The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels)

by Jon Land

  Kamanski’s expression tightened. “That’s very good, Jared. You always were the best.”

  The Ferryman recognized an unfamiliar tone in Kamanski’s voice. He tensed and started to move. In his belt was a pistol lifted off one of Zeus’s dead bodyguards in Washington. Before he could free it, the three men from the counter and two from the booth had lunged for them with guns drawn, too well spaced for Kimberlain to possibly get them all.

  “You son of a bitch,” the Ferryman snarled, still half out of his seat.

  “Drop the gun on the floor, Jared.”

  “I could kill you before—”

  “Before they kill you,” Kamanski completed. “Yes, I’m sure you could. But you won’t, because it’ll mean your death, and under the circumstances you’ll insist on putting that off for as long as possible.”

  Kimberlain’s stare bore into the eyes across from him. “You’re one of them! You’re a Hashi!”

  “In the flesh, Jared. But don’t bother looking for the skull-and-spear tattoo. That’s been maintained only to throw persistent bastards like yourself off the track. No tattoo, no Hashi. We maintained that connection in order to exploit it in a different way. Our pursuers are never aware of our actual number or the positions some of us occupy.”

  “Pursuers like the Knights of Malta?”

  “Yes. I understand their leader was killed. Pity you didn’t die with him—or in London, as was the plan. Made things rather complicated. Exposing myself was a last resort. I knew you’d be calling after word reached me about Zeus.”

  It was all becoming clear. “Every time I got close to the Hashi with The Caretakers, something would go wrong. I could never pin it on a leak, but that’s what it was, wasn’t it?”

  Kamanski grew defensive. “Those pursuits were unsanctioned. You had no right going after us. They wanted you killed, Jared. At least I was able to keep you alive.”

  “A different strategy than the one you employed at Mendelson’s office in Boston.”

  The men with pistols drawn had advanced a little closer.

  “The gun, Jared. Now.”

  Reluctantly, the Ferryman let it clang to the floor. He looked Kamanski in the eye. “You’ve had your chances at me, Hermes, and you’ve blown them all.”

  “I’ve got one left.”

  “Maybe.”

  With that, a pair of the armed men spun him all the way around, one frisking while the other locked handcuffs onto his wrists. The three remaining gunmen nearer the counter warily kept their distance, eyes ready for any sudden motion Kimberlain might make.

  “Why’d you bring me into this in the first place, Hermes?”

  “I was ordered to by my superiors at Pro-Tech. They knew my file and my link to you. I wasn’t worried. I figured I could maintain control.” Kamanski motioned to the two men holding the Ferryman to start for the door. “Of course, I never expected you to get this far. Figuring out Lime’s murder, stopping the attempt on Eiseman, latching on to Benbasset and the Hashi—my, my, don’t you have a right to be proud of yourself!”

  “Oughta be an interesting world once you boys take over.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Except it hasn’t got a chance of working. Now order your goons off and let’s you and me walk out of here together. Shit, Hermes, I’m giving you a chance to stay alive.”

  Kamanski gawked at him disbelievingly. “You’ve got things crossed up this time, Jared. I’m calling the shots now.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re more of an underling than you’ve ever been, and if I don’t kill you here today, you’ll be dead anyway because you’ve outlived your usefulness to them.”

  “Let’s get him out of here!” Kamanski ordered, and instantly the two men grasped Kimberiain by his elbows and started to lead him toward the door out of the coffee shop and into the parking lot.

  The Holiday Inn was perched on a rise overlooking the bridge, with a decent view into New Jersey. Most of its parking lot, however, was obscured from the view of passing traffic. They emerged on the building’s side and moved quickly around to the rear, toward a black van parked by itself near the back of the lot. Kimberlain assessed the situation. Besides the men holding him by either arm, another pair with guns exposed flanked him on both sides, moving slightly ahead. A fifth was a good five yards in front of the rest and walked almost sideways so he could keep his eyes on Kimberlain as he led the way toward the van. Kamanski brought up the rear, well back, standing as the final defense and occupying the safest position if the Ferryman tried to seize the offensive.

  “Last chance, Hermes,” Kimberlain called behind him, testing the limited range the handcuffs allowed him. He knew if he managed to strip a gun free he would have to fire it with hands squeezed together by iron. “Send the goons away and we’ll talk. Time’s running out.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Kamanski replied.

  The gunman from the right flank had joined the one in front at the van’s rear doors. The gunman on the left side hung there, and the Ferryman’s captors continued to hold him at either elbow. Guns still drawn, the pair at the van started to open the doors.

  They had just depressed the latches when the double doors blasted open with a force that cracked steel into both their faces. Kimberlain watched them go flying as Winston Peet lunged from the inside. Using the shock of his assault as an ally, the Ferryman yanked free of his captors’ grasp and launched a side kick to the knee of one and smashed his foot around into the groin of the second. The second man had had time to go for his gun before crumbling and Kimberlain’s next order of business was to retrieve it from the black macadam surface even as he angled himself to finish the now kneeling first man with a vicious kick to the face.

  Kamanski, meanwhile, had missed with his first two shots and was struggling for a third when Peet hoisted the slumping body of one of the dazed gunmen effortlessly into the air and tossed him at another. The man was just aiming his gun at the giant when the impact sent him tumbling, and he launched his bullet straight into Kamanski’s chest. Kamanski gasped, reeling backward.

  Kimberlain had the pistol steadied by then and aimed back behind him. He had to twist around toward the pair of men struggling to their feet with guns in hand. Peet was rushing them, but their pistols were rising too fast, and the Ferryman started firing just as they were about to, fired and kept firing, squeezing the semiautomatic’s trigger as fast as he could. He wasn’t sure which of his bullets found the two men, but before they could get off any shots of their own at Peet, both had crumbled to the asphalt. Dropping the smoking gun, Kimberlain rushed to the fallen Kamanski while Peet dealt with the final conscious man who’d recovered enough from the Ferryman’s groin kick to try to scramble away.

  Kimberlain knelt over Kamanski and saw the blood pumping freely from his chest and pooling on the ground. He coughed, and more of it oozed frothily from his mouth. Kimberlain locked eyes with his dying stare.

  “Where’s Benbasset, David? Where can I find him?”

  The eyes barely even regarded him. “Fuck … you.” And then they locked open.

  Kimberlain rose as Peet pulled up next to him.

  “Never did trust the bastard,” the Ferryman said as much to himself as to anyone.

  “Hold still,” the giant instructed, working his way behind Kimberlain, where he proceeded to pull apart the steel chain that joined the individual cuffs together.

  Kimberlain drew his wrists in front of him and stretched the blood back into his arms as they began to run toward the spot on the other side of the building where Lisa was waiting with the car. When they had pulled into the parking lot earlier they had noticed the black van parked at the rear. That had aroused their suspicions and put Kimberlain and Peet on their guard, resulting in Peet’s own version of an insurance policy that placed him in the isolated van’s rear after Kimberlain had made his way inside.

  “Where to now?” Peet asked the Ferryman as they drew up to their car.

  “To catch
a train. Sort of.”

  Chapter 30

  LISA EISEMAN AND WINSTON PEET sat on the couch in the converted train car in Sunnyside Yard, while Captain Seven finished picking the locks on the cuffs still wrapped around Kimberlain’s wrists.

  “Fucked-up company you’re keeping, boss,” the captain noted, eyeing Peet as he reached for the remains of a marijuana joint smoldering in an ashtray.

  “Everything’s relative.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d offer your friend a toke, but it might stunt his growth.”

  Peet didn’t look amused, but his expression remained unchanged.

  “I seem to remember a time when the two of you weren’t exactly on speaking terms.”

  “Times change.”

  “Hold on a sec,” the captain said and disappeared into the kitchen contained in the second train car forming his abode.

  They had driven straight to Sunnyside Yard from the Holiday Inn, Kimberlain keeping his fingers crossed the whole way that Kamanski hadn’t managed to locate the captain’s hideaway. The Ferryman wanted to know exactly what they were facing at Outpost 10 if the Eighth Trumpet, as Brother Valette called it, came to pass.

  Seven returned with a pair of sunglasses in place and his bong. He plopped down in the black leather chair across from Kimberlain and chambered the bong with pot.

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Assume there’s an interconnected network of oil wells scattered across the Antarctic continent,” Kimberlain started. “Assume a pipeline links them up with a central pumping station called Outpost 10. You’ve got twenty-eight Jupiter-class nuclear warheads and you want to do the most damage possible to the continent. What would you do?”

  Seven spoke only after coughing out a hefty measure of the smoke he had bubbled into his lungs while the Ferryman had been speaking. His voice emerged sounding like a man with a bad cold.

  “Simple. An installation like this Outpost 10 would have two sets of pipelines, one to bring the oil into it and one to pump the oil into storage depots. Odds are those depots started overflowing a long time ago, so parts of the outgoing pipeline were probably laid all the way to various locations on the Antarctic coastline to allow easy loading onto tankers. Now since oil under such extreme temperatures would tend to coagulate and back up the works, each of the pipes would be fitted with a plug to push the oil along and clear the line. What I’d do is I’d place the individual warheads in front of the plugs within the outgoing lines and send them out into the continent to be detonated at your leisure. Hey, you shittin’ me with this or what?”

  “Just go on.”

  “Okay. You’d rig the enabled warheads on timer detonation. It wouldn’t be the most exact science in the world, but the fucks behind the warheads would be assured of a damn good spread once detonation came, which is to say: drop a piece of china on the floor and you’ll have a pretty good notion of what Antarctica would look like.”

  “Splintered? Fractured apart?”

  Captain Seven nodded as he drew in another drag off the bong. “Lots of ice melted or set adrift.” His eyes swung briefly to Peet. “Plenty for your friend over there to have his next drink on the rocks.” And when Kimberlain didn’t respond to the humor, “Hey, you are shittin’ me with this, aren’t you?”

  Kimberlain’s stare answered for him. “Tell me the implications of the fracture.”

  Seven started to lower the bong to the table, then thought better of it and tucked it into his lap. “Let’s talk about the continent in general first. You know what Antarctica is? One monster fuckin’ ice cube on top of a landmass that covers, say, about six million square miles—twice the size of the beloved U.S. of A. You can call its weight somewhere around nineteen quadrillion tons—that’s a 19 followed by fifteen zeros.”

  “The weight’s important?”

  Seven sucked in some more smoke before responding. “Not weight so much as displacement. You wanna talk nightmares? Fine. On the one hand you’ve got a great portion of our ice cube almost instantly melted by the heat generated by the ultra-megaton force of the blast, while on the other hand you’ve got the incredible concussion generated by the blast, which will fracture ice at incredible distances. And remember, long after the mushroom clouds are history, the oil fires stretching through the ice shield are going to be burning. The fire will raise the heat levels and even more ice will bite the dust.

  “Now the ice closest to the blast radiuses would get vaporized and be gonezo. But plenty more would melt, thanks mostly to the burning oil and soot blackening the landscape and helping to absorb plenty of that twenty-four-hours-a-day sunlight. So you’ve got all these tons of water plunging into the ocean in a matter of seconds, minutes, hours, days—take your pick. Conservatively you’re looking at a rise in sea levels worldwide of two hundred feet. In fact, four might be a more realistic figure.”

  “Four hundred feet?” Kimberlain repeated disbelievingly.

  “Give you an idea of the effect of that—over ninety percent of the entire state of Florida isn’t more than seventy feet above sea level.” Captain Seven blew a smoky kiss. “Good-bye, Miami. Along with every coastal city in the world. Give you an idea what we’re talking about over seventy-five percent of every U.S. of A. lives within one hundred miles of a coast.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “It’s not his fault. And I’m just getting started. It don’t matter much what is the coast and what ain’t, because there’s not gonna be many left to notice. Let’s get back to weight.” He reached down to the table for the thin pick he’d used to free Kimberlain of the handcuffs and laid it across his index finger. He looked at Lisa. “Could keep this here forever, right? Why?”

  “Because it’s balanced,” she replied.

  Seven eased the pick a bit forward and it slid off his finger to the floor. “And now it falls. Why?”

  “Because the weight wasn’t balanced anymore.”

  He smiled at her the way a teacher acknowledges good work by a student. “ ‘A’ for the day, young lady, ’cause you just described what the fracturing of Antarctica will do to the balance of the Earth. The stability of the Earth’s spin axis will get fucked royally and cause it to tumble over like an overloaded canoe. So, Ferryman, you don’t have to worry ’bout the world being turned into a giant swimming pool ’cause there won’t be many left to take a dip.”

  “Go on,” Kimberlain said.

  “You want it all?”

  “I want it all.”

  “Hope you got a strong stomach,” Captain Seven muttered and settled low and deep in his chair. “Like I said before, the problem’s one of of weight displacement. Not much different than my pick, ’cause losin’ all that ice mass will topple the planet in similar fashion. We’re talkin’ here about what is generally and accurately referred to as a ‘poleshift,’ in which everything ends up tossed out of balance. Forces of nature don’t like that much, and they want their balance back. So they try to find it. Violently. Hurricanes with thousand-mile-an-hour winds will sweep the globe. Tidal waves will be as common as Jacuzzis. Any volcano with any life left in it will burp lava and hot ash like you never did see. Earthquakes will splinter plenty of land areas, and, as a bonus, they’ll swallow up lots and lots of nuclear reactors thereby causing the effects of a thousand meltdowns. Lots of radioactivity, my friend, set blowin’ in the wind.”

  Captain Seven started to raise his bong up again, then saw he was out of pot. “Thing is we’re talkin’ here about a planet that hangs in a surprisingly delicate balance between the poles. Our axis is maintained by the huge weight masses concentrated at top and bottom. Once those nukes displace all that weight in the south, what you’re effectively doing is removing one balance point. Dig?”

  “All too well.”

  “The planet would wobble around in search of a new balance with probably tropical South America taking over as the South Pole and somewhere around Japan taking over as the North.”

  That made Kimberlain think of something. “If
you could predict the location of the new poles, could you also predict zones least affected by the pole shift?”

  “You mean so anybody who knew what was coming could find refuge? Theoretically, yes. But all this is untested, so nothing’s for certain.”

  Not nothing, the Ferryman thought. The Hashi are in this to inherit whatever’s left, and somehow they’ve found a way to survive the initial effects of the cataclysm.

  “The only thing that’s certain is that whoever does survive might end up wishing they didn’t. All of the crops and plants indigenous to the old world will have a heap of trouble making it in the new. So whatever few survivors are left won’t have much to eat, and with all the aquifers ruptured by those quakes, a lot of the drinking water will be gone too. Freshwater bodies aboveground will be polluted with debris and poisons beyond repair. Yup, I guess you could say the world’d be fucked up good.”

  Captain Seven lapsed into silence and went about refilling one of the chambers of his bong with pot. Kimberlain found himself speechless as well. What the captain had just elaborated on was the vision of a madman, the vision of Jason Benbasset. He was going to punish the world for what it had done to him, to his family, and he had chosen a means that would destroy civilization as it was known and force it to remake itself from scratch.

  The Ferryman’s mind turned back to the Hashi. Their leaders would have embraced the plan as a means to create the kind of world they wanted and were suddenly in a position to inherit. If those safe zones could be pinned down, if they could emerge relatively unscathed from the Eighth Trumpet, then all other survivors would be at their mercy, the world theirs to remake.

  The key remained with Outpost 10. Danielle was en route there now, but even if she reached the outpost, she would need help to accomplish what she had to, and that help could only come through him.

  “There’s a senator,” Kimberlain told the three of them in the train after summarizing his thoughts, “I arranged a payback for. I’ve never called one in before, but there’s always a first time.” He thought further. “But that doesn’t help us with Macy’s. The parade’s got to be called off, and I haven’t got the slightest idea of where to go, considering the authorities will have no reason to believe me.”