Air raid, p.22
Air Raid, page 22
Chapter 29
The Vice President and the CIA director were waiting anxiously next to the fax machine in the West Wing office of the Vice President, Since the start of the crisis, spy satellites over South America had been relaying images to the Central Intelligence Agency on a continuous basis. They in turn were sent to the White House. Every minute a new image would spit out of the Vice President’s corner fax.
Over the past hour the photos had gotten more disturbing as the human activity around the C. dioxa forest increased.
“Something’s happening,” the CIA director said when the frozen black blur of a helicopter appeared over the blue blob of trees. His voice was tight with concern.
The next fax that rolled off the machine showed a close-up of the helicopter. It had landed near two others. Some sort of metallic arms had been fixed to the underside of the aircraft.
The Vice President, who at one time had served as secretary of defense, knew immediately that the old West German Messerschmitt had been tampered with. The fact that the aircraft had been altered sparked fresh concern.
“We’d better show him these,” he said.
He and the CIA director gathered up the photos and hurried down to the Oval Office. The President was there with a few of his national security advisers.
As the President and his advisers gathered around, the Vice President and CIA head lined the satellite photographs up in a neat row on the coffee table. The Vice President brought their attention to the helicopter in particular.
“There has been an increase in activity around the valley,” the Vice President explained. “The boat carrying the C. dioxa seeds arrived not long ago.”
He pointed to a photo. Little blurs of men dragged bundles across the white desert that rimmed the valley.
“Have you figured out what that is yet?” the President asked, indicating the desert region.
The CIA man and the Vice President glanced uncomfortably at each other.
“It appears to be ice, sir,” the CIA director said.
All eyes in the room looked slowly up at the CIA head. The men weren’t sure they had heard right.
“Did you say ice?” the President asked flatly.
“I’ve had experts looking into the archived satellite photos of that area,” the CIA director explained.
“There was a dense cloud cover over that valley for almost thirteen months. More than likely man-made from-burning the indigenous flora. The surrounding mountains held the smoke in, like smog in L.A. By the looks of it, they’ve altered the normal climate of that isolated area. Those plants of theirs don’t photosynthesize, so they wouldn’t have been affected.”
“These people are insane,” the President said, more to himself than to the others in the Oval Office.
“All the more reason to assume they’re capable of anything,” the Vice President said. “I hate the thought of it, Mr. President, but it might be time to take decisive action. Before the threat expands to a point where it can’t be stopped.”
The President gazed down across the photos. “No,” he said quietly.
“I can understand your reservations, sir,” the CIA director said. “But it’s not like we could get Brazil to do it themselves, even if they had nuclear capability. It has come down to that small valley or the entire world.”
The President chewed the inside of his cheek. It was an old habit he’d been trying to break.
“We have to wait a little longer,” America’s chief executive insisted.
The NSC chairman cleared his throat. “Mr. President, we’ve had people researching the genetic alterations that were made to the plants. The projections you were shown are accurate. Those plants will grow like weeds.”
The President looked up. All of the faces in the room were staring expectantly at him.
“Dammit, I can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “We have…people down there.”
No one else in the Oval Office was aware of any agents who had been sent to the region. The nation’s top national security advisers—the very men who would commit such agents—glanced at one another in confusion.
“What people?” asked the CIA director.
The President seemed reluctant to even discuss the subject. “I can’t say,” he insisted. “But there are people there that I trust.”
“Whoever they are, they are expendable, sir,” said the Vice President.
The President looked over at his Vice President.
During their time campaigning, the two had become good friends. Since assuming office, the older man had become the President’s most trusted adviser.
“Believe me,” the President said, his voice strong and level, “these men might not be.” He held up a hand, staying all arguments. “But in spite of that, I promise all of you that I’ll do what I have to when the time comes. Until then, excuse me, gentlemen.”
And that brought their meeting to an abrupt end.
He offered the confused men a few encouraging nods as he ushered the group of advisers out the door.
The Vice President was last to leave. The President caught the older man by the arm, holding him back from the pack.
“You think he’s going to use that helicopter to spread the seeds?” the President asked once the rest were gone.
“I believe so, sir,” the Vice President replied.
The President nodded somberly. “This is just between us,” he said, careful to keep his voice low. “Get the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the phone. I want a plane scrambled and above that area within the hour. Tell him he’s authorized to drop whatever’s necessary to neutralize those plants. Have him call me for the codes.”
The Vice President felt a tightening in his chest. “Yes, Mr. President,” he said.
The President saw the wan look that had settled on his Vice President’s face.
“We’re not doing this yet,” the chief executive assured the older man. “But we need to be ready for the worst. I want you on top of this. Keep me informed. The minute you see that helicopter taking off, I’ll give the order.”
The Vice President nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. He hesitated a moment. “But can I ask you, sir, why are we waiting? Who exactly is it we have down there?”
The President offered a lopsided smile. It was a smile devoid of mirth. “If I told you who they were, they’d have to kill you,” the leader of the free world said, his tone serious. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go figure out what I’m gonna tell those Clymers in the press about why I had to go and blow up half of Brazil.”
Shoulders sinking wearily, he shut the Oval Office door on the sickly face of the Vice President.
Chapter 30
They left the river far behind. The rowboat raced across the glistening surface of the glacier.
Cold wind bit Smith’s and Amanda’s skin and stung their eyes. They barely noticed. They were too busy gripping their seats for dear life.
Chiun sat behind them. He used delicate nudges to keep them from flipping out of the boat with every wild turn.
Remo was standing in the very back of the boat. He was using an oar to propel them forward at breakneck speed. Any time they seemed to be slowing, the tip of the oar would gouge the surface of the ice and they’d be whipping forward once more.
“See, the trick here is pretty simple,” Remo instructed. “We go fast enough that we’re not so much on the surface as we are above it. Mines don’t feel us, mines don’t go boom.”
Another tap from the oar. Chips of ice scattered in their wake.
Smith’s glasses bit back into the bridge of his nose. The g-forces pulled his thin lips back in a pained smile.
Unseen by Amanda and Smith, between shoving off, Remo was tapping the paddle against the glacier’s surface. The vibrations that came back to him gave him a rough sense where the most mines were buried.
Another subtle course alteration. Smith nearly launched from his seat. A weathered hand guided him back to the wooden bench.
“There is something up ahead,” the Master of Sinanju observed as he helped the CURE director settle back down.
Remo had noted it, too. There was some sort of dip beyond the end of the ice field. It rimmed the C. dioxa hill like a moat.
“I can’t see it from here,” Remo said from where he stood in the back of the boat. “But judging from all the surveillance equipment, I smell a German rat.” There were no mechanical vibrations coming from the hilltop. All they could see as they approached were the rotor blades of three dormant helicopters drooping at the edge of the forest. The long-range surveillance devices they were sensing had been positioned around the mountaintops that rimmed the valley.
“Why do I get the feeling we’re being lured into the spider’s web?” Remo grumbled to himself. Digging his paddle in deep, he propelled them like a wooden bullet toward the base of the hill.
When the fear began this time, there was no naughty thrill to it.
Olivier Hahn couldn’t believe his eyes.
The Swiss assassin was hunched over a single glowing monitor in the bowels of the CCS bunker. It was the only computer St. Clair had allowed in his underground haven.
The storage room was filled with barnyard smells. Around his small computer table, sacks of wheat and rice were piled high. Somewhere in one of the nearer rooms, a goat bleated. Herr Hahn barely heard it. He was busy watching the two Masters of Sinanju as they raced across the glacier.
It shouldn’t have been possible. According to his equipment they were passing directly over hundreds of mines. Yet they failed to set a single one off.
This was his last stand. Although he’d had setbacks with these two before, Herr Hahn knew to the marrow of his German bones that he would succeed here.
Hubert St. Clair had gone back to the surface. When he saw the boat coming in across the ice, the frightened little technophobe had ordered his pilot to start his helicopter. St. Clair intended to use the special hoppers Herr Hahn had designed to spread his blue seeds beyond the valley. Seeing Amanda Lifton arrive with her two bodyguards and another man, the CCS head was afraid that die valley was no longer safe.
But it was safe.
Hahn had designed this entire valley for the Congress of Concerned Scientists. It was his undeniable masterpiece. The engineering and technical skills that had gone into creating the firn, the hill, the C. dioxa forest and the subterranean chambers were sheer genius.
Hahn didn’t know what Hubert St. Clair’s ultimate plans were. Something to do with those blue trees of his. As. Long as the money was good, Herr Hahn hadn’t cared. Hahn had started for the money and, with the introduction of the Sinanju Masters to the mix, had remained for the thrill.
But the thrill was long gone, and he couldn’t spend his millions of CCS dollars if he was dead.
The mines should have exploded.
Remo stood in the back of the rowboat like a gondolier. The boat flashed over the hard-packed ice.
He was flying in too fast and changing course abruptly. There was no way for Hahn to track the small boat. No way to set off a mine directly beneath. But he could still set off the mines manually. There was a chance he might get them.
And after the ice field there was still one last line of defense. Maybe Hahn wouldn’t need it. Maybe by sheer luck, he could get them before they left the glacier.
As his frightened eyes watched the boat zoom in, Herr Hahn’s thick fingers fumbled at his keyboard.
The first explosion flashed bright orange to the right. It ripped through glacial ice, launching white chips over the speeding boat.
“I didn’t do that,” Remo called.
A second mine exploded, this one dead ahead. Remo had to twist and hop the boat over the smoking crater. Chiun kept Smith and Amanda from being flung to the glacier.
“I guess he couldn’t wait for us to hit one,” Remo said
“We have another concern,” the old Korean replied.
Tracking the Master of Sinanju’s gaze up to the hilltop, Remo saw one of the helicopters had spluttered to life. The rotor blades were rapidly picking up speed.
“That could be Hubert,” Amanda said. “He might be trying to escape with the seeds.”
“One catastrophe at a time,” Remo answered.
Through his tapping oar, he felt a metallic click. Another mine blew, this one a hair after they’d passed over it. It was only their great speed that kept them from being blown to bits. The boat pitched, and Amanda was thrown from her seat. Chiun grabbed her by the waist and settled her back to the bench.
The explosions became more frantic. It was as if whoever was controlling them had finally panicked Mines exploded near and far. The path they were taking blazed to life with blast after blast. And then it didn’t matter anymore because they were through the glacier and over to the other side. The ice pitched down, and the boat slid to the bottom of a short embankment. It came to a stop in a patch of soft mud.
Remo helped Amanda to her feet while Chiun saw to Smith.
The CURE director was rattled but unharmed. His knuckles were white around the handle of his briefcase. Bits of ice melted down the lenses of his glasses. Panting as he stood in the mud. Smith looked up to the hill. He spied a figure getting on board the helicopter.
“That’s St. Clair,” Smith said urgently. “Remo, you must stop him.”
“Can do, Smitty,” Remo said. “Let’s go, Chiun.”
The glacier’s edge ended at a hundred-yard-wide stretch of sand that encircled the artificial hill. It was only muddy at the periphery, where melting water seeped into earth. Remo and Chiun had ventured only a few yards out into the sand when Remo noticed something rising up before them.
It was small and black and reminded Remo of the cap from an underground sprinkler system. Two others rose out of the sand on either side. More beyond these. Another row came into view beyond until the entire plain of sand was peppered with little black nozzles. They encircled the plateau, disappearing in wide arcs in either direction.
Remo and Chiun stopped at a cautious distance beyond the first row of nozzles. The caps were hissing.
Smith and Amanda were coming up behind them.
“Why have you stopped?” Smith demanded. The helicopter was just lifting off.
“We’ve got trouble,” Remo said. “Both of you get back.”
“Why?” Amanda asked. She sniffed the air. “Do I smell gas?”
She had barely gotten the question out before the air before them turned to flame.
The natural gas that had been seeping from the nozzles ignited in a flash of orange so brilliant it put to shame the midday sun. Spouts of lire spit up from underground like dragon’s breath, forming an impenetrable wall of overlapping flames to the base of the broad mesa.
The heat beat them back. The four of them hurried back to where they’d abandoned the rowboat.
“He must have tapped into a natural-gas source,” Amanda panted. “An ice age and global warming in the same valley.”
The distance from fire to hill was far enough that the trees were unaffected by the spouts of flame. Safe, too, was the helicopter, which was lifting high over the fifty-foot spouts of flame.
“He’s getting away,” Smith said tightly. Remo was glancing rapidly around the area. He found what he was after buried in the hill at the edge of the ice field. Just visible beneath the surface was a faint blue circle.
Racing over, he sent a fist cracking through the ice. Flashing fingers caught the triggering mechanism just before it went off. Extracting the mine whole, he brought it back to the muddy edge of the sandy plain.
The helicopter was clearing the flame and angling toward the mountains and the jungle beyond.
“Cover your ears,” Remo suggested.
Hauling back, he let the land mine fly.
Hubert St. Clair was in his happy place.
It was one of the tricks he’d learned as a way of dealing with his fear of technology. When the panic of having to climb into a car or train or plane became too great, he’d think of that calming blue spot in his mind that was the world of tomorrow. The world where he lived in a bubble underground and could look up at a sky free of planes and satellites and, well, birds. But they’d come back one day. And the world would be better and it would be all Hubert St. Clair’s doing. Thinking of this happy place, he felt calm in spite of the helicopter that rattled and shook all around him.
The seeds were in the back. They had been poured into the steel hopper that would funnel them through the floor and into retractable seeding arms. Over the jungle, he’d simply dump them. Spread them for miles and let nature take over.
The helicopter bounced as the pilot flew up over the spouts of flame. St. Clair’s breath caught.
“Happy place, happy place, happy place,” he repeated.
He saw the C. dioxa forest. Small from the air compared to the ice sheet of the valley. Around the hill, fire. The gas flames wouldn’t harm his precious plants. Nothing could harm them.
Movement at the inner edge of the glacier. From the corner of his eye he saw the man on the ice. Amanda Lifton’s young bodyguard. He came from the glacier holding something in his hand. He reached back, and then the something in his hand was no longer in his hand, but in the air, and it was flying at the fleeing helicopter.
“Happy place, happy place,” Hubert St. Clair blurted just before the mine exploded against the underside of the helicopter.
The world turned upside down.
It was the nightmare Hubert St. Clair had always envisioned. Strapped and helpless inside one of humanity’s manufactured death traps.
The pilot fought to regain control. Trailing smoke, the helicopter flew back through the spurts of flame. It was a moment in Hell, with fire all around. St. Clair screamed even as he fumbled with his seat belt.
Somehow he kicked the door open. He was out in the empty air before he knew what was happening. When he hit the ground, the superheated sand burned and blistered his hands and face.
