The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (43 page)

“Steady,” Farraday told the Marine leader. “They’re almost to loader range now. Almost to the second line …”

Farraday resisted the temptation to order the loaders to move now. To do so too early would eliminate the element of surprise he still held, so crucial to the success of this stage of the plan as well.

Farraday was gnashing his teeth, walkie-talkie close to his lips, thoughts stuck on the three Marines who were dead meat if spotted and the three who were dead already.

Danielle’s binoculars were glued to her eyes. “The enemy is fifty yards from the loaders,” she informed him… . “Forty-five.”

Farraday counted out the seconds he estimated it would take for them to reach forty. When the loaders started rolling, there had to be a minimum of space and time for the invaders to adjust.

“Go!” he called to the loader drivers through his walkie-talkie.

The climatized engines turned over on the first push of the starter button, and the huge loaders roared to life. The drivers swung the shovels downward, thereby stripping away the white camouflaged tarps and clearing their line of vision.

“Thirty yards,” announced Danielle.

Shovels still descending, the loaders started into motion toward the stunned lines of invaders. The loaders’ tires were ten feet high, and their shovels stretched fifteen by twenty. They rolled through the mounting snow effortlessly, seeming to glide, moving forward far faster than the now retreating troops could either backpedal or turn and flee in the heavy drifts.

The three surviving Marines grabbed the opportunity to scramble behind the new line of defense created by the loaders and rush through the whiteness behind them toward the safety of the building complex.

Danielle watched the rest unfold the way a film does on a big screen. The loaders’ shovels were almost to ground level now, the invaders just starting to fire at them. The shovels took the brunt of the bullets, sparks flying at impact. As the shovels continued to descend, more sparks showered from the steel-encased cabs while the giant machines picked up more speed across the snow-swept tundra, closing the gap to the fleeing invaders. She found herself looking at Farraday, wanting to hug him to show her thanks and appreciation for his brilliance in plotting and carrying out this defense.

And for believing her.

The enemy was rushing away now, legs churning as the loaders gathered huge mounds of snow before them and plowed it on. The effect was that of a mountain of white in motion, an avalanche rushing across level land. The fleeing troops couldn’t hope to negotiate the drifts and piles from the still-raging storm. Many tripped and fell, pulling themselves along on hands and knees. Others trudged as best they could.

It didn’t matter. The loaders were gaining speed as bullets bounced off their steel hulls or were swallowed by the mountains of snow they pushed before them. The spacing between their frames worked well against the spread of the retreating troops. Danielle watched the first wave of gunmen disappear under the mounds of white and thought strangely of a wave at sea swallowing a surfer. The loaders rolled on, oblivious to the bodies crushed beneath their massive tires. The snow caught up with the others, one of whom had the foresight in a final dying motion to slide a grenade from his tomb, which wedged in ice beneath the onrushing monster. Danielle saw the smoke, first white, then gray, and finally black sprouting up as the center loader ground uneasily to halt.

The other two were raising their shovels, now packed with snow, and gathered fresh momentum. Farraday and Danielle watched as the surviving troops stopped their retreat and launched an all-out attack on the remaining loaders.

“Pull back!” Farraday screamed into his walkie-talkie. “Pull back!”

It must have been that the roaring engine sounds stole the drivers’ hearing, or maybe they heard the order and simply disregarded it, because the loaders rushed forward into a barrage of fire. A pair of men had readied rocket launchers, focusing on the same loader that had just caught up with another group of gunmen and dumped a ton of ice-snow on top of them. The shovel was descending again in the next instant, as if to act as shield against the coming rockets, but too late. The rockets blasted with red-hot light into the engine and cabin, and a burst of orange flame centered in black smoke sliced through the white death of the storm.

The final loader was charging the two men bearing rocket launchers, who struggled desperately to turn to get fresh loads chambered. They backed up as they struggled and managed to fire just as the shovel was upon them. The rockets blasted into the mechanism and shattered it, but momentum carried the heavy, snow-filled steel forward and crushed the shooters. The last loader wavered, damaged heavily. The invaders surrounded it like a group of ants around a spider trapped in its own web and fired relentlessly until a soundless
poof
erupted and everywhere again there was fire and smoke.

“God fuckin’ damn you!” Farraday shouted at the invading gunmen with tears in the corners of his eyes. “I’ll get you for that! I’ll roast everyone of you goddamn fuckers!”

As he spoke, Danielle was already grasping the handgrips of his wheelchair and steering him toward the elevator that would take them to the ground floor. There the fuses could be lit that would set off the oil slick concealed beneath the snow and ice fifty yards from the front of the building.

“How many do you think are left?” he asked her.

“As few as twenty. As many as thirty.”

“Say twenty-five, then,” he said as the elevator doors started open on the first floor. “Nice round number to kill.”

“How fast does the fuse burn?” she wanted to know.

“Ten yards per second.”

“Then five seconds is what we have to work with.”

“And I plan on enjoying each and every one of them.”

Their view on the first floor was restricted to what they could see out a single round window. Outside, the enemy was still regrouping. They would approach closer on an even wider angle to play it safe. Danielle had expected as much and was glad the fire pit had been constructed to keep that possibility in mind. The enemy troops fired as they ran, shots impacting upon the structure of Outpost 10 and each shot bringing them closer to the third line of defense.

Danielle gazed more closely at them. “They’re not all going to cross through the fire pit.”

“Damn.”

“Don’t worry. We should have expected this. We’ve got to make them move closer together.”

“How?”

And then she had it. “Tell the Marines to return their fire. Tell them to shoot in a way that forces the invaders to bunch closer together. Tell them that’s the object.”

Farraday spoke the appropriate instructions into his walkie-talkie and almost immediately the three surviving Marines began firing from positions they had fortified on the third floor. He knew Danielle’s plan was to make the enemy think the forces of the outpost had grown desperate, so when the firing stopped, they would have the illusion of victory.

“I’ll get ready on the fuses,” Farraday said and wheeled himself over to the spot in the wall where the three spools had been snaked through together so that one match would do the trick for all three. Once outside, beneath the ice, they would break off and reach the fire pit simultaneously to create first a ring of fire and quickly a pool of it. “Just give me the word,” he told Danielle, fuse tips, lighter, and walkie-talkie ready in his lap.

Danielle peered out the small window. As she had hoped, the opposition had bunched themselves together, with the snow and storm forming most of their cover as they returned the fire coming from within the complex.

“Walker’s hit, sir,” came a report from the sergeant over Farraday’s walkie-talkie. “It looks bad.”

Farraday gazed at Danielle and thought of the more than one hundred other personnel huddled throughout the outpost. How many more were going to die before this was finished? Danielle nodded at him.

“Cease fire, Sergeant, and pull away from the windows. Is that clear?”

“Affirmative, Commander.”

Outside, the invaders kept firing for a time before realizing their fire was no longer being returned. Next the front lines rose tentatively, every motion slowed by their prolonged exposure to the below-zero conditions. Danielle realized then that those troops spared by the fire pit would still have to brave the elements to overcome the forces of the outpost. She recognized their suits as a space-age design only recently available. But even these couldn’t protect them indefinitely. A stalemate meant victory for her and Farraday and Outpost 10.

The waves of white-clad invaders began to move, one line gliding ahead of the other until the advance line plunged into the snow covering the fire pit and the rest began easing themselves the last stretch to the complex. The second line began to follow soon after. Danielle held her breath against the chance that one of them might notice the difference in texture of this section of tundra compared to the others. None seemed to. She couldn’t tell how many of the remaining Hashi invaders were over the pit, but it was plenty, well more than half.

The storm obscured her vision, the winds blasting ice and snow against her small window. For a moment she lost track of the enemy entirely and managed to pick them up again only thanks to their commando-style tactic of crawling over the ice. There seemed to be around fifteen to twenty of them. Of the positions of the other ten or so, she had no idea.

The lead line of belly-crawling Hashi was three-quarters across the fire pit. She could wait for the rest of their number to join their approach no longer.

“Light it,” she told Farraday.

The commander didn’t hesitate. Face bent in a scowl, he flicked his lighter and pressed the flame against the fusing. The edges caught instantly, flaring for a second before turning to a soft orange glow that sped first to the floor and then through the hole made in the wall and out into the ice.

“Five,” Farraday started, “four, three, two, one—”

The flames erupted in perfect rhythm with his count, turning the fire pit briefly into an oblong shape of blinding orange. The Hashi had time only to lunge to their feet before the ring of fire closed upon them in an instant. The white-clad men found themselves jammed against each other in the pit’s very center, visible among the scorching flames only for a moment before the smoke and fire consumed them. The savage whistling of the storm swallowed most of their screams, but what rose above it was bloodcurdling. Danielle turned away when the flames became blinding, hiding whatever stray motion remained.

Her mind, though, was fighting to tabulate numbers. How many of the Hashi were left? All three lines of the defense had performed up to or beyond expectations. And the fourth, that of the bitter cold the remaining opposition would have to contend with, would show no mercy.

“How many left?” Farraday asked.

The screams extinguished, Danielle pressed her eyes back against the small window. The still-raging flames sliced through the storm over the mostly circular shape of the fire pit but caught no man in the spill of their light.

“I can’t see any,” Danielle reported. But she could sense them. There were still some out—

An ear-wrenching blast shook her and toppled Farraday from his wheelchair as he swung. She was diving to his aid when a second blast followed and the door at the far end of the hallway leading in from the outside blew inward.

Danielle saw the white of the storm and of onrushing men an instant before their rifle bores began to spit orange.

Chapter 36

“OLLIE’S ON THE WAY,”
O’Brien told Kimberlain as the first of the number-two train’s passengers appeared down the dead tracks, evacuated by on-board transit police on Kimberlain’s orders.

“Ollie?”

“What we call the trash barge. You’ll see.”

Kimberlain’s watch read 10:33, which gave him all of thirty minutes. “What about the track line?”

“From here she runs straight toward the World Trade Center, then veers toward Wall Street before crossing the East River by tunnel into Brooklyn.”

With that, the Ferryman knew immediately what he had to do. “What’s in my way between here and the river?”

“We got a train stalled outside of Sheridan Square and another at Fulton Street. Ollie’ll be able to handle the extra load just fine, long as you don’t mind being slowed down a little.”

“How long for the whole trip, say to the middle of the East River tunnel?”

O’Brien eyed him suspiciously before answering. “Ollie does thirty MPH tops. Say fifteen on your trip with all the extra weight that accounts for slowdowns when you connect with the other stalled trains.” He thought briefly. “You gotta go three miles, so I figure you’re looking at twenty, maybe twenty-two minutes.”

That was going to make things very close. Kimberlain swung toward Donahue, who was standing next to Cathy.

“You’d better get a city engineer on the horn fast. Tell him the East River subway tunnel is going to blow just after eleven o’clock and to get ready for whatever the backlash of the water into the tunnel is going to do.”

“Hey,” broke in O’Brien, “what the hell are you saying? Blow the tunnel? Might as well nuke the whole system!”

“Better than the whole city,” Kimberlain shot back impatiently as a steady beeping sound started from the far end of the tunnel to announce the coming of the trash barge. He thought about all those subway cars packed with five hundred pounds of C-12, about the effects on the city above if they were allowed to go off anywhere but underwater, where most of the blast and its deadly percussion would be smothered.

O’Brien was still arguing—with Donahue now. Both of them were swearing up a storm as a roaring black beast neared the platform belching smoke and drowning out their words.

Ollie had arrived.

With Peet following him, Quail streaked down West 34th Street beyond the parade route where many of the participants were gathered. Defying the orders of the man behind the curtain, he could not simply depress the detonator after he had moved a safe distance away. That wouldn’t suit his purpose, because he’d witness none of the carnage, none of the death. He had seen the last of their lives while mixing among them, but to truly absorb those lives, to etch the impression forever in his mind, he had to see the end unfold before him.