Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (39 page)

A resounding
boom
rolled across the escarpment, simultaneous with a scream from the top of the stairway.

Jack rolled up and into a run, aiming for the guard as he lowered his machine pistol to scrape the pavement. The sentinel’s head had jerked towards the sound of the elephant gun. He just began to look back as Jack’s foot caught him in the side of the head. For the most part the blow glanced off, carrying a piece of headset, and as Jack sailed past he followed up with a quick punch to the inner arm, sweeping the machine pistol to the ground.

The guard recovered quickly, flexing into a classic tiger stance and snapping a clawlike hand at Jack’s face. Jack pushed the hand harmlessly up with his rising elbow, then shifted to the side, slapping his opponent. As the man fought to recover, Jack accepted a weak punch, then followed his slap with a brutal elbow strike to the underside of the jaw and a kick to the back of the guard’s knee. As the man fell backward, Jack stepped in close and brought his elbow down with all his strength into his opponent’s sternum and throat. The
pop-crack
of snapping bone was drowned out by a second roar from the elephant gun.

A spurt of fire chattered up into the sky, the death reflex of the second guard at the top of the ladder.

Jack’s opponent hit the ground solidly, breath whooshing from his lungs. When he struggled to twist to his feet, he screamed in pain.

“You’re collarbone’s broken,” Jack said, bending to hold the man still. “You’ll be fine if you don’t try to move.” The man began swearing in Russian, and Jack repeated himself in that language as he took a pistol and knife from the broken man’s belt.

A few moments later Solomon joined him. “The rifle’s going to draw some attention,” he said to Jack. “We’d better get up to the transmitter. Is he secure?” he asked, gesturing at the writhing guard.

Jack nodded. “We’ll let D-11 clean up when they get here.”

The other guard was dead, one of Jack’s first two shots having taken him in the head. Luck, he reflected. He retrieved his Glock and began climbing the ladder. Solomon was already almost to the top.

The third tremor was the worst of them all.

Jack felt it build beneath him, heard a rising clatter from a nearby stack of aluminum rain gutters,
tasted
the rough, thick ozone in the air before the tremendous jolt passed up from the foundation, from Hell itself for all he knew, and shook him from the ladder.

He tried to angle onto his feet but the wrenching shift of the roof threw him to the side and spun him about like a rag doll. The wounded guard shrieked as a few loose boards and one actual rafter thudded down heavily. Loose wood and steel, nails and bits of aluminum, and even a dozen irregular chunks of the building
itself
stuttered and skittered along the surface of the roof near the two men, like pebbles on a drumhead.

Jack covered his head and rolled from the wall as bits of the upper platform chewed themselves loose and rained down around him. He heard the ladder crackle loose and clang down.

Everything slid a few feet to the side. Piles of aluminum squealed and chittered towards the edge.

Lying there, Jack felt his stomach plunge and winced--sure the building had begun its final sway, had started a long, sheering, final drop to the ground.

Another internal lurch, then everything settled. He lay there for a long moment before daring to breathe. When he opened his eyes, he saw that a great portion of the building had given way and splintered off, falling onto tiers below or onto the street. Huge cracks had appeared in the stone and steel walls–but from his vantage at the peak of the artificial summit, he could see a symmetry to the destruction, an evenness. Jack’s stomach plunged again as a growing sense of dread swept him. Raines’ weapon was functioning perfectly. Already, light filtered from those crevices and crannies, flickering out over London.

Worst of all was the approach to the transmitter platform. The ladder was gone, probably over the edge. Though the wall had taken damage and patches had fallen, it was still smooth and unclimbable; too high to use some of the building materials as a ladder–

Solomon leaned his head over the edge. He looked unshaken, as always. “I’ve found a cutoff switch, must have been what those four were guarding.” The great black disk of the transmitter loomed behind him like a negative halo. “There’s a problem, Jack.”

“What’s that?” Must be a way to get up there. A second ladder; something.

“Just like Steve told us, two big levers connected by a grip, though it’s all I can do to pull it down. Like a circuit breaker. Keeping it down is easy enough, but there’s some sort of spring device inside that snaps the whole affair up again as soon as I release it.”

Jack looked around the roof, then back at Solomon. “Can you hold it down?”

“As long as it takes.”

Both men spoke at the same time.

“You’ll have to--”

“I’ll stay and--” Solomon smiled. “I’ll stay. You go.” His eyes shone.

Jack looked at him a long moment, then spun and raced into the darkness.

Solomon shrugged and worked his neck. The access panel before him lay in tatters; he’d ripped it off to get to the breaker. There were other controls on the board; a bank of digitized numbers and touch commands, backlit for easy reading; and three ports for cable and network access.

He ignored them. His task was simple. Solomon gripped the enormous lever in an equally large fist, and forced it down.

The reverberating hum, which he’d noticed upon climbing the ladder, quieted to a droning hiss.

Either the architect never intended the top floors to be completed, or they were predestined to be part of a model for a madhouse, Alonzo decided. There seemed to be no point to the rambling passages and mismatched floor plan, though Steve assured him the way was clear to the makeshift hanger. “Fine. I’ll check out the helicopter. See what you can do by way of diversion. Here.” He handed over his last grenades. “Be careful with the remote detonation.”

Steve agreed. “The stray radiation in this place is really messing up radio frequencies. So I plant the grenades. Then what?”

“Just meet me here. If Jack and Sol aren’t back by then, we’ll think of something.”

Alonzo ascended an unworked staircase, senses straining. Very few of the rooms were lighted, and he stayed low, moving cautiously from room to room. The maze of two-by-fours and half-laid drywall gave way to a wide loft overlooking the main room below. Ahead, the voices of at least three men were accompanied by the clatter of mechanic’s tools. The loft evidently served as a temporary rough work and storage area, piled with drywall slats and spare wood of various dimensions. Alonzo crept up behind a moveable rack of power tools and peered over the edge.

Raines stood below, in heated conversation with a long-haired man in a grey suit, who held a machine pistol. They stood near the helicopter; sure enough, a three-bladed Sikorsky. Three 7500 shp General Electric turboshaft engines, gaping open to receive as much air as possible. Usually they required a three man crew, but he’d do fine without a navigator or a flight engineer–the transports couldn’t fly themselves, but each Sikorsky carried a state-of-the-art avionics package which included a weather radar, radio navigation gear, Doppler radar, and a moving map display. He’d flown birds similar enough.

The suited man turned his head, and Alonzo got a good look at his face. Miklos Nasim, and he was furious. Raines offered a cigarette to the gesturing man, then lit one himself before continuing the conversation. Alonzo strained but couldn’t make out their exchange over the noise of the three mechanics and the increasing thrum of the turbines on the Sikorsky. Have to get closer.

He mentally noted the positions of five other guards in the room, then retreated from the edge. No sign of Raines’ personal secretary/bodyguard/whatever, the burly Oriental he called Michael.

Another minor tremor passed, rocking the sixty-watt bulbs in their hanging cages. Alonzo circled through the loft, moving clockwise. If he could get closer to the helicopter he’d be able to see exactly how many guards watched the room. The loft extended around half the vault; providing a view of the entire lower floor. He clung to the darkness, skirting the open rooms and stealing along the walls.

Only a few more minutes and the Sikorsky would be fully flight-capable. Alonzo wondered how they planned on leaving the country. Getting to a private airfield wouldn’t be difficult at all, he supposed, considering the chaos that Raines’ weapon would spawn over London. He had no conception of the exact manner in which the maser would detonate, but his mind’s eye filled briefly with images of an unearthly crater, a mile wide and deep, filling rapidly with gushing, acrid seawater.

Alonzo turned the corner and came face-to-face with the huge Chinese in the Saville Row suit, standing there, silently, in the dark. Before Alonzo could bring his machine gun around he found himself lifted in one oversized, manicured fist. The man’s other hand neatly covered the grip of the MP-5, and Alonzo winced as the frowning man tore it from him. Breath hissing from between clenched teeth, he groped blindly for his other gun, but felt that hand also immobilized.

“Roaches, capering in the dark,” Michael whispered, squeezing Alonzo up against a support. He began grinding the air out of the little man.

Then Michael bellowed as Alonzo’s free hand rammed a combat knife hilt-deep into his elbow. The razor ridges on the blade’s spine cut as well through flesh as they did the expensive fabric of the suit.

Alonzo writhed out of the weakening grasp and dodged to the side as his opponent surged, growling, after him. Backpedaling, he breathed in as fully as he was able. His chest ached hideously where Michael had pressed his knuckles, though he cut the pain off before it reached his face. Michael slowed, favoring his wounded arm, eyes riveted on Alonzo. The knife still stuck horrifically from his extremity.

If the man’s abilities had any roots whatsoever in the old Soviet doctrines, this was not going to be easy. Spetznatz hand-to-hand training was never completed until the student was able to deliver over one hundred and fifty potentially lethal blows in under a minute.

Both men circled sinuously around the room, measuring, judging, defining. The battle was joined.

Ian noted the dumbfounded look on each face in the squad as the D-11 men filtered into the vault and took their first look at the machine. No one was quite sure how to proceed.

“How do we get down to it, then?” asked the lead man. He had to shout over the grating din which echoed all about them. It was as though they’d entered the nightmare heart of a colony of demon wasps.

The single massive tube extending through the ceiling, which had been glossy before, now shone pure white, and Ian saw the inner core had turned a hellish gold-red. The indistinct, wraithlike shapes within were all but beating themselves to pieces. “I think we’d better leave,” he said.

Another tremor began, prompting the men to clutch at the platform railing. The crystal core abruptly went from gold-red to pure white, accompanied by an infernal shrieking wail, as if something unearthly were being racked with unbearable pain. The officers nearest Ian began backing toward the door. The walls and other surfaces shivered all around them. A terrible crashing preceded the growing network of luminous cracks suddenly crisscrossing the walls and ceiling. “Back!” the commander shouted needlessly. His other words were drowned out by a tumultuous rending peal, a thunderclap of solid cement.

Ian shoved men ahead of himself as he ran. Raines’ property was shaking itself to dust.

Vibrations passed up from the steel floor through Miklos’ boots as the helicopter engine warmed. Miklos sat next to Raines in a cushioned seat of the Sikorsky and considered the digital sweep of numbers on the other man’s computer screen. The Hradek program was operating exactly as the tests at Rockwell Island predicted. The palmtop was shielded, like the systems in the helicopter, to withstand certain microwave frequencies. Hradek would not disable their technology.

In one corner of the miniature screen, a colorless CCD-type video rotated through the various approaches to the hanger. Raines could continue monitoring the security cameras and access any of the building’s programs as long as they were within 12 kilometers of the Tower. As Miklos understood it, every component of the maser was preprogrammed and functioned perfectly without the input of the creator, but Raines seemed to enjoy the ringside seat that his computer provided to each process. Either he would execute the final command from the helicopter as they left the city, or allow the maser to activate on its own.

Miklos regretted they hadn’t been able to televise the mock demands they’d prepared, set to broadcast one minute before CNN would televise the footage of the princess killing everyone on the steps of Buckingham Palace. He’d been forced to endure the presence of the diminutive, fascist motion picture director for nothing, not even the pleasure of killing the man. Nothing to be done about that now.

An assistant approached the open cargo door. “Everything is done, sir. Computer records are clean and the hard copies of all your personal records in London have been destroyed as well.”

Raines nodded. “Very good.” He painstakingly lit a cigarette. He flicked his lighter shut, then leaned forward abruptly, staring at the tiny video screen on his computer. He pressed a series of keys, frowning.