The Alpha Deception (35 page)

McCracken shifted uneasily in his seat. The Hind could be controlled either by wheel or joystick, both containing firing buttons for the air cannons. He would have to launch missiles and rockets with his free hand when required, leaving him only one hand for all the rest of the controls. As Pamosa Springs drew closer, Blaine practiced the procedure again and again without engaging the weapons systems. According to his instruments he was barely five minutes from the town. The Hind’s controls felt smooth and easy, tight as a sports car.

The San Juans came up fast and Blaine had to climb substantially to rise over them, keeping the Hind’s bottom precariously close to their tips. The gunship obeyed his commands with immediate grace, bucking just a bit as if aware of what lay over the next ridge.

Guillermo Paz was quite proud of himself. All things considered, he had stabilized matters in Pamosa Springs so brilliantly that his few failures were certain to be overlooked in the face of his undeniable success. The last of the townspeople had been herded into the church, which was wired and ready to blow. That would keep his captives still while his guards at the gulley would easily fend off any assault the escaped mayor and sheriff might put together.

Paz stood proudly erect in the center of Main Street with one hand on his hip and the other stroking his mustache affectionately. His men saluted as they passed and Paz genially saluted back. All in all things were going to turn out pretty damn well. Soon the death beam would be fired and Paz would be among the only witnesses to actually see it.

The shallow whining sound confused him at first. It sounded like a chain saw echoing in the stiff wind. Then it grew louder. With a shudder Paz realized what it was and at the same time knew it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be! His eyes scanned the sky.

The Hind-D roared out from the cover of the mountains. Paz’s eyes locked on it as it dropped to tree level. He knew it must be the one he had lost in Nicaragua, knew it had been flown here to be used against him. And its pilot had planned his strategy well. He was coming in beneath the range of his main guns.

Paz could see the air cannon chambers turning an instant before the clack-clack-clack reached his ears. The Hind’s first spray bore into the area of his first gun battery, clanging sharply against steel where it connected and kicking dust up where it didn’t.

The Hind came in still lower. You’re crazy, Paz wanted to scream at the pilot, but this flier knew exactly what he was doing Paz realized as he watched the steel bird drop straight for him. He dove to the ground behind the cover of a jeep as the first sound of cannon fire came. It shattered the jeep and sent pieces of metal showering down on Paz. A small group of his men who had roared into the street at the first sign of fire had their frames torn apart by the warship’s huge bullets.

Paz crawled out from behind the burning jeep and made for the armory, prepared to defend the generator gun himself if that’s what it came to. He wouldn’t fail now.

He couldn’t.

McCracken had picked out Paz as soon as he cleared the ravaged front gun battery. He cut back the warship’s speed to steady his aim and might have hit Paz with his next burst. He wasn’t sure. Of the other men who had rushed into the street with their rifles ready, there was no question. McCracken saw their punctured corpses as he came round for his second pass, amazed at the accuracy of his air cannon fire.

Halfway to the second gun battery, he turned his attention to the thick barrels struggling for a bead on him from the foothills on the town’s western perimeter. He estimated they could not possibly sight down on him before he was over and past them. Instead, they should have anticipated their fire ahead for the gulley as he soared over it. They were opening the door for him, and damned if he wasn’t going to move right on through it.

McCracken fired a rocket and one of the truck-mounted guns exploded in a wall of flames. He followed up immediately with a barrage from the air cannons. This gained him the advantage he needed as he swept over the battery and climbed over the hill on the other side of which was the gulley.

The guards on the hill pelted him with rifle fire as he soared close, but the armor-piercing shells made barely a dent in the Hind’s reinforced steel carcass. He drove the big bird past the gulley to facilitate a turn. He wanted to come straight over his target with plenty of time to assure himself of accurate missile launches. He figured he could fire three times before having to pull up again and three should finish the generator gun for good.

Blaine brought the Hind around and was chilled as he gazed downward. From this angle, the generator-gun complex had the look of a massive turret with an exposed barrel poking upward. It was of vast size, a dome encased in dusty gray steel. It amazed him that such an impregnable defense could have been erected so swiftly.

Blaine gulped down air as he punched in commands to the missile-targeting computer. Finger on the firing button now, one hand steadying the wheel.

He had asked for only one chance. He was about to get it.

Fire from the gun battery at the far side of town exploded in the air near him, a close call. McCracken drove the Hind into a weaving pattern as he fired his three missiles in rapid succession, the laser guides doing the rest. He was actually over the generator-gun complex and past it before he was certain of impact, but he banked the Hind back so he could see the effect of three direct hits.

Nothing! The only evidence of any impact was a few scattered fires sprouting from minor splits in the steel over-skin.

Blaine’s stomach sank. He had struck the generator gun dead center with three shells that could level a city block, with no apparent effect. Already his mind was working in another direction. His only hope was to bide his time over Main Street long enough to ready another pass, and this time he would fire his missiles straight for the exposed barrel from which the ray would be emitted, a far more difficult shot but his only hope of knocking the weapon out.

He plunged closer to the ground as he crossed over Main Street again, firing his air cannons in random patterns just to buy himself time. Hitting the barrel would be a tough shot. He narrowed the firing grid at the small computer display screen on the console just to his right. The warship was fitted with an infrared camera on its underside, which broadcast the shape of whatever the missiles were aimed at on the monitor. When his target appeared on the screen all he had to do was lock into it and a missile would trace for the target from wherever it was fired.

McCracken dropped the Hind as low as he dared, barely fifty feet up, firing his laser-aimed cannons at windows where gun barrels protruded. The greatest congestion of resistant activity had been centered around three buildings in the town’s center, obviously headquarters and perhaps armory for Raskowski’s men.

The first, unbeknownst to him, was Sheriff Junk Heep’s office, the facade of which was obliterated by his first rocket. The second was what looked like a general store. He gave it a missile and enough of the building exploded outward to make the soldiers in the street dive to the ground.

When he neared the eastern edge of town, the regrouped gun battery aimed a volley at him which missed the mark widely. He sped up and peppered the guns with as many missiles as he could fire until he passed them, leaving smoke and flaming steel behind as he headed back west to deal with the second battery.

Four of Paz’s men rushed into the street beneath him holding what he recognized as Laws rockets. He aimed his helmet at them and fired, but his increased speed had the warship already beyond the shooters and his cannon bullets dug chasms out of the street’s fresh tar surface. He was boxed in, the Laws behind and the western battery ahead.

He wasn’t sure how many of the rockets actually struck the Hind-D. The controls seemed to lock up in his hands just for an instant. When the give came back, they were stiff. A pair of red lights flashed on his console board indicating aft fires too large for the automatic systems to fight. Blaine drove the warship on, faster, halfway to the gun battery now.

He could see the gun operators had gotten it right this time. Three of the four big guns were already aimed toward the gulley to lay down suppressing fire that would make it impossible for him to cross. The fourth fired token rounds which forced him to climb sooner than he would have wished. His maneuverability was reduced, as well as his chances of avoiding the blasts once over the gulley again.

His target, the exposed barrel, was frozen in his mind, but it needed to be equally frozen on his CRT grid if he was going to have any chance at all. The gulley came up fast as he crossed over the western battery. Blaine’s hand moved to the targeting computer to lock in.

The fire of the three guns came and kept coming. He was headed straight for the generator complex now, seconds away, with the barrage of shells exploding everywhere around him, the percussion ringing in his ears as the Hind buckled. He adjusted its nose angle lower for smoother release and focused on the narrower target grid waiting for the gun barrel to lock on.

There it was, square in the center! McCracken went for the firing button.

A huge blast tore into the Hind from the rear, kicking it skyward. The warship fluttered in midair, seeming almost to stall, and smoke began to flood the cabin. Red lights flashed up and down the instrument board.

The missiles hadn’t fired! They hadn’t fired!

Paz’s gunners had beaten him by an instant, but Blaine wasn’t giving up yet. He still had three missiles and intended to find a way to fire them. He coughed through the smoke and struggled to regain control of the Hind. More blasts rocked him as he brought the sputtering bird around in a wide bank that took him back over the San Juans. More red lights flickered to warn him all his weapons systems had shorted out and the fuel line was ruptured. The Hind was limping in the air, refusing to go further. He was flying it to its death. And his.

With the last burst of strength he could grab from it, Blaine veered deeper over the foothills of the San Juans. The huge artillery shells followed him every inch of the way, a final one finding him just as the foliage of the mountains was beneath him and he had begun to try some sort of landing.

But that final blast had finished the ship. Black smoke instead of gray flooded the cockpit and filled his lungs. Blaine was aware of a terrible grinding noise and of a tumbling sensation as the brave bird plummeted. He dimly recorded the whiplash of collision, certain at that point he would never know anything again.

Chapter 33

ZURICH’S BAHNHOFSTRASSE IS UNQUESTIONABLY
the city’s most fashionable and elegant avenue. Combining the qualities of Wall Street and Fifth Avenue along a three-mile stretch bordered by lime trees, the Bahnhofstrasse houses numerous banks, investment firms, insurance companies and brokerage houses. It is lined from one end to the other with business and commercial buildings of various sizes and architectural styles, the more modem ones seeming to compete with each other for uniqueness of design.

In one of the largest, the Kriehold Building, the top three floors are leased by a computerized mail service that specializes in a worldwide investment newsletter. In reality, the newsletter does not exist. The mail service is a cover. The three floors contain the technological headquarters of General Vladimir Raskowski.

Raskowski had chosen the Zurich locale personally, believing that his enemies wouldn’t expect him to set up shop in one of the world’s busiest business centers. Besides, Raskowski found directing his project from Zurich entirely fitting, for soon even the Bahnhofstrasse would belong to him if he desired. He could have it all, he could have anything.

The computers that controlled the generator gun in Pamosa Springs and the aluminum reflector soon to be in geosynchronistic orbit were on the top three floors, encased by concrete and steel on all sides. In effect, the control room was a massive vault a hundred feet square and employing three dozen men and women.

Raskowski inserted his command card into its slot outside the control room. The huge entry door parted electronically from its seal and swung open. He entered, men rising to attention as he passed. Raulsch, the old German scientist who had designed and built the entire headquarters, rose and saluted crisply. Raskowski’s favorite post was a chair from which he could gaze up at a huge electronic map of the United States. Now the map showed a rising green light—the path of the satellite containing his reflector as it climbed toward its deadly orbit. The various angles required of the reflector to achieve the destruction of specific American targets had been preprogrammed, and now those targets appeared in the form of dozens of flashing red lights all across the country.

“How long?” Raskowski asked Raulsch.

“Three hours, twenty-nine minutes, seventeen seconds,” the scientist replied.

The general settled back and fidgeted in his elevated chair. Word from the Biminis had not been good. Somehow McCracken and Tomachenko had found the means to defeat the force he had dispatched to the islands. This meant they were still at large, though cut off from their respective governments. They would therefore have to stop his operation on their own, which was impossible of course.

Raskowski still fidgeted.

In the end, the trees had saved his life. That’s what Blaine figured as he gazed back at the Hind’s smoking, twisted carcass, one wing protruding upward in imitation of Johnny Wareagle’s wooden one in Nicaragua. The treetops had torn out the warship’s bottom, then accepted its weight long enough to cushion his fall. He had maintained consciousness through it all and had made a quick escape, aware that Paz would be sending troops out to finish him. He had no choice but to flee, even if he had to stumble and crawl to get away, clinging to the hope that either Natalya or Wareagle could succeed where he failed.

Twenty yards into the woods his balance failed him and he slid to the ground. He wiped blood from his brow, but the warm fluid drenched him again as quickly as he cleared it. He tried to grab hold of something to pull himself to his feet but his strength was gone. His vision was clouded and hazy. The ground spun beneath him. Blaine clutched at it to make it still and fought to remain conscious. Back on the ridge, the carcass of the Hind went up in a final explosion and in that instant everything was clear to him again.