by James Axler
"How is it?" Ryan asked.
"That's like… like askin' Mrs. Lincoln if she liked the play." He croaked a laugh, like a raven, very far off.
"Listen, Rick." Ryan knelt down at his side, Krysty and J.B. standing behind him. There was the sound of footsteps, and Ryan turned to see that Doc and Jak had also entered the room.
"Go ahead, man. Speaking's getting harder, but I can still listen real good."
"We got clear of the ville. But we faced up with that sec man, Gregori Zimyanin. Mebbe we should have chilled him. I don't know. There's too many throats to try and cut them all."
"You fear that the Russians might try to pursue us?" Doc asked.
"Yeah. Their tracker got wasted. But Zimyanin's not a stupe. He got a map and he'll have sec reports. Food stolen from villes around. Won't take him that long to start drawing some lines and find that they all connect close by here. Then it's only an hour or so before we get visitors."
Rick swallowed several times, as though he were trying to summon up strength to speak, coughing to clear his throat. A shimmering ghost of a near-smile appeared and hung on his lips for a few heartbeats, then vanished.
"You mean get my finger out of the hole, Ryan. Time's a wasting. Sure. You get me down to the gateway and sit me comfortable and… Hell's bells, it hurts… Help me get there and we'll save the ship."
"When, Ryan?" Jak asked.
"Now."
"THERE WERE SOME KILLINGS. Some men disappeared. I want the request taken to my office. Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna will know. I must know as soon as possible. While we wait, I want men to sweep every stinking hovel for twenty miles around. I want word of food or clothes being taken. Word of any strangers. Word of hearing blasters. Tracks. Wags. Anything that's even a breath away from the ordinary. Anything at all. Understand? Good. Then get on with it. I'm sure we're close. I want to be closer."
WHEN THEY HELPED RICK to his feet, Ryan saw that the tattered and scorched American flag was neatly folded at his side. The freezie was almost helpless, unable to stand unaided. Outside, the skies had cleared and the temperature had dropped below zero. Krysty had suggested a fire to keep the glow of life in Rick, but Ryan vetoed the idea. The smoke from the chimney would carry for miles and would lead any pursuers to them as surely as a bank of floodlights.
Zorro was underfoot as they began to move Rick up the main stairs of the house. Ryan nearly tripped over the puppy and kicked out at it.
"Fireblast, Doc! Keep the bitching dog out of the way or I'll snap its neck."
"Stow it, lover," Krysty protested. "It's only a little dog."
Ryan turned quickly and faced her angrily. "I meant what I said. This isn't some double-easy kids' game. I figure we have to be out of this place one way or another by the end of tomorrow. Probably sooner. Or the Russkies'll pick us off easy as a bear plucking ripe thimbleberries."
ZIMYANIN WAS ONLY a handful of miles away from the dacha by sunset of the same day. He'd enlisted one of the gangs of teenage wolverines from the nearest suburb, knowing that their blind loyalty to the Party and their insatiable relish for cruelty and death made them the perfect instruments of terror.
It had taken irritatingly long for the information he wanted to be transmitted from his office in Moscow. When it came, nobody had a decent map of the area. Zimyanin was finding that his patience was slipping from his control like sand through an hourglass. Everything was going wrong. If Aliev had still been alive he was confident that Cawdor, Dix and the rest of the spies would already be dangling from a convenient branch. If his bosses hadn't ordered them back to the ville for some popular show trials.
Now they were still at liberty and he didn't know where.
The news was beginning to filter in to him from the wolf pack.
A lad of twelve, with webbed fingers, brought word of food disappearing from some wretched collection of hovels to the southwest.
Always to the southwest.
Another boy, who seemed incapable of not picking his nose, said there was talk of a giant lone wolf that was raiding some of the hamlets, stealing food.
"Southwest?" Zimyanin asked, already knowing the answer. He wasn't surprised when the boy nodded his agreement.
By evening the local sec commander had finally been located. He had been off on a secret mission that involved some illicit cheese and beef, which he was taking a percentage of. His sister-in-law had tracked him down with the sickening news that some stone-eyed bastard of a senior sec officer wanted him urgently.
Pausing only to change his undershorts, the man rushed along to meet with Zimyanin. To his enormous relief the Muscovite didn't seem concerned about where he'd been or even what he'd been doing. Zimyanin simply wanted to draw on his specialized local information, briefing him on the situation and asking him for his thoughts.
"They are hiding," Zimyanin concluded.
"Yes, Comrade Major-Commissar. But you do not think that they might have simply kept running? That their base is farther out?"
Zimyanin had taken off his cap with the silver circle, and he rubbed his hand over his bald skull. He considered the suggestion, but swiftly rejected it.
"No."
"But they—"
"No. I plotted all reports. All of them. They began a few miles from here. No farther. And now they go back by precisely the same route. They are hiding someplace close by. I saw a name on a map. The name was Peredelkino."
The sec commander nodded thoughtfully, his brain sharpened by his fear that his black-market dealings might be discovered, and honed further by relief that they hadn't been.
"Peredelkino? Yes, I know it. The stories are that Stalin provided large houses there. In fact, I believe that the Americans were given one."
"You are sure? A dacha that was once owned by the Americans, at Peredelkino? Then we have them, Mother Russia! We have them!"
"We must mount an attack," Zimyanin continued. "Not a massive attack. It might come to that, but I want to try to take them by surprise. Send me the vicious little bastard who runs the pack."
Chapter Thirty-Four
"YOU SURE ARE one powerful woman, Krysty," Ryan said, shaking his head as he saw again the full extent of the damage done to the locking mechanism of the gateway door.
"Not my strength," she replied. "I can only do that by calling on the Earth Mother. You know that."
"Sure."
He looked at the twisted metal, with entrails of the lock hanging out. Doc was at his elbow, peering at the wreckage.
"A sorry sight, my dear Ryan. Depressing to see the cunning works of man's hands laid so sadly low, is it not?"
"It is, Doc."
"I confess that I have spent some totally unprofitable hours while you were away, down here in the bowels of the earth. I was trying to work out some way whereby we might bypass the lock and trigger the jump mechanism from within."
"Nothing?" Ryan asked.
"It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools. I had no tools to blame."
"How about now," J.B. suggested, "with what we brought?"
Doc scratched the side of his nose in a vaguely ruminative manner. "Perhaps. And, then again, perhaps not."
"Yes," Rick muttered. Then, much louder, "Yes, we can!"
"Sure?"
There was a sudden, startling and hectic glow in his sunken eyes. "We can, Ryan. Don't doubt it, buddy. Just get the guys lifting barges and toting bales and all that shit. It'll take us the best part of six or eight hours." Another fit of hideous, racking coughs shook his whole frail body. "If we're lucky, that is."
THE BOY WHO LED the pack of sec brats was only a year or so younger than Jak Lauren. He had the same sharp planes to the bones of his face and the same blank killer's eyes.
He wore a cut-down woman's jacket in pale blue artificial silk, the sleeves hacked out and the front daubed with maroon circles of paint. The pants were small sec-issue, tucked into a worn pair of canvas boots. The ubiquitous strangler's cord—the badge
of the leader in a wolf pack— was tucked into the narrow belt.
The gang was a little larger than most. Zimyanin had counted eighteen of them, about half girls.
"You understand what I want you to do?"
For several seconds the boy said nothing, his face showing as much emotion as a slab of weathered stone. The officer wondered if he might be deaf, or very simpleminded and was about to repeat the question. But the kid's mouth clicked open and words came out slowly.
"Yes, Comrade Major-Commissar." Another long, long pause. "We will approach and enter the large house there. We will kill all we find. If we are seen and stopped, we come back and we report to you."
"No, no, no! Don't kill them all. I want the one-eyed man, the cripple and the woman with red hair spared and taken alive. Alive! You understand what that word means?"
"It means not dead, Comrade Major-Commissar. Not dead."
"Good."
"But, Comrade Major-Commissar," the boy continued, "if we have to make them all not alive, what then?"
"Then you make them all not alive. But I most earnestly want that one-eyed man not dead. Him more than the others."
"Yes," he replied, nodding.
As the boy walked slowly away to pass on the orders to his gang, Zimyanin watched him. "What a strangely gifted child," he said quietly in English. "Such a credit to his parents. Not that anyone would ever claim the credit for having birthed that monster."
THE WRENCHES WERE a hundred years old, the metal corroded and frail. To try to use them with a man's full power behind the effort would mean a handful of twisted rust. Everything had to be done so gently and cautiously.
Ryan was only too conscious that every hour sliding past doubled the threat from the Russian security forces. He was already regretting leaving Gregori Zimyanin alive. It would have been worth the price of a bullet to remove him from the game. But regrets were a valueless currency, and Ryan didn't waste much time thinking about it. But he did make sure that anyone not working down in the cellars of the mansion was up top, watching for the inevitable attack.
After two hours of intensive labor, Rick said that he felt that they were actually making some real progress.
"Got most of the lock opened up. Damage isn't as bad as it might have been. Bring me in closer. Gotta be able to see real good. And help me to a drink, one of you."
His swallowing was painful to see and hear. The disease was now racing so fast through his body that he needed continuous support. He was sweating constantly, though the subterranean rooms were bone-cold.
"How much longer do you figure, Rick?" Krysty asked as she took the mug of water from the freezie's lips.
"How long's a piece of string, lady? How high's up? How when's now? Just gotta keep doin' it my way. Suck it up and spit it out. I'll sit this one out, if you don't…" A coughing fit choked off the slurred, rambling words.
ZIMYANIN CALLED OVER the elderly captain who was acting as liaison with the local militia. "While the wolves go in, I want something in reserve."
"The little ones will not fail you, Comrade Major-Commissar."
"I do not believe they will succeed, but I am prepared to take that chance, Comrade Captain. I think that they will find themselves outmatched."
"They have removed many undesirables from these parts," the other officer protested.
Zimyanin gave a harsh barking laugh. "A mongrel might kill a hundred rats and think itself czar of the world, Comrade Captain. Then it will meet a bear."
"I understand. The Americans are dangerous, Comrade Major-Commissar?"
"Do the lakes freeze in winter, Comrade Captain? Yes, I believe they are more dangerous than anyone you will ever again encounter. Which is why I want all the reinforcements possible. Send men and roust out every male peasant between thirteen and fifty for ten miles around."
"You want me to…?" the older man began, his face puzzled.
"In olden times generals used the words 'cannon fodder,' Comrade Captain. I want as many bodies as I can to throw against that house. Better to have fifty men too many than one too few."
RYAN WAS TAKING A BREAK, squatting on the floor near one of the long elegant casements on the second story, keeping watch out across the silent fields. It had become colder, and his breath hung around his mouth like lace.
There were two races going on: one to repair the gateway before any sec men tracked them down, the other to repair the gateway before Rick Ginsberg slipped from the present into the past.
He'd walked slowly around the mansion with J.B. an hour ago, trying to guess where an attack might come, where there were weak points and where they might hope to make some kind of a defense.
"Like stopping a war wag with a sheet of wet paper," had been J.B.'s comment.
Ryan hadn't argued with it.
What they'd agreed was that they couldn't hope to fend off a serious assault on the house. There were too many ways in and not enough people to defend them. On the plus side, it was a solidly made building and it would take some hi-ex to take it apart. But if the Russians brought along gren launchers, then it wouldn't take that long to bring the walls down, though the secret stairs and the basement area would be difficult to penetrate and destroy.
Ryan glanced around the room and out onto the landing at the top of the stairs. That was where they might hold them up for a while. There had been a second flight of steps from the first floor, but it had been burned out years earlier. If the Russians wanted to take them, they would have to come up the front stairs.
J.B. had suggested the possibility of burning them out, as well, but the smoke would have attracted too much interest too soon. Better to let them come in and chill as many as possible.
Seeing friends fall, and being splashed with the blood and brains of companions, often acted as something of a deterrent.
THE INTRICATE WORK on the inside of the mat-trans lock was being carried out by Doc Tanner, working with a small screwdriver and a soldering unit while Rick watched every move. Krysty was the nurse to Doc's surgeon, handing him the tools he needed and acting as a third hand when some particularly complex and delicate maneuver was called for.
The comp-units still chattered quietly to themselves and panels of colored lights flickered and danced across the display boards.
At one point Rick turned to Krysty. "Don't forget. There are two more cryogenic complexes. Could be folks frozen like me, but maybe not so sick. Ryan knows where they are. I told him what I knew."
"I know, Rick," she replied. "One in south Texas, one up near where the Lakes were."
"Duluth, Minnesota. Ryan knows as near as I could tell him. Could be worth a look."
RYAN WALKED around the second floor, carefully checking out of every window, keeping himself flattened against the walls so that nobody outside would see him. It worried Ryan that the land was so much in deep shadow, with ditches and folds in the ground creating blind spots.
He stepped out of the most westerly room and saw four skinny kids approaching the top of the main stairs.
"Fireblast!" he roared.
Chapter Thirty-Five
RYAN FIRED four quick shots at the invading wolf pack. One was a clean kill through the side of the head, sending the young girl tumbling down the wide staircase.
One clipped the leader of the gang in the left shoulder, spinning him around as he uttered an eerie shriek of pain. The boy grabbed at the wound and dropped the garrote in the dust.
The other two rounds missed completely. Streetwise fighters almost from birth, the kids' reflexes were startlingly fast. One microsecond they were there, the next they disappeared. It flashed through Ryan's mind that the young 'uns were cut from the same cloth as Jak Lauren—reared as killers, with no fear and no pity.
Before the tangled corpse of the girl had reached the hall below, two out of the other three had darted to safety. The leader, despite his shoulder, slid down the oak balustrade, tumbling into a somersault to vanish into the shadows of the first floor
. The other girl vaulted the rail and dropped lightly to land on her feet and race away. The second boy was marginally less agile. So he died.
He stumbled as he landed, twisting his ankle. Ryan shot him through the back of the neck with a single round from the SIG-Sauer.
Apart from the breathy death rattle of the boy below, the house was suddenly, creepily silent. Ryan crouched near the top of the stairs, assuming he would hit them before any of them had managed a bridgehead on the second story. But he had no idea at all how many of the marauders were lurking on the floor below him.
Ryan's normal fighting calm and confidence had been shaken. It had never occurred to him that the enemy could infiltrate the house so easily, without being spotted. He'd imagined that there would be time enough to climb into the ruined attic and shout down to the others at the bottom of the winding stairs. But now…
It was a classic horns of a dilemma. If he risked going up to warn J.B., Krysty and Jak, then the gang might come swarming up after him and he'd be overwhelmed by numbers.
If he stayed where he was, the kids might bring in reinforcements and take him out before J.B. and the rest even knew there was danger.
Being the man he was, Ryan picked the third option. Blaster in hand, he slowly began to pick his way down the stairs, toward the ground floor where the wolf pack was hiding.
"NOT MUCH MORE. Check that the color-contacts are all connected, slide the replacement board in and cut the element force chips. Crosscurrent on the supplementary command and instruct modules. Good. Hell's bells! Let me down a little. Lay me against those gas cans. Support my back."
Rick was well into borrowed time.
Krysty was astounded at the delicacy of touch that Doc showed as he worked with microfibers and contacts, deftly repairing broken circuits where possible and looping around them when the damage was too severe. Without his scientific skill she doubted that the work would ever have been completed successfully.
