Last Gasp (58 page)

“So far, though eight and nine have yet to report.”

The attack hadn’t been unexpected. Even though the Tomb was hidden belowground and even though the supply trucks approached Desert Range from the Nevada side, keeping a hundred miles clear of Baker, Garrison, Mitford, and Lund, the movement of supplies could have been spotted by somebody with a curious mind and a suspicious nature. Probably they thought it was a top-secret government establishment—as it had been once—which in these fraught times would be enough to provoke hostility and feelings of revenge.

None of this surprised Chase. Nobody was sure anymore who controlled what. The location of the political and military seat of power— still referred to as Washington—was a mystery to the population at large. For a while “Washington” had been in Des Moines, then moved, so rumor had it, to Minneapolis. When the president appeared on television, speaking from a replica of the Oval Office, he might have been on the far side of the moon as far as anyone knew.

The general public had the certain conviction that their esteemed leaders had folded their tents and stolen softly into the night. In fact they’d stolen, according to Prothero, to the Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska—an impregnable underground installation that had been constructed to protect SAC from nuclear attack, and which might have been custom-built to serve as a command and communications center for “Washington” and the Pentagon. The air in Nebraska was still breathable, with the additional safeguard that the SAC HQ was a sealed enclosure with its own self-contained oxygen plant.

The siren’s harsh blare would have woken the dead, so Chase was prepared for the bleary-eyed faces peering out of the rooms as he ran for the elevator. He didn’t waste breath on explanations; everyone had been drilled in the emergency procedure. He thumbed the button, fretting as the huge elevator rose with ponderous slowness to the upper level. If the attackers were from one of the nearby townships they might be merely a bunch of guys filled with liquor and frustration who’d decided to find out what was going on at the old Desert Range MX missile site. That was his hope, because their security force was more than adequate to deal with what might be a straightforward policing situation.

And then again, maybe they weren’t just curious, and that could be bad.

All year long there’d been a steadily growing exodus from the south. This corner of Nevada, mostly desert scrub and dried-up water holes, wasn’t exactly hospitable, and so the stream of immigrants kept right on heading north, looking for a better place to settle. Chase hadn’t seen any of them with his own eyes, but he’d had reports. Among the dispossessed families and the anoxia and pollution victims were looters, drug-crazed youngsters, and, worst of all, freaks with deranged minds that had been eaten away by chemicals and cancer. He’d heard tales of bloody battles on the road and of small towns terrorized by demented mobs. His fear was that some of these had accidentally stumbled across the site, in which case they could be in for real trouble.

The grain of comfort he nurtured and jealously clung to was that even at this moment Frank Hanamura was setting up the pilot plant on the Scripps’ research vessel in San Diego. At least Hanamura and his team were well out of it and able to carry on the work.

Sam Drew looked up from the map table as Chase entered the operations room. Drew was ex-army, like most of the others in the security force—all of whom had been carefully screened and chosen for their commitment to the project. A guard in dun-colored camouflage gear stood at his elbow and there were three radio operators wearing headsets at the communications console, receiving reports and issuing instructions to the other command posts, nine in all, throughout the complex.

Drew brought Chase up-to-date on the situation. He was a compact stocky man with a frizz of prematurely graying hair. They occasionally played chess together, with Drew invariably the winner. “All other access points are secure—no signs of attack,” he said, circumscribing the layout of the Tomb with an outspread hand. “Either they don’t know about the other entrances or they’ve decided to concentrate on this sector.” He suddenly raised his hand. “Listen!”

From thirty feet above their heads came the muted rattle of small-arms fire. The operations room was on the topmost level, yet still protected by a thick slab of reinforced concrete and a series of lead-lined steel doors.

“Any chance of them getting in through the silo door?” Chase asked worriedly.

“Not a snowflake in hell.” Drew shook his head. “Not unless they’ve got a nuke warhead handy. The retracting cover weighs over seven hundred tons. No, their only hope is through the personnel entrance, and I’ve posted six extra men there. We can pick ’em off like wood pigeons as they come through. That’s if they can break down the door—which is about as likely as a cow giving processed cheese.”

“It’s like being a rat in a trap.”

“A pretty damn secure rat.” Drew didn’t seem too concerned, which Chase found reassuring.

“Any idea who they are?”

“Buchan got a peek at them through the scope, but the light wasn’t good enough to make out any detail.” Drew nodded toward the clock on the slabbed wall, which read four forty-seven. “Still dark up there.”

“How long before dawn?”

“About an hour. But it should be light enough to identify them before then if you want to risk putting the scope up.”

“Is that their gunfire or ours?” Chase asked.

Drew grimaced. “Them, the crazy bastards. They’re taking potshots at the door. I wouldn’t worry about it; they’re going to need more than a forty-five to even put a dent in it.”

Chase studied the site layout in the cone of light. The complex was in no immediate danger. Each access point was secure and under guard. Desert Range had been built to withstand all but a direct nuclear strike ... so why was he uneasy? What was bothering him?

What was bothering him, he realized, was that the location of the site had been discovered. This particular group mightn’t pose much of a threat, but suppose they sent for reinforcements or spread the word around? The Tomb would become a sitting target for every gun-happy loon within a hundred miles. In no time at all they would be under siege—and it didn’t take a tactical genius to realize that this was their one weak point. With their supplies cut off, sooner or later the moles would have to push their snouts aboveground and get their heads blown off.

“Access six in Blue Sector,” Chase said, tapping the layout with his finger. “That’s about a mile away, right?” He looked at Drew, who nodded slowly, frowning. “I want you to put as many men as you can spare on the surface and have them circle around to cut off the attackers’ retreat.” He described an arc on the map. “Our men open fire at the same time as we come up through access five. If we time it for daybreak we should be sure of getting them all.”

Drew blinked and gazed at Chase, dumbfounded. His Adam’s apple bobbed above the white triangle of sweat shirt at the open collar of his dark brown tunic. “You want to wipe ’em out?”

“Every single one. No survivors.”

“You think that’s necessary?”

“Listen, Sam, if word gets out they’ll come back with every piece of heavy armament they can lay their hands on. We’ve got to stop that before it starts.” Chase glanced at the clock. “It’s nearly five. How long will it take to get your men in position?”

“Fifty minutes.” Drew stroked his chin with hairy fingers. “That should be plenty of time to deploy before full light.”

“Let’s make it dead on six o’clock to make sure.”

“ ‘Dead’ being the operative word,” said Drew, looking at Chase as if he’d never seen him before. In a sense he never had.

Forty minutes later they were standing tensely in the concrete cubicle next to the ramp leading up to access 5. Now and then shots could be heard ricocheting off the steel door into the desert air like demented wasps. In the corridor outside six men in combat gear were squatting with their back to the wall, smoking and quietly talking, automatic weapons propped between their jutting knees.

Buchan was waiting nervously by the periscope control box mounted on the wall. “Beats me what the fuck they want.” He gestured vaguely. “None of this scientific stuff can be of any use. What are they after?”

“Perhaps it’s the idea of people hiding underground they don’t like,” Chase said. “Makes them feel insecure. Vulnerable. And when things get really bad out there they’ll want somewhere safe to run to. This is it.”

“How bad are things gonna get, sir?” Buchan asked. He was sweating profusely.

“Don’t you listen to the news bulletins?”

“What, you mean all that stuff in Africa and India and those places? I thought that was a plague of some kind, spread by bad drinking water. Nothin’ to do with the climate.”

“We don’t know for sure what caused it,” Chase said. “If anybody does they’re keeping quiet.” He was about to go on and then found he couldn’t. All of a sudden he felt very weary, and it had nothing to do with being hauled from his bed in the early hours of the morning. His fatigue was deeper than that, rooted in every fiber of his being, the effect of climbing a steep slippery slope that got steeper and slipperier, so that however hard you struggled upward you kept sliding down and down into unimaginable, unthinkable depths. With Cheryl and Dan gone, his only lifeline was somewhere out in the Pacific. But the lifeline was no more than a thread upon which the fate of the world hung. If the trials failed and the thread snapped, the slope would become a vertical plunge into nightmare and horror and final oblivion for himself and all mankind.

“Five minutes,” Drew said, swiveling his black-haired wrist to look at his watch. “Want to take a gander topside?” he asked Chase.

Buchan cleared his throat explosively and blurted out to Drew, “Sir, I gotta tell you. There’s two of our guys out there somewhere—Stuermer and Monteith.” He gulped, staring at the floor with stricken eyes. “They went out before the alarm, hunting for fresh meat. The guys do that, pick up a rabbit or a prairie fox, and get the cook to put it in the pot. I mean I know it’s against regulations ...” His hoarse voice died miserably.

Drew was standing rigidly, fists bunched at his sides, the cords on his neck sticking out. “You stupid bastards!” He released a long hissing breath. “Did you see either of them when you looked through the scope? Was there any sign of them?”

“Like I told you before, there were shapes but that was all. It was too dark. Maybe they came in through another entrance?” Buchan said hopefully. “They might have seen the attack coming and couldn’t make it back there—”

“All access points are sealed,” Drew told him harshly. “Nobody has entered the complex. Nobody. If Stuermer and Monteith went out, they’re still out!”

Chase stepped forward, pointing at the control box. “Hit it!”

Buchan started as if jabbed with a needle, pressed the green button with the heel of his hand, and the lightly greased shaft slid upward accompanied by the whine of hydraulics. Buchan pulled the ribbed rubber handgrips horizontal and locked them in position, then stood aside as Chase pressed his forehead to the molded foam rubber and adjusted the focus. It was like looking into a thin gray mist. Against the flat colorless backdrop he could just make out a group of shadowy figures. He turned the calibrated setting to greater magnification and faces loomed in close-up. The skin on the back of his neck crawled. He swallowed a lump of phlegm in his throat.

There were eight or nine of them as near as he could tell. Pitted and scarred like lepers and dressed in rags, they were huddled around a pathetic fire from which a thin trickle of smoke ascended into the whitening sky. He hadn’t expected this; whatever he had been prepared for it wasn’t children. The oldest was about fifteen. Some of the others were no more than ten, and one, a girl, little more than a toddler.

He didn’t want to look and yet his eye was held compulsively by each disgusting detail. A head with the flesh hanging off it like strips of yellow tissue paper. A boy with milky-white eyeballs staring emptily into the distance. A girl with scabrous patches of raw flesh on her back and buttocks. Some with a black fungal growth obliterating their face. At least four that he could see with fingers or hands or complete limbs missing, leaving only raw stumps through which the pale bone gleamed.

And in every eye—even the blind boy—a kind of bloodlust madness that made Chase break out in a cold sweat and his testicles shrivel.

The bloodlust was real, not his imagination. Near the fire lay two corpses, crudely dismembered. They still had heads, but their tatters of brown tunics swathed armless shoulders and their empty trousers were ripped open to the crotch. The children had divided the spoils, holding their portions on pointed sticks close to the paltry flames and crunching and chewing with rapt concentration and ravenous enjoyment.

Chase moved away and leaned against the wall. Pearls of sweat covered his face and neck. He didn’t say anything, couldn’t, as Drew gripped the handles and looked into the eyepiece.

The three men in the concrete cubicle with its garish contorting nudes stood without moving. Distantly, like snapping twigs, they heard the spasmodic stutter of automatic weapons, followed by the fading reverberations across the flat landscape. They heard the screams, too. Muffled by the steel and concrete surrounding them, they reminded Chase of sea gulls whooping and crying in a parody of human pain. Then the screams were not muffled but loud—much louder—as the guards in the corridor slid open the heavy steel door and charged bulkily up the sandblown steps, rifles and machine pistols spitting death.

No one in the cubicle wanted to witness the carnage thirty feet above his head. Imagining it was as bad, perhaps worse. Chase and Drew still felt sickened by the images of those grotesque children, while Buchan had refused to look.

Moments later the firing ceased.

Chase wiped his face and neck with his wadded handkerchief. Would he have experienced less guilt, less responsibility, if they had been adults and not children? Common looters or a drunken mob?