Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (27 page)

The ballistics vest took the two impacts, both over my sternum, bull’s-eyes, normally guaranteed death shots. I’d pushed backward as he fired. I was flying away from that opening, falling in a kind of slow motion, splinters flying off the door above as he fired,
automatic weapon
, and when I smashed into hard earth below it was unclear which pain was worse, the concrete feel on my back, or the sensation of having been hit with sledgehammers in front.

My shoulders had taken most of the blow.

I couldn’t breathe for a moment. My vision returned. I’d struck the earth with the top of my spine, and shoulders, and then my skull had rocketed back and slammed into the ground. The parka had provided a minimal cushion. It was like an airbag had gone off inside my brain. The earth burst up in splinters around me. He was firing diagonally through the trapdoor, as he moved toward it. He didn’t see me yet. He was spraying. I’d thrown myself out of his line of sight; now he needed to look down to see me.

Did the vial in my pocket break? Are the germs out?

The pain was a freight train in my ears; a jackhammer. I felt a cracking sensation in my chest when I breathed. The three-fingered mitten was inside the Beretta’s trigger guard. I saw my arm go up, swiveling toward that square of light. The pistol bucked,
crackcrackcrack,
as if firing by itself, firing from twenty years of Marine survival instinct.

I pushed backward. My back was an anvil and a hammer slammed down on it. I was dizzy. My fifteen rounds were exhausted. As I groped for a second clip I saw that my only advantage was that while
his
rifle was silenced, my Beretta was not, my firing would be magnified down here. My shots might be audible in the neighborhood. If so, they’d bring onlookers. They’d attract attention. They’d lure soldiers if any were near, or if someone phoned them.
Someone is shooting a gun down the block!

Jens would know that he could not stay here long.

The door swung shut above me, with a heavy
boom
, plunging me into darkness. I heard a lock snap. It made my breathing louder,
safe for a moment,
but each exhalation ground glass into my lungs. I tried to stand but a wave of dizziness knocked me back to the ground.

I took a quick measure.
The back seems bruised but the head injury will be the worry. I hit hard, so my brain would have smashed into my skull, front and back. Potential subdural hematoma. Potential expanding damage. Potential blood leakage. THINK ABOUT IT LATER!

He’s getting away.

I groped two steps toward the ladder, bent like an old man, stopped, and threw up. I groped for the flashlight. It had broken in the fall. In the dark I brought out fresh ammo. I thanked the Lord, the U.S. Marines, and a long-ago tight-assed drill sergeant named Dave Gaffney for making me load guns blindfolded at Parris Island, during training.

My breathing sounded like ripping fabric. As I touched the ladder, I heard, up top, slightly muffled by the door, the unmistakable revving of a four-cylinder snowmobile. That would be Jens, I guessed.

I envisioned him heading for the ocean, disappearing into the flood of people escaping from town, over the ice.

In the dark, struggling up each rung felt like dragging a boulder up Mt. Everest. My breathing sounded like an emphysema patient’s. I tasted sweet, cloying blood. Inside my back writhed a jumble of snakes. Was the total darkness natural? Or had I suffered some vision loss, too?

The revving sound up top grew smooth and dissipated. I envisioned a snowmobile heading off. My head hit the door. I’d reached the surface. Hooking my left arm around the top rung, I reached with the right and pushed, but the trapdoor would not move enough to let in even a sliver of light.

I banged on the door. Each impact sent waves of pain through my arm, into my chest. I tried yelling for help. My voice sounded frail to me, like some other, damaged man’s voice. The blood in my mouth inexplicably tasted of apples, and a wave of dizziness threatened to topple me back into the dark, but the arm around the rung kept me in place.

Gotta get him.

I reversed the Beretta and used it as a hammer. I banged on the hatch. My voice sounded like a whisper to me. Maybe it was not even coming out at all.

Then I heard a scraping noise, inches away, and an odd clicking, as if an animal, a woodpecker, tapped against the thick wooden door. A beak. Paws with nails. I heard a snort.

“Is someone there?”

The response was only muffled, jagged breathing, heavy, sounding like an animal’s.

“Waggy? Winfred? Winger?”

No, not the dog, because now I heard the lock scraping. I heard the metal padlock being moved. Was the dog nosing the thing? Or was a person lifting it.

“Who’s up there? Michelle? Is that you?”

The scraping stopped. I called out and got no answer. I couldn’t believe that no one had heard all the shooting. Or maybe a neighbor
had
heard it, but was too scared to come over, or had decided to not involve himself, or was using the anarchy out there to mount up on a snowmobile with a good GPS system and drive off, exiting the town.

Trapped.

No, not trapped.
Someone was unlocking the door.

The scratching sounds stopped. But the door didn’t open. Heart pounding, I reached up and pushed and this time the door moved. I pushed harder and it swung up and fell over, open, made a thunking noise as weak light flooded in. I saw through a blurred film—my vision—the mass of bruised Arctic sky.

Was he still here? Had
he
opened the door? Were the revving snowmobile sounds a trick, as in,
Poke your head up so I can fire?

I called out, “Jens!”

No answer.

“Who’s there?”

Silence.

I couldn’t just wait. I stuck the Beretta out and started firing, moving the gun in a circle. I quickly jutted my head up and glanced out, expecting to see Jens, maybe aiming at the door from a few feet off, but I saw Michelle Aitik. She lay still, two feet off, one hand tucked beneath her crumpled body, one stretched toward the door. She was a rag doll. Face in the snow. But the black hair spread over her back was matted with blood.

Christ, Christ, I killed the person helping me.

I made myself keep going. As I struggled out and up top I saw with no relief that I’d been wrong; she was dead, all right, but from this angle, it was clear that the wounds in her back were entry wounds. Clean and smaller, not wider. I’d not shot her. He had.

She’d probably been in the house, heard me firing, maybe heard the snowmobile start up, came out and saw Jens and he’d whirled, fired, and then he’d run for it. Then Michelle, mortally wounded, crawled a couple of feet, smearing the snow, reaching to release me, reaching for the lock on that heavy trapdoor.

My rage bloomed and for a moment drove off pain and dizziness. He’d slept with this woman. Then he’d shot her as casually as a farmer kills an animal. He’d killed four people on the tundra. He’d murdered Karen and Michelle. He’d destroyed the lives of innocent people. He’d used that storage cellar down there as a repository for a bioweapon, a murder weapon. He’d spread the disease from that vial.

I’ll kill you. Whoever you are, I will kill you.

I needed a doctor, but there was no time for that. I limped into the garage. Michelle’s snowmobile was gone. It had left a fifteen-inch-wide track heading north, up to the road, toward the sea, where Jens Erik, or whoever he really was, had driven off.

The wind was picking up, from the north, and that trail would be gone in minutes. I knew that there had been no time for General Homza to get enough soldiers out on the ice to stop the exodus from town. Not yet.

Go after him.

There was just my Ford for that and a Subaru Impreza in the garage, but both vehicles, even with studded tires, would not be able to follow a snowmobile through smaller openings in the sea ice.

If anyone in those adjacent homes was watching, they would have seen an apelike figure, me, run, hunched over, into the street, a knuckle-dragger with a Beretta, moving sideways, house to house, garage to garage. My ribs were on fire, the headache was worsening. In a subdural hematoma, one side of the brain hits the back skull, bounces off, then the other side hits the front. You’re okay at first, but things worsen if internal bleeding continues.

Don’t think about that.

Snowmobiles were often kept in yards. Sometimes, owners left keys in ignitions, not so much out of a belief in honesty, but it was tough to steal a snowmobile in a place where everyone knew one another, and many people would recognize the vehicle in town.

Why are you riding around on Gustav’s Honda?

In the third yard I passed, I spotted a red-and-white Polaris with a cracked windshield. The key was in the ignition! As I straddled the seat I saw a surprised face, a child clutching a doll, appear at the living room window. The face disappeared. It was replaced by an angry man as I turned the throttle. The snowmobile coughed clouds of blue smoke. I shot from the yard, glimpsing the front door opening and a man in jeans and a flannel shirt running out, shaking a fist.

I bumped up onto the street and felt the track catch and I turned left. Jens’s trail led straight to the sea. My back was on fire. The wind blew cross-wise, into my mouth, making it harder to breathe. The brakes were spongy. The pitted wind guard would make visibility difficult. Each bump was torture. I screamed to stay angry, screamed a war cry, screamed as fuel.

I took a shortcut between two homes and down Stevenson Street and Nachik Street and across Egasak onto the ice-sheathed beach. I spotted a moving dot a half mile ahead, zipping west. His track was shallow and the wind made it less visible with each minute.
What if the person ahead isn’t him? What if I mixed up his trail with another escapee?

It better be him. I turned the throttle higher with my right thumb. I sped up.

Which was dangerous.

I left the beach and reached sea ice, but this was no flat plain, no Bonneville salt flats of ice, no smooth skating-rink-type surface where you could drive as fast as the engine allowed. This was an obstacle course; hard, ridged, pitted geography that could hide a hill or make it look like a depression. It could offer a slit of open water as looking solid, a mirage. It could topple a rider as easily as a giant flicked a fly. One second you’re speeding along. The next you slam into an outcrop, miss a dip, plunge through an opening, skid sideways and topple. The borough emergency squad regularly attended to people—newcomers usually—who’d suffered accidents on ice.

I sped up again.

So, apparently, did the figure ahead.

I maintained distance but my windshield grew smeary. The horizon merged ice and white air. Featherlike flakes began swirling. I lacked goggles. I needed a thermal snowmobile suit. My fingers were already cramping. I needed mitten liners against hypothermia. And special boots, not the walking kind which I wore. A helmet would be nice, too.

Maybe goggles are in the saddlebags but there’s no time to look. At least not until I get past any troops out here.

Wind abraded my face. At thirty miles an hour, the temperature dropped at least fifteen degrees. Night was falling. That would make it worse. My ribs seemed to be cracking, fractures inside growing longer. I was losing vision, as it contracted at the edges, but I willed it to expand. My headache spread out, deepened.
Thudthudthudthud!

Pay attention.

I bounced out of an ice rubble field, reached a rise, and leaned forward on the snowmobile for traction. I remembered lessons that Alan McDougal had drilled into me at the beginning of the summer, when he gave Eddie and me a course in basics. I sat back for better weight distribution on the way down the hill.

Ahead of me the terrain went perpendicular. I shot across a hill face, leaning up, away from the drop, into the slope. Jens was a good rider. But I kept pace, riding with one knee on my running board, the other leg out, as I tried to ignore the pain.

Was I gaining on him?

That’s when I saw two other snowmobiles closing on me, ahead, a pincer closing from right and left, both machines spewing ice trails, trying to cut me off.

They were Rangers. Rangers trying to expand the blockade. Rangers on confiscated snowmobiles, drawing the cordon closed to cut off seaside escape. They had to be soldiers because civilians would have avoided other snowmobiles. These guys thought I was trying to escape.

Jens Erik had gotten through before the circle closed.

I might not make it.

I sped up, a mistake. The Polaris spun out. I’d been pushing too hard. I bounced off a stubbly rise and was suddenly spinning in a circle. I hit more ice, tilting, almost falling, sliding sideways on an incline as the track fought for grip. The other snowmobiles closed on me.

I saw one man unsling a rifle off his back as he moved.

I gunned the engine and only at the last second realized that the ice had opened here, torn, and looming twenty yards ahead lay a long, black slit of open water!

I slammed on the brakes. The sudden locking almost launched me off the seat. The track caught and spun left and I slid in a fast glide toward open water.

Jens Erik Holte, in the distance, beyond the two snowmobiles, drew farther away.

Ahead of me, the ice began bursting up in puffs, warning shots. The soldiers did not see the open water yet. They were shooting to try to stop me. They thought I could stop if I wanted. But I could not.

Shit, shit!

I stopped before reaching the water.

“Hands up, you!”

I did not see Jens Erik Holte anymore.

He’d gotten away.

•   •   •

THE FIRST MAN, THE SHOOTER, TRAINED HIS CARBINE ON ME AS THE SECOND
dismounted. From the way One looked at Two, Two was the boss. They held me at bay. I was a prisoner who’d been stopped from escaping. They were in no mood for back talk.

I tried to reason with them. “I’m Colonel Joe Rush. I’m a Marine. I’m working with General Homza. Remember me, from the school? Were you at the school? I’m after a fugitive. I have ID. You need to let me pass.”