With These Eyes (35 page)

"Tonati, I love you," she shouted over the
noise of the engine and the rushing water.

The puma turned his head and their eyes met.
His otherwise powerful voice produced a sound that would have made
the large wildcat appear cute to even the most fearful of men.
Isabelle could feel that he loved her, too. The moment between
Isabelle and the love of her life didn't last very long.

"Four more miles upriver."

Ryan's voice took Isabelle back to her
mission in an instant. She turned her head towards the
computer-savvy man by her side. He was looking up from the map on
the computer pad in his hand. Isabelle felt a presence of danger
growing stronger that she hadn't felt since Berlin. The reason
would soon become apparent.

Only a short distance away, the sharp blades
of a helicopter were slicing through the dark serenity of the river
valley like machetes. None other than a very angry Tasha was in the
pilot's seat, searching the jungle for her prey. She had convinced
Morabi that letting Isabelle get away would pose a threat to his
country. A trade of a few crates of Tasha's unique surveillance
gear from the troop carrier had bought the General's cooperation.
The weapons served as payment for her use of the military's most
sophisticated and only brand-new helicopter. Had Morabi been aware
of Tasha's track record with vehicle-based calamities, he might
have thought twice about handing her several million Dollars worth
of equipment. He had figured an experienced pilot and tactical
commander such as her would have little chance of damaging a
helicopter that was filled with a large array of safety features.
Just to be sure there would not be an exchange of fire, he had
ordered his troops to disarm the aircraft. This allowed him to
classify her excursion as a diplomatic mission, given Tasha’s
heritage of leadership in her homeland.

Tasha had updated the helicopter's infrared
and radar systems with her proprietary biometrics software, which
included Isabelle and Ryan's data. She was skimming over the jungle
canopy. The strong down-wash from her rotor was violently knocking
coconuts and animals to the ground. One of the screens identified a
family of apes running for their lives in a hail of debris. Soon,
Tasha approached the river. Despite the tropical temperatures, her
sensitive heat-vision camera picked up the trail of hot exhaust
left by the small watercraft's combustion engine. Filled with blood
lust, Tasha banked the helicopter into a sharp right turn and
followed the river upstream. She wasn't far from Isabelle. After a
short flight along the rushing waters, she spotted the motorboat up
ahead. Tasha knew immediately what her biometrics scan was about to
confirm. She had found her prey. Isabelle felt a chill running down
her spine as the darkness of her shadow grew closer. The noise from
the boat was drowning out the sound of Tasha's blades for the
moment, but Isabelle knew who was upon her. She turned back and saw
the rotary-winged blackbird approach. She caught Tasha's angry eye,
illuminated by the gages of her cockpit, for the first time.

Without flinching, the hunter flew past her
prey and continued upstream alongside a steep cliff.

44 GENE'S FINAL ORDERS TO TASHA

Gene's lair laid only a few kilometers ahead
of Isabelle and Tasha, hidden where few would expect a doomsday
device. A serene lake was situated atop a large waterfall that fed
into the river below. Under the lake was what used to be one of
Apophis' graphite mines. Just like Dr. Kenshin had explained to
Ryan, Gene had built his hidden lair into the granite and graphite
unseen from the outside. A maze of tunnels and shafts provided
ample space for the secret operation. The nerve center of pain was
an enormous control room that housed technology which made any of
Tasha's equipment seem ancient and primitive. An army of Gene's
henchmen operated control boards and a series of view-screens that
covered one of the room's walls. Several steps in the back of the
room lead to a podium. This was the platform on which Gene was
perched, supervising the lair's activities.

Sitting comfortably in his impressive chair,
the dark industrialist had found a hair in his soup of destruction.
It was Isabelle's progress that had ruined his enjoyment of what
was to be his biggest day, yet.

Three very large screens dominated the
video-wall he was facing. On the leftmost viewer was a map of the
world with a red dot over Tasha's homeland in northeast Africa. The
rightmost image was of his launch bay, where two ceramic missiles
laid on storage racks next to a launch track. The center screen
showed Tasha wearing aviator headphones and piloting her
helicopter. The henchmen stopped what they were doing to hear the
dialogue between their employer and his unsuccessful chief of
covert forces. Gene had never been this annoyed with Tasha and
frustration rang through his voice.

"The fact that she's here can only mean that
you lead her to me."

Just like Gene wasn't used to interference,
Tasha was not accustomed to being accused of incompetence. She was
getting defensive, a style that would not fare well with her
employer.

"It was one of your scientists that told her
about the facility."

Gene was not about to be dragged into
confrontation by someone he paid to obey. He keyed a code into the
number pad in his armrest. The three tones he used to recall
Tasha's training as a killer played over her headphones. This would
cause her to be guided by her reptilian brain, the cerebellum, and
forego any scruples or emotions the mammalian cerebrum - her
intellect - might otherwise bring into play. Gene only had one more
thing to say.

"Do your job, Commander."

Tasha had once again become the pliable
puppet Gene wanted. Her robotic response, "yes, sir. I've got this.
I'm about to take care of her forever," was lost in the ether. Gene
had long disconnected the link so he could focus on his
all-important launch preparations.

Installing absolute rule had traditionally
included the eradication of large portions of the population so the
survivors would accept the new situation as a welcome relief.
Destruction of housing and industry would keep future subjects busy
scrambling to rebuild their lives. There would be no time for the
people to revolt or even try to understand the true reasons for the
changes that were brought upon them. Gene knew from history that
after partial annihilation, a populous is easy to control,
especially when they think they have been liberated.

Tasha had become the alligator that knew it
would starve if it didn't catch the gazelle by the watering hole.
Guided by little more than a survival reflex, she landed her
helicopter atop the cliff, several river-turns ahead of Isabelle.
She could see the waterfall that marked the exterior of Gene's lair
in the distance. It wouldn't be long before Isabelle would catch up
with her. Tasha had to act fast. She kept the rotors turning at
idle speed, there was no time for engine shut-down and restart, a
process that would normally take at least ten minutes. She jumped
out and slid open the aft passenger door. Inside was her overnight
bag. It was the only luggage Morabi had permitted her to bring into
his picturesque country that lived in such harmony with nature.
Once again, Morabi had completely misjudged Tasha's true nature.
Just like everything else about her, even Tasha's toiletries were
deadly. She combined her toothpaste and perfume in a water glass.
After stirring briefly with an eye-liner pen, the two components
formed a gel. Tasha located a crevice in the cliff and poured the
highly explosive mixture in. She pulled out an electronic lighter
and a package of birth-control pills from her case and quickly
attached one to the other. Tasha flipped open the prophylactic's
lid, which served as a receiving antenna for what had become a
remote detonator. The angry fighter pushed the end of the lighter
into the explosive and jumped back into the idling helicopter.

No sooner than she was airborne, did the
headlight of the little motorboat appear below the cliff. Tasha
flipped open the transmitter that was disguised as an electronic
hair-removal device. The opening of the stainless-steel cylinder
revealed a trigger. Finally, the moment had come to take out the
biggest problem of her career. There was no consideration for
anything but the impending kill. Triumphantly, Tasha uttered her
words of victory.

"Good-bye pussycat."

The warrior of darkness depressed the button
in the detonator, and triggered an immense explosion, still very
close to the aircraft. The sudden pressure wave from the powerful
detonation forced a megalithic chunk of granite loose. The gigantic
boulder plummeted directly onto the small boat and took it to the
river bottom in the blink of an eye. Tasha saw little of this,
because she experienced firsthand the futility of her hasty action.
Just as quickly as the boulder plummeted onto the boat, the
concussion from the explosion ripped the tail off her helicopter.
With no force to counteract the motion of the quickly turning main
rotor, the aircraft went into a violent spin. The G-forces of her
rapid rotation forced all of Tasha's blood to the right side of her
so very muscular body and her brain. As the last reflex before
losing consciousness, her right hand reached for the ejection
handle by the side of her seat.

Her eyes closed and Tasha's body became limp
like a rag-doll under the strong forces of the uncontrolled
aircraft. Pulling the red handle by her side had initiated the
sophisticated helicopter's ejection sequence. The explosive bolts
that held the rotary wings and fuel tanks fired. Enormous
centrifugal forces sent the carbon-fiber blades and two reinforced
tanks shooting into the jungle like projectiles. The tempered glass
of her canopy shattered into millions of gravel-size pieces.
Servo-controlled pistons in the cabin structure had impacted it to
clear the way for the pilot. The next explosion came from charges
under her seat that propelled the unconscious predator up and clear
of the fuselage. A few moments later, the disabled aircraft smashed
into the side of the cliff and became little more than scrap metal.
With her suspender-type seat belts holding her firmly into the
contoured seat, Tasha would have been safe, had she not flown so
close to the ground. The parachute built into the back of her seat
deployed, but with only a short distance to travel she hit the dark
rushing mass of water barely slower than free-fall.

45 GENE STARTS HIS COUNTDOWN

Gene was busily engaging in launch
preparations for his monstrous weapon. The functional centerpiece
of his lair of darkness was the missile launch-bay. Adjacent to an
electromagnetic track, two ceramic missiles laid side by side on
their enormous storage racks. The track consisted of a pipe,
slightly larger in diameter than the missile. High-intensity
electro-magnets surrounded the length of the pipe. The
superconductive tube curved from its horizontal portion in the
launch bay towards the vertical end at the rocky bottom of the lake
above. There, a launch door sealed out the lake water. A length of
track at the launch bay's end allowed for the missile to be loaded
into the mechanism. Several tungsten escape-pods lined the wall
next to the tan cylinders of high-density ceramic material.

A heavy-equipment crane lifted the first of
the two missiles onto the open portion of the track where it rested
just outside the opening of the long electro-magnetic pipe. This
was the dummy-missile that carried no war head. It was Gene's way
of making sure his dark engineers had calculated the proper
trajectory for his weapon of doom. The non-lethal projectile was an
exact duplicate of its live cousin in weight distribution and size,
with inert mass in place of a warhead. The track beneath the heavy
ceramic blank groaned as its weight shifted from the crane onto the
electromagnetic surface. The power was off and thick rubber wheels
cradled the weapon that stretched about ten car-lengths to the
insertion point. Robotic arms moved in at the missile's aft and
connected supply-lines for electric power and superfluid helium-4.
Gene had chosen this rare form of the noble element because of its
temperature near absolute zero and its unique ability to quickly
flow into the smallest spaces. Both of these qualities had brought
the scene of horror upon the German viaduct.

The concept that would give flight to his
weapon was that ceramics reach a state known as
superconductivity
when cooled to a temperature of only a few
Kelvin. The scientific temperature scale named after the brilliant
physicist has its starting point at absolute zero, the lowest
temperature any material in this universe can attain. When the
ceramic fuselage at the head of the launch track attains
superconductivity, two new qualities appear on its list of
properties. One is the material's sudden ability to conduct
electric current with virtually no resistance. The other, quite
related change would be the body's intense magnetic force. Gene
took advantage of this by surrounding the length of his launch
track with strong electromagnets that would levitate the missile
once it became magnetic. It was designed to propel the weapon at
such staggering velocity that rocket-engine powered ballistic
missiles would not be fast enough to shoot it down. The weapon's
super-cooled ceramic hull and the lack of an onboard propulsion
system would furthermore give radar guided and heat-seeking weapons
little opportunity to lock onto the unusual projectile.

In the command center at the other end of his
lair, Gene was pleased with the progress in the missile bay. His
arms were nestled comfortably in the padded sides of his
throne-like chair. Gene leaned back with a look of great confidence
as he watched the automated activity in the launch bay on the three
enormous view-screens. He was contemplating the necessity of his
actions.