Assignment - Black Viking (18 page)

It was a submarine of Russian design. It was the submarine Durell had been looking for.

He stood up in the strange stillness. The Arctic midnight was filled with silently falling snow. It was as if the sea itself was momentarily calmed by an omnipotent hand outstretched from the eerie gloom above.

There was no movement on the sub’s deck or the narrow, winged sail. In the lull, he made out the familiar mountings of rocket launchers, fore and aft; but they were not the large size of Polaris-type missiles. He wondered where the crew might be. If they had occupied the bunker lab, his chances were relatively hopeless. They would be tough and desperate, confounded by the monstrous elements they had unleashed, filled with panic—-and therefore all the more dangerous.

“Is that the Chinese U-boat?” Elgiva asked.

“It’s the one they stole from the USSR, according to Colonel Smurov.”

“What are those strange fittings on the deck?”

“Rocket launchers. But they’re small. Perhaps good only for atmospheric weather testing . . .” Durell paused. He did not know what system Professor Peter Gustaffson had devised for his weather control. He felt a sudden rage, a desire to blow up and destroy that mechanism down there. It was an ultimate threat to all mankind. It was the inevitable end of a mad course of toying with infinite destruction. The H-bombs, the space race, the secret and dreadful germ warfare vats—and now the tampering with environment, threatening more destruction than any of them. There was no limit to man’s diabolical inventiveness in using good for evil, in choosing death over life.

“You’re shivering,” Elgiva murmured. “We must move on. It will kill us to rest here much longer.”

He stood up. “You’re right. You’re a remarkable woman, do you know that?”

“I am only a poet,” she said. “And perhaps not a very good one, after all. I dream of the past, and the awful future lies before us while I hide from it.”

“Let’s go,” he said.

He signaled to Mario and Gino, and they stood up and dusted snow from their rifles. Elgiva reached for her own weapon, but he checked her and took the rifle from her. He could see only her eyes through her woolen face mask. They widened as he kept the rifle from her gloved hand. “Just one more thing, Elgiva.”

“What is it?”

“Before we go on—”

“Don’t you trust me with the gun? I am an excellent shot.”

“I don’t doubt that. Back in Saltsjobaden, at your house outside Stockholm, you proved you were a good shot, indeed.”

Her eyes went blank. “I do not understand—”

“But you do. You shot Colonel Traskin, didn’t you?” She turned her head and looked at Mario and Gino, who were crouched behind the shelter of the stone wall. Then she looked up at the blockhouse laboratory on the crest of the snow-clad hill above. She was very still.

“How do you know?” she asked quietly. “It is a terrible thing that you suggest—”

“It’s not a suggestion. It’s fact. Elgiva, you killed Colonel Traskin to make Smurov suspicious of me. Why?”

“How can you be so sure?” she insisted.

“Traskin was killed by one shot. You showed us the broken window and said the bullet came from outside, on the beach. True, the window was broken; and only one bullet had killed Traskin. But I found another slug in the woodwork of your room there. I dug it out. Olsen, our man in Stockholm, has it. I’m sure it will match up with a gun you own, which Olsen has been ordered to find. So you fired two shots. One, the first, killed Colonel Traskin. Then you ran outside, fired through the window on the beach, and then went in again and claimed that an unknown assassin had killed Traskin.”

Her head under the fur-trimmed hood turned this way and that, as if seeking refuge from his implacable words. He wished he could see her face under her ski mask. Her shoulders lifted and fell, in a gesture of resignation. He told himself to be very careful. She was a brilliant and unpredictable woman.

“Why did you do it, Elgiva?” he asked.

There was a distant roaring far off in the gray darkness, a sound of rising wind approaching them at hurricane speed.

“I had to.” She took off her goggles to look at him. Her eyes were clear and brilliant. “Traskin told me they would never let Peter go. Even if they found him and took him from the Chinese, they would not give him back to me. And they would make me serve them as a guide. Can you understand how I felt? Traskin was a scientist, too. His superiors in Moscow wanted Peter, just as much as your people in Washington would like to have him. No, don’t deny it. You’re all cruel, dedicated to violence, to war and rivalry, whatever the cost to mankind. And I love Peter. He never wanted anything like this.” She lifted an arm toward the sound of the approaching wind. “It is the end of everything. Man has climbed up from the ravages of nature for thousands of years. And poor Peter has given man the weapon with which to commit suicide. Raw nature will win and laugh over our graves, and end all poetry and beauty.”

“But you killed him,” Durell insisted.

“He and Smurov—they wanted to take me with them. Without you, of course. North, by plane, to this place. To show them the way, as I’ve shown the way to you.” 

“Traskin was a quiet man.”

“But obedient. He took orders. He did as he was told. Nothing I said could change his mind. He tried to force me to leave the house with him. It was his gun I used. I pretended to be willing to go along, and when he relaxed a bit, I grabbed at the gun and it—it went off. I did just as you described. I pretended someone had shot Traskin from the beach, and hid his gun.”

“Yes. It had to be you, Elgiva. Everyone else was accounted for, at another place in Stockholm. There was no one else. And the bullet I dug from your wall clinched it.”

She put on her goggles again and her head lifted in defiance. “What will you do to me now, here in this place? We are all doomed, after this is finished.”

“You can help me to save Peter,” he said.

“For your Pentagon to pick his brains and use the invention he created to destroy the world?”

“No. You can have him back again.”

“Your superiors would not permit it.”

“I’ll arrange it. I promise.”

“I do not believe you. I know the sort of man you are. But I have no choice, I suppose. I’ve gone too far along this road with you.”

“Just trust me,” he said. “Now let’s get on.”

The wind struck at them like the vicious swipe of a wild animal’s paw, enraged that they might escape its brute power. Ice hissed and rattled along the crusted snow beside the road. In an instant, the house was wiped from sight, and the dark air was filled with a blinding horizontal spray of murderous crystals that slanted through their face masks and stung and froze their cheeks, caked on their goggles, and made their hands numb on the weapons they carried. Durell looked back once, but there was nothing to see along the Walk. Nobody could follow them or give them help. They were cut off as effectively as if they had landed on the moon.

If it hadn’t been for the single, lighted window on the hilltop, they would have been lost in that instant. Durell pulled Elgiva up the hill after him, and felt the tug on his life rope as Mario and Gino struggled after them. It was not more than a hundred yards, but it seemed to take forever. He did not think they could make it. The storm was more furious than ever. But they had to make it. There was no hope of return now.

Just before they reached the building, he handed Elgiva her rifle. She held it in both hands, her head turned toward him. She looked like something carved from ice and snow.

Then she nodded stiffly and he went up to the door of the concrete building.

The door opened as Durell approached.

THE MAN was tall and slender, with the Mongol cheekbones and flat face of a northern Chinese. His thick black hair was shot through with mature gray, and he wore dark-rimmed glasses over somber, if startled, intelligent eyes. The bitter wind and snow shook him as he stared at them. Behind him, two shorter, chunkier men in high-throated black naval uniforms trimmed with black

piping turned and stared at Durell as he shoved by the first man and covered them with his rifle. Behind him, Gino helped his exhausted uncle over the threshold, then added his weapon to the force Durell exhibited. Elgiva stepped in last and shut the door.

The howl of the gale was abruptly cut off. Everything was silent, except for the distant murmur of a generator.

“Dr. Lin Pi Tsung?” Durell asked harshly. The warm air in the room struck his lungs and made him cough.

“I am he. We were expecting you. Have you brought the surgeon, Dr. Gustaffson, with you? It is very urgent.” The Chinese spoke with a faint California accent. Durell did not doubt that when and if he ever got back to Washington and checked dossiers, he would find that Lin Tsung had probably studied at Berkeley or UCLA. The man said: “Professor Peter is very ill. The agreement was for his brother to operate at once.”

“There is no agreement now,” Durell said sharply. “Move back, please. Tell your two stooges to be very, very careful.”

Tsung blinked. “But—who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. Where is Professor Peter?”

“Are you Swedish agents? No, you must be the American I heard about. Olaf spoke of you. You’re Durell?” He nodded. “Is Olaf here?”

There was a second’s hesitation. “No. We have not seen him since he went to the Gustaffson house to fetch the doctor. But he should be back soon. I thought you were he, when I saw you coming up the path. In the storm, it is difficult to tell—”

The man was talking too much. Durell silenced him with a gesture and signed to Mario and Gino to disarm the two Chinese naval officers. The men in black uniforms seemed peculiarly stunned, as if worn to the limit of utter exhaustion. Their eyes had the faraway look of men who saw their doom inevitably, had lived with it for days, and had lost the power to initiate action against it. Durell wondered how many more of the submarine crew were here. He turned to Elgiva. She had pushed back her fur-lined hood and was shaking her light brown hair loose. The goggles had left rim marks on her cheeks, and she, too, looked as if she had been pushed to the end of her endurance.

“You know this place well, Elgiva?”

“Of course. I’ve spent many happy hours here.” “Where is the laboratory?”

“Down below. There is a big cellar system, hewn from the rock. The missile silos are just beyond, through some concrete bunkers.”

Durell turned to Lin Tsung. “Where is Professor Peter?”

The man’s eyes began to glitter. “He is in the laboratory. But what do you hope to do against—”

“How many of your men are here with you?”

Again there was a brief hesitation, a shifting of shadows in the dark, intelligent eyes. “Only a few. But what can you do? It is imperative that Professor Peter be saved. I thought you were his brother, really. That is why I let you in. Only a doctor can save us all.”

“It’s as bad as that?”

“Everything is out of control.”

Durell felt only a small gratification that his guesses were proved correct. He gestured with his rifle and urged the Chinese meteorologist and the two Navy men ahead, down a crude concrete corridor. He knew it was only a matter of time before the military men recovered and realized that they faced an enemy who might be better able to cope with the storm they had created. He must give them no time to think or seize the initiative.

The corridor formed a ramp that led up into living quarters. Durell saw that the entire structure had once been a military blockhouse, with a heavy poured-concrete rounded dome above and barracks-like dormitories in two wings spread east and west. The heavy structure, designed to resist bombs, did not yield to the storm. It was warm and comfortable inside, and the howling wind and ice and frantic seas simply did not seem to exist here.

Part of the main blockhouse area, a circle some fifty feet in diameter, was equipped with modern spotlights in the domed ceiling, and had been furnished with living-room chairs and sofas and carpets, with a modem free-form fireplace crackling cheerfully against one wall. The platforms where anti-aircraft rifles had once been emplaced were now used for couches, reading nooks, a hi-fi stereo set. Durell urged the three Chinese in ahead of him. No one else was in sight, and this troubled him. He wanted to know who and how many others were here.

Then Elgiva touched his arm and pointed to the tiled floor. A few spatters of blood still glistened in the electric light.

“Sigrid?” she whispered. “She was hit, I know, before she went out of Eric’s house after Olaf.”

“If she is here, then Olaf is here, too,” Durell said.

“Please be careful, Sam.”

“I intend to be.” He turned back to Tsung, who stood watching them with a strange calm through his big, dark-rimmed glasses. “Take us to the laboratory at once, please.”

“Of course, but—Mr. Durell, you must first listen to me. We need Dr. Eric here to help his brother. It is absolutely imperative.” The Chinese looked at the narrow embrasures of the windows, where snow seemed to flame against the thick panes. “Is there no way you could have brought Dr. Eric here?”

“Not now,” Durell said.

“Then Peter will die. He is an old friend, and I am stricken with grief. More than that, he is the only mar who can reverse the process going on in the atmosphere.’ The Chinese pointed to the domed ceiling of the bunker His hand shook slightly. “It is almost beyond the point o reversal now. But unless it can be reversed, everything will come to an end.”

“What kind of process is it? Surely it’s not silver iodidi crystals—”

“Nothing so simple. Professor Peter went far beyonc those crude methods. It is a matter of sound vibrations at first set off by rockets that released thousands of tin; catalytic mechanisms. But once the process begins, it i like a geometric progression. One movement breeds two others, so to speak. Our cruise originally was one c simple experiment—secret, of course—since Peking needs basic agricultural processes aided by favorable climatic conditions to support the population. We do not have the technological developments of your nations in the West. Believe me, it was not intended as a form of warfare.” “Are you really convinced of that?” Durell asked grimly- “Maybe you’ve been as deluded as Peter was.” “Peter is my friend. His weather control system was designed for peace, for the benefit of all men. Perhaps certain rulers in Peking had other designs in the back of their minds—a form of blackmail. But that would have been all right, too. Eventually, the whole world would have benefited.”