The red menace 3, p.18
The Red Menace #3, page 18
Through a bay window, he spotted three men inside a big dining room off the patio. The sniper’s rifle was braced on the windowsill as the shooter scanned the yard. The other two men carried handguns and crouched behind the sniper.
The sniper’s rifle was Dragunov. The other two held Makarov pistols.
Even if they’d gone native with their choice of weapons, their ill-fitting black suits, thick necks and sloping brows would have given them away like a flashing neon red sign over an all-night borscht house.
One thing the Red Menace could spot better than anything else on the planet was Russians, and there was not a shred of doubt in his mind that he was looking at a Soviet hit squad squatting on the dining room floor of R. Gunn Hallifax’s mansion.
And, he realized as he frowned behind his mask, the Russians had been expecting him. The element of surprise was gone. The Menace felt cold fear in his belly. Not for himself, but for countless innocents. Hallifax and his cult might at that very moment be off somewhere plotting the retaliatory destruction of most of southern California.
And where were the Realtopians? Cassandra had assured him that the mansion would be crawling with church members, yet the Russians were alone. The Menace saw no one else through the window.
He stood with his back to the front wall of the house for a full minute and watched the trio of Russians peering out at the lawn. The three men whispered amongst themselves, and although he could not hear what they were saying he knew that they were wondering if they’d shot their invisible target.
At last one of the men hiding behind the sniper ordered his partner with the handgun to go out and investigate. The leader stayed behind along with the sniper as the luckless third agent walked at a crouch below the windowsills over to the patio doors.
The Russian disappeared out the French doors and the Menace did not see him again until he came down the patio stairs and began creeping stealthily across the lawn.
The Menace bided his time, waiting until the Russian had made it all the way over to where the dead dog lay bleeding out into the grass. The Soviet agent nudged the empty air around the immediate vicinity with his toe, but found nothing. He took a few steps away from the dog and repeated the action, but still located no body in the grass.
The fact that he appeared to be searching for an invisible corpse confirmed that which the Red Menace already knew. They were after him, and hoped that they had shot him by firing blind around the pack of Rottweilers.
The Russian was carefully peering at the ground, stepping gingerly from spot to spot as if fearful of tripping over an invisible body. The Red Menace raised his gun, flipped the dial on the butt and squeezed off a single shot.
The bullet caught the Russian just above the ear and the man went down.
The Russians in the house reacted as panicked Russians always did. Both men began firing blindly out the window at the spot where their comrade fell. The silenced pops of the Dragunov rifle were drowned out by the sharp explosions as bullet after bullet fired from the barrel of the Makarov.
Unbeknownst to the Russians, their invisible target was safe several dozen yards away from the spot where their bullets chewed up empty lawn and pummeled the body of their fallen comrade. As the men continued to fire, the Menace very calmly cracked out the nearest pane of the bay window and sent two bullets sailing into the house.
The sniper was killed instantly by a head shot. The second man took a bullet in the side of the chest and went sliding on his back across the highly polished oak floor.
The Red Menace kept his barrel trained on the still-breathing Russian as he carefully reached in and unlatched the widow from the outside. He kept the man in sight at all times as he climbed in through the window.
Russians loved booby traps, and he dared not risk going in through one of the doors. He saw once he was in that the front door was clear of wires and explosives. So too were the French doors to the balcony. These Russians apparently had not been fully briefed on the skills of their target, and so had not prepared as well as they should have.
For the Red Menace, this was cause for some relief. Whoever had sent these men to ambush him weren’t fully up to speed on the Red Menace.
The man with the bullet in his chest held a hand to the open wound. With every panted breath, more blood gurgled from the hole. Bubbles of crimson popped around lips that were going pale. Already his skin looked like gray wax.
The Menace approached with caution, but saw no one else in the room. It appeared as though the Russians were alone in the house.
The Russian agent’s eyes widened at the abrupt appearance of the man in the mask. It was as if he had stepped out from behind one of the dust particles that danced on warm eddies of air in the big dining room. A nearly silent curse passed between the dying lips of the leader of the Russian hit squad.
“You’ll be dead soon,” the Red Menace informed the Russian spy. He spoke in the man’s native tongue. “You are about to experience freedom for the first time in your existence. Before you go, tell me who sent you.”
“Go to hell,” the Russian said. He gritted his teeth in defiance as a trickle of watery blood ran from his mouth and down his cheek, dribbling to the floor.
The Red Menace wished the man had talked voluntarily. He despised the ugly yet sometimes necessary work the business required.
The Menace took his heel and ground it into the man’s hand, which remained fixed over the bullet wound in his chest. The Menace could feel the shattered chest bones shifting at the pressure and the dying man gasped in fresh pain.
“Highest authority,” he wheezed. “All agents in America…ordered to stand down one month ago. We…we were reactivated. Told to take over from people in this house. Send them away. Moscow intelligence deduced someone would be coming. American agent. Someone in advanced camouflage. Could not be seen. You.”
“You don’t work for the Realtopians?” the Menace asked. He saw the confused look on the Russian’s face, as if the man had never before heard the name of the cult. “Does the name R. Gunn Hallifax ring a bell?”
The Russian seemed baffled, but he could have been lying. The Menace pressed the heel of his foot into the back of the man’s hand once more, and the Russian sucked in a horrible, damp gasp of pain.
“Nyet. Do not know this person. Is man? We send them away, those who were here. Could be with those who left. Do not know him…do not know… do not know…”
The Russian’s head lolled to one side, his eyes went glassy and the final breath of life hissed from between his lips. The gurgle of blood from the wound in his chest stopped an instant later.
The Red Menace took his foot off the Russian corpse.
“Did you hear that, doc?”
The voice replied over a small speaker embedded inside his mask. “I warned you there would be blowback over those agents you crated up and shipped back to Moscow,” Wainwright said. “You shook the hornet’s nest.”
“It sounds like they rousted the Realtopians out of here. They weren’t with them, they just knew I’d come here. Which means we’ve got trouble in the future, because that means someone in Moscow is smart. Oh, well. Problem for another day. No time to worry about the Russkies right now.”
“Unless there’s another one squatting behind the sofa right now with an atomic bomb tucked under his arm,” Wainwright pointed out.
Fortunately for the Menace, Dr. Wainwright and Carmel, California, there was no such armed Russian hiding in the living room. The Red Menace did find a pile of robes that must have belonged to the cult. He tore some strips off one and used it to bind the dog bite wounds in his arm. The cloth was warm and the robes had been neatly folded. The robes had come out of a dryer not long before. The Russians could not have chased the Realtopians off the premises very long ago.
The Menace ran from room to room but found no one. The large rooms at the rear of the house all opened onto another patio, this one the length of the entire back of the mansion. When he stepped out on the patio, he heard the drone of many engines coming faintly to his ears over the noise of the relentless surf.
The backyard was vast, and angled down to a long strip of beach. The side yard was dotted with even rows of cheap wood buildings, lined up in neat grid formation. The sight reminded the Red Menace of a barracks in a prisoner of war camp.
This was home base for Realtopian recruits. There were lights on in the back, and the menace saw that much of the yard had been plowed under and turned into vegetable gardens. There must have been hundreds of cult members who called the backyard of the mansion home. And if the sound of the engines out in the ocean were any indication, they had all been evacuated when the Russian hit squad showed up at the front door.
“Swell, we’ve got more trouble,” he announced.
He caught the brief sound of a voice that might have been Wainwright’s. He couldn’t tell over all the static. The house was interfering with the reception on the mini transmitter-receiver in his mask. The Menace had no time to worry about that.
He found a wide set of stone stairs at the far end of the patio, and raced down a path that took him to a long set of wooden steps that opened on a broad, white beach.
Far off on the waves he saw the tiny dots of dozens of weak lights bobbing on unseen boats speeding out to sea. Twenty long wooden docks jutted out from the shore, but there was not a single boat remaining in which he could pursue the fleeing Realtopians. All the Red Menace could do was watch helplessly as the doom of California was carried out from under his nose.
* * *
“I didn’t get that,” Thaddeus Wainwright said into the microphone. “Did you say trouble? What trouble? What’s wrong now? For God’s sake, answer me—”
Wainwright almost slipped and said “Patrick.”
He released the button at the base of the microphone, but all that came through the speaker was static. Wainwright dropped his cigarette and crushed it on the floor of the van with a frustrated toe.
The transmitter in the mask had been temperamental ever since Wainwright installed it several months ago. He had heard the Red Menace’s steady breathing up until the glass shattered, after which the younger man had presumably entered the house. He heard the soft pops of gunfire coming from the mansion more clearly outside the van than from the speaker over which his ears strained. After the Menace entered the house, the static interference grew until Wainwright lost the signal completely. The last thing he thought he heard was the word “trouble,” but he was not even sure of that.
At least Wainwright knew that the Menace had survived the Russian attack. Still, the doctor was there to offer advice and backup if absolutely necessary, and he couldn’t very well do either if the two men were cut off from one another.
All at once the doctor heard the scuff of a foot outside the van. For an instant he allowed himself to think it was the Red Menace, but his logical brain immediately dismissed the foolish hope. There was no way the young man could have gotten back to the van so quickly. Wainwright was reaching for his gun which was lying on the table beside him even before he heard the whispers in the dark outside the van.
He recognized one of the voices and had only an instant in which to make a decision. His hand passed straight over the gun and flicked a switch which silently unlocked the rear door of the van. He was bringing his hand back to his side when the rear door of the van flew open and he was caught with his hand hovering over his gun. “Freeze!”
He turned his face to the four armed men with the glazed looks in their eyes who were pointing weapons inside the van.
“I have already, as you can see,” Wainwright calmly replied. “With your permission, I would like to raise my hands in surrender.”
“Do it!”
Wainwright took his hand away from his automatic and raised both arms to shoulder height. He hoped that he had made the right decision even as he offered a slight nod to the fifth face that had just appeared at the back of the crowd of Realtopian guards.
The eyes of his fifth captor were definitely not glazed. They were sharp and filled with cunning. The woman glanced around the inside of the van but saw only the doctor.
“Get him out of there,” she commanded.
Wainwright allowed himself to be hauled from the rear of the van.
The woman strode up to him and lifted her beautiful face so that she was inches away and staring up into the tall man’s face.
“Where’s the smart mouth now?” Cassandra Vox demanded.
“Your neck is beginning to sag,” Thaddeus Wainwright replied.
Her look of triumph flashed to one of horror and both hands fluttered up to her neck to check for an excess of dangling skin. She was patting at the underside of her chin and tugging the flesh along her jaw line as she turned from him.
“Take him,” Cassandra commanded.
The four armed men left the rear door of the van open and propelled Dr. Wainwright by the barrel of a rifle down a path through the woods to the shore.
* * *
The Red Menace heard the whine of an outboard motor farther down the beach. It was hard to tell the exact spot from which it launched. To the south, the smooth shore ended in a wall of rock that rose to a sheer cliff face. Another beach might be on the other side of that rock, for it was from somewhere in that direction the sound of the new motor came. If there was another beach, it was inaccessible from his position.
He had gone down to the docks to confirm that which he already knew. There were no more boats strung up to the piers.
At the farthest point of the longest dock, he squatted down and tried to see the spot to which the small boats were fleeing.
The first motorboats had already reached their destination. The lights were winking out one by one on the small craft.
The sky was dark and bled into the horizon, and it was only when he crouched down and tipped his head that he caught a glimpse of something massive moored offshore. He tried looking directly at it and lost it again.
From the corner of his eye he picked it up once more. It was the shape of a huge vessel of some sort. But in the dark of night with no lights onboard, he could not tell what kind of ship it was. He only knew that it was big enough to swallow up every one of the small craft that raced out to it.
There must have been at least two hundred cultists judging by the size of the barracks in the side yard of the mansion and the apparent number of boats that had been used to evacuate them. No matter what kind of ship Hallifax had, it was huge.
The final lights on the main group of vessels winked out. All that was left was the single boat that had taken off farther down the beach. It was close enough that the Menace could make out the black-on-black as the boat bounced the waves and headed out to deep water.
More cultists racing to serve their master. The Red Menace could only hope that the Russians had merely confused and had not lit a fuse under R. Gunn Hallifax. The insane cult leader could inflict untold damage if angered.
The masked man turned from the ocean and raced up the dock toward the mansion high above.
20
In another life, the ship had been called the Queen Victoria. It was built as a luxury liner by a Finnish shipbuilder for a Canadian cruise company to operate in the Caribbean and South America.
The Canadian company had gone belly-up and its holdings sold off to the highest bidder. The Queen Victoria had been purchased with Realtopian Church of America money through a European dummy corporation and refitted in Baja California to the exact specifications of R. Gunn Hallifax. It was rechristened the Hallifax I.
If R. Gunn Hallifax had a home on this planet at all, it was aboard the Hallifax I.
By day the ship remained in international waters, mostly off the Mexican shore; by night Hallifax sometimes sneaked it close to American waters. Since the discovery of the substance that made men wild, he had been venturing more boldly into American waters. Soon he would be able to bring the Hallifax I home to Los Angeles Harbor. The greatest triumph for the demigods on their circling starship since the consciousness of the Rectium Swarm had first been deposited on this planet, eons before the progenitors of the human race flopped out of the primordial goo of ancient Earth.
The greatest of all the demigods, the author of The Realtopian Handbook and a spiritual leader greater than all ministers, rabbis, priests and popes combined, stood on the bridge of the huge vessel that bore his name. R. Gunn Hallifax watched the shore. Or rather, he watched the direction in which he knew the shore to be. The Hallifax I was a mile offshore, and with no lights onboard the ship and few lights in or around the mansion onshore, it was impossible to make out much of anything, even with binoculars.
He was able to see the last of the small boats drawing close to the Hallifax I. They vanished beneath the side of the behemoth vessel. He only knew that the men and women who had followed him out to sea had made it to the refitted cruise liner when he heard them clamoring up the stairs and onto the damp deck.
He heard exclamations of relief from his followers. Hallifax would never share with his disciples that he was relieved as well.
Hallifax had thought it was all over when the three Russians burst into the mansion of Donatello Figarelli, a wealthy Italian film producer who had joined the church after a promise that Hallifax would ensure his success in America. The Realtopians had weapons, but the Russians were better trained. When Figarelli had confronted them, the Russians had responded by shooting off the Italian’s right kneecap.
Hallifax was certain that they were agents of the Rectium Swarm, but the leader of the Russians assured him that they were not interested in the church in the least.
“You are crazy man,” the head Russian said. “Crazy man and all crazy people leave now, or crazy man is getting shot between eyes.”
They were impolite without a doubt, but they were apparently not agents of the Swarm after all. All he could get out of them was that someone was coming after him, and while they had no interest in defending R. Gunn Hallifax, they were intensely interested in killing the mysterious invader. Hallifax had tried to get more out of them, but they declined to illuminate him any further. Their refusal took the form of another bullet, this one to the left kneecap of Signor Donatello Figarelli.
