages could be better used as an accessory kept near the tunnel’s toilet. He smiled at his own wicked humor.
Wick - The Omnibus Edition Page 27
