The red menace 3, p.20
The Red Menace #3, page 20
“What the hell was he doing with it over there?”
“They don’t know,” Kirk said. “I don’t think it would surprise you, Mr. Becket, if I told you that most everything we do learn these days seems to be due to sheer dumb luck. We only know precisely where it is right now because he told us.”
“Great. Perfect,” Podge said, understanding. “The loon sent another demand.”
“Yes,” Kirk said. “The meeting you called me out of was with the president. Hallifax personally called the White House switchboard. He’s made himself important enough that he got passed right through to the president. All of his original demands still stand, but he’s issued a new warning. He admits he has the boat, and says that if he hears so much as a hint of an airplane engine or if he thinks he sees a periscope or a torpedo, he will release a vengeance on the entire country that will tear America apart.”
“Well, he had no choice to admit he had the boat. He’d know we’d know about it by now, unless the Russians were able to kill me which, being Russians, they weren’t.”
Kirk felt a fresh wave of nausea wash up from his belly to his throat. “What Russians?” he demanded.
“The dead ones,” Podge said. “They’re not important right now, trust me. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than a measly commie hit squad. What’s crackpot Hallifax talking about with tearing the country apart?”
Kirk shook his head. “No one knows. He only phoned—” He checked the clock on the wall. “—less than half an hour ago. Every intelligence service is mobilizing trying to find out, but they won’t figure out what, if anything, he means. Not in time. We have to assume he’s talking about that formula of his. He may have a new dispersal method. He’s already tested it throughout the country, which means he has cult members who delivered it to the various camp grounds, etcetera. They’re still out there. And he’s demonstrated that he’s willing to use a large dose of it on civilians at the movie studio. Right now we have to assume that this isn’t an idle threat, and that he can follow through if he’s attacked. The president has decided to back off.”
“You can’t be serious,” Podge said. “You’re actually giving this lunatic a chunk of California?”
“It wasn’t my call to make, although I don’t know if I would have done any differently,” Kirk said. “If Hallifax does have men positioned around the country with that gas and the president doesn’t give in, we could be talking hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, dead.”
“So that’s it?” Podge said. “You’re pulling the plug on us?”
There was a sudden flash of anger in the young MIC director’s eyes. His spine steeled as he sat up rigidly in his chair. If this was what it felt like to be a traitor, Simon Kirk would proudly take his place next to history’s most treacherous villains.
“Of course not,” Kirk snapped. “I don’t think the president had any other choice to make than the one he made, given his position. But we’re not him. We’re going after Hallifax and we’re getting Dr. Wainwright back.”
“That’s good, kid,” Podge said. “Because I was going anyway.”
Kirk was surprised to find that the worry, the fear, the nausea had all subsided, replaced with cold determination.
“You’ll need to get onboard that boat,” the MIC director said. “He’s heading down the coast right now. He’s ordered the president to pull all military craft from the waters along the Los Angeles coast. That’s where you’ll find him.”
“Good. I hate it when they make me work for it. I’ll have his crazy head on the end of an oar by lunch.”
“Wait,” Kirk said, before Podge could hang up. “Hallifax told the president that if we don’t step up evacuations, he’ll start bombarding Los Angeles.”
“Bombarding?” Podge asked.
“His exact word.”
“Where exactly in the Middle East did he take that cruise ship?” Podge asked.
“Libya. Why?”
“Once this is all over, I’m going to have to have a chat with Colonel Crackpot in Tripoli about supplying the bad guys with things that go boom.”
The connection was broken. Kirk listened to the dial tone for only a moment before dropping the receiver into the cradle.
The MIC director fully realized that his clandestine plotting might be the end of his position as head of his agency. If things in California went as sour as they very well could, he might even be looking at a full Congressional investigation and, quite possibly, jail time. All that did not matter. Simon Kirk did not matter. He had made a pledge when he took this job to defend the country he loved against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In an age when oaths were becoming as insubstantial as the air into which they were spoken, Simon Kirk was a proud dinosaur.
Kirk got up from his desk and punched the special code into the pad on the wall across the room. The corkboard map of the United States folded neatly and soundlessly and the MIC director stepped through the secret door. After, the map folded back out and the United States of America was whole once more.
22
The pair of dull-eyed guards unlocked the door to Wainwright’s prison cell. As brigs went, the prisoner accommodations on the Hallifax I beat those in San Jacinto State Prison by a country mile.
Since the ship had been a luxury cruise liner before her refit, many of the staterooms were still intact. Wainwright’s guard flipped the switch just inside the door and lights in sconces came on all around a paneled living room.
“A bit garish for my tastes,” Wainwright noted. “Do you have something less 1970s and more 1870s?”
The Realtopians shoved the doctor inside and locked the door behind him.
Wainwright immediately set about taking inventory. There were two bedrooms, a smaller room with twin beds and a large master bedroom. Sliding glass doors beyond the king-sized bed opened to a balcony.
Wainwright hurried across the room and onto the balcony.
The night was giving way to dawn. The horizon to the east was smeared a pale pink, while stars scattered above the lightening strip of sky winked out one by one.
He felt the salt spray brush his left cheek, which confirmed that which he had already felt through the soles of his shoes. The Hallifax I was moving south.
There were balconies directly above and below his. Others jutted from the side of the ship in both directions.
The balconies on either side were too far away and so completely out of the question. He leaned over the railing and tried to see the balcony below in the weak light of predawn.
With the right equipment he might have been able to reach it. He did not fancy the thought of tying bed sheets together and trying to swing down from one damp railing to another. That sort of derring-do was the province of the Red Menace, not Thaddeus Wainwright. The doctor imagined the knots of a makeshift rope coming undone or his shoes slipping or his hands losing their grip. A plunge to the ocean from this height into the wake of the cruise ship was a risk for a man much younger and more impulsive than Wainwright. And if he did make it to the balcony only to land wrong, they would find him nursing a splintered leg and probably toss him overboard as they had the unfortunate fellow on the bridge with the bullet wounds in his knees.
The sun broke brilliant and white over the horizon as Wainwright reentered the bedroom and slid the glass doors shut.
He was stepping back into the living room when the hallway door opened and Cassandra Vox stepped into the small foyer. The actress was carrying a pistol, and her unhappy frown pulled fresh wrinkles to her full lips.
“He wants to see you,” Cassandra said. She waved the pistol to the door.
Wainwright stepped out into the hallway. The two Realtopians stood watch on either side of the door. The goons fell in behind Cassandra as she led the doctor down the narrow corridor towards the fore of the ship.
“I presume you were the one who got him to bomb that movie studio,” Wainwright commented as they marched past an empty dining hall. Sunlight streamed through dozens of windows set high along the wall, illuminating the vast empty space where chairs and tables once sat.
“He didn’t care where it landed, so I gave him the suggestion,” Cassandra said. “That role I said I got? I didn’t. I lost it to some bitch three years younger than me. Serves them right.”
“However this began for Hallifax, he’s mad now and so his culpability is diminished. But you have entered this in your right mind.” He waved a hand in the air, erasing his own words, and added, “Such as it is.”
“Someone needs to direct this show,” Cassandra said. She kept her voice low so that the trailing Realtopians could not hear. “Without my help getting him to focus, the great High Star Admiral would still be moored down in Mexico buggering the little local boys and wondering what to do with that stuff Petit discovered. It’s a good thing he had me to be the flea in his ear, ’cause that junk would never have worked as perfume even if it didn’t cause people to go nuts and kill each other. He got it from a gland in some hippo’s ass. Who’s going to buy hippo-ass perfume? Nobody, that’s who. And Petit would have slapped my face all over every bottle. That’s all my career needs. First I dent a can of cling peaches on some nobody box boy’s head, then I lend the most famous face in the world to hippo-ass perfume. You’re right about one thing, pops. Everybody’s nuts around here but me.”
“Well, let’s not get carried away,” Wainwright cautioned. “You’re an amoral, delusional, narcissistic sociopath. In the vernacular, there is crazy, young lady, and there is crazy. You’re the former, Hallifax is the latter.”
They had just stepped through a door to a cavernous space at the ship’s midpoint.
“Ah,” Wainwright observed. “And if I needed further proof…”
Eight decks of the former Queen Victoria had been hollowed down from the main deck on which had once been an Olympic-size swimming pool. The roof that was once the underside of the pool was now a pair of massive metal doors of gunmetal gray.
The doors met in a seam up the middle. Wainwright saw no hinges, so he assumed they slid apart and into concealment in the deck.
There were catwalks on the walls, but they looked as if they had been hastily constructed and appeared unsafe. It looked as though the original floors and walls had been sawed and hammered out in haste. There were even some frayed ends of carpet from hallways that no longer existed which ended at doors that now opened into vacant air sixty feet above the floor of the new cavern.
Halfway up the main floor was a huge pivoting turret from which jutted three massive cannon barrels. The nearest was so close that Wainwright could have spat down the barrel.
Cassandra led Wainwright onto a platform that looked over the huge room. Waiting for them at the end of the walkway was R. Gunn Hallifax.
The Realtopian leader’s eyes lit up when he spotted Wainwright. “You see?” Hallifax announced. “World War Two. Decommissioned. Not from my old ship, unfortunately. The United States Navy doesn’t play ball. These were salvaged off a Japanese aircraft carrier. They’ve got quite a range on them.”
Realtopians crawled around the base of the turret. Wainwright saw stacks of shells piled up against the walls far below, presumably loaded down with Hallifax’s madness-inducing substance.
“Ex-Navy,” Hallifax informed Wainwright when he saw the doctor looking down at the men below. “Some civilian engineers as well. There are Realtopians in all walks of life. We’re everywhere. That’s how I was able to get all this accomplished. And once the United States turns over my land here in California, our influence will only grow. My reach will be universal.”
“Well, won’t that be handy,” Wainwright said. “I have difficulty reaching the middle of my back when I’ve got an itch, but universal reach? Very nice. You’ll be able to scratch yourself anywhere.”
Hallifax continued beaming even as he shook his head, confused. “What?”
“He’s making fun of you,” Cassandra droned.
But Hallifax’s eyes were off Wainwright and had darted back to the huge gun barrels. “This is how I delivered the bomb to the movie studio,” he said, proudly. “They have no idea it was fired from offshore.”
“Ironic,” Wainwright said, nodding thoughtfully.
The pride faded and Hallifax’s face clouded. “Why?”
“Oh, nothing to do with your cannon. Very nice, those. Most impressive. No, it’s her,” he indicated Cassandra. “It’s ironic that she would be involved in delivering a bomb into a movie studio, when she generally works the other way round.”
Cassandra seethed.
Hallifax hesitated a moment as his confused brain processed Wainwright’s words, then he burst into demented laughter.
“Yeeees,” Wainwright said, drawing the word out to four syllables. “You know they’re working wonders with lithium these days.”
“He’s doing it again,” Cassandra said. “I think we should shoot him. Can I please shoot him, High Star Admiral?”
She put the barrel of her revolver to Wainwright’s forehead.
The doctor did not flinch. Wainwright simply offered a wistful sigh and said, “That would most likely do it.”
“No, no, no,” Hallifax said. “He may have useful information on those the United States government would send after us, if they’re foolish enough to break their word.”
“What word?” Wainwright asked.
“Surrender,” Hallifax reported gleefully. “A vast section of California is being evacuated even as we speak. Here. See for yourself. Come, come.”
Hallifax led Wainwright, Cassandra and the two guards into a room off the gun chamber. The control room was hot and cramped. On a black and white television screen Wainwright saw footage of cars cramming roads and freeways. Although the earliest rays of the new morning sun had begun to burn hot across the pavement, the night was so recent that many had neglected to shut off their headlights. Trunks of cars were propped partially open and tied down with rope to hold in whatever the fleeing residents could jam inside. Anything that did not fit in the cars was strapped to roofs.
“That was the scene minutes ago on the San Diego Freeway,” a local news anchor reported in a somber voice. “Every road in the greater Los Angeles area is filled with bumper to bumper traffic as residents flee the scene in droves. The National Guard has been deployed and is going door to door with local law enforcement to see to it that all residents within the zone have left. There is still no official word on who is behind the threat, but it has been linked to the mass madness at Regnum Pictures. However, our national CBS Evening News sources in New York have informed us that the threat against Californians is justified retaliation against the administration in Washington for its prosecution of the unjust and lost war in Vietnam. The White House has neither confirmed nor denied, which lends credence to the initial report.”
“Do you have room on your spaceship for one more?” Wainwright droned, flat eyes directed at the television screen.
Hallifax did not hear. He gave the top of the portable TV a triumphant whack. The picture collapsed in jumping lines and the signal turned to gray snow, but the cult leader did not seem to notice.
“You see?” he announced. “And look. Look here.”
He issued a few commands to the men seated at consoles in the small room. Outside, there came a long, terrible groan of metal.
When Hallifax ushered Wainwright and the rest back out onto the catwalk, the doors high above were creaking slowly apart. The widening strip of sky above the cruise liner was white smog stained with streaks of orange.
More metal groaned beneath their feet. It sounded to Wainwright almost as if the ship were tearing itself apart. As he watched, the gun barrels rose slowly on their platform, a monstrous leviathan creeping up from the darkest depths of the sea.
The doors were open wide by the time the barrels reached them, and the entire platform broke up into the sunlight. A moment later, the sun vanished as the platform locked in place in the deck and the hollow space below was bathed once more in the weak floodlights that adorned the walls.
“We can reach the most populated areas on the coast with these guns. When I put you on the phone with them, you tell them that,” Hallifax said.
“That includes every movie studio in town,” Cassandra warned, teeth tightly clenched. “And the hotel suite where your friend is staying, so you better play ball, or Becket’s dead along with anybody left at every studio in this town.”
“What town?” Wainwright snapped impatiently. “For God’s sake, we’re on a boat, you imbecilic trollop. Hollywood does not encompass the entire world.”
Cassandra opened her mouth to speak, but Hallifax waved the angry words away before they could form on her lips.
“Yes, be quiet Senior Grade Lieutenant Vox,” Hallifax said. “Take it down!”
At the command, the gears reversed and the guns began their painfully slow descent back down from the uppermost deck of the Hallifax I.
“So you see that it’s lost for you,” Hallifax said, triumphantly swiping clouds of dandruff flakes from both shoulders. “We’ll get you on the horn to tell them that in Washington. And it’s not just the United States government. As a high level member of the Rectium Swarm, you might come in handy once the spaceport is up and running.”
“Spaceport,” Wainwright said, voice perfectly level.
“Oh, yes,” Hallifax said, nodding energetically. “We’ll need someone who’s part of the Swarm to deal with the Shade Miners of Krebulon. Actually, you might be one of them. Krebulonians are all over six feet tall, too. Are you one?”
“On my mother’s side,” Wainwright said. “But we’re not orthodox.”
Cassandra Vox had had enough.
“Oh, will you just stop it with the crazy bullshit and come back to planet Earth for one goddamned minute!” Cassandra yelled, waving her gun wildly.
The two cult members who were there to guard Wainwright did not aim their rifle barrels at her, but she noted at once that the men became much more attentive and that their barrels did at that moment shift away from the doctor slightly in her direction.
