Survivalist - 19 - Final Rain (7 page)

He pulled off the arctic outer gloves, the black gloves beneath them sensitive enough for the work.

A destruct system.

What had the dead man meant with his diary entry? That the destruct system might detonate the missiles? Or, was it so powerful a system that it would kill anyone nearby?

Had the eight Marine Spetsnaz personnel—two of the dead men here were officers—abandoned the facility out of fear of the launch, or the mechanism?

John Rourke had to know. He searched the panels, reading each gauge. There was a timer. Was it for destruct or launch? The diode reading showed minutes descending, seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds.

He tried to understand the scenario. An intentional launch or, due to inexperience with this land-based system, an accident?

If it was an accident, then the destruct mechanism would have been engaged as a last-ditch effort to abort the missiles.

Did the Soviet power based beneath the sea want to launch now? Against Mid-Wake? Wouldn’t the missile impacts destroy the very volcanic vent from which both cities drew geothermal energy?

Did the Russians think that way?

John Rourke holstered his revolver, dropped to his knees beneath the counter and started dismantling the access space at the front of the cabinet.

Launch or destruct?

He made the sign of the Cross.

He started tracking wires.

If there was a single nuclear detonation, because of the fragility of the earth’s atmospheric envelope, the earth would be destroyed. Twelve missiles here.

Were they about to fire?

Annie Rubenstein sat up. She had fallen asleep despite the headache, exhausted. But the headache was still with her, more intense.

She’d been dreaming.

She was the only one of them who dreamed consciously since the Awakening. And when she dreamed, she saw. Her father.

Her nightgown was stuck to her body with sweat. She hugged the blankets up around her. Her father.

Long tubes rising out of the ground and thrusting upward into the darkness.His hands moving. A sound.

The sound was loud, maddening in its intensity.

Wires and lights and switches, a jumble of them, bewil-deringly complex.

His hands moved over the wires. He was thinking about her, about her mother, Sarah, her brother Michael, about Paul, about Natalia. He didn’t know what to do. All the wires.

And there were red lights which formed a pattern, a pattern of numbers and the numbers were changing. The sound was becoming more intense.

Then the dream ended. Annie Rubenstein’s mouth was dry. Chills ran along her spine and across the top of her head. “Daddy.”

She closed her eyes, sitting there in the darkness. She knew.

The transceiver signal was weak, but the voice was clearly John’s. “Paul. Get the helicopter airborne, somehow. Make a pass toward the north of the island. There’s a concrete blockhouse surrounded by a fence. Twelve missile tubes, six on each side. If you see me in the yard and can land, do it. If I’m not there, just fly off and—just fly off. Are you in contact with the Arkhangelsk? Over.”

“John. What’s going on? Yes—I’m in contact. What’s wrong?”

“Alert the Arkhangelsk to contact Mid-Wake and take whatever precautions can be taken to evacuate. Twelve missiles here. They’re about to fire, Paul.” Paul Rubenstein dropped the radio handset, his stomach suddenly gone. “There’s a destruct circuit. I think I’ve got it. When it goes, this island will go with it because of the fuel in the rocket engines. That’s all right. But the missiles might launch before the destruct sequence takes over. The men we saw. They were trying to escape the island. The missiles were supposed to launch. I think it was some kind of mistake. And they sabotaged the destruct mechanism that would abort the missiles because they knew the island would go up and they’d go with it. They killed their senior noncoms and officers here. No time now. Look for me.

Out.” “John! John! John!”

Paul Rubenstein licked dry lips with a dry tongue. He put the handset down and put on the radio headset, his hands moving over the gunship’s controls as he began to talk. “This is aircraft calling the Arkhangelsk. Come in, Darkwood. Over.”

“Aircraft. What is wrong? Over.”

“Everything,” Paul Rubenstein said, his throat tight, the rotor blades overhead increasing their speed of revolution. “Everything is wrong.” The cables would have to be disconnected before he could even attempt to unlock the helicopter’s pontoons from the ice… .

A speaker built into the wall on the far side of the bedroom crackled. The voice was pre-recorded, very calm, a woman’s voice a little higher than her own. “Emergency. Mid-Wake is under attack. Emergency. This is not a drill. Emergency. Mid-Wake is under attack. Move to your pre-designated stations as quickly and calmly as possible. There is ample time to evacuate. Remember, remain calm and more lives will be saved. Emergency. Mid-Wake is under attack. Emergency. This is not a drill. Emergency …”

Annie Rubenstein stood up, tried the light switch beside the bed. It still worked.

There was a banging on the door at the far end of the small sitting room. “Mrs. Rubenstein!” It was the voice of one of the Shore Patrol personnel assigned to stay with her.

“Mrs. Rubenstein!” “Yes!”

The rerrycloth robe. She grabbed it up, stuffing her feet into her slippers.

She ran across the room, into the sitting room, across that, opening the door. The female Shore Patrolman

shouted at her, “Hurry!” and then grabbed her arm. Annie started to run. The dream.

Her father hadn’t made it.

It was cramped beyond the access panel for the computer linked launch controls of the missile battery.

John Rourke’s gloved hands were stiffening in the cold. Wires. The A.G. Russell Sting IA black chrome. He cut wires with the knife.

Reconnect wires.

He reconnected wires with the pliers he’d found on the floor beside the access panel, with the electrical tape that had been there as well.

After the first few seconds with the access panel removed, John Rourke realized there was no way to stop the launch. The size of the missiles, their obvious intent. They had to be fitted with nuclear warheads. With no way to abort the launch, the only alternative was to accelerate the destruct sequence which had been partially disabled.

He bridged a circuit, moved on to the next. If he could wire the launch sequence into the destruct sequence, there would be enough time. Perhaps.

The eight men he and Paul had killed clearly had been, impossibly ignorant. With the missiles set to launch, the destruct sequence activated, they had killed their leaders and cut through the destruct circuits with a bayonet or something, perhaps a saw of some kind. But all they had really done was to disconnect the destruct sequence controls.

At least one of them evidently realized this, because there was a clear and clearly botched attempt to reconnect the destruct sequence controls. With the destruct sequence which they so feared disabled, they had to have realized what they had done, made launch of the missiles inevitable. They ran, not knowing where, not knowing what would happen, only that somehow they had caused it.

Activating the destruct sequence had been a command decision, perhaps at this level or some higher one. Rourke was second-guessing them, but the logic of what he saw dictated nothing else. There was a degenerative fault in the wiring of the launch circuits. It was clear, as he bridged another circuit, that the system had several times started its own launch sequence and been shut down, only to start up again. A fault in the logic circuits of the computer through which the system was run. He didn’t know and there was no time to find out. The destruct sequence had been activated to prevent the missiles from self-launching, as they were about to do now.

But it was also clear, no one had known enough about sabotage to properly abort the launch sequence. The launch sequence was run through alternating circuits to prevent sabotage, and so complicated that attempting to disassemble it might override the proper launch sequence and simply launch. To disconnect the system would clearly trigger a launch, approximately an amount of residual electricity needed equivalent to that required for the simplest memory circuit in something as mundane as the videotape players he used at the Retreat. There was no way to dissipate the charge,

hence no way to kill the electrical supply and thereby cancel the launch.

The circuit boards which were the heart of the system were self-healing. When a circuit was damaged, electricity run through the system was used to bridge around it.

If he connected the wrong wires, at the stage he was now, both launch and destruct would be instantaneous and the missiles would get away.

Rourke’s back ached, cramped in the small compartment.

As he made another bridge, the self-healing process within the circuits activated and he started to move his hands away… .

People moved everywhere under the indigo dome of one of the two primary living areas. It was the best section of Mid-Wake in which to live, she’d been told by the two female Shore Patrol officers who’d brought her here. Senior officers of the submarine fleet used apartments here when they had shore leave or assignments keeping them at Mid-Wake. The better family residences were here as well. Everywhere she looked as she moved quickly beside her guardians across the grassy parkways there were women in nightclothes, men in hastily put on slacks and shirts, barefoot or in slippers, carrying shoes or boots, dragging small children by the hand, burdened with sheets and pillowcases turned into sacks for a few precious belongings.

United States Naval and Marine Corps personnel were everywhere as well, directing foot traffic, helping the elderly and infirm and the young. The hospital. Natalia.

Annie Rubenstein shouted over the cacophony around her, all the while the so-calm female voice ordering the emergency evacuation, “I’ve got to get my friend!”

“The hospital is being evacuated, ma’am, don’t worry.”

“But you don’t understand—Natalia’s so confused!”

The female Shore Patrolman holding her arm held to it more tightly. “We have to evacuate now, ma’am.”

They were moving along a walkway toward a monorail station, the yellow sphere in which family services, central education facilities and medical and dental services were headquartered in the next dome. Natalia.

The second Shore Patrol officer bent over to snatch up a bag a man had dropped, putting it into his waiting hands as he moved on.

Already, there were lines at the monorail station, but her guardians passed ahead, their uniforms all the badge of authority needed to take them to the head of the line.

A woman with two small children was boarding ahead of them, the one child who was walking, dragging behind. “Let me,” Annie offered, sweeping the child—a little boy—up into her arms.

They were inside now, the car doors closing, a hum as the monorail train powered up, a so slight as to be almost unnoticeable lurch, the train moving. She stood, the two Shore Patrol officers on her right, the woman with her other child on the left. The central hub of the wheel would be crowded, she’d realized, but as the train pulled in along the platform, she hadn’t realized how much. There were people everywhere, looking for other people, she realized.

There were no living quarters here, only communications, administration and energy facilities, but these were staffed twenty-four hours a day and shift workers were trying to find loved ones who had evidently promised to rendezvous with them here in the event of_

disaster. Confusion was everywhere.

The train stopped. The doors began opening. “Don’t worry ma’am,” one of the Shore Patrol personnel told her. “We don’t have to change trains.”

The doors were fully open, people leaving, people entering. “Why are trains going that way?” Annie asked, gesturing with her head toward the rail on the other side of the platform. “And they’re all empty?”

“Returning from the sub pens, ma’am, to get more people.”

“I see.” The doors were starting to close.

Annie Rubenstein shoved the little boy she held into the arms of the Shore Patrol officer nearest to her and jumped for the doors, her robe caught as the door closed. She jerked it free, running for the opposite side of the platform. She had left an indigo-colored train and she was looking for a yellow one… .

He was soaked to the skin, sleet mixed with snow blowing across the flat rocks on which the helicopter had come to rest. But the moorings were released.

As gusts buffeted the helicopter, it seemed to tilt, first in one direction and then another. If it overturned—Paul Rubenstein, wet, cold, racked with chills, buckled in at the controls.

He checked oil pressure, fuel mixtures, tried remembering everything John Rourke had taught him.

And a smile crossed his lips. “Trigger control, trigger control,” and he throttled out, the helicopter slipping, a tearing sound as ice beneath the floats cracked and separated and metal strained, a gust slamming the aircraft on the port side.

“Trigger control,” he hissed, his hands like vises as they held to the controls and the chopper gradually started to rise.

John Rourke opened his eyes. The klaxon was sounding. His fingertips tingled.

Mechanically, he checked his watch. The Rolex seemed unscathed. He would heal. It wouldn’t. He sat up. An electric shock. “Dammit,” Rourke rasped.

He’d been thrown half out of the compartment behind the access panel. He crawled back inside, finding the pliers and the tape.

Wires to cut.

Already, some of the circuits he’d disconnected had re-routed themselves. The countdown was continuing. And there was no time to even check how much time was left… .

Annie Rubenstein was alone on the monorail train, the voice here, too, piped in over speakers inside the car. “Emergency …” She focused her attention on the waste processing plants the train passed in the tunnel leading toward the yellow dome. Some Mid-Wake people called the city itself the “octopus” even though there were only six “tentacles,” each tentacle a tunnel and, rather than a sucker at the end, a dome. The head, where she had escaped her guardians and boarded the yellow train, was the central core.