Down: Trilogy Box Set (154 page)

“Paul, please …”

“No, let me finish. Unfortunately, I’ve become an expert on the subject. You can’t survive in Hell unless you have a laser-like focus on your survival and creature necessities. I was luckier than most. I was quickly dealt to Stalin and though I was essentially a slave, I was a high-class slave because what I carried in my head wasn’t viewed as a commodity. I could have refused to work for this monster who wanted me to be an engine for weapons manufacture, weapons which would cause pain and misery on a mass scale. I could have made a dogged effort to escape. But I didn’t. I protected my own hide. Why tell you this? It’s because you’re not like me. You’re a wonderful, altruistic person without a selfish bone in your body. To save the world from doom you will push the button, even if it means trapping your lover in Hell.”

“You’re correct when you say I’ll do the right thing. But you’re wrong about the universality of selfishness in Hell. I saw people there who transcended their narrow survival concerns for the greater good. My first time there I was rescued by a group of women who survived by looking after each other. And I’m inspired by Garibaldi and the people who’ve cast their lot with him to try and bring a modicum of humanity to Hell. Yes, there are terrible people doing terrible things, and yes, that may be the status quo, but I’d like to dwell on the goodness that can exist even inside people who’ve done evil. Are you hearing me, Paul? You’ve got so much goodness still inside.”

He broke down and put his head in his hands, a weeping mask. She came over and put her arms around his chest and held him for a long time.

“I’ll try to make you proud of me,” he said. “I’ll try to make my children proud. I know it won’t be easy with them. With a bit of luck I’ll have twenty, perhaps thirty years of life ahead of me before I die and have to return. Even if all of it is spent in prison, I’ll try to do some good, in my work, in my writings. I’ll figure it out.”

“I know you will.”

As was their habit, they joined Dirk and Duck for lunch in their unlocked cell, microwaving some frozen foods for them. They sat eating with chairs drawn up beside their bed, a muted Disney video playing on the TV.

Emily brought up the subject foremost on their minds. “I did speak to Mr. Wellington about your plea to remain here.”

“What did ’e say?” Duck asked, inhaling a baked, stuffed shell.

“He said it was the government’s policy to repatriate as many Hellers as they could prior to breaking the connections.”

“What’s that mean?” Dirk said.

“I’m afraid it means you can’t stay.”

“But we don’t want to go back!” Duck said. “We like it ’ere. Did you speak to my Delia?”

“Not directly, no,” Emily admitted, “but according to Mr. Wellington, she did put in a good word for you.”

Dirk pointed his plastic spoon at Loomis. “But you don’t ’ave to go back, do you?”

“No,” he said, “I was able to make a deal.”

“Paul has some very special skills which gave him the ability to make a bargain,” Emily said.

“We’ve got skills,” Duck said. “Dirk can make the best beer in Dartford and I can, I can, well, I can ’elp him do it.”

Emily smiled at them. “Look, I’m making no promises but we’re going to be very busy tomorrow, so busy we might not have the time to make sure you leave the building and make it to the soldiers at the edge of the hot zone.”

“I always ’ave difficulty fathoming your meaning, Miss Emily,” Dirk said.

Duck hit him with one of his sharp elbows. “She’s saying we can stay!”

Emily didn’t sleep that night; she didn’t want to. To give her body a break she lay down on one of the mattresses she and Paul had dragged from the jail cells to the control room, but she stayed awake, straining her ears for any sign John had returned.

At six o’clock she woke up Paul, made some tea, and checked on the cooling status of the twenty-five thousand magnets arrayed inside the MAAC tunnel like a giant string of pearls. Super-cooled liquid helium had taken the magnet temperature down overnight to 4.5 K, or -268.7ºC. If the schedule held, in two hours she and Paul would have to initiate the final cooling protocol to achieve 1.7 K, preciously close to the absolute-zero temperature needed to accelerate uranium protons to their maximal collision energy.

“No sign of him,” Loomis said, leaning over her workstation.

She shook her head and started calling out checklist items for them to implement.

At seven o’clock the video link with Geneva opened and the full team at the Large Hadron Collider began mirroring the activities at MAAC and lending many pairs of virtual hands.

At eight o’clock Emily logged onto a videoconference with Prime Minister Lester and his Cobra group in Manchester, Ben Wellington and his people at MI5, army personnel at SAS headquarters in Credenhill, and the Drone Warfare Centre at RAF Waddington.

“Dr. Loughty, are we on schedule?” the prime minister asked.

“We can be,” she answered. “If we have a final go decision we can fire the particle guns in two hours.”

“Is it going to work?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “As I’ve explained, we can’t be sure the rather primitive modifications we’ve made to the injection system and particle guns will work with the uranium gas. If it does work, we can’t be sure we’ll be able to obliterate the strangelets. It’s all based on hypothetical modeling.”

Lester gave her a grim nod and said, “At least you’ve been consistent, but I was rather hoping for an answer of, yes, Prime Minister.”

“I wish I could be more positive,” she said.

The prime minister looked to his cabinet and asked, “Well, are there any objections to green-lighting this? No? MI5? No? What about Credenhill? Are your people in position?”

Major Gus Parker-Burns, the Officer Commander of 22 SAS Regiment, said, “Yes, we are in position, Prime Minister. We have three, three-man extraction teams on the fringes of the Leatherhead, Dartford, and Sevenoaks hot zones. It is our continuing assessment that the group deployed to Upminster was likely over-run by Hellers three weeks ago and sending an extraction team into Upminster would, unfortunately, neither be safe nor productive.”

“RAF Waddington, what say you?” Lester asked.

The Brigadier General in charge replied, “We have Greater London blanketed by our full contingent of Reapers and Predators supplemented by the twenty on loan from the United States. We are intensely monitoring the known HZs.”

Lester asked, “In the event the MAAC start-up does not have the intended result but, in fact, exacerbates the problem, are all the drones fully armed?”

“Yes, sir,” the general answered. “Brimstone missiles on the Reapers, Hellfires on the Predators.”

“Mr. Wellington,” the prime minister said, “I know you’ve had the burden of authorizing missile strikes. At this point I feel I ought to shoulder that responsibility personally.”

Ben sounded relieved when he said, “Of course, Prime Minister.”

“And, Mr. Wellington, has your package been delivered to Leatherhead?”

“It has. It is in the hands of the SAS extraction team.”

“And finally,” Lester said, “we all know that in the event that the procedure today does successfully break the connection between our world and theirs, that we will have hundreds, perhaps thousands of Hellers permanently trapped in London. We’ll need to capture each and every one of them and determine their fate. However, that will be a problem for another day. Right, does anyone else have anything to say?”

Emily nodded a few times. “I would just like to point out that we haven’t seen John Camp or Trevor Jones or any of the MAAC staff or visitors transported at the onset of the present crisis.”

The prime minister stared gravely into the monitor; the videographer in Manchester zooming in so close that Emily could see the luminous blue of his eyes. “We know nothing of the fate of the others but we are very much aware of the heroism of Mr. Camp and Mr. Jones. I do know the implications of our decision this morning and so do you. So I ask you, Dr. Loughty, do you have an objection to initiating the final two-hour countdown?”

She closed her eyes. “None,” she said. “We’ll initiate the sequence immediately.”

On the outskirts of Leatherhead the sergeant in charge of the extraction team rapped his knuckles against the tinted window of the Land Rover.

Malcolm Gough got out and went around to open the other rear door. The SAS team knew the nature of the package but they nevertheless seemed awestruck by the sight of King Henry in his doublet and cloak.

“These men will be your escort, Your Majesty,” Gough said.

Henry surveyed the scene. To the west was a mass of army and emergency services vehicles and personnel. To the east, the town.

Turning toward the River Mole Henry said, “So this is the present-day town.”

Gough said, “Yes. I believe you’ll be taken across that bridge.”

“That’s correct, sir,” the sergeant said, staring at Henry with saucer-eyes.

“I wonder what I shall find on the other side of that bridge?” Henry said.

“You’ve been away for a good while,” Gough said.

“Indeed. I do not think I shall still be king. I venture that Cromwell and Suffolk have fought for my crown like two rats in a bag. I wonder, will the victor fight me when I seek to reclaim it or meekly place it upon my head?”

The professor said, “I’d really like to know the answers to your questions.” Then he smiled, “But not enough to come with you.”

“I believe you will miss me, Gough,” Henry said.

“I will, Your Majesty. More than you know. It has been the privilege of my life to spend this time with you.”

“If you ever stray from the virtuous life of a scholar then perhaps I will see you again at the end of that life.”

“I hope not, Your Majesty.”

The three-man SAS team closed in and began walking the king toward the bridge.

The professor recorded video on his mobile phone and kept recording until the soldiers and king reached the bridge and vanished halfway across.

Then he called his wife and said, “I’m coming home.”

John pointed toward a spot on the riverbank. “There. That’s where we need to land.”

John had anointed Campbell Bates as skipper when he learned the FBI director was an avid sailor with a fifty-footer on Chesapeake Bay. But John knew the river and the two of them successfully navigated the boat through the darkness and into the dawn.

The barge made a hard landing under full wind power, jolting the Earthers on board. John and Bates quickly lowered the sails, while Trevor jumped off, pulling a line.

When they were disembarking, John passed Smithwick’s limp body to some of the men. Last off, he watched the barge drift downstream.

“Not a bad vessel,” Bates said. “Hope we don’t need it again.”

“You got that right,” John said. With Smithwick back on his shoulder, he shouted, “Everyone, follow Trevor and me.”

They were less than a mile from the hot zone but something ahead disturbed John. By the standards of Hell the day was bright and he squinted to better define what he was seeing in the marshlands and bulrushes.

“Is that a crowd?” he asked Trevor.

“Looks like it, guv.”

John swore and said, “We may be screwed.”

“Is the temperature stable?” Emily asked.

A scientist in Geneva remotely monitoring the MAAC magnet temperature came on one of the video screens and said, “Holding at 1.7 K.”

“All magnets online?” she asked.

Geneva reported the schematics looks good.

“We’re ready to initiate injection of the particle guns,” she said. “Paul, I’ve begun a one-minute clock.”

Loomis was hunched over a workstation and replied, “On your mark.”

As the clock ticked off the seconds, she looked increasingly brittle. “Begin injection,” she said.

Loomis checked the injection pressures and announced, “Uranium gas is flowing, boosters are functioning, the synchrotron appears to be filling normally.”

“Please let me know when filling is complete,” Emily said.

A minute later Loomis made the call and Geneva concurred.

Emily glanced at the control-room doors, hoping against hope they would fly open but they did not. “Fire the particle guns, Paul.”

Trevor was staring at the Hellers blocking their way. “Maybe we can go around them,” he said.

John grunted. “Maybe. Let’s get a closer look.”

Matthew Coppens had found a large crowbar onboard the barge and he was carrying it in both hands. He caught up with John and asked if they were going to have to fight their way through.

“We’ll see.”

Matthew kept up with him, stride for stride. “I’m ready if we do,” he said.

“You ever fight anyone before?” John asked, smiling at his crowbar.

“Never, but now might be the time to start.” Then he added with an air of desperation, “I’ve got to get back to my wife and son.”

“Good man. Stay close.”

There were dozens of Hellers between them and the hot zone, all with their backs to the approaching Earthers. They seemed to be watching and waiting, edging, but not rushing forward.

The ground to the south, nearer to Dartford village, was slightly elevated and as they got within a hundred yards of the Hellers John and Trevor spotted someone waving furiously at them a hundred yards past the crowd.

“Think that’s one of the good guys?” Trevor asked.

A shot rang out, the distinctive big-boy sound of an AK-47. One of the Hellers screamed in pain and the cordon surrounding the hot zone moved back a few yards.

“Music to my ears,” John said.

In the distance there was more waving and another shot was fired. Indistinct shouts from the SAS men came their way on the morning breeze.

The Hellers still had their backs to them, unaware of their presence.

“I think our guys want us to make our way through,” Trevor said.

“They’d help by letting a lot more lead fly,” John said.

“Maybe they don’t have the ammo,” Trevor said.

“You may be right.” John stopped and with his free hand motioned for everyone behind him to halt.